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How do!

Not really thought this one through, hence posing it as a question. Inspiration for the topic came from discussion about the Armageddon Ork Hunters, and how relatively few are Catachan, the whole task force (?, can’t think of a better phrase) being Veteran Remnants of otherwise fallen Regiments.

Here, we need to first acknowledge that whilst probably the most famous, Catachan isn’t the only Jungle Deathworld within The Imperium, and far from the only Deathworld to provide Regiments to the Imperial Guard.

We also see other Regiments from single-biome worlds that truly excel in their native environs. For instance, you’ll be hard pressed to find better Arctic Warriors than the Valhallans, or better Desert Warriors than Tallarns. And for less specialised, few worlds have anything like the discipline of Cadians or Mordians.

Yet, due to the staggering inefficiency and ineptitude of the Munitorum? Such famed Regiments and their ilk only comparatively rarely get to wage war in their preferred environment. And that means there’ll also be wars on Jungle/Ice/Desert worlds where none of the Regiments assigned have the training let alone instinct of the more famed specialised Regiments.

On one hand, with something as vast and varied as The Imperium, and reliant on unavoidably inconsistent and unpredictable Warp Travel, it’s always going to be of limited efficiency. There are too many fronts needing too many troops all at the same time to get it perfected.

But there is room for significant improvement. For instance. Break it down by sector/sub-sector. Understand the Imperium held worlds within that sector. If there are Ice/Desert/Jungle/Whatever worlds? Ensure that the standing presence or rallying points all have representation from Regiments known to excel in those environments. Draw Veterans from mauled examples of such Regiments in to train whatever local PDF’s there might be, so at the very least they know the logistical basics for waging war on such extreme worlds.

Sure, a bunch of Valhallan Veterans training the local PDFs in Ice World Warfare are never going to match their old Regiments in efficiency, no. But at least those who are selected to join the Imperial Guard will have some experience, and so experience fewer losses due to the more hostile environs.

Combined, you stand a better chance of driving any attackers off, and/or putting up enough of a fight their progress is held in check long enough for proper reinforcements to arrive and give them a real kicking.

That would be a strong Imperium. One using its constituent worlds to proper effect, each lending its strength to the other, all learning and improving from one another’s specialisation. An Imperium better able to at least pin down an enemy until it can bring its staggering armed forces to bear.

At least, that’s one hypothesis, what do you reckon, Dakka?

If the Imperium was well organised and efficient, it wouldn't be the Imperium. That is kinda the point of the satire. Even during the Great Crusade, the cracks were showing.

Probably the closest thing to an organised, efficient Imperium would be... the Tau Empire.

Also a lot of the inefficiency is by design. The fracturing of military command, different turf wars, SM chapters, etc are there so no one source could turn traitor and have HH 2.0.

If they put more trust and ability in to the hands of those who could make it more efficent, the imperium might do a much better job fighting its foes, might might get ripped apart internally by rebelions.

(Which it might be better at putting down, or having cascade failures as more people turned)

Yeah it's kind of a hallmark of fascism that it's spectacularly disorganised from all the intentional infighting.

The closest you'd maybe get would be a democracy with a lot of military assets like the United Earth Government in Halo or United Federation of Planets.

Anything fascist or authoritarian will inevitably eat itself alive because someone somewhere will be oppressed and eventually rebel against the ruling power.

The more militaristic a society, the less efficient at anything it is because it loses all of the benefits of civilian life.

 Haighus wrote:
If the Imperium was well organised and efficient, it wouldn't be the Imperium. That is kinda the point of the satire. Even during the Great Crusade, the cracks were showing.

Probably the closest thing to an organised, efficient Imperium would be... the Tau Empire.

Pretty much. An efficient Imperium would be unrecognisable. We'd no longer be talking Warhammer at that point. We may as well be talking Star Trek or the Culture.

It would still be the Imperium.

If the Imperium only sheds its disorganisation, it would still have major hobbles on it

1) Technology - a big one for the Imperium. Even if they are organised they'd still not be allowed nor encouraged to develop new tech outside of sanctioned developments by the Mechanicus. This still holds the Imperium back in general from advancing their tech. They'd still be locked into this way of thinking.

2) Unity doesn't mean progress. IT depends entirely on the direction the new united Imperium takes. Progressive alliances with Xenos; Die hard Emperor worshippers purging non believers from within; hyper xenophobic and driving all resources into a massive crusade that burns out what stockpiles they have; united and non-expansionist; drawing hard defensive lines but also fortifying their position and not expanding into new territories.

3) Scale; keep in mind some of the "we forgot a world was there" also bleeds into the fact that the Imperium is so vast that losing a world or two here and there is basically "Clerical error" territory. So even if organised, some of those systems are not going to change; they are still one in a million (at least) of worlds.



Honestly we'd likely see the Imperium do well if united as it would have the potential to drive other factions from their boarders. Certainly the likes of the Tau would most certainly be crushed.

A lot of those problems, such as technological regression, go hand in hand with the disorganisation. Technology is lost because of disorganisation, and disorganisation is entrenched because technology that was used to stave it off has been lost.

To some degree I presume an organised Imperium would also resolve those problems, as it would be sort of necessary for the premise. The Imperium couldn't be properly well organised in the first place otherwise!

I disagree - you can be organised and still insane. The mechanicus are pretty well organised and yet they don't regard technology like we do.

An organised Imperium just means that its no longer losing worlds in the administration system; that its no longer pulling itself in a million different directions; it can still be utterly insane. It all depends who ends up at the very top; what direction this united Imperium goes in.

It could go directions that make it organised, sane, sensible, pragmatic and logical.
Or it could go off the deep end and be organised but crazed; perhaps even more technophobic and archaic. Driven to the Divine Emperor and deciding that the best course of action is to close boarders; draw in their forces and seek purity within itself to draw the Emperor back to them.



Again just because you're organised doesn't mean you suddenly become sane by modern western cultural standards.

Note that I extremely deliberately did not use the word "sane" or "insane" in my post.

I think the way travel in 40k works, the only efficient empire possible is one that uses the webway.

If the imperium is structurally the same as now, relying on warp travel, it will be impossible for them to be well organised. The best they could do is a sector strong fleet for each planet they have, but that still makes each one isolated.

The imperium just can't fundamentally operate in a close knit organised way unless it gets faster and more predictable travel and communication.

I actually think it's one of the good things about the 40k setting, there's like a universal empire collapsing constant based on the tyranny of distance. It allows call backs to Rome.

 Overread wrote:
I disagree - you can be organised and still insane. The mechanicus are pretty well organised and yet they don't regard technology like we do.

An organised Imperium just means that its no longer losing worlds in the administration system; that its no longer pulling itself in a million different directions; it can still be utterly insane. It all depends who ends up at the very top; what direction this united Imperium goes in.

It could go directions that make it organised, sane, sensible, pragmatic and logical.
Or it could go off the deep end and be organised but crazed; perhaps even more technophobic and archaic. Driven to the Divine Emperor and deciding that the best course of action is to close boarders; draw in their forces and seek purity within itself to draw the Emperor back to them.



Again just because you're organised doesn't mean you suddenly become sane by modern western cultural standards.

I guess it kind of depends on what exactly you mean by "organized". As Ashiraya said, the "disorganization" is both a cause and symptom of the various traits that make the imperium the imperium. And what's more, you could make the case that the imperium *is* pretty organized on the whole given the sheer scale at which it operates.

So let's take the "forgot a planet existed" thing. First, let's assume the imperium did just suddenly become way more "organized" and never made clerical errors like losing track of planets again. If they're already successfully keeping track of 99.9% of the planets under their control, then does adding an extra 0.1% of the planets to their roster actually make a huge difference for them in the grand scheme of things? And now setting aside the hypothetical where the imperium is organized, the fact that planets do get lost in the shuffle is itself a symptom of the massive beuracracy and tangle of poorly-shared and poorly-maintained infrastructure that helps make the imperium what it is. There are definitely more efficient and organized ways of keeping track of your planets than hoping some Rogue Trader shares his intel with the right parties. There are better ways of keeping records than having a machine cult put them in a holy server farm and then prevent anyone short of an inquisitor from accessing the servers. But if you made the imperium reasonable and efficient, it wouldn't recognizably be the imperium any longer.

The premise of the thread reminds me of the bit in the 2nd ed Ork codex that basically says if the Orks ever "got organized" they would be unstoppable.

I can quit anytime I want.

Keeping track of more planets isn't going to help the Imperium its true. But being more efficient with their logistics and communications would make them unstoppable. No more logistics requests going to the wrong planets. No more troops being sent to the wrong warzones. Fewer rebellions because of incompetence driving people to desperation.

Heck, even simply a moderate increase in their organization and efficiency would be very very bad news for any of their enemies who don't have anything supernatural tilting the scales in the balance. Basically Tyranids, Orks, rebels, and any other mortal enemies would be steamrolled.

Only Chaos, Necrons, and Dark Eldar would really have a chance at that point. Dark Eldar and Chaos have safe spaces to hide in and the Necrons are just that powerful. Everybody else would be mopped up over a few centuries.

The Imperium has endured for 10k years despite blinding incompetence and inefficiency and the losses are still glacial. Imagine if they were even 10% stronger.

A boost to efficiency does help the imperium out, but it also kind of wrecks one of the fundamental traits of the faction. It's kind of like asking:

"What if all eldar could go back to using their War in Heaven level psychic powers?"

"What if the necrons' tech hadn't broken down while they were asleep?"

"What if the chaos gods actually tried?"

The answer to all of those is probably just, "Well, then they'd be too powerful for the setting to retain its stalemate, and then the setting wouldn't work."

And if an organized imperium *didn't* make them so powerful that they just broke the setting by winning, then they'd be a less flavorful/grimdark/satirical faction than they are now, and the setting would probably be worse for it.

It’s not even about perfect unity.

Within its existing forces, it has more than enough soldiery of varying flavours to ROFLstomp pretty much anyone.

But right now, its organisation is there, but it’s fragmentary and patchy at best. See my hypothesis of an Imperium better able to assign and from there hopefully successfully deploy its specialists to the areas where they’re of greatest strategic value. From there, it had a greater chance of putting out local fires quickly and efficiently, allowing its forces to redeploy to the next one with greater speed.

That wouldn’t be a huge change. Certainly I don’t think much would have to change at the top for it. Just a different approach with forethought applied.

If it could organise a proper crusade against the Tau, and use The Warp to strike at the homeworld itself, perhaps just to launch a quick Exterminatus, it could cause a collapse of morale, perhaps even deal a mortal blow.

With one foe down in that neck of the galactic woods? The armed forces located therein are freed up to focus on the Tyranids and Orks there. That doesn’t equate to “and therefore victory”. Just a better chance of therefore victory.

If it could organise a crusade against Craftworlds? Imagine a galaxy without Farseers fiddling with fate and arranging catastrophes for others. Yes you’d be removing a sometimes ally. But we the players know Eldar never, ever act out of altruism. There’s always a price, and it may not manifest immediately.

There would still be threats. Hive Fleets, Waaaghs!, Necrons, Dark Eldar and Chaos are all sods to defeat and for various reasons.

Orks there are perhaps the thorniest. We know they’re absolutely everywhere in the galaxy. And that will include systems The Imperium can’t get to or is entirely ignorant of the existence thereof. And their haphazard “punch a hole in reality and then hope you get to a really really good fight” approach to warp travel renders them entirely unpredictable. As indeed does the “don’t really care where we end up as long as we get to fight someone when we do, ideally with loads of stuff we can nick” culture kind of lacks any other goal.

Yes, Ghaz has a plan. And he’s a popular lad with a massive following. But there’s still huge fleets of Orks out there just doing what they do best with no real goal behind it. So you still can’t really predict their movements, or declare any system truly safe.

And this is worsened by any big fight being liable only to attract even more Orks. Especially if the initial lot aren’t getting the best of it.

But again, organisation and a little forethought. Planetary Governors have a shocking amount of leeway, provided the Tithe is met on time, every time, including any random and unheralded increases demanded. And that includes arming, equipping and training the local PDF. Yet, it’s still well within The Imperium’s power to dictate who is training that PDF. Even a squad, the last remnants of a veteran Regiment with a storied history of fighting Orks would make a fine basis for an Office Corp to train a PDF where Orks are a constant threat.

Yet…it doesn’t do that. Sure, some Governors will arrange that for themselves. But surely it makes sense to us at least for The Imperium to set a standard for the PDF?

Now, as ever I don’t want to unfairly bash the PDF. In the background, we typically only see them when things have got out of hand and the Guard show up. But that’s not necessarily a matter of incompetence. The PDF is a pretty much static force, so if their world/system hasn’t been attacked for centuries, we can’t fairly expect a top notch response when someone does come a-knocking. And they certainly can’t do anything about say, a Tomb World awakening, a Splinter Fleet arriving or a Space Hulk dropping by a disgorging any number of horrors upon their world.

So it can sometimes feel like the fire brigade sneering at someone who tried to put the fire out early, using sensible equipment but with no success. Because typically, when you can put the fire out yourself? The fire brigade (Guard here) just aren’t going to hear about it.

Sorry. Tangential Whimbriling has occurred. Yeah. That’s right, Whimbriling.

Again, the Imperium is inefficient as a consequence of its structure as a highly-oppressive feudal empire. It cannot be more efficient to any significant degree without addressing the autocracy, because that degree of autocracy inherently breeds massive corruption and promotes loyalty over competence. Add a hefty dose of theocratic dogma fully ossifying this through traditions and the threat of heresy. The Imperium would cease to be recognisable as the Imperium if you fixed the underlying causes of the inefficiency, or would slip back into them very quickly if, say, the prodigy child of the Emperor re-appears and starts trying to micromanage an empire of a million worlds.

Could it theoretically do things better? Objectively yes, but it doesn't because it cannot with its current structure. It would require fundamental reform.

If the Imperium got that organised, it would unite the Orks into a much bigger Waaagh in response. Every Ork is a combatant, and their population can easily rival that of the Imperium.

The Eldar would likely see such an effective Imperium as a greater threat and focus their efforts on it.

Tyranids would continue to be an overwhelmingly difficult problem for the Imperium to deal with.

And of course, an Imperium with such concentrated military might would be even more vulnerable to sections of it falling to the Enemy Within and rebelling.

I haven't seen anything that sidesteps the tyranny of distance that the imperium has to grapple with.

They can't go any faster and they can't communicate any more reliably. That puts a hard limit on how organised and coordinated they can be.

True, but we know in the past they were much more organised.

Plus if they cut out a lot of the inter-departmental infighting that alone could save them a lot of resources. There's bound to be shipments and troops and more that go in circles as different power bodies move them this way and that way for political reasons and so forth .

 Hellebore wrote:
I haven't seen anything that sidesteps the tyranny of distance that the imperium has to grapple with.

They can't go any faster and they can't communicate any more reliably. That puts a hard limit on how organised and coordinated they can be.

I think the basic point is that the Tau manage this better... somehow (over a much smaller Empire, but still pretty vast), showing it is possible. Also, interstellar communication in the Imperium is unreliable, but it isn't that unreliable, at least until the Great Rift. Worlds survive that rely on warp-travel shipments of basic resources from other worlds for millennia.

To be honest, the tyranny of distance could be mitigated by better decentralisation and delegation. The Imperium cannot do this too much because much of their population lives in terrible conditions and is one missed mass-conveyor away from food riots and so on. But an empire that actually maintains a good quality of life and tangible benefits... more like the Tau, would have much less problems with loyalty and could actually delegate more power down to lower levels.

Ironically, the basic building blocks of a decentralised system are already there by necessity, with things like delegated Imperial Commanders (planetary governors), and subsector and sector military reserves that respond to local and regional crises. But corruption, abuse, and the resulting risk of rebellion are baked in to the system so there is only so much that can be done to improve this basic framework. Especially as the superplanetary commanders that might have the power to make changes are like-as-not incompetents who got the role through their family and political connections and are entirely content with a status quo that is benefiting them personally... at least until it is too late and a major threat roles in that they don't have the capacity to manage.

Hell, the Mechanicus and the Imperium don't even trust each other within their own secret societies... just look at the Grey Knights in the Sol System

The Forge Moon of Deimos (towed from Mars to Titan) has its own Knight House, House Steel, (who can't talk) and has a fully functioning STC that can make everything the rest of the Imperium can...

Except!

The Nemesis Weapons that the Grey Knights use are made on Titan. Why? They don't trust the Mechanicus.

I think inbuilt distrust of everyone that's not your particular tribe is the wedge that keeps the Imperium from truly becoming a true terror.

Yeah, the constant suspicion is a key part of the theme. It wouldn't be the Imperium if it didn't relentlessly demand suspicion against everyone and everything.

(Incidentally yet another in the long list of goated quotes they chose for the Dawn of War Confessor to recite: "No one is above suspicion." Not as good as "The plea of innocence is guilty of wasting my time.", but still great.)

Innocence Proves Nothing.

That’s a doozie.

Would a stable Imperium be any fun though?

Hellebore wrote:I haven't seen anything that sidesteps the tyranny of distance that the imperium has to grapple with.

They can't go any faster and they can't communicate any more reliably. That puts a hard limit on how organised and coordinated they can be.

Yeah. I think in practical terms, an imperium that makes fewer clerical errors probably translates to something like, "10% more forces get deployed to a given battlefield and are 50% less likely to end up starving from messed up supply lines when they get there."

Like I said earlier, a more organized imperium is kind of unappealing in a couple of ways. Either it doesn't make enough of a difference to matter, or it *does* matter and now we have to unite the eldar and the orks to reign the humans in or whatever. Which then robs the faction of the crumbling empire/somehow-kind-of-the-underdogs status that is part of their appeal.

Lathe Biosas wrote:Would a stable Imperium be any fun though?

In my opinion, it would be signficantly less fun. We're sorta kinda talking about the difference between the M41 imperium and the Great Crusade era imperium. The GC was entertaining in its own way, but a franchise where the humans are doing pretty great actually and regularly go around winning battles is a lot less juicy than a setting where humanity is surviving by the tips of its fingernails and constantly being subjected to nightmarish fates.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Would a stable Imperium be any fun though?

Absolutely not. The Imperium is only remotely cool because of how amazingly horrible it is, in several senses of the word.

As much as I think 40k has issues with some fans missing the point and unironically stanning the Imperium, and definitely is guilty of catering to such views sometimes, it's still ultimately not forgotten its roots.

 Haighus wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
I haven't seen anything that sidesteps the tyranny of distance that the imperium has to grapple with.

They can't go any faster and they can't communicate any more reliably. That puts a hard limit on how organised and coordinated they can be.

I think the basic point is that the Tau manage this better... somehow (over a much smaller Empire, but still pretty vast), showing it is possible. Also, interstellar communication in the Imperium is unreliable, but it isn't that unreliable, at least until the Great Rift. Worlds survive that rely on warp-travel shipments of basic resources from other worlds for millennia.

To be honest, the tyranny of distance could be mitigated by better decentralisation and delegation. The Imperium cannot do this too much because much of their population lives in terrible conditions and is one missed mass-conveyor away from food riots and so on. But an empire that actually maintains a good quality of life and tangible benefits... more like the Tau, would have much less problems with loyalty and could actually delegate more power down to lower levels.

Ironically, the basic building blocks of a decentralised system are already there by necessity, with things like delegated Imperial Commanders (planetary governors), and subsector and sector military reserves that respond to local and regional crises. But corruption, abuse, and the resulting risk of rebellion are baked in to the system so there is only so much that can be done to improve this basic framework. Especially as the superplanetary commanders that might have the power to make changes are like-as-not incompetents who got the role through their family and political connections and are entirely content with a status quo that is benefiting them personally... at least until it is too late and a major threat roles in that they don't have the capacity to manage.

Decentralisation puts a limit on how coordinated you can be. The imperium is currently at the worst end of the scale. But there is a limit.

Long distance communicationsntake almost as long as warp travel due to the use of astropathic choirs, warp shenanigans and the need for boosters. They have pass through relays. They get lost in the warp.

The imperiums decentralisation is a response to these hard limits.


I'm not saying the imperium can't be more organised than it currently is, I'm saying that the limits on how organised are baked into the metaphysics. 99% more organised isn't much when you are starting at 10% organised - sure you've doubled it but 19.9% organised is still not high.

The tau function differently with different needs, objectives and speeds. They send messages in couriers, which are even slower than astropaths.

The tau have taken out the infighting which reduces organisation, the superstition, the religious need to dominate, the number of worlds needed to organise etc.

Ultramar is probably almost as organised as the tau but it's almost entirely down to how close the world's are to each other.

Without real time comms and travel no one is going to be super organised no matter how efficient they are.

On Earth, the maximum communication time for an empire from the capital to the frontier was about 6-8 months one way, and even then was arguably pushing it to the absolute limit. Decentralization is a requirement when those are the logistical and communication challenges. That is why I really think the Imperium should be shown to be broken up into many de facto regional or pocket empires, all paying nominal lip service to the idea of an Imperium but essentially doing their own thing and fighting their own conflicts, including against each other. That way it would easily explain away all the Imperial vs Imperial games.

 Haighus wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
I haven't seen anything that sidesteps the tyranny of distance that the imperium has to grapple with.

They can't go any faster and they can't communicate any more reliably. That puts a hard limit on how organised and coordinated they can be.

I think the basic point is that the Tau manage this better... somehow (over a much smaller Empire, but still pretty vast), showing it is possible.

T'au are still in a tiny little pocket of the galaxy. It's only vast to them.