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According to the Wikipedia page on the galaxy, there are at least 10 billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars.

Let's assume 10% of them are occupied by the Imperium and paying the Imperial Tithe, and let's also assume that each one has a population of 1 million.

10% of 10,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000
1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000 = 1x10^15

Now let's assume that 1 percent of the people there are active members of the Imperial Guard.

1% of 1x10^15 = 1x10^13

Or

10,000,000,000,000 soldiers in the Guard!

How do they not win every battle they fight?

Because the other 90% is full of big nasty aliens who eat guardsmen for breakfast.

Because the foes of the Imperial have to look good. If the IG just Steamrolled every single enemy faction to the Imperium then there would be no 40k as we know it.
plus there are probly more planets then that, its probly just rounded out, and at the same time each and every planet has different populations and regiment turn out.

But for the most part. The bad guys gotta look cool and kill alot and they gotta "win" sometimes.

- 1x10^13 Soldiers create unimaginable logistical problems. Imagine you have, for example, 10, 15 million troops on standby. You have to arrange transport, munitions, food, water, other armaments etc, which would be a hellhole for any commander.

- Some attacks such as 2nd Armageddon take the Imperials by chance. No sheer number of troops will be able to face such a suprise attack.

- You're forgetting that these 1x10^13 troops are scattered across the galaxty. I don't know if you've looked up recently, but space is actually pretty large. Even if you had the *best* FTL drive in existence, you would take months, years even to get to your warzone.

- Also, consider that 1x10^13 troops are going to do squat against a Chaos Imperator, unless you go by Zapp Brannigan's Big Book of War: We send wave after wave of men into the enemy death cannons, clogging them with wreckage."

Whoops, one thing I forgot to consider: that's the amount the Guard get EVERY SOLAR YEAR.

There are probably just as many Orks stompin' through the galaxy as well. And Imperial communications are such that even coordinating things from one neighboring system to another is an exercise in bureaucratic tedium and ritual. There are probably fleets of IG transports still in the warp on their way to a battle that ended long ago.

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
According to the Wikipedia page on the galaxy, there are at least 10 billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars.

Let's assume 10% of them are occupied by the Imperium and paying the Imperial Tithe, and let's also assume that each one has a population of 1 million.

10% of 10,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000
1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000 = 1x10^15

Now let's assume that 1 percent of the people there are active members of the Imperial Guard.

1% of 1x10^15 = 1x10^13

Or

10,000,000,000,000 soldiers in the Guard!

How do they not win every battle they fight?

Because GW doesn't have a concept of numbers really. By their own numbers they have billions of regiments within the Imperial Guard and trillions of soldiers. Such a fighting force, especially coupled with the Imperial Navy, is huge to the point where the total military value of the *entirety* of the Adeptus Astartes is roughly equal to that of about 8 hours of daily IG recruiting.

Hence, why 40k is Space Fantasy, not Science Fiction.

If you look at it as Science Fiction, the entire universe falls flat on its face and the only factions that matter at all are the Imperial Guard/Navy, Orks, and Tyranids with everything else literally completely military irrelevant.

Pretty much the above. The main reason IG doesnt win every single battle is because they are just normal humans. Against the superhuman enemies of the galaxy they're bound to struggle somewhat.

The logistics to transport such massive armies is a nightmare, not to mention training them and organizing them. Watch a local guard player unpack his army sometime, he usually has about twice as many models as his opponent. While that means they have a numbers advantage, when they don't outnumber the enemy bad things are going to happen. They are often compared to a sledgehammer, slow and cumbersome to wield, but when it hits home, it's devestating. When the IG get's to fight on its terms, its unstoppable. However, thats rarely the case.

Yeah, the guard lose battles because their force concentration is terrible. Remember, all those soldiers are responsible for defending every planet in the imperium AND have a bunch left over for crusading, etc. Take that 10 trillion guardsmen per year, and re-divide it across the 1 billion inhabited worlds, and you only get an average of 10,000 guardsmen per planet per year. If they are, indeed, that spread out, then it's really not too difficult to achieve local superiority over any particular guard force.

That said, you're right, the guard do have a lot of stuff. The fluff itself says that when the guard really get going, they never, ever lose, mostly for this reason. The only reason the Imperium bothers with space marines is because sometimes it can take a century or two to collect and deploy an entire guard army, whereas the space marines can be there with likely enough force to do the job by next Tuesday.

I thought it was only 1 million inhabited worlds, ala-Dune? did they change that recently?

Like Valkyrie points out logistics would be a huge problem for the Imperial Guard, the fact that every planet's regiment's equipment can vary is proof of that difficulty. If we were to assume the IG's logistics were even as good as todays you're looking at only 1/3 of those soldiers actually being combatants with the rest dealing with logistics. So 10x10^12 becomes 3.33x10^12... if the implications of something similar to a 1940's level of sophistication were true it becomes a case of only 1/5 being combatants.

Another aspect of why Guardmen might struggle in a war is a case of density. There is only so much air space and land mass to land guardsmen on a planet. Even still, if they all got planet side in as devestating a fight as a 40k battlefield you need space. For example imagine playing an all infantry guard army, you run out of cover and you can't really maneuver troops... now imagine if your table top was multiplied across the surface of an entire planet.

You go to remember, the majority of Imperial Guardsmen only fight planetary rebellions and VERY VERY VERY VERY rarely, would they ever see Chaos Space Marines, Eldar, Tau, and possibly Tyranids and Orks.

Chances are, due to their superior training and weaponry, they would steamroll planetary rebellions

Common people, 1d4chan is not a reliable source for fluff

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
According to the Wikipedia page on the galaxy, there are at least 10 billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars.

Let's assume 10% of them are occupied by the Imperium and paying the Imperial Tithe, and let's also assume that each one has a population of 1 million.

10% of 10,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000
1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000 = 1x10^15

Now let's assume that 1 percent of the people there are active members of the Imperial Guard.

1% of 1x10^15 = 1x10^13

Or

10,000,000,000,000 soldiers in the Guard!

How do they not win every battle they fight?

Unless all these Guardsmen somehow grow a warpdrive and a third eye, it will be rather difficult to transport them from one place to another.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Vaktathi wrote:
I thought it was only 1 million inhabited worlds, ala-Dune? did they change that recently?

Nope, this hasn't changed afaik.

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
According to the Wikipedia page on the galaxy, there are at least 10 billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars.

Let's assume 10% of them are occupied by the Imperium and paying the Imperial Tithe, and let's also assume that each one has a population of 1 million.

10% of 10,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000
1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000 = 1x10^15

Now let's assume that 1 percent of the people there are active members of the Imperial Guard.

1% of 1x10^15 = 1x10^13

Or

10,000,000,000,000 soldiers in the Guard!

How do they not win every battle they fight?

Because Orks outnumber them 1000 to 1. They Tyranids outnumber them 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.

Because Chaos is without number. Because Necrons rebuild themselves. Because this is 40k and Guardsmen fight with flashlights.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
There are probably just as many Orks stompin' through the galaxy as well. And Imperial communications are such that even coordinating things from one neighboring system to another is an exercise in bureaucratic tedium and ritual. There are probably fleets of IG transports still in the warp on their way to a battle that ended long ago.

There are probably scores more orks than that. They far outnumber everyone possibly barring the tyranid fleets.

 Ailaros wrote:
Yeah, the guard lose battles because their force concentration is terrible. Remember, all those soldiers are responsible for defending every planet in the imperium AND have a bunch left over for crusading, etc. Take that 10 trillion guardsmen per year, and re-divide it across the 1 billion inhabited worlds, and you only get an average of 10,000 guardsmen per planet per year. If they are, indeed, that spread out, then it's really not too difficult to achieve local superiority over any particular guard force.

That said, you're right, the guard do have a lot of stuff. The fluff itself says that when the guard really get going, they never, ever lose, mostly for this reason. The only reason the Imperium bothers with space marines is because sometimes it can take a century or two to collect and deploy an entire guard army, whereas the space marines can be there with likely enough force to do the job by next Tuesday.

This exactly.

by the way a good number of the planets that contribute most of the troops in the imperium are Forgeworlds and hiveworlds often being both so really you wold get most of ur stuff wherever you came from and if you were being transported to a major warzone (ie cadia, Armageddon, or the sabbat worlds) 1 there would be so much stuff already there that it wouldnt matter and 2 you have to remember that EVERYTHING in the imperium is dedicated to the war effort so they would have centuries of experience getting around these shortcomings.

In response to the OP, the defining feature of the 40k universe is that every single faction, on its own, is an unstoppable super power, but because they are all unstoppable super powers they have effectively reached a dynamic equilibrium, each faction may make overwhelming victories or suffer crushing defeats on a single planet or even in an entire sector, but as each faction suffers these in equal amounts in proportion to their size, everything balances out in the end. Yes the guard have an unbelievable number of soldiers, but the Orks and Tyrannids probably have more bodies, Chaos feeds from the collective thoughts of humanity, Necrons, Tau, and both flavours of Eldar have unbelievably advanced technology, and Space Marines are super-soldiers who in the fluff would not be harmed by all but the heaviest of weapons that the Guard possesses (the tabletop game greatly sacrifices fluff for game-balance). So yes, the guard is strong, having a seemingly endless supply of men, but everybody else is evenly matched.

The original numbers are way, way off. "Assume an average population of 1 million".

Try much, much higher than that. If 10% of the earth had the population density of hong kong, it'd have 330 billion people on it.
Granted there are also many worlds with very few people on them, so you have to form an estimate based on something. Let's say there are 4 angri-worlds, population 20,530,398,000 (the population density of norfolk * 25% of the earth's surface area) for every hive world (pop 330 billion, as above).

Multiply that by 100 million planets (1% of navitagable total) and we get a population estimate of 3.8212159e+19. Let's say 1% of that was in the guard at any one point, allowing another 1% for the PDF. That gives us a grand estimate of...

382,121,590,000,000,000!

That's 382 Quadrillion men.

10 trillion indeed. Pfft.

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
According to the Wikipedia page on the galaxy, there are at least 10 billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars.

Let's assume 10% of them are occupied by the Imperium

10% aren't occupied by the Imperium. 1,000,000 planets has been in the fluff since the start, and hasn't changed. They're even added a little bit noting that because it's such a small amount of planets in the galaxy, the IoM is actually quite thinly spread as well.

The main problem with the IG is their ponderous logistical and political baggage. It takes a very long time to get all those men, and sufficient support units and supplies, en route to the correct destination. And by the time they get there, it's very likely that whatever conflict they were sent to fight has long since finished.

Even then, it takes hundreds of millions of soldiers to fight even a single engagement in some of the 40K battles. Ten trillion men may be a weeks worth of casualties in some war zones.

The humble guardsman can't win every battle because space marines have to exist. Therefore GW ignores their own fluff and "forgets" the sheer size of the IG, and exaggerates the importance of a single space marine to laughable extremes. The only sensible explanation is that the Imperium exaggerates everything and keeps the "heroic" space marines at the center of the story for propaganda purposes, while the guard and navy quietly win all the wars. In terms of actual combat ability marines are about as useful as real-world soap opera stars.


Of course it's the Imperial Navy that doesn't get the proper respect. Too bad GW will never show what should happen when you have a nice horde of orks/tyranids/whatever like the art shows.

Or you know, because in any one battle only a few thousands and when the fighting actually starts, it becomes focused too only a few hundred fighting here and hundred here.

A poweful/fast force can defeat the Guard through simple Economy of Force.

 Galdos wrote:
Or you know, because in any one battle only a few thousands and when the fighting actually starts, it becomes focused too only a few hundred fighting here and hundred here.

A poweful/fast force can defeat the Guard through simple Economy of Force.

That only goes so far. It's amazing the capabilities most factions in the 40k universe lack, from artillery, to aircraft, to anti-aircraft, and more. The Guard however, do not, or at least not in conjunction with the Imperial Navy, which is essentially always with the IG. Economy of Force only goes so far until either something is brought to bear that you can't respond to (e.g. hey, we can lob shells from 30 miles away and you have no response!) or until you run into issues of attrition. Economy of Force can only be applied if the scope of the conflict is limited, otherwise attrition will eventually tell or something will be brought to bear that simply can't be responded to.

The Imperium is vulnerable to repeated small attacks that can withdraw entirely before anything can respond, the equivalent of papercuts and mosquito bites, the harder you hit the Imperium, the attacks that are more like body-blows, then the greater and more powerful, swift and inevitable the Imperium's response is.



A lot of people are also making it sound like the IG can never get anywhere, this is not true, while they take longer than Space Marines because they aren't constantly sitting there under way waiting for a deployment order or on patrol, they don't take 200 years to get to every warzone, they don't take decades to respond to every single threat, and quite often it takes even Space Marines months if not years to respond as well given the nature of the Warp and the fickle nature of many SM chapters. Quite often the IN/IG can respond within weeks or months over vast interstellar distances.


Again, from any realistic perspective, the only factions that would ever truly matter are the Orks, Tyranids, and IG/IN. For the 40k universe to work, it has to be seen as Fantasy in Space more than anything else if stuff like Space Marines, Eldar, Tau, etc are to be anything other than the most trivial and irrelevant of combatants.

 Peregrine wrote:
The humble guardsman can't win every battle because space marines have to exist. Therefore GW ignores their own fluff and "forgets" the sheer size of the IG, and exaggerates the importance of a single space marine to laughable extremes. The only sensible explanation is that the Imperium exaggerates everything and keeps the "heroic" space marines at the center of the story for propaganda purposes, while the guard and navy quietly win all the wars. In terms of actual combat ability marines are about as useful as real-world soap opera stars.

I dunno, I think the problem with the IG and navy is their ponderous chains of command, political obligations and necessary separation. If reports come in of a world under attack, the SM can be en route within minutes, while the IG have to seek permission for a new founding or re-allocation of existing assets, find a suitable navy task force to transport them, perform the actual founding/training, organise a huge logistical chain, etc etc.

By the time the IG get there, all they find is a dead world, and an enemy that's long gone.

The SM lack the staying power to fight a full scale invasion, but the IG lack the speed and efficiency to respond to beleaguered planets.

Most of what everyone is stating here is completely true. This is science FANTASY not science fiction/fact. IG, Orks, Tyranids are the only forces potentially large enough to defeat the others.

With that in mind though, the other factions are there because they are cool and have a story behind them. Even if all the SM gathered under one banner and attacked the IG they would probably barely be able to make a dent before being wiped out. The thing to remember is that the IG IS the Imperium. SM are like the Navy SEALs (or equivalent) of today. Yes they are incredibly badass, but in comparison to the rest of the entire US military (marines, navy, airforce, army) they are nothing. Specialized for what they do. Also, keep in mind that many of the other factions have their own agendas going on (survival, redemption, betrayal etc etc) whereas the IG are doing EVERYTHING haha. They need everything at their disposal because they are dealing with every threat imaginable.

In a logistical sense if you wanted to play the faction that always wins in a galaxy wide term, play IG or Orks or Tyranids. If you want to play a specific "story" play anything. That's why the armies are there

-VardenV2

 Kaldor wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
The humble guardsman can't win every battle because space marines have to exist. Therefore GW ignores their own fluff and "forgets" the sheer size of the IG, and exaggerates the importance of a single space marine to laughable extremes. The only sensible explanation is that the Imperium exaggerates everything and keeps the "heroic" space marines at the center of the story for propaganda purposes, while the guard and navy quietly win all the wars. In terms of actual combat ability marines are about as useful as real-world soap opera stars.

I dunno, I think the problem with the IG and navy is their ponderous chains of command, political obligations and necessary separation. If reports come in of a world under attack, the SM can be en route within minutes, while the IG have to seek permission for a new founding or re-allocation of existing assets, find a suitable navy task force to transport them, perform the actual founding/training, organise a huge logistical chain, etc etc.

By the time the IG get there, all they find is a dead world, and an enemy that's long gone.

The SM lack the staying power to fight a full scale invasion, but the IG lack the speed and efficiency to respond to beleaguered planets.

The SM's aren't *that* fast. They don't get alerts for help any faster than anyone else, they still very often take their sweet time in deciding if they want to go or not and often may have to return home to load appropriate equipment ("hey, we're gonna need tanks for this!"), etc, and they don't travel faster than the IN does through the Warp. Yeah, it helps that they've got most of their stuff ready to go and are often already oot and aboot, but it's not like the IG show up years late to every battle or the Imperium would be dead, because quite frankly Space Marines are about as abundant as Unicorns.

They're rare to the mount of being myth in most of the Imperium and the overwhelmingly vast majority of the Imperium's gargantuan wars never see a single Space Marine boot, if for no other reason than there simply aren't any to be found.

Space Marines, both Loyalist and Traitor, are relevant because they form the core of the story and GW says they are. The full might of the Traitor Legions could be defeated by a few thousand IG regiments (meaning, a statistically irrelevant percentage of the IG's total military strength) in pitched battle assuming a very generous 100-1 kill ratio in favor of the CSM's. Why doesn't that happen? Because it would make for a boring story so GW doesn't write it that way and because GW doesn't really understand numbers. The entire Armageddon war thing is described as one of the most apocalyptically sized battles in the Imperium's history and has fewer guardsmen fighting there than died on the irrelevant sideshow of Vraks.

The Imperium has 1 million world, so you really work on that number. However of those planets, not all have tithes. Astartes homeworlds, Mechanicus Worlds, and Shrine Worlds all don't have to pay Guardsmen tithes which reduces the number by several tens of thousands.

Moreover, the amount each planet pays differs massively. Armageddon is more or less a planet geared entirely towards the Imperial Guard, whereas your backwater feudal world probably contributes very little. It's really impossible to determine an accurate number, except that it is in the tens of billions if not hundreds of billions.

Humanity is counting its last days, in my humble opinion.

Despite the ability to deploy an almost limitless armed force on any given planet, entire worlds are regularly lost to incredibly powerful enemy forces. I would be hard pressed to make optimistic predictions for the future of mankind as a dominant force in the galaxy.

Yes, the Guard and the Navy are ridiculously powerful, and are capable of grinding an enemy to pieces, but what does that matter if they aren't there to combat the threats?
The Departmento Munitorum does its best, but what that amounts to is a system that is essentially mummified in billions of miles of red tape. Therefore, threat response generally amounts to massive and unflinchingly powerful blows.

Hence, "Hammer of the Emperor", not "Rapier of the Emperor".

The future is grim and dark, indeed.

 Vaktathi wrote:
The SM's aren't *that* fast. They don't get alerts for help any faster than anyone else, they still very often take their sweet time in deciding if they want to go or not and often may have to return home to load appropriate equipment ("hey, we're gonna need tanks for this!"), etc, and they don't travel faster than the IN does through the Warp. Yeah, it helps that they've got most of their stuff ready to go and are often already oot and aboot, but it's not like the IG show up years late to every battle or the Imperium would be dead, because quite frankly Space Marines are about as abundant as Unicorns.

It happens often enough that they make specific mention of task forces arriving months, sometimes years too late in the rulebook. The background of 40K goes to great lengths to ensure we understand the ponderous nature of Imperial bureaucracy, the disjointed chain of command, the way entire worlds are lost to rounding errors, etc. The Imperial Guard itself is often described as lumbering and slow in it's processes. To raise a new Imperial Guard force to respond to a threat could take months of political debate and bureaucratic red tape before the order for conscription is even raised. We could simply pull resources from an existing conflict, but that weakens Imperial Forces there. And I've never read of Imperial Guardsmen not being on deployment. Despite their numbers, there's still never enough of them to go around, and there's always more conflicts to be fought.

I agree that the only reason Marines are relevant is because GW says so, but GW have written the IG as to be almost irrelevant as a defensive force. They simply take too long to get anywhere. Once they're loaded up and ready to go they travel just as fast as anyone else, but the process of getting ten billion men, tanks, support personnel, food, ammunition, fuel, medical supplies, clothing, replacement parts, water, so on and so forth all ready to go, then liasing with the navy to provide transport and protection for said troops and supplies, takes a huge amount of time.

That's why the Marines are important: they are the First Responders of the Imperium. IMO, at least.