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Author Topic: WH40K discussion thread: from Tyran's heart I stab at thee.  (Read 1043871 times)

Grim Portent

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8790 on: May 15, 2017, 03:20:01 pm »

I might be in a minority here, but I would've been more interested in seeing Rowboat Girlyman employ his famous skills in organisation and strategy

To do what though?

The Imperium is basically using the most optimal strategies given it's logistics and resources, with humans being more expendable than lasguns, it's organisation was already designed by Guilliman during the Scouring, it's at the limits of a lot of it's technology and has a limited capacity to expand or modify its internal organisation without losing massive amounts of territory while productivity is disrupted.

Oh, and half the Imperium has been cut off by a giant warp storm, so the Imperium is in the worst state it's been in since the Heresy. There's not much room for altering the way they handle paperwork in the schedule of constantly fending off hostiles and processing military requirements.

The only things that really can be done to improve their situation are technological advances, which are outside Guilliman's field of expertise and vassalizing some of the less hostile xenos to use as cannon fodder and special forces, maybe letting Beastmen and mutants join the army again to take advantage of their physical advantages.
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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8791 on: May 15, 2017, 03:28:10 pm »

Inefficiency and choking bureaucracy are one of the hallmarks of the Imperium, lots of room to improve there. And if they did have to advance the tech, again I would've preferred something else than Space Marines getting some love (though that still might happen of course). Or for the marines 2.0 to look more different than the old ones, they seem a little bit like 'marines +1' right now. Still cool, but I think they could stand to push the envelope more.
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MrRoboto75

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8792 on: May 15, 2017, 03:33:36 pm »

People really hated this one feature that dramatically enhanced the atmosphere of the game, enh?

Atmosphere so great you can't even see it.

75% of the time the game's just pitch black for the sake of being dark, the rest of time it might be concealing an item or two, or a single enemy that you easily kill with the most unsatisfying guns in history.

The darkness doesn't make the game tense, and it doesn't make it scary.  It just slows the game down into tedium.  Either you juggle a worthless weapon around to perform basic FPS functions, or you blindly grope the game to get what you need.
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pisskop

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8793 on: May 15, 2017, 03:36:45 pm »

Yes, because its not like monsters made of fire that teleport in surrounded by fire throwing even more fire can be seen without a torch.



I think its somewhat ironic that the imperium is 'divided in two' when secundus-man is around.  He's on the wrong end of the galaxy if you ask me.
  I get that theyre threatening another 'age of darkness'  to come about, and that would be neat if I thought theyd do it.
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nenjin

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8794 on: May 15, 2017, 03:45:41 pm »

Spoiler: Not 40k (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: May 15, 2017, 03:51:49 pm by nenjin »
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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8795 on: May 15, 2017, 04:06:00 pm »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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nenjin

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8796 on: May 15, 2017, 04:16:33 pm »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: May 15, 2017, 04:35:13 pm by nenjin »
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pisskop

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8797 on: May 15, 2017, 04:20:27 pm »

Doom4 is the Duke nukem 3d of doom
D4 is to the doom franchise what Skyrim is to Morrowind and ES
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Grim Portent

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8798 on: May 15, 2017, 04:30:14 pm »

Inefficiency and choking bureaucracy are one of the hallmarks of the Imperium, lots of room to improve there. And if they did have to advance the tech, again I would've preferred something else than Space Marines getting some love (though that still might happen of course). Or for the marines 2.0 to look more different than the old ones, they seem a little bit like 'marines +1' right now. Still cool, but I think they could stand to push the envelope more.

The bureaucracy is not actually inefficient or choking, it's just huge, and mistakes get made when dealing with things on that scale. The average planet's non-local paperwork consists of a rough census, psyker records, planetary tithes and military matters that go through Administratum channels. But all that paperwork is being handled by a couple of dozen people, a bunch of servitors and servo skulls, and that's about it. If your planet is important you get thousands or millions of people trying to process your paperwork, but it's a monumental and unending task just to keep track of taxes and who lives where.

Even just getting paperwork to an Administratum center can take decades or centuries because warp travel is so unreliable. By the time a clerk actually gets to see how many people live on Hydrosia Minor in M34 887 it's likely some other clerk has already processed their census information from M35 352. Some planets don't even send such information for centuries because no one bothers to come collect it. The average Feudal/Feral World has so little of value it can be ignored until someone needs a new regiment of horse riding primitives.

Without improving warp transit reliability and time how do you really do anything about that? Reduce the paperwork involved in taxes? Not feasible nor desirable. Stop having a census? Then psykers and who knows what else will more often go ignored.

Of course reducing internal struggles in the Administratum would be helpful, since they destroy or displace paperwork and result in dead clerks, but those are rare and don't usually occur on a meaningful scale.
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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8799 on: May 15, 2017, 04:41:56 pm »

Lexicanum begs to differ:

Billions of Administratum officials on Terra and throughout the galaxy are constantly carrying out population censuses, working out tithes, recording and archiving information, and the million other things that are necessary for the running of the Imperium. Such is its immense size and complex bureaucracy that whole Administratum departments have been lost and forgotten. So dogmatically bureaucratic, whole departments of adepts continue to diligently but purposelessly carry out the role their department was founded for, even after the department has become long obsolete.

Of all the Imperium's divisions, the Administratum is regarded as the least prestigious, but its high ranking members are among the most powerful men in the Imperium. Despite its massive inefficiency, the Administratum is so integral to the running of the Imperium, that without it, the whole Imperium would grind to a halt.
(Emphasis mine.)

This is corroborated by the wikia 40K wiki. Some choice quotes:

Such is its immense size, that whole departments of the Administratum have been submerged by a sea of complex bureaucracy, becoming lost in loops of paper trails. Other departments have continued to dogmatically operate and carry out their founding function, even if the intent and requirement behind them no longer exists.

[...]

The main resource the Administratum controls, and which the Inquisition often requires access to, is information. It is said that nothing occurs in the Imperium that is not at some point recorded by an Administratum scribe, catalogued, filed, copied in quadruplet, processed in one of the Adeptus' vast datamills and, perhaps many centuries later, archived. Each phase in this process might take solar months, even standard years to accomplish, dependent upon the perceived relevance of the information. Unfortunately, the individuals that determine the relevance do so entirely according to their own set of values, often more concerned with the niceties of data-retrieval systems than with any external consideration. Thus, an incorrectly phrased request for military aid might be returned to its sender to be completed again, while that sender's entire world falls to alien invasion in the meantime.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8800 on: May 15, 2017, 05:05:25 pm »

There's really no difference between size and inefficiency in this regard.
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Grim Portent

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8801 on: May 15, 2017, 05:22:40 pm »

Those are problems of scale more than efficiency. The former is an issue that arises from the departments carrying out their tasks until told to stop by a higher up, who will probably never hear of the obsoletion of the department's purpose (chances are neither will the department depending on what kind they are) because they have a huge backlog of paperwork to deal with, and the latter is just part of how the feudal delegation system of the Imperium works, each person rules their specific chunk the way they want, even in the Administratum, so overseer clerks wind up able to have people killed for not doing things the way they want, and it's too big to centralise it with any ease or efficiency since orders from above can't always make it through on time, if at all.

How exactly would you reform this system anyway? It's hard enough to send a message from one system to another for everyday purposes, trying to restructure a deliberately decentralised system via Astropathic communications and courier ships in order to conform to a centrally defined standard would be nigh impossible and probably result in the loss of dozens or hundreds of planets as paperwork is lost or mishandled during the process as different areas updated at different speeds or according to incorrect orders passed down. The time and effort it would take would possibly even kill the Imperium as a whole.

The idea is explored in Death of Antagonis, with a manufactorum that mostly makes junk, machine parts that no one remembers the use for and that it just throws onto a big garbage heap. People literally work to death making scrap in this place, but it also makes bolt shells for the Astartes, and without it Chapter's would suffer supply issues and be unable to properly fight their wars. It would take months or years to properly review and refit the factory, and in that time the local Astartes Chapters would be impaired, and because of the delays inherent in warp travel for supply shipments, human error in arranging shipments, mistakes in what gets shipped and so on it could take decades or centuries to make up the deficit of equipment. During this period how many planets would die? Would it be possible to pull out of the death spiral it could cause?

There's really no difference between size and inefficiency in this regard.

It would help if the Emperor's webway project had succeeded. It only taking a few days to transfer paperwork from one side of the galaxy to the other with no risk of it being eaten by daemons would be a massive boon to record keeping. As is anything that gets so much as transferred via Astropath might as well be fed into a shredder, half of it set on fire and the remains glued together to form a document.
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Neonivek

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8802 on: May 15, 2017, 05:28:23 pm »

To me it isn't that the Imperium or even the Emperor isn't interested in reforming the Imperium...

Soooo much that it isn't happening without a civil war (not that they aren't ALREADY suffering constant civil wars... but this would be a bigger one) and they are currently in a war with several galactic destroying super powers... Sooo might want to hold off.
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GiglameshDespair

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8803 on: May 15, 2017, 05:31:24 pm »

Trying to reform it would be the work of generations. Huge, huge amounts of effort would be needed, if it's even possible to fix. Sometimes when the choice is between a sort-of working system and a not-working-while-you-fix-it system you need to just be able to grin and bear the inefficiency.

There's really no difference between size and inefficiency in this regard.

It would help if the Emperor's webway project had succeeded. It only taking a few days to transfer paperwork from one side of the galaxy to the other with no risk of it being eaten by daemons would be a massive boon to record keeping. As is anything that gets so much as transferred via Astropath might as well be fed into a shredder, half of it set on fire and the remains glued together to form a document.
Everything would be so much better, right up until it got sabotaged by the Navigator Guilds.

To me it isn't that the Imperium or even the Emperor isn't interested in reforming the Imperium...
It is pretty difficult to hold discussions on reform when you're dead, it's true.
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Neonivek

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Re: Warhammer 40K thread: from the Warp it cameth forth: Plot Advancement.
« Reply #8804 on: May 15, 2017, 05:37:23 pm »

Wait did the new version actually let the Emperor die and he isn't a Lich?
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