Imperial armour: Siege of Vraks analysis

[Ryan Thunder]

Mention of "columns" and "human wave" go without saying. They attribute a significant psyhcological effect to this. Although at this point I'm not sure we haven't steppd back from WW1 back into Napoleonic warfare lol.

The Imperial Guard actually get a special rule for forming up in a line and shooting in ranks.

[Zinegata]

The tabletop says that Imperium cavalry squads can be armed with squad-level 'heavy' weapons: the squad may carry grenade launchers such as would be useful against Space Marine-equivalent foes (when firing armor-piercing ammunition). Or personal melta/plasma weapons that are viable antitank weapons in their own right at short range.

It would usually be more sensible, and this is how I'd want them used, to take Imperium cavalry have them simply dismount them and fight as dragoons, preferably trying to draw the Necrons into short range since my AT weapons are short-ranged.

Of course, I'm not Mogul Kamir, who's presented in-setting as a psychotic, scenery-chewing version of Attila the Hun.

If you really wanna fight the Necrons with pistol-sized melta and (supposedly rare) plasma guns plus grenade launchers which are all admittedly short-ranged against Necrons be my guest.

The point is that when you are fighting an army of undead slow-moving Terminators (from the James Cameron movies) you want to have a lot of heavy weapons. Like the regular squad heavy weapon (i.e. a lascannon) that is issued to EVERY regular Imperial Guard infantry squad that the cavalry don't get.

In short, you're improvising with pistol-calibre weapons when you should be fighting them with actual heavy weapons.

Besides which, the cavalry in fact didn't do what you proposed - which is to allow the Necrons to come to them and then blast away with their puny plastma guns and melta guns. They instead charged the Necrons. Because again the actual most potent weapon in the Rough Rider's arsenal is their explosive lance (it's the reason people take them at all). Which means that to use their heavy weapons, the cavalry essentially had to charge an enormous phalanx of undead. That's sheer insanity.

If the Invictia can kill 100 Titans for the loss of roughly ten of their own, then that's a sign of ludicrously powerful character shielding, not that this is a loss ratio that should be expected of Titan-on-Titan combat.

Well, rechecking the books Black Admiral is right and I forgot to add Tempestus losses. Even adding up these losses though, we can still easily assume a ratio of at least 2:1 in the Imperium's favor.

Black Admiral->

Yeah, you're right. Page 562 not 526 for the remaining Invicta/Tempetsus operational units; which is 36 and 9 respectively for a total of 45, albeit not all of these are necessarily complete kills (whereas the Chaos Titans aren't gonna be recovered any time soon)

Quite simply, this does not seem to be the norm for large scale Imperium campaigns, where the forces made available are usually more diverse and at least approximately suited to the task at hand.

Again, look what I said about potluck drafts.

Zinegata, you are simply, bluntly, wrong about this.

Large armored formations without attached mechanized infantry units are useless, except to oppose other identical large armored formations. That is all they are good for. Large infantry formations without attached armor and artillery get pinned down by machine guns and slaughtered by mortar fire in real life, no seriously this actually happens.

You've been contaminated by the oversimplified version of the Fall Gelb war-plan, which entirely misses a lot of important points about combined arms operations. Real modern armies integrate tank, infantry, and artillery at the level of the regiment, brigade, and division... which just happens to be the size range that Imperium 40k regiments fall into. In real life, no one would willingly construct a ten thousand man infantry unit without tanks mixed in to give them support against enemy armor and fortified positions... and yet you keep shouting about how bad an idea it would be to integrate tanks into the infantry forces.

Simon, if you'd notice I'm NOT advocating NOT integrating tanks and infantry into one formation. Like, at all.

What I'm saying is that the scale that Raxmei wants this integration to happen is too small for it to have any effect given the scale of 40K combats, leading to the French Army in 1940 situation wherein tanks are parcelled out into too small packets.

There is nothing wrong with having Army Groups that have a mix of tank, infantry, and artillery to make them a combined-arms force. What's wrong is thinking that you can solve the problem by doing this kind of parcelling at the regimental level, when you're in fact fighting campaigns on an Army Group level.

Even the example of a Soviet Motor-Rifle regiment doesn't work, because it's actually meant to fight as part of an army. "Third Shock" is not just an appellation that the regiment adds to its designation, it can actually draw upon army reserve assets that can supplement its firepower as needed. It's not really meant to fight on its own.

So again, there are two issues.

a) The possible lack of combined-arms in the Guard (at the regimental battlefield level), and b) the fact that its main fighting unit (the regiment) isn't actually relevant on the strategic scale. Making every regiment a combined-arms force isn't gonna fix the second problem, and introduces a whole host of new poblems like making it difficult to actually mass armoured formations. Go ahead and be the guy to tell all your 25 regimental commanders that you're borrowing their integrated armoured company for some kind of deep raid op. And watch as the 25 Armoured Company Captains argue who is in fact in charge of this armoured assault.

The fundamental issue therefore is that there should be proper organization at the Army Group level; rather than just succumb to laziness, ignore the force composition at the Army Group level (You have 50 regiments! I don't care if they're all cavalry! Kill the Necrons!) and discard all basic strategy or organization.

It's quite common for the Imperium to detach single regiments to deal with relatively minor problems: refusing to equip such regiments with organic tank/artillery support is foolish, and in my opinion is itself a sign of bad Imperial tactics.

It is very, very rare for a single regiment to fight all alone in an entire world unless there regiment is particularly large. There are some examples in the timeline, but in the novels I can only recall the Hathran Armoured Cavalry standing alone in the third book of the GK novels, and even then their manpower strength was well over ten thousand and it was acknowledged to be a scratch force. Ciaphas Cain also has his Valhallans out solo from time to time, but they're usually fighting for a small geographical area (i.e. a small outpost), supported heavily by the PDF, and they're ALSO one of the combined-arms regiments.

And really, think about it: Sending 6,000 Cadians (their standard regiment size) would, at best, only be capable of peacekeeping ops on a planet that has about the same size and population as, what, East Timor?

Finally, both of you are completely ignoring one major component that throws the wrench into the combined-arms regiment plan: Not every planet is capable of raising such a regiment (and note that I'm already assuming the mass defection of a full combined-arms force is a silly thing, so it's not an impediment to making all regiments combined-arms).

There are already some regiments that are combined-arms forces; the Hathran Armoured Cavalry, Cain's Valhallas, and the Cadogus 52nd being some examples. And these can be classified as "independent brigades" that can be sent out singly to minor troublespots.

But you aren't gonna get armoured regiments out of a feral world. Nor will a world short on manpower but strong on industry be able to come up with huge regiments of conscripts - they'll just ask to pay the tithe by sending our arty regiments low on manpower but high on firepower.

So you have to in fact accept that the building blocks for your armies will often be single-dimensional. But even given this limitation, there's no reason you can't evaluate each of these building blocks by their own merits and then make a true combined-arms (and semi-permanent) formation. That has to happen at the Army Group level however, because breaking up your Pardus Tank regiment into company-sized units directly under the control of your various infantry regiments is just French Army 1940 craziness.

Just because you have pure tank or infantry regiments does not necessarily mean you won't have combined-arms at the front, as long as you have structures in place that allow regiments to detach units to support one another. Which is already the modus operandi of most existing IG regiments in the first place; it just needs to be "fixed" in the sense that a) the overall force composition of the Army Group should suit the actual threat (i.e. Don't send an cav-heavy army against Necrons), and b) you shouldn't have regiments constantly getting shifted to fight with other regiments.

Heck, fighting as part of a permanent Army formation was how they did it back in 30K, and their regiments were apparently even MORE diverse than the current Guard. Regiments nowadays can be roughly classified as either light infantry, infantry, heavy infantry, mech, armour, artillery, and airborne. Back in 30K, Legion featured what was essentially a musket and pike regiment of geno-enhanced troopers that was commanded by psyker girls.

[Raxmei]

"Largest cavalry charge in Imperium's recorded history" against the Necrons is all you need to know. It is stupid insanity. Cavalry do NOT have heavy weapons. Every Necron requires heavy weapons to kill. End of story.

The outcome is insanity only if you accept your conclusion as a premise. Considering that the Imperium won using cavalry obviously the premise that cavalry can't beat necrons is false.

You might note that assault is one of the better ways to beat Necrons on the tabletop. They'll happily shoot it out with most anyone but they aren't very good in close combat and close combat assaults are the most reliable way to take down entire units at once, which shuts down reanimation protocols.

Except that you completely fail to realize the context of the Motor-Rifle Regiment.

The Soviet Motor-Rifle regiments were designed to operate on a much smaller scale than the Imperium, and they generally operated as part of a cohesive army. When a regiment is part of the Third Shock Army, it's not merely for show. It actually makes it part of a much larger and cohesive organization.

If you told a Soviet Motor-Rifle commander that you were sending his regiment ALONE against an alien world, he'd slap you in the head because the regiment isn't supposed to work alone. It's one small component of an army, which is really their core fighting unit.

This is again why I pointed out that the primary fighting unit of the Imperial Guard should not be the regiment. It should be the Army Group. Because regiments generally fight as part of an army group anyway, and that they should really just make these formations permanent.

Missing the point. Both will often be parts of a larger whole. They are building blocks but they are also intended to be functional tactical units. There's tactical interdependence and then there's having to ask another regiment for help brushing your teeth in the morning. Near universally integrated combined arms starts at around regimental level because it makes tactical sense to do so. The final scale of the overall formation doesn't matter. Additional building blocks and organizational levels are added as needed. That doesn't change the basic needs of the basic combat units.

So again, there are two issues.

a) The possible lack of combined-arms in the Guard (at the regimental battlefield level), and b) the fact that its main fighting unit (the regiment) isn't actually relevant on the strategic scale. Making every regiment a combined-arms force isn't gonna fix the second problem, and introduces a whole host of new poblems like making it difficult to actually mass armoured formations. Go ahead and be the guy to tell all your 25 regimental commanders that you're borrowing their integrated armoured company for some kind of deep raid op. And watch as the 25 Armoured Company Captains argue who is in fact in charge of this armoured assault.

Warfare in 40k tends to be of much smaller scale than many people envision. The majority of described conflicts use only one or a small handful of regiments, which presents a high risk of getting screwed because nobody remembered to bring artillery. Consolidating your armor is no more difficult than the distribution of support units that already occurs as a matter of routine, except now you don't have to do it every single time you deploy the Guard and don't get completely screwed when you can't. Reorganizing the chain of command to take into account the new organization would be a basic part of doing the reorganization at all, arranged by those who ordered it in the first place.

Finally, both of you are completely ignoring one major component that throws the wrench into the combined-arms regiment plan: Not every planet is capable of raising such a regiment (and note that I'm already assuming the mass defection of a full combined-arms force is a silly thing, so it's not an impediment to making all regiments combined-arms).

There are already some regiments that are combined-arms forces; the Hathran Armoured Cavalry, Cain's Valhallas, and the Cadogus 52nd being some examples. And these can be classified as "independent brigades" that can be sent out singly to minor troublespots.

But you aren't gonna get armoured regiments out of a feral world. Nor will a world short on manpower but strong on industry be able to come up with huge regiments of conscripts - they'll just ask to pay the tithe by sending our arty regiments low on manpower but high on firepower.

IG regiments are drawn from PDF. If the world has a working PDF at all they should be able to provide the necessities of a viable fighting force. Worlds with too little industry to provide any heavy equipment at all do pose a problem. One would either have to do extensive rearming and reorganization or give up on using them as a coherent fighting force on their own and part them out to other units. The latter would also be done (and more efficiently if all goes well) if the better equipped units were homogenously heavy types that had no light infantry of their own, except in that case those regiments would be screwed if their infantry from a different planet didn't arrive on time. This is 40k so you can't rely on interstellar shipments arriving on time or at all.

[PainRack]

Page 90

Each Death Korps soldier is also proficient in the use of all basic Imperial Guard weaponry types, the use of grenades and explosives and the rapid and skilled construction of trench works and defences. Their hand to hand training is also exemplary, bayonet dirll being practised from childhood. Accuracy (while obviously desirable), is secondary in Death Korps weapons training to fire discipline; with the ability to maintain continuous fire en masse as part of an infantry formation considered to be of paramount importance.

Other :"specialist" traits of the Krieg regiments, I imagine. Probably why they dont bother much with marksman or snipers, either. Contrast with say, the Cadians or tallarn, known for liking marksmen and snipers both.

This part I don't understand. Didn't snipers receive a huge boost during WW1?

[Simon_Jester]

Mention of "columns" and "human wave" go without saying. They attribute a significant psyhcological effect to this. Although at this point I'm not sure we haven't steppd back from WW1 back into Napoleonic warfare lol.

The Imperial Guard actually get a special rule for forming up in a line and shooting in ranks.

Interestingly, they don't have to form a line and shoot in ranks to get the rule to work for them. They just need an officer to be shouting at them from within (roughly) flamethrower range of their position...

Zinegata, my view of your post changed a bit as I read through it; I'm sorry if it comes across too harshly, and I think that face to face we could agree on a consensus. I tried to rewrite a few bits, but if I missed anything near the top that is addressed at the bottom, I hope you'll excuse me.

If you really wanna fight the Necrons with pistol-sized melta and (supposedly rare) plasma guns plus grenade launchers which are all admittedly short-ranged against Necrons be my guest.

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.

Besides which, the cavalry in fact didn't do what you proposed - which is to allow the Necrons to come to them and then blast away with their puny plastma guns and melta guns. They instead charged the Necrons. Because again the actual most potent weapon in the Rough Rider's arsenal is their explosive lance (it's the reason people take them at all). Which means that to use their heavy weapons, the cavalry essentially had to charge an enormous phalanx of undead. That's sheer insanity.

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.

Well, rechecking the books Black Admiral is right and I forgot to add Tempestus losses. Even adding up these losses though, we can still easily assume a ratio of at least 2:1 in the Imperium's favor.

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.

Simon, if you'd notice I'm NOT advocating NOT integrating tanks and infantry into one formation. Like, at all.

What I'm saying is that the scale that Raxmei wants this integration to happen is too small for it to have any effect given the scale of 40K combats, leading to the French Army in 1940 situation wherein tanks are parcelled out into too small packets.

There is nothing wrong with having Army Groups that have a mix of tank, infantry, and artillery to make them a combined-arms force. What's wrong is thinking that you can solve the problem by doing this kind of parcelling at the regimental level, when you're in fact fighting campaigns on an Army Group level.

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.

("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)

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.

And as you say, often this is with a combined arms force (Cain and the Valhallans, who appear to be a mechanized infantry force in that they have plenty of APCs, armored cars, and self propelled AA, along with a sprinkling of tanks, but no heavy artillery). But sometimes (as with Gaunt's Ghosts), it's a purely light infantry regiment being thrown into a trench war. Not so good.

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.

Therefore, yes it would make sense for individual regiments to have a combined arms force that can cope with a diverse range of enemies, even though they can often draw on army-level support assets in an emergency.

So again, there are two issues.

a) The possible lack of combined-arms in the Guard (at the regimental battlefield level), and b) the fact that its main fighting unit (the regiment) isn't actually relevant on the strategic scale. Making every regiment a combined-arms force isn't gonna fix the second problem, and introduces a whole host of new poblems like making it difficult to actually mass armoured formations. Go ahead and be the guy to tell all your 25 regimental commanders that you're borrowing their integrated armoured company for some kind of deep raid op. And watch as the 25 Armoured Company Captains argue who is in fact in charge of this armoured assault.

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.

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.

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 fundamental issue therefore is that there should be proper organization at the Army Group level; rather than just succumb to laziness, ignore the force composition at the Army Group level (You have 50 regiments! I don't care if they're all cavalry! Kill the Necrons!) and discard all basic strategy or organization.

Agreed. The Imperium is capable of this, but often fails at it.

It is very, very rare for a single regiment to fight all alone in an entire world unless there regiment is particularly large. There are some examples in the timeline, but in the novels I can only recall the Hathran Armoured Cavalry standing alone in the third book of the GK novels, and even then their manpower strength was well over ten thousand and it was acknowledged to be a scratch force. Ciaphas Cain also has his Valhallans out solo from time to time, but they're usually fighting for a small geographical area (i.e. a small outpost), supported heavily by the PDF, and they're ALSO one of the combined-arms regiments.

And really, think about it: Sending 6,000 Cadians (their standard regiment size) would, at best, only be capable of peacekeeping ops on a planet that has about the same size and population as, what, East Timor?

Finally, both of you are completely ignoring one major component that throws the wrench into the combined-arms regiment plan: Not every planet is capable of raising such a regiment (and note that I'm already assuming the mass defection of a full combined-arms force is a silly thing, so it's not an impediment to making all regiments combined-arms).

Yes, although it's hardly unusual. For one, there probably are a lot of places that have populations like East Timor: inhospitable worlds where only a few places are livable, resource extraction colonies, and regions on a single planet that are geographically isolated so that even while there are theoretically other Guard units on the planet, if your regiment needs to call for help that help will probably be a long time in coming.

Also, of course, there's the ever-popular "stiffen the PDF" role, where there may be a million men engaged on either side but for now there are only ten thousand or fewer Guardsmen on the planet: witness Straight Silver.

But you aren't gonna get armoured regiments out of a feral world. Nor will a world short on manpower but strong on industry be able to come up with huge regiments of conscripts - they'll just ask to pay the tithe by sending our arty regiments low on manpower but high on firepower.

So you have to in fact accept that the building blocks for your armies will often be single-dimensional. But even given this limitation, there's no reason you can't evaluate each of these building blocks by their own merits and then make a true combined-arms (and semi-permanent) formation. That has to happen at the Army Group level however, because breaking up your Pardus Tank regiment into company-sized units directly under the control of your various infantry regiments is just French Army 1940 craziness.

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.

Just because you have pure tank or infantry regiments does not necessarily mean you won't have combined-arms at the front, as long as you have structures in place that allow regiments to detach units to support one another. Which is already the modus operandi of most existing IG regiments in the first place; it just needs to be "fixed" in the sense that a) the overall force composition of the Army Group should suit the actual threat (i.e. Don't send an cav-heavy army against Necrons), and b) you shouldn't have regiments constantly getting shifted to fight with other regiments.

Heck, fighting as part of a permanent Army formation was how they did it back in 30K, and their regiments were apparently even MORE diverse than the current Guard. Regiments nowadays can be roughly classified as either light infantry, infantry, heavy infantry, mech, armour, artillery, and airborne. Back in 30K, Legion featured what was essentially a musket and pike regiment of geno-enhanced troopers that was commanded by psyker girls.

Fair enough. I think we've been talking past each other. Sorry.

[Zinegata]

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.

[Zinegata]

Considering that the Imperium won using cavalry obviously the premise that cavalry can't beat necrons is false.

There is more to victory than holding the ground against an immortal enemy that can teleport at-will.

You might note that assault is one of the better ways to beat Necrons on the tabletop. They'll happily shoot it out with most anyone but they aren't very good in close combat and close combat assaults are the most reliable way to take down entire units at once, which shuts down reanimation protocols.

Which is why I said Cav charge was better than dragooning with pistol meltas. Still insanity though given the terrain.

The final scale of the overall formation doesn't matter. Additional building blocks and organizational levels are added as needed. That doesn't change the basic needs of the basic combat units.

The scale of the formation does in fact absolutely matter. That's what you completely fail to comprehend. Otherwise, the French should have won in 1940.

Warfare in 40k tends to be of much smaller scale than many people envision.

That's because people keep forgetting that planets are actually pretty big and we even the most advanced modern army has trouble just policing one country with 250K troops.

IG regiments are drawn from PDF. If the world has a working PDF at all they should be able to provide the necessities of a viable fighting force. Worlds with too little industry to provide any heavy equipment at all do pose a problem. One would either have to do extensive rearming and reorganization or give up on using them as a coherent fighting force on their own and part them out to other units. The latter would also be done (and more efficiently if all goes well) if the better equipped units were homogenously heavy types that had no light infantry of their own, except in that case those regiments would be screwed if their infantry from a different planet didn't arrive on time. This is 40k so you can't rely on interstellar shipments arriving on time or at all.

Sending out ten company-sized tank formations to ten different regiments instead of simply sending one complete tank regiment to an Army Group the size of ten regiments is again, logistically inefficient, impractical, or outright impossible. And has the French Army 1940 problem.

[Zinegata]

I missed this.

No, that's the exact kind of idiocy I'm railing against.

Only an idiot would send massed tanks against Tau. They have the best anti-tank weapons in the game. The Tau _want_ you to send tanks against them.

They also have excellent infantry small arms, for which having vehicles like APCs makes a lot of sense if you don't want your troops cut up from long range. Sure, some of those APCs get railgunned- but you have a lot of them, and the Tau don't have that many railgun units present on a given battlefield.

Yes they do, but I'm being a very bloody-minded bastard.

A pulse gun is a very powerful small arms, capable of punching through most heavy infantry armor. This is actually precisely why I advocate sending a "human wave" army against the Tau.

An elite infantry army (carapace armored) will have much lower numbers than a human wave army. Say 6,000 Cadians vs 120,000 conscripts at the most extreme end. If each Tau gun can kill an armored infantryman anyway, why bother with armor? Send in more guys without armor instead. At the end of the day, if the Tau hit 1,000 times you'll lose 1,000 infantry. Would you rather have lose 1,000 Cadians and have 5,000 of them left, or lose 1,000 conscripts and have 119,000 left?

As you pointed out, Tau have issues with human wave armies. Orks and Tyranids in particular. What I'm saying is that the Imperium can human wave the Tau to death too using relatively lightly armed troopers, without needing to risk (and lose) armoured vehicles and tanks in much greater numbers, which can be deployed elsewhere to better effect.

You also need mechanization to counter the Tau's superior mobility. A foot-slogging conscript army won't be able to get and stay close enough to a Tau force to accomplish anything. Sure, it works on the tabletop, but I don't think it's a viable strategy in a 'realistic' version of the setting.

That's the problem with the Damocles campaign however: You're trying to out-mech the Tau, when the Tau are the best mech army.

If you instead simply deploy a huge mass of infantry, that marches forward slowly and methodically, there really isn't much the Tau can do against it. Sure, they can harass it. Sure, they might kill a couple thousand guys a day. But they won't be able to kill the blob fast enough to diminish its numbers effectively (because again they have very little artillery). And when the blob reaches the Tau's operating base (because mechanized warfare requires large reserves of fuel and support), the Tau are finished.

You don't always need mechanized forces to counter other mechanized forces. At the minimum, you need anti-tank elements, but these can in fact be had at the squad infantry level (i.e. each IG squad can have one lascannon). Heck, with that much manpower the Imperium can simply dig a huge trench line and advance it forward slowly and methodically, and there's nothing that the Tau can do except to attack that trench line and get hit by infantry-based anti-tank weaponry whenever they show up.

So you still end up needing a balance. Sure, using waves of Imperial armor to counter waves of Tau armor (I include battlesuits as light armor) is messy. But sending waves of unsupported foot infantry and towed heavy artillery against Tau air cavalry is equally messy, because the Tau can snipe and harass from long range and force your troops to disperse while they retain the ability to concentrate at will.

Obviously, such an army won't be simply all-infantry. But any army that fights the Tau should be manpower heavy, precisely because Tau forces are light, and highly mobile. It's little different from a COIN campaign - rather than trying to chase after the guerillas all over the place, simply have enough manpower to BE all over the place.

You'll lose some guys every time the Tau make a raid, but because you'll have forces everywhere they'll be taking losses too. Even better, your losses will be proportionately far less than the Tau, so every battle they fight (unless they win with zero losses) actually drags them closer to defeat.

If your enemy relies on elegance and hates attrition, force them into an attrition battle. It's very much like how Monty just bludgeoned the Afrika Korps to death: No more being cute. No more trying to out-fox Rommel. Just ram your overwhelming numerical advantage down the enemy's throat.

Massed infantry only works against Tau on the tabletop because the tabletop represents a pitched battle small enough that an infantry assault to get into close quarters can actually accomplish something. If the battlefield were as large as a realistic theater of operations (say, several hundred feet across) the Tau would be completely screwing over your infantry/artillery force by outmaneuvering it with Devilfish and whatnot.

Except I'm proposing to have enough infantry to actually cover the whole theater, so that the Tau literally have no where to go except to attack entrenched infantry.

The only time this kind of doctrine may end up being bad is when the terrain prevents the operation of large infantry armies (i.e. the Taros desert), but do we really want to keep planets that are just mostly desert?

[Simon_Jester]

Heh.

Weren't you the same guy who was just talking to me about how bad an idea it is to attrite an enemy's nigh-irreplaceable Titans with highly replaceable tanks?

I'm not entirely serious about that, but I do feel that you've done something of an about-face in your tactics....

[Zinegata]

Heh.

Weren't you the same guy who was just talking to me about how bad an idea it is to attrite an enemy's nigh-irreplaceable Titans with highly replaceable tanks?

I'm not entirely serious about that, but I do feel that you've done something of an about-face in your tactics....

Yes, but that's because I actually considered the massive differences in Titan and Tau weaponry.

Again, Tau are very short on area-effect weapons. They don't have artillery. The best that they've got are missiles, which are in short supply. They *cannot* kill massed infantry.

Titans by contrast *can* kill massed infantry and massed tanks. Very effectively. Because they have a huge number of area-effect weapons available to them. Weapons that are so powerful that they can obliterate multiple tanks in one shot.

Likewise, their staying power is different.

Firing massed lascannons against one Titan is impractical, and possibly useless (not enough firepower, and how do you coordinate 50 infantry squads to fire at the exact same time while tactical nukes are being thrown at them?).

Firing massed lascannons at a Tau battlegroup however is gonna be highly effective. It will only take about one good lascannon hit to obliterate a Tau tank. With enough hits you're simply going to wipe out the whole battlegroup - because you don't need that much firepower to chip away at its component parts. Moreover - again because the Tau don't have proper artillery - your lascannon teams will actually have a lot of staying power against Tau tanks. They're much smaller than a tank, more easily concealed, can take cover, and have about the same staying power as a tank if they get hit anyway.

This is why massed infantry (with a regular heavy weapon load out) is actually the ideal force against the Tau. Their arsenal of hyper-advanced anti-tank weapons suddenly becomes mostly useless. Their army's focus was on getting the best penetrating power for few targets, and not the most raw damage via area-effect. And their tanks aren't well armoured enough to withstand even the infantry-portable anti-tank weapons used by the Imperium.

And to kill Titans, just avoid using massed formations, and simply kill them via orbital bombardment. There should be nothing stopping you from nuking them from orbit. Fighting them "conventionally" will result in a scorched earth anyway, obliterating the usual excuse for not using orbital firepower to eliminate Titans.

It is therefore not an "about face". I am simply employing the best strategy possible for each particular situation based on the actual capabilities of the enemy force, which is the correct way of strategizing.

He who knows himself and knows his enemy will win, etc.

[Simon_Jester]

Relax, I get the logic, I was just amused. Step back- isn't there a bit of humor there? It's not a question of right or wrong, just one of irony.

Sorry.

Anyway, I'd prefer an armored cavalry force against the Tau myself- because you really are asking for trouble when you send a foot-mobile force against a highly mobile enemy, and I'd want a way to counter that as opposed to just a strategy that ought to nullify it. The combination of massed foot troops (for when you can force the Tau to give battle) and armored cav (as mobile reserve to respond if they do something really unexpected and manage to kick you in the shorts) should work better than either would alone.

[Zinegata]

Relax, I get the logic, I was just amused. Step back- isn't there a bit of humor there? It's not a question of right or wrong, just one of irony.

Sorry.

Well, it always pays to clarify because not everyone is smart enough like you to get the logic

Anyway, I'd prefer an armored cavalry force against the Tau myself- because you really are asking for trouble when you send a foot-mobile force against a highly mobile enemy, and I'd want a way to counter that as opposed to just a strategy that ought to nullify it. The combination of massed foot troops (for when you can force the Tau to give battle) and armored cav (as mobile reserve to respond if they do something really unexpected and manage to kick you in the shorts) should work better than either would alone.

Oh I'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't deploy any armored cav at all. I'm just saying that your force should be tilted much more towards having a lot of infantry (with anti-tank weapons), like you would in a COIN campaign.

Though in retrospect, an Imperial Air Cav Regiment might be a superior response force given the speed difference between Tau and Imperial armoured forces. The Air Cav forces in the new Codex feature some of the best anti-tank weapons in the Imperial arsenal - with the three twin-linked lascannons for the Vendetta gunship being more than enough to ruin the day of any Tau tank.

[Simon_Jester]

I figure air cavalry is rarer than armored cavalry, so I wouldn't want to count on having any. But Chimeras are common- ubiquitous, iconic, whatever, so a force built around lots of Chimeras and Chimera-chassis weapon platforms (Hydras, self-propelled guns...) should work. If I can find any Guard artillery units who know how to use modern self-propelled artillery tactics with the extensive reliance on "shoot and scoot," that would be great, because it'd give me a capability that's about as mobile as the Tau, but which has a sort of firepower they simply can't match.

Anyway, I get the desire for customization at the army level. Personally I'd caution against taking it too far, because the army that was dispatched to fight Tau may well end up getting repurposed three years later to fight Tyranids, at a time when no other major Guard battlegroup is prepared to do anything about the splinter fleet you're tackling. But I get it.

(Note that the Imperium has "lord generals" as a semi-permanent rank; it's strongly implied in the Cain novels, at least, that a general may remain in command of the same core group of regiments for years).

[Purple]

Wait... Are you people actually saying that the ideal way to fight at Taros would have been to do exactly what was done at Vraks, death corps included?

[Gunhead]

Wait... Are you people actually saying that the ideal way to fight at Taros would have been to do exactly what was done at Vraks, death corps included?

That would work about as well as how they in fact did it, i.e not at all. The Imp answer to Tau mobility is not to go slower. It's to be fast enough with more troops. This allows them to deny avenues of movement for the Tau and hamper their ability to choose where and how to fight. In theory you could just meatgrind the Tau into submission, but this runs into huge logistical issues and is just basically herding the Tau into a corner where they have to give decisive battle but this would incur massive casualties and as such is a bad proposition on a grand scale. Mech inf with tanks would be the weapon of choice with the IG slugging into positions that force the Tau to go on the offensive limiting the effectiveness of their superior tactical mobility. Massive mechanized encirclements are also viable tactics against a faster but less numerical foes.

-Gunhead

[Zinegata]

Simon->

Lord Generals exist, but their formal command over certain units doesn't seem to be exactly permanent. Cain gets attached to a specific Lord General's staff largely because he's a celebrity, but Gaunt goes through a lot of different ones, and yet they seem to have semi-permanent Crusade armies.

Purple->

Not in Taros, because it's a desert and you'll just kill off a huge number of men from lack of water.

However, if the Taros plan had focused on taking and holding the water sources from Day One (instead of being an afterthought) then having huge infantry forces to hold and entrench around these water facilities would have been a very tough nut for the Tau to crack, much more than armoured columns strung along the desert in easily ambushed packets.

====

Instead, if we look at a pure assault-type situation (i.e. the Imperium must take a surrounded city) against the Tau (and assuming a pure Tau arsenal, so no artillery), then the Death Korps would merely be "bad" as opposed to "appallingly incompetent".

The Kriegers would still blindly walk into the equivalent of heavy MG fire over no-man's land (because they're tough manly Space WW1 Germans), but they wouldn't be subjected to heavy artillery counter-fire except for the occassional Seeker Missile. Meanwhile the Tau will suffer all of the horrible effects of heavy artillery bombardment. And with their much more limited numbers, the Tau can ill-afford heavy losses from attritional trench battles.

Worse, all of the usual Tau tactics of raiding with high-mobility mechs and hover tanks will simply bang their heads against the brick wall known as "multiple mutually-supporting defensive trench lines". Their best and most elite forces will thus be mostly nullified, particularly when you consider that the Tau armoured forces don't even have the equivalent of the Imperial Leman Rush Demolisher tank for siege situations.

[Zinegata]

In theory you could just meatgrind the Tau into submission, but this runs into huge logistical issues and is just basically herding the Tau into a corner where they have to give decisive battle but this would incur massive casualties and as such is a bad proposition on a grand scale.

See, here's the thing: I actually believe that while losses will be incurred by large infantry forces fighting the Tau, they would be proportionately lower than if you send in any other forces, and even in absolute terms the losses will in fact be "cheaper" than risking large numbers of tanks against a foe that specializes in killing tanks.

It really boils down to the fact that Tau don't have artillery (at least not yet) except expensive Seeker missiles, which is the real infantry killer. Having a nice big Tau rifle sounds great and all, but if the Tau can shoot the Imperial infantry then it generally means that the Imperial troopers can shoot back, and the IG have more troopers and more heavy weapons at the squad level.

[Simon_Jester]

Wait... Are you people actually saying that the ideal way to fight at Taros would have been to do exactly what was done at Vraks, death corps included?

That would work about as well as how they in fact did it, i.e not at all.

Better infantry tactics than that would be advisable- say, World War Two level, with the infantry actually making serious calls for fire support from the artillery and advancing in a less mindless fashion. But ideally you'd want mass, because you really can outnumber a Tau position massively enough that it puts them at a huge disadvantage despite their powerful rifles and antitank heavy weapons.

This isn't, or shouldn't be, the stereotype of the WWII Soviets making massive mindless human wave charges. But something that resembles a WWII Soviet attack might actually be a good idea, because the Tau are very poorly equipped to deal with being drastically outnumbered at the point of contact with the enemy.

The Imp answer to Tau mobility is not to go slower. It's to be fast enough with more troops. This allows them to deny avenues of movement for the Tau and hamper their ability to choose where and how to fight. In theory you could just meatgrind the Tau into submission, but this runs into huge logistical issues and is just basically herding the Tau into a corner where they have to give decisive battle but this would incur massive casualties and as such is a bad proposition on a grand scale. Mech inf with tanks would be the weapon of choice with the IG slugging into positions that force the Tau to go on the offensive limiting the effectiveness of their superior tactical mobility. Massive mechanized encirclements are also viable tactics against a faster but less numerical foes.

-Gunhead

This is what I was getting at. Again, I think the analogy should be (here) Soviet Cold War mechanized units. Sure, the enemy will have some really impressive antitank weapons that will nail some of the massive IFV swarm, but it is well within your power to mass enough armor to counterpunch that effectively and drive through their opposition. And of course you NEED an intelligent doctrine for doing this, it's not all mindless URRA CHARGE AND DIE FOR THE EMPEROR bullshit, not if you're doing it in a professional manner. At the end of the day, they deploy a few supertanks and heavy-gun battlesuits that railgun some of your Chimeras but meanwhile you're shooting back with your own AT weapons and antitank missiles (look for Chimeras that have them, it gives you an equalizer). And you have a lot of Chimeras, you can afford to take a certain number of losses to deploy the infantry in an effective way that the Tau can't just effortlessly outmaneuver, much as you could afford to take a certain number of casualties blindly marching them to the objective on foot like a swarm of army ants.

EDIT: I'm serious, the human wave approach really does work a lot better on the tabletop, where you don't have to work so hard to explain how the hell your force even got into contact with theirs in the first place. The big problem with it on the strategic level is that you need to land about a million men to fully occupy a continent to the required level and density... and that you need a million men to counter a Tau brigade, let alone a Tau force of comparable size. This ties up a lot of troops and supplies that could be doing something else, as pointed out by others when that one idiot was all CHARGE AND DIE LOSSES ARE IRRELEVANT.

[Srelex]

See, here's the thing: I actually believe that while losses will be incurred by large infantry forces fighting the Tau, they would be proportionately lower than if you send in any other forces, and even in absolute terms the losses will in fact be "cheaper" than risking large numbers of tanks against a foe that specializes in killing tanks.

It really boils down to the fact that Tau don't have artillery (at least not yet) except expensive Seeker missiles, which is the real infantry killer. Having a nice big Tau rifle sounds great and all, but if the Tau can shoot the Imperial infantry then it generally means that the Imperial troopers can shoot back, and the IG have more troopers and more heavy weapons at the squad level.

I should point out that the Tau do have AOE infantry-killing ordnance in the form of railgun-launched submunitions, which they can also mount on aircraft. On the tabletop, their radius seems to be about the same as IG artillery, but I don't know if it's been described in actual fluff text.

[Gunhead]

See, here's the thing: I actually believe that while losses will be incurred by large infantry forces fighting the Tau, they would be proportionately lower than if you send in any other forces, and even in absolute terms the losses will in fact be "cheaper" than risking large numbers of tanks against a foe that specializes in killing tanks.

It really boils down to the fact that Tau don't have artillery (at least not yet) except expensive Seeker missiles, which is the real infantry killer. Having a nice big Tau rifle sounds great and all, but if the Tau can shoot the Imperial infantry then it generally means that the Imperial troopers can shoot back, and the IG have more troopers and more heavy weapons at the squad level.

I see the logic, I just don't think overall it's viable. On some specific battlefield maybe. IG infantry needs the heavy tank guns / lascannons to tackle tanks and other heavy vehicles and relying on what shoulder fired weapons they have to counter extremely agile armor is a losing proposition. Even if they can go toe to toe with Tau infantry, it doesn't help if they lack the offensive punch to deal with heavy armor. Basically without armored transport / tanks IG infantry is continuously out paced and their ability to move squad / platoon heavy weapons too is hampered. Mobility works against a missile armed opponent since those cannot be blindly spammed like artillery. Sure, IG tanks vs. Tau are going to suffer, but as far as attrition goes IG can lose more and still come out on top. As it is, I really don't know how good Tau tanks are against infantry in general and it might affect the scales somewhat.

As a side note, then there's the possibility the Tau specifically targeting IG heavy weapon emplacements which would seriously reduce their firepower. It even looks the the Tau missiles are designed to do just that. There's no need for the Tau to exterminate every single IG guardsman outright, just reduce them to a bunch of guys with lasguns and they can be destroyed in detail with direct heavy weapons fire with them unable to respond in any meaningful way.

Massed infantry positions would be good against the Tau but only if you can force the Tau to give battle and to "herd" them into a wall of prepared IG positions you need to have something that can even partially match the speed of the Tau and basically force them to either fight the chasers or smash into the dug in defenders. It's really about IG trying to tie the Tau to battle and then trying to circle them in, the IG forces directly facing the Tau will probably take a beating, but those losses are acceptable if the plan succeeds.

As I said though, I can see your basic reasoning Zinegata and I think you can use pure infantry against the Tau effectively but if you go at them without Tanks and APCs you're just asking to have your ass kicked.

-Gunhead

[PainRack]

As you pointed out, Tau have issues with human wave armies. Orks and Tyranids in particular. What I'm saying is that the Imperium can human wave the Tau to death too using relatively lightly armed troopers, without needing to risk (and lose) armoured vehicles and tanks in much greater numbers, which can be deployed elsewhere to better effect.

The problem is, they shouldn't have problems with human wave armies. They have artillery in the form of the Skipray as well as Manta, along with railgun submunitions and pulse cannons. They have the mobility to maneveur away from dangerous concentrations and hit weaker spots. They can concentrate and disperse at will.

That's the problem with the Damocles campaign however: You're trying to out-mech the Tau, when the Tau are the best mech army.

If you instead simply deploy a huge mass of infantry, that marches forward slowly and methodically, there really isn't much the Tau can do against it. Sure, they can harass it. Sure, they might kill a couple thousand guys a day. But they won't be able to kill the blob fast enough to diminish its numbers effectively (because again they have very little artillery). And when the blob reaches the Tau's operating base (because mechanized warfare requires large reserves of fuel and support), the Tau are finished.

They do exactly what they did in the Taros campaign. Hit your supply lines and let you flounder to death. You see, human wave armies work very well ONLY if you ignore the need to sustain them. The Nids do this via magic, and Chaos somehow has the ability to conjure up mobs at will like the GLA terrorists. If nothing else, they can rely literally on magic and summon endless daemon waves at you.
The Imps manage very well against Orks, especially feral orks who mass large enough for a conventional battle.

You don't always need mechanized forces to counter other mechanized forces. At the minimum, you need anti-tank elements, but these can in fact be had at the squad infantry level (i.e. each IG squad can have one lascannon). Heck, with that much manpower the Imperium can simply dig a huge trench line and advance it forward slowly and methodically, and there's nothing that the Tau can do except to attack that trench line and get hit by infantry-based anti-tank weaponry whenever they show up.

Interdict the supply lines, attack in force after isolating a certain trench line and use supporting fire to interdict second waves that's moving in to reinforce.

There's a reason why siege lines are obsolete. Its brought back in WH40k due to the presence of powerful void shields, but we haven't actually seen the common deployment of mobile void theatre shields yet.

Obviously, such an army won't be simply all-infantry. But any army that fights the Tau should be manpower heavy, precisely because Tau forces are light, and highly mobile. It's little different from a COIN campaign - rather than trying to chase after the guerillas all over the place, simply have enough manpower to BE all over the place.

You do know that the tactics in a COIN campaign requires that your forces be highly mobile? This is especially so in convoy escorts. In The Bear Went Over the Mountain, numerous commentaries mention the need to deploy helimobile troops to secure high ground, recce forces to recce possible ambush positions and etc.

I know what you're suggesting is actually the blockhouse positional warfare, as practised by the British in the Boer War. This works very well only when the enemy can't mass heavy firepower to break through your lines.

If you disperse your heavy firepower sufficiently enough to defend everywhere, you're weak everywhere. Napolean. Sun Bin all said this.

If your enemy relies on elegance and hates attrition, force them into an attrition battle. It's very much like how Monty just bludgeoned the Afrika Korps to death: No more being cute. No more trying to out-fox Rommel. Just ram your overwhelming numerical advantage down the enemy's throat.

Monty massed huge amount of firepower and dumped them on static positions, he was VERY successful in this because the Afrika Korps mobility was poorer than the Desert Army due to the British overwhelming airpower and superior resources, assisted by Ultra. This is totally different from what a confrontation against an ideal Tau Army would be like.

Except I'm proposing to have enough infantry to actually cover the whole theater, so that the Tau literally have no where to go except to attack entrenched infantry.

Have fun sustaining them. You don't really needs the Taros desert to improvish soldiers. The Japanese starved in the Imphal plains.

[lPeregrine]

Again, Tau are very short on area-effect weapons. They don't have artillery. The best that they've got are missiles, which are in short supply. They *cannot* kill massed infantry.

Tau are only short of area-effect weapons in the game mechanics. For example, a seeker missile isn't some magical precision weapon that kills exactly one person and does no damage to someone standing a few inches away, it's just a single-shot weapon for game balance purposes (Tau are precise, IG bring the pie plate spam). In "reality", we could expect the Tau to be perfectly capable of killing a conscript horde.

Firing massed lascannons at a Tau battlegroup however is gonna be highly effective.

Not really, since your slow horde of conscripts has no real way of forcing an army of fast skimmers to fight. Instead of tanks, your conscripts would be engaged by invisible Remora drones spotting for over-the-horizon seeker missile strikes on heavy weapon concentrations, orbital bombardment, etc.

[Zinegata]

Gunhead->

Even if they can go toe to toe with Tau infantry, it doesn't help if they lack the offensive punch to deal with heavy armor. Basically without armored transport / tanks IG infantry is continuously out paced and their ability to move squad / platoon heavy weapons too is hampered. Mobility works against a missile armed opponent since those cannot be blindly spammed like artillery. Sure, IG tanks vs. Tau are going to suffer, but as far as attrition goes IG can lose more and still come out on top. As it is, I really don't know how good Tau tanks are against infantry in general and it might affect the scales somewhat.

Tau tanks are essentially a modern MBT with hover capability and slightly less armor, except that it's limited to only AP ammunition. Which is why I'd much rather send Lascannon teams against them then tanks, even the LR Vanquisher has issues against them; much less the standard LR which is really a slow-moving infantry support platform. Again, people need to remember that IG infantry does have extensive AT weapons even without tanks; and the mainline Imperial tank is a primarily an infantry support weapon unless it's one of the specialist variants.

As a side note, then there's the possibility the Tau specifically targeting IG heavy weapon emplacements which would seriously reduce their firepower. It even looks the the Tau missiles are designed to do just that. There's no need for the Tau to exterminate every single IG guardsman outright, just reduce them to a bunch of guys with lasguns and they can be destroyed in detail with direct heavy weapons fire with them unable to respond in any meaningful way.

Hence why I said to have a lot of infantry. Again, assuming that we've got the usual integrated squad HW, that's gonna be a lot of HWs to chew through, and we do know that Tau tanks can be taken down by Krak missiles.

Massed infantry positions would be good against the Tau but only if you can force the Tau to give battle and to "herd" them into a wall of prepared IG positions you need to have something that can even partially match the speed of the Tau and basically force them to either fight the chasers or smash into the dug in defenders. It's really about IG trying to tie the Tau to battle and then trying to circle them in, the IG forces directly facing the Tau will probably take a beating, but those losses are acceptable if the plan succeeds.

You're misunderstanding "massed infantry" as only "human wave". Again, treat it more like a COIN operation. Have enough troops to BE everywhere. Deny the Tau any room to not fight a pitched battle.

Note how I said Kriegers (who use human wave) attacking the Tau is still "bad" as opposed to "appallingly incompetent".

As I said though, I can see your basic reasoning Zinegata and I think you can use pure infantry against the Tau effectively but if you go at them without Tanks and APCs you're just asking to have your ass kicked.

Like I keep saying, you should always have some tanks and mech forces (or ideally Air Cav). But force composition should be weighted MUCH more towards manpower.

Painrack->

The problem is, they shouldn't have problems with human wave armies. They have artillery in the form of the Skipray as well as Manta, along with railgun submunitions and pulse cannons. They have the mobility to maneveur away from dangerous concentrations and hit weaker spots. They can concentrate and disperse at will.

The Skyray is a missile shooter (it's technically an AA weapon). The Manta is a gunship without true indirect fire capability like artillery. Neither of which can actually kill large numbers of infantry very quickly unless they're marching in parade formation, and the latter has to expose itself to return fire.

Interdict the supply lines, attack in force after isolating a certain trench line and use supporting fire to interdict second waves that's moving in to reinforce.

You should really check out the part where I said Taros was NOT a good place to do this due to logistical concerns.

You do know that the tactics in a COIN campaign requires that your forces be highly mobile? This is especially so in convoy escorts. In The Bear Went Over the Mountain, numerous commentaries mention the need to deploy helimobile troops to secure high ground, recce forces to recce possible ambush positions and etc.

Note the suggestion to use Air Cav? Are you reading, like at all?

Again, Tau are very short on area-effect weapons. They don't have artillery. The best that they've got are missiles, which are in short supply. They *cannot* kill massed infantry.

Tau are only short of area-effect weapons in the game mechanics. For example, a seeker missile isn't some magical precision weapon that kills exactly one person and does no damage to someone standing a few inches away, it's just a single-shot weapon for game balance purposes (Tau are precise, IG bring the pie plate spam). In "reality", we could expect the Tau to be perfectly capable of killing a conscript horde.

Except we never actually see it action as more than just a glorified Hellfire even in the fluff.

While it's not as ridiculously ineffective as in the tabletop, it's still not a replacement for true artillery. It'd be like the US Army fighting the Chinese army without any artillery at all - not even company level mortars.

[Zinegata]

I should point out that the Tau do have AOE infantry-killing ordnance in the form of railgun-launched submunitions, which they can also mount on aircraft. On the tabletop, their radius seems to be about the same as IG artillery, but I don't know if it's been described in actual fluff text.

Oh, yeah, sorry you're right about this.

It's still problematic because railguns are generally direct-fire (and one of the virtues of arty is indirect fire), but at least the Tau tanks do in fact have the equivalent of HE rounds instead of just AP .

Updated above post and removed "Tau tanks are limited to AP" comment.

[Alkaloid]

The Guard do have access to things like Sentinels though (by far and away the coolest piece of Guard kit, really) that are supposedly fast enough that armoured companies and mech infantry use squads of them as recon units, and would be ideal for this. The scout models would still be outpaced by Tau vehicles, but can actually be used to screen the Guard elements as they are moving so the Tau can't just come up on them unprepared. Sure, you will lose some sentinels, but there is a big difference between Tau armour hitting an unprepared column and hitting a prepared column, taking casualties there and then taking more fire to the rear from mobile heavy weapons platforms as they try to disengage. Meanwhile the heavily armoured models are perfect for supporting infantry with mobile heavy weapons fire after you have actually engaged the Tau infantry, it's what they were actually built for and why highly mobile lightly equipped forces like drop troops make heavy use of them.