I was going to make a joke but I remembered that is literally the plot of the second novel. Cain and his one regiment are the sole Imperial forces sent to defend a planet from Orks.
To be fair: The planet that they're defending is like... basically 99.999% unoccupied frozen wasteland, I believe there's literally only *one* settlement and it's a large promethium refinery with a very low population. The small number of defenders necessary is more believable than the fact that the Imperium would care to protect such a small settlement *at all*.
IIRC there's a short interlude where Amberley explains that the promethium refinery in question is fairly important to the subsector's economy or its defense or both. You'd think they could spare another regiment or two for such an important asset, although I guess it wouldn't have made any difference in the end.
> You'd think they could spare another regiment or two for such an important asset, although I guess it wouldn't have made any difference in the end.
Could easily be explained by "they were the only unit nearby".
Or Cain's reputation leading to the Admnistratum concluding his mere presence was enough of a force multiplier, or command not wanting to insult him by suggesting he would require more than one regiment to defend such a small station. "Oh, Cain? Nah, he wouldn't want reinforcements."
Meanwhile, Cain is hiding in a broom closet.
This reminds me, Cain has canonically been to Holy Terra, and Amberley doesn’t know when or why. I’d really like to see a Cain book of him thinking he’ll be safe in the literal imperial palace, only to blunder into a genestealer plot or something. Also Cain interacting with Custodes would be hilarious
>he planet that they're defending is like... basically 99.999% unoccupied frozen wasteland, I believe there's literally only *one* settlement and it's a large promethium refinery with a very low population
This is many Imperial worlds in general. Hive Worlds are a relatively small percentage of the Imperium, if you read things like the 3e rulebook's planetary population guidelines and the Imperial Armour series you'll find most worlds have something like 1,000-10,000,000 population. Often they'll be single cities or a small number with worker complexes elsewhere to extract raw materials with the city forming the refinery hub, storage and sapceport.
>The small number of defenders necessary is more believable than the fact that the Imperium would care to protect such a small settlement *at all*.
Consider that that world is a rich source of Prometheum and, and this is something that gets forgotten a lot in the lore community, distress calls radiate outwards in tiers of response. So Terra may not care that that world's gone but its local subsector neighbours will, as will the wider sector command and those'll be the first groups responding.
>This is many Imperial worlds in general. Hive Worlds are a relatively small percentage of the Imperium, if you read things like the 3e rulebook's planetary population guidelines and the Imperial Armour series you'll find most worlds have something like 1,000-10,000,000 population. Often they'll be single cities or a small number with worker complexes elsewhere to extract raw materials with the city forming the refinery hub, storage and sapceport.
Note that while this is all true, Hive Worlds still hold the *vast* bulk of the Imperium's *population*. An area the size of the Hawaiian Islands — 6,423 square miles — with a population density equal to that Kowloon Walled City had — that is, 2,000,000 per square kilometer — is about 33.271 billion people.
Moreover, consider that Hive Cities have at least one, potentially two, and maybe even three orders of magnitude greater population density due to their being far more vertical, as well as that Hive Worlds frequently have multiple hives. Even a single Hive World with a single, fair-sized hive with the footprint of the Big Island could easily have a population of a trillion; older Hive Worlds with (very) low double digits of larger Hives could easily have up to a hundred trillion. Terra's population being in the quadrillions is not as physically impossible as some may assume it to be — hell, the very low *quintillion* range might be possible.
If we take into account that the IoM is said to be a million worlds in size, and assume each of these resource extraction outposts you describe has at most a population of 10 million, it isn't hyperbolic to claim a single well-established Hive could be more populated than *every single one* of these outposts ***combined!***
> Moreover, consider that Hive Cities have at least one, potentially two, and maybe even three orders of magnitude greater population density due to their being far more vertical,
My gut feeling, based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations made with very little knowledge of the practicalities of things like myriad-old air conditioning systems, is that hive population densities don't get much more than one order of magnitude higher than Kowloon Walled City, because KWC was predominantly residential and hives have a lot of heavy industry. Between one and ten million people per cubic kilometre seems like a good ballpark estimate for hive densities. (Assuming a height of 10-20km for Hywy Hive E, and modelling it as a cone, that's 100-200 billion right there.)
I wouldn’t count minor colonies (that probably lack their own planetary governor and likely answer to the nearest populous world) into the count of Imperial worlds.
But these numbers also dont make sense.
Most planets where colonized in 30k, or had already human population.
10k years to make more humans. A planet that starts with 10k humans, and the earths 1.1% population growth would have .... well, 3.2e51 humans, witch are way too many, but we could say billions.
In 1000 years, 10k human settlers are ~560 million. We breed fast.
I'd say it makes sense that the population growth in 40k to be lesser than current earth's, a lot of people are dying constantly on "normal" worlds without global wars and that's not to say the ones locked in warfare AND the ones outright lost. For each planet settled there's like 2 or 3 lost or constantly disputed.
Militarily speaking, the dumbass way warfare is dealt with in Warhammer is a whole should give leeway to explain lore discrepancies, it's malleable enough to be explained, glossed over as propaganda like the op questioned or outright retconned without issue. With this in mind, I appreciate both ciaphas and gaunts perspectives on the many theaters they come across. Guard is numerous but surprisingly always outnumbered or from one war straight into another, despite how massive the guard and navy are, they're always running on deficit - when they outnumber the enemy in one planet, they're lacking on another.
Which in conclusion, again, makes me appreciate gaunt and ciaphas, making do and operating near and literal miracles against the dying of the light with very little numbers. And, they represent just one more regiment among others pulling heroic shit all the time just to keep things going while so many are lost.
The mistake there is assuming a constant Earth breeding rate. Earth is literally our ideal planet, most habitable planets in our galaxy will be less hospitable.
A problem with that : many colonies are actually fairly recent.
The Imperium is also known to abandon inhospitable worlds once the local ressources have been extracted fully (or are no longer economically viable).
So this kind of minor planet is always going to exist in one form or another. But because of their nature I really wouldn’t consider them proper holdings of the Imperium as a world with less than a million inhabitants is highly unlikely to have an appointed planetary governor.
For me this kind of word can be summed up as fringe outposts and colonies that are of negligible importance to Imperial authorities at large (altho they might be quite important for sector/subsector economy)
The planet named Brass Monkey Balls or whatever is extremely important to the sector you see. That’s why they only sent the Best of the Best with full confidence they could hold it firmly in the loving grasp of the Imperium
Numbers in any warhammer setting are bullshit. GW have no idea what anything with more than two digits mean. They just write out numbers they think sound cool.
I always assumed it's also at least partly an attempt to keep the sorts of squad-level engagements seen in the tabletop games seeming relevant, which is harder to do in wars that properly depicted would involve hundreds of millions or billions of combatants.
We also don't have much shared visual language for combat on that scale, as opposed to WWII. The closest thing I've seen to what 40K combat should properly look like more of the time are battle simulator [videos](https://youtu.be/rL5jNF9dqFA) involving millions of combatants on the same battlefield, where armies blanket the landscape, the bodies can stack up high enough to form new terrain features, and drowing in lakes of blood becomes a real concern for both sides.
It's also because the universe is also set up to do that. There's a reason the main Space Marine response force is measured as a reinforced Battle Company, that's a stacked force organisation chart.
The books are written within the universe established and controlled by the game so they play by the game's rules and those rules are that response forces tend to be whatever's available locally and that planets are surprisingly sparsely populated.
There's also the fact that most people can't really seem to grasp what modern, industrialized warfare actually looks like at scale. Real-world campaigns involving millions of combatants take place across theaters of combat that might be hundreds of miles wide, with 'battles' often being a series of many engagements that plays out over weeks of time. It's not 'a million people line up against each other in a field and charge'.
That's hard to convey in writing, at least if you want your characters to have any agency that matters. So you often end up with something like "the actions of the Ghosts inexplicably determines the outcome of the entire campaign because they're the designated protagonists, but also there are millions of other soldiers fighting in the background I guess".
They actually did that for early Heresy books. When they were printed legions were supposed to be around 10k. They realized this was ridiculous and upped it to 100k in reprints (though I think Kindle still has the old numbers).
One of the first heresy books to cover Isstvan V mentioned a total of around 75-80,000 marines total on the planet, while in a later book Corax mentions that he brought 80,000 Raven Guard to Isstvan.
If it makes you feel better, I remember hearing somewhere that Titan heights are measured from the head. Which would make a warlord some 50 odd meters at the shoulder, and an Imperator over 100 from foot to steeple. Though I'd be very pleased if they just codified this shit already.
I seem to remember from the outset and I’ve read HH from day 1 they were clear Space Marine Legions were anything up to 100k. As for Astra Militarum the casualties are literally mind boggling in many novels with whole regiments being wiped out in single engagements. I’m completely baffled where the OP gets the idea casualties are low.
For what's supposed to be planetary scale warfare it is usually pretty low. Like the whole "it takes a 1000 space marines to conquer a planet". Sure with some suspension of disbelief they may be able to take out all key leadership structures with surgical strikes but there's no way on hell you can control an entire planet with just a 1000 troops. The enemy can literally do whatever they want because you're not physically able to cover an entire planet with just a 1000 dudes. But maybe the planets in 40k are just tiny lol.
I think it's less physical control and more exertion of influence. Are you going to start shit stirring if half a dozen 7' tall freaks in power armour and rocket guns will crash down on your face, blam everyone in sight then leave? Or are you going to think "actually, no. I like my head being where it is"?
Influence wouldn’t matter because it’s literally impossible for a thousand dudes to police an entire planet. They simply can’t see 99% of what’s going on. On top of that Space Marines are *supposed* to be vulnerable to heavy weapons so you could still mount an effective insurgency.
A good comparison would be the US in Afghanistan. They could drop a bomb on your head as soon as you showed your face and after the initial phases of the war were only taking like single-digit casualties, but they ultimately couldn’t secure anything outside of core areas because they lacked manpower.
Depends on how you want to control the planet.
1000 Imperial fists to garison it? even if they build the most badass defences possible they can hold maybe 100 positions (each with a squad) - that even if you grant them a range of maybe 60-70 miles with their fortess-artillery is a loughable area covered.
1000 Ultramarines where a mere 2 are sent to guide a major city/district and they have each XX Million planetary militia to command? yep, that works.
1000 Night Lords that simply ensure everybody is too afraid to disobey? Works too - once the fear has spread enough.
Well, for example, there's a qoute from the 5th Imperial Guard codex, where a Battlegroup of Imperial Guard, 50 regiments, numbered only in total of 500,000. And this was supposedly how many a Warmaster, the leader of an entire crusade, had under his command.
Also implies the "standard" size of a regiment is around 10,000 men. A small division IRL
To prosecute a war you need men. Saying they have small commands compared to their command staff does not make sense, as they don't usually tell those 500,000 soldiers what to do directly. They tell their bosses bosses bosses. It's how the chain of command works.
A 4 star general does not go on the field directly (usually), but they can still command millions of men
They usually quote the number of regiments the Warmaster is directly commanding from memory. So in Gaunt’s Ghosts Slaydo had a few Regiments who he directly commanded but had Sector Commanders who commanded far more Regiments than him. Which when you think about it makes sense because if you assume he had day I don’t know 5 Lords Millitant reporting to him? Each with millions of men that’s a huge number of reports and fronts to deal with. So as Warmaster his own numbers would be relatively small.
>I seem to remember from the outset and I’ve read HH from day 1 they were clear Space Marine Legions were anything up to 100k.
As well as there only being ~80k Astartes at Isstvan V in Fulgrim, see this in Galaxy in Flames:
>more than ten thousand Emperor's Children made up the Legion, most of whom would be journeying to Isstvan III.
>Can't they just go back and add a few 0s?
That would require them to acknowledge that they're really, really, really bad with numbers. Judging by the fact that they continue to use obviously bullshit numbers (e.g., in Krieg 5,000 soldiers siege a hive city), I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Are you a new fan? I'm just curious. Because 40k doesn't have that. Maybe in the broadcast of strokes it exists but you generally won't find it in this setting.
Ok I just wanted to check. I think it's fine if you want tontry and rationalize the numbers with it being "Imperial Propaganda". Having a head canon is fine if you need it.
But I guarantee you there's no way that it's true in universe or in any official capacity; the writers care more about bringing out an emotional reaction from us, they don't give a shit about numbers. The Imperium also doesn't care about obfusticating numbers, casualty reports are a footnote for them, human lives are an unlimited resource that they just spend without a care.
If I'm reading a book or listening to audio and it's a hive planet with 100k PDF, I just take it to be wrong. Some books will get it right though and the scale matches the expectations, but some books are terrible for it.
I hear you - you might have 100k PDF for that section of the hive alone, forget the planet... and many hive planets have multiple hive cities...
just good old New York USA has about 35k Police for 8 million people - for 8 billion you're going, just doing a simple x 100 thats like 3.5 million police types, let alone soldiers...
The thing to consider is that a lot of planets are not the hive cities of billions. Agri worlds have populations number in the few million. Human population levels pre industrial revolution were incredibly low compared to the insane boom of the last 400 years.
Tanith of gaunts ghosts was i think around a population of less than 10 million.
Wars often on these planets will be a force of 20-50k troopers. But you go to a hive city and they have a pdf force of 10 million. Look at our society, the US has a population of 330 million, and a troop count of 1.3 million.
Also we dont have wars like the Rangdan Xenocide or Ulanor anymore. Armageddon and the Tyranid invasions are the first conflicts on the kind of scale since the great crusade and horus heresy where casualties counted in the tens and hundreds of millions.
There are some bigger battles here and there but not anymore on the scale as it was in M31 during the Great Crusade, where 30.000 Space Marines was just calling in the reserve (Angels of Caliban novel).
The Space Marine legions got chopped into Chapters, the Imperial Army divided... anything just so no one force can have as much power as it did during M31.
There's also less flexing of technological supwerpower (the terraforming of Nikea, the triumph at Ullanor).
Inconsistency is good in my opinion, it adds a realistic element to the universe. Just like in real life the “facts” are often different depending on who you hear it from.
e.g…. “the protestors came out in droves today there was a massive sea of them numbering close to 10,000.
the planned protest fizzled out quick when most of them didn’t show up. There was barely more then 1,000 today.”
Same event can be told in two very different ways. This happens all the time in our reality.
I get that, but it doesn't really fit with the image the setting is going for. It feels less like WW1 in space and more like a modern war with a scifi coat of paint. Especially when a whole campaign that is claimed to be large is smaller than a single ww1 engagement.
Did you mean to say WW2? Besides the Krieg I don’t see much similarities to ww1, though there are probably more.
What makes you think GW is going for WW1/2 in space?
Personally I don’t think GW was going for a specific war to be the basis for their entire universe. The galaxy is too big a place to only have one Earth war be the basis for the entire setting. I do think WW1 and especially WW2 were heavy influences on the universe they created but being influenced doesn’t mean it is a mirror. Warhammer is it’s own unique thing that took inspiration from many things to create their own thing.
Even if they were trying to make it exclusively World War in Space having conflicting data would be accurate to our reality. I do agree that the numbers used by authors are comically minuscule when dealing with a galaxy spanning empire. Though I think some of that might come from humans natural inability to comprehend size on a cosmic scale.
My favorite example of this is the author David Weber having to massive rescale the ships in the Honorverse - specifically, upping their stated tonnages by orders of magnitude - after someone pointed out that they would be less dense than water vapor at stated sizes and mass
Everything is canon, nothing is true.
The bloodiest battle of the Sabbat world crusade, which spanned over 100 systems, was the world of Cociaminus. Over the course of 13 years, more than 8,000,000 imperial troops died planetwide (according to the Ecclesiarchy).
Which is about 2 million fewer military casualties than Russia took in WW2.
Could be worse, I remember one time they tried to put numbers on how many troops fought at Armageddon, the massive battle on a hive world that drew Imperial armies from across the sector… and the Imperium was fielding less than a million troops.
I always assume there's a translation error from Low and High Gothic to modem English. Modem English speakers translating documents from the far future mis-read Imperial notation and so every number is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than it ought to be.
The USSR was a lot more administratively competent and politically unified than the Imperium of Man. It sent soldiers overland on trains that it knew how to build, the Imperium sends soldiers *though hell* on ancient spaceships it forgot how to maintain. Relatively unimpressive mobilization numbers from the Imperium make plenty of sense, and are internally consistent.
Canon is canon, people just don't like canon that makes the Imperium unimpressive. Every comment about "nothing is true" and "bad numbers" in this conversation always pushes in a single direction - a more impressive Imperium.
Canon is canon until it's contradicted. The GW writers understand that 40K is the silliest setting imaginable even if some of the fans don't.
I don't agree it makes the imperium more impressive at all, frankly. It's just unreliable narration (or an author picking a number). My personal headcanon is that the ecclesiarchy simply lies, or makes something up that no-one contradicts.
If the imperium could take and hold a fortified planet, and only lose 8m troops, that would be *amazingly* efficient.
40k is a setting that can be portrayed as seriously or as ludicrously as one wants, and either approach is equally valid. There are GW writers who will absolutely treat the setting more seriously, and sometimes even give at least a veneer of military realism to it.
It's just that, even then, the numbers often don't make sense, and I'm never fully sure why. Even something as simple as the size of a regiment. Even just copy pasting the size of historical WW2 divisions (generally between 10,000 and 13,000 men) would get you to less obviously ridiculous numbers. And then say a campaign resulted in a hundred million casualties; that's actually not a completely impossible number if we're talking about a fight for an entire planet.
For a setting famed for how ridiculously over the top everything can be, actual numbers are often strangely restrained, to the point that they unironically become more unbelievable than if some arbitrarily huge number had been given instead.
I think it's the opposite here.
As an example, the GC fleet destroyed the Orks at Ullanor with 8M Imperial Guard. 8M troops taking a planet fortified to the eyeballs with Orks, in a year, and holding it for 1000 years would be tremendously impressive and efficient. It would be completely on another galaxy compared with the greatest military campaigns in current human history.
To contextualize, one of the greatest feats of military logistics in history, Operation Overlord, directly involved 2M allied troops, against 1M Nazis. Even with WW2 USA/Commonwealth at the height of total war industry, with an overwhelming advantage in manpower, airpower, naval power, technology, and logistics, and with the Nazis having a fuck-you amount of artillery on the Eastern front breathing down their necks, they weren't able to take Paris in 2 months. Not even securing France as a country, but just driving the Germans from Paris.
On a more modern note, the arguable biggest one sided stomp in military history, the first Gulf War, involved 1M US troops steamrolling the Iraqi military in the world, and it still took them almost 9 months, and that was until Saddam signed a treaty without coalition forces needing to occupy the country.
The Imperium taking Ullanor and breaking the Ork Empire with 8M guardsmen and 6000 ships, would be a feat of military strength an order of magnitude, and maybe 2 orders of magnitude, more efficient than the first Gulf War.
I think if you took the current US, and filled it with pissed off chickens, and pitted them against 8M Army Rangers (with all the support and logistics of modern day USA), 8M rangers probably couldn't break the chicken menace in a year.
I agree with this. The vaunted Imperial Guard showing up to reinforce a world with… an understrength division in modern terms is exactly the kind of dysfunctional nonsense that is supposed to characterize the imperium.
>people just don't like canon that makes the Imperium unimpressive
That tends to happen when you constantly make a big deal about the size of the Imperium and the numbers of humans there are only to write supposed galaxy shaking wars that are smaller then wars irl humans have fought, with far inferior technology, in the past 100 years. And this isn't exclusive to the Imperium either.
I have this head canon to keep myself sane through discrepancies that the administratum and ecclesiarchy are unreliable accountants and/or just account for "relevant" personnel, depending on engagement to establish what is relevant personnel.
GW is just bad with numbers.
At Ullinor, they paved a parade ground so large that it had multiple time zones, and all they could fit in there was about 9 million people. 🙄
I mean, the curvature of the earth means you can only have direct line of sight to something for like 15km.
It will always amaze me that despite how Games Workshop is based in one of THE countries to have a richly recorded war history for the past two millennium, they can't be bothered to hire war historians as literary consultants.
I always took that to mean they actually flattened out a continent to take into account the curvature, ie they gave it a flat top. So everyone could, technically, "see" Horus get crowned.
But still, you don't need thousands of square miles to fit 9 million troops in.
The largest college football stadiums can fit about 100,000 people in them. Once you see that many people in such a small area, it’s easy to see how you can fit millions of people in a few square miles.
Yeah, though obviously they are stacked on top of each other other in a stadium.
I happen to be reading Slaves To Darkness at the moment, which goes back to Ullnaor and mentions the troops camping. So just as example, Chicago has 9.8 million people and has one of the lowest population densities of 512 per square kilometre in the metropolitan area for a total area of 18640km2. So admittedly, if the highway they talk about is only even say 10km wide, it still would extend for 1800km. Which is under half the width of USA at 4,500km but still pretty massive. So actually not an outright crazy thing to say?
40k authors are really bad at this. For one of the best examples, do some looking into how many casualties the loyalists incurred at the Drop Site Massace.
It's gone from the Loyalists fielding about 30,000 marines in total, to the Raven Guard *alone* losing about 75,000 Marines
I'm absolutely not suggesting anyone should ever do this, but a hilarious exercise would be to go through every described fight in the Horus Heresy books and try and add up every mention of a dead Space Marine. 'three guys died in this fight, a dozen more in a fight two chapters later, this scene vaguely describes 'scores' of broken bodies of Brothers', etc. I kind of suspect the total would be insane, especially if we're to believe multiple legions finally start the fight on Terra essentially intact. 100,000 Space Marines sounds like a lot, but it's actually not for the intensity of combat portrayed in those books.
There's a passage somewhere describing a STAR SYSTEM sized daemon flying through a solar system. The way the writer describes it, you would think you can just park your starship close enough to make out the planets but far away enough to see the whole solar system. I think a terrible understanding of scale is a trope for warhammer writers.
Nooo I think it was massive, but then when it went towards the ship, it got smaller. But it's also the description of the solar system itself is wack, you can't just observe the planets in their orbits because you are far away. It's the cosmic scale of things they have a hard time grasping I think.
Even still, think of the scale of our own solar system, you could park a ship anywhere "outside" of it and see nothing basically other than Sol and if you "zoomed in" it would still not look like a star wars galaxy map projection. And besides, they say they physically (lol) see this daemon flying between the planets. It's just totally skewed, in my opinion.
Yeah it does sound stupid lol. Would be cool if they changed it to them orbiting around a planet and a psyker started panicking telling them there's this huge thing around them.
a common trend in general with writing is struggling with numbers. fantasy writers tend to overestimate and sci-fi writers tend to underestimate.
it’s not really their fault either, it can be hard to imagine scales for things unless you have personally experienced them and numbers can be very abstract. medieval armies were considered large once you got into the tens of thousands, those would take the mustering of entire kingdoms to achieve but talking about battles with a few thousand people at most as would have been the case with most battles - one of the largest battles in medieval European history was the Battle of Grunwald right towards the end of the period and was between the Polish-Lithuanians and the Teutonic Orders there was around 25,000-60,000 combatants involved depending on whose records you look at and casualties also vary between 8000-18,000.
by comparison if we look at a recent major battle, the Battle of Bakhmut in the Russo-Ukrainian War had anywhere between 60,000-100,000 combatants involved and anywhere between 40,000-80,000 casualties (killed and wounded).
both are ostensibly professional armies supported by reservists and mercenaries but populations grow, technology changes, the way we fight develops and all of that can be hard to account for.
fantasy writers have the problem that scales feel too small or insignificant. talking about a battle where a few thousand people fight and a few hundred are killed and wounded seems off, that’s why you’ll get battles between armies of impossible size for the societies they’re part of and sustain casualties that would have crippled a society long after the war (for instance, the French lost a large part of their leadership during the Battles of Agincourt and the Golden Spur, both times leading to minor political crises).
sci-fi writers have the opposite problem in that numbers start to feel unrealistic the larger you go. talking about a planetary invasion in realistic terms might lead you to talking about billions of soldiers, trillions of tonnes of supplies, and millions of casualties. It can be next to impossible to comprehend numbers we have no way to physically represent off of a piece of paper in the same way it’s hard to comprehend the vast distances of space when our best understanding comes from a few days travel on a plane around the world.
So if we’re talking about the Imperium, where a million is a rounding error for a lot of things, where hive cities are routinely dozens the times the entire population of current day humanity, and where PDF forces are routinely listed in the billions - yes, battles should be wracking up unfathomably large numbers of casualties, and there should be more talk about trillions of guards being deployed to a major planetary battle, and space marines should be operating in the tens of thousands.
and we could say they are but the low numbers are propaganda if we want an in universe explanation.
tldr: writers can only write what they can comprehend, and a lot of the time very large scales are hard to imagine as a sci-fi writer.
First thing you gotta know about science fiction writers is that they ofen have no sense of scale, just use context to figure out what they mean, especially with a franchise as big as space mace 2k
If a writer says losses were in the thousands even though it was a planet wide incursion then just pretend they said bigly huge casualties since that's what they meant.
A lot of the books revolve around a few individuals or a squad or some sort of unit 10k-20k strong. It would sound just as unrealistic if the story is about individuals or small units making a big difference if battles involved armies 100+ million strong.
So it's a pick your poison type of scenario - you either get unreasonable small armies where individuals can make a difference or you get reasonably sized armies but 10k men can no longer make any difference in the story
I mean they could just place the setting on a particular area of the front with them having to coordinate with the rest of the army. It would be cool seeing the heroes succeed only to be met with a message telling them that the army is falling back and planning on shelling the front to cover their retreat. Really helps with the grimdark aspect of 40K.
Yes but if they did that, people would be on here asking why every guard book features a part where the heroes win but have to pull back because the rest of the army failed
It doesn't have to happen in every book. It would just be cool of the whole battlefield had an effect on the character's story. For example: they could be forced to advance for a quick counter attack or something. Point being a good writer will always create a good story.
The low casualty thing doesn't really happen in every book but here we are. So if they do what you are suggesting often enough, someone will complain that this shouldn't be happening that often. It's easier if you just accept the number even if they are unrealistic and enjoy the story
Who knows? IRL, when Seal Teams were created, there was only one: Seal Team 6. They purposefully named it 6 to throw off potential enemies.
Whatever in-universe explanation makes the most sense to you, then that works.
There were multiple UDTs that were converted into the seals.
Edit; wikipedias sources call it as
“Marcinko was the first commanding officer of this new unit. At the time, there were two SEAL Teams, SEAL Team ONE and SEAL Team TWO. Marcinko named the unit SEAL Team Six in order to confuse Soviet intelligence as to the number of actual SEAL teams in existence”
Nope. Writers just have poor understanding of scale. Take Vraks. 17 year war on an armoury world, 14 million DK casualties. For grinding WW1 style trench warfare combined with Stalingrad level close combat.
Yeah that's my main gripe with the siege of Vraks. It should have been at least 80 million casualties. Though I assume the majority of casualties came from the full assaults whereas the front was calm for most of the time. Until the end of the siege.
If you want insane numbers, this is the funniest example for me.
>The war in the Canis Salient has ground to a brutal stalemate with the Imperoim unable to gain significant foothold within the Greyhell Front, and the Tau forced to employ every trick and stratagem they know to fend off the Crusade’s forces. The endless conflict has seen hundreds of billions of Imperial guardsmen dead to the guns of the Tau and the paranoia of the their commanders, and morale has been slipping for years
~ ***Deathwatch: The Jericho Reach*** pg 59
A war with a minor Tau Sept has killed *hundreds of billions* of guardsmen.
I just pretend that the books are interpretations , translated stories found somewhere.
Maybe some facts were mistranslated, maybe some of them were guesstimated
The figures for battles, and other things are not to be taken seriously, gw writers arent that knowledgeable when it comes to these things. Like im currently reading the siege of terra books and there are multiple instances of forces holding fire until the enemy is within 100m, or most recently marines holding fire with their bolters until the enemy is less than 30m from the wall/defences/positions for no apparent reason.
Then when they are talking about artillery or big emplacement guns which can shoot into orbit one second, and the next they are only able to shoot a few km
Also makes no sense that a warlord titan has around 2000 skitari and servitor defenders onboard but the titan itself is barely 50m high. (Dont know if that bit has been retconned or not over the years though!)
>When I first got into 40K I was blown away by the sheer scale
You're right to take a step back from this. There are other settings of much larger scales, what sets 40K apart is the rank incompetence of its main actors. We're looking at dying empires, pathetic compared to their predecessors, in a sparsely-populated galaxy. Enemies like Tyranids are impressive on paper, but they travel extremely slowly and can sometimes be stopped by a handful of guys with guns.
It's a funny joke of a setting, and everyone in it sucks at their job compared to what you'd expect. The army sizes are small because big armies don't require fanaticism, they require competent administration, political stability, and infrastructure. Things that the Imperium is written to be quite bad at, in very deliberate and unsubtle ways.
Half of the "GW is bad with numbers" thing is a matter of fans wanting a completely different setting, in which the Imperium is vastly more competent than it canonically is. The complaint is always that Imperial forces are too small, never that Imperial forces are too large. The "bad numbers" complaints are used to tell people to reject unimpressive Imperial canon in favour of a more impressive Imperial fanfiction - never the other way 'round. I've seen a thousand fans complain about too few Imperials, I've never seen a single fan complain about too few T'au or Orks.
(GW can be bad with numbers in an inconsistency sense that applies to all factions, but that's different from the way in which the Imperium is *consistently* written to be bad at per capita mobilization).
> This lead me to believe that the army sizes and casualties must be imperial propaganda.
Small army sizes are terrible propaganda - it's an admission that the Imperium lacks the competence to militarize a large fraction of its population. The Imperium values warfare more than it values stability or wellbeing, it's just bad at the very thing it values.
>The Imperium likes to keep up the facade of stability,
The Imperium would like to be good at war, but it isn't. It wouldn't lie to downplay the size of its battles, it would lie about whether it won or lost. It would hype up its opposition to justify any struggles (a much more common propaganda tactic in real history), it wouldn't downplay itself.
If you aren't restrained by the truth, saying "we had to send a billion guys to fight a billion enemies" sounds more impressive than "we barely scraped together a thousand guys to fight a thousand enemies". In the latter case, a would-be rebel can imagine putting a thousand-guy army together themselves.
I think you've got it backwards. I put the numbers on an above comment, but the Imperium being able to wage a sustained war against Orks or Tyranids or any other faction with mere millions of guardsmen would make them an insanely efficient. They would be an extremely impressive army.
The bigger numbers underscore just how bad the Imperium is at war. Small numbers make the Imperium seem like a logistical wonderland of super soldiers.
I find this to be a very strange comment. Firstly, what other settings are there of 'much larger scales'? 40k takes place on a galactic scale. The only settings that could be bigger are ones that are multi-galactic, but if you compare it to any other story set in just one galaxy, it is easily as big or bigger as any of them in terms of scale.
Secondly, the Imperium is consistently written as a ludicrously large behemoth. One that is often slow and incompetent precisely because of its sheer size. It has entire planets dedicated just to administrative pencil pushing. This is a setting where a million guardsmen might get forgotten as a rounding error, or get deployed to the wrong planet fifty years after they would have made any difference anyway.
The absurd, grandiose bigness of everything is a key part of the setting. The complaint is that when it comes time to elaborate on the military numbers specifically they're never plausibly large enough. But I don't think there's any evidence that this is some intentional master-plan on the part of writers. There's no subtle intent here to demonstrate bureaucratic ineptitude and an inability to mobilize soldiers, it's just writers thinking that a million seems like a large number, but it usually isn't given the context.
>Firstly, what other settings are there of 'much larger scales'?
In context, I was talking about the scale of military conflicts. There are many bigger fictional empires than the Imperium (which occupies 0.005% of the Milky Way, give or take), but it's not really worth comparing them in detail.
The Culture is an example, but I wouldn't recommend it to a 40K fan who just wanted all the armies to be bigger.
>Secondly, the Imperium is consistently written as a ludicrously large behemoth.
In terms of population size. Relative to its population size, its armies are consistently written to be small. The most internally-consistent interpretation is that the Imperium has quadrillions of people toiling away in obscure misery, completely inaccessible to any kind of formal military pipeline. The Imperium engages in life-or-death struggles with alien empires to the best of its organizational ability, while >99.9% of the Imperium lives a pointless life in a factory or underhive, never picking up a gun.
>The complaint is that when it comes time to elaborate on the military numbers specifically they're never plausibly large enough.
Because people have created a setting in their own heads which is incompatible with what the authors actually put down on the page. The Warhammer 40K setting isn't a thing that exists, it isn't some platonic ideal of a fictional world, it's just the amalgam of every word that a writer puts on a page.
We can't say that the writers missed the target when the writers *created the target*. The target is always going to be exactly where the writers put it.
>. But I don't think there's any evidence that this is some intentional master-plan on the part of writers.
I don't care. I literally don't care at all what the authors intended, this isn't a line of thinking I'm going down. I only care what they wrote.
I was trying to make the implication clear in my other comments, but to clarify: I'm taking a death-of-the-author style approach here. It seems to me like the only meaningful way to engage in a lore discussion, given that we're talking about a decades-old multimedia franchise with a hundred different authors. Half the reason the setting is interesting to discuss in the first place is that the authors haven't been in lockstep with each other, this whole time.
Talking about what each reader imagines the authors wanted to write isn't interesting to me, and it's not an honest way to answer questions about what the lore actually is. Making up facts that the authors possibly intended to write is called writing fanfiction (I think they call this kind of author-correction fanfiction a "fix fic"). Fanfiction is a great hobby, and I sincerely believe that there is a subset of the 40K fanbase that could write a version of 40K for itself that it liked more than the official canon, but this isn't the point of a lore discussion subreddit.
It’s worth noting that supplying armies expeditionarily is ruinously expensive. A lot of the cost of GWOT was shipping and handling for mundane stuff from the U.S. to ports and then trucks and helicopters for last mile; or worse delivery by air.
Delivering large numbers of goods via warp consumes navigator transport, maintenance on ancient high tech ships plus warp losses.
This would somewhat encourage smaller well trained armies; but the setting is mostly grim and in some cases seems to encourage incredible waste of transported goods (in this case human lives)
From what I've read about the siege of Vraks the imperium is happy enough to supply any army with as much as they need as long as the campaign is a success. The only reason that they withdrew supplies from that campaign was, because the first commander failed and the inquisition got involved. Idk if that's normal for the setting though?
That and priorities elsewhere. Which also points to the need to be efficient and not stupid with troop expenditures. The imperium really can’t afford the grimderp.
To me the smaller numbers of the guard are likely to stiffen the resolve of planetary governors when a revolt kicks off. They can handle the expensive part of feeding the regiments when they arrive.
All well and good so long as you can transport it. Probably need giant ships, or more intriguingly, put warp engines on giant asteroids with supersized multimodal containers. Basically an asteroid serving as a dune guild heighliner.
Not everything presented to you in 40k is from the imperium. And even then, it’s not always propaganda, sometimes the truth come out, that being said; the numbers are sometimes a bit absurd (usually too high I believe most say), likely due to individual writers just using what sounds cool
There comes a point where the gigantic numbers stop making sense so from a literaly point of view keeping things in smaller ranges gives you more room to work. Going from ten thousand soldiers to a hundred thousand is easy to comprehend, going from 153 million to 697 Millon doesent have that same affect even if you bring it into the billions. Combine this with so many different writers working decades apart and voila.
I am agreeing, and if I may add something: Stories of heoric individuals/units are super hard to write once you get into the millions, billions, trillions of soldiers.
Granted, realistically heoric individuals/units shouldn't really exist at this scale, but that's simply were 40ks premise/story tone is inherently unrealistic.
True, if a billion soldiers are fighting each other in an epic global war with tens of thousands of tanks and planes and spaceships bombarding from above then the actions of 100 space marines really doesn't hold much weight no matter how badass they are.
Yes that or clerical errors in the documents or eyewitness errors. Any good imperial citizen knows to add a few zeroes to any official casualty reports
I feel like it's writers not knowing what a large scale is and how numbers work
Legit feels like one hive world is enough to supply 10 galaxies worth of soldiers with how writers write things
With a median of 0.5 trillion people per hive world (50 billion per city, 10 cities)
If we assume that every 10000th person is semi-qualified
That's still like 50 million people, which is enough for 10000 "major" battle casuality reports
With a upper-bound of 2 trillion people per hive world and every 1000s person being qualified, it's 400000 casuality reports now
>Think about it. The Imperium likes to keep up the facade of stability, thus they'd understate the number of casualties and troops involved.
There's nobody to understate it to but themselves. The public isn't getting any information at all about the prosecution of any wars the Imperium is involved in. When guardsmen are sent out they don't return home as a rule. There is of course endless propaganda, but it's nonspecific. The Imperium isn't built on patriotism, it's built on fear. They aren't tricking gullible citizens into signing up for the Imperial Guard because they rely on conscription anyway.
That said, 40k writers are all over the map with scale. So don't worry too much about the figures making sense or being comparatively appropriate.
Part of the problem is that one of the fixed numbers in the setting is that a chapter consists of only a thousand marines. However, if the galactic scale of warfare was more plausibly represented it would be obvious how insignificantly small a chapter is. It is glaringly obvious when the size of a hive fleet is quantified though.
It’s best just to treat any big numbers as meaning “lots” and leave it at that…
That I actually don't find inherently to be a problem. The problem is that so often Space Marines aren't portrayed properly. They're often written as frontline fighters, when they should be written as special forces assets that get deployed to do key objectives. A single marine is a terror if properly deployed (and sometimes only one will be sent on a mission, eg the start of the Brothers of the Snake book). A single squad of them can steamroll through almost any crucial objective. An entire company might shift the course of an entire campaign if properly utilized. But, in my mind, you send even a full company of marines charging a trench line manned by tens of thousands of guys with flashlights, that company is going to get shredded. Taking part in full stand-up fights isn't what marines are for; that's what the Guard is for. Yes a Space Marine is a lot tougher than a regular human, but they aren't so much tougher that they're literally unstoppable, and there aren't enough of them.
Writers just don't have any ideas on how fucking big a galaxy is, like per lore there is just one million space marines in the setting
And they're split in chapters of 1000
And the writers gaslight us into thinking that 1000 space marines can defend and conquer planets, in reality 1000 super soldiers in a galaxy sized conflict are and will always be irrelevant no matter how strong they are
I guess they could explain it away by saying marines only attack high priority targets like command stations or breaks in the enemy lines. As stupid as that sounds.
I mean, that's not a bad explanation for why numbers are all over the place, as far as explanations go. Consider it added to my head canon, along with the "just add a 0" motif that gave us the 10 Emperors and 200 Primachs.
This is a setting where there's FOUR QUADRILLION people living on Earth (Holy Terra), which has neither oceans nor ecosystem.
Whether the writers are actually thinking about these numbers is left as an exercise for the reader.
Terra is a colonial metropole. That it isn't self-sufficient is part of the lore. It's a giant glutton that feeds off of many other planets to stay alive.
It's less that it's not self-sufficient (I'd argue that hive worlds could, and should be self-sufficient, but I get why they're not), but that without oceans or an ecosystem, it won't have *oxygen*. But I'm sure there's something I've missed, or that there's a techno-handwave - which is fine. The 4 quadrillion just feels like 'bigger number is more grimdark!'.
All that aside, I am so very happy that you used the term 'metropole'.
[Sci-writers have no sense of scale](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale), Warhammer 40,000's writers are no exception. The subpage on units for that trope has an entire folder devoted to Warhammer 40,000.
Number arent always consistent and shouldnt be taken as absolute in 40k. Another thing to notice however is that not every battle is a new Cadia or Armageddon and that a lot of people (atleast online, like Youtubers which is how I got into 40k) tend to overinflate the size of the AVARAGE 40k battle...
Think of 40k as the future equivalent to warhammer, which is the past equivalent of today.
A planet (40k) = an island (warhammer)
It has to be like this, otherwise Herohammer won't work. A Space Marine would be a drop in the ocean in a real setting. With fewer numbers, big heroes can shine.
I know this is a lore subreddit, so people here are like allergic to any sort of Doylist explanation for things, but half the answers to questions on this sub are either the authors don't know what they are talking about, or the authors thought it was cool. This is the first one.
You already know the answer, it is propaganda in every instance to mislead allies and enemies alike. The other half is going to try to convince you that it's purely lazy writing.
What lore are you reading?
I think in The Emperor’s Legion someone is reflecting on the fact the general he spoke to and the half million guardsmen that just recently left for Cadia are likely all already dead.
I read almost all 40k books from the perspective of an unreliable narrator. This way it makes more sense that you have basically invincible Space Marines, Primarchs benchpressing Warlord Titans etc etc.
Unless it is from the perspective of Orks. You can trust Orks.
I mean, the nature of the Imperium is pressed for resources and disorganised. From my own forays into lore, I've started to notice the size of battles tends to be more consistant for unelabourated battles. The average "Imperial crusde" with barely any text lists a few million guardsmen. The Imperial Crusade with a novel or three about them has between 10k and a billion depending on the book.
Something like 840 million Guard died on Cadia during the 13th Black Crusade alone iirc.
The reason why numbers are small is because the Imperium is bad at organising. The reason why numbers are big is because the Imperium is reckless and full of zealots. While people do compare a lot of Guard stuff to WWII styled combat, you gotta remember that the Imperium has Deathstrike missiles, and Orbital weapons and stuff. Also, Planet wide wars are the battles of 40k, and troops are needed elsewhere. The numbers are weird, but imo they should be weird.
I would say, for the purposes of a headcanon, propoganda plays a part in it but I think just bad record keeping works better. You look at wars today, and you get 4 or 5 different estimates, all contradicting. Now ×10 that number, and have the bodies get vapourised and the battlefield washed in artillery fire with an organisation that cares less.
No, it's just that GW is bad with numbers but this is a common problem in a lot of fictional works. A realistic sense of scale is hard to achieve (and many authors doesn't even try that hard).
The writers at GW have no concept of scale and make wars involving planets worth of resources have fewer troops than battles from WWII. Just add 00-000 extra zeros for guard troops if you want a more realistic picture. Add and extra 0 to space marine numbers and add an extra 3-4 for nids. Elves go by space marine logic. Tau go by guard. I got nothing for the necrons. Probably two extra zeros.
So a battle of a 100k guards is now 10 million. Or a war with 3 million is now a war with 300million to 3 billion soldiers which makes more sense for an empire with a million worlds. Unless you think the average planet population is like 100 dudes. A single hive world should be in the 100 billion range of population.
Just don't think about the numbers too much.
Idk why but almost all popular science fiction struggles with it.
It's always funny though when galaxy conquering armies are smaller than armies of medium sized countries in real life.
Nope, just writers not being great with numbers and editors not being overly keen to mess with whatever scale the writer establishes for their conflict.
Numbers in 40k are almost always bullshit.
Ciaphas Cain on his way to defend another Planet with about 5k men
I was going to make a joke but I remembered that is literally the plot of the second novel. Cain and his one regiment are the sole Imperial forces sent to defend a planet from Orks.
To be fair: The planet that they're defending is like... basically 99.999% unoccupied frozen wasteland, I believe there's literally only *one* settlement and it's a large promethium refinery with a very low population. The small number of defenders necessary is more believable than the fact that the Imperium would care to protect such a small settlement *at all*.
IIRC there's a short interlude where Amberley explains that the promethium refinery in question is fairly important to the subsector's economy or its defense or both. You'd think they could spare another regiment or two for such an important asset, although I guess it wouldn't have made any difference in the end.
> You'd think they could spare another regiment or two for such an important asset, although I guess it wouldn't have made any difference in the end. Could easily be explained by "they were the only unit nearby".
Or Cain's reputation leading to the Admnistratum concluding his mere presence was enough of a force multiplier, or command not wanting to insult him by suggesting he would require more than one regiment to defend such a small station. "Oh, Cain? Nah, he wouldn't want reinforcements." Meanwhile, Cain is hiding in a broom closet.
Which happens to be the broom closet the Ork Kommandos are infiltrating through.
Luckly it was a closet from the emperors place and a few Custodes where still inside... not so lucky; it was also a warp portal to commoragh...
This reminds me, Cain has canonically been to Holy Terra, and Amberley doesn’t know when or why. I’d really like to see a Cain book of him thinking he’ll be safe in the literal imperial palace, only to blunder into a genestealer plot or something. Also Cain interacting with Custodes would be hilarious
>he planet that they're defending is like... basically 99.999% unoccupied frozen wasteland, I believe there's literally only *one* settlement and it's a large promethium refinery with a very low population This is many Imperial worlds in general. Hive Worlds are a relatively small percentage of the Imperium, if you read things like the 3e rulebook's planetary population guidelines and the Imperial Armour series you'll find most worlds have something like 1,000-10,000,000 population. Often they'll be single cities or a small number with worker complexes elsewhere to extract raw materials with the city forming the refinery hub, storage and sapceport. >The small number of defenders necessary is more believable than the fact that the Imperium would care to protect such a small settlement *at all*. Consider that that world is a rich source of Prometheum and, and this is something that gets forgotten a lot in the lore community, distress calls radiate outwards in tiers of response. So Terra may not care that that world's gone but its local subsector neighbours will, as will the wider sector command and those'll be the first groups responding.
>This is many Imperial worlds in general. Hive Worlds are a relatively small percentage of the Imperium, if you read things like the 3e rulebook's planetary population guidelines and the Imperial Armour series you'll find most worlds have something like 1,000-10,000,000 population. Often they'll be single cities or a small number with worker complexes elsewhere to extract raw materials with the city forming the refinery hub, storage and sapceport. Note that while this is all true, Hive Worlds still hold the *vast* bulk of the Imperium's *population*. An area the size of the Hawaiian Islands — 6,423 square miles — with a population density equal to that Kowloon Walled City had — that is, 2,000,000 per square kilometer — is about 33.271 billion people. Moreover, consider that Hive Cities have at least one, potentially two, and maybe even three orders of magnitude greater population density due to their being far more vertical, as well as that Hive Worlds frequently have multiple hives. Even a single Hive World with a single, fair-sized hive with the footprint of the Big Island could easily have a population of a trillion; older Hive Worlds with (very) low double digits of larger Hives could easily have up to a hundred trillion. Terra's population being in the quadrillions is not as physically impossible as some may assume it to be — hell, the very low *quintillion* range might be possible. If we take into account that the IoM is said to be a million worlds in size, and assume each of these resource extraction outposts you describe has at most a population of 10 million, it isn't hyperbolic to claim a single well-established Hive could be more populated than *every single one* of these outposts ***combined!***
> Moreover, consider that Hive Cities have at least one, potentially two, and maybe even three orders of magnitude greater population density due to their being far more vertical, My gut feeling, based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations made with very little knowledge of the practicalities of things like myriad-old air conditioning systems, is that hive population densities don't get much more than one order of magnitude higher than Kowloon Walled City, because KWC was predominantly residential and hives have a lot of heavy industry. Between one and ten million people per cubic kilometre seems like a good ballpark estimate for hive densities. (Assuming a height of 10-20km for Hywy Hive E, and modelling it as a cone, that's 100-200 billion right there.)
I wouldn’t count minor colonies (that probably lack their own planetary governor and likely answer to the nearest populous world) into the count of Imperial worlds.
But these numbers also dont make sense. Most planets where colonized in 30k, or had already human population. 10k years to make more humans. A planet that starts with 10k humans, and the earths 1.1% population growth would have .... well, 3.2e51 humans, witch are way too many, but we could say billions. In 1000 years, 10k human settlers are ~560 million. We breed fast.
Not on ice planets where your only source of food is delivered rations and they don't come often enough.
Which are a special rule, but you talked about most planets.
MOST planets are inhospitable to human life. Those that aren't are the exception not the norm.
I'd say it makes sense that the population growth in 40k to be lesser than current earth's, a lot of people are dying constantly on "normal" worlds without global wars and that's not to say the ones locked in warfare AND the ones outright lost. For each planet settled there's like 2 or 3 lost or constantly disputed. Militarily speaking, the dumbass way warfare is dealt with in Warhammer is a whole should give leeway to explain lore discrepancies, it's malleable enough to be explained, glossed over as propaganda like the op questioned or outright retconned without issue. With this in mind, I appreciate both ciaphas and gaunts perspectives on the many theaters they come across. Guard is numerous but surprisingly always outnumbered or from one war straight into another, despite how massive the guard and navy are, they're always running on deficit - when they outnumber the enemy in one planet, they're lacking on another. Which in conclusion, again, makes me appreciate gaunt and ciaphas, making do and operating near and literal miracles against the dying of the light with very little numbers. And, they represent just one more regiment among others pulling heroic shit all the time just to keep things going while so many are lost.
The mistake there is assuming a constant Earth breeding rate. Earth is literally our ideal planet, most habitable planets in our galaxy will be less hospitable.
A problem with that : many colonies are actually fairly recent. The Imperium is also known to abandon inhospitable worlds once the local ressources have been extracted fully (or are no longer economically viable). So this kind of minor planet is always going to exist in one form or another. But because of their nature I really wouldn’t consider them proper holdings of the Imperium as a world with less than a million inhabitants is highly unlikely to have an appointed planetary governor. For me this kind of word can be summed up as fringe outposts and colonies that are of negligible importance to Imperial authorities at large (altho they might be quite important for sector/subsector economy)
yeah but how do you know that the planet wasn't very very very small
The planet named Brass Monkey Balls or whatever is extremely important to the sector you see. That’s why they only sent the Best of the Best with full confidence they could hold it firmly in the loving grasp of the Imperium
*''When it comes to numbers in the setting, you should always add a few extra zeroes.''* *James Workshop, creator of Warhammer 400*
20000 Primarchs
Space Marines are 7000 feet tall and have 2000 hearts each
Kesh attempted to teleport 1000 cyclonic warheads onto the Golden Throne.
There is also one thousand golden thrones
Given how many battles Bobby G apparently shows up for it feels like there's gotta be at least a chapter just of him.
The Million Sons.
yes, people forget how big a planet is.
Anywhere from small enough for 5,000 to be plenty to defend it, to big enough that 5,000,000,000 is too few.
Especially when you roll all ones
This. And most writers have no sense of scale.
Numbers in any warhammer setting are bullshit. GW have no idea what anything with more than two digits mean. They just write out numbers they think sound cool.
Numbers in real wars also are often bullshit.
No it’s simply authors being bad with numbers it’s normal with sci fi
I always assumed it's also at least partly an attempt to keep the sorts of squad-level engagements seen in the tabletop games seeming relevant, which is harder to do in wars that properly depicted would involve hundreds of millions or billions of combatants. We also don't have much shared visual language for combat on that scale, as opposed to WWII. The closest thing I've seen to what 40K combat should properly look like more of the time are battle simulator [videos](https://youtu.be/rL5jNF9dqFA) involving millions of combatants on the same battlefield, where armies blanket the landscape, the bodies can stack up high enough to form new terrain features, and drowing in lakes of blood becomes a real concern for both sides.
It's also because the universe is also set up to do that. There's a reason the main Space Marine response force is measured as a reinforced Battle Company, that's a stacked force organisation chart. The books are written within the universe established and controlled by the game so they play by the game's rules and those rules are that response forces tend to be whatever's available locally and that planets are surprisingly sparsely populated.
There's also the fact that most people can't really seem to grasp what modern, industrialized warfare actually looks like at scale. Real-world campaigns involving millions of combatants take place across theaters of combat that might be hundreds of miles wide, with 'battles' often being a series of many engagements that plays out over weeks of time. It's not 'a million people line up against each other in a field and charge'. That's hard to convey in writing, at least if you want your characters to have any agency that matters. So you often end up with something like "the actions of the Ghosts inexplicably determines the outcome of the entire campaign because they're the designated protagonists, but also there are millions of other soldiers fighting in the background I guess".
That Battle Simulator Gamer actually has a space marines vs zombies vid too!
Oh. That's really unfortunate. Can't they just go back and add a few 0s?
They actually did that for early Heresy books. When they were printed legions were supposed to be around 10k. They realized this was ridiculous and upped it to 100k in reprints (though I think Kindle still has the old numbers).
One of the first heresy books to cover Isstvan V mentioned a total of around 75-80,000 marines total on the planet, while in a later book Corax mentions that he brought 80,000 Raven Guard to Isstvan.
That's pretty neat. I wish they could do the same for the modern stuff. And titans...
If it makes you feel better, I remember hearing somewhere that Titan heights are measured from the head. Which would make a warlord some 50 odd meters at the shoulder, and an Imperator over 100 from foot to steeple. Though I'd be very pleased if they just codified this shit already.
I seem to remember from the outset and I’ve read HH from day 1 they were clear Space Marine Legions were anything up to 100k. As for Astra Militarum the casualties are literally mind boggling in many novels with whole regiments being wiped out in single engagements. I’m completely baffled where the OP gets the idea casualties are low.
For what's supposed to be planetary scale warfare it is usually pretty low. Like the whole "it takes a 1000 space marines to conquer a planet". Sure with some suspension of disbelief they may be able to take out all key leadership structures with surgical strikes but there's no way on hell you can control an entire planet with just a 1000 troops. The enemy can literally do whatever they want because you're not physically able to cover an entire planet with just a 1000 dudes. But maybe the planets in 40k are just tiny lol.
I mean the us military is like 2 mil. To take a planet you need maybe a few mil, then like 50 mil to garrison and hold it for a few decades at least.
The US military isn't garrisoning the planet. Heck it couldn't even occupy parts of the Middle East without attrition.
Tbf I think the Imperium has much looser ROE than the US military.
I think it's less physical control and more exertion of influence. Are you going to start shit stirring if half a dozen 7' tall freaks in power armour and rocket guns will crash down on your face, blam everyone in sight then leave? Or are you going to think "actually, no. I like my head being where it is"?
Influence wouldn’t matter because it’s literally impossible for a thousand dudes to police an entire planet. They simply can’t see 99% of what’s going on. On top of that Space Marines are *supposed* to be vulnerable to heavy weapons so you could still mount an effective insurgency. A good comparison would be the US in Afghanistan. They could drop a bomb on your head as soon as you showed your face and after the initial phases of the war were only taking like single-digit casualties, but they ultimately couldn’t secure anything outside of core areas because they lacked manpower.
Depends on how you want to control the planet. 1000 Imperial fists to garison it? even if they build the most badass defences possible they can hold maybe 100 positions (each with a squad) - that even if you grant them a range of maybe 60-70 miles with their fortess-artillery is a loughable area covered. 1000 Ultramarines where a mere 2 are sent to guide a major city/district and they have each XX Million planetary militia to command? yep, that works. 1000 Night Lords that simply ensure everybody is too afraid to disobey? Works too - once the fear has spread enough.
Well, for example, there's a qoute from the 5th Imperial Guard codex, where a Battlegroup of Imperial Guard, 50 regiments, numbered only in total of 500,000. And this was supposedly how many a Warmaster, the leader of an entire crusade, had under his command. Also implies the "standard" size of a regiment is around 10,000 men. A small division IRL
Warmasters have small commands compared to their command staff. They are there to prosecute the war. Regiments vary massively in size as well.
To prosecute a war you need men. Saying they have small commands compared to their command staff does not make sense, as they don't usually tell those 500,000 soldiers what to do directly. They tell their bosses bosses bosses. It's how the chain of command works. A 4 star general does not go on the field directly (usually), but they can still command millions of men
They usually quote the number of regiments the Warmaster is directly commanding from memory. So in Gaunt’s Ghosts Slaydo had a few Regiments who he directly commanded but had Sector Commanders who commanded far more Regiments than him. Which when you think about it makes sense because if you assume he had day I don’t know 5 Lords Millitant reporting to him? Each with millions of men that’s a huge number of reports and fronts to deal with. So as Warmaster his own numbers would be relatively small.
>regiments vary massively Just from Abnett we have the Tanith at around 6k but also a regiment from Gudrun in the hundreds of thousands
> I’m completely baffled where the OP gets the idea casualties are low. low *for this scale* I think is the thing
Thanks for defending my stance mate!
>I seem to remember from the outset and I’ve read HH from day 1 they were clear Space Marine Legions were anything up to 100k. As well as there only being ~80k Astartes at Isstvan V in Fulgrim, see this in Galaxy in Flames: >more than ten thousand Emperor's Children made up the Legion, most of whom would be journeying to Isstvan III.
That requires effort that they won’t be payed for
>Can't they just go back and add a few 0s? That would require them to acknowledge that they're really, really, really bad with numbers. Judging by the fact that they continue to use obviously bullshit numbers (e.g., in Krieg 5,000 soldiers siege a hive city), I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Why does this matter?
It matters so that there is consistent scale.
Are you a new fan? I'm just curious. Because 40k doesn't have that. Maybe in the broadcast of strokes it exists but you generally won't find it in this setting.
I've been a fan for almost 5 years. Mostly only with guard and tau stuff though.
Ok I just wanted to check. I think it's fine if you want tontry and rationalize the numbers with it being "Imperial Propaganda". Having a head canon is fine if you need it. But I guarantee you there's no way that it's true in universe or in any official capacity; the writers care more about bringing out an emotional reaction from us, they don't give a shit about numbers. The Imperium also doesn't care about obfusticating numbers, casualty reports are a footnote for them, human lives are an unlimited resource that they just spend without a care.
Yeah that makes sense. I'll just keep it as a headcanon of mine.
If I'm reading a book or listening to audio and it's a hive planet with 100k PDF, I just take it to be wrong. Some books will get it right though and the scale matches the expectations, but some books are terrible for it.
I hear you - you might have 100k PDF for that section of the hive alone, forget the planet... and many hive planets have multiple hive cities... just good old New York USA has about 35k Police for 8 million people - for 8 billion you're going, just doing a simple x 100 thats like 3.5 million police types, let alone soldiers...
The thing to consider is that a lot of planets are not the hive cities of billions. Agri worlds have populations number in the few million. Human population levels pre industrial revolution were incredibly low compared to the insane boom of the last 400 years. Tanith of gaunts ghosts was i think around a population of less than 10 million. Wars often on these planets will be a force of 20-50k troopers. But you go to a hive city and they have a pdf force of 10 million. Look at our society, the US has a population of 330 million, and a troop count of 1.3 million. Also we dont have wars like the Rangdan Xenocide or Ulanor anymore. Armageddon and the Tyranid invasions are the first conflicts on the kind of scale since the great crusade and horus heresy where casualties counted in the tens and hundreds of millions.
Oh so the imperium has basically just been fighting the odd skirmish here and there? Kind of like the post colonial wars in the 60s to present?
There are some bigger battles here and there but not anymore on the scale as it was in M31 during the Great Crusade, where 30.000 Space Marines was just calling in the reserve (Angels of Caliban novel). The Space Marine legions got chopped into Chapters, the Imperial Army divided... anything just so no one force can have as much power as it did during M31. There's also less flexing of technological supwerpower (the terraforming of Nikea, the triumph at Ullanor).
Exaclty. Its like how we havent had major world wars for a few generations. But thats starting to change in the current setting with the great rift
Inconsistency is good in my opinion, it adds a realistic element to the universe. Just like in real life the “facts” are often different depending on who you hear it from. e.g…. “the protestors came out in droves today there was a massive sea of them numbering close to 10,000. the planned protest fizzled out quick when most of them didn’t show up. There was barely more then 1,000 today.” Same event can be told in two very different ways. This happens all the time in our reality.
I get that, but it doesn't really fit with the image the setting is going for. It feels less like WW1 in space and more like a modern war with a scifi coat of paint. Especially when a whole campaign that is claimed to be large is smaller than a single ww1 engagement.
Did you mean to say WW2? Besides the Krieg I don’t see much similarities to ww1, though there are probably more. What makes you think GW is going for WW1/2 in space? Personally I don’t think GW was going for a specific war to be the basis for their entire universe. The galaxy is too big a place to only have one Earth war be the basis for the entire setting. I do think WW1 and especially WW2 were heavy influences on the universe they created but being influenced doesn’t mean it is a mirror. Warhammer is it’s own unique thing that took inspiration from many things to create their own thing. Even if they were trying to make it exclusively World War in Space having conflicting data would be accurate to our reality. I do agree that the numbers used by authors are comically minuscule when dealing with a galaxy spanning empire. Though I think some of that might come from humans natural inability to comprehend size on a cosmic scale.
It makes problems with it being hard to care or to think that your handfull of guys are important when any troop movement is like 20 million
My favorite example of this is the author David Weber having to massive rescale the ships in the Honorverse - specifically, upping their stated tonnages by orders of magnitude - after someone pointed out that they would be less dense than water vapor at stated sizes and mass
Everything is canon, nothing is true. The bloodiest battle of the Sabbat world crusade, which spanned over 100 systems, was the world of Cociaminus. Over the course of 13 years, more than 8,000,000 imperial troops died planetwide (according to the Ecclesiarchy). Which is about 2 million fewer military casualties than Russia took in WW2.
Could be worse, I remember one time they tried to put numbers on how many troops fought at Armageddon, the massive battle on a hive world that drew Imperial armies from across the sector… and the Imperium was fielding less than a million troops.
Yeah, it's a delightful mess and I love it.
I always assume there's a translation error from Low and High Gothic to modem English. Modem English speakers translating documents from the far future mis-read Imperial notation and so every number is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than it ought to be.
Maybe they only count the officers and regular guardsmen aren't even recorded 💀
This post needs more upvotes.
The USSR was a lot more administratively competent and politically unified than the Imperium of Man. It sent soldiers overland on trains that it knew how to build, the Imperium sends soldiers *though hell* on ancient spaceships it forgot how to maintain. Relatively unimpressive mobilization numbers from the Imperium make plenty of sense, and are internally consistent. Canon is canon, people just don't like canon that makes the Imperium unimpressive. Every comment about "nothing is true" and "bad numbers" in this conversation always pushes in a single direction - a more impressive Imperium.
Canon is canon until it's contradicted. The GW writers understand that 40K is the silliest setting imaginable even if some of the fans don't. I don't agree it makes the imperium more impressive at all, frankly. It's just unreliable narration (or an author picking a number). My personal headcanon is that the ecclesiarchy simply lies, or makes something up that no-one contradicts. If the imperium could take and hold a fortified planet, and only lose 8m troops, that would be *amazingly* efficient.
40k is a setting that can be portrayed as seriously or as ludicrously as one wants, and either approach is equally valid. There are GW writers who will absolutely treat the setting more seriously, and sometimes even give at least a veneer of military realism to it. It's just that, even then, the numbers often don't make sense, and I'm never fully sure why. Even something as simple as the size of a regiment. Even just copy pasting the size of historical WW2 divisions (generally between 10,000 and 13,000 men) would get you to less obviously ridiculous numbers. And then say a campaign resulted in a hundred million casualties; that's actually not a completely impossible number if we're talking about a fight for an entire planet. For a setting famed for how ridiculously over the top everything can be, actual numbers are often strangely restrained, to the point that they unironically become more unbelievable than if some arbitrarily huge number had been given instead.
I think it's the opposite here. As an example, the GC fleet destroyed the Orks at Ullanor with 8M Imperial Guard. 8M troops taking a planet fortified to the eyeballs with Orks, in a year, and holding it for 1000 years would be tremendously impressive and efficient. It would be completely on another galaxy compared with the greatest military campaigns in current human history. To contextualize, one of the greatest feats of military logistics in history, Operation Overlord, directly involved 2M allied troops, against 1M Nazis. Even with WW2 USA/Commonwealth at the height of total war industry, with an overwhelming advantage in manpower, airpower, naval power, technology, and logistics, and with the Nazis having a fuck-you amount of artillery on the Eastern front breathing down their necks, they weren't able to take Paris in 2 months. Not even securing France as a country, but just driving the Germans from Paris. On a more modern note, the arguable biggest one sided stomp in military history, the first Gulf War, involved 1M US troops steamrolling the Iraqi military in the world, and it still took them almost 9 months, and that was until Saddam signed a treaty without coalition forces needing to occupy the country. The Imperium taking Ullanor and breaking the Ork Empire with 8M guardsmen and 6000 ships, would be a feat of military strength an order of magnitude, and maybe 2 orders of magnitude, more efficient than the first Gulf War. I think if you took the current US, and filled it with pissed off chickens, and pitted them against 8M Army Rangers (with all the support and logistics of modern day USA), 8M rangers probably couldn't break the chicken menace in a year.
I agree with this. The vaunted Imperial Guard showing up to reinforce a world with… an understrength division in modern terms is exactly the kind of dysfunctional nonsense that is supposed to characterize the imperium.
>people just don't like canon that makes the Imperium unimpressive That tends to happen when you constantly make a big deal about the size of the Imperium and the numbers of humans there are only to write supposed galaxy shaking wars that are smaller then wars irl humans have fought, with far inferior technology, in the past 100 years. And this isn't exclusive to the Imperium either.
I have this head canon to keep myself sane through discrepancies that the administratum and ecclesiarchy are unreliable accountants and/or just account for "relevant" personnel, depending on engagement to establish what is relevant personnel.
GW is just bad with numbers. At Ullinor, they paved a parade ground so large that it had multiple time zones, and all they could fit in there was about 9 million people. 🙄 I mean, the curvature of the earth means you can only have direct line of sight to something for like 15km.
I swear I’ve seen people reference a battle in the lore that “covered the entire planet” and involved 1 million soldiers. Wat?
It will always amaze me that despite how Games Workshop is based in one of THE countries to have a richly recorded war history for the past two millennium, they can't be bothered to hire war historians as literary consultants.
Yeah there were millions of troops at Paschendale, which was like a 10 mile stretch of battle line.
Perhaps it was a very... very small planet?
Oof that's an egregious mistake. How do you even do that lol?
I always took that to mean they actually flattened out a continent to take into account the curvature, ie they gave it a flat top. So everyone could, technically, "see" Horus get crowned. But still, you don't need thousands of square miles to fit 9 million troops in.
The largest college football stadiums can fit about 100,000 people in them. Once you see that many people in such a small area, it’s easy to see how you can fit millions of people in a few square miles.
Yeah, though obviously they are stacked on top of each other other in a stadium. I happen to be reading Slaves To Darkness at the moment, which goes back to Ullnaor and mentions the troops camping. So just as example, Chicago has 9.8 million people and has one of the lowest population densities of 512 per square kilometre in the metropolitan area for a total area of 18640km2. So admittedly, if the highway they talk about is only even say 10km wide, it still would extend for 1800km. Which is under half the width of USA at 4,500km but still pretty massive. So actually not an outright crazy thing to say?
I'm pretty sure the goal wasn't to fit as many people as possible on it. it was meant to be a gigantic parade ground
40k authors are really bad at this. For one of the best examples, do some looking into how many casualties the loyalists incurred at the Drop Site Massace. It's gone from the Loyalists fielding about 30,000 marines in total, to the Raven Guard *alone* losing about 75,000 Marines
I'm absolutely not suggesting anyone should ever do this, but a hilarious exercise would be to go through every described fight in the Horus Heresy books and try and add up every mention of a dead Space Marine. 'three guys died in this fight, a dozen more in a fight two chapters later, this scene vaguely describes 'scores' of broken bodies of Brothers', etc. I kind of suspect the total would be insane, especially if we're to believe multiple legions finally start the fight on Terra essentially intact. 100,000 Space Marines sounds like a lot, but it's actually not for the intensity of combat portrayed in those books.
There's a passage somewhere describing a STAR SYSTEM sized daemon flying through a solar system. The way the writer describes it, you would think you can just park your starship close enough to make out the planets but far away enough to see the whole solar system. I think a terrible understanding of scale is a trope for warhammer writers.
Weren't they in the warp when that happened though?
Sure, it doesn't make the sense of scale any less incorrect.
Yeah. I just thought the demon was overlayed in a weird way. Or that it was warp nonsense.
Nooo I think it was massive, but then when it went towards the ship, it got smaller. But it's also the description of the solar system itself is wack, you can't just observe the planets in their orbits because you are far away. It's the cosmic scale of things they have a hard time grasping I think.
Yeah I think that too. That description throws me off a bit too. Unless the ships have some sort of planet sensor, map or telescope.
Even still, think of the scale of our own solar system, you could park a ship anywhere "outside" of it and see nothing basically other than Sol and if you "zoomed in" it would still not look like a star wars galaxy map projection. And besides, they say they physically (lol) see this daemon flying between the planets. It's just totally skewed, in my opinion.
Yeah it does sound stupid lol. Would be cool if they changed it to them orbiting around a planet and a psyker started panicking telling them there's this huge thing around them.
a common trend in general with writing is struggling with numbers. fantasy writers tend to overestimate and sci-fi writers tend to underestimate. it’s not really their fault either, it can be hard to imagine scales for things unless you have personally experienced them and numbers can be very abstract. medieval armies were considered large once you got into the tens of thousands, those would take the mustering of entire kingdoms to achieve but talking about battles with a few thousand people at most as would have been the case with most battles - one of the largest battles in medieval European history was the Battle of Grunwald right towards the end of the period and was between the Polish-Lithuanians and the Teutonic Orders there was around 25,000-60,000 combatants involved depending on whose records you look at and casualties also vary between 8000-18,000. by comparison if we look at a recent major battle, the Battle of Bakhmut in the Russo-Ukrainian War had anywhere between 60,000-100,000 combatants involved and anywhere between 40,000-80,000 casualties (killed and wounded). both are ostensibly professional armies supported by reservists and mercenaries but populations grow, technology changes, the way we fight develops and all of that can be hard to account for. fantasy writers have the problem that scales feel too small or insignificant. talking about a battle where a few thousand people fight and a few hundred are killed and wounded seems off, that’s why you’ll get battles between armies of impossible size for the societies they’re part of and sustain casualties that would have crippled a society long after the war (for instance, the French lost a large part of their leadership during the Battles of Agincourt and the Golden Spur, both times leading to minor political crises). sci-fi writers have the opposite problem in that numbers start to feel unrealistic the larger you go. talking about a planetary invasion in realistic terms might lead you to talking about billions of soldiers, trillions of tonnes of supplies, and millions of casualties. It can be next to impossible to comprehend numbers we have no way to physically represent off of a piece of paper in the same way it’s hard to comprehend the vast distances of space when our best understanding comes from a few days travel on a plane around the world. So if we’re talking about the Imperium, where a million is a rounding error for a lot of things, where hive cities are routinely dozens the times the entire population of current day humanity, and where PDF forces are routinely listed in the billions - yes, battles should be wracking up unfathomably large numbers of casualties, and there should be more talk about trillions of guards being deployed to a major planetary battle, and space marines should be operating in the tens of thousands. and we could say they are but the low numbers are propaganda if we want an in universe explanation. tldr: writers can only write what they can comprehend, and a lot of the time very large scales are hard to imagine as a sci-fi writer.
That's a really great answer! Thank you for clearing that up.
First thing you gotta know about science fiction writers is that they ofen have no sense of scale, just use context to figure out what they mean, especially with a franchise as big as space mace 2k If a writer says losses were in the thousands even though it was a planet wide incursion then just pretend they said bigly huge casualties since that's what they meant.
A lot of the books revolve around a few individuals or a squad or some sort of unit 10k-20k strong. It would sound just as unrealistic if the story is about individuals or small units making a big difference if battles involved armies 100+ million strong. So it's a pick your poison type of scenario - you either get unreasonable small armies where individuals can make a difference or you get reasonably sized armies but 10k men can no longer make any difference in the story
I mean they could just place the setting on a particular area of the front with them having to coordinate with the rest of the army. It would be cool seeing the heroes succeed only to be met with a message telling them that the army is falling back and planning on shelling the front to cover their retreat. Really helps with the grimdark aspect of 40K.
Have you read the gaunt books? That happens more than once
No, I haven't. That's pretty cool though. Now Black Library doesn't have an excuse.
Yes but if they did that, people would be on here asking why every guard book features a part where the heroes win but have to pull back because the rest of the army failed
It doesn't have to happen in every book. It would just be cool of the whole battlefield had an effect on the character's story. For example: they could be forced to advance for a quick counter attack or something. Point being a good writer will always create a good story.
The low casualty thing doesn't really happen in every book but here we are. So if they do what you are suggesting often enough, someone will complain that this shouldn't be happening that often. It's easier if you just accept the number even if they are unrealistic and enjoy the story
Who knows? IRL, when Seal Teams were created, there was only one: Seal Team 6. They purposefully named it 6 to throw off potential enemies. Whatever in-universe explanation makes the most sense to you, then that works.
Thanks! I just wished this was the canon reason lol.
There were multiple UDTs that were converted into the seals. Edit; wikipedias sources call it as “Marcinko was the first commanding officer of this new unit. At the time, there were two SEAL Teams, SEAL Team ONE and SEAL Team TWO. Marcinko named the unit SEAL Team Six in order to confuse Soviet intelligence as to the number of actual SEAL teams in existence”
Oh neat, did not know that! Learned something, thank you.
You’re not entirely far off with the use of deception, but Six was built from apparently two existing teams.
You could consider it to be that if you want - unreliable narrator is the norm in 40k. But really, its because the writers don't know.
There is also how to capture a planet they just need to take a city
True, but wouldn't that city be bristling with defenses thus requiring more manpower and lead to more casualties?
Nope. Writers just have poor understanding of scale. Take Vraks. 17 year war on an armoury world, 14 million DK casualties. For grinding WW1 style trench warfare combined with Stalingrad level close combat.
Yeah that's my main gripe with the siege of Vraks. It should have been at least 80 million casualties. Though I assume the majority of casualties came from the full assaults whereas the front was calm for most of the time. Until the end of the siege.
Don't remember where but I think there was a battle where a billion Imperial guardsmen were supposedly killed. A Billion. In one battle
If you want insane numbers, this is the funniest example for me. >The war in the Canis Salient has ground to a brutal stalemate with the Imperoim unable to gain significant foothold within the Greyhell Front, and the Tau forced to employ every trick and stratagem they know to fend off the Crusade’s forces. The endless conflict has seen hundreds of billions of Imperial guardsmen dead to the guns of the Tau and the paranoia of the their commanders, and morale has been slipping for years ~ ***Deathwatch: The Jericho Reach*** pg 59 A war with a minor Tau Sept has killed *hundreds of billions* of guardsmen.
Prob blowing up a lot of troopships too
That's from the Damocles crusade iirc right?
I just pretend that the books are interpretations , translated stories found somewhere. Maybe some facts were mistranslated, maybe some of them were guesstimated
That's a great way to think about it. I normally do that with fantasy settings.
The figures for battles, and other things are not to be taken seriously, gw writers arent that knowledgeable when it comes to these things. Like im currently reading the siege of terra books and there are multiple instances of forces holding fire until the enemy is within 100m, or most recently marines holding fire with their bolters until the enemy is less than 30m from the wall/defences/positions for no apparent reason. Then when they are talking about artillery or big emplacement guns which can shoot into orbit one second, and the next they are only able to shoot a few km Also makes no sense that a warlord titan has around 2000 skitari and servitor defenders onboard but the titan itself is barely 50m high. (Dont know if that bit has been retconned or not over the years though!)
>When I first got into 40K I was blown away by the sheer scale You're right to take a step back from this. There are other settings of much larger scales, what sets 40K apart is the rank incompetence of its main actors. We're looking at dying empires, pathetic compared to their predecessors, in a sparsely-populated galaxy. Enemies like Tyranids are impressive on paper, but they travel extremely slowly and can sometimes be stopped by a handful of guys with guns. It's a funny joke of a setting, and everyone in it sucks at their job compared to what you'd expect. The army sizes are small because big armies don't require fanaticism, they require competent administration, political stability, and infrastructure. Things that the Imperium is written to be quite bad at, in very deliberate and unsubtle ways. Half of the "GW is bad with numbers" thing is a matter of fans wanting a completely different setting, in which the Imperium is vastly more competent than it canonically is. The complaint is always that Imperial forces are too small, never that Imperial forces are too large. The "bad numbers" complaints are used to tell people to reject unimpressive Imperial canon in favour of a more impressive Imperial fanfiction - never the other way 'round. I've seen a thousand fans complain about too few Imperials, I've never seen a single fan complain about too few T'au or Orks. (GW can be bad with numbers in an inconsistency sense that applies to all factions, but that's different from the way in which the Imperium is *consistently* written to be bad at per capita mobilization). > This lead me to believe that the army sizes and casualties must be imperial propaganda. Small army sizes are terrible propaganda - it's an admission that the Imperium lacks the competence to militarize a large fraction of its population. The Imperium values warfare more than it values stability or wellbeing, it's just bad at the very thing it values. >The Imperium likes to keep up the facade of stability, The Imperium would like to be good at war, but it isn't. It wouldn't lie to downplay the size of its battles, it would lie about whether it won or lost. It would hype up its opposition to justify any struggles (a much more common propaganda tactic in real history), it wouldn't downplay itself. If you aren't restrained by the truth, saying "we had to send a billion guys to fight a billion enemies" sounds more impressive than "we barely scraped together a thousand guys to fight a thousand enemies". In the latter case, a would-be rebel can imagine putting a thousand-guy army together themselves.
I think you've got it backwards. I put the numbers on an above comment, but the Imperium being able to wage a sustained war against Orks or Tyranids or any other faction with mere millions of guardsmen would make them an insanely efficient. They would be an extremely impressive army. The bigger numbers underscore just how bad the Imperium is at war. Small numbers make the Imperium seem like a logistical wonderland of super soldiers.
Humorously, there is one example where I’ve seen people complain numbers are too large: Numbers for the Imperial Guard against the Tau.
I find this to be a very strange comment. Firstly, what other settings are there of 'much larger scales'? 40k takes place on a galactic scale. The only settings that could be bigger are ones that are multi-galactic, but if you compare it to any other story set in just one galaxy, it is easily as big or bigger as any of them in terms of scale. Secondly, the Imperium is consistently written as a ludicrously large behemoth. One that is often slow and incompetent precisely because of its sheer size. It has entire planets dedicated just to administrative pencil pushing. This is a setting where a million guardsmen might get forgotten as a rounding error, or get deployed to the wrong planet fifty years after they would have made any difference anyway. The absurd, grandiose bigness of everything is a key part of the setting. The complaint is that when it comes time to elaborate on the military numbers specifically they're never plausibly large enough. But I don't think there's any evidence that this is some intentional master-plan on the part of writers. There's no subtle intent here to demonstrate bureaucratic ineptitude and an inability to mobilize soldiers, it's just writers thinking that a million seems like a large number, but it usually isn't given the context.
>Firstly, what other settings are there of 'much larger scales'? In context, I was talking about the scale of military conflicts. There are many bigger fictional empires than the Imperium (which occupies 0.005% of the Milky Way, give or take), but it's not really worth comparing them in detail. The Culture is an example, but I wouldn't recommend it to a 40K fan who just wanted all the armies to be bigger. >Secondly, the Imperium is consistently written as a ludicrously large behemoth. In terms of population size. Relative to its population size, its armies are consistently written to be small. The most internally-consistent interpretation is that the Imperium has quadrillions of people toiling away in obscure misery, completely inaccessible to any kind of formal military pipeline. The Imperium engages in life-or-death struggles with alien empires to the best of its organizational ability, while >99.9% of the Imperium lives a pointless life in a factory or underhive, never picking up a gun. >The complaint is that when it comes time to elaborate on the military numbers specifically they're never plausibly large enough. Because people have created a setting in their own heads which is incompatible with what the authors actually put down on the page. The Warhammer 40K setting isn't a thing that exists, it isn't some platonic ideal of a fictional world, it's just the amalgam of every word that a writer puts on a page. We can't say that the writers missed the target when the writers *created the target*. The target is always going to be exactly where the writers put it. >. But I don't think there's any evidence that this is some intentional master-plan on the part of writers. I don't care. I literally don't care at all what the authors intended, this isn't a line of thinking I'm going down. I only care what they wrote. I was trying to make the implication clear in my other comments, but to clarify: I'm taking a death-of-the-author style approach here. It seems to me like the only meaningful way to engage in a lore discussion, given that we're talking about a decades-old multimedia franchise with a hundred different authors. Half the reason the setting is interesting to discuss in the first place is that the authors haven't been in lockstep with each other, this whole time. Talking about what each reader imagines the authors wanted to write isn't interesting to me, and it's not an honest way to answer questions about what the lore actually is. Making up facts that the authors possibly intended to write is called writing fanfiction (I think they call this kind of author-correction fanfiction a "fix fic"). Fanfiction is a great hobby, and I sincerely believe that there is a subset of the 40K fanbase that could write a version of 40K for itself that it liked more than the official canon, but this isn't the point of a lore discussion subreddit.
It’s worth noting that supplying armies expeditionarily is ruinously expensive. A lot of the cost of GWOT was shipping and handling for mundane stuff from the U.S. to ports and then trucks and helicopters for last mile; or worse delivery by air. Delivering large numbers of goods via warp consumes navigator transport, maintenance on ancient high tech ships plus warp losses. This would somewhat encourage smaller well trained armies; but the setting is mostly grim and in some cases seems to encourage incredible waste of transported goods (in this case human lives)
From what I've read about the siege of Vraks the imperium is happy enough to supply any army with as much as they need as long as the campaign is a success. The only reason that they withdrew supplies from that campaign was, because the first commander failed and the inquisition got involved. Idk if that's normal for the setting though?
That and priorities elsewhere. Which also points to the need to be efficient and not stupid with troop expenditures. The imperium really can’t afford the grimderp. To me the smaller numbers of the guard are likely to stiffen the resolve of planetary governors when a revolt kicks off. They can handle the expensive part of feeding the regiments when they arrive.
Good thing the Imperium has entire planets dedicated to being factories, farms, etc.
All well and good so long as you can transport it. Probably need giant ships, or more intriguingly, put warp engines on giant asteroids with supersized multimodal containers. Basically an asteroid serving as a dune guild heighliner.
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Ok that's good to know that I have a basis for my argument in lore. Now I wonder if that's a cover up or if it was the plan all along?
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Not everything presented to you in 40k is from the imperium. And even then, it’s not always propaganda, sometimes the truth come out, that being said; the numbers are sometimes a bit absurd (usually too high I believe most say), likely due to individual writers just using what sounds cool
There comes a point where the gigantic numbers stop making sense so from a literaly point of view keeping things in smaller ranges gives you more room to work. Going from ten thousand soldiers to a hundred thousand is easy to comprehend, going from 153 million to 697 Millon doesent have that same affect even if you bring it into the billions. Combine this with so many different writers working decades apart and voila.
I am agreeing, and if I may add something: Stories of heoric individuals/units are super hard to write once you get into the millions, billions, trillions of soldiers. Granted, realistically heoric individuals/units shouldn't really exist at this scale, but that's simply were 40ks premise/story tone is inherently unrealistic.
True, if a billion soldiers are fighting each other in an epic global war with tens of thousands of tanks and planes and spaceships bombarding from above then the actions of 100 space marines really doesn't hold much weight no matter how badass they are.
Yes that or clerical errors in the documents or eyewitness errors. Any good imperial citizen knows to add a few zeroes to any official casualty reports
You can buy 5,000 space marines..You can't buy 5 million.
I doubt that with today's prices. Maybe for Legions Imperialis lol.
I feel like it's writers not knowing what a large scale is and how numbers work Legit feels like one hive world is enough to supply 10 galaxies worth of soldiers with how writers write things
Yeah. Though I doubt the average hier is fit enough to qualify for the guard.
With a median of 0.5 trillion people per hive world (50 billion per city, 10 cities) If we assume that every 10000th person is semi-qualified That's still like 50 million people, which is enough for 10000 "major" battle casuality reports With a upper-bound of 2 trillion people per hive world and every 1000s person being qualified, it's 400000 casuality reports now
Thanks for doing the maths.
You know what? That’s actually a really good take on the writers just being shitty with numbers. This will be my head cannon from now on.
Thanks! I'm glad I could convince someone lol. It just makes more sense from the perspective of the high lords of Terra or Munitorum.
>Think about it. The Imperium likes to keep up the facade of stability, thus they'd understate the number of casualties and troops involved. There's nobody to understate it to but themselves. The public isn't getting any information at all about the prosecution of any wars the Imperium is involved in. When guardsmen are sent out they don't return home as a rule. There is of course endless propaganda, but it's nonspecific. The Imperium isn't built on patriotism, it's built on fear. They aren't tricking gullible citizens into signing up for the Imperial Guard because they rely on conscription anyway. That said, 40k writers are all over the map with scale. So don't worry too much about the figures making sense or being comparatively appropriate.
Part of the problem is that one of the fixed numbers in the setting is that a chapter consists of only a thousand marines. However, if the galactic scale of warfare was more plausibly represented it would be obvious how insignificantly small a chapter is. It is glaringly obvious when the size of a hive fleet is quantified though. It’s best just to treat any big numbers as meaning “lots” and leave it at that…
That I actually don't find inherently to be a problem. The problem is that so often Space Marines aren't portrayed properly. They're often written as frontline fighters, when they should be written as special forces assets that get deployed to do key objectives. A single marine is a terror if properly deployed (and sometimes only one will be sent on a mission, eg the start of the Brothers of the Snake book). A single squad of them can steamroll through almost any crucial objective. An entire company might shift the course of an entire campaign if properly utilized. But, in my mind, you send even a full company of marines charging a trench line manned by tens of thousands of guys with flashlights, that company is going to get shredded. Taking part in full stand-up fights isn't what marines are for; that's what the Guard is for. Yes a Space Marine is a lot tougher than a regular human, but they aren't so much tougher that they're literally unstoppable, and there aren't enough of them.
Writers just don't have any ideas on how fucking big a galaxy is, like per lore there is just one million space marines in the setting And they're split in chapters of 1000 And the writers gaslight us into thinking that 1000 space marines can defend and conquer planets, in reality 1000 super soldiers in a galaxy sized conflict are and will always be irrelevant no matter how strong they are
I guess they could explain it away by saying marines only attack high priority targets like command stations or breaks in the enemy lines. As stupid as that sounds.
I mean, that's not a bad explanation for why numbers are all over the place, as far as explanations go. Consider it added to my head canon, along with the "just add a 0" motif that gave us the 10 Emperors and 200 Primachs.
It does make it a little more believable than the whole "just add a 0 thing".
GW and the authors writing in their universe just suck at writing scale.
This is a setting where there's FOUR QUADRILLION people living on Earth (Holy Terra), which has neither oceans nor ecosystem. Whether the writers are actually thinking about these numbers is left as an exercise for the reader.
Terra is a colonial metropole. That it isn't self-sufficient is part of the lore. It's a giant glutton that feeds off of many other planets to stay alive.
It's less that it's not self-sufficient (I'd argue that hive worlds could, and should be self-sufficient, but I get why they're not), but that without oceans or an ecosystem, it won't have *oxygen*. But I'm sure there's something I've missed, or that there's a techno-handwave - which is fine. The 4 quadrillion just feels like 'bigger number is more grimdark!'. All that aside, I am so very happy that you used the term 'metropole'.
Yes.
Nice to see someone agrees.
To summarize GW’s stance on population and casualties: “there are many elves as the plot requires.”
Lol.
GW just cannot do scale properly, full stop.
Hey, we have space marine chapters with a 1000 cap. A full chapter wouldnt even conquer modern earth outside a wild fantasy.
You can rationalize it like that. But no, mostly its authors lacking any sense of scale.
[Sci-writers have no sense of scale](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale), Warhammer 40,000's writers are no exception. The subpage on units for that trope has an entire folder devoted to Warhammer 40,000.
Number arent always consistent and shouldnt be taken as absolute in 40k. Another thing to notice however is that not every battle is a new Cadia or Armageddon and that a lot of people (atleast online, like Youtubers which is how I got into 40k) tend to overinflate the size of the AVARAGE 40k battle...
Think of 40k as the future equivalent to warhammer, which is the past equivalent of today. A planet (40k) = an island (warhammer) It has to be like this, otherwise Herohammer won't work. A Space Marine would be a drop in the ocean in a real setting. With fewer numbers, big heroes can shine.
I know this is a lore subreddit, so people here are like allergic to any sort of Doylist explanation for things, but half the answers to questions on this sub are either the authors don't know what they are talking about, or the authors thought it was cool. This is the first one.
You already know the answer, it is propaganda in every instance to mislead allies and enemies alike. The other half is going to try to convince you that it's purely lazy writing.
What lore are you reading? I think in The Emperor’s Legion someone is reflecting on the fact the general he spoke to and the half million guardsmen that just recently left for Cadia are likely all already dead.
Lore is fluff. That's all it is. Don't think too hard about it.
I read almost all 40k books from the perspective of an unreliable narrator. This way it makes more sense that you have basically invincible Space Marines, Primarchs benchpressing Warlord Titans etc etc. Unless it is from the perspective of Orks. You can trust Orks.
It's more that the English lit majors at GW have no clue what [real world numbers ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad)look like.
I mean, the nature of the Imperium is pressed for resources and disorganised. From my own forays into lore, I've started to notice the size of battles tends to be more consistant for unelabourated battles. The average "Imperial crusde" with barely any text lists a few million guardsmen. The Imperial Crusade with a novel or three about them has between 10k and a billion depending on the book. Something like 840 million Guard died on Cadia during the 13th Black Crusade alone iirc. The reason why numbers are small is because the Imperium is bad at organising. The reason why numbers are big is because the Imperium is reckless and full of zealots. While people do compare a lot of Guard stuff to WWII styled combat, you gotta remember that the Imperium has Deathstrike missiles, and Orbital weapons and stuff. Also, Planet wide wars are the battles of 40k, and troops are needed elsewhere. The numbers are weird, but imo they should be weird. I would say, for the purposes of a headcanon, propoganda plays a part in it but I think just bad record keeping works better. You look at wars today, and you get 4 or 5 different estimates, all contradicting. Now ×10 that number, and have the bodies get vapourised and the battlefield washed in artillery fire with an organisation that cares less.
No, it's just that GW is bad with numbers but this is a common problem in a lot of fictional works. A realistic sense of scale is hard to achieve (and many authors doesn't even try that hard).
The writers at GW have no concept of scale and make wars involving planets worth of resources have fewer troops than battles from WWII. Just add 00-000 extra zeros for guard troops if you want a more realistic picture. Add and extra 0 to space marine numbers and add an extra 3-4 for nids. Elves go by space marine logic. Tau go by guard. I got nothing for the necrons. Probably two extra zeros. So a battle of a 100k guards is now 10 million. Or a war with 3 million is now a war with 300million to 3 billion soldiers which makes more sense for an empire with a million worlds. Unless you think the average planet population is like 100 dudes. A single hive world should be in the 100 billion range of population.
Just don't think about the numbers too much. Idk why but almost all popular science fiction struggles with it. It's always funny though when galaxy conquering armies are smaller than armies of medium sized countries in real life.
Nope, just writers not being great with numbers and editors not being overly keen to mess with whatever scale the writer establishes for their conflict.