Armies of the Imperium
There are people who unironically think these are the good guys. That is terrible.
Commissars are obviously modeled on Soviet Commissars (there are a few hints, such as the fucking name), but they remind me of the Nazi SS in that of all the forces in the army, they have the really stylish awesome uniforms that turn heads. When people bang on about how good Nazi uniforms were (often trying at the same times to distance themselves from neo-fascists, good luck with that!), they’re not talking about brownshirts, they’re talking about the SS. And Commissar jackets, trenchcoats and hats look totally sweet.
History has taught us that looking great is not justification for genocide and warmongering, however, so this isn’t saving the Imperium.
Anyway, as Frank is about to mention in a bit more depth, this game was not just an update on the previous one (whereas you could sort of take your 3E army into 4E and just be at a mild disadvantage from basic power creep or some abilities working differently). Likewise from 5th to 6th and from 6th to 7th – they were the incremental changes of D&D 3E to 3.5 where maybe your specific character suddenly sucks because someone had a hate-on for chargers but if you had made a Wizard under the old system, chances were good that you barely had to change anything other than allocate your Scry skill points into a new Knowledge or something, maybe adjust your prepared spells, and any old prestige classes not yet updated could still basically work (for non-casters, probably better than once they DID update them!). 2E to 3E in Warhammer 40K was a lot like 2E to 3E in D&D where you were doing it all from the ground up and your old codex was suddenly meaningless.
I’m going to add some bonus entertainment by adding a reason why fans and players of each given faction are the worst people. Not the reason why each in-setting army are the worst people or the most stupid or the conceptually dumbest, though that is also possible, just “why you should avoid people who play this”. If at the end of this review you decide to avoid all 40k players, I will have done some good in the world.
A wargame isn't a playable thing without army lists, which is why 4th edition was such a slap in the fucking face. Anyway, all the rules and shit only means anything to anybody in reference to the actual soldier mans you re marching around on the table, and 3rd edition scrapped backwards compatibility with old army lists entirely. And in order to make that not mean that 3rd edition was an unplayable pile of slag on release, there are minimalist army lists for all the supported factions in the basic book.
Supported factions in this case is: Space Marines, Chaos Marines, Imperial Guard, Craftworld Eldar, Dark Eldar, Sisters of Battle, Orks, and Tyranids. Which means that Squats, Harlequins, Daemonworld, and Cultist armies from the previous edition could all go pound sand. Not that there was really a lot of support for any of those fuckers in 2nd edition, but they were all nominally playable and the angry tears of space dwarf players who realized with the publication of 3rd edition that they had not yet gotten a full codex for their army because they were fucking never going to get one was a deep well of schaudenfreude if you like that sort of thing.
There are enough armies on this list that we're going to tackle them in two parts: Imperial Armies and “the rest of them.” The Imperial Armies differ from any other army because there was a small list of “Heroes of the Imperium” that you could take for any faction that happened to have the Imperial tag: Marines, Guard, or Sisters. This was like a weird little appendix that most people forgot actually existed, so if you ended up using any of it you could expect incredulous stares or people accusing you of cheating. Obscure rules for the wins!
Note: I do like the schadenfreude because it’s nice to know someone else has it worse.
Anyway, way back then, I found that people were okay with an Imperial player taking a single Assassin. They will look at you weirdly if you take anything else like a Priest or an Inquisitor, and multiple Assassins were right out, but adding one Eversor or whatever alongside your Space Marines. In my case it was a Callidus. I wanted the whole set, but the store happened to have Callidus Assassins (possibly just one), so that was what I snapped up, and it turned out they’re really good alongside basically any army. But next to my Ultra Marines (shut up it was my first army) nobody batted an eye. I literally never saw anybody take any other “Heroes of the Imperium” than Assassins though and yes, augmenting cheap shitty troops with Priests would absolutely be seen as “beardy”. You know, like what current Imperial Guard can just do within their Codex if they really want.
Practically speaking you were not going to get an Inquisitor. There were obscure Leadership stat related reasons you might want to, but the fundamental issue is that all characters of the multiple attacks and wounds type end up paying a big pile of points just for existing, so if you don't have a pretty good plan for them killing a big pile of dudes, it's pretty hard for these characters to justify their cost.
On the other hand, there were lots of good reasons to use Assassins (or at least, the Calidus or Vindicare Assassins), because they had clear means to recoup their points cost quickly. And more obscurely, every Imperial squad could have an attached Preacher character. Your basic priest was a cheap normal human with a laspistol, but he was technically a character so you could give him a Power Fist or a Storm Bolter. They don't wear armor, but due to obscurities involving wound allocations, that is often completely OK. Generally speaking, it was often useful to put priests into Guard squads as an additional source of firepower.
The bottom line though is that while there were a few reasons to use a few of the Heroes of the Imperium, you were pretty much asking for people to call you a cheese head for doing it. For fuck's sake, the troops aren't actually in your codex, they are in an appendix no one reads.
Later on, the shit-awful Inquisitor tabletop game briefly existed, and when that happened, we saw the Heroes of the Imperium simply get rolled in with other forces in the new codices of Codex: Daemon Hunters (which is about Grey Knights with a side order of Imperial Assassins and Ordo Malleus Inquisition) and Codex: Witch Hunters (which is about Battle Sisters with a side order of Imperial Assassins, Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors, and the assorted weird stuff of the Priesthood). The main thing I remember is that an Orbital Bombardment is not wargear you purchase for a character, it’s a unit (with no model other than the large blast template) that is a Heavy Support slot with a maximum of 1 per army. So in Apocalypse (which ignores both of those restrictions), you could basically field a hundred of those and just have a rain of fire every single turn. I don’t even know if it’s a good idea, but it’s funny, and also costs zero dollars. As long as someone on your side fields enough actual models to actually do things and not automatically lose the game, it could maybe work?
I digress. The things covered in the main book served as a reasonable baseline, but obviously things changed. Actual codices were usually better, and some forces were shuffled around (Heroes of the Imperium mostly), and Tau and Necrons started existing within this edition but not when it hit the shelves, so their books brought entirely new things to the table.
Let us now talk about some of the actual armies as presented in the book, starting with a minor sub-faction you might not have hear- I’m kidding.
Space Marines!
Featured on the cover of every edition of WH40K that has happened and will continue to be on the cover of every edition of WH40K in the future even after Games Workshop goes bankrupt and the IP is sold to an Icelandic videogame company.
Space Marines are the default army. They come in the box, they come in all the other promotional materials, they are easy to paint, they are cheap to collect, they are forgiving to model, and so on and such like. It's baby's first WH40K army, and by the way they are (in this edition) fucking powerful. Any and all 3rd edition army lists had to be asked the question “Can this army possibly beat a pile of Space Marines with default weaponry?” and if the answer was “No” then that army could “Fuck off.” You were going to play against Space Marines. A lot. And they were damn good.
The first thing about them is that they have just good stats pretty much across the board. They are strength 4, they are toughness 4, they have 3+ armor saves, their basic weapon is strength 4 too. Fuck, even their Initiative is 4, and that stat probably shouldn't even exist. The game tried to tell you that a normal stat was 3, but Space Marines had 4s across the board, which meant that all the other armies were just sub par in various ways. Orks have low BS and Strength. Eldar Warriors have low Strength and Toughness, actual human guardsmen are just generally shit. And so on.
But the really big fuck you to the rest of the game was “And They Shall Know No Fear.” That was a slogan back from the original Rogue Trader, and the authors liked it so much that they made it a broken special rule for Marine factions. Basically units in 3rd edition are called to make Leadership tests when they take a lot of casualties or get the bad end of close combat, and if they fail that test they break and there are various ways they can be wiped out. Failing that leadership test is bad. But with the Space Marine special rule, you don't get wiped out. You actually don't suffer any real penalties at all, and even get to shoot on your next turn in a lot of situations where you otherwise would not be allowed to do that. When Space Marines fail that test, it is good instead of bad. It's like playing on super easy mode, where you can get badly outflanked and get your heavy weapons team caught in a hammer and anvil by assault squads and just shrug because your opponent doesn't get to use the normal rules for wiping out squads.
Yeah, it’s not enough to just be Fearless (where you literally ignore the entire rules on Morale), Space Marines were allowed to run away but then just automatically regroup and act normally the following turn. And there are legitimate reasons why you might want your troops to run away for a very short moment. Your nine guys locked in combat with arbitrary orks, having lost one guy, would absolutely love to step back a few inches, then open fire and gun the orks down good and proper with actual ranged weapons, rather than sit in combat and slowly let iterative probability grind out a winner (still likely to be the Space Marines unless they managed to get a lot of orks in base contact).
And for a beginner army, you can sort of see why you might want them to have simplified Morale rules. Morale is important in the game (as it should be – imagine if some dickhead just changed it to “Whatever, I guess if you take casualties, check to see if you take some more”. That’d be a shitty fucking game not worth playing!), and also quite complex, doing a bunch of different things (Fear, Pinning, Morale from being shot to pieces, Morale from losing combat, Regrouping and its strict requirements…) But a better process might be to just select one or two aspects of it and say “This army is Immune to these parts of the Leadership rules, but not the others” or just cut a few restrictions on regrouping or something. Give actual baby steps there, rather than “for the most part you still have to know how you can be Pinned or Broken, but you can ignore what happens afterwards”.
Space Marine players are the worst players for a number of reasons. They want to have absolutely everyone else’s toys (and to a greater or lesser extent, they get them, sometimes actually stealing them and retro-actively making them Space Marine Only toys). They throw a hissy fit any time another army has something good. They expect to always win automatically. A large number of their players are actual children playing the game for the first time and so are annoying. Also they like to bellow (as best they can in their prepubescent voices) “FOR THE EMPEROR” a lot at the table, which is fucking annoying to people with sensitive ears.
Beethoven does not mind playing against Space Marines players.
You might think that a faction that had no weaknesses would be impossible to beat, but that wasn't strictly true. Space Marines weren't fantastically expensive, but they did cost more than anyone else's line troops. And there are definitely break points on the d6, so the fact that Space Marines were predictably good across the board meant that you could min/max your troop and weapon selections to trade well against Marines. And you fucking had to do this, because the chances of you playing against a faction that wasn't Marines was pretty small.
This was best shown in the Eldar Codex, where Gav Thorpe went ape shit writing up weapons that were perfectly optimized to cracking open Space Marines – which ironically made that force tragically incapable of fighting anything else. Yes, a Star Cannon will kill Orks or Guardsmen as easily as it will kill Marines – but that's exactly the point. Orks and Guard cost less points than Marines, so if you are killing “as many” of these guys as you'd be killing Marines, that is actually terrible.
Sisters of Battle
It comes last in the book, but you didn't actually expect us to save it for last did you?
Frank collected these before I even knew what 40K was. Sisters were actually my second army, when I returned from living interstate (the first time) and working with depression (the second time) and needed something to fill my time (always) and also had access to the poison that is 4chan’s /tg/.
If you want Sisters of Battle rule 34, they got your back.
At the start (and when the codex first dropped), there were two “typical” armies for Sisters of Battle. The first was to just put blobs of 20 Sisters and things like that, with masses of models everywhere. Lots of shooting, and lots of individual models to individually shoot (or wipe out in one go with a Battle Cannon). The second was to have three Exorcists (which were amazingly good) and a bunch of Seraphim squads and then a bunch of squads of Sisters in Rhinos. “Ideally” with a single Guard Platoon added so there are masses of cheap bodies to soak up fire. That second one may have actually been a “Codex” one and not a Grey Book one.
Later on after the codex, a joke army was introduced: the Lawn Chair Army. You take a Guard Platoon with a Sentinel patrol of 3x 3 Sentinels, you take 3 units of 3 Penitent Engines, and for the HQ you have Inquisitor Lord Fyodor Karamazov, so you have eighteen Walkers and one thing that looks like a Walker.
By the time later editions made tanks great again, it all changed, and it just became “Field as many Immolators as possible, and load them up with units that have 2-4 Meltas each”, with all your Troops actually being Storm Troopers or Inducted Guard. One guy had a kind of funny thing involving 2 Canonesses, 2 Command Squads with the expensive banner of “in close combat, every friendly unit in range counts as dealing 1 extra wound” and one or two Seraphim squads to leap in, then at the end of combat the enemy has taken 10-12 “extra” wounds to push their Leadership off the RNG and make them flee (or slaughter Fearless enemies, in the case of 5th Edition).
But that’s what it eventually became: gimmicks and “Everything except actual Sisters”.
Conceptually the Sisters of Battle in the Grey Codex are just what you get when you put Marine equipment on Human statlines and have a unit cost that comes in between those two. In 2nd edition, the Sisters of Battle were conceived as an allied force that you could stick into other Imperial armies – like the Heroes of the Imperium in 3rd edition. So the line wasn't particularly complete. There were 21 different models, but that's actually much less than it sounds. Recall these were metals, so every new pose was a whole new model. Eight of those models were just regular Sisters holding bolters at slightly different angles with or without helmets. Add some sculpts for unit leaders with various close combat weapon options and a couple of poses for jet pack troops and there was only room for one model with each heavy or special weapon option. And not very many of those. Your choices are Melta, Flamer, Multimelta, Heavy Flamer, and Heavy Bolter. That's seriously the whole list of non-Bolter gun options for the infantry.
So with that background, and the total lack of posable plastics or swappable weaponry, your units are pretty much just the same Sisters of Battle with the same weapon options in slightly different proportions. Retributors are the best because they have the most weapon upgrades, but the rest of the squads aren't really different. If for some reason you didn't pay any points for weapons upgrades, a Retributor Squad would be exactly the same as a regular line squad.
It should be noted that they also have the jet pack troops, and they look awesome.
With very little choice in troop or weapon selection, it would be easy for this army to be a train wreck. Many armies limited in such a way have historically been terrible. The Sisters were actually pretty OK for certain very limited ranges of points, simply because their weapon choices happen to cover everything you desperately want to do. Too many points and they run out of Retributor squads they are allowed to purchase and everything goes to shit.
Later on of course, the Salamanders would get special vehicles that were functionally immune to melta weapons, which was a hard counter to the entire army. And the expansion materials never really addressed these issues and it was all pretty odd. Instead we got randumb tables for prayer effects for your battle nuns.
There is also the Storm Bolter as a weapon option, but the fact that Frank forgot to mention it should serve as a hint as to how much you care. If you field models with Storm Bolters in your Sisters army, I can just about guarantee that the reason is “that’s the model I have”. And that’s a thing about metal armies of the time: your choices were to field what you got in the box, buy lots of individual blister packs, or get your saw out and do some conversion work. Also, the Storm Bolter was a weapon that unit leaders could take as well as being a Special Weapon for Dominion squads (the Fast Attack choice that has to take a Transport, and gets the Melta Gun and Flamer, whereas the Retributors get Heavy Flamers, Heavy Bolters and Multi Meltas). So you can generally make the Storm Bolter mini your Sister Superior for units rather than using up a position that could have a Melta or Flamer.
So, the reason why Sisters of Battle players are the worst should be obvious: they’re basically like me. Until we get a Codex that is on the scale of Space Marines (with different Orders getting different Heroines and special rules), with lots of options and good units in every slot, we will be unhappy and every official codex will be the actual worst codex ever, written by the worst writer ever. Until we get plastic kits for everything, the world is a shitty, miserable place. We are not going to accept any other army getting decent coverage for Flamers, Bolters and Meltas (like fucking Salamanders or Blood Angels) until we have something unique. We’re never happy with anything. A lot of us desperately want our army to be seen as the glorious righteous heroes whilst also being the militant arm of the major religion, and I’m just saying, historically that isn’t a combination you should expect to see.
Also a lot of them will also do the “FOR THE EMPEROR!” thing.
Imperial Guard
The Grey Codex Imperial Guard is actually quite powerful. When they made the Guard Codex the author basically apologizes for how overpowered these fuckers are and makes them cost a lot more points without being better. Most Codices are one flavor or another of power creep, but every so often you find some codex author who has a bug up their ass about how things are too powerful and writes a massive nerf codex to try to put things right. This can't ever work, because the other codex authors aren't on the same page and are just happily power creeping away. But before the Imperial Guard went on their unilateral disarmament campaign, they were pretty good.
Here's how it works: the Imperial Guard are slow as shit. They have the worst transport options in the game, none of their units have bikes or jet packs, and they are highly encouraged to put heavy weapons into almost every squad, which means they can't move at all. If you wanted a WWI simulator, here it fucking is. Further, they have shitty stat lines and bad basic equipment. But what they do have are two things:
- They are pretty cheap, just 5 points a model in the Grey Codex.
- They have access to the biggest guns in the game as vehicles and squad upgrades.
Imperial Guard spent their troop slots not on squads of infantry, but on platoons of infantry. Even their HQ was a mandatory command squad rather than a stand alone commander. A platoon was at least 25 dudes in 3 squads (and up to 55 dudes in six squads before taking optional extra dudes like priests and commisars). So the mandatory troop selections of the Imperial Guard were 55 models, which was already more models than most other entire armies. And that could cheaply be outfitted with 8 Lascannons and 4 Plasma Guns, which is kind of a lot for the basic troop picks of an army, and really a lot considering that you got 50 dudes your opponent had to chop through and the whole fucking thing only cost you 400 points.
And then on the other end you had slow as shit tanks with ginormous weapons that blew the everliving shit out of things under 5” templates. And some of those had nearly impervious front armor. It was good times.
Now was it possible to beat the Guard? Absolutely. But a lot of armies people actually ran couldn't do it. If you tweaked all your weapon choices to fight marines (which you probably did), you could easily end up just not having enough bullets for all the Guardsmen on the other end of the table.
You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.
These days it is possible to field legitimate armies of nothing but Main Battle Tanks (and a handful of Tech Priests), but back then, that was not possible. Indeed, you were considered a dirty cheater if you took a pair of minimum Troops choices, a Company Command Squad and then as many as THREE tanks. Slow down there, three whole tanks? You can fuck off, what do you think this is, a military endeavour? I mean, I’m pretty sure there are people living in America who have never served in the military yet own more than three tanks just for their own shits and giggles. As the game progressed, they added options for taking smaller numbers of infantry (even if they were more elite and thus had a similar final cost in points, you were essentially buying and painting the same type of model, so it saved you dollars), and larger numbers of tanks, and if you did that you were PLAYING THE GAME WRONG!
Meanwhile, half the time it was actually more effective to slam a hundred models onto the table and go “Oh, I guess I’ll have to put the rest in Reserves.” back then. It only became a problem for objective-scrambling, and against enemies with big blast weapons (which gradually increased until that was most armies), or missions against fast-running melee forces when you have a lot of intervening cover or night-fighting rules or something else that just shuts the entire army down. But seriously, in the early days, you were often better off fielding a swarm of doods, and that was seen as the less beardy thing, which D&D players should understand just fine when it comes to justifying two prestige classes on a fighter but Clerics working just fine.
The supremacy of Guard did not last very long, and they went from “dominant” to “bad” to “essentially unplayable” in not very long. The most obvious difficulty was changing the cost of a basic troop from 5 points to 6 and changing the cost of Lascannons from 15 points to fucking thirty. But the real kick in the nuts was the gradual change from a default mission of “kill the other dudes” to a default mission of “put a squad onto each of the objectives.” That pushed the game from one where you could have your entire army sit back and shoot heavy weapons and say “come at me bro” to one where you were required to have some non-zero number of squads on jetbikes or packed into fast transports or something so that you could plausibly contest objectives near the enemy deployment zone. The Guard did not have that and had no real way to get that.
Imperial Guard players are the worst players because when they put men on the table or move them, it takes hours. Also, they tend to do the “FOR THE EMPEROR” thing plenty. But they’ll also shout other stuff, generally taken from a dozen different generals and tacticians who had wildly incompatible styles – so expect “Plenty more where that came from, send the next wave! Drown them in your corpses!” right next to a line about the enemies’ numbers counting for nothing. They like to think of themselves as great generals and historians who have read up on the art of war (I mean, "I have read The Art of War during my Three Kingdoms obsession period", but that doesn’t magically make you a good tactician), and will (unsuccessfully) try to coordinate the entire side in a multi-player game like Apocalypse, where any failing is obviously because the other generals didn’t listen to their amazing advice.
Next Up: Non-Imperial armies.
Don’t worry, they also have the worst players!