The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up

[Red Bovine]

it appears that we have successfully covered my issue with this universe (one last time for other people-> I am NOT saying I don't like wh40k, I'm just not used to it)
thank you for understanding.

I think that as I learn more of the lore/backstory of what all of these characters actually CAN do I will be better at understanding this stuff. it probably doesn't help that the lore is not entirely consistent about what people can do. (what story is anyway? ---->>>I'm still not sure if real life is consistent or not! XD)

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Um, hate to break it to you but W40K is pretty much a setting that heavily runs on Rule of Cool which comes with a number of inconsisitencies which means you if someone is going to be involved a quest like that they should be willing to have a large amount of suspension of disbelief.

More so considering that realistically a 40 thousand year tech gap means that it would actually make sense for humans in setting to have tech that would outright seem magic to us considering that if someone from 2018 went back to 1918 and explained everything that we are currently capable of that is common knowledge it would pretty much come across as magic or outright impossible and not that is just a 100 year difference.

 

[noliar]

Lets just kill the bastard as efficiently as possible. We need to feed his war machine into the smelter and get ready for the next shoe to drop. For instance, a fleet as big as the this one is the output of hundreds of worlds - that is a trail of destruction through thee galaxy pointed straight at the Trust and infested with Orks.

 

[inverted_helix]

Soo, speaking of optimizing things, the air war has been one of the largest slowdowns in the campaign that prevented us from utterly dominating the field, I'm not sure what if anything to do about that, more AA? Get the Trust Guard to maintain a larger number of advanced aircraft? I can imagine munitions swarms that would be a better AA area denial weapon than what we're using, but no sign that any of my ideas already exist in the setting, except possibly as part of the arsenal of random xenos species 400 on the other side of the galaxy.

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Well I went picking through the military sheet, and this one is even more complicated than for the last war. I can't even find the damage calculations this time.

Comparing the costs of various units and their stats though, if we want more AA the answer is basically more fighters. The anti-air helltrooper regiments we have on our military information threadmark aren't even on the military stat spreadsheet (though it lists us having 400 of them, it just doesn't say their stats). So I can't say for them.

For every other unit though our fighters are simply vastly more effective at dealing with enemy aircraft than anything else we have. Something like 3-4 magnitudes more effective than our other units in terms of cost. Though this doesn't include the missing AA regiments, nor the fixed AA that Svartalfheim has, as I don't have stats or costs on them respectively. Also bombers are more effective at AA than most of our units, though not close to fighters.

Amusingly our Helltroopers are better at AA than our Helguard since the Helltroopers have missile launchers while the Helguard replaced those with Neutron and Plasma heavy weapons.

 

[Enjou]

Lets just kill the bastard as efficiently as possible. We need to feed his war machine into the smelter and get ready for the next shoe to drop. For instance, a fleet as big as the this one is the output of hundreds of worlds - that is a trail of destruction through thee galaxy pointed straight at the Trust and infested with Orks.

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Agreed. We're able to fight him not only because he's stupid, but because we have a number of immense military advantages that most human polities are going to lack. Letting any Ork Waaagh we can destroy leave alive is asking them to infest more worlds, making the problem bigger.

 

[Red Bovine]

Agreed. We're able to fight him not only because he's stupid, but because we have a number of immense military advantages that most human polities are going to lack. Letting any Ork Waaagh we can destroy leave alive is asking them to infest more worlds, making the problem bigger.

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Eh, from a practical stand point having an extremely personally powerful idiot Warboss around means that any close by waaghs would end up being taken over by him making the waagh a significantly lesser threat than if it were lead by someone actually competent as shown by how it has been repeatedly mentioned throughout the whole war that if the guy was actually competent the horde would have been truly dangerous. Which is why some people have suggested by other players that we should find a way to capture him and then send him to incoming waaghs to significantly weaken them. Of course it's not really practical since we lack any real means to capture him or even keep him contained safely.

 

[Nurgle]

17 votes 16 for Enjou Plan.

Adhoc vote count started by Nurgle on Jun 9, 2018 at 7:06 PM, finished with 131 posts and 17 votes.

• ---

  16 people have voted

  [X] Plan Kaiju Crushin' Headcrusha
  -[X] Meet Headcrusha's horde with a force built around your power armoured troops - Over half a billion Power Armoured Troops are currently on Svartalfheim, allowing you to meet Headcrushas' Horde with a force entirely in power armour. This would allow you to take advantage of the poor armor penetration capacity of the majority of the Ork troops now that the Waaagh Field has weakened.
  -[X] Balanced Stance- By using a mix of dug in forces, raids and sallies you would be able to greatly speed up the battle without risking to much of your forces .
  -[X] Kill Headcrusha with elites- Deadly as headcrusha is even he can't stand against the full might of the Black Irons, though many lives would be lost keeping him isolated which he is worn down
  -[X] Low- Continue as things are, sacrificing fighters in order to cover a campaign of harassment on the ground which would be supported by bombers.
  -[X] Scry and Fry [Warbosses & Ork Leaders]- Your Diviners could work with your other psykers to locate the most dangerous foes and take them out.
  -[X] Thermonuclear Battle Tiger - Launch Deathstrikes against Headcrusha's horde, and then have Xavier lead a choir to turn the flames into a giant, fiery tiger kaiju to rampage through the Orkish lines, as you planned to do in during the last war. No Transcendent Alpha will interfere this time!
  -[X] Biomancers will provide boosts to the elites going against Headcrusha.

  • Enjou
  • HanEmpire
  • Nikandros
  • DeusFerreus
  • SirHades2.0
  • Void Stalker
  • Azgrin
  • cl20
  • nat_401
  • random_npc
  • PurposefulZephyr
  • Stylph
  • Nianque
  • Romka
  • sabreFather
  • Adventwolf

  1 people have voted

  [X] Plan Give peace a chance
  -[X] Meet Headcrusha's horde with a force built around your power armoured troops - Over half a billion Power Armoured Troops are currently on Svartalfheim, allowing you to meet Headcrushas' Horde with a force entirely in power armour. This would allow you to take advantage of the poor armor penetration capacity of the majority of the Ork troops now that the Waaagh Field has weakened.
  -[X] Balanced Stance- By using a mix of dug in forces, raids and sallies you would be able to greatly speed up the battle without risking to much of your forces .
  -[X] Kill Headcrusha with elites, Last Hunters, Space Marines, Governors own if Thermonuclear Battle Tiger does not work
  -[X] Thermonuclear Battle Tiger at day 4 or best opportunity - Launch Deathstrikes against Headcrusha's horde, and then have Xavier lead a choir to turn the flames into a giant, fiery tiger kaiju to rampage through the Orkish lines and challenge the ork warboos to a fight, just as you planned to do in during the last war. No Transcendent Alpha will interfere this time!
  -[X] Biomancers will provide boosts to the elites going against Headcrusha.

  • Nurgle

 

[Enjou]

Eh, from a practical stand point having an extremely personally powerful idiot Warboss around means that any close by waaghs would end up being taken over by him making the waagh a significantly lesser threat than if it were lead by someone actually competent as shown by how it has been repeatedly mentioned throughout the whole war that if the guy was actually competent the horde would have been truly dangerous. Which is why some people have suggested by other players that we should find a way to capture him and then send him to incoming waaghs to significantly weaken them. Of course it's not really practical since we lack any real means to capture him or even keep him contained safely.

Click to shrink...

Being an idiot makes him less of a threat in some respects, yes. But look at the size of the Waaagh he's gotten under his thumb. He's gotten such a large force in spite of being a moron. The reason for this is that he much bigga than other Warbosses - he can force those that refuse to bow to him into combat and wreck them, then subsume their Waaaghs into his own. Other Ork Warbosses should just be able to beat him through better tactics, but that's not how Orks work. They follow the biggest. And Headcrusha is very, very big, so Orks are going to just instinctually get behind him.

Polities that aren't as powerful as ours will fall to the might of such large Waaaghs even if they're lead by an idiot, compounding the problem by making more Ork worlds, which will in turn continue to produce more Orks and more ships. Plus it generally doesn't go well if one tries to really control what Orks do - in the long run it's bound to backfire.

 

[Valkur]

Um, hate to break it to you but W40K is pretty much a setting that heavily runs on Rule of Cool which comes with a number of inconsisitencies which means you if someone is going to be involved a quest like that they should be willing to have a large amount of suspension of disbelief.

More so considering that realistically a 40 thousand year tech gap means that it would actually make sense for humans in setting to have tech that would outright seem magic to us considering that if someone from 2018 went back to 1918 and explained everything that we are currently capable of that is common knowledge it would pretty much come across as magic or outright impossible and not that is just a 100 year difference.

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Hate to break it to you but a week ago you said that the Sword Maidens coudnt be an all female fighting force because it would just limit potential.

When I argued rule of cool you said no. So tell me straght are we doing rule of cool or not? And this isn't just Red Bovine but EVERYONE.


If we can have rule of cool with the only limit being mechanics fine. But of our own version of rule of cool is something else I'd like to ask what exactly it is.

Now if people just don't give that much of a shit for the Sword Maidens then that' fine. I for one see not that much enthusiasm for our space marines past there initial Colonazation of Fjol IV.

I raise this point because I wanted to do something with the Sword Maidens that would have been Nordic and aproraite but it felt people were just ganking me. Some for the sake of winning an argument I felt.

Also I'm on my phone so autocorrect may have hurty wording of things.

 

[Andres]

@Enjou, why are you having the battle tiger attack the horde instead of Headcrusha? The battle tiger represents immense force concentration so it's better for anti-hero work than anti-army work.

 

[Enjou]

@Enjou, why are you having the battle tiger attack the horde instead of Headcrusha? The battle tiger represents immense force concentration so it's better for anti-hero work than anti-army work.

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Well, I'm kind of maybe imagining it to be significantly bigger than Headcrusha and more suited towards killing huge swaths of army - I mean, we originally envisioned it to stop a mass sacrifice rather than fight a hero unit. But fine, whatever, added a bit to throw it at Headcrusha himself.

 

[Andres]

Well, I'm kind of maybe imagining it to be significantly bigger than Headcrusha and more suited towards killing huge swaths of army - I mean, we originally envisioned it to stop a mass sacrifice rather than fight a hero unit. But fine, whatever, added a bit to throw it at Headcrusha himself.

Click to shrink...

The thing about the mass sacrifice stuff was that they were happening at central locations, which is why the battle tiger works. Since armies are more spread out, you'd want to use something that has a more spread out effect, like a rolling sea of fire or something.

EDIT:
[X] Plan Kaiju Crushin' Headcrusha

Huh, turns out I wasn't already voting for this plan.

 

[guyfromtheplace1]

I can understand and believe that some people are more trained/better equiped then others... because I know some people in real life are fricking monsters when it comes to hand-to-hand combat.
but I also know the WH40k universe has people do absolutely abserd stuff (im not criticizing mind you, im just noting it).

more specifically, I see quite a few storys (cannonized one too) where someone beats even THOSE people...multiple times over. when in reality there are strict limits to what the human body can do. and while you CAN get closer to the "perfect" solder with more training. the fact remains that you simply CANT make somebody "so" good that they can 1v10 navy seals/marines or whatever super-trained solder you want to talk about. the useral tactics that let a black belt take down a mob don't work when the "mob" themselves know the tatics and know how to counter them....and in this setting you have people that can 1v10 THOSE people....and then you have people who then can 1v10 THOSE people......it strains the imagination as to how thats possible. because either you are SIGNIFICANTLY faster or stronger which as I said is impossable for real humans to do. or you have tatics that counter theirs.

long story short, wh40k doesnt have the physical limitations that real life has (again, im not saying its bad....) and this means I don't know how to properly optimize because I'm used to dealing with "normal" people

This whole universe has that to a degree (which is why I keep ending up asking and thinking very ridiculous things>>> because I lack context...like the ranges that we were working at,I had no idea that this universe had NOT hand-waved away accuracy restrictions....what we were talking about made it seem to me like that was the case),
but as I was saying I don't even TRY with the solders. it doesn't make sense to me.

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Effectively the entire population is capable of emulating Batman in level of physical and mental capability(with enough training) as a side effect of genetic tampering during the Dark Age of Technology, moreover the geneticists somehow managed to remove most of the hard limits on how capable humans can theoretically become(don't ask me how, it might involve the warp), though there is a point of decreasing returns.

Well, I'm kind of maybe imagining it to be significantly bigger than Headcrusha and more suited towards killing huge swaths of army - I mean, we originally envisioned it to stop a mass sacrifice rather than fight a hero unit. But fine, whatever, added a bit to throw it at Headcrusha himself.

Click to shrink...

I was so confused by all of the thermonuclear battle tiger references, until I went back and read your plan, then I realized they were hilarious.
I'm going back to figure out where the idea came from and read the discussion surrounding it.

 

[Red Bovine]

Hate to break it to you but a week ago you said that the Sword Maidens coudnt be an all female fighting force because it would just limit potential.

When I argued rule of cool you said no. So tell me straght are we doing rule of cool or not? And this isn't just Red Bovine but EVERYONE.


If we can have rule of cool with the only limit being mechanics fine. But of our own version of rule of cool is something else I'd like to ask what exactly it is.

Now if people just don't give that much of a shit for the Sword Maidens then that' fine. I for one see not that much enthusiasm for our space marines past there initial Colonazation of Fjol IV.

I raise this point because I wanted to do something with the Sword Maidens that would have been Nordic and aproraite but it felt people were just ganking me. Some for the sake of winning an argument I felt.

Also I'm on my phone so autocorrect may have hurty wording of things.

Click to shrink...

Okay to clear things up the issue with your arguments for the sword maidens seemed to be that they were at first the newly found sisters of battle which didn't make any sense for the reasons people mentioned, then there was the idea that we needed an all female group as a counter to the SoBs which didn't make any sense, then there was the whole pointless gender segregation thing which didn't make any sense.

While yes, the Imperium did do a lot of things that didn't make a lot of sense for modern people it does make a bit mroe sense for the people in the setting including the sisters of battle being all female. But thing is that the complaint were largely about why it wouldn't make sense for the trust to found an all female group due to the level of gender equality and seemingly making a big deal about the gender thing than needed.

And as mentioned I did say if there were a reason that actually made sense like say it being originally a womens club that just happened to end up being an actual unit of warriors that just happened to be female. A reason for it staying all female could be the same reason that the Cattathan Phase Tigers don't get anymore members due to them not recruiting anymore to avoid messing up their coordination.

Being an idiot makes him less of a threat in some respects, yes. But look at the size of the Waaagh he's gotten under his thumb. He's gotten such a large force in spite of being a moron. The reason for this is that he much bigga than other Warbosses - he can force those that refuse to bow to him into combat and wreck them, then subsume their Waaaghs into his own. Other Ork Warbosses should just be able to beat him through better tactics, but that's not how Orks work. They follow the biggest. And Headcrusha is very, very big, so Orks are going to just instinctually get behind him.

Polities that aren't as powerful as ours will fall to the might of such large Waaaghs even if they're lead by an idiot, compounding the problem by making more Ork worlds, which will in turn continue to produce more Orks and more ships. Plus it generally doesn't go well if one tries to really control what Orks do - in the long run it's bound to backfire.

Click to shrink...

Don't think it works like that since we have seen plenty of occasions where warbosses would fight with their armies for years before actually fighting against each other and that could be avoided with someone like Ridcully putting focus on it. For Headcrusha while he is pretty strong personally imagine that it still takes him quite a while to actually defeat warbosses due to him sucking at commanding his forces and it taking a while to actually get to the point where he can challenge a warboss personally.

And as mentioned the ideal plan for some of us would just be to capture and put in into stasis to send to incoming waaghs but as mentioned it isn't really practical for a number of reasons.

 

[Valkur]

The Sword Maidens are an ancient society of warrior women though. Or just a society.

And in an increasingly militarizong (for 40k anyways) they can work. I was juggling possibilities back then. But good to know it was a lack of debate.

 

[Andres]

@Enjou, I think you should add a clause under Balanced Stance to switch to Defensive Stance after Headcrusha is killed. The text implies that the only bad thing about Defensive is the damage that Headcrusha would do, but after his death the point would become moot.

 

[Red Bovine]

@Enjou Not sure if you seen the post mentioning it but think you might want to attach some last hunters to the group going after major orks since their job is assasination and they are the best at it.

 

[guyfromtheplace1]

Somthing has just occured to me, we're going to turn around and find that the tainted ships we pulled out of Dis have been cleased while we weren't looking, aren't we?

I really hope this is a flora/fauna/microbes/ghost gribble effect, and not just the planet, that way we could transplant it to other worlds. I'd like to think that people would accept dealing with deadly invasive species in order to gain another means of keeping Chaos away. Also if we figure it out really soon we might speed up the planetary cleasing Lin is undertaking.

 

[nat_401]

I really hope this is a flora/fauna/microbes/ghost gribble effect, and not just the planet, that way we could transplant it to other worlds. I'd like to think that people would accept dealing with deadly invasive species in order to gain another means of keeping Chaos away. Also if we figure it out really soon we might speed up the planetary cleasing Lin is undertaking.

Click to shrink...

We had a look at the ships being cleansed and found out it's some sort of warp entity doing the cleansing, not going to be able to transport those.

Edit: No idea why this got a funny, oh well.

 

[Enjou]

@Enjou Not sure if you seen the post mentioning it but think you might want to attach some last hunters to the group going after major orks since their job is assasination and they are the best at it.

Click to shrink...

Scry and Fry is entirely remote. No need for attachments.

 

[guyfromtheplace1]

We had a look at the ships being cleansed and found out it's some sort of warp entity doing the cleansing, not going to be able to transport those.

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Oh, i didn't realize that'd already happened, I'll go looking through the posts again.

That said, one of the things I've been looking at from Sunless Sea is crated souls, the caverns have areas loosely based on that setting, animals on Avernus eat souls, and the reason real plants grow fruit is to convince animals to eat the fruit and spread their seeds around, it wouldn't be strange for there to be soul catching wood in the caverns, intended to trap the souls of things the plant kills for cavern soul-eating herbivores to take a chomp out of.
If such a thing could be cultivated it would aid the soul trade, and might make such capture and transport of warp creatures feasible.


Edit: I keep planning to include this in a really long omake about the caverns, but can't seem to make myself keep up with my writing.

 

[Red Bovine]

Scry and Fry is entirely remote. No need for attachments.

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Was thinking more having something like the diviners help the Last Hunters locate targets that to assasinate while they work on the ones they could more easily fry. Because frankly the bonuses we seem to get from psykers not being more general seems pretty small while the only time the last hunters went out they did a ton of damage.

Come to think of it it might be better if in the future we found a divination order that would be our equivelent of farseers that focuses on directing attacks in battle unlike the order of omens whose job it is is to just watch out for dangers to the trust and the people of Avernus this one would be directly involved in battles and directing attacks by way of divination. Considering that divination has been getting used a lot in this fight seems like it would be beneficial to have people specialized in it though staying off of the frontlines.

 

[Piren'e Colass]

Taking the Triple
I never knew who my father was growing up. I mean on Averneus that makes very little difference to one's life experience as chances are pappy'll probably be murdered by the wildlife or a witch pretty soon anyway, but still, I never even knew who he was. Most people at least have pictures, a few videos, hand me down weapons, and old medals.

Anyway, this small difference in upbringing didn't alter my life at all significantly, and I grew up happily surrounded by my mother and her large extended family in Lindon.

I took to Avernite life like a temple cat takes to crushing spiders, led my company in youth militia, and was one of a very select few to be allowed to take the triple. Taking the triple is an institution afforded to those young Avernites who show incredible military potential at a young age, and to get those individuals into the Helguard, where they belong.

Pdf boot camp was a breeze. Most of the kit was familiar, I was top of my class physically and mentally, and I got through with full marks. Assigned light infantry. No surprises there, since Mum first took me into the wild age 9 and I'd been out at least once a week since. Helltroopers was harder, but I still graduated second top of my class. I was later told the top graduate had turned out to be a latent psyker and she had been shipped off to the university. Hope she does well. This knowledge however skimmed through my mind as hurriedly I prepared for Helguard boot.

Now, I won't lie to you, Helguard Boot is harder than adamantine. Weeks spent in areas of Averneus where life is best described as a constant horrific fighting retreat, sprinkled with wrestling training from men who could dismember an Ork unarmed, all tinged with the constant numb pain of sleep deprivation.

The anti-psyker training was the worst. A shuttle took us to the city of glass, and we were hurried into a small, dark room with arcane equipment hanging from the cellings. We were then ordered to hold our position, and given practice lasguns.

What followed was emperor knows how long of the worst nightmare you've ever had. They pushed our minds as far as they could go, and suddenly let off, let us think we were done. Then, after a too short moment, it started again. I don't know how I made it through that period of utter horror, but I did, and now weak witches do not scare me in the same way that they used to.

My receipt of a small white and green striped letter upon my entry into the Helguard was a suprise. It was unmarked, except my name, and a small image of a tiger. I opened it up and read...

 

[Dragon_352]

Um, hate to break it to you but W40K is pretty much a setting that heavily runs on Rule of Cool which comes with a number of inconsisitencies which means you if someone is going to be involved a quest like that they should be willing to have a large amount of suspension of disbelief.

More so considering that realistically a 40 thousand year tech gap means that it would actually make sense for humans in setting to have tech that would outright seem magic to us considering that if someone from 2018 went back to 1918 and explained everything that we are currently capable of that is common knowledge it would pretty much come across as magic or outright impossible and not that is just a 100 year difference.

Click to shrink...

....yep... I knew this would happen and I stated it three times already in those older comments (don't make me go and look through to quote myself.....)

......but I guess I will state it again.....

I KNOW that its a different universe/////I am NOT criticizing it////// I DON'T hate it for this////// I actually LIKE wh40k (minus the parts that focus too much on grim-dripness)

I know that SoD is needed, alright?(also, wombat already explained the in uni explaination about it)

but the fact still remains that I don't know the lore very well.....i am basing literally EVERYTHING off 2 hrs of playing a wh40k game and reading the wiki ! )
Edit: ...and mind you...we have people running around with literal reality-warping powers....so I can't even rule things out that seem ridiculous at first glance. I just have to go with it effectively.

 

[Andres]

but the fact still remains that I don't know the lore very well.....i am basing literally EVERYTHING off 2 hrs of playing a wh40k game and reading the wiki ! )

Click to shrink...

If you want a place to learn the lore, the If the Emperor had a Text to Speech Device series on Youtube series is a good place to go. It's a pretty funny series. Not that this is a "watch this or don't speak" thing or anything, just recommending a good series.

 

[Dragon_352]

If you want a place to learn the lore, the If the Emperor had a Text to Speech Device series on Youtube series is a good place to go. It's a pretty funny series. Not that this is a "watch this or don't speak" thing or anything, just recommending a good series.

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I watched a little of it actually. but its too cringe-y to me so I stopped. (thank you for not being one of those people who get up in arms about their chosen show.)

also, I am not sure I believe you that its actually a good source because its trying to make FUN of it.
which means I cant know when its twisting the lore to make a funny about it.

that's the kind of source to send someone to if you want them to get WILDLY off information about something. which is exactly what I am trying to avoid XD!

thank you anyway however.