As nice as that'd be Lightbringer, you'd need a pretty fat Codex to fit everything in there, possibly even bigger than the last Space Marine one. Since anything less than 3 fully fleshed army lists would just be a waste of time and money.

And then there's the problem of someone who only plays one of the three armies being forced to buy the rules for the other two.

Blood Pact said:

Yes, I take your point.

Possible ways around this:

• no more than 2 types of basic troop type for each of the 3 Chambers Militant, 1 Heavy, 1 Fast attack and one Elite type. By doing this, you could keep the whole section covering Grey Knights, Sororitas and Deathwatch down to about 8 or 9 pages...ie less than most current Codex books.

• Deal with Henchman as a single Codex Entry spread over two pages, much like the old Codex books did. Just with more henchmen types.

• Aside from background, make the only difference between Inquisitors the Ordos and faction they belong to, with restrictions on the Chamber Militant, gear and henchmen they can call on as a result of these choices. Do it this way and the entry for Inquisitors would be about 2 pages at most.

With these steps you could make it shorter than the Space Marine Codex...although I personally have no problem with a big Codex, as long as it's densely written, with good background.

EDIT: Anyway, I'm jumping the gun here. Like I say, I haven't read the new Codex yet, so it may be it covers the sort of thing I'm talking about anyway.

Lightbringer said:

That and the fact that it basically seems the regiments consist of the core characters and their squads. About 100 strong in all. The rest of the regiment mainly seem to be ablative plot armour. Basically he writes company level fiction, but has it with a regiment to back it up. They also rarely suffer heavy casualties. In the Guns of Tanith they are in a heavy fight, which is said to have lead to a fight for the survival of the regiment. At the end of it they have suffered 10% casualties. for a leading unit in an assault that is not heavy casualties. That's barely anything.

Ach, I still enjoy the books, but 1) I don't find they have much of a 40k feel to them and 2) they have lots of little things that irritate me (so many minor things that he just gets plain wrong).

But orangutans in your army... I will have to see what these figures look like.

Shadow Walker said:

Actually, that may be where he's best left. If anything could use the Ward effect it's the millions of years old, super science, cyborg, zombies that currently are a bit down to earth.

Face Eater said:

Giving Ward anything more complicated than an asprin bottle's label to write is asking for trouble.

Actually, Necrons couldn't be hurt by him. Better them than Grey Knights...

Wait.

Ugolino said:

Yeah, what's he gonna do make them teleport around the table or turn some of them into Ghosts.

He'll still surprise us by how bad it is.

Face Eater said:

...Isn't that what Necrons do already?

I think the worry about Matt Ward is that he'll give them fluff about having a soft spot for cute, fwuffy lil bunnies, introducing a special character that shoots rainbow-colored lightning out of his ass and secretly snuck into Terra and into the Golden Throne room, and ate the Emperor's soul while nobody was watching, and that Necrons will no longer have a unique and flavorful We'll Be Back.

You mean getting back up at the start of their next turn?

Sure it's unique and flavourful, but it's also a whole seperate thing to keep track of, with models littering the table.

Just making it so that they have Feel No Pain really would be a simple way to replicate the effect, and it would work within the current ruleset instead of needing to be 'special'. Sure the fact that now, once they're 'dead', they can't be killed anymore would be a slight advantage lost, but I don't think it's an overall big enough change to matter.

Except the issue isn't as much one of mechanics (I've actually gathered the codex isn't all that unbalanced), its one of flavor. Feel No Pain is a good mechanical approximation, but one of the main issues with Ward is his tendency to ra- er, to distort the existing fluff to fit his new (sometimes balanced) mechanics.

Shadow Walker said:

HELL YES!!!

u sir have made great smile on my face

space zombie wanabee terminators lovers im very not sorry

Unusualsuspect said:

Yes, but now GK's do too.

Regarding formation of IG: I don't get a sense that the IG gets the cream of the PDF. In "15 hours", the newly raised IG company gets a single PDF veteran sergeant and one officer of unknown provenance - the rest are raw recruits. In "Gaunt's Ghosts" the regiment receives some soldiers from planetary militia - but I don't think all or even most of the recruits are prior service.

Well, "on paper" and realism may differ depending on the world in question. If the Munitorum notices that some governor is hiding his best troops this may well have unpleasent consequences for him, though - up to charges of treason for potential preparations of rebellion.

Or a world may have simply been "bled dry" from previous conflict and thus has little to offer in terms of men.

One more data point - in Gaunt's Ghosts 3, Vervunhive is described as never levvying it's PDF for IG formation. All of the IG regiments from the world are formed from scratch. I think that basically, IG is treated as a mass conscript formation and Adepts don't care that much about the quality - as long as men are supplied, they are content. The worlds that do raise high quality IG regiments (such as Bluebloods or Patricians) do so on their own initiative, as a status display.

I appreciate that GW wanted to get a 'Russian feel' to the IG, but it really doesn't work very well as a believable or tenable system. Especially considering that it didn't actually work for the Russians, and they ran desperately short of manpower and equipment trying to replace quality with quantity.

Standards may vary, and lives may be cheap, but logistics and equipment aren't. It makes little sense to equip a barely-trained unit, lift it up a gravity well, feed it for three months or more during transit half-way across the galaxy, only to use the poorly trained troops as cannon fodder. Honestly; the ineptitude of some of the IG shown in fluff makes you wonder what they were doing on all that time on the transport ship. Because even 2 months training in transit would result in far higher standards than those displayed in some bits of fluff and fiction.

History has showed time and time again that weight of numbers is the *worst* force multiplier in the armoury. Considering the Imperium was supposed to harbour so many strategic geniuses, this point seems to have been missed somehow.

Siranui said:

Wouldn't using undertrained troops is the opposite of a force multiplier. At best you are just using force.

As for the Russians, they did take horredous casulaties but they also faced far stronger opposition that the Western allies did, up to an including taking part in the largest land battle in the history of the world, which of course was against the largest, most well equipped force the Germans fielded in WWII so it's hard to say how any body else's doctrine would have panned out.

As for the IG, the US Marines training takes 70 days and, as you say, travel between planets is matter of months let alone training on the homeworld. It must only be units that are reinforced on the planet in question where there would be any lack significantly undertrained troops. Although of course they might be inexperienced even if well trained and that really depends on the IG regiment in question.

Using *lots* of troops is a force multiplier. A very bad one.

[Digression: Indeed: 80% of Germany's troops were on the Eastern front (the Western Allies had a cake-walk of the war in comparison. The Russians won the ground-war for us, and we were a bit of a side-show).

Throwing ill-trained infantry against the Axis simply didn't work for Russia, because it's just a bad plan. All it did was buy time and bled the country dry of manpower. Russia turned things around when it stopped fighting like that, overhauled and developed tactics and strategy to counter Blitzkrieg, re-built their officer corps, and generally started fighting 'properly', like a real modern combined arms army, using the vast space available for maneuver warfare instead of attrition. There is a misconception that the Soviets went through the entire war throwing men forward in human wave attacks, but the truth is that it was done as a stop-gap measure during a time when they were completely back-footed, and had just lost the vast majority of their experienced senior officers (Because Stalin shot them all). Later on the Russians pulled off some great envelopments.]

I don't mind the idea of PDF units being shipped out in emergencies and deployed as meat-shields, but it makes sense for the IG to be a bit better than that. Heck: In some fluff they can barely reload lasguns!

Siranui said:

I'm don't think I understand the phrase 'force multiplier'. I would have assume having lots of troops was the 'force' and other factors multiplied that.

I agree the Russians that attacked Finland were a laughing stock but by the end of the war they were the most feared Army in the world by a way. But they were never one on one match for their German opposites, because the level of education of the basic manpower was practically impossible to train them in advanced tactics.

Siranui said:

If you take into account that normal people, not the hero’s, in RPG's are/should be below 1st level characters in stats, the meat-grinder of the IG becomes more reasonable and somewhat expected. They can train the guardsman as well as possible but a 1 wound, 2 toughness guardsman in flak armor (4 AP) is generally going to be severely wounded by a lasgun the first time he takes a hit. Most normal people will never gain more than 3-6 wounds in their lifetime.”Special Characters” such as Karskins, Sororitas, Inquisitorial Storm Troopers, etc. are the exception to the masses, with the Player Characters being even more of an exception.

The level of lethality of the weaponry in 40K, even the much maligned lasgun, is what causes the meat-grinder effect, not a lack of tactics or training.

Krater said:

I've formed a personal interpretation of how the matter of Imperial Guard recruitment works over the years, which has served me well enough:

Basically, the Imperial Guard can be roughly divided into two groups - planned, and emergency.

A planned Regiment is raised upon a world which contributes Imperial Guard forces as a routine part (or the entirety) of its Tithe - Cadia, Krieg, Mordia, Armageddon, Elysia, Catachan, and thousands of others. Because they're planned, these regiments can be raised and trained properly and to a high standard, and the worlds often end up with a powerful military tradition. Seldom do these worlds draw from their PDF forces to supply regiments - indeed, Cadia and Armageddon seem to use the 'surplus' Imperial Guard regiments they've raised as PDF (with the Cadians picking which regiments go and which stay at random, meaning that many of the world's finest soldiers have never left it).

An emergency Regiment is raised at short notice upon a world close to a warzone, and exists purely out of necessity. The Tanith 1st, and the Jumael 14th Volunteers from Fifteen Hours fit this definition. Due to the shorter time-scale involved (because soldiers are needed as soon as possible), pre-existing individuals with skill-at-arms are preferred, and the Departmento Munitorum has the right to claim any and all such men it requires (the PDF being an ideal source for this), as well as to institute a draft or begin conscription if ready-trained men don't provide sufficient numbers (in the case shown in Fifteen Hours, it seems that several regiments were raised, with PDF troopers only numbering enough to provide part of the forces required, forcing the Munitorum to draft untrained civilians to make up the numbers).

As far as I can tell, pretty much any Imperial Guard regiment can be placed in one of those two groups, with the former preferred where possible (because they're an inherent part of the resources the Imperium gathers from its worlds on a regular basis), but the latter making up a considerable portion of the actual forces in any given campaign (because the need for troops outstrips the availability of planned regiments, forcing local emergency regiments to be raised quickly to make up the shortfall).

Face Eater said:

Any advantage a military force uses multiplies its effectiveness. Some are more effective than others. Easy examples of a force multipliers are terrain, technology and training. Some thing are more effective than others. Simply drafting more cannon fodder in is generally a poor strategic answer.

As for the second part: Maybe if you're talking about the Axis forces at the start of the conflict. But by 1944 when they were fielding children and old men, having been bled dry, and facing experienced Soviet veterans, the Axis infantryman was outclassed.

ItsUncertainWho said:

Remember that the 'average' Imperial Guardsman is a Rank 2-3 DH character. Yep, they're better than the starting Guardsman "Recruit" that gets swept up into the Inquisition as an Acolyte PC.

I hope you're not taking the names of the ranks that literally.

Cause the Guardsman career also has ranks named "Storm Trooper" and "Lieutenant". Cause by your apparent logic, just earning enough XP means you automatically get promoted or join the special forces.

ItsUncertainWho said:

The written stats don't really support this idea. From dark heresy the average human range goes from 24 (poor) the 38 (good), most statlines use base 30 for stats with the most change in WS BS and INT. The only statlines with 3-6 wounds are birds, dogs, and servo skulls. The lowest human wound count I've actually seen is 8, for the DW civilian statline

And the Imperial Guard bring more to the table then just numbers, it's the fact that most of those troops are of decent to good quality (excluding emergency re-enforcements like the troops in 15 hours) because of a huge number of good troops allows commanders to use risky plans that may result in huge death counts. Because they have more men to use.

The meat grinder effect is caused by the lethality of foes and weapons, uncaring commanders, and the stagnation caused by the huge demand for spares.

And numbers isn't a force multiplier, it is what is multiplied by force multipliers. Guns is a force multiplier, armor is, air support is another. boots on the ground is what they make better.

One thing to remember is that Tabletop IG face opponents that they, in all thematic expectations, tend to have a tough time handling without a glorious leader, or divine assistance.

The Imperial Guard is the imperium's swiss army sledgehammer, meant to fight and kill other humans in many ways but also to act as a speed bump to the dark forces men can only face with faith, and the knowledge he has an organization backing him that hopefully will see the fight through despite his loss in its name.

Since there's no official (forgeworld isn't official in this case. ) heretics, renegades, random xenos on the wrong planet, etc codex you don't see TT guard operating as they normally do. Instead you get those last desperate moments where the unspeakable horrors beyond the emperor's light are either triumphant, or are held back for another few heartbeats. In a way it's like a lovecraft story, only with heavy artillery.

Grey Knights OTOH are specifically molded into not just slayers of monsters, but killers of things man can't even imagine without his head literally exploding and damning an entire world to the warp. Just making it through training leaves a being so purified and set on his path there's literally nothing he can't do to see mankind exist for another day. And since he's not just so herculean, but takes a bit of effort to train, he gets to play in the big boy toybox.

The imperium actually has numerous institutions that are like that really. The Adeptus Astartes are an obvious one, as is the Collegia Titanica. The guard is only fodder, because the rare and priceless things are....so rare and priceless. Also, you really don't want to try and make a normal man fire a psilencer....it'd likely melt his face off.

Even elite regiments like the Vostroyan Firstborn, The Stormtrooper 'regiment', and Cadian Kasrkin are a dime a million in comparison. Unfortunately since the tabletop requires a certain simplicity a lasgun is a lasgun no matter who made it. The individual minutiae of training is also largely unimportant. Though I do wish Carapace armor was cheaper. ^^

And uhmm I don't think I helped at all. XD