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Made in us
Stalwart Veteran Guard Sergeant




Greetings, long time, no post...
So, if I were to say draw out some tactical graphics for 40K units (in case I wanted to make a strategic wargame of it)...most of them are pretty simple for Imperial Guard, and Imperial Navy...and Space Marines would use the same symbol for Size/Echelon as the IG, but I would suppose that a Chapter would be equivalent to a reinforced Heavy Regimental Combat Team.

My question is, what are the canon sizes for all of the other forces of the Imperium and other such forces such as Eldar?

What would be the unit size for an Inquisitorial Retinue? I would guess a squad, since they are usually between 6 and 15 personnel?
What size forces do Sororitas deploy in? They usually show up as squads and platoons? Does a Cannoness have an equivalent rank in the IG?

What would a Legion be equivalent to (pre-Heresy)? Is that like 50,000 personnel or so? Bigger?

And finally, what about Titans and Imperial Knights...what would an Imperator Titan be equivalent to? In the lore, they seem equivalent to a Division.

-STS

Grey Knights 712 points Imperial Stormtroopers 3042 points Lamenters 1787 points Xenomorphs 995 points 1200 points + 1790 points 770 points 369 points of Imperial Guard to bolster the Sisters of Battle
Kain said: "This will surely end in tears for everyone involved. How very 40k." lilahking said "the imperium would rather die than work with itself"

 
   
Made in us
Gore-Soaked Lunatic Witchhunter







The closest equivalent to a Canoness in the Guard is probably a Colonel, but a Sororitas Order is an independent combined-arms force organized a lot more like a Marine Chapter (though with more than a thousand soldiers) than a Guard regiment. The rank directly below Canoness (equivalent to a Space Marine Captain) is called 'Palatine', it existed on the tabletop a while ago but hasn't for a few editions now. I don't expect they'd deploy in forces smaller than a company, but they do use basically the same ten-woman squad structure the rest of the Imperium uses.

The Inquisition doesn't really make sense as an element in a game that requires tactical graphics; they tend to be involved almost exclusively in small-unit actions. If I were you I'd make Inquisitors an upgrade to other Imperium armies' command staff.

The Legions varied significantly in size pre-Heresy but they generally ran to between one and two hundred thousand (the Ultramarines were the largest, the Thousand Sons the smallest). Organization varied widely from Legion to Legion.

The Adeptus Mechanicus is wildly complicated on this one; roughly speaking a large military deployment is going to be run by a "Magos Prime"/"Magos Dominus" (pre/post Heresy), which is an ad-hoc rank assigned to the tech-priest in charge. The force as a whole is composed of elements drawn from a number of "Orders" (the Legio Cybernetica, Ordo Reductor, Titan Legions, Knight households, Auxilia Myrmidon, Centurio Ordinatus, the Lacyraemara, Skitarii, and the Autokrator), each of which has its own independent command structure and is coordinated by the Dominus' central command staff.

Imperial Knights deploy generally as "lances" of three engines; the 30k Questoris list goes into detail about the rank/organizational structure of the Knight pilots (ranks generally prefixed "Knight-" or "Scion-"):
-Martial: The basic line engines.
-Dolorus, Uhlan: Scouts/outriders/flankers.
-Preceptor: Techically-adept pilot who makes use of advanced sensor/communication equipment.
-Aucteller: Traditionally the guy chosen for single combats, tends to run off hunting big things.
-Arbalester, Implacable: Fire support. The Arbalester hangs back and covers the rest of the force, the Implacable breaches fortifications.
-Lord-Scion, Baron: Command rank
-Seneschal: Overall commander of a Household's deployment in the field.

Titan Legions are deployed a lot of different ways in the lore; sometimes you'll find one Battle-Titan shoved into another Imperial force, in older lore Scout Titans are deployed in pairs to clear the way for Battle-Titans, but Inferno has brought in the Secutarii, who are an infantry formation set up to deploy around/with the Titan to support it against infantry. I'd probably give them their own tactical graphics if I were you, but a division for a large Battle-Titan sounds about right (a smaller Battle-Titan like a Reaver or a pair of Warhounds is probably closer to a Regiment).

As to non-Imperial armies that's pretty hard because of how wildly disorganized most of them are, but I'll try:

Craftworld Eldar have no permanent formations beyond the low-level concept of an "Aspect Shrine" (the adherents of a single temple/disciples of a single Exarch, presented on the table as a squad), anything larger than that is an ad-hoc formation, and Craftworlds try to avoid any kind of large deployment in the first place given their endless manpower shortage. The psychic communication and divination available to the Eldar makes the kind of command structure necessary to the Imperium sort of redundant; the Autarch/Farseer in command in the field is in effectively constant contact with squad leaders around the field and the whole battle gets run in a very coordinated fashion.

I'm not even going to try to explain the Harlequins given the sheer amount of mysteriousness GW insists on maintaining about how they actually work.

Dark Eldar shouldn't be thought of as an 'army', they're a loose confederation of mercenaries and pirate crews. Any large formation is going to be wildly unstable.

Orks have a bizarre and unusual command structure; in any group of Orks the biggest one is in charge. This means you get an emergent structure based on how many Orks you need for a given task; send an arbitrary forty Orks somewhere and the biggest one in those arbitrary forty is in charge while they're on that task. Unfortunately this chain of command, while fascinating and entertaining, means they have to get in fights to confirm who's the biggest every now and again.

The base-level organization of a Tau army is the 'Cadre', which is roughly analogous to a Guard Company, but has various sorts of units fully integrated at that level (so a 'Cadre' could be forty mechanized infantrymen and a couple of Piranha squadrons, or it could be a dozen Crisis suits and a Stealthsuit team, it can be completely mixed and there isn't any core element that makes something a Cadre). A Shas'el will command a single Cadre while a Shas'o will command a multiple-Cadre detachment.

Balanced Game: Noun. A game in which all options and choices are worth using.
Homebrew oldhammer project: https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/790996.page#10896267
Meridian: Necromunda-based 40k skirmish: https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/795374.page 
   
Made in gb
Fixture of Dakka






Some of the Imperial Armour books (IIRC the Taros, Vraks and Anphelion books, and probably others) have TO&E charts like you're looking for. They're pretty simple, though; Guard go Squad-Platoon-Company-Regiment-Army, with everything above Squad being of variable size; an infantry company can be between 110 and 430 men*, for example.

In my head, the extra ranks and levels of command are present, just not reflected in the rules (corporals in charge of special and heavy weapon squads, the members of a command squad will be non-coms, the general staff of the regiment which is not represented on the tabletop, etc.

* 10 men to a squad. a platoon is an officer, 4-man command squad, plus 3 infantry squads at minimum or 5 infantry squads, 2 special weapon squads (6 men) and three heavy weapon squads (6 men). A Company is three to five platoons commanded by a Captain and a four-man command squad. That doesn't include any conscript units or specialist officers. A Baneblade company is 33 men (3 tanks, 11 crew per tank).

One of the Horus Heresy books has a TO&E for a Space Marine Legion. That includes the Battalion as an intermediate level - three Companies. In a "modern" Chapter, the nine "power armoured" companies would be battalions 1-3 and the Scout company would be on its own, but that's only a "paper" organisation.
   
Made in us
Stalwart Veteran Guard Sergeant




Thanks. I really appreciate that info. I will now make a list for everything.

-STS

Grey Knights 712 points Imperial Stormtroopers 3042 points Lamenters 1787 points Xenomorphs 995 points 1200 points + 1790 points 770 points 369 points of Imperial Guard to bolster the Sisters of Battle
Kain said: "This will surely end in tears for everyone involved. How very 40k." lilahking said "the imperium would rather die than work with itself"

 
   
Made in gb
Regular Dakkanaut





Side note, sorry, this is why I've never understood why for IG, a platoon leader is not an HQ. To me company leaders are far too high rank to be leading most IG platoons sized organisations (unless it's the command platoon, of course).

I'd love to see this kind of thing and I think if GW started thinking this way they'd probably sell even more as people will have a structure to build up to.

 
   
 
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