We've had plenty of advice given about how one would start a Black Crusade. Of how to best go about attacking/infiltrating the Imperium.

Now...what would be the best recourse of gathering a force large enough to be a force that can threaten the Imperium?

What sort of mix of force would you seek out to try to gain their loyalty? What sort of champions would you like serving you?

wow do you know the list of things i would need too know too ansore that Q?

who am i fighting:

why am i fighting?

what am i fighting with?

who am i fighting alongside and why are they fighting?

what resorces do i have?

what does that enemy have?

what are my strengts and weaknesses?

what are there strengts and weaknesses?

these would be things i would like too know befor i thinks about going too war(or a battle of a fight) BC sounds more like a build your powerbase kind of thing then anything els too me. and hey by the time your posibal deamon prince matirial well i`m sure you know just who is on your side and who you want too kick the ass off from and for what reson

The best way to gather the legions of the followers of the Dark Gods to oneself is probably to simply make a name for oneself. If you can get a reputation that is spread among the warbands and settlements of the Screaming Vortex recruitment will be alot easier. So that's probably how I would go about it.

Also one of the most important aspects would be to ensure that I have a solid core warband that I can count on in almost any situation. The rank and file of my Black Crusade can be oppertunistic turncoats and renegades, but I should have a firm group that I can use to rely on and to help me do my dirty work without being afraid that they'll try to make off with something important for me.

Aside from gathering an army to do the conquering, getting a navy to enable that said army to conquer anything but the planet they are sitting on is vital. Without controlling the void around a planet, the most you can do to other planets is a bit of raiding. Strategically, it can be compared a bit with the warfare in the Pacific during WW II, where the US navy created the circumstances in which the Marines and Army could get ashore and conquer tiny islands in a vast sea. Without having a firm command of the seas surrounding a target, any portracted operation immediately became very hazardous if not impossible.

So, if you wish to get off your planet and do some real conquering, find those ships. Quickest way to do that might getting your tentacles on some of that crew of the Rogue Trader who let himself be tempted by the ooh so delicious stats of that old Repulsive Grand Cruiser, that just sad idly in a naval yard. The fools said it was cursed or something....

Friedrich van Riebeeck, Navigator Primus, Heart of the Void

P.S. Ooh, and make sure you have fallen Navigators (of whom my character will strongly deny the existance!) or some good daemon pacts ready to get your ships on the right place at the right moment. Arriving 10,000 years post date on a battle is a bit of a pity...

I completely agree with the above poster that having a space fleet will be a very important, perhaps the single most important, part of the Black Crusade. Hell, with a good space fleet the landbased troops can be fewer as they can rely on being deployed from orbit, call in orbital strikes and also most likely be extracted from the planet itself back to orbit.

Knowledge is power!

The weak Eldar (not really, they're kewl, but this is a Black Crusade forum, 8-) ) have a means of traveling without ships, take it from them.

The Ecclisiarchy has holy books that spread the lies of the false Emperor, these books are printed somewhere & transported. Change a few words & whole passages can have different meanings, leading to the only true path.

Enlighten those who work in the betrayers factories or aboard starships as to the true nature of those they serve, a missed dial reading here, a switch left on there.

An assasination of an individual that would become a future champion of the treacherous false-Emperor & his fawning lapdog Leman Russ.

All ways to bring about the enlightenment of the warp, as taught by our great primarch Magnus the red.

Sincerely;

Dracurian

8-)

1) Become false prophet of Emprah on some sort of hive world.

2) Slowly breed dissent and hatred in your flock for the major Ecclesiarchal powers that be on said hive world.

3) ???

4) Profit and just as planned!

Ultimately, I think the way to win would be through science. You are facing a static enemy essentially. It is why, as long as the they aren't destroyed in the near future, the Tau will eventually inherit the universe. They'll continually advance, until they reach Necron tech levels and then some. The Empire will always be stuck in their STC molds.

The big argument for the "Tau are going to take over" is that they've advanced very rapidly over the last six thousand years. The problem with that is that there is plenty of evidence that the Eldar have shaped the Tau's development for their own reasons. This makes using the Tau's past technological development a very poor tool for predicting their future.

I don't know of anything that claims that. There is an Eldar Farseer saying he felt a "kinship" with the Tau, and that their race stood to succeed where the Eldar failed, but that is about it. And of course the question where the Ethereals suddenly sprang up from, and what caused the warp storm that saved their planet from the Imperium the first time. But the Eldar haven't been shown to be able to conjure up such warp storms at whims, otherwise their Craftworlds would never be under threat. Nor anything about them seeding technology amongst the Tau, or at least no mention by the Tau that the Earth Caste happened upon technology all the time. I think it is more plausible that a sapient race in complete unity and a drive to expand would be able to make such rapid advances. Humans are doing pretty well since we decided to trust in the scientific method, and that is with us spending resources on blowing each other up and the majority of the population preferring to watch Dancing with the Stars than learning how their own body works.

Waywardpaladin said:

It's in Xenology IIRC.

I think the Imperium would/will surprise a ton of people when it finally comes down to - "We're going to die if we don't adapt."

Each world taken under the Imperium has its own tech/tech-level. A vast majority are likely based off old STC - but it can't be all the worlds. And even so - the STC were the "pinnacle of technology". Of course - the Tech-Priests come in, confiscate everything, and take it back to Mars. But if you think it's for proper destruction - I think you would be wrong.

Then there's alien tech - back to Mars!

Tech-Priests have turned technology into a religion for control. And - like any religion - the priests hold the power. I bet the Tech-Priests have plenty of tricks up their collective sleeves if their precious Mars were ever "really" is threatened.

===

Heck - it's not necessarily canon, but it's "Warhammer sanctioned fiction" as far as I know.

In the Dawn of War games - they develop a "bio-toxin" to destroy the Tyranids. That's pretty quick adaptability for such a stagnant Imperium.

===

In my opinion, the Tech-Priests, and the Imperium at large - encourage a bit of Heresy. Let someone else **** their soul - then, move in, acquire the forbidden knowledge - and take what's actually safely useful.

While 40K has to insert "grim dark" - I actually agree with a more prolonged mode of discovery (actually taking the time to discover the side-effects of an invention) than just greedily consuming all technology as our current world view encourages.

i'm going to have to agree with the belief that the Imperium would adapt quickly if forced into a hardwon victory or total annihilation scenario. You'd be suprised how fast a man will let go of long held beliefs when you back him into a corner. If I were to conquer the Imperium, I'd make every imperial denizen ridiculously rich (how i would accomplish this is unimportant at the moment). What this does is level the playing field economically, and creates a breeding ground for corruption. after all, give a starving man a million dollars, and he'll stuff his belly full of food. but once he's had his fill, he'll realize that bread isnt the only thing for sale...

I'd find some way to shut off the Golden throne, or seriously damage it in such a way that no matter how many souls you feed into the Astronomican, the nature will run its course and the emporer will FINALLY die. What way to shake the faith of a population than to kill their god?

unless of course you decide to mass desseminate that little fact the Emporer was effectively an Aetheist, who never saw himself as a god, and then you have that "EVERYTHING I'VE BEEN TAUGHT TO BELIEVE IS A LIE" crisis on everyone's hands...

Either way, Have Chaos Forces go on a mass "join us or die" campaign specifically through the imperial Navy, and then Work your way down through the guard, and then (possibly) through the Astartes... gotta swell your space marine ranks somehow... anyways, after that, turning the the common citizens is cake, and your only real opposition is a (fractured) Ministorum and the AdMech. all ya gotta do there is wipe out and/or convert the imperial priests, and then corrupt as many young magos minors and tech-guard commanders as you possibly can, let them know that their leaders have been holding out on them, and then lead them to kill off all of their superiors, instituting a new order.

i am very aware of how many times i used "and then"

Gillam Harrow said:

Really like the first scenario

Second is much less likely: how many people know about that in the 41st millenium?

Two issues. It doesn't matter if the Imperium decides to give up their stagnation and unleash the creative abilities of mankind in their dire hour, because they're not going to erase thousands of years of your advancements in the blink of an eye.

The Necrons already proved they could wipe out Terra at any moment. A handful of their ships landed on Mars without needing to fire a shot, the last one simply waiting on the dirt for the fleet to catch up and bombard it.

I mean, the Mechanicus is already doomed. The Dragon is awake now and they're starting to have a civil war on their hands as they lose brothers to the "real Machinegod". At this point, Chaos will be lucky if they get to put the final nail in the coffin before the Necros do.

@stormast:

that's the thing. most folks dont know it, so imagine what happens when they're face with that knowledge....

Waywardpaladin said:

forgive me for living under a rock.... but what is the Dragon?

A C'tan that can control all machines.

Gillam Harrow said:

Like all people that are religious fundamentalists - they ignore it because it doesn't fit into their belief system.

Pretty simple really - people are really good at ignoring the truth if it doesn't suit them.

Plus, it's so easy for them to twist in to something that favours their ideas. The Emperor "didn't believe in Gods" because he knew that he was the only true God, or some such excuse. Or he didn't want to be worshipped as a God because that's just how awesome of a god he is.

Waywardpaladin said:

First, what the Necrons did was nothing. Let me state that again... What the Necrons accomplished there was NOTHING.

Flying around the Sol system and landing on Mars is now proving a thing, let alone that they could "wipe out Terra" at any moment. The Emperor's palace was build in to a hollowed out mountain range, and then reinforced under the orders of Rogal Dorn himself, so the thing is a pretty hard nut to crack. It's more due to his ingenuity than the skill of the defenders in question, that the Adeptus Soriritas were able to hold off the Space Marines so well when they were trying to get Vandire's head. Bombarding it from space can't be considered a surefire way of wiping it off the map.

But back to the more relevant point, the trio of Necron frigates were moving top speed and manuevering to evade any attempts to threaten them, and two of them still god blown up. To accurately aim and fire upon ground-based targets or enemy ships you'd have to more at a more sedate pace, which would allow Imperial defences to bring even more firepower to bear against them. Zipping around like mad, trying not to get shot, is a long way off from a full-scale assault on what has to be the most heavily defended system in all of the Imperium (and you can **** well garauntee that reinforcements will be en route in the event of an attack).

It's akin to assuming that you can bomb Russia flat with no trouble, because we were able to send a few U2 spyplanes safely in to their airspace during the Cold War (not that a few jingoistic fools don't think that).

As for the Dragon, all evidence appears to indicate that the Dragon is still imprisoned. While a civil war is quite the overstatement of the schism that it has caued within the Mechanicus. Some confronted with its existence swing in the opposite direction and reject the machine, instead of embracing the 'True Machine God'. It could develop in to a full blown civil war eventually, but currently it's just a heretical following, like the Temple Tendency.

As for the Tau, they have to survive thousands of years, if they're going to conquer the Imperial with their super-tech that's "thousands of years" ahead of what the Imperium has. Oh, and consider that they're already stamping stuff as too dangerous to explore further, Warp Travel being the specific one I'm talking about here. And of course, there's the general fact that they're a somewhat foolish and niave young race that is comparatively insignificant in the big violent galaxy that is 40K. Their 'recent' successes have really just succeeded in attracting a lot of dangerous attention to them (like the Dark Eldar's). That aside, the Imperium may be losing a lot of its tech, but it seems to recover it at just about the same pace. It might not replace what they just lost, or it might do it at a worse job, but it's still a point in their favour, in addition to their (admitedly glacial) own development of new technology.

To sidetrack things a bit (again?) while it's a popular opinion among most of the fanbase that the galaxy and pretty much every faction in it is doomed (Dark Eldar society collapsing in to anarchic civil war when Vect dies, or half the city being swallowed up by shadows), I don't think it's in the conventional Ragna-pocalypse sense that everyone usually goes for. No, I think it's going to continue on for just about forever, because that's arguable worse.

A bit of a misinterpretation of my words. I did not say the Tau were going to conquer the Imperium. I was saying that with how stagnant the Imperium is, and yet the amount of resources it has to throw around and the number of worlds in it, advancing technology to the point where you have an overhwhelming advantage and then striking would be your best bet. The citation of the Necrons was to show that THREE advanced ships could bypass the defenses of Sol. Necrons can destroy planets, if they even chose to have a decent sized fleet run the Sol defenses they could destroy the Palace. (As for having a mountain to protect you, so does NORAD in Cheyenne mountain, and three nukes would still destroy it.)

Your claim of the Necrons not accomplishing anything is kind of silly. Obviously they accomplished what they set out to do, the last ship didn't even try to resist being killed afterwards. Also, Imperial command seemed to be shitting themselves that three ships could get past them. The Necrons defeated the Old Ones and all their servitor races, the Empire isn't a threat. If anything, the only thing keeping them in check is the Deceiver himself, for he really doesn't want all life to get destroyed again, he finds them to be the only interesting thing in the universe.

What Mechaniam civil war are you referring to? I must have missed that one, steep as I am in Rogue Trader (old fart that I am. 8-) )

The only schism I am aware of is the 'Emperor is the Ommnissiah' Vs the 'Emperor is not the Omnissiah'

As to the Dragon on Mars, it is infered to be a C'tan, but it could just as easily be a Slann/Eldar weapon to combat the Necrons. GW is fond of doing that from one edition to the next.

Look at the Grey Knights. They have gone from being one of the first founding Legio Astartes, personally founded by the Emperor & the last surviving Legion in the 41st millenium. To a standard codex chapter in the new Grey Knights codex.

It could even be an exalted greater Daemon for all we know, they are not bound by standard forms.

Still the present changes the past from moment to moment, we must wait for the future to vindicate our actions.

Sincerely;

Dracurian

8-)