Good anti-Imperium of Man fappery essays.

magnuskn · Post by **magnuskn** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 4:28 pm

Koumei wrote:I'm not going to fault the Imperium for its attitude on other races. Because every single time they've even met another race, said race expressed the desire to wipe them out to the last. So by the time the Tau came along, it's just a natural survival instinct to say "Fuck it, give me a plasma cannon, I'll sort this out". If they had thought to develop FTL technology (ie get written up earlier), then they could have established good relations before the orks, eldar, necrons and tyranids turned them off the idea.

Waitasecond, I thought it was Imperial policy forever to wipe out every other sentient race they discover as soon as possible after contact? And the Tau just were lucky that their homeworld got caught in a warp storm soon after being discovered.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 4:34 pm

magnuskn wrote:
Koumei wrote:I'm not going to fault the Imperium for its attitude on other races. Because every single time they've even met another race, said race expressed the desire to wipe them out to the last. So by the time the Tau came along, it's just a natural survival instinct to say "Fuck it, give me a plasma cannon, I'll sort this out". If they had thought to develop FTL technology (ie get written up earlier), then they could have established good relations before the orks, eldar, necrons and tyranids turned them off the idea.
Waitasecond, I thought it was Imperial policy forever to wipe out every other sentient race they discover as soon as possible after contact? And the Tau just were lucky that their homeworld got caught in a warp storm soon after being discovered.

Not during the Great Crusade, not the way I remember Horus Rising. (Or was it False Gods?)

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 5:08 pm

Err?
I only remember Fulgrim going apeshit and killing a bunch of eldar on one of their paradise worlds . .
He found the world, it was perfect enough for him to love it immediately.
And then when the eldar appeared:"Greetings, what brings you to our home?" he killed them all in disgust and i think glassed the world afterwards.

The only major contact the Tau and the Empire had was in the one crusade after they got uppity. And then the empire had the slight problem with a hive fleet descending on ultramar and needing the manpower there.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 5:20 pm

Great Crusade policy did not include exterminating nonhumans. A number of the Primarchs were pretty fucked up in the head even before the Heresy.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 5:58 pm

And i misremembered as well.
He killed them because they told him that Horus was gonna snap soon.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 10:44 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If GW has to shitdark up one of the factions because they can't think of enough reasons to motivate people into blowing up a random squadron of Tau without making them another needlessly villainous faction, then they just suck dog dick.

While I seriously doubt that GW grimdark'd the Tau in order to make people like me happy rather than because they have a juvenile obsession with making everything suck and/or didn't like how the Tau were a straightforward and canonical proof that the Imperium's extreme measures were, far from necessary, actually harmful, I personally don't want just any excuse to blow up the Tau. Almost any faction from almost any setting can be fought for depressing reasons like resource shortages or a miscommunication escalating conflict past the point of no return before it gets resolved. But slaughtering thousands because you have no choice is not fun in the same way as slaughtering thousands because those thousands are all individually jackasses who drown puppies for fun.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Fri Oct 10, 2014 11:12 pm

The satisfaction of triumphing over puppy-drowners is somewhat diminished by the fact that there are no factions to play as which do not drown puppies.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Oct 11, 2014 3:48 am

I invent my own. Rogue planetary governor intending to subvert the Imperium for great justice is my usual route. I'm aware that's not really the intent of having no good factions, but accidental or not it is a feature of the setting for me.

EDIT: Uprising of Tau who believe in Tau propaganda and thus have come to despise grimdark Tau reality would be another viable route. Chaos warband seeking to restore balance to Chaos is another. Small Eldar craftworld who see hubris as being ultimately responsible for the Fall, and that by going on embracing their delusions of superiority the other craftworlds will never be able to defeat Chaos or restore the Eldar to their former glory. Orks led by crazy but very large warboss who leads his horde to become the Batmen of the galaxy, beating up on aggressors to keep the peace. And so on.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Sat Oct 11, 2014 4:37 am

Chamomile wrote:Orks led by crazy but very large warboss who leads his horde to become the Batmen of the galaxy, beating up on aggressors to keep the peace.

...you lost me. Orkz don't want peace. They want to fight. You could sell me on a warboss taking a protection racket legitimately: conquering a world and instead of killing everybody, just asking for a tribute of guns and trukks, and if he catches wind that some Tau fucker is trying to plunder his turf, he points the Waaagh back there to protect his suppliers.

But peace? Orks use the same word for "peace" that they use for "insanity".

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Oct 11, 2014 6:59 am

Zaranthan wrote:But peace? Orks use the same word for "peace" that they use for "insanity".

Chamomile wrote:Orks led by crazy but very large warboss who leads his horde to become the Batmen of the galaxy, beating up on aggressors to keep the peace.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat Oct 11, 2014 8:24 am

Ork waaagh sweeps into imperium controlled desert deathworld and tirelessly plants trees. In a generation's passing it is now green and verdant. Fly off in sustainable bio-squig fueled organic-sustainable ships made of hollowed out asteroids and into the warp, ready to be spit back out towards some lonesome world that needs them.

"GREEN IZ BEST"

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat Oct 11, 2014 9:13 am

The orks are Troll enough to actually do something like that.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Sun Oct 12, 2014 2:32 pm

Chamomile wrote:
Zaranthan wrote:But peace? Orks use the same word for "peace" that they use for "insanity".

Chamomile wrote:Orks led by crazy but very large warboss who leads his horde to become the Batmen of the galaxy, beating up on aggressors to keep the peace.

Also, 40K is grimderp enough that Ork Batman may simply be able to count on never, ever running out of violent uprisings to squish with Waaagh! Batman.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Sun Oct 12, 2014 8:50 pm

Chamomile wrote:Orks led by crazy but very large warboss who leads his horde to become the Batmen of the galaxy, beating up on aggressors to keep the peace.

Crazy by OUR standards. Orks are supposed to be gonzo. If you're an ork, and somebody proposes a course of action that leads to LESS violence, you think that guy's nuts.

Count Arioch the 28th · Sun Oct 12, 2014 8:59 pm

Hmm, now I want to play an ork warband that specifically picks out Chaos and Necron and Tyranid targets, not because they're evil, but because they are the most fun to fight.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Oct 12, 2014 11:39 pm

That is in fact a completely reasonable decision for Orks to make (and one they often do make when given the choice). Necrons because they get up and let you hit them again. Chaos because it's like Space Marines (which are good proper 'urty and take a right baffing) except more violent, plus a possibly endless bunch of daemons in need of a good slap. Tyranids because you never run out of them and most of them want to run up close and make the fighting happen where orks like the fighting to be.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sun Oct 12, 2014 11:44 pm

I remember reading about some planet where either the imperium or much more likely the eldar threw a waaagh into the way of an incoming tyrannid hive fleet and the orks fought them to a stand still and simply kept fighting them at that level for quite some time. while the tyrannids evolved more and more to be able to kill orks better and better because they kept eating them there, the orks evolved/learned/grew more and more to be able to kill nids better and better because they were there to fight . .

and somewhere else i think i remember reading about some waaghboss going into cadia and other hell worlds to prepare his boyz for a trip to the eye of terror. where they found themselves a khornate demon world. they got killed, but then they got resurrected to be fought and killed again. basically, the demons who thought they'd be making life hell for the orks gave them their valhalla:"See ya gits! i know da best places to krump! even if ya get dead, ya get to do it again soon anyway!"

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sun Oct 12, 2014 11:55 pm

You're probably thinking of the Kryptman Gambit, where an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor decoyed Hive Fleet Leviathan into a cluster of Ork-held worlds. The Imperium generally considers this to be a major fuckup because either the Tyranids will win, eat a bunch of biomass and develop new forms then keep rampaging, or the Orks win and start looking for someone else to beat up.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 4:03 am

name_here wrote:You're probably thinking of the Kryptman Gambit, where an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor decoyed Hive Fleet Leviathan into a cluster of Ork-held worlds. The Imperium generally considers this to be a major fuckup because either the Tyranids will win, eat a bunch of biomass and develop new forms then keep rampaging, or the Orks win and start looking for someone else to beat up.

That's retarded. If successfully getting one enemy to murder the other is played in the fiction as a fuckup then that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It makes no sense on any level.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 4:10 am

Tyranids eat their own and enemy dead to refill on biomass, so if they win they'll much more than replenish their casualties, and the fighting is attracting massive hordes of Orks from all over, so if they win they'll have quite possibly the biggest concentration of Orks in history all united under one Warboss.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 5:16 am

If we accept that fighting the Tyranids only adds to their numbers then nothing in the entire setting makes sense. We must accept that fighting the Tyranids is an effective way to fight the Tyranids. Every piece of the setting that interacts with the Tyranids mandates that to be true. If that is not true then the setting should be called "The Tyranid Show" and the tagline should be "In the 41st millenium, there are only Tyranids".

If the Tyranids win, having fought a long and costly battle, then fighting them then would mean they are weaker than they otherwise would have been anytime before then or after then. If the Orks win, having fought a long and costly battle, the same holds true for them. It's impossible that getting Enemy Force A to fight Enemy Force B would have the fight end with with an Enemy Force greater than A+B.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 5:54 am

Stahlseele wrote:The orks are Troll enough to actually do something like that.

"REDUCE, RE-USE, RECYCLE"
-Deffskulls motto

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 6:48 am

Zaranthan wrote:Crazy by OUR standards. Orks are supposed to be gonzo. If you're an ork, and somebody proposes a course of action that leads to LESS violence, you think that guy's nuts.

Are you trying to convince me that I misunderstood myself or something? Yes, the ork warboss is crazy by ork standards, which makes him sane by ours. So what?

We must accept that fighting the Tyranids is an effective way to fight the Tyranids.

The Tyranids only lose strength when they are defeated. If they can't stick around on the planet to eat their dead and reuse the biomass, they actually do lose forces. For the reverse side, orks have no grand strategy and only act slightly like a united faction because they'd rather fight non-orks than orks. So if you have ten groups of a thousand orks all going in random directions, that's a lot better than one group of five thousand orks all in one place. Although the total number of orks is smaller, the amount of military force required to hunt down ten small packs is in fact greater than to defeat one far larger army (unless for some reason you must fight all ten at once, but you don't, the Imperium can totally sacrifice a few planets).

With that said, the Tyranids are absolutely, far and away, without even the slightest realistic possibility of anyone turning things around, going to win the war in the end, partly because of that but mostly because they have anywhere between 7-8 and hundreds of galaxies worth of biomass coming, and their very next hive fleet will strike hard enough to utterly destroy the Imperium unless it can somehow quintuple its forces in time to counter it. And even if the Imperium manages to quadruple its military power, it won't even make things any easier on the other factions, because anytime the Tyranids win any battle they always become stronger, no matter how much damage they took in the process. Basically Games Workshop just didn't think ahead when writing that fluff at all (nor do they have to, since the timeline progresses in reverse).

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 6:54 am

I understand the 'Nids get boned by fire and acid. If you use those weapons, or scorch the bodies of the dead when you can, you can actually out-attrition them. The problem is the Tyranids tend to retreat and leave once they've run into enough losses, so you won't exterminate them.

Also, Necrons. I think they're supposed to be generally freaked out by the tyranids, now that the Necrons are fluffed as having sapient leaders. I understand they're supposed to be opposed to the 'nids.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 6:56 am

@Dean: The tyranid war effort runs solely on biomass, and dead tyranids are biomass. Also, tyranids are impossibly swift and efficient at collecting biomass and converting it into war resources (it's magic soft sci-fi, I ain't gotta explain shit). Tyranids have a non-conventional war industry that runs on super sci-fi corpse recycling bullshit, and conventional analysis doesn't really apply. In the short-term, turning a tyranid into a tyranid corpse means you have one less tyranid trying to kill you. In the long-term, turning a tyranid into a tyranid corpse means you have added one more tyranid corpse's worth of biomass to the planet for the tyranids to later consume.

You defeat tyranids by preventing them from holding territory long enough to harvest it OR you glass planets until there is no usable biomass to harvest. Every tyranid corpse you deny them is a step forwards, and every non-tyranid corpse you let them have is a step backwards. The correct strategy is a fighting retreat in which you glass planets as you go. So, yeah, if the tyranids win, they get a bunch of resources they didn't have before (ork corpses) and get to reclaim all the resources they used in the war (tyranid corpses).

But orks on the other hand... the idea that orks (who operate on much more conventional rules) could narrowly win a protracted war at great cost and come out stronger is stupid as fuck. I think the official explanation is that the Warboss in charge will instantly turn on the Imperium to keep his horde from falling apart due to infighting. But that doesn't change the fact that his horde will be beaten and bloodied by the tyranids, and every orc that flocked to fight the tyranids is an orc that flocked from somewhere else. Orks winning is a fantastic outcome. Tyranids winning is awful.