Was the IG as grimdark during great crusade? With shitty gear and comissars blamming you for shits and giggles and stuff.
I dont know anything about table top except, that it is played with miniatures. How does it feel to be flanked with baneblade or titan?
Does any of you, bay12yers, have any awesome stories of tactical genius happening with you/ pulling that of with someone? Are there any DEVASTATING DEEP STRIKE RULES working like that?
Was not the total incompetence the exclusive lore feature of 90 % IG commanders?
What is the most glorius tank in imperial arsenal?
Is camo cloak making someone nearly invisible high tech thing, or it is just camouflage cloak, so your yellow armour suit looks a bit less obvious in forest?
How did imperium even fight against tau, if they had stealth suits, night vision gear and stuff like that?
Are there any cases of imperium genociding eldar/ tau, like blowing up sept world or eldar ship worlds?
The Imperial Army, the Great Crusade version of the Imperial Guard was more of an auxillary force to back up the Space Marine Legions and occupy conquered worlds. They were better equipped and trained on average than the guard are and were by and large treated better. Due to the waning power of the Imperium it needs large numbers of soldiers more than it needs elite warriors, so the guard are given easier to make but less potent tech and spend less time training. Like most things the 30K army was less grimdark than the 40k one.
Honestly being flanked by superheavies is more annoying than anything else. If you both have superheavies it means your own ones got to blast at the enemy army for a turn with no equivalent retaliation, but the outflanking one gets a chance to shoot yours in the side armour. Doesn't happen often because it's honestly not that great a trick.
Most Outflank stories are from older editions, newer versions of the same sort of stuff usually work off Deep Strike formations that let you charge when you arrive.
The vast bulk of Guard Commanders are actually meant to be very competent, very
very competent in fact, they just rarely have much hesitation to do horrible things we'd consider foolish wastes of men since men are the thing they have the most of. Of the Commanders with printed rules Knight-Commander Pask is probably the least competent, since he can't command very well but is instead just great at driving and fighting in his tank.
Most glorious is probably one of the Baneblade variants. The Stormsword is a pretty neat piece of pre-heresy kit that is no longer made.
Camo cloaks are made of some sort of reactive material, they change colour and texture to match the terrain around the wearer. They only work properly when staying quite still of course, but that's true of most camouflage.
Tau stealth tech is still detectable, and only found on a small number of their units. That and being invisible doesn't help when the enemy has enough men to literally drown you in blood and corpses if they want to and enough artillery to turn night into day. The Tau just get ground down by the sledgehammer that is the guard while their leadership gets taken out in precision strikes by Space Marines. Most fights the Tau have 'won' is just because the Imperium had to go deal with something that's actually a threat, like Chaos, Orks or Tyranids. It's important to remember that thought Tau tech is slightly better than the Imperium's, it's still behind the Dark Age of Technology relics the Imperium possess and the Tau empire is only about a hundred worlds in size compared to the millions of worlds in the Imperium.
The Imperium has destroyed a few Tau worlds in the 2nd and 3rd expansions of the Tau empire, but it usually doesn't bother. Tau worlds can be reclaimed just fine unlike those of Chaos or Orks, so exterminatus is usually only done to them to deny the Tau ground and destroy any military assets they have present. As for genociding the Eldar Craftworlds... I think the Imperium killed one, and lost most a segmentum fleet to do so. It's one of the hardest tasks in the Galaxy and since Eldar are usually peaceful enough to ignore it's not a common thing. Especially since the other Craftworlds will destroy a hundred humans worlds in revenge.