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 JNAProductions wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

And?

Those young white males weren't excluding people who weren't young/white/male, and neither were GW.

Considering that people gave GW flak for putting out a statement that white supremacists and nazis were not welcome? Yeah no, there definitely has been parts of the fanbase that has not been welcoming to people outside the white, male, straight vanilla envelope.

Yeah. It's not like GW has ever said "Warhammer is a boys-only club! Girls are icky and have cooties!" or anything of the sort. But that doesn't mean the hobby is equally as welcoming to people of different genders, or ethnicities, or a whole host of other things.

I don’t agree, the hobby is welcoming to everyone equally. It’s not we want everyone to play but we want white males to play a little more than anyone else. Sure, we need more novels and characters that represent everyone but I wouldn’t go as far as saying the hobby isn’t as equally welcoming to everyone.

Again, the hobby is for everyone equally, no matter race, sex, religion etc… I also believe you can’t compare 1980s GW to present day GW. I’ve been part of the hobby for 20 years now and it’s changed drastically, mainly for the better. A big part of the change is also on us. We need to stop with the scapegoating and call out hate when we see it. Hate has no place in the hobby. Unless you’re a Xenos player or Chaos player….

While the hobby generally is welcoming to all there are always going to be elements that are not.
It's a hobby which again generally accepts and supports all. However there are certain people, as in any group that will always try and force their views onto others. A prime example that I have personally encountered on a few occasions has been the type we all know that says you're doing it wrong only their way is right.
It's people like them who mean I don't game in-store or at a club.

usmcmidn wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

And?

Those young white males weren't excluding people who weren't young/white/male, and neither were GW.

Considering that people gave GW flak for putting out a statement that white supremacists and nazis were not welcome? Yeah no, there definitely has been parts of the fanbase that has not been welcoming to people outside the white, male, straight vanilla envelope.

Just because something is predominantly populated by young white males doesn’t mean that it’s racist or sexist. While racism, sexism, hatred etc… exists, the vast majority of hobbyists are welcoming and understanding (regardless of their skin color or sex), including GW. Unless you have some hard statistical evidence that the majority of hobbyists are like that and the company, my comment still holds.

Love everyone, and welcome everyone. This hobby is absolutely for everyone and anyone.

PS you misquoted me. I did not say “ Lets not bury the reality that this was a young white male hobby & business for many a decade.” idk why it says that in your statement.

It says that in my statement because _I_ said that. It wasn't a quote, that's how your 'always' statement came across to me. You can pretend the 1980s GW was a different company if you want to, but that simply isn't true. I'm not a fan of writing history because it sounds happier. Things are better, but they were pretty bad. And by this very thread, very clearly isn't all gone.

usmcmidn wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

And?

Those young white males weren't excluding people who weren't young/white/male, and neither were GW.

Considering that people gave GW flak for putting out a statement that white supremacists and nazis were not welcome? Yeah no, there definitely has been parts of the fanbase that has not been welcoming to people outside the white, male, straight vanilla envelope.

Yeah. It's not like GW has ever said "Warhammer is a boys-only club! Girls are icky and have cooties!" or anything of the sort. But that doesn't mean the hobby is equally as welcoming to people of different genders, or ethnicities, or a whole host of other things.

I don’t agree, the hobby is welcoming to everyone equally. It’s not we want everyone to play but we want white males to play a little more than anyone else. Sure, we need more novels and characters that represent everyone but I wouldn’t go as far as saying the hobby isn’t as equally welcoming to everyone.

Again, the hobby is for everyone equally, no matter race, sex, religion etc…

Sounds like your local community is pretty welcoming and healthy. However, I regret to inform you that our hobby does, unfortunately, have its share of unpleasant people with less healthy views on the world. The standard gamer "boys club" culture that you see among video gamers is present here, as are a certain subset of people who are a little too into the fascism the setting is meant to be satirizing.

I also believe you can’t compare 1980s GW to present day GW. I’ve been part of the hobby for 20 years now and it’s changed drastically, mainly for the better. A big part of the change is also on us. We need to stop with the scapegoating and call out hate when we see it. Hate has no place in the hobby. Unless you’re a Xenos player or Chaos player….

Okay, so you do agree that things weren't always handled as well as they are now and that there is occassionally hate to be called out? I don't think anyone is claiming that the hobby itself is super unwelcoming, but the percentage of our ranks that tend to be misogynistic, gatekeepy, etc. seems to be noticably higher than in the... I don't know... knitting community. Or artist community. Or basically any community that wasn't seen as a "nerd space" in the 90s.

Yeah. Echoing Wyldhunt.

Great strides have been made.
A lot of places are chill and good-not perfect, but nothing is.
But that doesn't mean there's nothing left to do to improve on accessibility for communities.

Self appointed gatekeepers make me laugh. Genuinely laugh. Because it’s such a pointless, aimless endeavour. Just silly little online echo chambers utterly powerless to control anything outside of that echo chamber.

If you don’t want to play with a given demographic? Bit weird, but you do you. Because there’s plenty of others who will play with them, and there’s not a damn thing the weird little gatekeeper can do about it.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Combat Drugs, Stims, Muscle Grafts, Bionics. All exist, all used in differing amounts across different Imperial Guard regiments. Not so much in modern military.

The upper body strength is also a daft argument here. Can they stand, carry and aim a Lasgun? Then they’re plenty good as Imperial Grade Cannon Fodder. Especially given Lasguns and their ammo packs are explicitly described as being lightweight, so this insistence on upper body strength just doesn’t apply to 40K as it does in the real world.

Also, increased muscle mass = increased calorie requirements to maintain that muscle mass. There's a reason that no military in the modern world is trying to staff their combat forces exclusively with people with the physique of a Mr. Olympia.

The Imperium already has the space marine beefcakes to waste resources maintaining inefficient physiques on, they don't need to import that kind of thinking to the guard as well.

That is actually a very good reason for why men would be preferred.

Yes, strength is not a decisive element in combat. In fact, even during Middle Ages, soldiers were preferred to NOT be hulking Gregor Clegane types - in part due to food issue you mention. But due to greater amount of testosterone, males will have more strength and endurance for given body weight. Males also have much lower minimum amount of body fat they can maintain while still being healthy, are more efficient in locomotion (due to narrower pelvis), and have better balance of upper body strength vs lower body strength than females.

And even in modern military, a lot of stuff (e.g. digging trenches) requires decent amount of strength and endurance. Nothing like Ahnold physique - think more Bruce Lee - but definitely something men are better at. You mentioning weight of lasgun misses the point by, like, light years. Yes, lasguns may be lighter than modern rifles. But even if that is the case, the rest of the pack is unlikely to be much lighter (in fact, historically speaking, modern soldiers are the most encumbered ever). Not to mention that infantryman's most important weapon is actually his shovel, especially for the type of warfare Imperium oftentimes practices.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8628437/

Results
Male are 15.7% heavier and 7.4% taller and presented a percentage of fat mass (17.2 ± 1.8%) significantly (p < 0.001) lower than that of women subject (25.0 ± 2.5%) (difference male vs female for fat mass: -45.5%). HG, BS, 5JT and SJ performances were significantly higher in males (44 ± 5 kg, 141 ± 2 kg, 11 ± 1 m and 32.4 ± 2,7 cm, respectively) than in females (31.0 ± 4 kg, 81.6 ± 13 kg, 8.7 ± 0.7 m and 21.1 ± 1.9 cm, respectively). In the control (unloaded) condition, the relative difference between males and females represented 23.5% and 34.7% of the male performances for 5JT and SJ, respectively. In the weighted condition, the relative difference between weighted males and females still represented 11.7% and 23.8% of the weighted male performances for 5JT and SJ, respectively. Cancelling the sex difference in fat mass by adding weight in males reduced by 50.1% the sex difference during 5JT and 31.4% and 71.7% for hight and power results, respectively during SJ test.

Conclusion
During short and maximal exercise, male performed better with their hands, back and legs than female students. Excess fat for female students has a disadvantageous effect on vertical and horizontal jumps performances. The persistence of sex differences after weighting of male students indicates that body fat is responsible for 30 to 70% of the observed differences between sexes performances and power outcomes during jump tests.

https://neurosciencenews.com/male-female-running-speed-21531/

These data revealed that the difference between male and female performance time increased with event distance from 8.6 percent to 11 percent from shortest to longest sprint events (60 to 400 meters).

Additionally, within-race analysis of each 10-meter segment of the 100-meter event revealed a more pronounced pattern across distance – sex differences increased from a low of 5.6 percent for the first segment to a high of 14.2 percent in the last segment.

And you cannot fix that by genetic engineering... except by making women, well, no longer women. A.K.A. by turning them into men. In which case, why bother when you can just recruit more men?

Further, men have far better reflexes than women, so they would still be better combatants even if strength and endurance were to be magically equalized:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4456887/

The ART is faster than the VRT in medical students. Furthermore, male medical students have faster RTs as compared to female medical students for both auditory as well as visual stimuli. Regularly exercising medical students have faster RTs when compared with medical students with sedentary lifestyles.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10671188.1963.10613242

Nine hundred and thirty men, women, and children ranging in age from 6 to 84 were tested to determine the differences between males and females of various ages in their speed of reaction and movement and to ascertain whether or not a relationship exists between reaction time and movement time. Results indicated that (a) males are faster than females in both reaction and movement; (b) speed of both functions increases up to early adulthood and then decreases; (c) peak speed is maintained longer by males in movement and longer by females in reaction; and (d) in the majority of groups studied, no relationship exists between speed of reaction and speed of movement.

Lord Zarkov wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Combat Drugs, Stims, Muscle Grafts, Bionics. All exist, all used in differing amounts across different Imperial Guard regiments. Not so much in modern military.

The upper body strength is also a daft argument here. Can they stand, carry and aim a Lasgun? Then they’re plenty good as Imperial Grade Cannon Fodder. Especially given Lasguns and their ammo packs are explicitly described as being lightweight, so this insistence on upper body strength just doesn’t apply to 40K as it does in the real world.

Worth noting that the guard recruits are frequently the top x% of the pdf (depending on world etc).

So, depending on how much they weight physical strength/robustness, that may mean the majority of guard recruits are male (but not all, both as the top women will outperform the majority of men and because other criteria might be more sex neutral), and a higher proportion of pdf troops female.

But if you hit the bar, the Mutinorum is not going to care if you’re male or female.

IG soldiers already are the top, however (they are - or are supposed to be - the cream of the crop of any given world). So top women will still fall below top men - meaning that, if anything, IG should have fewer women among its combat personnel compared to PDF. And factors I noted previously in the post mean that if you go for universal standard... at least 95% of your recruits will be men. So while female Guard regiment can exist, they should be exceedingly rare. And if Guard goes for mixed regiments instead of all-female ones, then basically no IG regiments will have female majority (barring few statistical freak accidents)... you will have 90%-99% men with some women thrown in.

If you look at football (a.k.a. soccer a.k.a. Association Football)... that is one example of a sport where large amount of physical strength is not needed - endurance, coordination and reflexes matter far more. Yet even there, boys U-15 team performed significantly better than women's national team.

 Gert wrote:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
As for in-universe, even if a Catachan woman is stronger than average man, she will still be weaker than Catachan man.

Lmao, imagine trying to use modern science on a planet that is exclusively populated by 80s action heroes. What an absolute joke.

Real-world standards apply up to the point where they explicitly do not apply.

If we use your measures, joke would be us attempting to discuss ANYTHING. Might as well shut down the background section of the site since, apparently, logic need not apply.

any Catachan units will be raised based on Catachan standards.

Catachan standards aren't based on physical strength alone but cunning, survival ability, and combat skill. Strength alone doesn't keep people alive on Catachan and it is a massively equal society where if an individual doesn't want children, they don't have children, no questions or judgments. The family unit is so non-existent that soldiers from the same family in the same Regiment won't even acknowledge each other in most cases.

And physical strength alone is not the only area where men are better than women. And if Catachan really is a Death World (and we know it is), then any notion of a "massively equal society" should have led to their extinction long time ago.

 RaptorusRex wrote:
Gotta love how an account with ~6 posts comes in to derail the thread based on their politicized understanding of human biology.

Learn some science, please. There is nothing "politicized" about my understanding of biology.

And I didn't "derail the thread". I was answering the OP's question:

bibotot wrote:
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?

Just because you hate the answer doesn't mean you get to call me out on answering the quite clearly stated question.

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

IG soldiers already are the top, however (they are - or are supposed to be - the cream of the crop of any given world). So top women will still fall below top men - meaning that, if anything, IG should have fewer women among its combat personnel compared to PDF. And factors I noted previously in the post mean that if you go for universal standard... at least 95% of your recruits will be men. So while female Guard regiment can exist, they should be exceedingly rare. And if Guard goes for mixed regiments instead of all-female ones, then basically no IG regiments will have female majority (barring few statistical freak accidents)... you will have 90%-99% men with some women thrown in.

=> of course only as long both sexes are recruited at all. There might be lots of reasons for purely female PDFs. The simplest that comes to my mind given the mentioned better average strength of males: On a planet with lots of heavy work like a mining world or Industrial world, there might well be a priority to get the phyically fittest indivivuums in production. The security forces that by and large "just" have to carry lasguns (especially in motorized regiments that don't have to carry that much kit) can be filled up with less physically impressive specimens. On such a world, a purely female PDF would make a lot of sense, so the "top of the crop" would be purely female too. The Munitorum would not object, as long as the ordered boots on the ground are there and equiped.

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
Real-world standards apply up to the point where they explicitly do not apply.

If we use your measures, joke would be us attempting to discuss ANYTHING. Might as well shut down the background section of the site since, apparently, logic need not apply.

Hey, I'm not the one that picked the worst possible example. You chose to use the extremely silly killer planet populated by action heroes as your example, and I'm debating that choice.

But even if you had picked a world like Cadia, Tallarn, Mordian, or Armageddon, then you'd still be wrong because the Guard doesn't recruit based on standards that a modern army would use. The Guard recruits people who are human enough to hold a Lasgun.
There will be exceptions such as Vostroya where all firstborn sons must serve as punishment for their choice to remain neutral during the Horus Heresy but for everywhere else it's "Can you hold a gun? Congratulations, you are hired".
That's the Total War mentality of the Imperium. Size, shape, skin tone, or special body parts don't matter because the Guard cannot afford to turn away soldiers.

And physical strength alone is not the only area where men are better than women. And if Catachan really is a Death World (and we know it is), then any notion of a "massively equal society" should have led to their extinction long time ago.

Again, it's a massively silly planet and the whole idea of it maintaining a pre-industrial population size has been discussed and debated many times as being very silly. The canon population of Catachan is half that of Bejing for crying out loud.
Nothing on that planet makes any sense whatsoever.

The logic of a permanent defensive total war dictates that yes, indeed you would actually avoid recruiting women.

Not when population density is so high that birth rates aren't an issue, especially when the Imperium can and will ship entire populations from planet to planet to suit its needs. Fenris and Armageddon are good examples of that, the former had thousands of tribes moved to artificially increase the pool of recruits for the VIth Legion and the latter had most of its population replaced after the 1st War with people who weren't aware of Chaos.

And in some cases (like Krieg with its Vitae Wombs) decoupled from the size of the female population.

 Gert wrote:
Not when population density is so high that birth rates aren't an issue.

Nope. Ignoring localised nature of conflict on an galactic level still disprove this, especially with lackluster capacity of logistical reliability.

The Imperium has worlds chocking with population in levels of extreme overpopulation that we'd consider madness. Even after 10,000 years of trench warfare, they've survived and sustained the greater part of the Imperium. Clearly population and breeding are not a concern at all.

Indeed when you consider the sheer mind-breaking horrors of warfare in the setting; anyone who can hold a gun and hold the line is wanted. Bodies are more important than your genetic make-up. So long as you're not so mutated that you're considered a mutant to be purged. Even then there are several breeds of mutant that are still used by the Imperium every day - eg Rattlings and Ogryns


Again the Imperium army isn't fussy at the large scale. It just wants bodies for the meat-grinder. It will take them from worlds like Catachan, where the average person is physically superior to what we have on Earth; it will take them from Hive worlds like Necromunda, where the toxic lifestyle means many will likely have lungscarring and other imperfections. Despite their resilience they are likely less than they could be. The trenches don't care, the lasgun doesn't care, the Xeno doesn't care; nore does the mutant nor the heretic (though the heretic likely would want your shoes because they are better than the rags and ruin they have)

Hive Worlds are also used to farm populations to settle new planets because they're so overflowing with people.

We're not talking about one or two planets with massive populations, we're talking about 10 to 25% of all Imperial worlds being a Hive World with an average population of half a trillion and an upward limit of (X).

If the Imperium needs to move those people, it uses those people to mine the resources, manufacture the materials, and construct the ships to move them, at which point all the people who were planning to be moved have been supplemented by the next two or three generations of people.

In an immediate warzone, the locals are going to get conscripted as well even if they end up not being very good then a local battlegroup can easily be reinforced by a few billion people with some surplus Flak gear and an autogun. If the threat is defeated then the Imperium ships more people in to replace the dead and if the threat isn't defeated then those billions are dead or enslaved which means the Imperium has lost them.

Heck lets not forget the Imperium uses people to pull back the guns on their warships. Those massive cannon have people pulling ropes to draw the gun back. Granted its likely got some ancient piston system that helps, but the Imperium sees no problem at all with people doing that harsh manual labour.

Not to mention the myriad of other roles where they use people rather than machines. Heck they breed bodies to get brains for cogitators and servitors and there's ample evidence that not ever brain that ends up running those is braindead made for it.

If a population gets low enough, the Mechanicus can always make more pod people.
Most Magi and Tech-Priests are pod people, even Cawl was a pod person.

Also, the casualty rates of battles and wars in the 40K universe are actually very small compared to actual historical wars, because the same people who wrote that 1 million space marines can be important on the galactic stage also wrote how many imperial guard are involved in wars spanning the entire surface of a planet.

For example, there were 1 million more French and British forces at the Somme alone than there were Imperium forces in the entire Armageddon subsector at the onset of the third war for Armageddon. There weren't enough Imperial forces in an entire subsector to attack a single section of the line on one front in World War 1.

For another instance, WW2 resulted in the loss of around 3% of the total world population over the 6 years of the war. If wars in the 40K universe were to be equal to that, then Terra alone (population in the quadrillions, supposedly) would have to lose at least 13,698,630,137 people per day, every day for those 6 years to pull its own weight in those casualty numbers.

They could stand to up the numbers a bit, but you can also view it as logistical bottlenecking. If you have a fleet of 20-30 ships, even if they are massive ships with crews in the hundreds of thousands, you're only going to be able to carry a few hundred thousand troops at most per vessel. Maybe 3/4 a million in a dedicated transport. But you're going to have to dedicate a massive amount of your space to not people, food, ammunition, vehicles, and other supplies. After all, you're probably going to go months or years without resupply ships arriving so you need to have everything with you to sustain the soldiers you brought for potentially years.

This would really cap invasions and counter invasions at maybe a few million troops being dropped in at any one time.

Of course this would be ignoring any indigenous people on the planet itself who could be quickly armed in their 10s of millions quite easily on a heavily populated world, or maybe not, depending on how much weaponry you have laying around. Perhaps the thing preventing the Imperium from arming billions upon billions is simply arming them. And would explain why even a lasgun is more valuable than a dozen guardsmen. yes, lasguns are cheap. But humans are even cheaper, so cheap we can't arm them all even if we wanted to. The Imperium can only make millions and millions of lasguns per annum, not billions and billions.

 Gert wrote:
If a population gets low enough, the Mechanicus can always make more pod people.
Most Magi and Tech-Priests are pod people, even Cawl was a pod person.

Yep, loved that scene in "The great work" when the rest of thh pod peeps we going through the left or right doors- Cawl after speaking up gets to go through the CENTER door.
Whelp, this topic looks weird now (TL;DR [Skimmied]) But I recommend Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond which has a good section all about differences in ethnicities of humans aren't as big as we think. Same goes for the sexes- I try not to talk down or mansplain to a woman since I consider them capable of going out there and doing their due diligence.
Granted, I had a trans friend and when Jason became Jessica she out and out stated that the hormones were giving her brain fog and she felt all emotional all the time.. But as I said- hormones. They'll do that.

Okay- semi-back to topic after all that: I think this is why Human tau Auxiliaries see the benefit of breaking away with the Imperium. The Tau give them guns and protection and don't (outright) ask for much in return, other than to serve the greater good. So for the Damocles backwaters, it comes down to supply line issues, and when a bunch of genestealers are running around your hive sewers, it looks much better to have some Pew Pew pulse rifles than wait for eventual help/ exterminatus.

 Grey Templar wrote:
They could stand to up the numbers a bit, but you can also view it as logistical bottlenecking. If you have a fleet of 20-30 ships, even if they are massive ships with crews in the hundreds of thousands, you're only going to be able to carry a few hundred thousand troops at most per vessel. Maybe 3/4 a million in a dedicated transport. But you're going to have to dedicate a massive amount of your space to not people, food, ammunition, vehicles, and other supplies. After all, you're probably going to go months or years without resupply ships arriving so you need to have everything with you to sustain the soldiers you brought for potentially years.

The other thing is once you go beyond a certain point the numbers become meaningless to most readers/people.

Once people have no way to relate to the numbers and once they numbers start to get pretty long and to the point you need a calculator to work them out; it goes from information to just a background noise for most people.
Even if it means that the setting has really wonky numbers if you look at it logically; it makes sense to the average person in a way they can connect with it.

Warhammer might be the most extreme with examples like marines; but other books and shows do similar things. In the end its not actually important how many people there are in the setting and how many die; what's important is that the numbers feel vast and the setting feels big and it seems horrific and it carries that tone. Similarly how few marines there are doesn't matter so long as the readers get the impression that these are the elite of the elite and are super rare. Though I'd argue that 1K per chapter is indeed a very very tiny number.

At least with the 1 million marines, it seems to even in universe be seen as mostly a propaganda number. I recall in the old 4th edition codex it listed out the strengths of the Ultramarine companies and if you added everything up it came out to somewhere in the 1400 marines range, and that is for the Ultramarines. Probably the only chapter to be in full compliance with the Codex.

The line has never been that there are actually for real only ever 1 million space marines. Its more that the Imperium says there are a million, despite there being no accurate count of chapters or a census within those chapters or that many of those chapters do not give a feth about the Codex. So even in-universe the number is basically acknowledged to be false.

Folk also need to keep in mind distinct planets like Catachan are very much the exception, not the rule.

The Imperium is said to contain roughly 1,000,000 worlds. And all of them will have some kind of population. From barely populated gas planet mining platforms, right up to Hive Worlds such as Necromunda, where there’s no way to conduct an accurate census, and even Hive Primus is roughly estimated to have a population well in excess of modern day Earth’s.

So the Imperium is just never, ever going to hurt for bodies. Ever. Yet, because of the scale of the treats it faces? It still cannot afford to be sniffy in who is recruited into the Imperial Guard.


And on that silly, silly argument about Upper Body Strength? I myself am a big sod. A strapping 6’2”. And whilst by no means beefcake, I’m possessed of reasonable strength. Certainly in terms of lifting, I’m stronger than my mate Chris. Or, to give him his proper name? Ninja Chris. For whilst a mere fart in a jar at 5’8” or so? He’s been into Wing Chun for…years.

We had a play fight once. I could barely lay a finger on him. Because training matters. You may well be able to bench press a planet with your peen, but if you’ve no combat training of any kind? Someone with combat training is still going to have an advantage.

Dodging matters. Going for the hurty bits matters. Being able to predict your opponent matters. Skill is important, and often a deciding factor.

Here's a question that's just occurred to me:

What kind of criteria do we think planets tend to actually use when they're deciding who to send for a tithe?

My understanding is that guard tithes are generally pulled from the PDF, right? I feel like many planets might not really give their troops a chance to do the same kind of "soldiering" that would be expected of them in the guard. I doubt many of the recruits from thoroughly-industrialized/urbanized worlds have had a lot of opportunities to dig trenches, for instance. And unless your planet is regularly or recently threatened by some major invasion, your mission experience is probably mostly just clearing out underfunded cultists, putting down the occassional angry mob, etc., right?

So who's looking at what stats to decide what the "cream of the crop" is for the average imperial world? Are they just checking average marksmanship scores or something? Is somebody actively measuring which troops haul sandbags around faster?

Asking because all the talk of upper body strength has me wondering whether such a thing really translates into whatever recruiting metrics they use for the tithe.

(This is assuming that someone is actually making a good faith attempt to recruit the cream of the crop of whatever. I imagine plenty of worlds just send the eldest child of each household or try to get away with press ganging a bunch of gangers or whatever.)

I don't think it's explicit that it's the "best" of the PDF, just about 10% IIRC.
So it's probably just names selected from a program or in some cases volunteers plus whoever wants to sign up from non-PDF sources.

 Gert wrote:
I don't think it's explicit that it's the "best" of the PDF, just about 10% IIRC.
So it's probably just names selected from a program or in some cases volunteers plus whoever wants to sign up from non-PDF sources.

IIRC, there is no explicit rule as such. However, tithed troops are supposed to meet a minimum standard- if they don't, the punishment is great (usually the governor's life is forfeit). Therefore many worlds recruit Guard tithes from their best PDF units to minimise this risk. This is by no means universal (for example, Cadian units were selected for Guard vs PDF randomly) and may not even be a majority.

 Overread wrote:
The Imperium has worlds chocking with population in levels of extreme overpopulation that we'd consider madness. Even after 10,000 years of trench warfare, they've survived and sustained the greater part of the Imperium. Clearly population and breeding are not a concern at all.

Indeed when you consider the sheer mind-breaking horrors of warfare in the setting; anyone who can hold a gun and hold the line is wanted. Bodies are more important than your genetic make-up. So long as you're not so mutated that you're considered a mutant to be purged. Even then there are several breeds of mutant that are still used by the Imperium every day - eg Rattlings and Ogryns


Again the Imperium army isn't fussy at the large scale. It just wants bodies for the meat-grinder. It will take them from worlds like Catachan, where the average person is physically superior to what we have on Earth; it will take them from Hive worlds like Necromunda, where the toxic lifestyle means many will likely have lungscarring and other imperfections. Despite their resilience they are likely less than they could be. The trenches don't care, the lasgun doesn't care, the Xeno doesn't care; nore does the mutant nor the heretic (though the heretic likely would want your shoes because they are better than the rags and ruin they have)

That is just not true, just as it is not true that you can run an economy effective centrally for the sheer amount of data even with a far more effective information system and cooperative nature that is the pricing mechanism on a world, neither can you run a military at a galactic scale in a way that would make it matter that you have population farms due to the logisctial irreliability of the warp.

The fact that i have to explain this shows a severe lack of logistical knowledge to the point that the whole discussion is basically moot. Having to have a population farm and having that in reach of a reliable enough warp route severly cuts down your whole argument to the point of nonsensical considering even internal sector travell ranges from sluggish to loterry like chances to basically impossible to phenomena understood or not understood.

Why do you think all planets are mandated to field PDF's? Because the IoM knows that its logistics are dead without decentralised structures, and these decentralised structures have not the luxury in many cases to draft willy nilly into reproduction capable individuals of the species else there's not much left depending upon enemy, and the reaction time for the guard is due to that alone horrific, NVM that production often also is localised for basic equipment aswell, hence why recruiting without regard is most certainly not something done unless the situation has become anyways a loss on that particular locality.

You also see that when the IoM goes to the offensive and ammasses armies, those are indeed drawn from population farms / centers but their weight is basically a continuous stream, ala flood gates and then yeah, it doesn't matter. Problem is the IoM rarely goes to the offensive in such a manner and often the offensives are so delayed due to logistical issues again that the localised nature of combat around planets makes their effectiveness questionable endeavours in itself. Which is also the reason why the tau did win their little strife with the IoM.

Gert wrote:We're not talking about one or two planets with massive populations, we're talking about 10 to 25% of all Imperial worlds being a Hive World with an average population of half a trillion and an upward limit of (X).

Whilst I agree with your overall point, the only canon number I have ever come across for hive worlds lists approximately 32,000 out of the rough 1,000,000 worlds of the Imperium. About 3%. Still a vast population base though.

For the record, I don't think this would include planets like Verghast, where the biggest hive is barely more populous than modern Tokyo.

A Town Called Malus wrote:

For example, there were 1 million more French and British forces at the Somme alone than there were Imperium forces in the entire Armageddon subsector at the onset of the third war for Armageddon. There weren't enough Imperial forces in an entire subsector to attack a single section of the line on one front in World War 1.

What numbers are you using for Armageddon subsector?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Folk also need to keep in mind distinct planets like Catachan are very much the exception, not the rule.

The Imperium is said to contain roughly 1,000,000 worlds. And all of them will have some kind of population. From barely populated gas planet mining platforms, right up to Hive Worlds such as Necromunda, where there’s no way to conduct an accurate census, and even Hive Primus is roughly estimated to have a population well in excess of modern day Earth’s.

So the Imperium is just never, ever going to hurt for bodies. Ever. Yet, because of the scale of the treats it faces? It still cannot afford to be sniffy in who is recruited into the Imperial Guard.


And on that silly, silly argument about Upper Body Strength? I myself am a big sod. A strapping 6’2”. And whilst by no means beefcake, I’m possessed of reasonable strength. Certainly in terms of lifting, I’m stronger than my mate Chris. Or, to give him his proper name? Ninja Chris. For whilst a mere fart in a jar at 5’8” or so? He’s been into Wing Chun for…years.

We had a play fight once. I could barely lay a finger on him. Because training matters. You may well be able to bench press a planet with your peen, but if you’ve no combat training of any kind? Someone with combat training is still going to have an advantage.

Dodging matters. Going for the hurty bits matters. Being able to predict your opponent matters. Skill is important, and often a deciding factor.

In a play fight, a whole other scenario than relevant here, especially as soon as pointy bits get involved or blunt objects in which endurance and strength become deciding factors. Or whoever is faster with an sidearm.

Also you are so close with your initial argument and yet so far. The problem is one of distance logistics. It don't matter that the IoM can throw bodies at a problem on paper in theory. Because in practice it would first need to raise the army for that campaign especially if it is a newer campaign, then collect that army on a jump off point then wait on the navy to do the same thing beforehand and potentially wait on response of more independent forces like marines and more importantly mechanicus depending upon infrastructure and force requirements and then initiate the first battles.

Clausewitz explains that rather well, Time and force are a correlation. Hence why a lesser force with speed can even win at all incidentally an modus operandi a lot of factions use against the IoM as an aside and the sole reason why marines in their small numbers are even somewhat relevant in the setting at all.

I seem to remember that the criteria for "best 10 %" were up to the tithing planet. And as long as the munitorum is not obviously cheated ("Yeah, being blind, one legged or paraplegic is deemed top 10% on our planet!") they don't really care. Besides strength, endurance and the like, good morale and fervent adherence to the imperial creed is a perfect quality marker as well. Especially when it is expected that the Regiment will face of against Heretic forces and resistance to taint would be of high interest.


One word regarding the "numbers game" though. On a big scale I completely agree with the posters that mentioned that the imperium does not hurt for - in this case - (wo)manpower. But on a localized scale the points that have been brought up regarding birth rates etc. might be relevant. I might be wrong but I think there were some situations in the fluff, where a localized crisis turned up and the local planets were tithed in a frequency, that it made a real dent in their population. So not "you have 100 billion people, just give us 1 Million every 5 years" and more "You have 100 Million, we'll need 1 Million every 2 Months for the next 10 years, since we cannot expect reinforcements from elsewhere soon". In such cases the planetary goverment should indeed have an eye on the sex balance of the soldiers they send off world, especially as those cannot be expected to return.