It’s the 42nd millennium in the newest edition, the tyrannic wars have mostly ended, the wars for Armageddon still loom on with the orks weakening each day, the necrons, tau, and eldar are showing signs of instability, and the imperium is looking towards entering another “age of apostasy” situation even with the galaxy being torn in half. If the age of strife never happened, the imperium in its current state would be as strong if not stronger than the ICOG from xeelee. But how strong is the imperium right now?
They’re pretty fucking OP that’s for sure.
Unlike the low effort bait spewed out on community threads, the imperium has only been expanding rapidly since the Horus heresy. The guard and the astartes got reorganized into legions and chapters to maintain cohesion and improve their stability. The sisters of battle exists as a check to keep the administratum and inquisition from irresponsible decision making and as a stand-alone fighting force. Recovered STCs have brought the return of primaris and centurion space marine power armour. Guilliman, Vulkan, and rogal dorn are back. Several space marines were discovered during exploration trips or were added to the chapters. Some improvements (and I mean some) to imperial leadership have been seen to make the empire less comically fascist and incompetent under guilliman. Finally, the sheer number of humans in the galaxy has rapidly grown thanks to fertility rates and the introduction of vitae wombs on planets like Vraks—seriously, those planets can produce fifty million soldiers a year; imagine how many people in general they pump out. To top of everything else, all imperial worlds have been fortifying for ages now while the imperium has been passively expanding its reach into new worlds since the great crusade started. Just look at the story of tertium as an example of how fucking huge the empire really is.
Unless GW can pull an extremely sound excuse to give some random heretic or alien uniquely strong plot armour, this franchise isn’t going to end the way Fantasy did but with the galaxy cleansed of any nonhuman and robotic life in a few centuries to millennia. The only things going on so far are the returns of angron, Magnus, and mortarion.
Thoughts? Personally, I want to see how this board game ends. Would be nice to finally justify not painting anymore models.
12 posts omitted.While I’m here, I might aswell spread some guardsman propaganda
The average imperial guard officer is what one could call today the “ideal adult.” Unlike you and I, imperial officers do not suffer from any lifestyle issues. They don’t have issues with obesity, weight, blood pressure, sensory deficits, mobility, addiction, or chronic disease. Officers have the mobility of an elementary school gymnastic student well into old age and can climb, vault, swing around, and lift many heavy objects.
Aside from having no real hindrances to their health, the imperial officers are exceptionally fit and well trained too. Unlike what GW likes to fetishize, the guard is full of genuinely really strong people. These guys are partially resistance to extreme pain, they can independently tend to their own wounds, they can march for hundreds to thousands of kilometres in a single sitting, they have an entire professionals worth of military experience and knowledge in their first recruitment years, and they’ve got some of the best planning and teamwork skills you could get out of a military. The astra militarum is like the mobile infantry if it was competent. That’s just the start really.
These guys also come with fully automatic armour penetrating laser rifles with attachments and optics provided as a standard weapon—a weapon known for having functionally unlimited ammo mind you; full body protective armour with a protective helmet is available in abundance in many ranks; they got heat sensing visors and optics capable of tracking down a target several to several dozen kilometres away; dropship troops that can stand in for the fucking space marines when they aren’t available; they come with an unholy amount of artillery and missile systems; they’ve got manpower number in the quadrillions of soldiers; and to top it off, they’ve got some of the most heavily advanced augmentations assigned to their best soldiers to operate at peak performance.
The guard is so good that GW had to nerf these guys a couple of editions ago just to keep these guys from beating every other faction. The guard is simply that powerful.
>>41023Not really. The imperium’s militarism and fanaticism actually does more damage to its survival than anything else.
I’m pretty sure that if the morons at Terra could be bothered to take advantage of a single forge world’s lost knowledge or even just give a few hive cities a good clean up (in the literal sense to get rid of rubble, debris and dirt) the quality of living and longevity of the empire would last a good century from something so petty.