Warhammer Warhammer General discussion thread: Now with 100% more Space Marines

Emperor Tippy

Merchant of Death
Super Moderator
Staff Member
Founder
One theory / explanation I have found is that he is just asocial as fuck. Basically, he can organize everything and manipulate people, but he cannot ever gain true loyalty because he treats people like cogs in a machine. Guilliman spells it out after his rebirth IIRC., and even before that it is clear that Guilliman - probably one of the most loyal Primarchs - is loyal to humanity, and Emperor's idea of uniting humanity for its protection, not necessarily to the Emperor personally.

Malcador would indicate otherwise. As would the example of Horus, whose charisma was the product of basically playing a numbers game with conversations, body language, etc.

The Emperor might not have cared over much about gaining "true loyalty" but the very idea of true loyalty undercuts the entire point I am making.

The Imperium of the Emperor during the Great Crusade was not a state, or even a polity at the most base levels. It was the personal domain of a warlord just conquered and ruled by whim and decree without any attempt at integration or building any kind of stable entity.

The only domestic policies that the Emperor seemed to care about were 1) wiping out religions/spreading the Imperial Truth, 2) enforcing his rules regarding psykers and the Black Ships, 3) not rising in active rebellion/repudiation of his rule, and 4) forking over what military resources were demanded promptly.

Hell, the Imperium was on a barter economy and didn't even have any kind of tax policy until after Horus was made Warmaster!

The Emperor has been alive and active since literally before the Spartans fought the Persians. He lived through every imaginable form of government and society across a span of forty to fifty thousand years. That entire time he was superhumanly intelligent and had at least some interest in human politics. By sheer osmosis if nothing else, he would have learned how to make a stable empire if he wanted one.

This is a man who conquered and unified the entire Sol system in a period of a century or two and then built the force that would conquer the entire galaxy. The idea that he couldn't build the army of administrators and bureaucrats needed to secure that conquest at the same time is farcical. As is the claim that he thought he could build a stable empire without them.

But look at what the Emperor did as opposed to what he said or what others believed that he wanted. The consequence of his conquest of the galaxy was to 1) purge every noteworthy xenos power save the Orks and (to a lesser extent) the Eldar, 2) purge every pre-existing religion from humanity across the breadth of the galaxy, and 3) establish a common mythos for humanity.

Then you have the heresy which is just chalk full of religious connotations and symbolism; which ends with the Chaos Gods taking a major blow (they lost a good chunk of invested power when Horus fell) and established a savior myth so hard that Moses would squeal.

Very rapidly the Imperial Creed becomes a thing - a creed based on a text penned by a Primarch convinced every word of it was true and raised in a theocracy (that he would then lead). It would find fertile ground across the breadth of the galaxy as every competing faith had been purged and the supporting framework to support an aesthetic belief structure was both absent and impossible to create (at least so long as the tech-priests remained a thing).

The Custodes, despite the supposed hatred of the Emperor for religion and the absolute nature of the Imperial Truth did nothing as the Creed spread and even gained a seat on the High Twelve. Indeed, they would bring the first of the Sisters of Battle into the very presence of the Emperor to convince them that Vandire was a false prophet and they left even more convinced of the Emperor's divinity. The Living Saints are a thing as well.

All of this in a galaxy where belief shapes reality, faith creates gods, souls are real, souls have power, and souls can be dedicated to other entities via ritual. The entire Eldar pantheon was a deliberate creation, the Emperor was there to see the creation of Slaanesh as well.

Quadrillions of souls who pray to the God Emperor, perform their religious rituals to him, and dedicate their souls to him. Fanaticism is practically bred into the citizenry of the Imperium. "For the Emperor!" "The Emperor Protects!" - these aren't just catch phrases, the are catechisms.

Ten thousand years of effectively the entire human population of the galaxy dedicating their lives to the Emperor and worshipping him as a god before willing their souls to his protection. Ten thousand years of trillions of them dying in his name on the field of battle with a fanatics hatred of the xenos, the mutant, and the heretic and all dedicated to the Emperor. Ten thousand years of a thousand psykers per day being ritually sacrificed to the Emperor with their souls consumed. Ten thousand years of every* human psyker being soul bound to the Emperor.

The psychic power of the Orks goes to Gork and Mork and so is basically irrelevant in the game of Immaterial politics that the Emperor, Chaos, and the Eldar are playing. The Eldar trap their souls in Infinity Circuits and don't have the numbers anyways. The Necrons are soulless. Humanity is the ONLY source of souls/belief/warp power that exists at scale to contest. And for every heretic (which needs to be split four plus ways) there are a million ardent supporters of the God Emperor.

And note what two of the core tenets of the Imperial Creed are. The Emperor is anathema to the heretic and their masters, protecting all loyal humans from the predations of the xenos, the mutant, and the heretic. And that the xenos, mutant, and heretic are to be purged.

A religion purpose made to create an anathema and a belief structure virtually impossible for any non human power to suborn.

Losing? Every day that the Imperium of Man manages to hobble on is another day of all that belief and all those souls being fed to a pro-human warp entity that is anathema to chaos and will accept nothing less than total human domination of the galaxy.

The more reasonable scenario is that everything is basically going just as the Emperor planned and once he decides that he either has no choice or that his chances of victory are as good as its going to get, he unleashes all of that gathered power into the warp and basically scours it clean of anything but his power all at once, heals himself, and then restructures humanity into what he wants it to be.

Let the Eldar be steadily whittled down, let the eventual three way war between the Orks, the Tyrranids, and the Necrons occur and whittle all three down. Let Chaos remain both his foil and the force to temp away the less faithful. And then, purge.

Isn't it interesting how the second largest fleet in the galaxy (second only to the combined fleets of the Mechanicus) is the Black Fleet and yet it never does anything?

Let's not talk about Cawl and the Primaris. That was one tech-priest in secret using things he ill understood. What do you think that the Emperor could have squirreled away somewhere under the oversight of the Custodes or some of his Perpetual buddies?

Look at the Sisters of Silence. Blanks one and all and thus impossible to perceive in the warp. Spread the breadth of the Imperium via the Black Ships. Loyal only to the Emperor and his personal agents. Look at what happens when you have enough Pariahs in one place? It makes an active shadow in the Warp and that is why the Culuxes Temple was stuck out in the back of beyond.

Go to somewhere out of the way, perhaps with a rogue planetoid in interstellar space, put a ton of Pariahs on site to conceal the whole thing from Chaos, the Eldar, and anyone else with psyker powers, have any travel down with Black Ships crewed only by Blanks, and you could build an entire warmachine to put in stasis without anyone the wiser.

Use the Sisters as secure couriers and living data archives. All they need is cybernetics that allow them to establish a neural connection between one another on contact and you have an utterly secure communications conduit.

You think that the Custodes can't fake the seal of a Lord Inquisitor? Assuming that one of the perpetuals who was actually in the Emperor's inner circle and wasn't given such a seal basically from day one?

Or that the Grey Knights would hesitate even a moment if a Custodes gave them orders to do something and conceal the doing under the guise of fighting chaos?

---
I mean really, the Emperor being open and honest with his plans and intentions? Who would think that would be in character for him?

Now the entirety of the Great Crusade, Heresy, and Imperium being one grand gambit designed to serve the Emperor's true goals with everyone else playing the game set out as a distraction? Well that seems entirely in character for the Emperor.
 

Aldarion

Neoreactionary Monarchist
I mean really, the Emperor being open and honest with his plans and intentions? Who would think that would be in character for him?

Now the entirety of the Great Crusade, Heresy, and Imperium being one grand gambit designed to serve the Emperor's true goals with everyone else playing the game set out as a distraction? Well that seems entirely in character for the Emperor.

Yeah, that does make sense. But would that mean that the Primarchs being taken away and separated was also foreseen by the Emperor, or maybe even orchestrated by him? Or it happened despite him, and he worked around it as best as he was able?

Also, I hardly think that *everything* is going exactly as the Emperor had planned. He is not infallible, and if he truly wanted to be worshipped as a God, why would he censure Lorgar and Horus? To provoke the Heresy at a time when Imperium could actually survive it? Because replacing a religion with a new one is actually easier than wiping out a religion, replacing it with atheism (the Imperial Truth), and then replacing that with a new religion. So I assume that the Emperor actually did intend to wipe out the religions as a way to starve the Chaos - unless that too was a way to manipulate Horus into the rebellion.
 

Emperor Tippy

Merchant of Death
Super Moderator
Staff Member
Founder
Yeah, that does make sense. But would that mean that the Primarchs being taken away and separated was also foreseen by the Emperor, or maybe even orchestrated by him? Or it happened despite him, and he worked around it as best as he was able?

If the Primarchs weren't taken then he has twenty demigods raised directly by him to act as his lieutenants and agents. I'm sure he had some other plan to get a viable end result from that situation.

If the Heresy hadn't happened? Well then he gets the Imperial Webway and with it fast, reliable, safe, secure, interstellar transport and communications and has the power to transition the Imperium into the kind of government that is actually useful. You know that his next move after securing the Webway would be to turn on Mars and break the tech-priests hold on education. In such circumstances, building up the cultural and societal infrastructure & framework to actually support the Imperial Truth becomes a lot more viable.

But Chaos steals the Primarchs and the "ideal" situation goes away. The Primarchs go from trusted lieutenants to suspect, disposable, pawns.

So the Emperor presents a threat that Chaos has to honor (the Imperial Truth and the Imperial Webway) and allows the Four to invest power and resources into thwarting him and his plans and corrupting his "sons". And then the Emperor stacks the board to get the right people to fall to ensure his own desired outcome when he gets a "pyrrhic" victory.

I mean Angron? Could you purposefully design a more perfect target for the Blood God?

Or Lorgar? He just happened to arrive on a theocracy that worshipped Chaos, thought the Emperor was a god, professed this fact publicly, and got away with this for basically the entire Great Crusade until suddenly the Emperor takes notice and does the most half assed chastisement of all time. I mean the Emperor all but laid out the red carpet for Lorgar's fall.

Or the Emperor letting the XVth remain despite the Fleshchange? Or his suddenly deciding that he needed to take official notice of Magnus's warp antics and then giving an Edict that he had to know the Thousand Sons would break? Conveniently timed to ensure it all comes to a head just so.

Or him and Malcador remaining ignorant of the lodges infesting the Legions? When the both of them seem to be compulsive plotters and spies who never trust anything?

Or that the Emperor remained ignorant of the Interax, Horus getting stabbed, and Horus getting better? And not bothering to take any official notice of any of this? Not even bothering to send out a Custodes to see what's going on?

Or all of the Emperor's spies remaining ignorant of the Fabricator-General's games and all of his preparations when he is in the same system as the Emperor and Malcador?

Or him remaining ignorant of all the other blatant signs and goings on in the lead up to the Heresy?

And let's not forget Moloch. The Emperor just so happened to bring four primarchs to ensure the worlds compliance despite having left a Perpetual guardian on the world and all of his more discrete forces. He permanently stations massive amounts of force on the planet for no explicable reason but never notices what the locals are up to. He then mind wipes the primarchs to forget the planet. Really? This is the same Emperor who utterly erased two entire Legions and their Primarchs and he couldn't keep one out of the way planet hidden away?

The Heresy only works if either 1) the Emperor is actively allowing it or 2) the Emperor is the biggest dunce to have ever lived and all of his vaunted abilities are less than those of a competent mortal in real life.

Also, I hardly think that *everything* is going exactly as the Emperor had planned. He is not infallible, and if he truly wanted to be worshipped as a God, why would he censure Lorgar and Horus? To provoke the Heresy at a time when Imperium could actually survive it? Because replacing a religion with a new one is actually easier than wiping out a religion, replacing it with atheism (the Imperial Truth), and then replacing that with a new religion. So I assume that the Emperor actually did intend to wipe out the religions as a way to starve the Chaos - unless that too was a way to manipulate Horus into the rebellion.

His censure of Lorgar is a prime example of why you never do someone a small injury. It was perfectly calculated to drive him away from worshipping the Emperor but not to drive him to embracing the Imperial Truth. Lorgar needs his gods, and if the Emperor won't fill the role then he will look elsewhere. I mean any psyche profile of Lorgar would show that he was going to act as he did, the Emperor could not have been ignorant of that and he was fully aware of the Chaos Gods and had to be aware of the historical connection to them that Lorgar had.

Lorgar had been acting the same way for the whole of the Great Crusade, but when did the Emperor choose to take official notice and act?

Horus getting made Warmaster, Lorgars censure, Nikiea, Fulgrim getting demon possessed. All occurring in a relatively small period of time and all after the primary work of the Great Crusade is done and over with.

The Emperor suddenly demotes the Primarchs and Legions and ensures internal jealousies. He keeps piling on (or allowing to pile on without respite) additional stressors.

As for the Imperial Truth/Creed. If the Emperor publicly professed a desire to be worshipped as a god then it's just another religion and he just another delusional despot. Break all religions, publicly repudiate any attempt to worship you while constantly aping every deific image that you can, espouse a fundamentally flawed ideology and enforce it long enough to break the remaining religious powers but not so long that it becomes properly established, have events occur that flatly conflict with your "Truth" and remove you from an ability to repudiate your worship (and that justify that worship), ensure that a unified and consistent Creed exists and has just a hint of suppression against it. Pretty much guaranteed to ensure that faith spreads like wildfire and gets near universal adoption.

Seriously, if the Emperor's goal was to be worshipped as the God-Emperor then he couldn't have engineered a better way to go about it than what occured in canon.
 

Emperor Tippy

Merchant of Death
Super Moderator
Staff Member
Founder
So what kind of FTL communications system should Golden Age/DAoT humanity have?

I mean astropaths don't really work (especially not thematically) but it also can't be something that the Emperor could relatively trivially replace (otherwise he would have done so).
 

Zachowon

The Army Life for me! The POG life for me!
Founder
So what kind of FTL communications system should Golden Age/DAoT humanity have?

I mean astropaths don't really work (especially not thematically) but it also can't be something that the Emperor could relatively trivially replace (otherwise he would have done so).
Iirc be was trying to make his own web way
 

Battlegrinder

Someday we will win, no matter what it takes.
Moderator
Staff Member
Founder
Obozny
So what kind of FTL communications system should Golden Age/DAoT humanity have?

I mean astropaths don't really work (especially not thematically) but it also can't be something that the Emperor could relatively trivially replace (otherwise he would have done so).

Given there's been, to my knowledge, no mention of any sort of widespread FTL comms pre-Imperium, and the sheer improbability of not one working example being recovered, I would guess they didn't have planet to planet FTL comms at the time. They probably made do with courier ships.

Alternatively, they would have a more advanced version of whatever the Tau have.
 

Morphic Tide

Well-known member
So what kind of FTL communications system should Golden Age/DAoT humanity have?
Probably the psi-servitors the Mechanicum uses, or Men of Iron techbase stuff involving wormholes. Noosphere technology may be derived from a remnant, given its apparent immunity to the warp-contamination of Scrapcode.
 

Emperor Tippy

Merchant of Death
Super Moderator
Staff Member
Founder
Iirc be was trying to make his own web way
Yes, but humanity had nothing to do with the webway in the Golden Age.

Given there's been, to my knowledge, no mention of any sort of widespread FTL comms pre-Imperium, and the sheer improbability of not one working example being recovered, I would guess they didn't have planet to planet FTL comms at the time. They probably made do with courier ships.

Alternatively, they would have a more advanced version of whatever the Tau have.
Courier ships have their own issues. And the Speranza apparently had an STC and AI that were still communicating with others.

I didn't think that the Tau had FTL comm's, I thought they were limited to couriers. Actually, do the Tau even have FTL at all anymore?

Probably the psi-servitors the Mechanicum uses, or Men of Iron techbase stuff involving wormholes. Noosphere technology may be derived from a remnant, given its apparent immunity to the warp-contamination of Scrapcode.

The psi-servitors (are those still canon?) are basically just astropaths.

Hmm, I suppose micro-wormholes that needed some kind of precise, moment by moment, adjustment to remain stable could work. And without AI the level of precision simply wasn't possible any longer.

---
Maybe something like ME comm buoys. Utilizing Warp based tech to create a very small path where light moves faster and shooting a comm laser down it. But in addition to needing to make tons of the buoys so that they can be daisy chained between star systems, maybe they also need really precise station keeping and aim as the warp channel is miniscule and it needs to be kept on target with the next buoy in the chain.

In practice, you basically need AI to manage the needed precision and extremely advanced (and precise) mass production to even build the buoys in the first place.

When the Men of Iron rebelled, the network got wrecked (at least before the end) and it was never rebuilt before everything collapsed. The Emperor can't rebuild it because 1) the AI issue, 2) mass production facilities of the needed precision and capability to produce at the volume required don't currently exist, and 3) putting those buoys in place would take forever (say their range is only an AU, you would need ~63,300 per lightyear for a chain with zero redundancy).
 

Battlegrinder

Someday we will win, no matter what it takes.
Moderator
Staff Member
Founder
Obozny
I didn't think that the Tau had FTL comm's, I thought they were limited to couriers. Actually, do the Tau even have FTL at all anymore?

They had it at the start of of 8th when they turned on all thier warp drives at once and accidentally lost an entire sphere expansion. I don't know if they still use those drives after that incident.
 

PsihoKekec

Swashbuckling Accountant
I would say they had something like the BT HPG, but with much longer range and good networking system, but the tech got disrupted by both AI uprising and warp upheavals following the birth of Slaanesh.
 

Tyzuris

Primarch to your glory& the glory of him on Earth!
Is there any reasons given how Imperial Fists managed to get such a huge fleet of 1500-2000 warships?

Edit: Especially when legions with their own ship yards like Iron Warriors had 100 capital ships and 300 escorts and Ultramarines had 30-35 battle ships along with maybe 200 strike cruisers and battle barges along with maybe 400-600 escorts.

And World Eaters with 150k Astartes had only 60 capitals. The same for Space Wolves who at 100k Astartes had 60 capitals and 240 escorts.

Yet Imperial Fists without their own shipyards farted out between 1501-1999 warships.
 
Last edited:

PsihoKekec

Swashbuckling Accountant
Different authors not caring about synchronizing lore? The best explanation would be that as they got assigned the task of fortifying Terra the Emps prioritized them for building up their naval strength, so their ships came from multiple shipyards throughout Imperium.
 

Emperor Tippy

Merchant of Death
Super Moderator
Staff Member
Founder
Is there any reasons given how Imperial Fists managed to get such a huge fleet of 1500-2000 warships?

Edit: Especially when legions with their own ship yards like Iron Warriors had 100 capital ships and 300 escorts and Ultramarines had 30-35 battle ships along with maybe 200 strike cruisers and battle barges along with maybe 400-600 escorts.

And World Eaters with 150k Astartes had only 60 capitals. The same for Space Wolves who at 100k Astartes had 60 capitals and 240 escorts.

Yet Imperial Fists without their own shipyards farted out between 1501-1999 warships.
Everything involving 30k (and 40k to a somewhat lesser extent) numbers is an absolute shit show.

I mean just take the number of Second Founding chapters and compare the SM numbers to what Legions were said to have.

The Imperial Fists split into six successor chapters (including the IF chapter) post Heresy. In other words, they nominally had around six thousand Space Marines at the time.

For reference? The Raven Guard lost roughly eighty thousand SM's as Istvaan and weren't noted for their size at the time.

The same applies to basically every Legion to Chapter transition; either the Legions suffered 90%+ casualties in the battle for Terra or the Second Founding had an order of magnitude more chapters in it than has ever been indicated.

---
So when you are talking about IoM space assets? Expect zero consistency from numbers, because they make the SM issues look tame by comparison. It seems every single author decides to radically alter basically everything involving spaceships, space travel, and space combat basically on whim.

40k could benefit massively from someone sitting down and writing a starship/space combat tech bible and then ruthlessly enforcing it.
 

Battlegrinder

Someday we will win, no matter what it takes.
Moderator
Staff Member
Founder
Obozny
So I got a Baneblade and a squad of cadians.
I cant wait to start building it!

A baneblade as in a baneblade in particular, or one of the variants?

I'm also working on finishing my guard army this year, and it will include a baneblade of some sort. Not sure which, currently thinking Banesword or hellhammer, though the stormblade and stormhammer are also contenders.


Also, anyone else wish Cain had a game about his life? It is astounding

The issue with a Cain game is that those stories don't really translate well. It'd be some sort of RPG, but you don't get to really build your character because Cain is already well defined, and Cain doesn't actually have a lot of agency in his own story, the amusing part is how he keeps getting into trouble no matter what he does to avoid it, which is fun to read but not to play.


I think what would be cool is a 40k game focused around one of the assassin temples, because it encourages them to pick one style of combat (sniping, infiltration, "no one will notice if there's no one to notice") and focus heavily on that, and there are existing templates to base the games around. It'd basically be Hitman 40k/Sniper Ghost Warrior 40k/MGS Revengance 40k. I think I'd prefer a Callidus based game for.....reasons.





Anyway, speaking of getting models, I've also been thinking of building a 5 man company vet sqaud. Currently it's of indeterminate composition, and I'm looking for suggestions. Doesn't have to be super meta, looking for more of a fun unit to have running around. Any ideas?

The only restrictions are that it can't be a bunch of guys with plasma guns or melee weapons and storm shields, because hellblasters and bladeguard already exist (for similar, eradicator related reasons, a melta based sqaud is discouraged), and it must be legal for dark angels to take, but does not have to conform to the DA vet kit, these will be kitbashes.
 

Zachowon

The Army Life for me! The POG life for me!
Founder
A baneblade as in a baneblade in particular, or one of the variants?

I'm also working on finishing my guard army this year, and it will include a baneblade of some sort. Not sure which, currently thinking Banesword or hellhammer, though the stormblade and stormhammer are also contenders.




The issue with a Cain game is that those stories don't really translate well. It'd be some sort of RPG, but you don't get to really build your character because Cain is already well defined, and Cain doesn't actually have a lot of agency in his own story, the amusing part is how he keeps getting into trouble no matter what he does to avoid it, which is fun to read but not to play.


I think what would be cool is a 40k game focused around one of the assassin temples, because it encourages them to pick one style of combat (sniping, infiltration, "no one will notice if there's no one to notice") and focus heavily on that, and there are existing templates to base the games around. It'd basically be Hitman 40k/Sniper Ghost Warrior 40k/MGS Revengance 40k. I think I'd prefer a Callidus based game for.....reasons.





Anyway, speaking of getting models, I've also been thinking of building a 5 man company vet sqaud. Currently it's of indeterminate composition, and I'm looking for suggestions. Doesn't have to be super meta, looking for more of a fun unit to have running around. Any ideas?

The only restrictions are that it can't be a bunch of guys with plasma guns or melee weapons and storm shields, because hellblasters and bladeguard already exist (for similar, eradicator related reasons, a melta based sqaud is discouraged), and it must be legal for dark angels to take, but does not have to conform to the DA vet kit, these will be kitbashes.
A standard baneblade. That is about it


I feel like a Cain game akin to Mass Effect would be cool.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top