GW News: Combat phase in #NewAoS

well they are the closest thing to "good" guys alongside tau and maybe some of the less stuck up eldar. Imperium, tau & the more friendly eldar are merely trying to survive (and thrive) and are fighting (mostly) in self-defense in a universe filled to the brim with stuff that's trying to horribly horribly murder them. And these three do occasionally trade and participate in diplomacy amongst eachother. And yeah, it kinda makes sense to want to murder all aliens if 99% of em are monstrous beings who want to eat/kill/torture you in some horrific way...

 

I don't know about that, The imperium as a whole is basically the Third Reich. The Adeptus Astartes are space Nazis and the imperial guard is heavily based on troop structure in the soviet union. Even the iconography and propaganda is the same.

It's a dark dark universe and I love it, but I don't think anyone should be under any misconceptions that the space marines are a force for good. They are blind, fanatical zealots and I don't think GW is trying so much to hide this but they definitely don't advertise it

 

It's easy to paint in broad strokes as per the memes though. The Imperium is better described as a feudal and nightmarishly byzantine bureaucracy with each sector and even planetary governor being more or less independent to run their fiefs as they see fit, so long as they pay their taxes and worship the God-Emperor in some way. It's just that no one really wants to read about a rather well-to-do civilized Imperial world that has its shit in order and actually quite pleasant by our standards (at least, not without something or someone screwing it over hard).

Astartes are indeed a terrifying prospect to face against in-universe (they aren't referred to as the Angels of Death for nothing, after all). With that said, the outlook and culture of each chapter runs the gamut from "Risking an entire operation to rescue babies from a burning orphanage" to "Kill them all, let the God-Emperor sort them out". The Battle of Helsreach demonstrates one fine example of two such chapters - Salamanders and Black Templars, respectively - at odds with one another over civilian refugees in the path of a major ork assault on the titular hive-city.

As for the Imperial Guard, despite the common depiction being human wave tactics with political officers to enforce it, the largest military organization in the Milky Way galaxy does in fact enjoy quite a bit of tactical and strategic flexibility with each of its regiments and formations, so long as those higher up the chain know what they're doing.

 

The main reason 40K is so grimdark is due to the story Always focussing on planets where a war is happening, and thus by definition horrible stuff is happening. And who better to send to deal with this horrible stuff than fanatical zealouts literally created to destroy said horrible stuff before it murders you. As @ChapterAquila92 just said, there's plenty of planets (and entire systems) where nothing much happens most of the time and people have fairly decent lives.

And yes the adeptus astartes have loads of zealots, but they also regularly show acts of bravery and heroism to save the innocents. They literally only exist to be humanities shield against the horrors of the universe, and if at any point should humanity overcome those horrors and the astartes should no longer be needed they'd be retired.

Hence humans, tau & eldar are the "good" guys (or at least neutral and capable of of good deeds) whereas the other factions are merely hell-bend on doing horrible things to everyone that isn't them, but in a universe so horrible that "the cause justifies the means" quickly becomes an unavoidable stance as half-measures aren't going to stop your average alien invasion. A 98% casuality rate for stopping that invasion is still better than the entire planet being eaten by tyranids. And yes, that will involve propoganda and loads of other questionable things to keep the population in check, at least in the more horrible places.

 

Nids I can get behind (my 40k army is nids). The lore and mystery for them I love, the way they destroy planets to feed the hive ships I love. It's primal and devoid of politics. Not even the Genestealer cults who helped the invasion are spared (except maybe the Patriarch). That I can get behind. Eldar and Tau are probably the closest to "Good Guys". The Imperium as a whole I still don't think so.

 

I was just going to say this. The vibe I get from a normal “imperial citizen” is basically slavery in some form or another. Like a fascist-communist love child.

I don't think I have read about a planet in the warhammer universe where you can choose to live a life for yourself, maybe that reinforces the point about focussing on the nitty gritty. Milk and honey is boring after all.

 

Bear in mind that 40k is a setting in which everyone is struggling to survive at any cost due to how shitty it is overall. The Eldar will willingly see to it that billions of humans die if it means that they can save one of their own, and the Tau Empire takes on a very Orwellian overtone the more you look at how the Ethereals operate in Tau society and what they do with captured human populations (all for the Greater Good, of course). The fact that the Imperium is both able and willing to such things and more on a far larger scale than either has more to do with its sheer size by comparison (The Tau are barely a blip on the galactic map, and the Eldar are practically an endangered species on the verge of dying out), with nothing to say of its own history, including the apocalyptic Horus Heresy.

You're free to call them evil all you want, but given what they have to deal with those evils are rather necessary and considered paltry compared to the alternatives.

 

I take your point, admittedly I am a bit out of the loop with “recent” 40k lore (or even old 40k lore) to be fair.

I’ve been more of a fantasy man in recent years, and even then my knowledge is a little sketchy outside of Lizardmen

 

Aggri-worlds are supposed to be relativly comfortable, worst case you're a serf breaking your back ploughing fields but at least you have breathable air & get to eat decently (no point in transporting corpse-starch to an aggri-world). And occasionally you'l even get to sit in the sun for a minute or two. Plus, less crowded since they need the space to grow crops. Anything higher than the lowest serf should have it fairly comfortable on an aggriworld.

On hive worlds it depends a lot on were you live. The underhive is horrid. But the higher you go the better it gets. A good representation of it I think is Taris in SW KoToR: the undercity is riddled with crime, monsters, mutants & desease. Virtually noone has any sort of (legal) income. The lower city is riddled with gangs and derelict areas, but you can already get some luxuries and there are legal jobs here and desease is no longer rampant. It's more akin to modern day ghetto's, it's not great and you're probably going to end up shot in a random turfwar but it isn't exactly hell either. And the upper city is clean and for the most part comfortable, no worse than modern day society (apart from maybe the fact that noone has a yard..). With the proper upper class like the gouvernour living in luxury.

Factory worlds are fairly awefull as they're polluted to the extreme. So where hive-worlds eventually start to get comfortable factory worlds really only become comfortable inside the areas for the upper class. Anything below the nobility is kinda screwed.

Also bear in mind the imperium is humongous, a hive city houses anywhere from 10 billion to a 100 billion people and planets can easily have multiple hive cities. Even if 99% of the imperium lived comfortably in the obscene wealth of nobility there'd still be untold billions of people living in abject squalor or in active warzones. So there's plenty of people stuck in one grimdark horror or another to write stories about.

Anyways, the imperium (as a whole) are ultimatly the "good" guys (alongside Tau, and the less stuck up Eldar from there respective points of view). Attempting to protect the innocent, and would if they got the chance build a utopia, doing away with those grimdark horrors and the institutions they themselves created to fight those horrors. There'd obviously be some issues with corrupt governours and powerhungry inquisitors if the alien horrors would dissappear overnight. But ultimatly their goals do boil down to "making the universe a safe and comfortable place for humanity". Hell given enough time the imperium would even be able to overcome it's xenophobia, though that'd probably take the work of several primarchs or the emporer himself to deal with the millenia of indoctrination...

Meh, the killing of inventors has 3 reasons as far as I can tell.

1) It's nice and grimdark, so obviously the writers are adding that no matter how stupid it is.
2) The adeptus mechanicus barely understands anything of what they're doing and how their tools work. So tinkering with it tends to result in disaster. Both cuz you end up accidently breaking stuff they don't know how to fix, and cuz you might accidently blow up half a planet.
3) Technology in general seems to have the nasty tendency of doing horrible things in 40K (see men of iron)

So based on 2& 3 they'd rather be safe than sorry and not allow you to do anything unless they reaaaaaaaally trust you.

It's still kinda dumb though, and mostly due to the whole "it's grimdark so we'l act like idiots even if it doesn't make any sense"

 

No worries.

If there's any other trait that defines 40k, it's the sheer scale of it compared to what's featured in detail. An entire fictitious version of the Milky Way Galaxy - some 200 billion stars or so - and at most there's barely a few thousand worlds known to us, most of which being little more than named footnotes at best.

Just going to correct you on the tau being commies. Eastern-like collectivism aside, their eugenic-based caste system is anathema to what we'd consider to be communism.

If you're referring to the techno-heresy that the Adeptus Mechanicus abhors so much, there is some precedent for it. Much like what @Canas pointed out:

1. The AM believe that the Dark Age of Technology, from whence their coveted Standard Template Constructs (an advanced form of blueprint archive) were created, was the zenith of human technological achievement and that by recovering even partially intact STCs they could usher in a new technological golden age for humanity a lot faster than by trying to reinvent the wheel.
   
2. A lot of what they currently have in their databases has been so thoroughly corrupted by scrap code or lost to time that the only way they can keep things running is by ritualizing barely-legible Haynes manuals.
3. Because of the nature of belief in 40k, machines have spirits that need to be carefully tended to so that bad ju-ju doesn't happen.

With all that said, tech-priests are permitted some degree of innovation, albeit under a lot of scrutiny from their peers and superiors. Not unlike the engineering guilds of the Dawi, actually.

 

I'll just put this right here.... Necrons!

 

Even by your eldricht logic those can't be "good".

 

It's good to be bad!

 

A look at the various non chaos warbands alongside their reasons for showing up which can be summarized as:

Destruction: They're insane and just wanne punch things, there's things to punch here so the various greenskins go and punch things.
Death: Nagash sends his thralls to do stuff. Being undeath most don't mind being near chaos and losing a corpse or two doesn't exactly hurt Nagash in any way shape or form. So it's not like he really risks anything if he wants an artifact or something. And he's arrogant enough to assume he can cleanse anything of any potential chaos corruption.
Also, flesh court "nobles" go cuz they're insane and envision they're doing some quest or some such nonsense.
Order: Somehow the leaders of SCE, fish aelves & DoK have concluded that risking your eternal soul for a minor (corrupted) artifact, a handfull of (corrupted) souls, or to punch some minor warlord in the face is worth the risk. Also, despite the absolutly asthonishing risks going here would pose none of these objectives are worth sending actual armies for some reason.

I guess the greenskins and death motivations make sense, or at least it makes sense they do not care about any of the risks, so the moment they think they stand to gain anything of course they'd go there or send some thralls.

Order on the other hand still seems completly random as why they go there given that everything of value will be corrupted and thus probably useless to them. And since these are only minor warbands, sending an assasin seems rather pointless as well, there's more important targets to assasinate in easier to reach places...