Steel Legion Command – Organising the Imperial defenders

A battle is but one part of a larger whole. Any student of war will tell you that a wise commander will not commit to battle unless he has first ensured that it is a fight he cannot lose. But this still gives the battle an importance it does not warrant. Fighting a battle, even a battle you cannot fail to win, is the purest foolishness unless it advances the chances of ending the need for any further battles. Your primary aim must always be to win the war, not win the battle.

Imperium Tactica

7th Army survivors fall back in the face of the Evil Suns advance
@death_of_a_rubricist

Important! If you want to get involved, all you need do is post pictures of your models with the tag #ashesofarmageddon. There is no bar to leap over, no minimum amount, and no standard beyond feeling you've done your best effort.

This article explains how you can help expand and enrich the project. The aims are to help fire your imagination, give you ideas, and to add depth to your hobby enjoyment.

There is a Discord server for further discussion and to ask any questions – here's your invitation (Edit: this has been updated following Ariel's comment below). This is also the best place to submit an article, or get help in writing one.

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Detail of members of the 16th Regiment, part of the 'Fighting First' 1st Army
@the_steel_legion

Orders, commander?

Games Workshop's boardgame The Battle for Armageddon is a strategic wargame that provides a campaign map with cardboard chits or counters to represent the tens of millions of combatants involved in Waa-Ghazghkull's invasion of Armageddon. 

In this project, I'm inviting you to help explore the details of those cardboard chits. Rather than the clinical and impersonal 'Imperial Guard 9th Army', we'll know that this is 'Kerschlact's Hunting Hounds'. Your contributions, alongside those of other hobbyists, will see your models and armies clash, somewhat like GW's old worldwide campaigns.

We look here at the structure of the Imperial Guard forces during the Second Battle for Armageddon. If you'd rather fight on the side of the greenskins, you can read about that here; there will be a follow-up article that covers all the extras, like Space Marines, Hive Gangs, Squats, and Border Forces.

Let's have a closer look at the forces at the Imperium's disposal. At the end of the article, you'll see how to 'claim' a counter – and what you can do with it.

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What is an Army?

An example Imperial Guard Army counter

Each of the Imperial Army counters represents a Field Army of anywhere between 25,000–250,000 men and women. The Field Army is a logistical force, representing a number of largely independent and self-supporting Regiments, each of around 2,000 or so soldiers and their equipment. Each Regiment will itself have additional specialist and support units attached, making each Army a flexible and fearsome force in and of itself.

Your Warhammer 40,000 or Epic-scale army would likely represent a Platoon or Company (or more!) within a Regiment; which is itself part of an Army. For that reason, you don't need to worry too much about treading on anyone else's toes by describing the actions of (say) the 6th Army – as your contribution will be a small – but crucial – part of that Army's actions. 

Each counter has three statistics: leftmost is Attack, the central value Defence, and the rightmost Movement. The higher the better in all circumstances. 

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7th Army Reserve
@death_of_a_rubricist

She was vaguely aware of a chemical scent, even through her rebreather, but the grit in her eyes was his main concern. Ducking behind a still-warm ork wreck, she rubbed her eyes with the rough knuckles of her glove, and blinked hard, trying to clear them. 

Las-shots and the throaty crackle of the orks' return fire still echoed across the battlefield. She heard the turret of a nearby chimera spool up for a fraction of a second before unleashing its now-familiar rapid scream-crack at a target out of her eyeline. 

Half a dozen of her squadmates suddenly jogged past, and she leapt up to scramble after them into the wildly-swirling and flashing smoke. Her eyes were clear, her rifle in hand, and she was going to defend her world.

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The Imperial Strategy: Delay and Attrition

While the orks start the campaign with three full clans, the Imperials are caught on the back foot, and have access only to a limited set of counters. Throughout the game, the Imperial player can raise new armies and fortifications – and so the race is on. Can the orks overwhelm and degrade the Imperial military-industrial machine before the Imperium can shovel enough hastily-armed soldiers out of the hives to stop them in their tracks?

Imperial Armies

The Imperial Armies

At the beginning of the game, the Imperium starts with seven Armies in play. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd are the elites; and you can deploy them anywhere. The 4th through 7th are capable, and have been assigned to hold the line alongside the Border Defence forces. The other Armies can be raised during the game.

As you'll see above, there are diminishing returns for the Imperium. The armies you start with are the cream of the crop: experienced veterans with the best that the Hiveworld can offer. That quality drops off rapidly, however – and the Armies that are raised throughout the game are increasingly poorly trained, led and equipped, until the 15th–20th Armies are indistinguishable from the Hive Gangs that you can impress into service...

These armies represent the bulk of Armageddon Secundus' military might, and are an interesting look at how the Imperial tithe system works. Each planet across the Imperium must provide armed soldiers, and Armageddon is no exception. It forms well-equipped Regiments of around 2,100 soldiers. These Regiments are tithed by the Departmento Munitorum, and so a tenth go to fight off-world as part of the Imperial Guard. These are called 'Tithed Regiments', and are sometimes supplemented by specialists, armour and equipment from other planets. 

The 52nd Infantry Company, 46th Regiment, Armageddon Planetary Defence Force. Part of the 4th Army.
@johnpaints

All of these armies will include specialist Regiments – there will be Armoured Regiments, Artillery Regiments, Infantry Regiments and Mechanised Infantry Regiments within them; not to mention Aeronautica Imperialist squadrons and other specialised supports. What makes them 'Army' counters rather than (say) Tank Brigades is the relative proportion of armour – in these ones, it's much more of a mix, while in the dedicated Tank Brigades below, the vast majority are Armoured Regiments, with perhaps just a few attached recon/infantry elements.

When you come to write your force article, it's worth bearing in mind that:

The most common type of company found in regiments raised on Armageddon are mechanised infantry companies, sometimes referred to as Armoured Fist companies. These are similar in many respects to normal Imperial Guard infantry companies, except that all of the infantry that would normally have to move around on foot are provided with Chimera armoured transport vehicles. Mechanised infantry companies are normally quite rare in the Imperial Guard, as it is difficult for most planetary governors to obtain and maintain the vehicles for such a formation. However, Armageddon is one of the chief manufacturing planets for Chimeras, producing several hundred every day for use all across the Imperium. Because of this, infantry units raised on Armageddon are routinely equipped with Chimeras.

It is important not to overstate the number of mechanised infantry companies in each Steel Legion regiment. While its not uncommon for them to make up 90% of a regiment’s companies, it is equally likely they account for less than a quarter of the units available, especially in Armageddon Steel Legion regiments that were raised as part of the Armageddon Planetary Defence Force. Battlefield attrition can also be very high amongst lightly protected vehicles like Chimeras, and there have been numerous cases in the Armageddon campaign where a regiment has lost almost all of its Chimeras in battle, and has been reduced to using what were once mechanised infantry companies as plain old infantry.

Epic: Armageddon rulebook 

For our purposes, at the start of the war, the elite 1st, 2nd and 3rd Armies differ from the others in that they include a number of veteran Tithed Regiments that have – for one reason or another – returned to their homeworld, bringing experience, expertise and exotic troops to the war.

The remaining Steel Legion Regiments have never left the planet and are part of the Armageddon Planetary Defence Force (PDF). These regiments differ slightly from tithed regiments in the mix of units that they use, generally having no off-world auxilia or vehicles. These Regiments have been gathered up into the 4th through 7th Armies. At the start of the war, they are capable and well-equipped, but beyond local conflicts or perhaps a few isolated Companies, they have no experience of fighting aliens.

The 8th through 14th Armies are those that are raised following the orks' invasion of Armageddon. How and why they were raised will be up to you to write. Are they willing volunteers drawn from a single hive? Indentured but capable? Perhaps they've been assured it'll 'all be over by Sanguinalia'. These Armies are likely using existing high-quality equipment that Armageddon had intended to export, and are instead pressing into service.

The 15th through 20th Armies are those raised during the fighting in Armageddon Secundus itself. These Regiments are much more varied. They are still professional Armies, and in appearance are still Steel Legion – though the gap between Steel Legionary and impressed Hive Ganger is finer than might have been. If you choose one of these armies to explore, perhaps you might like to explore a Regiment using long-mothballed second-line equipment; or one that is pressing hurriedly (and badly) manufactured tanks into immediate service. Their soldiers, while still potentially brave and altruistic, are more likely to have been press-ganged or forced into uniform. This isn't to say that they lack appeal as a project – in fact, I'd argue it invests them with a lot of potential for character.

88th Armageddon Mechanised, part of the 8th Army.
@88th.mechanized

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Rough Rider Brigades

Rough Rider Brigades

A proportion of the initial Imperial forces is made up of Rough Riders, with the 1st and 2nd Brigades being available. Horse cavalry might not seem to have much place in the battlefields of Armageddon, but they clearly have their place.

Rough Rider cavalry auxiliaries: 7th Army
@death_of_a_rubricist

You might, however, also interpret the horse as symbolic, and choose to represent the Brigades with equivalent fast-moving forces – bikers, buggies, Sentinels, air cavalry etc. – or a mix. As with the Army groups above, these counters are strategic-level abstractions of the reality on the ground, so you've got plenty of freedom.

Tank Division

Steel Legion Tank Divisions

...and the (quite literal) big guns of the Imperial forces: the tank Divisions. Consisting of around 20,000 soldiers in each, only the 1st Tank Division is active at the start of the war. These forces are potentially very diverse. The silhouettes on the pictures are more symbolic than representational – so the 3rd Tank Division, for example, is not made up purely of Baneblades, but can include every type of armoured fighting vehicle manufactured on Armageddon – and perhaps beyond...

Late-war Trojan Artillery Tractor. Having developed a superstition regarding overly florid names, it was designated simply 'Vehicle no:059' by its crew.
@225thsteellegion 

Epic: Armgeddon has this to say about Armageddon's Armour:

Tank and artillery companies in a Steel Legion regiment consist of a command vehicle and three squadrons (in Tank companies) or batteries (in the artillery) with three vehicles each. Tank and artillery companies are much more likely to operate at their full strength, as they are usually only directly engaged by the enemy in major battles with the result that they are either operating at full strength or have suffered such heavy casualties that they need to be withdrawn from front-line duty and amalgamated with other similarly battered formations. Artillery, in particular, either survives a battle unscathed or is overrun or wiped out.

Super-heavy tank companies are composed of three super-heavy vehicles.

Epic: Armageddon rulebook

If you claim one of these counters, you should feel complete freedom to use any vehicles you like. You might take inspiration from the symbols – the Stormhammer of the 2nd Tank Division might suggest to you a versatile force that nevertheless prefers urban fighting; while the Basilisk of the 7th Division might suggest an artillery-heavy force – or equally, simply a poorly-supplied and rag-tag force made up of odds and ends.

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Claiming a counter

Having looked over the options above, you now have a couple of choices.

If this all looks a bit complicated, don't worry! As noted right at the top, you can simply post models with the #ashesofarmageddon tag and I'll use them as seems appropriate within the project to support others' work – rest assured you will always be credited if I use your pictures or writing. If I can't get in touch or find a username, I won't post your work.

If you've got an idea in mind and want to claim a counter, pop onto the Discord chat (or send me a message on Instagram (@death_of_a_rubricist) with the following info:

• Your Instagram handle (or however you wish to be credited).
• The counter you want.
• The name of the warband 

For example, a claim might be:

I'd like the Rough Rider Light Brigade [stats 1 1 4], they'll be called 'Stoneheart's Heroes'. For credit: @spacejockey. 

The next stage is to share some models and text. This can be as involved as an entire article or battle  report – which you are invited to send in to be hosted on this blog –, or as simple as an Instagram comment or captions. Please post your model(s) wherever you like, using #ashesforarmageddon. 

If you've got a full article or pictures to submit for this blog (or are just interested in doing so), let me know by sending me a message on Instagram (@death_of_a_rubricist) or Discord (apologist).

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Important  Claiming a counter doesn't give you exclusive ownership. While I'll do my best to avoid direct contradictions (i.e. such-and-such army is called two different things'), I encourage you to interact on your own steam to work with other hobbyists to come up with something greater than its parts. Perhaps your entire gaming group may want to collaborate on a particular counter?

Likewise, the point of these articles is to inspire. They are showcases of your work, but the hope is that other people will find inspiration and riff off them. As an example, if the article on the Fighting First inspires you, feel free to use that as inspiration; giving you prompts and ideas for more on this particular Army. 

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What if I've got models that don't seem to fit?

Don't panic. Showcasing beautiful models trumps anything else, and there are lots of ways to work it in.

This could be a supporting element of another counter.

• It could be added to someone else's existing force to help expand and enrich that warband – such as the Fourth Army (for example).
• The Imperial Guard is a vast and wide-ranging organisation, so there's likely some way we can fit in your force – though those with obvious efforts to bring them as on-theme as possible will be favoured. For example, Catachan models in green are unlikely to be seen – though never say never, as there's space in the equatorial jungles. Catachan models in a desert scheme and a few Armageddon-themed markings? That's much more likely to be used.
• In short, there is almost always a way to explain things – even the seemingly esoteric. While I encourage you to riff off the established lore (as that makes it as palatable as possible as widely as possible), Armageddon is a big place. We'll favour Steel Legion, Orks and the historical forces here, but if you want to bring in something more esoteric in your own writing, feel free!

Kill confirmed
@the_steel_legion

Notes and tips:

If the counter you desperately wanted is 'taken', then get in touch – I can suggest alternatives or work with the person claiming it to take your ideas and pictures into consideration.

• Scale is of no object – you can submit 40k, Epic, Kill Team, home sculpts... whatever you like.
• There is no minimum requirement. Articles with pictures (or vice versa) will get priority, but don't feel that you have to do anything. Even a single model can make a great article.
• Please feel free to tag me (@death_of_a_rubricist) on Instagram if you want me to be sure of spotting it.
• Remember to have fun with it – this isn't a job, there is no time pressure, and the aim is to help you and others enjoy your hobbies.
• If you've got any questions, get in touch.
• Finally, no challenge is made to GW on any level with this – it's an unofficial, fan-led project that celebrates a great little game!