Simon_Jester wrote:All else being considered, I'd rather be somewhere else. But if that's what I had to work with, that's what I'd do: dismount and fight as dragoons while screaming for armor and infantry support.
But Mogul Kamir is a ridiculous lunatic.
Actually, given the circumstances I can't blame them for charging. Dismounting and fighting as dragoons may sound logical and all, but again realize that their weaponry is limited to pistol-sized weapons, with very short range. The Necrons meanwhile have access to plenty of long-ranged weaponry.
So while dismounting and fighting as infantry may make it harder for the Necrons to kill the cavalry, the cavalry probably won't be doing much damage in return. With a massed charge, they at least get to take a good bunch of the enemy with them. It's either "Die slowly to superior ranged firepower and kill a few Necrons with lucky potshots" or "Die quickly but take some of them with us due to our lance charge!"
Yes. Mogul Kamir is a ridiculous lunatic. That's what it comes down to- also, the guys at Games Workshop don't know much about real 20th century cavalry tactics, in which "dismount and fight as dragoons" is pretty much the first thing on the list.
If I were trying to create a cavalry force in 40k with the stated advantages of Rough Riders in the codex, (mobility without high fuel consumption and maintenance issues) I'd arm them heavily with melta and las weapons- ones that break down into manpack versions, or that can be towed on a light chassis by a single horse, the way wheeled heavy weapons show up on the tabletop models.
Hm. Is there some fundamental reason why multilasers aren't a heavy weapons option for the Guard?
Tactics would be to, yes, dismount and fight as dragoons. "Hunting lances" would be a rather trivial afterthought.
But GW doesn't let you do that. And it's a silly exercise anyway; it's just the least bad way to set things up given that you're so lacking in mechanized mobile warfare assets that you resort to horse cavalry for God's sake.
Rough Riders aren't a very popular option in the current Codex, and dragoons are how they
should be equipped if GW was sane. There's no reason that a Rough Rider squad shouldn't have a heavy weapon (i.e. Lascannon) rather than just being equipped with pistol-sized special weapons.
As it stands though, the lance charge
is a semi-effective one-shot weapon on the tabletop. You send the cavalry in, have them kill some heavy infantry (or even tanks), and recognize they're dead by the next round. At that point, they've done their duty anyway and they were cheaper than the guys they killed.
To be fair fluff-wise, Rough Rider regiments are supposed to be rare and only come from a few rare planets (and they are just as rare on the tabletop after the introduction of improved Hellhound variants and Air Cavalry assets to take up the Fast Attack slots). But then again you've got the Death Korps Krieg with their own Rough Rider regiments... despite supposedly being trench warfare maniacs.
There is also no reason why the Multi-laser shouldn't be a HW option for a Guard squad, but the Heavy Bolter honestly fills the same niche already.
Yes, but the Imperium can't realistically expect 2:1 Titan:Titan losses all the time, that would be ridiculous if they're fighting opponents of comparable strength. Sort of like how we don't really expect Space Marines to beat Chaos Marines at 2:1 odds realistically, even if there are novels where this happens.
It makes more sense to expect 1:1 losses between Titan-scale war machines, and then the question is: is losing 100 tanks more or less important than losing one Titan? I don't think that can be answered trivially.
Which is why I nonetheless said that the best way to kill Titans was with small teams and orbital bombardment.
Sending massed "anything" against Titans is a waste. Because Titans can concentrate firepower to a much greater degree than tanks.
If you have one Titan fight 100 tanks, what will happen is this: Titan shows up and surprises the tanks (because it's faster and has better electronic jamming), and blows up 10+ tanks in the first volley. The tanks try to coordinate and counter-attack. Maybe some of them start firing back, but they lack the firepower to rupture the void shields. Others bark for instructions. By the time the tanks are ready to attack the Titan with massed counter-fire the Titan has already blown up 20 more tanks and is already gone.
And that of course assumes that the tanks are even able to coordinate that well. Titanicus actually demonstrates how hard it is to coordinate sufficient firepower to rupture void shields - i.e. how they destroyed the Imperator-class Chaos Titan using massed coordinated fire from dozens of Titans.
So, again:
To kill a Titan, you need two things: Massed firepower, and the ability to deliver
all of it simultaneously and accurately in one go.
If you're a Titan, you want one thing: Lots of enemies clumped up together, so you are inflicting maximum casualties with every high-power shot. You're firing the equivalent of small tactical nukes, you want massed enemies, not dispersed enemies.
Massed tank are again therefore the stupid thing to send against Titans. They can do massed firepower, but not deliver it simultaneously and accurately ine one go (hence cannot kill Titans effectively). Meanwhile, being massed makes them easy targets for Titans (making them easily killed by Titans). It is classic pitting weakness against strength.
The things that can reliably kill a Titan are orbital bombardment (with accurate spotting), and another Titan. Massed time-on-target artillery might also work, but they'd be vulnerable to a Titan who finds the arty park.
Zinegata, 40k regiments tend to be very large: in modern terms we'd probably call them "brigades" or even "divisions." A force that size usually will have organic armor support, because while it doesn't always fight alone, it's supposed to be able to at least get something done without crying for help.
And the US military didn't exactly send only one Brigade against Iraq, did it? It didn't even send just one Division.
So again, sending a lone "regiment" against an entire world is really on the ridiculous side, unless it is of a very limited geograhical area, in which case an "independent brigade" would suffice.
("Organic" means "built into the unit:" for instance, an infantry company where each squad has a machine gun has "organic" machine guns at the squad level, whereas one where all the machine guns belong to a single heavy weapons platoon does not)
Note that I did not say there shouldn't be any regiments fully capable of independent action. In fact I said these regiments should have a special designation (i.e. "Independent Brigade").
What I'm saying that
it may not be practical to have all your regiments have this capability. Your building blocks come from a world that may not be able to produce tanks.
40k regiments are sometimes but not always dispatched to fight campaigns at the army group level. The Imperium fights a lot of small wars and deals with a lot of small problems, where all that gets dispatched to deal with something is a single squad of Astartes or a single Guard regiment. Check the Sandy Mitchell and Dan Abnett novels for plenty of examples of this. Sometimes, a single Guard regiment will be literally the only Imperial fighting force on the planet, either because the threat and the objective to be covered are small, or because they're there to 'stiffen' the local forces by acting as heavy-duty reinforcements.
Actually, if you'd notice, the Ghosts seriously
never fight any battles without other Imperial forces also on the planet. In fact, the ONLY novel wherein they are the ONLY "Imperial Guard Regiment" on the planet is in Straight Silver, but that's totally irrelevant since they were there to support and advise the much larger PDF forces.
Single squad Astartes actions are also almost always limited to one specific facility.
Again, if the area of operations is as big as
East Timor, then sure it makes sense to only send a regiment. But that's seriously NOT what most Imperial campaigns end up as.
So no, the Imperium doesn't run all its campaigns at the army group level. That's just the level at which the top ranks of the bureaucracy get involved. There won't always be an army group physically present in the zone of operations, or even on the same planet, when a Guard regiment finds itself in combat.
Hence why I said there is a place for independent brigades.
As you allude to later...
There is nothing stopping the Guard from having both individual armored companies semi-permanently attached to individual (brigade-sized) regiments and dedicated armored regiments that consist of a mass of tanks with a little mechanized infantry attached so they don't utterly fuck up when confronted with difficult terrain. You use the integrated companies to keep the infantry from getting their asses kicked when a bunch of Chaos Dreadnoughts show up, and the massed formations to deal with assaults straight through a giant mass of orks or whatever.
Actually, having individual armored companies semi-permanently attached to individual regiments will happen if you follow what I said - create permanent army groups. And having dedicated armour regiments (or simply the ability to pool all of those detached armour companies) is STILL gonna happen within permanent army groups.
This isn't gonna happen easily with ad-hoc army groups. Because with a permanent army group you at least a clear chain of command and responsibilities.
For instance, let's say you've got the Zinegata's 3rd Army Group. It consists of 6 regiments of foot-slogging Cadians, 2 regiments of Mech Cadians, 2 of Pardus Tankers, and 2 of Mordian Heavy artillery.
Because I know that I'm always going to have these forces permanently under my control, I can earmark 1 Pardus tank regiment to be split amongst the 6 infantry regiments for infantry support. Likewise, I may be able to distribute some artillery from 1 Mordian arty regiment for close-up arty support. Meanwhile, the other Pardus Tank regiment will be paired up with the two Mech Cadian regiments to be my mobile reserve, and the remaining Mordian artillery will be the army reserve. The advantage of this is that everyone knows what they're supposed to do and what their responsibilities are, and this can be maintained from campaign to campaign.
Better yet, because I'm working with several guys on a permanent basis, I may be able to actually create an intervening level of command between the Army Group and the individual regiments. So instead of micromanaging 12 different regiments, I can assign two "brigadiers" to manage my regiments for me (Say two "frontline" brigadiers with 3 Cadian footsloggers apiece, and one "reserve" brigadier in charge of the reserves).
By contrast, what happens if this force was given to me ad-hoc? I'm gonna have to argue (at the start of every campaign) with the two Pardus tank commanders and convince one of them to split their regiment up to support the infantry. Same with the Mordians. And then what if some of the Cadian infantry regiment commanders demand I give them even more tanks? Do I just call in the Commissars and remind them that I'm in charge? (and all of the bad blood that will entail?)
Nothing in the "permanent army groups" suggestion interferes with the Guard's ability to detach units at even the
company or
platoon level to ensure there are combined-arms forces at the front.
As ot the "relevance on the strategic scale" issue, the way you wrote this, I don't think you were allowing for the range of different scales on which Imperial strategy has to function. A ten thousand man combat unit is big enough to need an experienced CO, a staff, a complex table of organization and a very detailed and extensive logistics train- you can't just treat it like you'd treat a squad. But at the same time, compared to a galaxy-sized war where you might conceivably have to deploy a hundred million men (ten thousand of those units) to a single planet out of several that are being contested in the war... yeah, that unit is small and not especially important and will not normally be regarded as 'independent' by the top level command structure.
Except that having a clear distiction between an Army Group and an Independent Brigade does actually make the distinction in scale already. "If you must take a city, send an Indie Brigade. If you want to take a planet, send an Army Group."
If you wanna go higher, that's what Crusades are for. "If you want to conquer a whole sector, then put several Army Groups together under one command and call it a Crusade". Otherwise, the Army Groups just report to Segmentum command.
There
needs be some kind of intervening unit scale between regiment and the High Lords of Terra that exists on a permanent basis.
So you need a system that can embrace both "we need a hundred million men to defend Planet Factorium from the Nibble-Pibblies" and "we need ten thousand men to put down a revolt in the capital of Bob's World." Which means your ten thousand man units really ought to be flexible; you can't just take the Table of Organization for a generic infantry platoon, multiply by 300 of the things, and say "here, this is a ten thousand man 'regiment.' " A combat unit created by taking a platoon or company-sized unit and cloning it a hundred times will seldom be very helpful except under unusual conditions (like the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, where a force of several thousand light infantry can find useful employment, granted).
The issue, which I keep pointing out, is that the
building blocks (the regiments) cannot really follow a galaxy-wide TO&E, because they are raised on a per-world basis, and each world has its own quirks. If you're recruiting from a feral world, you're probably getting 100,000 conscripts. You can't really ask them for tanks.
So you need to put those 100,000 conscripts into a BIGGER unit that has other supporting arms to make sure they aren't wiped out. That unit has to be the
permanent Army Group - it's big enough to fight for a whole world, and it can absorb multiple "building blocks".
It cannot be done at the regimental level, because for it to have all the supporting arms it needs to import
company or battalion-sized units, most likely from a different world. And I do not think it would be practical, or even possible, to have Pardus exporting individual tank companies out to different worlds, as opposed to simply assigning one whole and complete tank regiment for an Army Group.
And again, the rare worlds capable of making an all-arms regiment should simply have their regiments classified as "independent brigades" - which can be sent out singly to small trouble spots, or reinforce a full army group as necessary.
If you've got a planet that does nothing but produce artillery, common sense is that you take some of that artillery, keep it as part of the tithe, and parcel it out to units that don't have decent artillery of their own. Otherwise you get feral world regiments that are useless for anything except rear area policing because they can't handle any threat bigger than small arms.
Now, granted, that's a legitimate role- a sensible Imperium would use its feral world populations to raise light infantry formations that don't do anything but police and garrison and provide base security and occasionally fight enemies on another feral world, and so on. Or that serve as labor battalions. That includes the Attilans, which keeps them safely out of the way of the Necrons, too.
See above. Parcelling it out for regiments means you're parcelling it out on a company or battalion-level scale. Again, what makes more sense: Sending out 10 transports to send 10 companies of tanks to 10 regiments, or send ONE tanks regiment using ONE transport to be part of a new Army Group that will get 10 regiments?
Even worse, what happens when you put together an ad-hoc army group of 10 regiments, each of which has its own tank company? The answer: The tank companies
won't know how to operate together. Because they might not even come from the same world. They might not even have the same kind of tank. You'll be stuck with the French Army of 1940.
[And yes, your ad-hoc regiment might have one regiment of pure tanks too, but organizationally it's better to be able to mass
two tank regiments rather than having one tank regiment, and ten tank companies that can't fight together.]
Fair enough. I think we've been talking past each other. Sorry.
No worries.