kirotheavenger wrote:I find the Alpha Legion so silly, astartes have to be the worst spy agents you could imagine.
What are they supposed to do in the Great Crusade? spying, infiltration, and sleeper agents aren't gonna be remotely useful when you're fighting against the Orks or Megarachnids. Their whole existence and approach as a Legion assumes a great civil war where they are fighting other astartes.
I was chuckling reading some of their novels where they repeatedly depict a fully armoured astartes just hiding in the shadows in a [lit] room to surprise a character. Like how?!
Honestly the memes aren't even that inaccurate to what's actually written, it's just stupid and lame because the writing is stupid and lame.
Before the Horus Heresy novels the Alpha Legion lore was more in leading uprisings and using cult troops to fight their battles. Similar I guess to Word Bearers but more subtle. I guess too similar and subtle for the writers of
HH.
The Alpha Legion does still use regular human operatives for a lot of their actual infiltration, in fact they use more human support than any other Legion for this reason.
The Great Crusade very often involved fighting humans who wouldn't readily submit, ripe for infiltration.
As for how an Astartes could hide, cameoline. It's a high-tech armour coating that acts like active camouflage. In 30k it's chiefly associated with the Raven Guard, but as with so many other Raven Guard things the Alpha Legion copied it. In
Harrowmaster we see a Headhunter squad use it for Crysis-style cloaking, which isn't true invisibility but easily enough to make you overlooked if you stick to the shadows and an enemy's attention is elsewhere. (They also at another point dug themselves into snow and turned their armour systems to minimum to become nigh undetectable even to Mechanicus scouts).
But beyond all this,
Horus Heresy book 3: Extermination stresses that they are no less capable of fighting conventional war. They prefer to do so with particular tactics and pre-battle ploys, but when they are sent to invade Paramar and the sudden appearance of loyalist Iron Warriors throws their existing plan out the window, they execute an armoured mass assault and overwhelm the planet's defenders that way. It's not how they prefer to do it - their flaw, as
Harrowmaster stresses, is a psychological need to show off, and a tendency to overcomplicate things in their plans - but they absolutely
can do things the hard way. Their infiltration and scheming actually aids them in this, ensuring they are well-supplied with advanced equipment siphoned off by compromised industries, and advanced blueprints stolen from others.
A lot of the issue is people taking memes on face value (as always). Alpharius can Infiltrate any unit. People think this means he literally hides a tank behind a lamppost, when it more likely means clever use of false colours, disguising a fully functional tank as an old wreck until the enemy gets close, concealing it under a loose layer of rubble, etc.
