As someone who played Warhammer fantasy and plays AOS, armour save mods weren't that big a deal. They worked just fine.

Manchu wrote:
Representation" in a broad sense assumes people can only relate to people like themselves along a few, extremely superficial dimensions. Pretty dumb. The more narrow sense of representation (for example, if your movie is about a woman suffering prejudice because she is Asian then you should probably cast an Asian actress as that woman) by contrast is very well taken. But that narrow sense doesn't really apply to 40k.

Bro, you don't get to tell women what they should be content with in terms of representation anymore than anyone has a right to tell trans people that they should be happy with the status quo where they're lucky to even get acknowledged as existing in most fiction outside of being the butt of disgusting jokes. Representation is about making people feel included. And in a large shared setting where one can endlessly add content because it's not tied down to the concerns that affect a single narrative setting like Lord of the Rings; there is no good excuse to not make people of colour, queer people, or women feel more included by giving them characters that they can relate to as a source of representation without people jumping on them with mansplanations about why they're violating canon by existing. Characters who should at least get to do something important once in a while even if it's in some self contained novel series. Like, do you even know how happy LGBTQ (or simply Queer for short) people are when a major work of fiction acknowledges their existence and gives them a positive portrayal? They squee in joy and delight because someone has the kindness to acknowledge they exist and not portray them as monsters. Or how much it brightens the day of many a young girl to see a woman who isn't just window dressing or a prize for the leading man to win in a movie or a game or a book? Or seen a black person get positively elated when they get a black character who isn't a collection of racial stereotypes? Maybe you don't have the proper frame of reference for it, but this is very, very deeply important to many people who would love nothing more than for the media to acknowledge that they exist and deserve to be respected and loved like any other human being. This isn't some dumb wish fulfillment audience avatar thing, this is born out of wanting to be acknowledged in a society that all too often objectifies, marginalizes and sometimes outright demonizes them. When you have angry redditors ranting, raving, and shouting about "da ess jay double yous" when major media has the audacity to include a cast that's not just filled with white dudebros or has girls who have the audacity to be actually major and independent characters; you have a lot of these marginalized people feeling very threatened to simply share the same space with the IP lest they get the kind of ranting and raving tongue lashing that Bioware fans get from people who have been accusing Bioware of cultural marxism since the 2010s began.

Is this some sort of Kafkaesque absurdism? Are you seriously attempting to insinuate that your average middle class male nerds are somehow more oppressed and marginalized than Blacks and Indigenous people who are disproportionately likely to end up dead and tend to live in markedly lower standards of living than the racial majorities in the developed world; than women who are constantly objectified, ignored or shoved to the sidelines in fiction; or Queer people who have for most of the modern era's history been regarded as actual factual abominations by much of the developed world, to be denied the right to exist as they actually are on the pain of death? People who even now are continually called abominations to be damned to burn in hellfire to this very day?

Is this something I am actually seeing?

The inescepable fact of humanity is that people want representation of themselves and their groups in the fiction they consume. When you have half of the human population who has for the longest time, been excluded, marginalized, sexualized, or even outright villified in most of humanity's history in the creation of fiction, you're going to get women pushing hard for increasing more visible female representation in fiction and wanting a decrease in sexualized portrayals of their gender and sex. You also see this with racial minorities such as black and native american populations who want to see more of their population represented in a morass of seemingly endless whiteness in most visual and even textual medium. And of course, sexual and gender identity minorities have also pushed for greater representation in the face of thousands of years of straight up erasure or even demonization. Queer people, racial minorities, and women aren't coming to take away your franchises from you, they just want to be represented in a respectful way and given actual prominence rather than just existing in the margins of settings and universes after being pushed to the sidelines for most of storytelling's collective history.

Western Mech designs (that aren't kaiju sized) seem to either crib off of the AT-ST and the AT-At or the Power Loader from Aliens. The sentinel borrows from the AT-ST and the Dreadknight draws from the Power Loader.

The sentinel power loader is what happens when the AT-ST and Power Loader get really drunk one night and do something they both regret later on but they live in some crappy country that bans abortions and so the power loader gives birth to a child born of a shameful one night stand.

I'm hoping for more Xenos vs Xenos battles because the Valedor novel was one of the most interesting I've ever read out of 40k. Xenofiction is rare enough in fiction in general, so more of it is never a bad thing.

theocracity wrote:

 Melissia wrote:


Automatically Appended Next Post:

theocracity wrote:
The Tyranid psychic presence has a quantifiable effect - the Shadow in the Warp.

Only produced by hive fleets, and the effect is weakened for splinter fleets. Just like an Ork WAAAGH! being dependent on the size of the horde. A "seeding" scout party of a few lictors, a warrior, and a couple dozen gaunts and gants? Not gonna produce a Shadow In the Warp.

Maybe not as much as one, but it's also not going to be doing any physics-warping. A psyker who sees them would know there's a group of drones being controlled by a more powerful psyker, and could potentially feel its mind control effects. The same psyker seeing an Ork would not get the same feeling of psychic power just because the Ork's gun is a piece of crap.

Path of the seer explicitly mentions that the Eldar can feel the psychic presence of the WAAAGH surrounding the Orks and twisting the skeins of fate through its very power as the simple presence of Orks gathered in a WAAAGH alter the possible futures that destiny can take. The WAAAGH field a very real thing. It's a natural product of Orkoid physiology. Likely because as mentioned, the Orks were a psychic soldier race made for an apocalyptic war against an army of star eating gods and their unliving robot minions.

theocracity wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:

theocracity wrote:

 Kain wrote:

Manchu wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:
Orks slap a tube and a trigger onto a box and it fires .50 rounds, somehow.

Magic?

 Deadshot wrote:
they make use of laws humans haven't discovered or understand yet

But not magic?

No, they are both just examples of magic.

When you get down to it, 40k is a fantasy setting that runs on varying forms of magic from start to finish. Whether it's common narrative magic or just outright setting physics magic. It's not hard science fiction and it should never try to be. Leave harder scifi to stuff like the Culture or the Xeelee sequence.

I mean, even the lasgun probably relies on several violations of the laws of physics as we currently understand them to work (like energy density, because as far as I know there's no non-nuclear forms of energy generation that can fit the needs of an assault rifle sized DEW that can blow off limbs and provide for a hundred shots) and Chainswords wouldn't actually work because the chainblades would get stuck on bones and body armor.

Everything working because of "feth it, space magic" is perfectly acceptable if setting metaphysics is not supposed to be the key point of the setting.

But 40k magic has rules that it follows, none of which is being followed when we talk about Orks firing magic bullets out of sticks that they think are guns.

40k magic is chaotic, dangerous and flashy. It affects the people who use it such that they go mad, or have to take precautions to protect themselves. It has a palpable presence that sensitive users can detect.

None of these rules are followed by the exaggerated examples of the gestalt field.

Well its only Chaotic to the human mind which has a rigid and fixed idea what order and physics are. Orks are chaotic because to a human who lives in society system X, Ork system Y is complete madness. Same with the warp. The warp has rules, so to speak, about how it can be used in the Materium, but the Orks can use it differently because its the equivilent of a Librarian saying "But you can't do that!" and an Ork saying " Kan it 'umie, I just did."

Then what is there no difference in the chaotic nature of warp magic when a Wyrdboy does it? Wyrdboys follow the same general rules of flashy, dangerous, mind-altering magic as Librarians and Sorcerers - the only difference is the lack of demonic threat.

Why isn't there green lightning and flashes of roaring power when an Ork conjures a bullet as there is when a Wyrdboy vomits Waaagh! energy at someone? Because it isn't magic, and no bullet is being conjured.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kain wrote:

theocracity wrote:

 Kain wrote:

theocracity wrote:

 Kain wrote:

Manchu wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:
Orks slap a tube and a trigger onto a box and it fires .50 rounds, somehow.

Magic?

 Deadshot wrote:
they make use of laws humans haven't discovered or understand yet

But not magic?

No, they are both just examples of magic.

When you get down to it, 40k is a fantasy setting that runs on varying forms of magic from start to finish. Whether it's common narrative magic or just outright setting physics magic. It's not hard science fiction and it should never try to be. Leave harder scifi to stuff like the Culture or the Xeelee sequence.

I mean, even the lasgun probably relies on several violations of the laws of physics as we currently understand them to work (like energy density, because as far as I know there's no non-nuclear forms of energy generation that can fit the needs of an assault rifle sized DEW that can blow off limbs and provide for a hundred shots) and Chainswords wouldn't actually work because the chainblades would get stuck on bones and body armor.

Everything working because of "feth it, space magic" is perfectly acceptable if setting metaphysics is not supposed to be the key point of the setting.

But 40k magic has rules that it follows, none of which is being followed when we talk about Orks firing magic bullets out of sticks that they think are guns.

40k isn't Mistborn. The so called "rules" of its magic are at best very loosely followed guidelines that authors routinely ignore or alter their interpretations of how the details work whenever they feel it suits them. Which makes a certain kind of sense because the warp is an artistic realm of emotion and feeling and not a rational realm of rules and reason.

But those loosely followed guidelines still fit the feel of the setting. Check my edit above for what I'm referring to.

Going outside those guidelines breaks suspension of disbelief in the setting. I think the only reason the gestalt field idea has had legs, rather than being rejected as setting-breaking outright, is because orks are also known as comedic rule breakers so they somehow get a pass. I think that's bunk - even rule breakers shouldn't be breaking the feel of the setting. Unless they're deadpool.

Not particularly? Jonah Orion goes through Dawn of War 2 without once being even moderately imperiled by his own powers..

I assume that is a librarian? One who's wearing a psychic hood, a piece of equipment specifically created to protect them from the consequences of their powers?

And if we're talking Dawn of War, let's examine what happened to the Librarian in the original dawn of war....

Isador wasn't corrupted by his own powers, he was directly being corrupted by Sindri Myr talking to him and taunting him almost constantly.

Meanwhile Jonah can: Walk into and out of the warp unharmed: Throws psychic shooting attacks as his standard means of dealing damage, spam psychic powers like there's no tomorrow without so much as a daemonic hiccup, and the only way to get him corrupted is to hand him chaos corrupted wargear, fail to bring him on some missions (in which he becomes corrupted out of resentment for not being brought along and not by his own powers), or leaving him on the space hulk for too long.

Throughout Dawn of War, the only psykers who have ever been portrayed as being at risk from their own powers were the Imperial Guard's sanctioned psykers, and the worst they can ever do is cause themselves some damage occasionally. Everyone else can cast their spells with 100% reliability and safety and absolutely nobody ever considers their psykers to be a particularly great threat to their own team throughout all seven games released so far. Not even so much as a single mention of wariness besides Crull saying he'd rather not have to use Sorcerers because he's a World Eater.

It's easy enough to find other examples of psykers having wildly incompatible depictions in the black library and in the video games. 40k has absolutely no internal consistency so I'm not sure why you'd be surprised when you find that a series legendary for being incredibly internally inconsistent is surprise surprise, internally inconsistent.

theocracity wrote:

 Kain wrote:

theocracity wrote:

 Kain wrote:

Manchu wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:
Orks slap a tube and a trigger onto a box and it fires .50 rounds, somehow.

Magic?

 Deadshot wrote:
they make use of laws humans haven't discovered or understand yet

But not magic?

No, they are both just examples of magic.

When you get down to it, 40k is a fantasy setting that runs on varying forms of magic from start to finish. Whether it's common narrative magic or just outright setting physics magic. It's not hard science fiction and it should never try to be. Leave harder scifi to stuff like the Culture or the Xeelee sequence.

I mean, even the lasgun probably relies on several violations of the laws of physics as we currently understand them to work (like energy density, because as far as I know there's no non-nuclear forms of energy generation that can fit the needs of an assault rifle sized DEW that can blow off limbs and provide for a hundred shots) and Chainswords wouldn't actually work because the chainblades would get stuck on bones and body armor.

Everything working because of "feth it, space magic" is perfectly acceptable if setting metaphysics is not supposed to be the key point of the setting.

But 40k magic has rules that it follows, none of which is being followed when we talk about Orks firing magic bullets out of sticks that they think are guns.

40k isn't Mistborn. The so called "rules" of its magic are at best very loosely followed guidelines that authors routinely ignore or alter their interpretations of how the details work whenever they feel it suits them. Which makes a certain kind of sense because the warp is an artistic realm of emotion and feeling and not a rational realm of rules and reason.

But those loosely followed guidelines still fit the feel of the setting. Check my edit above for what I'm referring to.

Going outside those guidelines breaks suspension of disbelief in the setting. I think the only reason the gestalt field idea has had legs, rather than being rejected as setting-breaking outright, is because orks are also known as comedic rule breakers so they somehow get a pass. I think that's bunk - even rule breakers shouldn't be breaking the feel of the setting. Unless they're deadpool.

Not particularly? Jonah Orion goes through Dawn of War 2 without once being even moderately imperiled by his own powers. Some authors have basically completely different views of how psychic powers work, and many of these differences aren't even based on whether the authors view warp power as closer to science fiction psionics or to fantasy magic. There is no consistency and there is no canon with Games Workshop having explicitly abdicated the responsibility of curating canon to the fans to decide what they want to be canon. By GW's statements you are within your rights to completely disregard everything Games Workshop, Relic, the Black Library and more have ever written and have something completely different be canon. Sure it'd be kind of pointless because why even play 40k at that point, but you're allowed to do it and you'd be just as right as anyone else. Perhaps this is a product of GW deciding that if the Black Library and the Video Game developers wanted as much creative freedom as possible then GW wasn't going to be arsed to police what they were doing. Perhaps it's because GW legitimately takes post-modernist stances to the very idea of canon.

But the result is undeniably that there is a billion and a half portrayals of how the warp works and what it's power manifests as being like, and you have the fandom all arguing over which is the true canon instead of accepting that there is no truth in 40k. Simply what you want to believe out of the pile of lies and inaccuracies. This is in my opinion, the best way GW could approach canon and it's how everyone should approach shared universes. Nobody is wrong or right, they simply have their own headcanons and none are more correct than the other.

theocracity wrote:

 Kain wrote:

Manchu wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:
Orks slap a tube and a trigger onto a box and it fires .50 rounds, somehow.

Magic?

 Deadshot wrote:
they make use of laws humans haven't discovered or understand yet

But not magic?

No, they are both just examples of magic.

When you get down to it, 40k is a fantasy setting that runs on varying forms of magic from start to finish. Whether it's common narrative magic or just outright setting physics magic. It's not hard science fiction and it should never try to be. Leave harder scifi to stuff like the Culture or the Xeelee sequence.

I mean, even the lasgun probably relies on several violations of the laws of physics as we currently understand them to work (like energy density, because as far as I know there's no non-nuclear forms of energy generation that can fit the needs of an assault rifle sized DEW that can blow off limbs and provide for a hundred shots) and Chainswords wouldn't actually work because the chainblades would get stuck on bones and body armor.

Everything working because of "feth it, space magic" is perfectly acceptable if setting metaphysics is not supposed to be the key point of the setting.

But 40k magic has rules that it follows, none of which is being followed when we talk about Orks firing magic bullets out of sticks that they think are guns.

40k isn't Mistborn. The so called "rules" of its magic are at best very loosely followed guidelines that authors routinely ignore or alter their interpretations of how the details work whenever they feel it suits them. Which makes a certain kind of sense because the warp is an artistic realm of emotion and feeling and not a rational realm of rules and reason. It's like Doctor Strange's magic; there's some very loosely established guidelines in the comics but authors ignore, alter or do away with them as they feel like it because the magic is ultimately just a tool to serve a story. In a game you need rules otherwise you might as well be doing play by post role playing but a story only needs rules if the author feels they are necessary.

Manchu wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:
Orks slap a tube and a trigger onto a box and it fires .50 rounds, somehow.

Magic?

 Deadshot wrote:
they make use of laws humans haven't discovered or understand yet

But not magic?

No, they are both just examples of magic.

When you get down to it, 40k is a fantasy setting that runs on varying forms of magic from start to finish. Whether it's common narrative magic or just outright setting physics magic. It's not hard science fiction and it should never try to be. Leave harder scifi to stuff like the Culture or the Xeelee sequence.

I mean, even the lasgun probably relies on several violations of the laws of physics as we currently understand them to work (like energy density, because as far as I know there's no non-nuclear forms of energy generation that can fit the needs of an assault rifle sized DEW that can blow off limbs and provide for a hundred shots) and Chainswords wouldn't actually work because the chainblades would get stuck on bones and body armor.

Everything working because of "feth it, space magic" is perfectly acceptable if setting metaphysics is not supposed to be the key point of the setting. It's like Superman, there's not a single explanation for any of what he does that possibly squares with the rules of our reality but honestly the only people who care are physics nerds with nothing better to do.

Personally I like 40k being a ridiculous and silly black comedy setting full of over the top insane lunacy and hilarious violations of common sense rather than a dour place that takes itself seriously and forgets its roots as a satire on fascism and Space Opera. 40k loses its spark when it takes itself too seriously and forgets that it's fundamentally a pretty dumb and silly premise (much like how I'm always opposed to trying to make Star Wars or Comic Books too deprived of humor and fun; when you really get down to it it's all kind of dumb and silly at its core and should always remember to have fun with itself) and should never be afraid to laugh at its own ridiculousness. Black Comedy 40k is infinitely superior to Grimdark 40k. It's why I actually rather like /tg/'s interpretation of the setting (when stripped out of the racist and sexist jokes, so more towards Text to Speech Device) where everyone's a lunatic played for laughs.

Manchu wrote:
@Kain

But none of that is in dispute and none of it supports the theory that ork ammo = psyker power. You seem to be on the verge of arguing that all orks are psykers and firing their weapons is a psychic power equivalent to something like a Grey Knight using Smite.

I'm not actually arguing it, I'm simply arguing that it's one of the less crazy and out there things warp power has done in the setting.

A setting where people can be power bombed from orbit, solar systems can be cast into black holes with the flick of a c'tan's wrist, where a flaming headed cocaine addict's talking head is in the possession of a bunch of space mongols, and where space elves can interbreed with a species that developed 60 million years after they did.

Finding the possibility that Ork guns probably don't work entirely under normal laws of physics to be ridiculous by the standards of a setting that operates entirely on rule of cool is in my opinion, a tad silly when the setting has about the same level of respect for the laws of reality as a superhero comic book where the Flash can run so fast that he'd be able to punch everyone in the entire star wars galaxy to death in a microsecond and yet somehow the entire earth doesn't explode the second he takes a step at 321 quintillion times the speed of light or whatever.

Manchu wrote:
By that logic, the IG could also source ammo via psychic magic.

Orks are repeatedly referred to as having greater psychic sensitivity than humanity on average. All orks contribute to the WAAAGH field which does exist. Humans are not only less psychically sensitive but more of their psychic feedback into the warp is fed into Chaos than anything else. Of course, Orks are a purposefully engineered soldier race (albeit a degenerate remnant of thereof) while humans are naturally evolved, so humans having less ability to direct their weaker psychic contributions to the warp is perfectly congruous with what is known about the setting. Through the mechanics explained of both species, humans not being able to affect reality through their emotional-psychological contributions to the warp to the same degree the Orks are makes perfect sense.

And humans do make impossible things happen through mere thought and emotion. It's called Chaos. All those Daemons exist for no reason beyond that humanity (and most other species) is a bunch of dicks as part of Warhammer 40,000's initial premise as a setting to show just what kind of awful crapsack world you'd need to live in for the arguments of fascism to become justified; and so the warp is filled with a bunch of dicks who want to murder you in imaginative and nasty ways. All those Lords of Change are drawing from power that originally came through innocuous enough seeming ambition and scheming that fed into the warp and formed Tzeentch.

Manchu wrote:
And?

40k is very much a "belief and emotion makes it real" setting for just about every faction. It primarily comes up with humans, eldar, and orks, but to believe that Orks can affect reality by making impossible things happen because they don't really care about the already very loose laws of physics in the setting is no more a stretch than believing that the collective anger of humanity and a bunch of other xenos sits on a throne of skulls and wears blackened armor and spits out red skinned demons who cut people open with swords and axes.

Well I mean, a Wyrdboy can use their psychic gestalt field to make a giant foot squash your army like it's a monty python sketch.

On the Ork gestalt field thing, I see it as being like the "how many times did Gilles le Breton bone Lileath while serving as the green knight" question, I.E it's meaningless and doesn't actually affect anything because every author will give a different answer because Warhammer has no defined canon. :U

 Deadshot wrote:

 Kain wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
The ability of the lasgun power pack to taker a charge from an electrical supply or convert light or heat energy is another of those "magic" things that the audience takes for granted, too.

I can't help thinking that I bet some types can be charged by shaking, too, like self-winding watches.

"Commissar we're out of ammo and the 'nids are closing in, what do we do?"

"There's only one thing we can do sergeant."

"What's that ma'am?"

"DANCE!"

That might actually be a viable tactic. I could just imagine the Nids stopping dead to reconsider this scene. I imagine conversation being something like this

Hormagaunt: "Ughhh..."

Synapse: "Boss, they're dancing..."

Hive Mind "We probably shouldn't absorb them, they'll make us ret***ed"

Another victory for Lady Commissar Boogiera.

Warzone Valedor not only had no space marines, it had no humans at all. Which is something I'd like to see more of. 40k stories with no humans. No Chaos, no Imperials; just Xenos beating the gak out of each other.

I'm pretty sure GW has ways to resurrect every single Primarch and even reveal the two missing Primarchs if they believe it will make them more Pounds sterling.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
The ability of the lasgun power pack to taker a charge from an electrical supply or convert light or heat energy is another of those "magic" things that the audience takes for granted, too.

I can't help thinking that I bet some types can be charged by shaking, too, like self-winding watches.

"Commissar we're out of ammo and the 'nids are closing in, what do we do?"

"There's only one thing we can do sergeant."

"What's that ma'am?"

"DANCE!"

The thing about bullets is that you'd need to ship either them or the manufactorums to make them across a massive distance. Supplying huge numbers of soldiers with physical bullets or supplying the ship or ground based military factories to make them in a setting where human FTL travel is notoriously unreliable is a terrible idea. I mean, the Allies had enough trouble supplying bullets across the atlantic and pacific oceans in world war two. Imagine the difficulty when you scale the number of troops up tremendously and scale the distance up exponentially. And also the ocean is full of Kaiju who want to eat your boats.

Rechargable batteries are just infinitely more convenient logistically.

 techsoldaten wrote:
Bringing back dead primarchs would be heresy of the highest order.

The more likely scenario would be to bring them back in a non-literal way. For example:

- Instead of Sanguinus, we might see the incarnation of the Black Rage. It's not like the Eldar don't have avatars, great spirits can be manifested and what not. It's not like we don't already have Eldar assisting with the resurrection of Primarchs.

- Instead of Ferrus Magnus, they might bring in some manifestation of the machine god (which is supposed to be a C'Tan buried in a volcano on Mars.) It's part of the fluff and would create a welcome opportunity for Space Marines to get another OP D weapon wielding superheavy LOW.

- Instead of Horus, we already have Abbadon. Perhaps he finally ascends to Daemonhood only to come out looking more like Horus. Gets stats equal to those of a Primarch, only costing twice as many points, no eternal warrior, and with ear and soul blaze.

- Alpharius / Omegeon would be hard to explain if they were anything but Alpha Legion. You know they are not dead. It will probably turn out that they have both been around for a long time and plan to come back once something else is revealed. All part of a master plan.

Abaddon explicitly refuses to ascend to daemonhood or accept any Daemonic gifts because he actually hates the Chaos Gods and plans to betray them so he can crown himself emperor. Accepting power from the Chaos Gods would make him dependent on them, and Ezekyle doesn't want to be dependent on or subservient to anyone.

 Lance845 wrote:

 Kain wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
What I would really like is for Leviathan to run full rampant. Overrun the orks in octarious and make a run at terra. End up intercepting Chaos on the way and ending the black crusade dead in it's tracks. Then have Eldar, IOM, Tau, and Crons loyal to the Silent King unite to stop Leviatha which would over run them all if they don't stand together. Orks come too because big fights are fun.

8th ed launches in the aftermath. The leviathan splinter fleets are much diminished and everyones resources are vastly depleted from the all out fight for survival. Back to nobody trusting anyone and mass fighting as per normal.

The isssue is that Ghazghkull is at Octarius and is flat out stated by Eldrad to be destined to become even greater than the six Primorks of the Beast who nearly shattered the Imperium on the knee of Orks who were as strong and tough as space marines, more advanced than the Eldar, were mass producing death stars, and had super weapons that could destroy whole star systems by translating an Ork's boasts into superluminal gravitational waves.

So I don't think Leviathan is going to defeat Ghazzy. Especially since Ghazghkull is almost certainly due for a big honking super expensive new model.

Rather I think that it'll fall to a new Hive Fleet, which going by the naming scheme of Hiv eFleets I'd wager would be named Echidna or Typhon; with the hive fleet after that probably being named Ziz after the third biblical superbeast.

Ghazghkull is about to leave Octarius for Armageddon according to the Ghazghkull book. He doesn't need to be there when the Nids win the fight. That being said, a new Hive Fleet would work just as well.

His big plan is to unite the four greatest WAAAGHs in the galaxy to trigger some kind of Football Hooligan Resonance Cascade and Gork and Mork are giving him the ability to command his forces all at once no matter how far away they are from him. Even on Octarius he can command the Orks in the Armageddon war as if he were there in person. I don't think he'd tolerate anyone trying to wreck his plan to unite every Ork in the galaxy into a single WAAAGH for the RagnaORK and surpass even the WAAAGH of the beast. Armageddon and Octarius are two of the WAAAGHs he's knitting together, not sure on what his other two pillars of his plan are.

It would give GW room to just continually release larger and larger Ghazghkull models; probably culminating in some hulking green mass of muscle and mega armor as big as an Imperator titan or something along those lines given that the six primorks were described as being Knight sized or thereabouts. Then GW can release some super huge Swarmlord Model and they can fight together in time for 2020's Godzilla vs Kong.

BrianDavion wrote:
I'm not sure though that we can count destiny 100% GS3 gave me the distint impression that the rise of Ynned, and the ressurection of Gulliman where things "unforseeable" that caught even Tzeetch by suprise.

We can also count on "Ghazghkull's model is old as balls and they're going to need to pump him up when it's the orks turn to get a triumvirate".

 Lance845 wrote:
What I would really like is for Leviathan to run full rampant. Overrun the orks in octarious and make a run at terra. End up intercepting Chaos on the way and ending the black crusade dead in it's tracks. Then have Eldar, IOM, Tau, and Crons loyal to the Silent King unite to stop Leviatha which would over run them all if they don't stand together. Orks come too because big fights are fun.

8th ed launches in the aftermath. The leviathan splinter fleets are much diminished and everyones resources are vastly depleted from the all out fight for survival. Back to nobody trusting anyone and mass fighting as per normal.

The isssue is that Ghazghkull is at Octarius and is flat out stated by Eldrad to be destined to become even greater than the six Primorks of the Beast who nearly shattered the Imperium on the knee of Orks who were as strong and tough as space marines, more advanced than the Eldar, were mass producing death stars, and had super weapons that could destroy whole star systems by translating an Ork's boasts into superluminal gravitational waves.

So I don't think Leviathan is going to defeat Ghazzy. Especially since Ghazghkull is almost certainly due for a big honking super expensive new model.

Rather I think that it'll fall to a new Hive Fleet, which going by the naming scheme of Hiv eFleets I'd wager would be named Echidna or Typhon; with the hive fleet after that probably being named Ziz after the third biblical superbeast.

The forces fighting each other in the Ork Octarius empire are probably larger than the entire Tau Empire's population by orders of magnitude.

The tau really just don't matter in the grand scheme of things. They're not only not very numerous but they lack the Eldar's webway access that lets them pop up anywhere in the galaxy.

endlesswaltz123 wrote:
Plot twist. Let the Tyranids take Baal and consume it, including all the Biomass of the long dead brothers who suffered the black rage and also Sangy's DNA/biomass.

Tyranids with Primarch DNA....

Instead of rippers you have RIPPED Tyranids. Who defeat the enemies of the Hive Mind by suplexing them in between taking their supplements and making massive GAINZ.

Really all you can do is put as many multimeltas, lascannons, and vanquishers on your tanks as you can and hope for the best.

The way the Imperium deploys its marines doesn't really gel too well with German Sturmtruppen units in the first world war or Shock divisions and their equivalents employed in the second world war. Shock divisions tended to emphasize the ability to infiltrate into their positions and overwhelming firepower from artillery and infantry over operational mobility (in the first world war because Germany had all of twenty tanks between the entire Heer, in the second because the tanks and mechanized/motorized troops were to exploit the breaches the shock troops made), with the armoured support they did have tending to come from assault guns and heavy tanks rather than more mobile medium tanks.

Standard Astartes tactics lend themselves more to acting as a swift and deadly rapier than as a brutal sledgehammer as is traditionally demanded by historical shock trooper tactics. For one thing, the Astartes' armoured support doesn't have the brute firepower of the Guard's and instead relies more on mobility and precision. The Astartes really are closer to a Special forces unit with greater than normal materiel support; more akin to the VDV than the Shock Divisions.