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One thing in Warhammer 40k that tires me is that battles seem to have no consequence. No matter how massive the loss one faction takes, they just shove it under the rug and pull from their ass a bunch more armies. Now that the storyline is advancing, we need some of the factions/armies/races to go, much like the Squat a decade ago. They have served their purpose, but their continued existence only serves to stagnate the plot.

The removal must make sense lore-wise, either the faction has pitiful lore to back them up or already on the brink of destruction. Getting rid of the Tyranids through retcon and bs is out of the question.

My personal wish-list of factions/armies/races to be annihilated:

Thousand Sons and Space Wolves. Magnus finally achieves vengeance but lost his whole legion in the process. The Space Wolves are too few and will eventually die off. Magnus wins in the end because the Thousand Sons have a Successor Chapter which is still loyal to the Imperium whereas the Space Wolves can have none.

The Imperium. A new institution replaces the old Imperium, one that is more efficient and better-run. Guilliman may start a civil war that wipes out all dissidents.

Tau Empire. Farsight sees through the Ethereals' plot and overthrows them, uniting the Tau Empire and the Farsight Enclave under his leadership. Alternatively, a Hive Fleet can devastate most of the Tau Empire, forcing it to merge with the Farsight Enclave.

Dark Eldar. Vect finally meets his demise with grace. Commorragh falls and the entire Dark Eldar race either die off or join the Ynnari.

Eldar Corsair. Very weak plot overall. The presence of this faction gives the false allusion that the Eldar were more numerous then they are supposed to be. As long as this faction exists, the Eldar race cannot be seen as teetering on the edge of extinction. A punishment campaign by the Craftworlds and the Imperium see them off.

Slaanesh. Just like Age of Sigmar. With Ynned on the rise, her end is approaching.

Khorne. Kharn the Betrayal grows in power and eventually challenges Khorne and defeats him, becoming the new Blood God.

How about whatever army you play is the one that gets annihilated

only fair, right

Didn't they try this once already? As I recall, it didn't go over so well....



(Hint look at my sig)

First off, 40k is a setting, not a story. The setting is evolving but there is no "story arc" it is following. It's really just a stage for you to imagine explosions and "pew pew" noises with your army. So I disagree with killing off any faction.

Secondly:

bibotot wrote:

Tau Empire. Farsight sees through the Ethereals' plot and overthrows them, uniting the Tau Empire and the Farsight Enclave under his leadership.

That is a pretty lame way to handle Farsight. I miss the days when Farsight was just a renegade leading a lucrative mercenary colony.

None. Though I'm surprised that Blood Angels still exist, they seem to get destroyed all the time and just barely saved through Deus ex machina.
Funny that you exclude Tyranids but then want to destroy the most powerful Chaos god.

I vote your army. Their weaponry has unrealistically short ranges. The troops stumble over themselves half the time when charging the enemy and even if they closed with the enemy the enemy casually walks away. Their largest of land vehicles can be stopped in its tracks by a kid with a stick. Their aircraft fly in unreasonable tight rectangles extremely low to the ground and gets knocked out by flame throwers. The army doesn't know how to use cover and the troops die when clipped in an extremity. List goes on.

I'll also say sisters of battle because if you know about Bretonnia then you should expect it.

Dandelion wrote:
First off, 40k is a setting, not a story. The setting is evolving but there is no "story arc" it is following. It's really just a stage for you to imagine explosions and "pew pew" noises with your army. So I disagree with killing off any faction.

Secondly:

bibotot wrote:

Tau Empire. Farsight sees through the Ethereals' plot and overthrows them, uniting the Tau Empire and the Farsight Enclave under his leadership.

That is a pretty lame way to handle Farsight. I miss the days when Farsight was just a renegade leading a lucrative mercenary colony.

100% this, it's a setting for games and collectibles, leave the story developments to black library novels. They already almost irreparably damaged the setting with the Cawl and primaris garbage...i'm not sure how much more of that kind of stuff I can handle before it becomes something unrecognizable.

AOS "advanced" the story, and ruined the setting of the Old World in the process.

40k would have the same effect when you start killing off entire factions. Chaos wins, the Eye of Terror rips open uncontrollably and destroys the galaxy. The Emperor had planned for this all along and awakens from his Throne in the epicentre of the Eye and rebuilds the galaxy on a whim - and creates the Stormcast-Ultra-Avengers to fight and take back the Immortal Realms. Is this ridiculous fan-boyism writing what you want?

Bye Tyranids. Idiotic fluff, ugly models, and rules that are just "orks, but buy another $50 codex to pretend they're a different army". I can't think of a single redeeming quality for the faction, their presence will not be missed.

None. You take flawed view and assume 40k should be some evolving story when it was from get-go setting for you to play out your own stories. You want to wipe out faction? Play it out on the games! That's how 40k was supposed to work.

bibotot wrote:
Tau Empire. Farsight sees through the Ethereals' plot and overthrows them, uniting the Tau Empire and the Farsight Enclave under his leadership. Alternatively, a Hive Fleet can devastate most of the Tau Empire, forcing it to merge with the Farsight Enclave.

How horrifically dull.

I don't like intellectual genocide. I think the Squats should in fact be brought back.

Mark.

Ah, trollbait. The best kind of bait. If you forced me to choose at gunpoint an army to remove it'd probably be Dark Angels, not for any lore reason but because out of all the various factions to have an army book, I think they arguably add the least interesting flavor.

Their theme is...secrecy, plasma guns and leaving your helmet off in favor of robes? Grey Knights, Black Templars and Blood Angels all do the "medieval marines" shtick more interestingly. Deathwatch are a much better "gadget marine" faction. Greenwing could be a standard marine chapter tactic with absolutely no need to change anything. Structurally, they adhere to the basic marine codex unit setup with no deviations like you see with all the other unique marine factions.

I dunno. I don't want to offend dark angels fans but I don't think there's very much they bring to the table (not nothing, but not more than other unique marine factions do, and again just in my opinion). For as much as they make me cringe at times, even space wolves have a more interesting basic concept.

I like all of the factions because it helps paint a grander setting

But gun to my head, someone’s gotta go, I’d honestly say either Orks or nids.

They both fill a very similar role story wise as a massive xeno horde.

I’d also probably say Daemons because I feel that Humans using the ruinous powers is more pleasing story wise, you can better develop a character from someone that turns to chaos than a being that is manifested chaos.

I'd say you can ditch at least one of the custom space marine chapters without it being any great loss. Personally I'd say Blood Angels don't really bring much to the table. You could pretty much reproduce them in the regular SM codex with a chapter tactic and a special character.

Controversial, but I'm tempted to say Craftworld Eldar. They've been on the brink of dying out for how long? Die already...

People put a lot of effort into collecting and painting armies. It is cruel to then say "sorry, your army can't be played any more. Ho ho ho! What WERE we thinking with this silly faction?"

As many people have said above, if something HAD to go, let it be a flavour of space marines - at least the model collection could still be used as space marines, even keeping the same paint scheme, just using the general purpose space marine rules with the most suitable chapter tactic...

The two races spawned by the Old Ones merges and becomes the dreaded Orkdar...

No good can come of this thread.

It's also 'Destroyed'.

I remember in 3rd edition there were rumours going around that the Dark Eldar were going to be wiped out by the Tyranids, thankfully they just re-did the model range instead!

I don't think anybody should be deleted, but I do think marines from the OG traitor legions should be rarer than they appear in the background after 10,000 years of attrition.
The armies of Chaos could be rejigged to mainly comprise low quality imitation space marines cooked up in dark mechanicus gene shops along with cultist and mutant hordes. True space marines would be limited to commanders and elites.

Nothing should be deleted or added (especially not anymore imperial subfactions).

I'd rather 40k were left as a static setting because it's really cool as a setting. It's not so cool as an unfolding story; too many cringy Mary-sue characters and idiotic rubbish like super-super soldiers,

I'll word this question differently. If I had NO choice in the matter and HAD to pick one codex to axe, i'd eliminate Custodes. They're extremely redundant, and if you REALLY need to keep the models, you can easily just wedge them in as elites and heavy support in the standard Marine codex.

Not one of those ideas is a good way of ending a faction.

I'd take out Ynnari, Sisters of Silence, Custodes and Inquisition.

Squats, o wait they already did that one.






Still makes me mad tho.

But really Tau, they get eaten by Tyranids.

Those that sell less. There's no reason to kill any faction that sells well.

If I had to pick one, Space Wolves. Mainly just because their fluff is so badly written, contradictory, confused, and ridiculous even for 40k that they come off as a tweens bad internet fanfic

They really should have just cut off their fluff spigot before the 2009 codex and HH books...they were so much cooler then XD

Eliminate the Tau - both Farsight and Empire.

I'd be happy with "The Tyranids did it." as a rationale, though I'd prefer a retcon that removed them entirely.

Keep the Kroot as a merc race, though. The birdmen are cool.

Why remove factions? You're trying to grow the hobby, not drive off whatever customers might be tempted into it by a faction's fluff or aesthetics.

If you're going to do it though, start with the Custodes and Sisters of Silence. Back to 30k where you make sense, please.

With the exception of AoS I doubt GW is into eliminating factions. What is more likely to happen is that they take an existing faction and then splinter it into several factions. For example, my Dark Elves suddenly became 3+ damn factions when once there was one.

Currently waiting and seeing what they are going to do with the Drukhari, and whether they are going to write the faction as three separate(coven, cult, kabals).

So to answer your question:

Drukhari is eliminated and now we have Coven, Cults, and Kabals as three separate factions.

Dark Angels are eliminated due to infighting and become three separate factions: Ravenwing, Deathwing, and Core Dark Angels.

Craftworlds become their own separate factions due to infighting. Now we have Alaitoc, Saim-Hann, and Yianden.

Due to a mutation Genestealers have made their own separate faction outside of Tyranids.

etc etc etc.

Necrons and Tyranids.

I don't see that there's a case to be made for eliminating factions on the basis of wanting the story to advance or whatever. That's not the point of the 40k background. It's also kind of perverse since either "the battles have no consequence" as far as a particular player is concerned or else they massively negatively impact that player. Like, I mostly play Eldar and Guard so I don't really care at all about Space Wolves. If the 40k plot advances and eliminates Space Wolves that doesn't actually mean very much to me. The only people who really care about Space Wolves either way are Space Wolves players, and they'll be pissed.

The case for eliminating factions has to be that it's good for the game. Now, this is a pretty easy case to make for many factions -- if this were a computer strategy game it'd be obvious to almost everyone that there are way too many factions that aren't nearly distinct enough (nor does GW have the resources to adequately support them all) and they should be cut down significantly. But of course we're dealing with lots of physical sunk costs so you need to be realizing a lot of improvement to justify screwing over a bunch of players by invalidating their stuff.

GW also has almost no financial incentive to squat a faction. It makes much more sense for them to just ignore unwanted factions for years on end. Like, what has been the cost to GW of not just squatting Orks? By just not paying them any attention they still get to occasionally sell models, and all they have to do is release half-baked rules for them every few years. Maybe eventually it's been so long that they can release new models and it's as if they're releasing a completely new faction (which they like to do because you sell more models for completely new things than you do for things that people already own versions of). Or maybe the zeitgeist sort of comes around on a faction and it makes sense to suddenly give it a lot more attention -- Sisters probably benefited from a general cultural move towards inclusivity. Either way it's very cheap and easy to keep a faction on life support indefinitely.