What's the point of land combat?

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**roboemperor**

It's been bugging me.
Spaceship > Titan by a huge, huge factor
Orbital Bombardment > Entire land army.

So what's the point of land combat when 100% of the battle is determined in outerspace and everything on the planet is annihilated by orbital bombardment?

Tyranids I understand because their orbital bombardment is dropping a mega **** ton of soldiers. Soldiers are their orbital munitions.

But the rest? Why doesn't Imperium of Man orbital bombard the entire opposing faction to oblivion instead of sending space marines and imperial guard to the ground? I mean I understand v.s. Chaos because chaos is born inside a settlement and IoM can possibly contain it with land forces. But Tau, Eldar, Ork, Necrons (especially Necrons) what's their excuse?

**Iracundus**

Because the fundamental assumption you start with is wrong as in 40K everything is not determined in space.

Void shields provide protection against bombardment.

Also with reference to the BFG rulebook, the average planetary defense laser silo packs almost as much firepower as the broadside of a Gothic cruiser, with greater range than the Gothic. Likewise, the average planetary defense missile silo has the launch capacity of a full cruiser, and the average planetary defense air base has enough short range aerospace fighters and bombers to match a Dictator cruiser.

From the old GW Armageddon 3 website archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20010820235454/www.armageddon3.com/English/Campaign/BFG/BFGmap.html

we can see the defenses of each hive on Armageddon comprised at least 4 air bases, 8 missile silos, and 8 laser silos. That kind of firepower would be enough to shred your average Imperial frigate, and even your average cruiser, if they tried to bombard the hive. Even if one takes Armageddon to be a more heavily defended than usual hive world, it still gives a rough gauge of the defenses a typical hive might have, which still is likely to overpower most spaceships.

So in other words, in 40K, ground based defense installations can pack equal or superior firepower to an orbiting starship, and if point values are any indicator, at a lower cost too.

**Aash**

I suppose they do sometimes orbital bombard to oblivion with exterminatus and stuff, and it could be argued that that and space battles should be all that happens, but the lore stems from a tabletop game, so there needs to be land battles otherwise there’s no game.

It could be compared to modern warfare where air strikes serve a purpose but are usually in support of land forces. Resources, etc require land forces. Also the much of the warmaking from an imperial perspective is about expanding/preserving the imperium, so exterminatus is too lethal. They want the planet to be habitable and functional after the battle.

Why don’t the factions other than the imperium stick to orbital bombardment? Here’s my suggestions:

Tau: they also want to expand their empire and conquer/absorb their enemies.

Dark Eldar; not many slaves without ground forces to capture them.

Craftwold: not sure, possible want to preserve planets that were formerly eldar? Or that they aren’t human and their motivations are ineffable.

Tyranids: they land ground forces to gain biomass
GSC: they rise up inside the population

Chaos: it’s more evil/fun/sadistic/visceral to go with ground forces?

Orks: it’s more about the fighting than the winning, ground based combat is their “national pastime”.

Necron: this one I don’t know. I’m not familiar enough with recent lore to come up with a plausible explanation. Possibly for preservation of their ancient artefacts and orbital assault would risking destroying something they are trying to preserve/recover?

Did I miss any?

**Deadnight**

Firstly, in a universe with space ships and orbital attacks being used, folks will have developed reliable defences and whole books of tactics to use against space ships and orbital attacks.

Beyond this, your space ships turns up with its munitions to blow stuff up - where do you go? Planets are pretty frickin big. By several orders of magnitude above ships. It's like an elephant scaled against a tardigrade. Now, where do you shoot? You need ground forces in place to identify the things that may be a good target.

Now, do you really actually want to blow stuff up? Oftentimes you don't - what you want to do is seize what's on the ground, take it from them and hold it yourself for your own use, not blow it up with an orbital strike.

Those orcs on a nice verdant resource world or agri world? Well, your orbital strike is probsbly destroying all the infrastructure you need for extraction of said resources (for example, the spaceport). So you might blow up some orcs. Now what? The planets essentially a wreck, and no use to you. Never mind considering how much it will take to rebuild. Never mind the fact the orbital strike won't have killed everything, and you'll still have to deploy ground forces.

Guardsmen are ten-a-penny. They're cheap and expendable. You can lose plenty of them in seizing a planet and have the infrastructure mostly intact when they're done. Titans and spaceships? Yeah, far far far more expensive and many, many many times fewer of them. The resources that go into one space ship can probably fund a couple of dozen full scale planetary invasions.

**JohnnyHell**

Sometimes you don’t want to nuke the infrastructure and bombard the population.

Land war allows less indiscriminate targeting than “flatten that city/continent”.

**Jackal90**

Sure, bombard a shielded planet who’s resources you need.

Kill the individual you’ve been hunting to question.

Kill the allies stranded on that world that need aid.

There’s a couple of reasons for land combat.
It’s not just fighting because they want to fight.
Most battles are fought because of an objective or point of interest.
Simply killing a planet doesn’t achieve that very well.

**BrianDavion**

back in the twenties and thirties there where airforce generals who thought that the next war would be fought entirely by strategic bombers. they where proven wrong. Ultimately you need boots on the ground if you want to secure anything.

**roboemperor**

I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.

It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.

I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.

So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?

And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?

**Iracundus**

BFG fighters can intercept torpedoes which are roughly equivalent to ICBM so yes there is a defense, just as there is a defense against direct fire weaponry in void shields. People have already answered your question but you seem unwilling to accept the answer. Quite simply within the 40K paradigm, space combat is not the be all and end all of everything, no matter how much you might say otherwise.

**OldMate**

Short response: It makes a better story than just than being like; well we'll just nuke them from orbit. With a giant meteorite, we don't even have to invest anything in ordinance or anything. I mean it worked for the dinosaurs.

40k Response: They have shields and presumable effective batteries for stopping dinosaur level rocks hitting the ground and killing everyone (does not seem to work against ork rocks though) But yeah,

Also if you want to make sure the enemy is all dead and/or want to save your own people on the planet you have to land troops.

**Sherrypie**

You said it yourself, it is worse than carpet bombing. That's one of the main reasons you don't want to do it.

Wars aren't fought to kill the other side (outside some bizarre exceptions), you kill the other side as much as you need to in order to fulfill the actual objectives like grabbing land or mystic technoartifacts. Bombing that land into useless irradiated glass from the orbit is a prime way to lose by your own actions and pretty much all sentient beings even in the insane galaxy of 40k still want to inhabit the planets they fight over.

Boots on the ground is the way every conceivable war in the history of ever has been won, because while you can cause massive destruction with scifi weapons of super murder, that's it. Destruction alone does not mean you won anything, if what you're left with is a cloud of dust and less munitions than you had in the beginning.

**Platuan4th**

roboemperor wrote:
I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.

It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.

I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.

So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?

And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?

As shown in the Heresy novels, an Imperator titan can survive Exterminatus. It's not worried by an orbital bombardment.

**Grimtuff**

OP doesn't understand why 40k exists in the first place...

The entire reason what you suggest does not happen (and the game does) is because presumably that patch of land you are fighting over is for some strategic reason and blowing the ever loving gak out of it defeats the purpose.

**Jackal90**

You could simply read the responses and it would answer your question.

However, ask yourself this.
Why is there fighting in that planet to begin with?
Armies don’t just show up to fight randomly, there tends to be a reason.

**CthuluIsSpy**

roboemperor wrote:
It's been bugging me.
Spaceship > Titan by a huge, huge factor
Orbital Bombardment > Entire land army.

So what's the point of land combat when 100% of the battle is determined in outerspace and everything on the planet is annihilated by orbital bombardment?

Tyranids I understand because their orbital bombardment is dropping a mega **** ton of soldiers. Soldiers are their orbital munitions.

But the rest? Why doesn't Imperium of Man orbital bombard the entire opposing faction to oblivion instead of sending space marines and imperial guard to the ground? I mean I understand v.s. Chaos because chaos is born inside a settlement and IoM can possibly contain it with land forces. But Tau, Eldar, Ork, Necrons (especially Necrons) what's their excuse?

Because if you glass a planet you can't settle it afterwards and claim its resources. Remember that the Imperium of Man's goal is to reclaim worlds that were lost to them and settle them. Can't do that if said worlds are inhospitable.
Despite what the memes may tell you, the Imperium doesn't just declare exterminatus on a whim. That's reserved for cases where a world cannot be recaptured.

**Deadnight**

roboemperor wrote:
I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.

It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.

Incorrect. It can be a rain of nuclear hellfire. It can also be a limited, precision strike. Or a more localised, heavy yet indiscriminate strike - see the star phantoms standard doctrine.

roboemperor wrote:

I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.

So What If they were conventional. That was 80 years ago. This is 40k. Don't forget Escalation is a thing. Batman begins. 'We carry semi automatics, they carry fully automatics. We wear body armour, they start carrying armour piercing rounds. And your wearing a mask...'

Stands to reason in a setting where orbital strikes and space ships exist, counter measures to those orbital strikes and space ships will also exist, and will have been in use for ten thousand years.

As to there not being any way to defend against nuclear missiles or weapons - Um, shoot the missile or shoot down the bomber?

Remember, in an era where these things exist, counter measures will also exist. Especially when the defenders have ground to orbit defense as a matter of course.

roboemperor wrote:

So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?

Yes, shields and anti orbital weapons are a thing.

And also, agin, you're not getting it. Why are you launching a rain of a thousand nukes in the first place? what happens when you actually want something On said planet. After a rain of your 1000 nukes everything is glass, and uninhabitable for thousands of years. You really gonna go and do that to the emperors worlds? Me thinks you'll be seeing a visit from an inquisitor very shortly for dereliction of duty and misuse of the emperors forces and for destruction of the emperors realms.

roboemperor wrote:

And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?

Course you do. How else do you find and confirm your targets?

you can only see so much from the air. Basically no better than a blurry snapshot. you don't want to waste your shots blowing up the Sahara desert, when the real targets are elsewhere, do you? .if you want to argue you can zoom in with fancy cameras that can let you read a newspaper from orbit (pretty sure we can do that now), but you still need to know where said newspaper are in the first place is to zoom in on. What happens when the targets are underground or in hidden locations? And you can only 'see' so much from intercepted comma chatter. You really need to see for yourself. Hence boots on the ground is a vital component of any operation.

**Overread**

If you want to take a planet and use its resources and infrastructure for your own gain - bombarding it with heavy nuclear ordinance and worse isn't a good first step. Now you've irradiated it for generations and destroyed many of the structures that were present. You've buried the resource you wanted if its a mineral and you've rendered any potential food output of the world 0 by destroying the surface.

Well done, now you've got to spend generations investing vast amounts of resources building mega-cities with shields against the radiation so your serfs can mine. But you've also got to ship in vast quantities of food and water all the time to keep that population functional. You've turned a net gain into potentially a net loss.

The Imperium wants to either capture or recapture worlds. The better the condition of the world the less they have to invest to get a return on their investment. Many worlds have huge factories and cities, far better to take them and use them than to obliterate them from orbit.

Yes they can obliterate planets, but its a huge cost both in resources and in political impact. Even against Tyranids their strategy of burning whole worlds was frowned upon heavily. Sure they denied and starved the fleet of fast food sources, but the result was that the Imperium also lost those worlds. Each one now lost utterly or taking vast investment to return to some semblance of use for the Imperium.

The Imperium can far better send in copious ground troops to fight it out on the ground. To secure facilities; resources and in the end win victory with far less destruction. Crippled cities can be rebuilt fast if all they've taken is ordiance pounding. Fields can be ploughed up very fast after the war is over if all you've got to do is clear munitions and plough.

**Kayback**

CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Because if you glass a planet you can't settle it afterwards and claim its resources. Remember that the Imperium of Man's goal is to reclaim worlds that were lost to them and settle them. Can't do that if said worlds are inhospitable.
Despite what the memes may tell you, the Imperium doesn't just declare exterminatus on a whim. That's reserved for cases where a world cannot be recaptured.

Pretty much this. Short of Exterminatus you also aren't guaranteed to kill everything with orbital strikes. You may also not have aerial or even orbital superiority. There are tons of reasons. You may not need to kill an entire planet/continent/province/city/suburb to stamp out the enemy. The infrastructure may be too valuable.

**A Town Called Malus**

Kayback wrote:
You may also not have aerial or even orbital superiority.

If you do not have aerial and orbital superiority then you have no chance of successfully launching an invasion of a planet as your forces will not make it to the surface in sufficient numbers, and sufficient organisation, to establish a beachhead and hold that beachhead to enable reinforcement and resupply.

**Kayback**

A Town Called Malus wrote:
Kayback wrote:
You may also not have aerial or even orbital superiority.

If you do not have aerial and orbital superiority then you have no chance of successfully launching an invasion of a planet as your forces will not make it to the surface in sufficient numbers, and sufficient organisation, to establish a beachhead and hold that beachhead to enable reinforcement and resupply.

Not true by any means, you may have local air or orbital superiority, you may have forces on the ground already, you may even have orbital or air parity. You can also make hot insertions like the SM can with drop pods or even teleport in like the Necron or Eldar can.

**Overread**

A Town Called Malus wrote:
Kayback wrote:
You may also not have aerial or even orbital superiority.

If you do not have aerial and orbital superiority then you have no chance of successfully launching an invasion of a planet as your forces will not make it to the surface in sufficient numbers, and sufficient organisation, to establish a beachhead and hold that beachhead to enable reinforcement and resupply.

You clearly underestimate the Imperiums willingness to throw Imperial Guard at a problem until the problem goes away

Losing a few transport ships on the way down is simply the price to be paid to retake the world when bad generals or under supported ones are tasked with the impossible.

**Sherrypie**

40k canon has plenty of examples of contested invasions, since the scales are so much larger than our mundane wars you can have a roiling space battle raging up above with landing craft punching through here and there. Presence of super-soldiers or inhuman monsters naturally helps with this, as you need a smaller volume of things to make an impact than with purely human forces, but still.

Ghazghul's Armageddon invasions fought with the navy while sending roks down, heedless of lives lost. Heresy saw fights like the battle for Nuceria during the Shadow Crusade where Ultramarines led a large fleet where warships charged against the traitors' flagships to keep their guns occupied as titan carriers and dropships ran past... it's a scifi classic.

**Max Moray**

There are ground battles, because to most people they are more fun than tabletop with space ships.

**Nevelon**

OldMate wrote:
Short response: It makes a better story than just than being like; well we'll just nuke them from orbit. With a giant meteorite, we don't even have to invest anything in ordinance or anything. I mean it worked for the dinosaurs.

Just wanted to reply to this with a bit of a classic from BFG history:

Rocks are NOT ‘free’, citizen.
Firstly, you must manoeuvre the Emperor’s naval vessel within the asteroid belt, almost assuredly sustaining damage to the Emperor’s ship’s paint from micrometeoroids, while expending the Emperor’s fuel.
Then the Tech Priests must inspect the rock in question to ascertain its worthiness to do the Emperor’s bidding. Should it pass muster, the Emperor’s Servitors must use the Emperor’s auto-scrapers and melta-cutters to prepare the potential ordinance for movement. Finally, the Tech Priests finished, the Emperor’s officers may begin manoeuvring the Emperor’s warship to abut the asteroid at the prepared face (expending yet more of the Emperor’s fuel), and then begin boosting the stone towards the offensive planet.
After a few days of expending a prodigious amount of the Emperor’s fuel to accelerate the asteroid into an orbit more fitting to the Emperor’s desires, the Emperor’s ship may then return to the planet via superluminous warp travel and await the arrival of the stone, still many weeks (or months) away.
After twiddling away the Emperor’s time and eating the Emperor’s food in the wasteful pursuit of making sure that the Emperor’s enemies do not launch a deflection mission, they may finally watch the ordinance impact the planet (assuming that the Emperor’s ship does not need to attempt any last-minute course correction upon the rock, using yet more of the Emperor’s fuel).

Given a typical (class Bravo-CVII) system, we have the following:
Two months, O&M, Titan class warship: 4.2 Million Imperials
Two months, rations, crew of same: 0.2 MI
Two months, Tech Priest pastor: 1.7 MI
Two months, Servitor parish: 0.3 MI
Paint, Titan class warship: 2.5 MI
Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.9 MI
Total: 9.8 MI

Contrasted with the following:
5 warheads, magna-melta: 2.5 MI
One day, O&M, Titan class warship: 0.3 MI
One day, rations, crew of same: 0.0 MI
Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.1 MI
Total: 2.9 MI

Given the same result with under one third of the cost, the Emperor will have saved a massive amount of His most sacred money and almost a full month of time, during which His warship may be bombarding an entirely different planet.
The Emperor, through this – His Office of Imperial Outlays – hereby orders you to attend one (1) week of therapeutic accountancy training/penance. Please report to Areicon IV, Imperial City, Administratum Building CXXI, Room 1456, where you are to sit in the BLUE chair.

For the Emperor,
Bursarius Tenathis,
Purser Level XI,
Imperial Office of Outlays.

**AnomanderRake**

Follow that up with the fact that even tried-and-true Exterminatus weaponry may not actually work. Consider Istvaan III: Horus virus-bombed the planet, destroyed the biosphere, set off the resulting planet-wide inferno, killed eight billion people, and because Tarvitz got word to the troops on the ground a lot of the Astartes he was actually aiming at got to bunkers in time and survived the bombardment.

The biggest weapon you can find isn't necessarily the most efficient or effective solution to your problem.

**Caradman Sturnn**

Bombarding a planet from space is actually very difficult, Ship-to-ship weaponry is generally not optimized for planetary assault, with many weapons losing their effectiveness quite drastically. A ship needs to move into very low orbit in order to attack with some effect, and will have to cope with the planet's gravity and other athmospheric conditions, all the while being extremely vulnurable for attacks, from both the surface and space.

**solkan**

I think we can summarize the OP: “Hey, everyone, why don’t everyone use scorched earth policies in 40k?”

Either that, or the OP has some strange notion that “land armies” are parked next to, rather than occupying, whatever valuable things exist on the planet. Especially if there’s an orbital fleet approaching.

And you wind up in a situation where orbital weaponry is just air superiority with bigger guns. There are enemy forces scattered throughout a city. Your orbital weaponry is going to blow up entire blocks of the city when you fire upon it, if it’s using enough firepower to ensure killing the targets.

It’s the same situation of “Why have snipers and sharpshooters if you can just use an aerial drone to kill the target?” Answer: Collateral damage.

Even in the grim darkness, with only war, you don’t go blowing up and wrecking the places you want to put your stuff.

**Vaktathi**

roboemperor wrote:
It's been bugging me.
Spaceship > Titan by a huge, huge factor
Orbital Bombardment > Entire land army.

So what's the point of land combat when 100% of the battle is determined in outerspace and everything on the planet is annihilated by orbital bombardment?

Tyranids I understand because their orbital bombardment is dropping a mega **** ton of soldiers. Soldiers are their orbital munitions.

But the rest? Why doesn't Imperium of Man orbital bombard the entire opposing faction to oblivion instead of sending space marines and imperial guard to the ground? I mean I understand v.s. Chaos because chaos is born inside a settlement and IoM can possibly contain it with land forces. But Tau, Eldar, Ork, Necrons (especially Necrons) what's their excuse?

It's like asking why do we have armies who's primary battlefield weapon is a sword in a universe where tanks, aircraft, artillery, and automatic weapons exist.

It's because 40k is a Space Fantasy setting, not really a science fiction one. 40k Space combat is more Age of Sail, or at the very best, Battle of Jutland, in SPAAAAAAACE than it is anything else. It's all rule of cool, and having space ships show up and blow everything away makes for a very poor company level tabletop wargame.

Once one starts to really dig into questions like these, the entire setting falls apart quickly. One realizes a million Space Marines would be several orders of magnitude too few to have any meaningful relevance in fighting the Imperium's wars on a Galactic scale, that starships with turrets hauled onto target by literal chain gangs of slave-crew probably wouldn't work very well, that Genestealer cults could be pretty easily rooted out and destroyed with modern 21st century technology, that 41st millenium air combat is largely just reskinned Battle of Britain imagery and that nothing in the setting remotely resembles the advanced radar/C3-networks/AA systems of the modern world, etc ad nauseum

**Gregor Samsa**

The idea is that the armies on the battlefield represent the lucky few who have threaded the needle of the various theatres of war and made it within striking distance of the strategic objective which correlates with the specifics of the mission being played.

It is assumed that vast legions of soldiers are destroyed while attempting to move out from forward operating bases into enemy territory. The models that end up on the tabletop are the thinned ranks of those forces and/or the elite units tasked with defending the strategic importance of the mission content.

**locarno24**

roboemperor wrote:
I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.

It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.

I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.

So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?

And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?

Not quite true: the problem is analogous to a naval ship fighting a shore fortress.

Anti-orbital guns like defence lasers that protect planets are massively, massively more powerful than the equivalent weapons on a starship.

Planet-wide shields are not a thing (I'm sure there are archeotech exceptions but they're rare), but a hive or fortress can pack shields able to hold off that kind of firepower.

The upshot is that an Imperial warship cannot survive in bombardment orbit above a militarized planet.

To put it in perspective, one of the best examples we have of planetary siege is Vraks - the citadel was protected by 40 defence laser silos: roughly equivalent of the firepower of thirty gothic-class cruisers: more than many sector battlefleets. Until at least the outer silos were destroyed, no starship could remain above the horizon Long enough to launch an effective bombardment, and even later in the siege, an astartes battle barge was practically crippled during a brief pass that only crossed the starport and stayed below the horizon of the citadel's main guns.

Secondly, this assumes you're okay with apocalyptic destruction. If you want the planet to be something other than an uninhabitable cinder, massed bombardment rather than drop troops or precision strikes is not a great plan.