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The Orks have something to say about it. Taken from the Tyranid codex, an Ork boss commenting on war with a real foe (Tyranids) and not some busted IG army he describes as exactly what the thread alleges:

"Dis ain't no stinkin' scrap where da puny gits run an' hide behind walls when da killin' starts. 'Dis is proper fightin'."

Sounds more like a buttmad Ork that failed to siege an Imperial stronghold, lol.

Of course he's buttmad. Those panzies are hidin behind der wallz instead of coming out for a propa foight.

It's worth noting that Skarfang ended up ambushed and eaten by several dozen lictors and venomthropes.

I suppose puny humans fare better than orks in some situations because they know when to hide behind walls when the killing starts.

TiamatRoar wrote:
I suppose puny humans fare better than orks in some situations because they know when to hide behind walls when the killing starts.

It's also worth noting that a single Lictor crippled the defense of an entire Ecclesiarchy world.

If I recall correctly, it's been a while since the Eccesiarchy's military might was portrayed as something resembling competence.

TiamatRoar wrote:
If I recall correctly, it's been a while since the Eccesiarchy's military might was portrayed as something resembling competence.

Sisters of battle included.

It is perhaps also worth noting that when the Tomb World on Ka'Mais' moon woke up, the invading Tyranid fleet which was massacring the Tau was destroyed in a hours.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
It is perhaps also worth noting that when the Tomb World on Ka'Mais' moon woke up, the invading Tyranid fleet which was massacring the Tau was destroyed in a hours.

An outnumbered splinter fleet of an already small hive fleet.

And then there is Maugan Ra...

 Void__Dragon wrote:
And then there is Maugan Ra...

If you can explain how one man could beat all this;



While reconciling it with the fact that the Tyranids are doing more damage to the Imperium than any other force at the moment, be my guest.

So lone Lictor crippling Ecclesiarchy world = Awesome

But a Phoenix Lord, among the mightiest individuals in the galaxy, defending a single world from Tyranids = Bad?

And is it now? Care to prove that statement? Because the Orks have proven to be a far longer-lasting foe, a single Necron Dynasty conquered a hundred or so Imperial worlds in a matter of months, and Abaddon is having far more troops sent to defend Cadia from him than any Hive Fleet ever has.

Also, that video is of a world already heavily infested by the Tyranids. Maugan Ra never let it get to that point, obviously.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
So lone Lictor crippling Ecclesiarchy world = Awesome

But a Phoenix Lord, among the mightiest individuals in the galaxy, defending a single world from Tyranids = Bad?

And is it now? Care to prove that statement? Because the Orks have proven to be a far longer-lasting foe, a single Necron Dynasty conquered a hundred or so Imperial worlds in a matter of months, and Abaddon is having far more troops sent to defend Cadia from him than any Hive Fleet ever has.

Also, that video is of a world already heavily infested by the Tyranids. Maugan Ra never let it get to that point, obviously.

The Tyranids are a billions year old species who have crushed multiple galaxies. Ra's what? Ten thousand years old? Ones more reasonable than the other.

As for proof. Check the map of Hive Fleet leviathan's assault and see how the tendrils of a single fleet are rampaging through the Imperium, with death and defeat spread liberally across the entire galaxy.

And Abaddon's fleet got smashed at Cadia. He's not going anywhere anytime soon. Meanwhile Leviathan is described as a desparate threat to the Imperium, Tau, and Eldar simultaneously. Furthermore, the Imperium does not believe it can survive the entire Tyranid race without essentially destroying itself through over militarization.

Call me when Abaddon gets a strategic conclave informing the high lords of terra that to stop him they'd need to halt their entire economy to draft everyone into the army.

 Kain wrote:

The Tyranids are a billions year old species who have crushed multiple galaxies. Ra's what? Ten thousand years old? Ones more reasonable than the other.

So what you are saying is that Tyranids just should be far more awesome than everyone else because they are awesome?

As for proof. Check the map of Hive Fleet leviathan's assault and see how the tendrils of a single fleet are rampaging through the Imperium, with death and defeat spread liberally across the entire galaxy.

Yet they are always routed by the Necrons, in every battle.

And Abaddon's fleet got smashed at Cadia. He's not going anywhere anytime soon. Meanwhile Leviathan is described as a desparate threat to the Imperium, Tau, and Eldar simultaneously. Furthermore, the Imperium does not believe it can survive the entire Tyranid race without essentially destroying itself through over militarization.

Yes yes, I know what the Tyranid codex says, just like I know how the core rulebook explicitly states that the Emperor's death will mean Chaos floods the galaxy, and that the Emperor is dying.

Call me when Abaddon gets a strategic conclave informing the high lords of terra that to stop him they'd need to halt their entire economy to draft everyone into the army.

The Imperium sent more troops to a single world to fight Abaddon than it has sent to battle Leviathan in its entirety.

I'd be hypocrtical if I denied it but yes, I do think the Tyranids should be painted as the greatest threat as that makes the most sense. They've already destroyed dozens of other galaxies, they're older than every other faction combined, and they cannot be reasoned or bargained with to even the smallest degree. Everyone else wants to enslave or conquer the galaxy, the Tyranids are the only one who want to destroy it, and traditionally, the conqueror and the hero unites to fight the destroyer.

You can't prove they are the oldest race though, though they should only have competition from the Necrons (The C'tan, before the retcon, were also far older).

It is frankly hypocritical IMO for you to sing praise toward sole Lictors devastating a world, but bashing Maugan Ra, who is far, far, far more formidable personally than Deathleaper is for doing the same to Tyranids.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
You can't prove they are the oldest race though, though they should only have competition from the Necrons (The C'tan, before the retcon, were also far older).

It is frankly hypocritical IMO for you to sing praise toward sole Lictors devastating a world, but bashing Maugan Ra, who is far, far, far more formidable personally than Deathleaper is for doing the same to Tyranids.

Didn't the retcon definitively set the Necrons at sixty million years instead of maybe billions ("near the start of the galaxy's formation" would put them at around ten billion or so)?

Now let's consider the differences, the Lictor recognized that the Cardinal was the lynchpin of the morale for the Ecclesiarchy world and it's sisters of battle and PDF. So if it broke him, it broke the planet's defense. It kept on killing his friends and advisors until by the time the world was descended upon by the fleet he was left a stark raving lunatic who couldn't coordinate a marching band, much less an army.

Maugan Ra apparently just gunned down and chopped up a tendril that the blood ravens and ultramarines had to devote a super cunning and irrepeatable (the 5e Tyranid codex says the trick that Ventris and Force Commander Hairgel pulled no longer works) plan to stopping.

No.

He presumably made use of the planet's defense batteries. Also, it was a splinter fleet.

PresidentOfAsia wrote:
The thing is that they're not always deployed 100,000 at a time; the typical regiment has about 2000-3000 men, and not all of them are combatants(support crews, crew chiefs, etc)

Though it is true that many guardsmen do go up against the worst horrors in the galaxy like the Chaos Space Marines, it should also be noted that such is a very rare occurrence
imagine this: meeting space marines is a very rare occurrence, now lets look at chaos space marines which have even lesser numbers

Really, majority of conflicts the IG gets into is no more worse then being stationed in Afghanistan or Somalia

Not true, I'm afraid. We have evidence of regiments ranging from a few thousand to several hundred thousand Guardsmen (up to 750,000 in the Abnettverse). The Siege Regiments of the Death Korps are noted for their enormous size because of the amount of manpower Krieg is able to produce thanks to the Vitae Womb (no, it's not cloning before anyone jumps on that AGAIN) and the way the Siege Regiments, as well as the Death Korps infantry regiments, prefer to wage war, through attrition - wearing down opponents numbers until there is nothing left to oppose the Krieg units. The Guard is noted as having regiments losing thousands of men each day in large scale conflicts, as in across an entire world.

Numbers are heavily inflated across 40k to give a greater sense of scale and what has more of an impact, an army of 2 million Guardsmen facing off against a horde of Tyranids that block out the horizon with their numbers or 3,000 Guardsmen facing a few thousand Tyranids?

I agree that the majority of conflicts the Guard face tend to involve separatists, renegades & so on, whilst the actual conflicts against Xenos (besides Orks) tend to be very rare.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
(The C'tan, before the retcon, were also far older).

How was the age of the C'tan retconned?

Kain wrote:Now let's consider the differences, the Lictor recognized that the Cardinal was the lynchpin of the morale for the Ecclesiarchy world and it's sisters of battle and PDF.

It was unstoppable and had impossible "instinct". It should have just been called intelligent, but no, apparently it's not sapient but can still knows how best to break the morale of an intelligent species. Great logic. But mainly I think it's the unstoppable thing.

It's not as if the Imperium couldn't just pull the Dominus Astra trick again. All it takes is some wards and a crew willing to die (and the Mechanicus being willing to sacrifice the vessel) and there goes a large chunk of the Hive Fleet. I'm going to assume that the reason this isn't used in a lot of engagements is because most ships are protected against the Warp and can re-emerge whereas the Tyranid ships aren't and so die or get corrupted or somesuch).

JWhex wrote:

Tyranids: They are animals so who cares.
So then, puny they may be, they are the only faction that can score on a Saturday night!

Humans are animals.

And Guard don't get Saturday nights off!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sparks_Havelock wrote:

PresidentOfAsia wrote:
The thing is that they're not always deployed 100,000 at a time; the typical regiment has about 2000-3000 men, and not all of them are combatants(support crews, crew chiefs, etc)

Though it is true that many guardsmen do go up against the worst horrors in the galaxy like the Chaos Space Marines, it should also be noted that such is a very rare occurrence
imagine this: meeting space marines is a very rare occurrence, now lets look at chaos space marines which have even lesser numbers

Really, majority of conflicts the IG gets into is no more worse then being stationed in Afghanistan or Somalia

Not true, I'm afraid. We have evidence of regiments ranging from a few thousand to several hundred thousand Guardsmen (up to 750,000 in the Abnettverse). The Siege Regiments of the Death Korps are noted for their enormous size because of the amount of manpower Krieg is able to produce thanks to the Vitae Womb (no, it's not cloning before anyone jumps on that AGAIN) and the way the Siege Regiments, as well as the Death Korps infantry regiments, prefer to wage war, through attrition - wearing down opponents numbers until there is nothing left to oppose the Krieg units. The Guard is noted as having regiments losing thousands of men each day in large scale conflicts, as in across an entire world.

Numbers are heavily inflated across 40k to give a greater sense of scale and what has more of an impact, an army of 2 million Guardsmen facing off against a horde of Tyranids that block out the horizon with their numbers or 3,000 Guardsmen facing a few thousand Tyranids?

I agree that the majority of conflicts the Guard face tend to involve separatists, renegades & so on, whilst the actual conflicts against Xenos (besides Orks) tend to be very rare.

Your fascination with the DKoK just made me spend 5 minutes reading their entry on Lexicanum.. they sound like they would be the ultimate badasses!

Nothing like rigorous nuclear fire, training from birth, and endless Religious programming to make people utterly utterly dogmatic and unflinching in their every waking hour. They would make the Taliban look like a punch of whoopsies.

I think the IG's status as "regular humans" is actually part of the appeal of the army. They don't have chaos demons, they're not a genetically engineered killing machine in power army,they're not millenia-old robots. Just regular old guys with guns.

Lots of guns.

Generally speaking there are two depictions of the Guard:

1.) Desperate poorly trained/equipped cannon fodder sent to their deaths by the hundreds of thousands in a hopeless battle against superior enemies. Retreat, and they will meet a traitor's end at the barrel of a Commissar's pistol

2.) Elite soldiers, the best of their worlds PDF's, equipped with the extraordinarily powerful lasgun. Well-motivated, independent thinking, competent. Have a professionalized feel to them. Inflict enormous casualties on their enemies, who can only break them by weight of numbers or clever trickery. Why have Space Marines anyway?

Generally speaking, direct GW studio/codex publications prefer #1, dakka/many Black Library books (most notably the Cain series) #2

One of the reasons I decided to start an IG force is precisely because of the allure of an army that simply has incalculable numbers (seemingly endless stream of fighting me) who I can identify with readily. They aren't engineered, they aren't mutants or anything like that. They're just men like myself who have been slung into the hell of warfare and either adapt or die - usually against foes who are superior in some way or another. They fear the conflict but have no choice but to press onward or face their commissars. Bullets from the enemy or the ally, except one of them allows you a chance at survival.

Sort of reminds me of the brutal conflict in the Eastern theater during WW2. A titanic clash of 5 million men unparalleled by anything else in history. War is madness. Now I'm gonna go make people wish they were never born in BF2142.

 Kain wrote:
Didn't the retcon definitively set the Necrons at sixty million years instead of maybe billions ("near the start of the galaxy's formation" would put them at around ten billion or so)?

As I recall, the number given is 4 billion, and some time apparently shortly thereafter they go to sleep and wake up after sixty million years, which is about now because Mat Ward accidentally a whole math.


The whole argument of "well, the Guard have numbers, so that's why they win" is rather silly, when in almost every instance they're going to outnumbered, as their primary enemies in descending order of size are: PDF traitors/chaos cultists/mutants, Orks, and Tyranids. Everything else is so rare as to be completely negligible (for instance, there are, going off the canonical numbers, in excess of one thousand regiments of Guard per Space Marine - not per chapter, per individual marine).

That the Guard forms the single largest coherent fighting force in the setting is irrelevant when in nearly every fight they're the smaller, elite force with the best weapons and strategy.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:

 Kain wrote:
Didn't the retcon definitively set the Necrons at sixty million years instead of maybe billions ("near the start of the galaxy's formation" would put them at around ten billion or so)?

As I recall, the number given is 4 billion, and some time apparently shortly thereafter they go to sleep and wake up after sixty million years, which is about now because Mat Ward accidentally a whole math.


The whole argument of "well, the Guard have numbers, so that's why they win" is rather silly, when in almost every instance they're going to outnumbered, as their primary enemies in descending order of size are: PDF traitors/chaos cultists/mutants, Orks, and Tyranids. Everything else is so rare as to be completely negligible (for instance, there are, going off the canonical numbers, in excess of one thousand regiments of Guard per Space Marine - not per chapter, per individual marine).

That the Guard forms the single largest coherent fighting force in the setting is irrelevant when in nearly every fight they're the smaller, elite force with the best weapons and strategy.

Well Chenkov is the most stereotypical guardsman commander.

Pity the fool if he has to fight Tyranids with his usual tactics though.

SomeRandomEvilGuy wrote:

How was the age of the C'tan retconned?

It hasn't, but I wouldn't count an extinct race in the running.

 Kain wrote:
Well Chenkov is the most stereotypical guardsman commander.

Pity the fool if he has to fight Tyranids with his usual tactics though.

Or Orks. Or Eldar. Or... anyone other than poorly equipped cultists...

Chenkov may be the most stereotypical, but he doesn't appear to be the most typical, if that makes any sense.