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The imperium is maintained by the guard.

There are not enough marines to make any long term fight viable.

The guard do 90% of the work because they are always there.

Hellebore wrote:
The imperium is maintained by the guard.

There are not enough marines to make any long term fight viable.

The guard do 90% of the work because they are always there.

Yeah if you count having enough guard to keep dying until one of the real forces like Storm Troopers,Mechanicus or Marines arrive as work.
I mean even in the fluff I cannot remember reading of to many occasions where guard actually achieved anything against a force tougher than renegade milita without support from one of the actual imperial military forces.

Guard are cannon fodder in the purest sense in that even there abysmal equipment is considered more valuable than they are, imagine being considered worth less than a gun that in fluff terms is only useful against a unarmoured human or a grot.

SeanDrake wrote:

Yeah if you count having enough guard to keep dying until one of the real forces like Storm Troopers,Mechanicus or Marines arrive as work.
I mean even in the fluff I cannot remember reading of to many occasions where guard actually achieved anything against a force tougher than renegade milita without support from one of the actual imperial military forces.

Guard are cannon fodder in the purest sense in that even there abysmal equipment is considered more valuable than they are, imagine being considered worth less than a gun that in fluff terms is only useful against a unarmoured human or a grot.

This is actually the false stereotype of how people see the Imperial Guard. I'm not saying this never happened, but it is not the norm.
I dare to say you didn't read many novels about the Imperial Guard. I understand they might be biased a bit so you need to take it with a grain of salt, but if the Guard was incompetent like you say, always and only depending on the help of others, Imperium wouldn't be a galaxy-spanning empire anymore.

The majority of conflict isn't roughly-equal forces or even potentially-questionable-outcome engagements. The majority is one side steamrolling the other. Most have no upsets or surprises. But those engagements aren't as dramatic or interesting. So we don't read about them. We certainly don't play them out.

In the average SM engagement, they don't pitch a battle against an equal foe. They come in. They rock. They leave.

The average Nid attack isn't a close affair at all. They just walk in, overrun the opposition, then eat everything.

The average Ork Waaagh doesn't stop 50 paces away. It's not 50 Boys against 50 Guardsmen. It's not a 10 minute fight. Waaaghs rage far, wide, and long. And spread across entire planets.

The average DE raid isn't a pitched battle at all. They raid easy targets. Get in, have some fun, grab some loot, get out.

The average CWE engagement doesn't include CWE at all.

Likewise, the average IG engagement isn't what we see on the tabletop. It's steamrolling less powerful renegade PDFs or xenos races. They're really good against most of the galaxy. We just don't see that because the game focuses on the super-powered forces of the galaxy, not the minutia of the average planet or system.

What is CWE? I have never seen that acronym before :(

-STS

Craftworld Eldar

I also think a lot of the "power" of the IG comes rather subtil, since their number, tactics and equipment hinder enemies to fully use their potential or prefered tactics. At least in my understanding facing an IG regiment usually means facing a f***load of artillery standing around somewhere, therefore forcing the enemy to avoid whide open plains and reducing the angles of attack on important targets. This way the smaller number of for example space marines can really matter, by not having to be everywhere but only in the small corridor leading to the attacked hive city that is not already reduced to a shelled wasteland.

On a similar note, the trusty lasgun might suck compared to a heavy bolter, but these things are everywhere and (again: in my understanding) force enemies to have at least a bit of armour if they do not just want to be obliterated befor reaching the enemy. Without that the Nids for example might have deployed an unarmoured troop unit, that is even faster to produce and other armies would not have to commit at least a part of their weapondry to "anti hoard duty" and be more optimized against Marines.

The same goes for their tanks. Sure, there are sturdier and shootier tanks than the Leman Russ, but again: these things are everywhere. And therefore a Tau army attacked by Imperials is forced to distribute its anti tank weapons instead of throwing everything against the handfulls of Landraiders attacking from the south.

All in all this definitly does not make for the heroic stories where the guard smashes the foe alone, but I think a lot of victories of the other imperial branches are only possible because the guard keeps a lot of constant pressure comming from a lot of directions on the enemy

The Guard does not immediately mobilize into one unstoppable force in one go.

I think it was the 3rd edition IG Codex that detailed an expanding radius of mobilization over time, as more and more planets get tapped to send forces to a war zone, without top down orders from the High Lords. Local authorities respond to the threat and requests for aid.

What that means is the enemy in one static warzone such as a planet will face wave after wave, drawn from an ever increasing area. If they were all massed together, maybe they would be unstoppable but coming in waves, the enemy might be able to defeat each one. However this still becomes a battle of attrition, which the vast majority of enemies cannot ultimately win.

In the deadly 40K galaxy, many enemies will cut through the Guard like a hot knife through butter. Except there is a cubic light year of butter...

It's just not a very heroic narrative though playing the 459th wave that finally succeeds against an exhausted depleted enemy when the last 458 waves have been obliterated.

The thing that might actually be the bottleneck is interstellar troop shipping. The "average" BFG transport holds only roughly an infantry regiment if the Imperial Armour Taros book is used as a reference. The true limitation of delivering the Guard to a warzone might be the Navy's transport ability, and the necessity of multiple transport runs to deliver a full invasion force.

I see the circular logic in many of these posts. Let me explain.


One person posts - There are millions of them and they over run with numbers.

Next person posts - Imperial guard are far better than they often made out to be.


Both are correct!
The imperial guard are often made out to just be crap that needs to be saved by the Astartes. The rules have them as just humans with guns which would make sense with conscripts and penal troops.

The fluff of imperial guard chapters has them to be waaaaay better than just an average human with a gun. They are the best of the normal humans and are highly trained and often have a strong legacy of military tradition like Cadia, Mordia, Catachan, Elysium and Valhalla. They often specialise further and become extremely good at one thing making them even more effective at what they do. These guys should be considerably better than an average human seeing a civilian militia doesn't do well against an elite special forces unit.

So what can we make of this....well i did ask the question...and from reading replies my thoughts so far are the IG suffer from making the space marines look good. Considering that space marines are not even the elite troops of the imperium having several more powerful units...like terminators, grey knights and primaris marines...if the imperial guard were doing a good job the elites of the imperium would be unstoppable.

The Imperial Guard are heterogenous in quality.

An agri-world may not have much of a population and what it does tithe are still counted as Guard, though they may be far lower quality than the already hard bitten forces from a world like Cadia or Necromunda, who are already likely already veterans of gang warfare. Highly populated worlds can just re-allocate a portion of their PDF, which itself may be up to Guard standards. The WS BS 3 statline is basically that of a professional soldier.

Then we have examples like the character from the Black Library novel Fifteen Hours who is from a quiet peaceful world and has just 4 months of basic training. He might count as a "Conscript" or Whiteshield in terms of game stats but he is still technically Guard, though another world he might not make the grade and still be classed as PDF.

The IG in general are doing a good job. In most war zones, fluff-wise, they win with or without support from super humans.

And fluff does not translate to tabletop. Just listen to Marine players that want 10-shot, S6, AP -2, D2 bolters that inflict d6 mortal wounds per hit against anything with a 5+ save or worse. That would be fluff accurate, I’m told.

While a Guardsman is typically the cream of the crop that a given planet has to offer, that is not physically impressive compared to the other races of the galaxy. The lasgun is an impressive weapon in its own right, but not designed to penetrate armour. Keeping in mind that power armour is rules-wise the equal of most battle tanks (3+). Flakk armour gives the wearer a 33% chance to remain *combat effective* after taking a direct hit from an RPG. (If we consider bolters and frag weapons to be equivalent to rpg s)

So while a Guardsman (singular) is not the equal of other galactic soldiers in-game, and often in the fluff, the Imperial Guard (the organization) is all but unstoppable.

The Guants Ghosts books are pretty good at showing how wildly the quality of imperial guard troops can vary, from spec ops types, to world war 1 style infantry, to even more esoteric formations depending on technology only their planet uses. The books also do a good job at showing how when used correctly together all of these varied units with different military quakity and traditions can be used to over come nearly any enemy. Marines appear as antagonists or allies, but often the imperial Marines are only used sparingly for very specific missions (like a space hulk insertion).

 Dakka Flakka Flame wrote:
Also, entire chapters of Space Marines either being completely annihilated or reduce to a small number of survivors is pretty common in the books. If that was the norm I imagine that pretty rapidly there would be no Space Marines left, but like with the Guard an easy victory doesn't make for a good story.

I have made this point numerous times in other threads but still get shouted down by fanboys who think bolter-porn is good writing.

w1zard wrote:

 Dakka Flakka Flame wrote:
Also, entire chapters of Space Marines either being completely annihilated or reduce to a small number of survivors is pretty common in the books. If that was the norm I imagine that pretty rapidly there would be no Space Marines left, but like with the Guard an easy victory doesn't make for a good story.

I have made this point numerous times in other threads but still get shouted down by fanboys who think bolter-porn is good writing.

In its own way it is.

pm713 wrote:
In its own way it is.

The storyboard:

marine chapter arrives -> fight sequence -> politics -> more fight sequences -> plot twist -> climactic fight sequence -> marines win the day with a pyrrhic victory that nearly wipes out their chapter/unit with no regard to what that kind of victory would actually mean for the integrity of the chapter/unit

may have been novel once, now it is just old and overused, at least to me. They say that no art is objectively bad, but I think that formula comes as close to objectively bad as you can get. I actively avoid those kinds of stories wherever possible. As you can imagine, that means I don't get to read a lot of marine lore.

With the amount of time it takes to recruit and train a marine, and that most tactical marines have roughly 50+ years of fighting experience:

-Losing a single marine should be an unfortunate occurrence that happens once every few battles
-Losing a squad should be a tragedy
-Losing any formation larger than a squad should be an unmitigated disaster that should change how that chapter would operate for decades (ala Ultramarines after the siege of Macragge).

I just finished Talon of Horus. I actually thought it was pretty good, but on reflection it follows exactly that story board!

w1zard wrote:

pm713 wrote:
In its own way it is.

The storyboard:

marine chapter arrives -> fight sequence -> politics -> more fight sequences -> plot twist -> climactic fight sequence -> marines win the day with a pyrrhic victory that nearly wipes out their chapter/unit with no regard to what that kind of victory would actually mean for the integrity of the chapter/unit

may have been novel once, now it is just old and overused, at least to me. They say that no art is objectively bad, but I think that formula comes as close to objectively bad as you can get. I actively avoid those kinds of stories wherever possible. As you can imagine, that means I don't get to read a lot of marine lore.

With the amount of time it takes to recruit and train a marine, and that most tactical marines have roughly 50+ years of fighting experience:

-Losing a single marine should be an unfortunate occurrence that happens once every few battles
-Losing a squad should be a tragedy
-Losing any formation larger than a squad should be an unmitigated disaster that should change how that chapter would operate for decades (ala Ultramarines after the siege of Macragge).

It's pretty much the all around canevas for everything told in 40k, as far as battle are concerned. I find myself not to enjoy battle based lore too much because of that.

I'll be quite blunt and just say that the Imperial Guard as a whole, and the particular soldiers of the Guard in specific, are as good as, or as bad as the needs of the author.

GW is not very consistent.

 Melissia wrote:
I'll be quite blunt and just say that the Imperial Guard as a whole, and the particular soldiers of the Guard in specific, are as good as, or as bad as the needs of the author.

GW is not very consistent.

To be honest, that is a statemebt by which all armies could go

They have the firepower but lack the stopping power, that's the problem with the Imperial Guard.
They cannot go toe to toe with enemy infantry, they need to out number the enemy and rely on heavy weapons teams to succeed.

At their best, they have highly trained drop troops that can deploy behind enemy lines, capture objectives and repel attacks on their own.

IG are alright.

a single trooper is a pitiful soldier.

A million troopers is a near unstoppable force.


It's not how good they are, it's how many regiments the Imperium is willing to throw into the warzone to grind a victory.

The Astra Militarum works on simple theories.

They either outnumber and outgun you. Or they have better strategy.

When you’re inevitably faced with thousands of troops, and/or hundreds of Tanks? Your strategy had better be perfect. Because whilst hardly Special Forces, they’ve got the bods and guns to make any mistake a fatal one.

As for inflicting defeat against them? It’s hard to make it lasting, because there are always more.

It’s a master of attrition, and nobody gets into all that much trouble if a few hundred lives are wasted on a botched operation, so long as they achieve the objective overall.

Rebel4ever85 wrote:
I see the circular logic in many of these posts. Let me explain.


One person posts - There are millions of them and they over run with numbers.

Next person posts - Imperial guard are far better than they often made out to be.


Both are correct!
The imperial guard are often made out to just be crap that needs to be saved by the Astartes. The rules have them as just humans with guns which would make sense with conscripts and penal troops.

The fluff of imperial guard chapters has them to be waaaaay better than just an average human with a gun. They are the best of the normal humans and are highly trained and often have a strong legacy of military tradition like Cadia, Mordia, Catachan, Elysium and Valhalla. They often specialise further and become extremely good at one thing making them even more effective at what they do. These guys should be considerably better than an average human seeing a civilian militia doesn't do well against an elite special forces unit.

So what can we make of this....well i did ask the question...and from reading replies my thoughts so far are the IG suffer from making the space marines look good. Considering that space marines are not even the elite troops of the imperium having several more powerful units...like terminators, grey knights and primaris marines...if the imperial guard were doing a good job the elites of the imperium would be unstoppable.

except all those more elite then marines units you've listed... are marines

As I read somewhere before, from some book.

"Lasgun pretty much won't do much, unless you face a hundred of them."
- paraphrasing of some Chaos Astartes quote

I've heard a lasgun can't penetrate an armour unless you literaly repeteatly shot on the very same spot like no tomorrow until the laser finally "drills" through it. Is that any of canon? In which case yes, an astartes is nigh invulnerable to lasgun if they aren't a million...

Btw i've always wondered, whilst we're discussing the guard, that a Kauyon t'au tactic would actually work poorly against them: firstly because they're not supremely dumb still and would in the end at the very least become cautious, but also because getting your decoy/ main force litteraly shredded into soup-like state by basilisks must disrupt the tactic?

Sound a bit like the awful treadhead there but my bruv's getting into tau's and I find their fluff absurdly silly.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
I've heard a lasgun can't penetrate an armour unless you literaly repeteatly shot on the very same spot like no tomorrow until the laser finally "drills" through it. Is that any of canon? In which case yes, an astartes is nigh invulnerable to lasgun if they aren't a million...

Lasguns are depicted wildly differently in different sources. Sometimes they shoot laser beams capable of shearing off limbs. Sometimes they shoot energy projectiles that have recoil, ricochet off surfaces and take several shots to bring down determined human attackers.

The most consistent thing about them in the fluff is that they are extremely reliable and easy to support logistically.

In game terms they usually have about the worst armor penetration of any weapon. That brings in the question of how good 40k armor is though, and that also varies in the fluff.

For example, Flak Armor is depicted as both massively more protective and astoundingly more lightweight compared to modern body armor. And that's despite it being the "tee shirt" people meme about.

The lasgun's stats on the board are more reflective of how deadly everything else is, rather than any weakness on its own.

The fantasy flight books do a good job of showing that guard equipment is far better than how it has to be represented in game. Flak armor is light and some of the best armor you can get your hands on and a lasgun is both deadly, easy to maintain and very reliable.

I often think the lasgun follows a similar logic than the medieval crossbow: you can take some peasant from a feudal world or even a hunter gatherer from a feral world, who both never used ans technical device, give them a lasgun and some power packs, tell them which end faces forward and you are ready to go. And when "The stick that goes boom" stops firing they only have to change the power pack and put the old one in the sun or their campfire, problem solved. And however weak the lasgun might be, some dozends of these primitive soldiers with barely any training can kill opponents who trained for decades and use equipement that is worth more than thousands of lasguns.