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Just took a glance at my 5E rulebook - it does say "billions of Guardsmen in millions of regiments".

The book also counts planetary defense forces and militia units to be part of the Imperial Guard, so ... huh.

the quote i provided earlier is from the 5th edition IG codex

I would say a billion regiments isnt totally off count, because regiment size can range from 120,000 men, to 500. So an agri world could produce 1000 -500man regiments and that is just 500000 men/women that go into service out of probably 30+ million, not an unreasonable amount. Smaller worlds could be like israel where everyone must serve at least one year or any amount of time in the military.

500? At those numbers they'd be looking at being merged with another unit.

the phantine air born have about 650 men i think but also use their own air support

Fairfeldia wrote:the phantine air born have about 650 men i think but also use their own air support

They also got the s**t invaded out of them and were fighting in a defensive role for a long time without help.

they dont use their own air support- they ARE the air support. phantine has no land (it is an ocean world or something) so the entire regiment is airborne. they have so few people for several possible, speculated reasons:
1. phantine has a small population
2. aircraft are expensive (this is the most likely)
3. many died on phantine when the archenemy invaded

Ocean world is one way of thinking about it... provided you equate oceans with poisonous acids and chemicals.
They have regiments though they are drop troopers but they also have squadrons that are part of the Imperial Guard rather than the Navy.

meh, i was close.

Blackhoof wrote:they dont use their own air support- they ARE the air support. phantine has no land (it is an ocean world or something) so the entire regiment is airborne. they have so few people for several possible, speculated reasons:
1. phantine has a small population
2. aircraft are expensive (this is the most likely)
3. many died on phantine when the archenemy invaded

I'm not sure why your comparison lumps the Phantine Skyborne(the Airborne Regiments) with the Phantine Air Corps(the pilots).

They're not the same. Air Corps are organized the same way the Imperial Navy Fighter/Bomber Squadrons are which means there's going to be relatively small unit sizes while the Skyborne are organized like standard Imperial Guard Regiments.

The big problem, however, is what crops up in "Guns of Tanith". We don't see many Skyborne fighting, but that's likely because the majority of the book focuses on the Ghosts and their operations behind Blood Pact lines--where they were accompanied by some Skyborne for this infiltration mission.

I don't see a problem with Guard "Regiments" numbering in the high tens or low hundreds of thousands of men. There's at least one organizational level between company and regiment - battalion. I imagine Guard regiments vary in size from what we would consider a regiment today, up through division size and on to army group size, with appropriate subdivisions as necessary as the size of the regiment increases. Regimental size would definitely depend on the military tradition of the founding planet, the type of regiment, the men available, and so on.

Also, the size of a Regiment has varied widely even as far back as 2nd Ed if I recall correctly. The fluff back then specifically stated that the term "Regiment" had more to do with the act of founding a new unit rather than a specific number of bodies. While the size and internal organization might vary from planet to planet, they would be given a regimental name and number on founding, loaded up in troop ships, and kept together as a "Regiment" regardless of their size, for operational purposes, until everyone was dead. Back then the only way out of the Guard was to survive a crusade, at which point you earned the right to settle any newly conquered planets. A bit silly, and I'm glad they've retconned it to be more reasonable.

CalgarsPimpHand wrote:

Not to mention there's at least one organizational level between company and regiment - battalion.

No there isn't anymore. Last time IG had a organizational level ( in a codex or rulebook ) was 3rd ed.
Additionally, battallion isn't a different size than regiment today, just a different mix of units.

CalgarsPimpHand wrote:I imagine Guard regiments vary in size from what we would consider a regiment today, up through division size and on to army group size, with appropriate subdivisions as necessary as the size of the regiment increases. Regimental size would definitely depend on the military tradition of the founding planet, the type of regiment, the men available, and so on.

Surly different than today.
But GW has thrown out anything that isn't a company or regiment, as thats the only "groups" one can find in 5th ed fluff.
And there lies the problem. company command and regimental command are shown in the codex.
thus nothing between these 2, no additional staff to support a "regimental HQ" just these 5 (+5) guys....

1hadhq: I think you're giving too much weight to the codex unit entries.

Hmmh. Not really sure on that part, but I actually think he might have a point. If regiments truly can be of any size, there does not need to be anything between this formation and the company as basic unit. After all, what do you need a battalion for when a "small regiment" fills the same role? On an organizational level, they'd all be subjected to the same hierarchy anyways. Also actually makes integration for joint operations easier by "dumbing down" the core principle.

I also remember Final Liberation where there were only regiments made up of companies. Though you could say those were just game mechanics, it fits in nicely with what is written so far.

Just a theory, though. The last time I heard of battalions was back during the Great Crusade before the Imperial Army was split into Guard and Navy - though it should be noted that the fluff did at least mention them in this instance.

Emperors Faithful wrote:1hadhq: I think you're giving too much weight to the codex unit entries.

Too much?
IG codex page 9 first paragraph "created" this abomination of "everything is a regiment".
It dismissed any other "formation" as we know them.
Then, 4th paragraph, a regiment is formed from 3-20 companies, companies consisting of 3-6 platoons.
So where are these organizational names that should give the IG a level between Rgt and Co ? reads like regiment > company > platoon.

imo, the flaw are the examples and the trend to grimdarkify by upscaling the size.
1.500 to 12.000 sound possible, 1.500 to 120.000 ?
With 1 Rgt > 20 co > 6+ platoons its :
120.000 : 20 = 6.000 per company , 6.000 : 6 = 1.000 per platoon. 1.000 : 6+ squads = weird isn't it ?

Up upon page 13, for Solar Macharius the old system of platoon > company > regiment > >> army group still exists. (survived the c&p)....

When fluff isn't changed just to have moar guardsmanz, it can stay believable.
The IG suffered the loss of a clear organization in its codex, only to show a crappy "throw guardsmen at it tactic" as valid by providing
hundreds of thousands instead of the old and functioning thousands and up to tens of thousands.

Thus, i still believe in the functional organization that IS what made the IG work. From crusade down to squad level even if small engagemants and "spotlights" are the level of 40k and formations beyond companies from 1 or multiple regiments belong into apoc.

The weight of the unit entry is mirrored by the fluff of rgt>co>platoon>squad. May be found complete or in shattered pieces, depending on the IG codex.

I bet its more around 100 million if you include all the planetary militias there are as well.

I've heard it stated that it's canonically around one billion regiments, of an average of five thousand guardsmen each. I don't have a canon source for that number, having only seen it in discussions here, but it lines up well with what few other numbers we have that would indicated the rough number of Guardsmen.

Of course, that gives a number of five million Guardsmen for every Imperial world (on average), and in general the numbers given for Guard operations is in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes as low as the low thousands or low tens of thousands, meaning either massive garrisons of a scale much greater than any ever mentioned, and a great deal of redundancy with the various PDFs, or multiple warzones for every Imperial world. Reasonable answers being that either there are far more than the generally attested number of Imperial worlds (minor colonies and outposts, or uninhabited worlds that simply fall under Imperial jurisdiction, allowing for a greater number of warzones than the general calm most Imperial worlds experience would otherwise suggest), there are far less Guardsmen than even the lowest numbers outright stated (one million for every space marine), or the authors need to step back and think about the sheer scale of the setting, and adjust their numbers accordingly (even Abnett seems to fall into this, though the later Gaunt's Ghosts books seem to be adjusting the figures to be more in line with the scale of the operations described).

Remember kids:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale

GW/BL writers are notorious for this.

Melissia wrote:Remember kids:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale

GW/BL writers are notorious for this.

Absolutely hilarious

Melissia please stop killing my dreams


every one know that with enough bodies you can choke the eye of terror

Wait, you guys seem to forget about Astartes Worlds(i.e. no guard recruitment), Imperial Navy recruitment, Admech worlds, Inquisition Black Ships... so the amount of recruitment is lowered also if you take world class into consideration. Sorry if I seem to put some of the the more Veteran thinkers down...


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also by world class I mean Agri-worlds and Hive worlds.

In the real world isn't our milkyway estimated to have 100 billion stars? With another 200 billion galaxies like our own milky way?

if the imperium controlled even a small proportion of the stars in our galaxy, each star possibly having numerous planets like our own solar system. Even if only one or two planets had populations granting tithes it'd be more than 50million.

Lynata wrote:Hmmh. Not really sure on that part, but I actually think he might have a point. If regiments truly can be of any size, there does not need to be anything between this formation and the company as basic unit. After all, what do you need a battalion for when a "small regiment" fills the same role? On an organizational level, they'd all be subjected to the same hierarchy anyways. Also actually makes integration for joint operations easier by "dumbing down" the core principle.

I also remember Final Liberation where there were only regiments made up of companies. Though you could say those were just game mechanics, it fits in nicely with what is written so far.

Just a theory, though. The last time I heard of battalions was back during the Great Crusade before the Imperial Army was split into Guard and Navy - though it should be noted that the fluff did at least mention them in this instance.

Just to follow up on this - whilst looking for something completely different I stumbled upon this page:



(2E IG Codex)

So the regiments can be any size then...
Incidentally aren't battalions several regiments together?

Battalions would be something in between company and regiment.

In real life, regiments would have 3-7 battalions, which would in turn have 2-7 companies (according to wikipedia - likely subject to the individual nation and type of force).

Battalions still seem to exist in 40k, just not as a standard formation of a normal regiment - but there are both Penal Battalions and Storm Trooper Battalions, probably because they both work differently than a normal IG regiment. In case of the Storm Troopers, the necessity for battalions may originate due to the ST regiment never deploying as a whole. Whereas there might simply be no such thing as Penal Regiments, but rather Penal Battalions being attached to a normal regiment to supplement its normal companies? Theories, theories ...

Battalions seem to exist as a term for a force that is, even at full strength, smaller than a standard regiment... however big that is.

in the current IG regiment it says that local PDF's and rmies will have battillions but in the imperial guard there is only the regiment

Deceiver wrote:In the real world isn't our milkyway estimated to have 100 billion stars? With another 200 billion galaxies like our own milky way?

" Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with observations suggesting that it is a barred spiral galaxy. It contains 200-400 billion stars and is estimated to have at least 50 billion planets, 500 million of which could be located in the habitable zone of their parent star."

so the imperium only control roughly 1/500th of the galaxy?

suckers.

although, likely the number of habitable planets is much less that 500 million (which is only the number of planets which "could be within habitable zone"

regardless the imperium doesnt control as much of the galaxy as you would think.

There's also the fact that our RL space-viewing technology is still laughably simple, and these estimations are "best guesses".