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[Kot]

May be, even if I rarely feel the popularity of it myself.

[Trekkin]

This thread inspired me to go roll up a Necron dynasty on 1d4chan's creation tables. Among other things, I got a Phaeron/akh that harbors a bitter hatred of all life and is obsessed with testing and science.

The idea of GlaDOS as a Phaerakh (presumably with the different Cores as Crypteks) amuses me greatly.

[Rolan7]

Hello! I am relatively new to 40k universe (although I know a thing or two about the factions thanks to the wiki). I got introduced thanks to the games (the "Space Marine" TPS, the chess one and Dawn of War) but for the tabletop game I don't know much. Anyway, I just wanted to ask few things.

On this note, I wonder how people first found this setting?

For me:
Spacehulk-SP:  Open source project, space marines versus genestealers (tyrannids, but before that was even a thing).  A simulation of a board game.

Warhammer (Fantasy) Shadow of the Horned Rat:  Damn good, but too hard for me.  This is where I started to understand the nature of "magic" in this setting, with the pyromancer who tried to wield chaos, for a good cause.  Very tragic.

WH40K Dawn of War:  Probably the best Warhammer-themed video game I've played.  Especially if you count the sequel, which is very different, maybe even better.  (I haven't played 3).

The "official" Spacehulk video game.  Didn't get far.  Was hard to see anything, and turns took too long.  Went for atmosphere, but I was used to rapid tactical gameplay.
... Aheh, I mean the relatively recent Spacehulk TBS.  I did play the groundbreaking Spacehulk Tactical-FPS a bit before Shadow of the Horned Rat.  I didn't like it, but its intention was pretty incredible.  It would make a good movie, but it was frustrating to actually play.  (You had to manage 4 different marines at once, who were basically useless if you didn't switch into them)

There have been a lot of good Warhammer video games, fantasy and modern apparently (I hear the Total War for Fantasy is alright).  And I guess as capstone, I'm pretty happy with WH40K:Space Marine.

I... guess it's an okay introduction to the setting.
I like that I started on Space Hulk, which largely featured sacrificing at least one space marine in a typical mission.  Either by guarding a tricky flanking corridor, or sometimes to stand and delay as the team proceeded.  Space Hulk drove home that these power-armored superhumans were expendable with the stakes involved.

So when I learned about the Imperial Guard, well, yes.  Of course they would be more expendable.  By magnitudes.

[Rolan7]

And on replaying WH40K: Space Marine a bit, I'm still pretty happy with it.

I wouldn't expect it to be especially universe-realistic, as a TPS.  But it catches the major themes surprisingly well.  As did the single player of W40K Dawn of War 2... You cannot defeat the tyrannids on the battlefield.  You can only slow them.

Similar for Dawn of War 1: Dark Crusade and the Necrons.  Oh, you can defeat them.  Knock down their shells, see the metal go inert.  But they're still there.  They're just waiting.  A typical space marine lives centuries...  These remnants of an elder empire have operated for perhaps a million years.  The initial process may have involved stripping their consciousness away, maybe not...  This many years later, nothing is left.

Oh, but a few eccentric personalities are left, and maybe that's the scariest part.

[Trekkin]

Yeah, I found it through Dawn of War as well.

What irritates me though is that sometimes the setting is so grimdark that the characters go beyond stupid. Like, oh I am a general and muh army is made of expendables?! Why don't we throw hundred soldiers in that minefield, let them die, and then throw some new troops?! Who needs explosive-detection devices when you have fresh meat?! Also, FUCKING KUBRIK CHENKOV!

I meant to respond to this and then I forgot. So please forgive my lateness.

Probably the most important thing to understand about the 40k setting is that it's written around a story it is very intentionally not telling: the story of the armies you build and the battles they fight. It's designed so that you can pick up an army you like and fluff them the (reasonable) way you want without somebody being able to say "that couldn't possibly exist because of what it says on Page 3,428 of the single wholly authoritative text that defines how we have to imagine our toy soldiers fighting." If you're inspired by Chaos Space Marines fighting a ten-thousand-year old war for largely personal reasons and the lengths to which they've gone, great; you can totally put together some veterans of the Long War. If you would rather they be crazed demon-worshiping lunatics bereft of honor or reason for your guys to righteously slay, there's plenty of those running around the setting too. The same is true of every faction in the game, and it helps to read the fiction while bearing in mind that the individual authors have that level of creative freedom. Particularly when the Guard are antagonists, it makes sense to play up their expendability to contrast with the viewpoint faction's quality-over-quantity approach. In short, everything ever written about the 40k fluff should be assumed to be from an in-universe point of view, rather than objectively true, because everyone picks a version of the contradictory parts to believe anyway.

That said, yes, the Guard spending men like water is one of the sillier aspects of the setting, but it can make a certain kind of sense. I have a headcanon that I find makes it more believable; perhaps it will enhance your enjoyment of 40k.

The internal efficiency of the Imperium is one of the more flexible aspects of 40k, and if you choose to believe the more systemically broken descriptions of the Adeptus Administratum, then it follows logically that the Departmento Munitorum is doing a very spotty job of supplying the Guard with everything they need. That's part of why flak jackets and lasguns are more valuable than men: when the Munitorum supply transport ends up on the other end of the galaxy or a hundred years in the past or sent empty by mistake, weapons and armor can be easily restored to functionality when the next transport arrives. Starved or sickened soldiers cannot. Similarly, while a lasgun can be recharged in a fire and a Chimaera can run on anything that will burn, a Guardsman is still human, with a human's manifold and specific supply needs at the mercy of a gigantic bureaucracy. Thus, the Guard are perhaps seen as expendable because they are perishable; it is only a matter of time before a regiment recieves promethium instead of water or forks instead of food or spare parts instead of medical supplies, at which point every trooper in that regiment is a finite time away from becoming ineffective. If they think they're going to lose the use of their men anyway, a sufficiently fatalistic commander may well choose to expend them, reasoning that their inevitable deaths in mine clearance or doomed charges will serve more of a purpose than their equally inevitable deaths by dehydration or disease.

[Archibald]

Rolan, is Shadow of the Horned Rat sorta like Total War? Man do I suck at those types of games. I am more of a Settlers-type (basically, you build your own empire/city/whatever and then go to war, only problem is that I am peaceful most of the times, so when I really have to wage war I just create a random mix of soldiers and zerg rush them to the enemy  )

But yeah, Space Marine is what got me into the universe. Bonus points for being a TPS. Hopefully they will make more games like it.

SPOILER WARNING!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I just don't like how they proclaimed Titus as a heretic despite him killing Chaos-aligned things and saving a manufactorum world that is relevant to the imperium. Also, couldn't they put some more types of daemons? Asking because I get a feeling that khornate daemons are your generic mook in most settings, despite the fact that there are three more types of them (4 if you count Malal ones, yes I read that part).

[My Name is Immaterial]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I just don't like how they proclaimed Titus as a heretic despite him killing Chaos-aligned things and saving a manufactorum world that is relevant to the imperium. Also, couldn't they put some more types of daemons? Asking because I get a feeling that khornate daemons are your generic mook in most settings, despite the fact that there are three more types of them (4 if you count Malal ones, yes I read that part).

Oh-ho-ho, you've stumbled upon an important question in the lore! Two actually:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Firstly: the Imperium is SUPER antsy about Chaos. If anyone besides the Grey Sues, I mean the Mary Knights, I mean the Grey Knights has to fight Chaos, there will often be a backup force waiting to execute them, so they can never speak of what they saw. Chaos is that contagious, which is why the Guard has their Commissars, Space Marines have their Chaplains, and so on. Frankly, knowing the word "Chaos" is probably enough to make you a heretic in the eyes of most Inquisitors.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Secondly: Daemon's do not get along with other daemons. You'll never see a Bloodletter next to a Plaguebearer, unless it's a Black Crusade thing. The Chaos Gods and their followers do not get along. I'll let someone else more awake and knowledgeable elaborate.

[Archibald]

I get that they don't get along. What I mean is, why going through the pain of making multiple mooks if you are going to use just one of them the whole time? Why don't you in one setting place khornate daemons and in the other Slaneeshi ones (I am not talking about plot here)? Seems to me that the khornate daemons are the Chaos version of Ultramarines or something.

[Loud Whispers]

-snip-
A drafted ganger, prisoner or feral tribesman is probably worth less than even the standard loadout, partly due to being a drain on resources normally. There's plenty more just like them where they came from and despite often already being decent combatants they're still 50 to a penny as it were.
As for the rest of that, yeah pretty much. The guard are the Hammer of the Emperor after all. Brute force and weight of numbers eventually solves most problems. Provided you have the ability to reinforce your guardsmen, which is surprisingly uncommon because of how much the navy has on it's plate, you can throw an arbitrary number of men at any problem.

Agreed on all but I think even with gangers and ferals, there's a bit of leeway in that the gangers will be bringing their own equipment which would no doubt cover for administratum shortfalls, and the ferals would be used to fighting with anywhere from medieval to stone age technology

[LordBaal]

I found out about warhammer thanks to Dawn of War on a very happy afternoon in a cybercoffe near a place I used to work. It was love at first sight.

[Grim Portent]

I get that they don't get along. What I mean is, why going through the pain of making multiple mooks if you are going to use just one of them the whole time? Why don't you in one setting place khornate daemons and in the other Slaneeshi ones (I am not talking about plot here)? Seems to me that the khornate daemons are the Chaos version of Ultramarines or something.

Because the Chaos gods are all part of the same faction but with the army roles filled by different gods/daemons.

In a rules sense Khorne and his daemons were made to be the hard hitting melee daemons, Slaanesh the fast death by a thousand cuts daemons, nurgle the tanky daemons and Tzeentch the magical/shooty daemons. Most armies in 40k have various units for different roles and this usually winds up with some units being super specialised.

The reason Khorne gets used as much as he does is that he is the easiest to use from a thematic standpoint. There's no plotting, no scheming and no magic to work into plots or events, it's just violent super warriors who stab things. When marketing to non-40k people it's best to use a daemon that is fairly generic, and Khorne is basically the generic one at a basic level.

[scriver]

I think Warhammer is just atypically popular in Poland. I've heard several times that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay long eclipsed DnD as the primary tabletop game in Poland, and so 40k stuff is probably similar.

I'm not so sure that is a meaningful metric; while I have no knowledge of the Poles' preferences in rpgs specifically, DnD tends to be much less hegemonic in Europe than it is in the US and countries tend to have very influential rpg systems of it's own (such as German Dark Eye/Schwartze Auge and Swedish Drakar och Demoner/Dragons and Demons) which tends to dominate their home markets. It wouldn't surprise me if Poland had something similar of their own or used Schwartze Auge.

[Mech#4]

Rolan, is Shadow of the Horned Rat sorta like Total War? Man do I suck at those types of games. I am more of a Settlers-type (basically, you build your own empire/city/whatever and then go to war, only problem is that I am peaceful most of the times, so when I really have to wage war I just create a random mix of soldiers and zerg rush them to the enemy  )

Shadow of the Horned Rat has a linear campaign consisting of missions with a few branching paths. Battles are in real time though I remember the controls being rather difficult to get used to with buttons for rotating units, charging and rallying. Though, looking at some videos it seems like the version you can get from Gog.com has a better interface with buttons for setting move waypoints and engage targets.
A neat aspect of the game is the consistant nature of your forces. Over battles you will find items, take damage, gain new units and earn gold. You can give items to units to give them bonuses and there's good emphasis on keeping your units alive so they grow in strength over missions rather than spending money on replenishing them.

There was also a sequel called "Warhammer: Dark Omen". I think it focused on the Vampire Counts as the main enemy but it's not available on Gog.com.

[Rolan7]

Rolan, is Shadow of the Horned Rat sorta like Total War? Man do I suck at those types of games. I am more of a Settlers-type (basically, you build your own empire/city/whatever and then go to war, only problem is that I am peaceful most of the times, so when I really have to wage war I just create a random mix of soldiers and zerg rush them to the enemy  )

I actually never realized, but yes, it's *very* similar to Total War's tactical battles (but with a mostly linear 30-mission campaign).  Even tracks the individual fighters in units, such that colliding armies collide into melees.  The graphics are kinda 2.5D, like Doom or Populous The Beginning, but the basic mechanics of charging cavalry into non-pikemen and such are similar.  Just with magic items and Warhammer's rather... shifty magic system.

I'm not any good at such games either, and unfortunately this one has Homeworld mechanic where your losses carry over from fight to fight.  You're not technically forced to reload after taking losses, but the rest of the game will be even harder.  I find mechanics like that cool in theory, but very frustrating when you don't know how well you're expected to do.

But yeah, it's a tough tactics game.  No grand strategy machinations to save us
(Thanks Mech#4 you helpful ninja)

SPOILER WARNING!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I just don't like how they proclaimed Titus as a heretic despite him killing Chaos-aligned things and saving a manufactorum world that is relevant to the imperium. Also, couldn't they put some more types of daemons? Asking because I get a feeling that khornate daemons are your generic mook in most settings, despite the fact that there are three more types of them (4 if you count Malal ones, yes I read that part).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

First, I misread the name at first and thought you were talking about someone from Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising.  Someone who used chaos to fight chaos, and inevitably fell.  Still fighting chaos, but also for chaos, because there's no contradiction there and it's subtly corruptive.  It's kinda a theme of the setting

Titus might be in the same boat, eventually, he hasn't been exposed for much time at all.  His strange "immunity" could be a few things, but a strong possibility is Tzeentch using him for some keikaku.  Being able to use the device without harm, with no explanation, really is super suspicious.  Even if he's completely loyal, he could be an unwitting pawn.

[Tack]

I bought the guard codex today.
Haven't really read much but feel free to AMA.

For starters, they address Cadia blowing up. Apparently new regiments are literally being bred from the old ones and raised and trained on their way to new war zones.
Which says a lot about the maternity leave policy.