Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27642965-20160211003725/@comment-88.171.98.229-20160429061146

About ground battles, that's not only a matter of people, that's a matter of who is in charge too. take the Imperial Guard for exemple. They are a potent force, but they get slaugtered by billions because of old WW1 tactics and "for the Emprah !" -style charges. IF they used modern combined arms techniques and if the Imperial Fleet did half of its job (aka giving them some fucking air support and orbital strikes), they would roll over any force in the 40K Universe.

Then, about the whole "you can't beat the Imperium on ground and space..." Well, if you think about classic sci-fi settings, with a technology that is ahead of us but not that much (a few centuries to a few millenia), yes it's true, because of sheer manpower and industrial output.

THEN, if we consider much more advanced civilisations, with really advanced tech that is completely different well...remember the ships from the Dark Age of Technolgy that can fire black holes ? Imagine that ten times better and you have civilisations like the Culture. As an example (but I'm pretty sure we can find other civilisations like this), their ships are mainly made of magnetic fields, they can interact with our dimension while travelling in an other, they can teleport antimatter weapons inside your ship, they can replicate them as much as they want (oh, and the ships are sentient too, and a 80 km long ship can be operated by a single IA)...so if we go to these kind of settings, I know civilisations that could crush ten imperium of man before breakfast.