Why do 40k factions even insist on doing Ground Warfare when they can just nuke each from orbit? Especially the Necrons or Tyranids who don't care about taking territory intact?
 Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
 Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Because it’s cool
The short answer is that it's a toy soldiers game and not a toy spaceships game.
^
>The short answer is that it's a toy soldiers game and not a toy spaceships game.
I miss when 40k was a toy spaceships game.
Battlefleet Gothic had cooler, more distinctive miniatures, and a better ruleset than 40k, and seeing it get discontinued was a tragedy.
40k is hardly alone when it comes to underutilizing spaceships for orbital support, most writers don't know how to handle that future warfare aspect.
Planets can nuke orbit back and have shields.
The people defending the planet don't want it nuked because they live there.
The people attacking the planet don't want to nuke it because they want to conquer it for themselves.
Tyranids don't nuke the planet because that would be a waste of biomass.
Don't know about Necrons.
Necrons are massive human larpers. While the Mechanicus goes out of their way to speak and think more like a machine, the Necrons want to be human again even if it is less efficient.
And obviously even if the attacking force did want to destroy the planet and gain nothing from it but the casualties it takes to do so, usually the defending planet would likely have fleets of ships contesting the orbit to make it prohibitively difficult to even sit in that orbit uncontested let alone long enough to fire the "destroy planet" armaments.
>Especially the Necrons or Tyranids who don't care about taking territory intact?
This actually grinds my gears. You can argure that imperium, orks, chaos and tau care about conquering territory and having planets to live on, but the tyranids?
Why don't the tyranid hive ships just blast the planets's surface and then slurp up everything after they're done
I guess it is because dead planets don't taste as good.
>Why don't the tyranid hive ships just blast the planets's surface and then slurp up everything after they're done
If a McDonald's burnt down would you expect to be able to eat the food out of the ruins?
>but the tyranids?
Any biomass lost while conquering the planet is regained when it is consumed after a victory.
>Why don't the tyranid hive ships just blast the planets's surface and then slurp up everything after they're done
They do. Once a planet becomes a target and it's ecosystems get infected they slowly tyranform the planet to turn the ecosystem against the inhabitants.
This means that when Tyranids attack you have two ways to win: Detect the infestation early and cleanse it before it grows exponentially or wait at least around when the hiveship arrives and is still deploying bioforms and therefore is focused elswhere and easier to attack.
If both fail, then the tyranids turn the planet's biomass against the defenders with ease because tyranformation also means an early digestion of biomatter and adaptation of bioforms to the conditions of the planet, basically meaning that you would be facing an enemy that is in the exponential growth part and has a force specifically designed to destroy your defenses.
Do nucrons care?
I know old ones definitely had no reasons not to nuke the planet, but what about new ones?
They would at some point like to return to a more normal existence, and every planet being a barren glassed wasteland would be depressing.
Because various means of making sure you cant nuke from orbit exist. You want to glass hive Abraxes VXII? Need to take out its planetary shields and orbital defense networks first, which guess what, takes landing and doing ground warfare.
Its like people forget that 40k ground battles arent just happening in a vacuum.
This is also of course assuming you have the means to glass the place anyways (meaning you either have the generally quite rare means of quick planet killing, or the space dominance to just saturation bombardment that planet to death the hard way) and you also have nothing you want to gain from the planet.
The nids do use asteroids as a means of initial bombardment, but they neither have the weaponry to straight up wipe worlds clean before they land nor the ability to avoid landing altogether (as they need to collect biomass)
Becuse it's cooler. A game about people killing each other in ground warfare is more popular than space warfare
GW made Battlefleet Gothic , game about 40 Space warfare. It flopped
GW recently revived Aeronautica Imperialis, a game about 40k Aerial Warfare. It flopped and they killed off all the xenos races' planes. The imperial planes got shoved into Epic.
Most factions do care about taking shit in tact, like humans don't wanna go nuke the planet when there are valuable manufactorums on the planet because it could destroy the ancient tech there... Or when there are holy relics on the planet, etc. Eldar only ever get involved when there is eldar shit on the planet, so they don't wanna nuke.
tau don't wanna nuke because greater good.
orks don't wanna nuke because there wouldn't be a fight.
dark eldar wanna loot, which means no nukes.
necrons often show up because their is a tomb on that planet, which means they don't wanna nuke their own home.
Tyranids want biomass. Nuking the shit out of their meal would mean less biomass, so bad idea. Just send bugs.
Genestealer cults are same story. Send bugs.
and chaos... Well, they are chaos. They might nuke you, or not. Chaos is weird.
>and chaos... Well, they are chaos. They might nuke you, or not. Chaos is weird.
chaos gods demand you do conquest in a way pleasing to them, which usually means a solid chance of you getting fricked as well
Nids are a joke that aren't as hyperevolved as GW often implies, and have a lot of strange evolutionary blind spots like not being able to just kill everything with viral warfare
The rest are explained well enough on this thread, particularly here:
Why don’t Tyranids just have massive harvest planets where they farm plants etc until the planet is devoid of all nutrients instead of just eating what’s there and moving on. Seems a little inefficient
Because clearcutting a world with fifty billion recyclable rippers is faster, cheaper and gets the same results. There are an unlimited number of planets available for eating so agriculture projects are wasteful and tie down resources.
I think that there actually is a Hive Fleet that seems to be doing that while creating disturbing structures that I suppose we can only speculate as some kind of beacon or maybe an emitter for their psi bullshit, but GW refuses to elaborate further because either they don't know or its more fun to be mysterious.
Often their are weird splinter fleets out there accomplishing anomalous goals that aren't really typical of Tyranids, such as the one motivated actively fight back Chaos despite gaining 0 biomass from it whatsoever.
Because what tyranids want is biomass. They are not part of the carbon cycle of a planet, so if they were to "farm" a planet they would basically be slowly extracting matter from it, therefore to do that might as well just vacuum suck the atmosphere and search for another planet.
Chances are that tyranids get most of their biomass from usual stellar objects: Gas giants, asteroids, icy moons... it's just that they know that if they want to operate near someone else's space they have to take out the opposition first, which is the dramatic part.
Although thinking about it, if tyranids were to really be capable of eating planets likes Venus or Saturn entirely(including rings) the total mass of the fleet would, over time, be equivalent to a giant Dyson sphere
>Especially the Necrons
That's what they did in the orpheus sector. 40k factions actually make a point of using ground combat when there's something you need boots on the groung to get, during the sector invasion hundreds of millions of troops were being gathered in a staging point that the necrons didn't value, so they got nuked from orbit.
The thing is, habitable planets are still a finite resource so completely destroying them is not to be taken for granted, you hear about the times when exterminatus is used because they are still the exception. For every exterminatus there are hundreds of wars lasting years or decades because it's not an option, and kryptman got into trouble because he tried going against that.
Also the majority of inquisitors calling exterminatus lost their rank after the fact.
Tyranids don't have a way to just wipe out a planet in an orbital strike. Also they want to eat everything on it so they avoid doing stuff that reduce the planet's biomass.
Necrons do want to conquer planets tho, they're vain tyrants who want to regain their old glory. There's nothing to gain from ruling a dead world.
>Why do boltaction factions even insist on doing Ground Warfare when they can just bomb cities into rubble? Especially the US or Soviets who don't care about taking territory intact?
Maybe you have to disable orbital shields??? I don't know. The authors were careless when introducing exterminatus. It should have been made extremely exceptional. Like, you need a traitors-at-Istvaan level flotilla to delete a planet. Otherwise, yeah, it becomes hard to justify many campaigns.
Although, the use of exterminatus differs from author to author. There is that one inquisitor who single-handedly sterilized dozens of planets on the Tyranids' path. But in that one necron novel, the imperial crusade burns necrons' planets, but have to use and put at risk all of its myriad of ships. And the planet can be potentially recolonized some time in the future.
>It should have been made extremely exceptional
But it is.
Why do the russians insist on doing ground warfare when they cant just launch targeted nukes?
Its cause planets are resources. Its needs to be reay bad or really not worth it to nuke it.
>Why do the russians insist on doing ground warfare when they cant just launch targeted nukes?
Because they live on the same planet as their foes. If Russians didn’t live in Earth, you can be sure lots of Earth countries would glow in the dark.
Why have marines and spaceships at all when you can just launch relativistic weapons from 500 million light-years away?
Because it would take many, many thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years to achieve impact, and even the most advanced astronomical predictions can only gaze a couple centuries into the future as far as the positioning of celestial objects. Chances are extremely high that you'll miss whatever you were aiming for, especially if your target has any awareness of the possibility of this threat, because they need only make gradual micro-adjustments to their future position at the time of your firing the weapon to completely negate its utility.
Also, for spacefaring civilizations, there is very little utility in destroying planets. Spacefarers can live in space and likely already do, by the time you're considering them as a target. They can live dispersed in an asteroid belt, billions of them, producing just as much - or more - war materiel to fight you with, and all you've done is blow up their ancestral homeworld which likely had extreme cultural and religious importance to their entire species, making them permanent enemies.
Non universe reason. Plastic toy soldiers ground warfare wargame sells better, in theory it have nukes but rules for it are laughtable.
In universe reasons.
If you have city with big factory on it if you nuke it from orbit(assuming it won't nuke you from orbit first) then you have no city with factory. This is a problem because you want this factory and city in first place.
Imperium want it so it produces for emperor, chaos want it so it produce for chaos(and optionally they can turn planet into daemon world), orks want it to produce better scrap, tau want it with entire population to brainwash for greater good. So so far everyone want to take it.
We also have necrons, they usually dig from ground so no nuking from orbit and we don't usually have a lot of necron invading, usually they come to awaken tomb world.
Eldar, they usually chase prophecy, by ploting course of events so they avoid fighting in future, it's usually done with small special forces like team that do single objective(kill/protect someone or sabotage something) and then get the frick out, no ocassion to nuke from orbit because eldar don;t like big scale war, they preffer if someone else fight said war for them(case and point Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka's rise to power and 2nd and 3rd war for armageddon was eldar's doing, orks would either attack craftworld or imperium, so Ulthwe made sure that Ghaz became warlord and lauched WAAAGH against Imperium instead of Eldar).
Dark Eldar they raid for slaves, if you nuke from orbit no slaves, no slaves = no profit.
Tyranids, while bugs destroy planet they do it by consuming everything on it, if you burn everything on planet they you have nothing to consume, this is why they lauch large scale invasions, they dead on both sides are eaten and surviving nids commit suicide by drowining themselves in digestive pools, 100% recycling. For this reason Imperium likes to exterminatus planets where nid won as final frick you to bugs.
Extermanatus wastes a planet and all its recourses. Purging the wrenched xenos in glorious combat means that their recourses are there to be claimed for the glory of the imperium.