A single ARM commander suddenly gates in on an active Necron tomb world its goal, colonize and take over the 40k galaxy for use in the ARM's eternal war against the CORE. Can it accomplish its goal, can it be stopped?

What's an ARM?

He's talking about the pre-Homeworld example of stupid vs RTS games; Total Annihilation. A universe with super manufacturing powahz but really bad power generation and weapons effectiveness. Surely, the commander is 45m away from unlimited death cars, RIGHT? JUST LIKE IN THAT AWFUL RTS GAME!

The manual describes their lasers as beams of light literally frozen in time and their bullets and magnetically contained plasma. The idea they'll be fighting the Necrons is a joke.

Well, I found it fun.

The problem is I don't recall TA having any space ships. At least, they were never mentioned (Why go into empty space when you can just gate to a planet full of resources?) So the commander is stuck on the ground and his enemies can (presumably) get into space.

If the Necrons don't get him, the Imperium will when they hear he is in possession of an STC.

And if his army's pathfinding is as bad it is in game, you can write the whole thing off as a loss (except to sell entertainment tickets to a round of bumper boats).

They use ground-level warp gates, but doubtless there are awful novels describing vast and powerful fleets that simply never appeared. :V

But even if you use ingame manufacturing times you have to use ingame yields, and their weapons are pretty poor. They're just used because OMG CAN MAKE TANK IN 2S ROFFLE etc etc. That the tank has a gun that might set a tree on fire with a direct hit is simply not mentioned.

Frankly I think it's a bit sad we see this sort of thing all the time, and not stuff like 'in Warcraft you can spawn unlimited villagers and create super economy, expand to cover globe in three days' instead of 'make AK in 1s, sector level threat in three days'. RTS games' abstractions making no sense outside context? Who knew?

Man, you could not have picked a worse starting point, the Necrons? An active world?

Literally any other faction would be a better choice, but you pick the most powerful in the universe?

The problem with TA is that there are a lot of implication of serious power but there are few if any quantitative things to be found in the canon. The primary one is the build time of an HTL from the intro cinema which implies that game mechanic build times are within an order of magnitude of 'real' build times.

Other than that there is the implication that over the course of 4000 years they mined most of the heavy metals out of their galaxy (which implies a fucking scary amount of war material being utilized) and implications of Energy to matter conversion and other jazz but nothing you can really get numbers from.

Besides, everyone knows TA trees are made of adamantium.

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A teenage girl is just a teenage boy who can get laid.
-GTO

We're not just doing this for money; we're doing this for a shitload of money!

Except they didn't because its all lying around on the surface, lol.

And man I bet you could work backwards from a laser that sets a tree on fire and find a joule value for one energy. If you were CRAZY.

It's probably because Total Annihilation actually gives an explanation for the fast production that... kind of makes sense. Warcraft doesn't even keep up a pretense that the soldiers you train from a barracks could realistically be trained and equipped that fast. TA does, and because it's Done With Nanites people don't dispute it so much.

Your definition of 'makes sense' is pretty broad. Your shit comes out of magic boxes, built using shit dug out of the ground in a universe where all resources have been used up that are on the other side of the map using a vague open air system of dots.

Yeah, pretty serious scienc fiction there. Like the time frozen beams of light! :v

In fantasy games the people are obviously coming from off map in a similar way. There just isn't any two dead fluff garbage for nerds to get hard over. It's the same abstraction in game terms to make the game fast and spammy.

One of the missions suggested an entire planet had been cracked in half to get at the resources inside... except you units could drive right across the crack, which also looked like it would have only been a few hundred feet wide at most (given scaling vs. trees) and this is hardly big enough to be a useful planetary scale mine if that even made sense. Quick, we need more magma because we build our stuff out of rocks!

I also love how they couldn't even be consistent if the strategic missiles were nuclear or anti matter in the manual itself. The only really verifiable thing to go on was, we know Core industry was once powerful enough to cover an entire planet in metal plating, but with no idea how long that took. Could have been a million years, or seven. The galaxy resources thing is very questionable given the warp gates, perhaps only gate linked worlds were being exhausted and space travel seems to have collapsed. Cut scenes suggest firepower is exactly like what we see in the game... laser blast violently sets tree on fire.

People claimed long ago that certain fiction was 'canon' according to the game makers with 'mach 60 railguns' and other stuff they never bothered to hint at in any form in game while they made it.. and since nobody seems to even have a copy of those left Total Annihilation is completely useless for debates. Even if they had technology a lot better then 40K, they'd still loose this anyway starting with a single commander on a single world. They'd never mass enough forces to avoid being annihilated early in a campaign. 40K has fleets powerful enough to blow up planet surfaces, this is a kind of serious problem for someone starting out with nothing and no signs of large scale shields even in the supposed canon fiction.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

The size of TA battles certainly suggests they don't fight wars on the same scale as the Imperium, even if the lone commander manages to build up some forces.

I chose an active Necron tomb world precisely because it is one of the worst places to start besides Commorragh and the Eye of Terror.

I recall the galactic war reports mentioning that they exchange gigatons of energy during ground battles, looking at the intro cutscene they actually build far faster than they do in game, everything they build is completely invisible (that's why there is a fog of war), every unit being piloted by elite soldiers, and them draining all the resources of the entire galaxy in just a few thousand years so they are definitely up there in terms of power.

The opening cinematic suggests that in-game build times are actually a quarter the speed of the 'reality' of TA. The opening cinematic also suggests that the weapons are half as potent as the in-game stuff so uh ...

Just like Starcraft's intro and ME1 cutscenes, right? :v

Fucking Battlezone has better tanks. That's pretty sad, and the necrons will eat them right up.

Intro movie: The building of the Sentinel by the Arm Commander (only one source of nanolathe, and no other construction unit in sight, so we can assume the Commander built it himself) took 7.97--->8 seconds.

The time it takes for a Commander to build a Sentinel by himself in-game is 33 seconds (with immediate switching between construction units, so the Commander essientially built it himself).

--->4 times faster.

So the real TA build speeds are about 4 times faster than the ones demonstrated in-game.

Now for yields.

Car=25 Metal
Average Car= 1500kg

1 metal=60kg

Energy required to produce 60kg of metal= 60x(3x10^8)^2
= 5.4x10^18 Joules

The TA manual describes the metal maker as 'extremely inefficient,' so let's be generous and assume only 1% efficiency.

5.4x10^18 x 0.01
=5.4x10^16 Joules

That's how many joules of energy are converted to metal from a metal maker,

each second.

Since it takes 60 energy to produce 1 metal,

1 unit of energy = 5.4x10^16/60
=9x10^14 Joules

Going by the bare minimum, a Commander carries 200 units of energy, in a matter/anti-matter backpack.

So, that's the equivilent of 1.8x10^17 Joules.

1.8x10^17 Joules/ (4.18x10^15) = approx. 43 Megatons of TNT
Source: http://www.matter-antimatter.com/energy.htm

Using the unit damage figures as ratio guidlines, the TA Commander's blast does 9999 points of damage.

So, 1 point of damage is approximately 4.3KT of TNT equivilent.

The Core A.K's laser (the game manual describes these as focusing light to a microscopic point) does 30 points of damage, equivilent of 129KT.
The Arm Annihilator does 2500 points of damage, equivilent of 10.75MT.
The Big Bertha does 2000 points of damage, equivilent of 8.6MT.
A nuke deals 5500 points of damage, equivilent to 23.65MT.

And so on.

And then direct hits make trees start to burn, ranges are a few hundred meters, etc etc. So what?

Anyone who can say a Bertha fires 26MT with a straight face is funny as hell. Disregard all mechanics ... Except the ones that make up absurd numbers that are clearly wrong! Lol

Do the necrons still have that interference with gear going on? If so triple lololololoool.

Well Hammer and Anvil depicts a tinhead commander not only being able to communicate with his entire force at once but being able to download and experiance the battle from every unit at once, in real time.

But this thread is a great example of why game mechanics are garbage. Quick! Try to find a gauss flayers range by using tt measurements.

Hey Dan, did the semen fly out of your monitor too?

There are novels?

Yes, a lot of them.

No, according to my calcs the Bertha fires 8.6 MT.

Well if you want to go that way we got the Galactic War reports which show even higher numbers than the ones I gave.


If small skirmishes produce this kind of firepower its easy to imagine how they are capable of exhausting the resources of the entire galaxy in just 4000 years.

They are able to withstand nuclear level firepower due to their unique armor design.


As for range it is canon that all units are cloaked so they have to get in "spitting" distance in order for their anti-cloaking devices to be able to see through the camoflauge (its TA's way of explaining things like the fog of war).

Also don't forget the lowly construction unit they have the ability to teleport mind control nanomachines into enemy units (works on both organics and machines) and the ability to instantly breakdown matter into usable building material and nanolathing technology to quickly build structures and repair units, these alone could be the bane of any 40k commander, especially since they are also quite versatile coming in land, water, and air forms.

So you're still not even trying to describe a war or battle; merely wank out your pet little game. Even if you're stupid enough to believe the obviously wrong shit you read (frozen in time, roffle) you havent bothered talking about how they'd win beyond 'OMG BUILD A LOT OF TANKZ BRO'.

Actually, do you honestly think 'cloaking'explains anything? Certainly explains awful sonar ranges! :v

When you say things like 'instantly break down blah blah jism' I hope you realize everyone who played the game is laughing at you. You can make up a no-limits nanowank universe if you want, but nobody will care about the result but you.

Just presenting the facts.

As for the science not making sense, 40k science makes no sense as well and I really don't have to bother explaining why, we all know it doesn't make sense if you have even the most basic level of common sense just look at the Orkz (they can literally get buckets of red paint splash paint all over a looted tank and have it run circles around Imperial tanks with its super speed), then we have Chaos, Necrons, and basically any other faction's magitech (Tau make some sense though).

Lol 'facts'. Bertha is a multi megaton weapon! It may destroy UP TO FIVE TREES. :v

40k doesn't fight itself and require you to jump through a million hoops to get to 'supah powah'. Regardless, one they've built trillions of tree-threatening robot cars, what then? What's their grand plan with their mater energy conversion that clearly isnt and their unlimited elemental manipulation that obviously isn't and their unlimited teleportation of everything which probably isn't?

I suggest 'get blown the fuck up by necrons'.

There was the fluff written by the game producers publish on the old(now long long gone) multiplayer meta-game. Little stuff like a single fight with less than 400 unit total throwing around an aggregate of 2 gigatons of ordinance, burning a planet down to the bedrock just by fighting on it for a week.

The only real demonstration of TA's space assets end up being half-a-dzoen ships which evac a world with 10s of billions of population in a week. That and the planet they built for some sort of FTL weapon system in the Beta which got blown up a few weeks after release of the multiplayer meta-game.


Even going in game, you can burn down a +25m tall tree in seconds. That is a lot of energy.


Total annihilation handwaves the logistical requirements with teleporting nanotech & 3d printing, energy-to-mass conversion, and explicit use of heavy cloning(for the Arm).

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"Okay, I'll have the truth with a side order of clarity." ~ Dr. Daniel Jackson.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." ~ Stephen Colbert
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