The emperor made an unstable are of mentally degrading soldiers he killed after they had fullfilled his purpose, the made another batch of almost equally unstable people and sent them to conquer the stars, made a pact with a soceity of tecnocrats who had made science a religion despite having a strict "no cults allowed" in his imperium. And then proceded to play favourites left right and center between his top generals/sons, almost ensuring they were gonna end at each others throats at some point, and just proceded to leave command to start a mad science project. Unless he was actively trying to star a mutiny, his methods doomed his long before angron and konrad. Not to mention he actively let Angrons friend die in front of him.
"Mortarion" I mean - even if the *name* didn't ring an alarm bell, didn't the massive scythe, obsession with poison and general Grim-Reaper vibe suggest this wasn't a guy to be given too much power?
It is kinda clever, GW has made this setting where technological innovation is heresy. But then they are a model company and want to introduce new shit so they can sell more models. The simple solution is just to say "This isn't new it was just re-discovered". It can even be used by tech priests in the setting to justify why they suddenly have new shit. "Dude trust me, I found it in a ruin".
@@mokithepepe2454 and that besides some dirt and dust its practically new. Also ignore the fact that was buried like 20 meters deep and somehow no one detected the nuclear powered battery. And that its painted red. And that i know how it works. .... and that i just happen to have a stockpile of them.
Not quite It’s actually a lot worse So the mechanicum used to use the whole ritual for people who weren’t really good by could follow stuff well, so it could hide them in a way. Aka too much smoke means nobody sees me working and copies me, so I now I can get my job done and still have the same demand and supply as before. Aka it prevents people from learning so the mechanicum stay in power. Now they still innovate but… there is a fatal issue. The warp. Before the warp was pretty mild and not too much of a issue, but now… Well faith helps keep the ship safe even if the field is working some things can still claw at the ship and a mild flicker could let something in for as long as it exists. Now we say the Tau have a good run because of how advanced they are, but we forget that the demons can possess machines and so on. Thankfully the souls of Tau are so small it barely catches attention. You also have the same scale issue. A single discovery or invention on a planet may never even leave the system. We have seen this happen multiple times, entire civilizations could make armies and send them out to help the imperium but the advancements go unnoticed in the millions of soldiers there and of course it never is read in the paperwork. Some governors don’t even send out the research discoveries. Add to this and the faith aspect and… yeah. Change the machine and the faith wavers making it less likely to defend against the warp creatures. This includes the people on the ship believing it won’t actually protect them- this superstition also weakens the field that keeps the warp at bay. It really is not a simple issue. Effectively if you needed you could restart a planet and isolate humans for a few hundred years and treat them in a bubble, but if they communicate with the rest of humanity then all of your advances may weaken and the buff all that added would just be hit with a hard debuff thanks to the people learning about what is going on. That isn’t even taking into account what the humans may make up in their isolation.
Don't forget that Volkite used to be the standard issue weapon for both Marines and Imperial Army. The only reason they got phased out was because it was expensive to arm the whole military as it expanded.
Also as they expanded and raised forces on new worlds, those forces would often would often be armed and equipped with local equipment, since the Imperium's production couldn't keep up with its own expansion. You could have a regiment from one planet decked out in steam-powered power armor and black powder weapons and a regiment from another equipped with personal energy shields and plasma rifles fighting in the same battle. It was a logistical nightmare. Since lasguns, and flak armor for that matter, are not only cheap, but so simple to produce all a planet needs is knowledge of electricity, plastics, and metallurgy to make them it made standardizing equipment in a reasonable amount of time possible.
It was also less versitile and more difficult to clean and maintain. Bolters are fairly low tech to the point where Calibanites were using them *before* the emperor's arrival
a weirdly undescribed amount I heard that after the horus hersey they couldnt make terminator armor but now they can again, or how knights used to be a dying breed because no one knew how to make them anymore but suddenly tech priests remembered how its always getting retconed so its hard to tell
The imperium loses and gains world's every day, it expands and contracts As it expands, it finds STCs, which can be just about anywhere, even world's that have been in the imperium for millennia, but no one had dug up yet
Only the cataphracti terminator armour and a few other variants are unable to be reproduced mainly because of time and resource costs the indomitus pattern terminator suit however is way easier to create and costs less resources
they lost the potential to reclaim the advancements made during the Golden Age of Technology, or any sort of prosperity and peace. Potential is what the Imperium lost.
The Imperium is all about wasting potential. Maybe some xenos would be useful. Maybe you could ask before you shoot. Maybe some research an science would lead to improvement. Maybe Exterminatus is used too often. Maybe some of the soldiers you wasted to claim a pile of rubble could have become visionary people. Wasting potential is what keeps the setting grim-dark. So in a meta way, they can never stop wasting their potential.
@@hpenvy1106and yet also each time they try and not waste potential it turns out even worse cause 99.99% of xenos are genetically predisposed assholes and whatever radical approach to a problem solution an outlying Inquisitor may suggest usually ends up fucking things up more.
they literally were on the doorstep of that first one on mars with the magma city, a massive research complex that was about to unlock all that shit, but due to the civil ar on mars it had to be destoryed to keep the enemy from using it to insta win.
The lost technology thing always kind of annoyed me, since lack of spares is the most deadly enemy a mechanised military would face. A hundred centuries worth of operating hours is a long time to go without cracking some important bearing or wearing out the thread on a worm gear, little things like that. And pretty quickly every Shadowsword in the imperium would be dumped on the roadside after it lost a fan blade for the engine deck and the knowledge of milling titanium into that specific pattern isnt available...
What's even more fucked is the fact that Hive worlds have slave labor that essentially works a ridiculous amount of hours (not as much as the lore states as that's impossible) with endless resources always being dumped in. Production is said to always be high on these worlds and yet things like spare parts and components are almost always hard to come by.
Even solid state electronics would fail over that length, bus bars thin out, polymers crack and degrade, soldering (or it's future equivalent) fails, epoxies don't last forever either.
The machanicum is to thank for this. Let’s put this into perspective right. They are a culture derived around the keeping of knowledge as it makes you more Devine. So to me at least the tech priest understand last how the smaller parts works. Like a tech priest might know how to replace a leg or arm on a imperator titan. Maybe even fix all of the titan. But they don’t know how everything in this titan weaves together so perfectly. Like modern(40k) day humanity can make a warlord titan and lower. But above this it’s very well understood maintenance.
11:10 I wish there was a short story about Guilliman finding and digging through an unassuming filing cabinet about to be sent to a landfill. Only to find it contained the long lost blue prints for making Terminator armor, Volkite weapons, and Imperial Knights. Then trying to resist the urge to just shoot himself there and then.
Addendum to addendum to an addendum : we have found some old map with unused fleets, I do not know where to file it, pretty useless for now so I am going to file it under: other
We had 1000 scribes do statistical analysis on a newly discovered system only to find out the data we’re analyzing is 1500 years old and the system in question was depopulated by tyranids 180 years ago.
@@stephengordon576 as insane as it is with such a massive empire this things are just bound to happen... think about every problem we have right now with some unnecessary spending, now scale it up to the level of galaxy and add massive amount of information transfer problems and thousands of years of history... yeah there is a massive unused fleet in system X, we just kinda forgot system X even exists.
@JM-mh1pp yet nearly every other Sci-Fi galaxy spanning empire seems to manage it perfectly well. I mean the closest analog would be the Galactic Empire of Star Wars(in legends) at least. It's even explicitly stated in EpII "if it doesn't exist in the archives, it doesn't exist". The Imperial burrurocracy was able to manage millions of planets with trillions of citizens nearly down a microscopic level. Imperial bureaucrats were able to dictate and manage the output of specific factories on some bumfuck world all the way out of the Outer Rim. And they would know if production quotas wouldn't be met, and would pay them a visit promptly. It's a retarded piece of Warhammer lore that completely breaks the believability of the universe. No empire with a bureaucracy as comically bad as the IoM would survive nearly as long, probably collapsing before they even realized it was.
Since current earth is canon, does that mean GW is just lost knowledge? Could somebody on holy terra rediscover GW headquarters and learn the secrets of the universe?
I like him because he isn't totally circlejerking WH40k, he's totally right in saying the Forerunners could completely own the galaxy and the Covenant would thrive
I am surprised you didn't mention the short story "Watcher in the rain" when you talked about the Imperium absurdly horrendous burocracy. (What follows is the premise of the book, not a spoiler.) The whole premise of the book is that a scribe did a mistake when filing some datas and a whole regiment of guardsmen received expired food resources, resorted to cannibalism and were then executed to a man. A whole regiment, that's hundreds of thousands of guardsmen!
Warp travel unreliability, limited technology for faster than light communication, resource transport that have to be planned decades in advance, these all contribute to the imperiums problems.
@@FarremShamistyeah, and her kill count by now is probably in the billions of people and a hundred planets lost because of that, she made countless mistakes every day, as far as we know it, she made Cadia fell. XD
My favorite quote regarding 40k is that you know the administration is labyrinthian when the average rounding error does more damage to your empire than the average enemy invasion.
that black hole gun scares the hell out of me. it is so powerful it distorts reality forcing you to time travel backward so that the weapon can't miss ever. that ture madness.
The Necrons had stuff that made Humanity's best gear during the Dark Age of Technology look like obsidian spears and atlatls...The only reason everybody not Necron isn't dead is because the Silent King told his subjects to destroy or lock all that up permanently after destroying the C'Tan.
State of Decay was a really good game. My anecdote for it is that I played really really carefully and only had my first death very late into the game, on the final mission because my vehicle glitched out and got stuck. When I booted up the game the next day I discovered that the deaths of characters are permanent, even the main character that the early story is written around. It was very frustruating to imagine this dude who had gone through so much in the apocalypse and almost made it out, died because his frickin tire somehow translocated into a concrete barrier. What was cool was that when the procedurally generated characters from my safehouse took over as playable characters, they had a bunch of natural dialogue lines about how he had been around forever and how sad it was that he died trying to find safety for everyone.
10:24 comprable real world example would be the Saturn 5 rockets. Many of the expert tradesmen who assembled those from back in the day are dead or long retired and never passed on their skills, so we can’t build them anymore.
@@calebbarnhouse496 but why waste resources, why ask the imperium to do the same? The imperium cannot afford, any delay in supply means you've messed up decades of planning.
@@tarektechmarine8209 probably because most tech preists aren't really doing that much in the galaxy, and if the equipment was so effective they would be willing to get it back
@@calebbarnhouse496 No, simply not true. By any reasonable estimation, even with all the knowledge already learned from then, a modern day working replica of a Saturn V would be much, much more expensive.
I love the section about the Imperium's burocracy. The entire basis for a bunch of interrelated homebrews I'm working on is two systems being forgotten about and subsequently reclaimed and repurposed.
@@bigdaddy_bo6741 where do people post fan fiction? I've been looking for a place to post. I don't want to make money I just want to tell cool stories.
When you mentioned "erasing matter", which is correct, they also had a weapon that could destroy information so not only was something destroyed, but it in a very literal sense never existed, that is truly terrifying :D
They had 2 such weapons by name: one is called an Ontological weapon (which was used by a Dark Angel on some Chaos-corrupted ship crew and after firing at them, he forgot who they were or anything about them, despite being a Space marine who by default has a perfect memory and who has served on that ship for years with those crewmen. All he remembers is that there were some hostile crew armed with pistols and he fired at them. The other kind are hypometric weapons, which are written about a little bit in the Priests of Mars trilogy as one of the weapons that the Speranza was equipped with. It was said that these weapons could erase entire swathes or sections of spacetime. Not sure if the reality information consumption tech that the DAOT mechanovores from the story Perpetual are the same tech, but they do the same thing.
Theres a great quote from (I think) the 8th edition rulebook saying "every year a thousand worlds a lost and a thousand words are rediscovered within the Imperium's borders". Also wouldn't losing half the space marines probably be a kinda big loss?
You'd think that this WOULD be the case, but GW's overall attitude for a long time basically just amounted to 'throw more Space Marines at it, whaddya mean half the fanbase hates Space Marines!?', so it honestly doesn't matter as much as you'd think it would. If at all.
The whole "they simply forgot" is definitely real. There's ruins from 3000 years ago that nobody knows what they were for exactly. We can make an educated guess what Stonehenge was for, but no one knows FOR SURE what it was for or what people did with it or how the bloody thing was even built! It could've been a webway portal for all we know.
The Stonehenge might not be a good example, as 3000 years ago the world was quite a bit bigger than today. True, space is even bigger, but if you got one unified empire supposed to be ruling over things, then it's quite the display of incompetence. The folk who built Stonehenge likely were also doing it for themselves/their own peoples, for their own reasons. If an Empire existed, and commissioned the construction of something as impressive for the time period it was built in (no doubt likely using public funds for it too), then you'd think they would have it somewhere in their historical record, as it would be quite the feat. That said, most of the humanities history is indeed lost today. Between all the different languages, natural disasters, wars, plagues, burning giant libraries full of recorded knowledge for giggles, bonking the guy on the head who knew all the stuff cause war, cultures, some things never being written down and only existing in oral tradition, plus a lot of times, where writing stuff down probably seemed like a waste because why would you do that, a lot of stuff has just been forgotten about. Plus, the tools used to record stuff also were less than durable. So even if someone jotted it down, it coulda been destroyed by a random desperate rat feeling hungry that day, or a leak in the roof causing water to fall on the pile. An Empire of galactic scope can't exactly do anything but blame itself for being shockingly incompetent when it comes to its own bureaucracy, record keeping, administration and archiving. Seems like they had some genuine dumb dumbs in charge for not understanding that this kinda stuff, as well as performing regular updates/reforms to keep it robust and functional, are kind of important.
We forgot how to make roman concrete until recently, greek fire is still lost, even the byzantines themselves forgot how to do it before their collapse, its definetly real
Y'all are making some Admittedly stupid comparisons. A few thousand years ago the only method of record keeping wasn't even BOOKS, it was on papyrus and shit. Then scrolls, THEN books. It's kinda easy to forget when the places that hold that exact knowledge were getting burned down on the regular by barbarians. There's no forgetting HOW to make something super important in the current age because of the methods we have to record and safekeep information. So you're going to tell me that after tens of thousands of years we would end up going BACKWARDS in our information keeping while becoming the single dominant and unified empire in the galaxy rather than forwards? There's forgetting about ancient shit from when paper was considering an unparalleled technological advancement and forgetting the most impressive war machines in history after you've advanced to a point where the internet looks like paper.
Pancreas is after my own heart with their description of how they play strategy, I thought I was an outlier Although 40 years is radical by my standards, I'll spend centuries building up in Stellaris before sending out my generalized fleet for a galactic crusade with a massive tech advantage
Me too, I just don't like sending soldiers to die meaninglessly, if I send them to conquer I'll make sure they will be the best equiped they can be to minimize casualties, until then, let the enemy die by the thousands against our defenses.
I'm a 'build tech and manufacturing base, then send out elite murder machines to Blitzkrieg the enemy' kinda guy. Slow build, then rapid overwhelming force.
Considering Angron was meant to be a healer and ended up turning into a murder machine but was still deemed acceptable for the imperium it REALLY makes you think about the two lost primarchs
Hearing how you run strategy is interesting. Although Dawn of War is an RTS rather than a Grand Strategy, and therefore doesn't worry about interstellar empire management, I have something potentially funny to share. My favourite faction in that game is Imperial Guard. Their strengths are all in defensive holds, turtling, followed by huge pushes after achieving tech milestones. Instead of doing that, I consistently beat my friends and the Harder AI by doing hyper-aggressive bayonet charges. That's not the funny part though. The funny part was when one of my friends countered that charge and thought he got me. Instead I just fell back a bit and turtled just outside his base. Then I started building my base into his base. There's something magical about playing a defensive faction and seeing how aggressive it lets you be.
This is why Sigmar is the better Emperor. Atleast when he left the front lines, it was because the project he was working on was basically their only hope, and not a passion project that could've waited a couple of hundred years.
While i agree that Sigma(r) its at the very least 10 times better than the Emperor on this specific topic they are tied, Sigmar tried to close off the entire Demon Realm from reality permanently (and also was hinted to maybe get everyone off the planet in case plan A didnt work. and thats more or less what he did on AoS) he knew he didnt have that much time as the demons in fantasy are far more direct and to the point (in fact the only reason the setting lasted as long was because people like magnus, karl, teclis, etc) Big E tried to access a 4th(?) dimension (web way) where demons cant open portals willynilly, then take everyone there so demons slowly die out , he knew a huge civil war was coming and that he was on a grace period before everything went south, tho its implied he didnt knew exactly what, how and when was coming he just knew but a rough estimation (PD: Its no longer mention as often but in some Horus heresy books a few friendly eldars and other alien races straight up said that the Emperor wanted to ally with them and share the web way, fully on starving the demons, resetting the warp to a "neutral" state AND also destroying the dark eldar but they doubt it will happen now with horus and the war, he also didnt knew about the Tyranids as far as we know at least, but that would also be a perfect counter for them) TDLR: they both had a very very similar plan but with different means of getting, Big e: Take everyone "off" the galaxy, Sigmar: Take demons off reality then close the lid/take everyone off the planet.
@@timecorn They existed without the project for 10000 years. Completely leaving the massive administration of your empire to maybe build a highway is stupid when you already have transport. Lets assume it would be able to starve the chaos gods. What's to stop another disturbance in the warp later? And the terrible future (neckrons and Tyranids) don't come for 10000 years, he had time. If he just did some administration he could have nipped the rebellion in the butt, and had 10000 years of relative stability to make his pet project
@@andrewbryner2187cause first he had to rush humanity to Ullanor to stop Orks from evolving into Krorks there, and then he was on a timer for Webway project because be knew Chaos gods were going to literally throw everything and a kitchen sink at him when they realised that he planned to starve them to death.
A fun detail about terminator armor-- the fact that the kind of terminator armour chaos fields in m42 is the kind that only 'popped off' after the heresy largely implies that Chaos has swiped a huge chunk of what the Imperium has even produced over the years. Also, Cadia probably still would have fallen with a revived Dorn, because the one way to get Perturabo to do literally anything is to involve his skill for being the one guy who can reliably beat Dorn.
i could actually see Konrad being useful for keeping noblemen and other socio political elites in check. would need one hell of a leash to keep HIM in order though lol.
Not only are you right but there is no need for a leash, the size of the imperium ensures it, a million worlds to go through. His brothers could just ask him to keep the idiot nobles in line and that's a full time job in and of itself.
HLC is hilarious. Also, best comparison for F-22 and F-35 is Battletech F-22: Is a Timber Wolf F-35: Is a Marauder with a C3 system F-22: Kills things real good in really diverse ways F-35: Kills things almost as good in almost as many diverse ways, but will also coordinate an entire theatre’s weapons onto the enemies location.
My favourite Imperium goof is when a techpriest on an explorator mission discovers a database containing every STC humanity ever produced during the dark age of technology and accidentally deletes it
Another interesting way to look at the imperium like how they forget about entire planets or systems is like owning a beach, if one grain of sand goes missing you are not exactly going to notice nor care about it. And even if you went to look for that grain of sand you are not exactly going to find it let alone that specific one.
Actually, yes, as part of high school education here in Aus we're expected to complete a week of work experience at a business of our choosing and I chose Intergalactic Empire Management and spent a week nursing an authority induced priapism after being granted powers that would have Palpatine palpably palpitating, probably.
I'd imagine the Imperium is basically Fallout in Space. They're using technology recovered from a more advanced age with no knowledge of how half of it works, unaware of its original purpose, and painstakingly maintains what it does have because it wouldn't know how to repair a complete wreck. It would also help explain why some fields are so advanced(using what's basically a diesel engine on futuristic walker mechs) while others are woefully behind(diesel engines in general).
The one bit of lore I always look at to show how bad Imperial Record keeping is a story in one of the guard codexes where a regiment is sent to a warzone but after they don't arrive they're declared traitors, all because the report of them being wiped out before the initial order even arrived had been lost in the inbox.
0:21 I actually like the harlequins they aren't nearly as full of themselves as the elder also the exodites are by and large decent people who ride dinosaurs
Intriguingly, his point of forgetting info or misplacing and flat out losing it happens with me all the time. As an aspiring writer and a person with ADD, if I don’t write down something I am bout to forget it entirely. As for losing stuff this has happened many time is my life to various things. But the worse offender was when my family moved across town and their was both a fine cabinet of stuff like old documents and some drawing stuff I owned and some stuff like pictures, trophies, etc. from my dads childhood home in the unfinished basement. And literally 2 years later I realized we left it behind, or at least don’t remember if it was ever packed. So the Imperium losing information without even trying hurts me on a personal level and makes total sense to me.
People don't seem to understand that. Take into consideration the warp, there is no 100% clear standard in bringing data across world's, you've know opened up logistics issues for a simple part because you wanted to improve.
if you had read the culture series by Iain Banks would you consider do a the culture vs 40k? Also Magnus. He was a pretty good leader and administrator. If HE was at the healm of record keeping alongside his sons Imperium might had another mini golden age.
That is a perfect good situation. Their power would be a shocker to all factions. There is atleast one fan story that can found on Ao3 where the Culture sees the state of the Warhammer galaxy and the Eldar are the first to become aware of them. It is called "The Culture Explores Warhammer 40k". The story is over a decade old and only went on for five years after it started so it is quite far behind right now.
One of the funniest short stories I ever read in 40k was one about some tiny imperial guardsmen unit that gets randomly dropped into a random war zone because some administratum clerk just misheard the dictation.
A weapon straight up erasing matter from the universe is an idea so incredibly violent and ultimative it didn't ever occur to me before. It's so existentially brutal and outright nihilistic it's legitimatly terrifying just to think about it as a concept. It's the mother of all weapons, manifest extinction. Almost as frightening as mormons with railguns.
The imperium and 40k are some of the few sci fi factions im passionate about i been waiting for a video like this While the imperium lost a lot with the return of guilliman the imperium has regained a fair bit especially with belisarius cawl who perfected plasma weapons with the mk 3 cawl patterned plasma incinerator that has a saftey mechanism that makes it impossible to overheat unless it’s removed , also new anti gravity tanks have been introduced for the primaris along with armour like the gravis suit that gives near terminator levels of defense but are common and can be worn by captains of the space marines . Also gravity guns and volkite guns aren’t a lost tech they can still be manufactured but only by a select few individuals volkite guns have also seen a slow return
I dislike cawl. His whole story does not mesh well. You Could've said the mechanicus work slow due to part trying to fully understand what they're doing and then reliably trying to get that as standard, so it takes a very long time to approve research as correct. You could've said that magos from forge worlds that are as old as cawl or even slightly younger had the tech and facilities and that they've been working to equip a new marine army while trying to care for the imperium. Cawl broke both the mechanicus Religion(the fact that people somehow think there wouldn't be a civil war over cawl is just prime GW simpery) cawl then broke the idea that this was a human achievement, instead it is all cawl, somehow Girlyman gave 1 dude all 20 Geneseed in prime condition, sure.
This touches on my biggest 40k gripe. Losing technology, methods of production, scientific knowledge, designs, etc, is not far-fetched. There are numerous examples of it in human history. Some things we simply don’t know how it was originally accomplished. I can buy that easily. What I can’t buy is that human ingenuity and curiosity just… stopped. Yes, yes, I know the logic given: humanity is so retrograde and spiritual that any curiosity is immediately deemed heresy and stomped out. However, that doesn’t apply to a multitude of groups that either exist outside the Imperium itself, under its notice, or are beholden to Chaos. The imperium goes without knowledge of entire sectors, which humans live in. The idea that not a single one of them indulges in scientific curiosity doesn’t hold water. Vashtorr doesn’t have servants that are scientifically curious? Bullshit. The cults of Slannesh don’t bend their creativity towards a grand purpose to fuel their ego and advance themselves? Bullshit. There aren’t more Belisarius Cawls that research forbidden technologies or knowledge, gambling that their heresy would be overshadowed by delivering the Imperium a technology that, say, makes warp travel completely unnecessary? Bullshit.
In defense of the Emperor overly aggressive strategy, it is mentioned in the Heresy books by Malcador that they were on a timer. I don't recall which Primarch questioned their hurry but the issue is that the Great Crusade happened in a specific time frame in which other major players in the galaxy were too busy to deal with the expanding Empire (at least that's how I understood it), so your strategy o turtling for 40 years before safely expanding wouldn't work because you *only had* those 40 years to expand.
The Emperor was a firm believer that the ends justified the means and was a hardline utilitarian, but He was also a man whose vision was so long-sighted, so singular, that literally no one else around Him could comprehend either His motives, His lack of patience, His ambition, or His lack of tolerance; even those who had stuck with Him throughout the millennia saw him as being (rather ironically) inhuman. His own son, His closest and most cared for progeny, the Primarch Horus Lupercal, ends up rebelling because of this destructive character flaw that constantly shows up. Though his pragmatism made him a superb ruler in wartime, the ultra-militarized society He had created was entirely dependent on the Imperium being constantly at war. Even if the Great Crusade had proceeded exactly as the Emperor expected, it still would have run out of enemies eventually. And when you have a few trillion newly unemployed soldiers with no other skills beyond killing on your hands and no other purpose in life beyond said killing...well, they tend to get rowdy. He may have realized this already when he had to mop up the surviving Thunder Warriors. It remains unknown how the Imperium would have continued to look after the Great Crusade was completed, how its colossal military forces would be scaled down, or how such a feat could even be achieved. Though there were signs that change was in the air as the Emperor quit the Great Crusade and the Council of Terra was formed to officially begin transition of the Imperium from its permanent war footing to a civilian government. Recent lore has made it clear that Emps and Malcador wanted to rehabilitate all the Primarchs and the legions for peacetime, but that would clearly be easier for some than others. A likely outcome would've been a gradual drawing down of forces during the final stages of the conquest of the Webway, by simply reducing recruitment and using remaining forces to clean up isolated threats such as the occasional Ork WAAAGH or human rebellion, which is exactly what happened in the years between the Scouring and the War of the Beast. This was, incidentally, what Guilliman figured the Emperor's plan was. He believed that many of the Legions would most likely be significantly reduced in size and scope, and so trained his own boys to be as useful in peacetime as possible.
The Records makes since as a problem. 10,000 years is older than even the oldest language we have now. One would think over time as language changes. English in the 13th century can sound different from English of our time not even in the British Islands. To go through some of the records one may need a linguist to even try and interpret the records. This is one thing I do have as a problem with 10,000 year old kingdoms and empires. The records would be a nightmare.
Your bit about the bureaucracy is spot on. I'm an archival science student, so there is some bias, but it's true that a good filing system is vital for any large organization. Hell, even if the Imperium knows where all their records physically are, they may still be useless if they lost track of how they are related to each other. My favorite ordo of the inquisition is the ordo scriptorum, who see bad record keeping as a big enough threat to the Imperium that it warrants burning at the stake.
I dont know where the myth that terminator armour was construction equipment came from, but its just not true, the indomitus armour was constructed late in the great crusade/horus heresy, and the only thing that applies there is the fact that the general exoskeleton of it was loosely inspired by suits that used to be used in the most inhospitable environments known to man, thats it, its first and foremost a weapon made for the astartes, it was a stop gap terminator suit that was cheaper to produce, with neither the sheer tankyness of catiphractii, or the speed of tartaros armour
Memes are what new 40k fans use to understand the universe, they do not care to think themselves and try and read and flesh out an idea of a working world.
I love this video so much, and you can basically summarize it all in one word as Thanos said "Everything." ( well not Everything Everything but Everything)
I think Leman Russ would be far easier to manage in peace times than Angron or a lot of the other warrior-esk primarchs. Just send him off world to hunt down some big beasties that can give him a challenge and there you go. Also while a Space Wolf may joke about cutting a citizen or trooper's head off to stay sharp... the World Eater or White Scar is more likely to do it. Plus Rogue Traders need bodyguards. Just give the Wolf King and his sons a job that has some sense of adventure. Don't put them with the bitchy high lord that likes debauchery.
Hey Pancreas, what do you think would happen if stellaris end game crises (plus the one's from the gigastructures mod) ended up popping up in the warhammer 40k galaxy? Though I do have to be honest, the blokkats would eat up the 40k galaxy as if it were cookies
@@captaintitus4637 Well the Shroud is just warlmart Warp. They even have petty infighting like Chaos does. Almost every single faction in 40k is on par with a fallen empire lol
Blokkats would kill everything, Unbidden wouldn't honestly be a big deal, and the Shroud is, as another already said, is just the Warp but less interesting.
Honestly the criticism of big e’s ruling style is him kind of forgetting humanity was about to undergo something worse than a stellaris endgame crisis and was on a time limit.
Player crisis needs to be killed, before they destroy all of the milky way with the aetherophasic engine, also any faction that captures it and learns how to use it or build their own then can do the same. That beats the Blokkats, Necrons may be able to remove their invincible shield also and starve them of resources if they unify most of the sane dynasties and aren't affected or driven beserk by the contingency.
I think the Space Marines are better equipped than they were in the Heresy in terms of technology. But life for the average Imperium citizen is horrific in 40k and the whole empire is run terribly, as you point out. How badly managed the whole thing is, is definitely it's biggest weakness.
Again what do you expect? The warp is unreliable at best, the idea that the imperium can switch and change out things is just Not a possibility. That would be the same problem as German engineers adding while things are on the production line. Communication and knowledge can't travel except through the warp. Even the Eldar have this problem still, sure mind communication but nothing like tech is reliably going through that.
@@tarektechmarine8209 While technology is regressed the Imperium is still very advanced in terms of certain Technologies like bioengineering. also slow Innovation does occur classes of navy ships gradually change over time.
They’re definitely not. Most of their assets are much, much worse overall. Volkite is less present, Grav is less present, Contemptors and Leviathans are relics, Their Land Raiders are confined to one type, they have worse ships, they don’t have access to Jetbikes and the most commonly used Terminator Armour is the least effective of the three types commonly used during the Heresy.
@@AuramiteEX “Volkite is back”. Oh sorry, I didn’t realize there were units of 10 marines walking around with Volkite in every single Chapter, or that Contemptors and Leviathans were back. Also, terminators were still better then? A ton of Primaris stuff is still worse than Crusade Era tech. Floating tanks still don’t beat the sheer number of tanks and the variety in them from the Crusade. Again, still no Jetbikes either. You mentioned two things and left out all of the rest of the stuff I mentioned in my post.
Most of the Primarchs being lost was also probably for the best. Given their personalities, few of them are leadership material, and with them around, they'd probably divvy up the Imperium into pieces like some Diocletian-era reform project. You'd have four, five, six, maybe even seven or eight empires all calling themselves the Imperium of Man, but in function, they are totally different nations altogether, kind of like how the Western Roman Empire is different from the Eastern Roman Empire. At best these states would cooperate with each other, but at worst, you're looking at an eternal Crisis of the Third Century or War of the Diadochi situation where these kingdoms would wage war and treat with each other to check one another's power. All while the enemies of man nip at the borders. Some might even be hired by one Imperium faction to help against another; Guilliman hires the Eldar to keep Konrad Curze in check, Konrad Curze hires the Dark Eldar to counter him, while Angron lures Ork warbands to go attack Leman Russ while Rogal Dorn is fighting off Tyranids after Magnus the Red placed a Tyranid Lictor on a world protected by the Imperial Fists. Then again, with both Guilliman and Lion'El Johnson on the table once more, I wouldn't be surprised if the Imperium gets split again. Dante already rules his share of the Imperium, and given how large and unwieldy the whole thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if the Lion goes to take his share away from Guilliman. Depending on things, Rowboat might either view the Lion as a rival, or be happy that he's responsible for less sectors at the end of the day.
Honestly, if they are all cooperating, the imperium getting a bit divided is for the best. At the long run, if these spaces can run on their own, the imperium just got a bit of a refresher on their beyond strained logistic and administration.
@@clairelili873 That's IF they cooperate. If they don't, which is the more likely scenario, you're looking at a bloodbath that would make current 40K look tame by comparison.
I want to believe the you saw my comment under your last halohammer because i'm happy to hear you are doing a video for the unsc taking on the Imperium
I'm new to posting attention at all to 40k lore. I've known some really minor basics for about 15 years since college. My best friend in college was a huge WHFB fan and liked 40k too, just a lot less. I didn't realize the Horus Heresy was like *right* at the beginning. I figured it would be like 80% of the way from the start of the Imperium up to now.
The loss of records being the greatest problem of the Imperium is an interesting idea, and the more I think of it, the more I agree with you. The library at Alexandria was burned down by a idiot who wanted to be remembered forever (fuck him) and I'm positive if asked immediately after the fire what specifically had been lost, the librarians would have drawn a blank. They'd remember a lot, but not everything, or even close to it. Also, that panacea thing, the cure to all illnesses that the Eldar stole? I never heard of that before, that's a bad one. Goddam space elves.
Back when History Channel was still good, it was theorised on one show that if the library at Alexandria hadn't been arsoned, Columbus could have been going to the moon in 1492 instead of the Americas.
Was it not Caesar that burned the Library be accident during his war against Pompey ? and later one completely burned down be the Muslim taken over Alexandria and saying the library was heresy if it was contradicting the Koran or superfluous if it agree whit it ?
The imperial bureaucracy hurts me. The first book in the dawn of fire series shows just how many heart attacks that it would give to anyone who understands the importance of record keeping. If they had excel they would instantly find enough of everything to just win
Yeah too bad some relic of a script calls some function to multiply 2 columns but lo and behold scrap code got into that process and now every time someone tries to multiply 2 numbers it just returns their location and issues bombardment orders on every available channel.
You know I never did think about it, nut you're totally right in that some of the Primarchs being dead/traitors is actually helpful to the Imperium. Who knows what the Emperor's original vision was but in their current form (or as they were pre-Heresy), some of them were just straight up liabilities.
The record thing is because they never really squared the circle on how you're going to have large scale data networking when your people are literally scared of trying to figure out the numbers behind your tech. The mechanicus is, essentially, really good at reading and following instructions that are already written down. It's heretical for them to even approach the understanding of the underlying numbers behind the instructions.
Okay, I gotta ask; what is the background image (the guys on the roof of a run-down gas station blasting zombies lurching through a cornfield) from the start of this video taken from?
7:31 Magnus also would have been great if we hadn’t lost prospero, they had that whole pysker thing down really REALLY well and could have helped humanity master the warp without risking everyone and everything to become chaos… gribblies.
To be fair it's hard to collect taxes beyond one million companies, now make that one million whole ass civilisation/systems and you can understand the attitude of the Ad Administratum.
I guess GW was smart by capping the technology with stcs but the part i like most is the demon influence making invention dangerous. One minute you think you invented a new grenade, next thing you know the explosion makes a demon portal. Oops sorry
Good video going indepth comparisons into this subject. Their database and methods of recording are absolutely abysmal. For other sort of topics I think the Culture from M Banks Culture series, the Aeternum of Stellaris Gigastructural Engineering, and the decendents of the Interim Coalition of Governance from Xeelee Sequence would make for good videos if they were to arrive into the Warhammer 40k setting.
The videos about Khaine and Slaanesh are ones I will be anticipating greatly, especially since in 40K they both have a shared history of sorts with the Fall of the Aeldari
id love a video about othger alien races that are not the main ones. i know most of them got purged by the great crusade or random necrons but it would still be fun
The imperium expanding as fast as it did made perfect sense though, to name one example the orks, you have to steam roll those guys or they’ll come back twice as strong, also the moral part of saving millions of worlds from the age of strife asap, see Mortarians primarch novel. But should he have at least told Lorgar, Magnus, and Horus the plan? Sure, should he have put Konrad and Angron on ice until he could fix them one day, probably, maybe not screw over Angron as soon as he found him, absolutely.
You're right, but not for the reason you posit. It's because Chaos grows as war does, so the Grand Crusade had to move fast enough to be victorious before a new bout of warp storms spilled Chaos into the galaxy again. Orks would prolong that, sure, but they're not the prime threat.
@@arcdecibel9986 the orks were a problem but most of the fighting was against alien, aliens that were generally technology more advanced. The warp was much calmer at that time.
And there were Human and Xeno civilisations corrupted by chaos, imagine if they got several hundred years more to expand and solidify, not to mention some extreme Xenos, like The Khrave, yeah you don't want to give thoe guys any more time to expand.
I can imagine a very funny, but also interesting plot when the Imperium finally splinters they immediately start another Horus heresy like war and all the factions lose Terra, or Terra just gets straight up moved, and now all the human factions are in a race to find Terra and solidify their claim to be the true Imperium
the other thing to remember is that the Imperium isn't on its way up, it's in the ruins of its former self. there's tech floating around or worlds that's absolutely wild, but to them it's mundane because they've allways had it. The mechanicus rocks up and is just given the full technical data package because every man and his dog already knows how to make that plasma battery in his garage with a few sticks and a rock.
"Ah, yes! It is currently the year 279 B.C." (15:08) I like how confident this guy is that he's living 279 years BEFORE a major epoch is set to happen. Still tracks for 40K canon though...
During the dark age of technology the high end weapons of the imperium like gravity guns , volkite weapons, terminator suits, plasma guns and imperial knights were rudimentary mining tech or haz mat suits if the imperium were to regain its age of tech status and revive the emperor to full health it would be one of the most busted factions in sci fi
The Emperor lost everything the moment he let people with names like "Angron" and "Konrad Kurze" into the fold
Angron was a good idea until they put nails into his head
Konrad was necessary to maintain order. Then he was sent to Nostramo.
*coughs* Erebus *coughs*
The emperor made an unstable are of mentally degrading soldiers he killed after they had fullfilled his purpose, the made another batch of almost equally unstable people and sent them to conquer the stars, made a pact with a soceity of tecnocrats who had made science a religion despite having a strict "no cults allowed" in his imperium. And then proceded to play favourites left right and center between his top generals/sons, almost ensuring they were gonna end at each others throats at some point, and just proceded to leave command to start a mad science project. Unless he was actively trying to star a mutiny, his methods doomed his long before angron and konrad. Not to mention he actively let Angrons friend die in front of him.
"Mortarion"
I mean - even if the *name* didn't ring an alarm bell, didn't the massive scythe, obsession with poison and general Grim-Reaper vibe suggest this wasn't a guy to be given too much power?
A Goofy amount is my totally precise calculation.
goofy ahh? or just goofy
Atleast 2 if i say so myself
@DeathSeller-MK2 maybe even 3
@@nopls36073 fiddy
@@nopls3607atleast 4
It is kinda clever, GW has made this setting where technological innovation is heresy. But then they are a model company and want to introduce new shit so they can sell more models. The simple solution is just to say "This isn't new it was just re-discovered". It can even be used by tech priests in the setting to justify why they suddenly have new shit. "Dude trust me, I found it in a ruin".
just ignore the fact that the ruin was of a tech lab i made a while back
"I found it in a ruin" has probably been used as a cover story for heretical invention more than once.
Oh, and this world has intelligent rodents messing about with atomic age technology.
Wait, what do you mean that already exists in the Canon?
@@mokithepepe2454 and that besides some dirt and dust its practically new.
Also ignore the fact that was buried like 20 meters deep and somehow no one detected the nuclear powered battery.
And that its painted red.
And that i know how it works.
....
and that i just happen to have a stockpile of them.
Not quite
It’s actually a lot worse
So the mechanicum used to use the whole ritual for people who weren’t really good by could follow stuff well, so it could hide them in a way.
Aka too much smoke means nobody sees me working and copies me, so I now I can get my job done and still have the same demand and supply as before.
Aka it prevents people from learning so the mechanicum stay in power.
Now they still innovate but… there is a fatal issue. The warp.
Before the warp was pretty mild and not too much of a issue, but now…
Well faith helps keep the ship safe even if the field is working some things can still claw at the ship and a mild flicker could let something in for as long as it exists.
Now we say the Tau have a good run because of how advanced they are, but we forget that the demons can possess machines and so on. Thankfully the souls of Tau are so small it barely catches attention.
You also have the same scale issue. A single discovery or invention on a planet may never even leave the system. We have seen this happen multiple times, entire civilizations could make armies and send them out to help the imperium but the advancements go unnoticed in the millions of soldiers there and of course it never is read in the paperwork.
Some governors don’t even send out the research discoveries.
Add to this and the faith aspect and… yeah.
Change the machine and the faith wavers making it less likely to defend against the warp creatures.
This includes the people on the ship believing it won’t actually protect them- this superstition also weakens the field that keeps the warp at bay.
It really is not a simple issue.
Effectively if you needed you could restart a planet and isolate humans for a few hundred years and treat them in a bubble, but if they communicate with the rest of humanity then all of your advances may weaken and the buff all that added would just be hit with a hard debuff thanks to the people learning about what is going on. That isn’t even taking into account what the humans may make up in their isolation.
Considering that it took about 10,000 years to get some stuff back, I’ll have to say a Skaven Army sized amount of stuff was lost
So.....yes ??
@@Moncrom Yes
Yes-yes
They have robust and stifling religions to prevent them reinventing anything.
big losses yes yes
Don't forget that Volkite used to be the standard issue weapon for both Marines and Imperial Army. The only reason they got phased out was because it was expensive to arm the whole military as it expanded.
Also as they expanded and raised forces on new worlds, those forces would often would often be armed and equipped with local equipment, since the Imperium's production couldn't keep up with its own expansion. You could have a regiment from one planet decked out in steam-powered power armor and black powder weapons and a regiment from another equipped with personal energy shields and plasma rifles fighting in the same battle. It was a logistical nightmare. Since lasguns, and flak armor for that matter, are not only cheap, but so simple to produce all a planet needs is knowledge of electricity, plastics, and metallurgy to make them it made standardizing equipment in a reasonable amount of time possible.
It was also less versitile and more difficult to clean and maintain. Bolters are fairly low tech to the point where Calibanites were using them *before* the emperor's arrival
@@Topo-Grigio1312this is why playing diplomatic tall is always better than playing belligerent wide.
The ability to makr volkite isnt lost it was just written off as too expensive so they decided to use flashlights instead.
No, it was lost.
Belissarius Cawl just rediscover it and made it for the Primaris.
a weirdly undescribed amount
I heard that after the horus hersey they couldnt make terminator armor but now they can again, or how knights used to be a dying breed because no one knew how to make them anymore but suddenly tech priests remembered how
its always getting retconed so its hard to tell
The imperium loses and gains world's every day, it expands and contracts
As it expands, it finds STCs, which can be just about anywhere, even world's that have been in the imperium for millennia, but no one had dug up yet
@@ragnarian on a meta level they retcon a lot of stuff
Only the cataphracti terminator armour and a few other variants are unable to be reproduced mainly because of time and resource costs the indomitus pattern terminator suit however is way easier to create and costs less resources
One thing they definitely lost were the ability to make more contemptor dreadnoughts
@@memosanchez8916is it less durable compared to the cataphractii though?
The f-35 has a doctorate from Yale the f-22 did 15-20 in state prison on murder charges where all they did is pump iron and eat bricks
The f35 is a scalpel, the f22 is a chef's knife. Both can dissasemble a carcass from arms length, one just lets you do it from the inside out.
@@BrandonsUsername I was referencing a @habituallinecrosser video lol but fair point
This basically sums them up lmfao
@@BrandonsUsername and the f/a 18 is when you whip out the tenderizer because someone froze the pork instead of putting it in the fridge
they lost the potential to reclaim the advancements made during the Golden Age of Technology, or any sort of prosperity and peace. Potential is what the Imperium lost.
The Imperium is all about wasting potential. Maybe some xenos would be useful. Maybe you could ask before you shoot. Maybe some research an science would lead to improvement. Maybe Exterminatus is used too often. Maybe some of the soldiers you wasted to claim a pile of rubble could have become visionary people.
Wasting potential is what keeps the setting grim-dark. So in a meta way, they can never stop wasting their potential.
@@hpenvy1106commissar I think we found the tau
@@hpenvy1106and yet also each time they try and not waste potential it turns out even worse cause 99.99% of xenos are genetically predisposed assholes and whatever radical approach to a problem solution an outlying Inquisitor may suggest usually ends up fucking things up more.
they literally were on the doorstep of that first one on mars with the magma city, a massive research complex that was about to unlock all that shit, but due to the civil ar on mars it had to be destoryed to keep the enemy from using it to insta win.
I don't buy this as Cawl and Guilleman pretty much disprove this.
The lost technology thing always kind of annoyed me, since lack of spares is the most deadly enemy a mechanised military would face. A hundred centuries worth of operating hours is a long time to go without cracking some important bearing or wearing out the thread on a worm gear, little things like that.
And pretty quickly every Shadowsword in the imperium would be dumped on the roadside after it lost a fan blade for the engine deck and the knowledge of milling titanium into that specific pattern isnt available...
the mechanicum are to thank, holy oil and prayers get you a long way believe me
What's even more fucked is the fact that Hive worlds have slave labor that essentially works a ridiculous amount of hours (not as much as the lore states as that's impossible) with endless resources always being dumped in. Production is said to always be high on these worlds and yet things like spare parts and components are almost always hard to come by.
Even solid state electronics would fail over that length, bus bars thin out, polymers crack and degrade, soldering (or it's future equivalent) fails, epoxies don't last forever either.
The machanicum is to thank for this. Let’s put this into perspective right. They are a culture derived around the keeping of knowledge as it makes you more Devine. So to me at least the tech priest understand last how the smaller parts works.
Like a tech priest might know how to replace a leg or arm on a imperator titan. Maybe even fix all of the titan. But they don’t know how everything in this titan weaves together so perfectly. Like modern(40k) day humanity can make a warlord titan and lower. But above this it’s very well understood maintenance.
That's where the machine spirit comes in and why the mechanics has priests.
11:10 I wish there was a short story about Guilliman finding and digging through an unassuming filing cabinet about to be sent to a landfill. Only to find it contained the long lost blue prints for making Terminator armor, Volkite weapons, and Imperial Knights. Then trying to resist the urge to just shoot himself there and then.
Addendum to addendum to an addendum : we have found some old map with unused fleets, I do not know where to file it, pretty useless for now so I am going to file it under: other
We had 1000 scribes do statistical analysis on a newly discovered system only to find out the data we’re analyzing is 1500 years old and the system in question was depopulated by tyranids 180 years ago.
@@stephengordon576 as insane as it is with such a massive empire this things are just bound to happen... think about every problem we have right now with some unnecessary spending, now scale it up to the level of galaxy and add massive amount of information transfer problems and thousands of years of history... yeah there is a massive unused fleet in system X, we just kinda forgot system X even exists.
@JM-mh1pp yet nearly every other Sci-Fi galaxy spanning empire seems to manage it perfectly well.
I mean the closest analog would be the Galactic Empire of Star Wars(in legends) at least. It's even explicitly stated in EpII "if it doesn't exist in the archives, it doesn't exist". The Imperial burrurocracy was able to manage millions of planets with trillions of citizens nearly down a microscopic level. Imperial bureaucrats were able to dictate and manage the output of specific factories on some bumfuck world all the way out of the Outer Rim. And they would know if production quotas wouldn't be met, and would pay them a visit promptly.
It's a retarded piece of Warhammer lore that completely breaks the believability of the universe. No empire with a bureaucracy as comically bad as the IoM would survive nearly as long, probably collapsing before they even realized it was.
Since current earth is canon, does that mean GW is just lost knowledge? Could somebody on holy terra rediscover GW headquarters and learn the secrets of the universe?
That's just the black library.
Above post isnt wrong this scenario is nodded to like 5 different times and 3 of those came from black library stories.
Brilliant.
@@dombodomicus1890 holy shit you’re right
Purtarabo uses a table top version of Space Marines and different armies to plan battles.
Sooooo..
If you listen closely you can hear Erebus' laughing echo through the warp
Seriously when are they finally going to kill that crapsack?
Press F to f...k Erebus.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF@@andreykuzmin4317
@@andreykuzmin4317I'm still not over Argel Tal.
The only thing is hear is WAAAAAGH!
That ending joke is like six references in one, and I am here for it.
Confirmation that my favorite Warhammer creator watches my favorite historical creator is what I needed today
Historical Creator? Any suggestions?
Tell us !
I like him because he isn't totally circlejerking WH40k, he's totally right in saying the Forerunners could completely own the galaxy and the Covenant would thrive
Lazerpig
@@jamesbrickton5598 That guy? He isn't the best person to learn history from.
I am surprised you didn't mention the short story "Watcher in the rain" when you talked about the Imperium absurdly horrendous burocracy.
(What follows is the premise of the book, not a spoiler.)
The whole premise of the book is that a scribe did a mistake when filing some datas and a whole regiment of guardsmen received expired food resources, resorted to cannibalism and were then executed to a man. A whole regiment, that's hundreds of thousands of guardsmen!
Warp travel unreliability, limited technology for faster than light communication, resource transport that have to be planned decades in advance, these all contribute to the imperiums problems.
That scribe went rogue.
I mean
Spoilers but
The scribe made the mistake, realized that, and then started doing it on purpose quite repeatedly.
@@FarremShamistyeah, and her kill count by now is probably in the billions of people and a hundred planets lost because of that, she made countless mistakes every day, as far as we know it, she made Cadia fell. XD
My favorite quote regarding 40k is that you know the administration is labyrinthian when the average rounding error does more damage to your empire than the average enemy invasion.
my favorite power fantasy in 40K is imagining the administratum having access to Excel
“F2 to edit.. WTF!?!”
I kinda hate that the imperium is seen as backwards. Obviously they'd have better than excel, but everything has to be grimdark because.
The Imperium lost Malcador the Sigilite, but luckily he can be found in all our hearts
Idk who that is, sounds like he may be related to Malcador the Hero tho!
that black hole gun scares the hell out of me. it is so powerful it distorts reality forcing you to time travel backward so that the weapon can't miss ever. that ture madness.
The Necrons had stuff that made Humanity's best gear during the Dark Age of Technology look like obsidian spears and atlatls...The only reason everybody not Necron isn't dead is because the Silent King told his subjects to destroy or lock all that up permanently after destroying the C'Tan.
State of Decay was a really good game. My anecdote for it is that I played really really carefully and only had my first death very late into the game, on the final mission because my vehicle glitched out and got stuck. When I booted up the game the next day I discovered that the deaths of characters are permanent, even the main character that the early story is written around. It was very frustruating to imagine this dude who had gone through so much in the apocalypse and almost made it out, died because his frickin tire somehow translocated into a concrete barrier.
What was cool was that when the procedurally generated characters from my safehouse took over as playable characters, they had a bunch of natural dialogue lines about how he had been around forever and how sad it was that he died trying to find safety for everyone.
10:24 comprable real world example would be the Saturn 5 rockets. Many of the expert tradesmen who assembled those from back in the day are dead or long retired and never passed on their skills, so we can’t build them anymore.
The problem with thst is we could easily make more if we wanted to spend the money
@@calebbarnhouse496 but why waste resources, why ask the imperium to do the same? The imperium cannot afford, any delay in supply means you've messed up decades of planning.
@@tarektechmarine8209 probably because most tech preists aren't really doing that much in the galaxy, and if the equipment was so effective they would be willing to get it back
Another great example is fogbank
The us government straight up forgot how to make a key component of some nuclear bombs and had to reverse engineer it
@@calebbarnhouse496 No, simply not true.
By any reasonable estimation, even with all the knowledge already learned from then, a modern day working replica of a Saturn V would be much, much more expensive.
I love the section about the Imperium's burocracy. The entire basis for a bunch of interrelated homebrews I'm working on is two systems being forgotten about and subsequently reclaimed and repurposed.
That sounds interesting, would like to read!
@@bigdaddy_bo6741 where do people post fan fiction? I've been looking for a place to post. I don't want to make money I just want to tell cool stories.
When you mentioned "erasing matter", which is correct, they also had a weapon that could destroy information so not only was something destroyed, but it in a very literal sense never existed, that is truly terrifying :D
They had 2 such weapons by name: one is called an Ontological weapon (which was used by a Dark Angel on some Chaos-corrupted ship crew and after firing at them, he forgot who they were or anything about them, despite being a Space marine who by default has a perfect memory and who has served on that ship for years with those crewmen. All he remembers is that there were some hostile crew armed with pistols and he fired at them.
The other kind are hypometric weapons, which are written about a little bit in the Priests of Mars trilogy as one of the weapons that the Speranza was equipped with. It was said that these weapons could erase entire swathes or sections of spacetime. Not sure if the reality information consumption tech that the DAOT mechanovores from the story Perpetual are the same tech, but they do the same thing.
Theres a great quote from (I think) the 8th edition rulebook saying "every year a thousand worlds a lost and a thousand words are rediscovered within the Imperium's borders".
Also wouldn't losing half the space marines probably be a kinda big loss?
You'd think that this WOULD be the case, but GW's overall attitude for a long time basically just amounted to 'throw more Space Marines at it, whaddya mean half the fanbase hates Space Marines!?', so it honestly doesn't matter as much as you'd think it would.
If at all.
The whole "they simply forgot" is definitely real. There's ruins from 3000 years ago that nobody knows what they were for exactly. We can make an educated guess what Stonehenge was for, but no one knows FOR SURE what it was for or what people did with it or how the bloody thing was even built! It could've been a webway portal for all we know.
The Stonehenge might not be a good example, as 3000 years ago the world was quite a bit bigger than today. True, space is even bigger, but if you got one unified empire supposed to be ruling over things, then it's quite the display of incompetence. The folk who built Stonehenge likely were also doing it for themselves/their own peoples, for their own reasons. If an Empire existed, and commissioned the construction of something as impressive for the time period it was built in (no doubt likely using public funds for it too), then you'd think they would have it somewhere in their historical record, as it would be quite the feat.
That said, most of the humanities history is indeed lost today. Between all the different languages, natural disasters, wars, plagues, burning giant libraries full of recorded knowledge for giggles, bonking the guy on the head who knew all the stuff cause war, cultures, some things never being written down and only existing in oral tradition, plus a lot of times, where writing stuff down probably seemed like a waste because why would you do that, a lot of stuff has just been forgotten about. Plus, the tools used to record stuff also were less than durable. So even if someone jotted it down, it coulda been destroyed by a random desperate rat feeling hungry that day, or a leak in the roof causing water to fall on the pile.
An Empire of galactic scope can't exactly do anything but blame itself for being shockingly incompetent when it comes to its own bureaucracy, record keeping, administration and archiving. Seems like they had some genuine dumb dumbs in charge for not understanding that this kinda stuff, as well as performing regular updates/reforms to keep it robust and functional, are kind of important.
We forgot how to make roman concrete until recently, greek fire is still lost, even the byzantines themselves forgot how to do it before their collapse, its definetly real
@@imaginehavingpfp5779don't forget Damascus and wootz steel the best we can make now are just pale imitations of the real alloy
Y'all are making some Admittedly stupid comparisons. A few thousand years ago the only method of record keeping wasn't even BOOKS, it was on papyrus and shit. Then scrolls, THEN books. It's kinda easy to forget when the places that hold that exact knowledge were getting burned down on the regular by barbarians. There's no forgetting HOW to make something super important in the current age because of the methods we have to record and safekeep information. So you're going to tell me that after tens of thousands of years we would end up going BACKWARDS in our information keeping while becoming the single dominant and unified empire in the galaxy rather than forwards?
There's forgetting about ancient shit from when paper was considering an unparalleled technological advancement and forgetting the most impressive war machines in history after you've advanced to a point where the internet looks like paper.
@@jhonnoilcringeincarnato8593OK buddy let's get you to bed
Pancreas is after my own heart with their description of how they play strategy, I thought I was an outlier
Although 40 years is radical by my standards, I'll spend centuries building up in Stellaris before sending out my generalized fleet for a galactic crusade with a massive tech advantage
Same here😂
Only exception being SC2, where I love mining salt😂
Me too, I just don't like sending soldiers to die meaninglessly, if I send them to conquer I'll make sure they will be the best equiped they can be to minimize casualties, until then, let the enemy die by the thousands against our defenses.
I'm a 'build tech and manufacturing base, then send out elite murder machines to Blitzkrieg the enemy' kinda guy. Slow build, then rapid overwhelming force.
Considering Angron was meant to be a healer and ended up turning into a murder machine but was still deemed acceptable for the imperium it REALLY makes you think about the two lost primarchs
Man, pulling out of the Horussy was rough.
Pulling out is always a struggle...
Horusssy is a crazy phrase.
Yes inquisitor, this comment right here!
Hearing how you run strategy is interesting.
Although Dawn of War is an RTS rather than a Grand Strategy, and therefore doesn't worry about interstellar empire management, I have something potentially funny to share.
My favourite faction in that game is Imperial Guard. Their strengths are all in defensive holds, turtling, followed by huge pushes after achieving tech milestones.
Instead of doing that, I consistently beat my friends and the Harder AI by doing hyper-aggressive bayonet charges. That's not the funny part though.
The funny part was when one of my friends countered that charge and thought he got me. Instead I just fell back a bit and turtled just outside his base. Then I started building my base into his base.
There's something magical about playing a defensive faction and seeing how aggressive it lets you be.
This is why Sigmar is the better Emperor. Atleast when he left the front lines, it was because the project he was working on was basically their only hope, and not a passion project that could've waited a couple of hundred years.
It is strongly hinted in recent lore that the emperor had to do this project ASAP because he foresaw some terrible future coming
While i agree that Sigma(r) its at the very least 10 times better than the Emperor on this specific topic they are tied, Sigmar tried to close off the entire Demon Realm from reality permanently (and also was hinted to maybe get everyone off the planet in case plan A didnt work. and thats more or less what he did on AoS) he knew he didnt have that much time as the demons in fantasy are far more direct and to the point (in fact the only reason the setting lasted as long was because people like magnus, karl, teclis, etc)
Big E tried to access a 4th(?) dimension (web way) where demons cant open portals willynilly, then take everyone there so demons slowly die out , he knew a huge civil war was coming and that he was on a grace period before everything went south, tho its implied he didnt knew exactly what, how and when was coming he just knew but a rough estimation (PD: Its no longer mention as often but in some Horus heresy books a few friendly eldars and other alien races straight up said that the Emperor wanted to ally with them and share the web way, fully on starving the demons, resetting the warp to a "neutral" state AND also destroying the dark eldar but they doubt it will happen now with horus and the war, he also didnt knew about the Tyranids as far as we know at least, but that would also be a perfect counter for them)
TDLR: they both had a very very similar plan but with different means of getting, Big e: Take everyone "off" the galaxy, Sigmar: Take demons off reality then close the lid/take everyone off the planet.
@@timecorn They existed without the project for 10000 years. Completely leaving the massive administration of your empire to maybe build a highway is stupid when you already have transport. Lets assume it would be able to starve the chaos gods. What's to stop another disturbance in the warp later? And the terrible future (neckrons and Tyranids) don't come for 10000 years, he had time. If he just did some administration he could have nipped the rebellion in the butt, and had 10000 years of relative stability to make his pet project
@@andrewbryner2187somebody forgot about the war of the beast
@@andrewbryner2187cause first he had to rush humanity to Ullanor to stop Orks from evolving into Krorks there, and then he was on a timer for Webway project because be knew Chaos gods were going to literally throw everything and a kitchen sink at him when they realised that he planned to starve them to death.
A fun detail about terminator armor-- the fact that the kind of terminator armour chaos fields in m42 is the kind that only 'popped off' after the heresy largely implies that Chaos has swiped a huge chunk of what the Imperium has even produced over the years.
Also, Cadia probably still would have fallen with a revived Dorn, because the one way to get Perturabo to do literally anything is to involve his skill for being the one guy who can reliably beat Dorn.
i could actually see Konrad being useful for keeping noblemen and other socio political elites in check. would need one hell of a leash to keep HIM in order though lol.
Konrad would rather go to a hiveworld to torture poor people
Not only are you right but there is no need for a leash, the size of the imperium ensures it, a million worlds to go through. His brothers could just ask him to keep the idiot nobles in line and that's a full time job in and of itself.
@@yaelz6043 konrad would choose to not be useful because he'd rather torture people then actually keep the law
@@calebbarnhouse496he’s a tortureholic. He invents and finds reasons to torture if none exist.
@@Cinerary what better way to torture people then to torture people by making society worse?
The most important thing the Imperium has lost is its soul.
And Sanguinius. Pour one out for the homie bird boy.
"It's the same picture."
He was a mutant
@@tarektechmarine8209 ok, so was the emperor.
HLC is hilarious. Also, best comparison for F-22 and F-35 is Battletech
F-22: Is a Timber Wolf
F-35: Is a Marauder with a C3 system
F-22: Kills things real good in really diverse ways
F-35: Kills things almost as good in almost as many diverse ways, but will also coordinate an entire theatre’s weapons onto the enemies location.
F-35 “We are the Borg”
F-22 “Target all of your weapons onto the following coordinates.. trust me”
What's the best aircraft an F-22 has faced in combat let alone Destroyed lol
My favourite Imperium goof is when a techpriest on an explorator mission discovers a database containing every STC humanity ever produced during the dark age of technology and accidentally deletes it
Another interesting way to look at the imperium like how they forget about entire planets or systems is like owning a beach, if one grain of sand goes missing you are not exactly going to notice nor care about it. And even if you went to look for that grain of sand you are not exactly going to find it let alone that specific one.
Actually, yes, as part of high school education here in Aus we're expected to complete a week of work experience at a business of our choosing and I chose Intergalactic Empire Management and spent a week nursing an authority induced priapism after being granted powers that would have Palpatine palpably palpitating, probably.
I'd imagine the Imperium is basically Fallout in Space. They're using technology recovered from a more advanced age with no knowledge of how half of it works, unaware of its original purpose, and painstakingly maintains what it does have because it wouldn't know how to repair a complete wreck. It would also help explain why some fields are so advanced(using what's basically a diesel engine on futuristic walker mechs) while others are woefully behind(diesel engines in general).
The one bit of lore I always look at to show how bad Imperial Record keeping is a story in one of the guard codexes where a regiment is sent to a warzone but after they don't arrive they're declared traitors, all because the report of them being wiped out before the initial order even arrived had been lost in the inbox.
0:21 I actually like the harlequins they aren't nearly as full of themselves as the elder also the exodites are by and large decent people who ride dinosaurs
Intriguingly, his point of forgetting info or misplacing and flat out losing it happens with me all the time. As an aspiring writer and a person with ADD, if I don’t write down something I am bout to forget it entirely. As for losing stuff this has happened many time is my life to various things. But the worse offender was when my family moved across town and their was both a fine cabinet of stuff like old documents and some drawing stuff I owned and some stuff like pictures, trophies, etc. from my dads childhood home in the unfinished basement. And literally 2 years later I realized we left it behind, or at least don’t remember if it was ever packed. So the Imperium losing information without even trying hurts me on a personal level and makes total sense to me.
People don't seem to understand that. Take into consideration the warp, there is no 100% clear standard in bringing data across world's, you've know opened up logistics issues for a simple part because you wanted to improve.
Did u get it back
if you had read the culture series by Iain Banks would you consider do a the culture vs 40k? Also Magnus. He was a pretty good leader and administrator. If HE was at the healm of record keeping alongside his sons Imperium might had another mini golden age.
That is a perfect good situation. Their power would be a shocker to all factions. There is atleast one fan story that can found on Ao3 where the Culture sees the state of the Warhammer galaxy and the Eldar are the first to become aware of them.
It is called "The Culture Explores Warhammer 40k". The story is over a decade old and only went on for five years after it started so it is quite far behind right now.
One of the funniest short stories I ever read in 40k was one about some tiny imperial guardsmen unit that gets randomly dropped into a random war zone because some administratum clerk just misheard the dictation.
A weapon straight up erasing matter from the universe is an idea so incredibly violent and ultimative it didn't ever occur to me before. It's so existentially brutal and outright nihilistic it's legitimatly terrifying just to think about it as a concept.
It's the mother of all weapons, manifest extinction.
Almost as frightening as mormons with railguns.
The imperium and 40k are some of the few sci fi factions im passionate about i been waiting for a video like this While the imperium lost a lot with the return of guilliman the imperium has regained a fair bit especially with belisarius cawl who perfected plasma weapons with the mk 3 cawl patterned plasma incinerator that has a saftey mechanism that makes it impossible to overheat unless it’s removed , also new anti gravity tanks have been introduced for the primaris along with armour like the gravis suit that gives near terminator levels of defense but are common and can be worn by captains of the space marines . Also gravity guns and volkite guns aren’t a lost tech they can still be manufactured but only by a select few individuals volkite guns have also seen a slow return
I dislike cawl. His whole story does not mesh well. You Could've said the mechanicus work slow due to part trying to fully understand what they're doing and then reliably trying to get that as standard, so it takes a very long time to approve research as correct. You could've said that magos from forge worlds that are as old as cawl or even slightly younger had the tech and facilities and that they've been working to equip a new marine army while trying to care for the imperium. Cawl broke both the mechanicus Religion(the fact that people somehow think there wouldn't be a civil war over cawl is just prime GW simpery) cawl then broke the idea that this was a human achievement, instead it is all cawl, somehow Girlyman gave 1 dude all 20 Geneseed in prime condition, sure.
''He had a physical inabillity to explai anything to anyone''
That's the best description of the emperor that i ever heard till now by far LOL
This touches on my biggest 40k gripe.
Losing technology, methods of production, scientific knowledge, designs, etc, is not far-fetched. There are numerous examples of it in human history. Some things we simply don’t know how it was originally accomplished. I can buy that easily.
What I can’t buy is that human ingenuity and curiosity just… stopped. Yes, yes, I know the logic given: humanity is so retrograde and spiritual that any curiosity is immediately deemed heresy and stomped out. However, that doesn’t apply to a multitude of groups that either exist outside the Imperium itself, under its notice, or are beholden to Chaos. The imperium goes without knowledge of entire sectors, which humans live in. The idea that not a single one of them indulges in scientific curiosity doesn’t hold water.
Vashtorr doesn’t have servants that are scientifically curious? Bullshit. The cults of Slannesh don’t bend their creativity towards a grand purpose to fuel their ego and advance themselves? Bullshit. There aren’t more Belisarius Cawls that research forbidden technologies or knowledge, gambling that their heresy would be overshadowed by delivering the Imperium a technology that, say, makes warp travel completely unnecessary? Bullshit.
In defense of the Emperor overly aggressive strategy, it is mentioned in the Heresy books by Malcador that they were on a timer. I don't recall which Primarch questioned their hurry but the issue is that the Great Crusade happened in a specific time frame in which other major players in the galaxy were too busy to deal with the expanding Empire (at least that's how I understood it), so your strategy o turtling for 40 years before safely expanding wouldn't work because you *only had* those 40 years to expand.
The Emperor was a firm believer that the ends justified the means and was a hardline utilitarian, but He was also a man whose vision was so long-sighted, so singular, that literally no one else around Him could comprehend either His motives, His lack of patience, His ambition, or His lack of tolerance; even those who had stuck with Him throughout the millennia saw him as being (rather ironically) inhuman. His own son, His closest and most cared for progeny, the Primarch Horus Lupercal, ends up rebelling because of this destructive character flaw that constantly shows up.
Though his pragmatism made him a superb ruler in wartime, the ultra-militarized society He had created was entirely dependent on the Imperium being constantly at war. Even if the Great Crusade had proceeded exactly as the Emperor expected, it still would have run out of enemies eventually. And when you have a few trillion newly unemployed soldiers with no other skills beyond killing on your hands and no other purpose in life beyond said killing...well, they tend to get rowdy. He may have realized this already when he had to mop up the surviving Thunder Warriors. It remains unknown how the Imperium would have continued to look after the Great Crusade was completed, how its colossal military forces would be scaled down, or how such a feat could even be achieved. Though there were signs that change was in the air as the Emperor quit the Great Crusade and the Council of Terra was formed to officially begin transition of the Imperium from its permanent war footing to a civilian government. Recent lore has made it clear that Emps and Malcador wanted to rehabilitate all the Primarchs and the legions for peacetime, but that would clearly be easier for some than others. A likely outcome would've been a gradual drawing down of forces during the final stages of the conquest of the Webway, by simply reducing recruitment and using remaining forces to clean up isolated threats such as the occasional Ork WAAAGH or human rebellion, which is exactly what happened in the years between the Scouring and the War of the Beast. This was, incidentally, what Guilliman figured the Emperor's plan was. He believed that many of the Legions would most likely be significantly reduced in size and scope, and so trained his own boys to be as useful in peacetime as possible.
@@ramonayala7647 I mean there are billions of necrons sleeping on the ground, that seems like job security for soldires.
@@MouldedMind Assuming the Great Crusade had been a success, as the Emperor wanted, I don't think the Necrons could be a threat.
Slaanesh…when you’re not quite ready to go home at 6 a.m.
The Records makes since as a problem. 10,000 years is older than even the oldest language we have now. One would think over time as language changes. English in the 13th century can sound different from English of our time not even in the British Islands. To go through some of the records one may need a linguist to even try and interpret the records. This is one thing I do have as a problem with 10,000 year old kingdoms and empires. The records would be a nightmare.
Your bit about the bureaucracy is spot on. I'm an archival science student, so there is some bias, but it's true that a good filing system is vital for any large organization. Hell, even if the Imperium knows where all their records physically are, they may still be useless if they lost track of how they are related to each other. My favorite ordo of the inquisition is the ordo scriptorum, who see bad record keeping as a big enough threat to the Imperium that it warrants burning at the stake.
I need a fan art of a swarm lord swinging around four light sticks at a Calliope Mori concert.
So basically the Tau owe their continued existence to the Heresy.
I dont know where the myth that terminator armour was construction equipment came from, but its just not true, the indomitus armour was constructed late in the great crusade/horus heresy, and the only thing that applies there is the fact that the general exoskeleton of it was loosely inspired by suits that used to be used in the most inhospitable environments known to man, thats it, its first and foremost a weapon made for the astartes, it was a stop gap terminator suit that was cheaper to produce, with neither the sheer tankyness of catiphractii, or the speed of tartaros armour
Memes are what new 40k fans use to understand the universe, they do not care to think themselves and try and read and flesh out an idea of a working world.
I love this video so much, and you can basically summarize it all in one word
as Thanos said "Everything."
( well not Everything Everything but Everything)
I think Leman Russ would be far easier to manage in peace times than Angron or a lot of the other warrior-esk primarchs. Just send him off world to hunt down some big beasties that can give him a challenge and there you go. Also while a Space Wolf may joke about cutting a citizen or trooper's head off to stay sharp... the World Eater or White Scar is more likely to do it. Plus Rogue Traders need bodyguards. Just give the Wolf King and his sons a job that has some sense of adventure. Don't put them with the bitchy high lord that likes debauchery.
The Wolves are a perfect insurrectionist best stick if you think about it
A million worlds sounds impressive until you realize that might be the equivalent to a single K2 civilization. Space is big.
Well nobody else in Warhammer has as much in 41th Millenium so thats impressive.
Hey Pancreas, what do you think would happen if stellaris end game crises (plus the one's from the gigastructures mod) ended up popping up in the warhammer 40k galaxy?
Though I do have to be honest, the blokkats would eat up the 40k galaxy as if it were cookies
I'm honestly curious what would happen if the unbidden were to show up
@@captaintitus4637 Well the Shroud is just warlmart Warp. They even have petty infighting like Chaos does. Almost every single faction in 40k is on par with a fallen empire lol
Blokkats would kill everything, Unbidden wouldn't honestly be a big deal, and the Shroud is, as another already said, is just the Warp but less interesting.
Honestly the criticism of big e’s ruling style is him kind of forgetting humanity was about to undergo something worse than a stellaris endgame crisis and was on a time limit.
Player crisis needs to be killed, before they destroy all of the milky way with the aetherophasic engine, also any faction that captures it and learns how to use it or build their own then can do the same. That beats the Blokkats, Necrons may be able to remove their invincible shield also and starve them of resources if they unify most of the sane dynasties and aren't affected or driven beserk by the contingency.
I think the Space Marines are better equipped than they were in the Heresy in terms of technology.
But life for the average Imperium citizen is horrific in 40k and the whole empire is run terribly, as you point out.
How badly managed the whole thing is, is definitely it's biggest weakness.
Again what do you expect? The warp is unreliable at best, the idea that the imperium can switch and change out things is just Not a possibility. That would be the same problem as German engineers adding while things are on the production line. Communication and knowledge can't travel except through the warp. Even the Eldar have this problem still, sure mind communication but nothing like tech is reliably going through that.
@@tarektechmarine8209 While technology is regressed the Imperium is still very advanced in terms of certain Technologies like bioengineering. also slow Innovation does occur classes of navy ships gradually change over time.
They’re definitely not. Most of their assets are much, much worse overall. Volkite is less present, Grav is less present, Contemptors and Leviathans are relics, Their Land Raiders are confined to one type, they have worse ships, they don’t have access to Jetbikes and the most commonly used Terminator Armour is the least effective of the three types commonly used during the Heresy.
@@ImrahilToChaos you living under a rock? They have more advanced plasma, volkyte is back, their tanks are hovering, they have more advanced armour.
@@AuramiteEX “Volkite is back”. Oh sorry, I didn’t realize there were units of 10 marines walking around with Volkite in every single Chapter, or that Contemptors and Leviathans were back. Also, terminators were still better then? A ton of Primaris stuff is still worse than Crusade Era tech. Floating tanks still don’t beat the sheer number of tanks and the variety in them from the Crusade.
Again, still no Jetbikes either. You mentioned two things and left out all of the rest of the stuff I mentioned in my post.
As long as the Imperium doesn't lose the Age of Mythology soundtrack, they're good to go !
Most of the Primarchs being lost was also probably for the best. Given their personalities, few of them are leadership material, and with them around, they'd probably divvy up the Imperium into pieces like some Diocletian-era reform project. You'd have four, five, six, maybe even seven or eight empires all calling themselves the Imperium of Man, but in function, they are totally different nations altogether, kind of like how the Western Roman Empire is different from the Eastern Roman Empire.
At best these states would cooperate with each other, but at worst, you're looking at an eternal Crisis of the Third Century or War of the Diadochi situation where these kingdoms would wage war and treat with each other to check one another's power. All while the enemies of man nip at the borders. Some might even be hired by one Imperium faction to help against another; Guilliman hires the Eldar to keep Konrad Curze in check, Konrad Curze hires the Dark Eldar to counter him, while Angron lures Ork warbands to go attack Leman Russ while Rogal Dorn is fighting off Tyranids after Magnus the Red placed a Tyranid Lictor on a world protected by the Imperial Fists.
Then again, with both Guilliman and Lion'El Johnson on the table once more, I wouldn't be surprised if the Imperium gets split again. Dante already rules his share of the Imperium, and given how large and unwieldy the whole thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if the Lion goes to take his share away from Guilliman. Depending on things, Rowboat might either view the Lion as a rival, or be happy that he's responsible for less sectors at the end of the day.
Honestly, if they are all cooperating, the imperium getting a bit divided is for the best. At the long run, if these spaces can run on their own, the imperium just got a bit of a refresher on their beyond strained logistic and administration.
@@clairelili873 That's IF they cooperate. If they don't, which is the more likely scenario, you're looking at a bloodbath that would make current 40K look tame by comparison.
I want to believe the you saw my comment under your last halohammer because i'm happy to hear you are doing a video for the unsc taking on the Imperium
I'm new to posting attention at all to 40k lore. I've known some really minor basics for about 15 years since college. My best friend in college was a huge WHFB fan and liked 40k too, just a lot less. I didn't realize the Horus Heresy was like *right* at the beginning. I figured it would be like 80% of the way from the start of the Imperium up to now.
godamn dude that end video segment you DO NOT pull punches
The loss of records being the greatest problem of the Imperium is an interesting idea, and the more I think of it, the more I agree with you. The library at Alexandria was burned down by a idiot who wanted to be remembered forever (fuck him) and I'm positive if asked immediately after the fire what specifically had been lost, the librarians would have drawn a blank. They'd remember a lot, but not everything, or even close to it. Also, that panacea thing, the cure to all illnesses that the Eldar stole? I never heard of that before, that's a bad one. Goddam space elves.
Back when History Channel was still good, it was theorised on one show that if the library at Alexandria hadn't been arsoned, Columbus could have been going to the moon in 1492 instead of the Americas.
Was it not Caesar that burned the Library be accident during his war against Pompey ? and later one completely burned down be the Muslim taken over Alexandria and saying the library was heresy if it was contradicting the Koran or superfluous if it agree whit it ?
The imperial bureaucracy hurts me. The first book in the dawn of fire series shows just how many heart attacks that it would give to anyone who understands the importance of record keeping. If they had excel they would instantly find enough of everything to just win
Yeah too bad some relic of a script calls some function to multiply 2 columns but lo and behold scrap code got into that process and now every time someone tries to multiply 2 numbers it just returns their location and issues bombardment orders on every available channel.
My respect for you after name dropped lazerpig has incredibly increased
The amount of stock halo images used in this video was adequate… It was enough to be known, but not enough to be overwhelming… Good job
You know I never did think about it, nut you're totally right in that some of the Primarchs being dead/traitors is actually helpful to the Imperium. Who knows what the Emperor's original vision was but in their current form (or as they were pre-Heresy), some of them were just straight up liabilities.
The record thing is because they never really squared the circle on how you're going to have large scale data networking when your people are literally scared of trying to figure out the numbers behind your tech. The mechanicus is, essentially, really good at reading and following instructions that are already written down. It's heretical for them to even approach the understanding of the underlying numbers behind the instructions.
I thought the Emperor was making his own webway for humanity itself, not just break into the Eldar’s own webway?
Nope, he was breaking into the webway that already exists.
A mix. He was making a new tunnel, but just wanted access to the old webway.
Imperium: Bröther, do you have lämp?
Emperor of Man: I am Lämp.
Imperium: Praise to Lämp!
The records of the Imperium are not lost, they were "gifted" to the Blood Ravens
Just how many of their ships do they devote to storing 'just' their 'gifts' in the first place?
Okay, I gotta ask; what is the background image (the guys on the roof of a run-down gas station blasting zombies lurching through a cornfield) from the start of this video taken from?
The people need to know
Pretty sure it's from State of Decay.
Angron now can reappear in real soace in like 2 months. His nuisance meter has skyrocketed
"I am NOT a heretic!" Shouts the distorted voice of a being who once might have been human, tentacles flailing in alien gesticulations.
7:31 Magnus also would have been great if we hadn’t lost prospero, they had that whole pysker thing down really REALLY well and could have helped humanity master the warp without risking everyone and everything to become chaos… gribblies.
To be fair it's hard to collect taxes beyond one million companies, now make that one million whole ass civilisation/systems and you can understand the attitude of the Ad Administratum.
I guess GW was smart by capping the technology with stcs but the part i like most is the demon influence making invention dangerous. One minute you think you invented a new grenade, next thing you know the explosion makes a demon portal. Oops sorry
never woulda thought id hear a Mori Horse joke in a 40k lore discussion video but here i am
The fact that the emperor never explained his plans to anyone really makes him the Olaf Scholz of Warhammer
Good video going indepth comparisons into this subject. Their database and methods of recording are absolutely abysmal.
For other sort of topics I think the Culture from M Banks Culture series, the Aeternum of Stellaris Gigastructural Engineering, and the decendents of the Interim Coalition of Governance from Xeelee Sequence would make for good videos if they were to arrive into the Warhammer 40k setting.
The age of mythology music. Brings back so much memories.
The videos about Khaine and Slaanesh are ones I will be anticipating greatly, especially since in 40K they both have a shared history of sorts with the Fall of the Aeldari
id love a video about othger alien races that are not the main ones.
i know most of them got purged by the great crusade or random necrons
but it would still be fun
The imperium expanding as fast as it did made perfect sense though, to name one example the orks, you have to steam roll those guys or they’ll come back twice as strong, also the moral part of saving millions of worlds from the age of strife asap, see Mortarians primarch novel. But should he have at least told Lorgar, Magnus, and Horus the plan? Sure, should he have put Konrad and Angron on ice until he could fix them one day, probably, maybe not screw over Angron as soon as he found him, absolutely.
You're right, but not for the reason you posit. It's because Chaos grows as war does, so the Grand Crusade had to move fast enough to be victorious before a new bout of warp storms spilled Chaos into the galaxy again. Orks would prolong that, sure, but they're not the prime threat.
@@arcdecibel9986 I didn’t say the orks were the primary threat just one example, but yes well said, sir
@@arcdecibel9986 the orks were a problem but most of the fighting was against alien, aliens that were generally technology more advanced. The warp was much calmer at that time.
And there were Human and Xeno civilisations corrupted by chaos, imagine if they got several hundred years more to expand and solidify, not to mention some extreme Xenos, like The Khrave, yeah you don't want to give thoe guys any more time to expand.
I can imagine a very funny, but also interesting plot when the Imperium finally splinters they immediately start another Horus heresy like war and all the factions lose Terra, or Terra just gets straight up moved, and now all the human factions are in a race to find Terra and solidify their claim to be the true Imperium
the other thing to remember is that the Imperium isn't on its way up, it's in the ruins of its former self. there's tech floating around or worlds that's absolutely wild, but to them it's mundane because they've allways had it. The mechanicus rocks up and is just given the full technical data package because every man and his dog already knows how to make that plasma battery in his garage with a few sticks and a rock.
I’m guessing probably a shit ton of stuff got lost because of Baldi’s Baby Tandrum against Big E during the Heresy.
Finally, someone else who follows the supreme strategy of being a turtle 🐢🐢🐢
Emperor speedformed empire of man tag, took max loans and start buildling expensive monument, and then raged that he spawned disaster
I really enjoy your videos. Only just discovered your Brettonia sucks video the other day, now I am watching everything you have produced.
"Ah, yes! It is currently the year 279 B.C." (15:08)
I like how confident this guy is that he's living 279 years BEFORE a major epoch is set to happen. Still tracks for 40K canon though...
"what does B.C. mean?"
"do I look like I can fucking read"
During the dark age of technology the high end weapons of the imperium like gravity guns , volkite weapons, terminator suits, plasma guns and imperial knights were rudimentary mining tech or haz mat suits if the imperium were to regain its age of tech status and revive the emperor to full health it would be one of the most busted factions in sci fi
So, in conclusion: The Imperium really needs to get their records together.
"I just like people talking about the funny flying death machines." Me too buddy, me too
10:50
Love the call-out to Lazerpig
Why would the Emperor expand slowly and give his enemies time to expand too?
Gotta go for that tech rush. Don't want to rack up those administration penalties.
Today I learned: Pancreas is a fellow Lazerpig enjoyer!
The age of mythology soundtrack for a warhammer video is not something i imagined but it's appreciated