Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27642965-20160211003725/@comment-88.171.97.94-20160430065751

Thanks for correcting my false opinions about the Imperial Guard, though I still think they lack sometimes good commanding officers - in fact, I think my opinions mainly come from the point of view of people who don't play the imperial guard. But to be fair in the books it is quite mixed - sometimes they use proper tactics and kick ass, sometimes they are just thrown into the meat grinder just for the Space Marines to save the day. We don't really know the standard.

The Culture, as mentionned above in this thread, is a very advanced human-like civilisation sin Iain M Banks novels and short stories. I am not going to discuss what they are capable of, as it as already been done above. My point here would be the following : there is little point in comparing civilisations that are not on a generally identical technological level (aka a few millenia at best). Because the technology of the Culture is so advanced that they actually do things that even the Eldar would qualify as magic. Actually in the books we saw the Culture going to war once. and they were capable of destroying stars with one single medium ship. Or create ships that would separate in billions of other ships capable of producing copies of themselves. or teleporting weapons into your own ships. They have security protocols that enable them to immediatly deviate energy to an other dimension, thus making their ships nearly undestructible with classic, not dimensio-bending weapons. Their most basic weapon is semi-sentient and can destroy an entire city. In one novel, they teleport the severed head of one of their operatives aboard a ship after he is beheaded and within one month the guy has a new body.

It's not even fun, these kind of civilizations are cheating because of sheer technological and scientific advance. It's a bit like in Civilization where you have access to tanks and helicopters when your opponent has knights. So if we are looking for serious contenders I think we should stick to similar worlds in terms of tech level.