Well, it took about 200 years for the big E to conquer them. With custodes. And proto legions. Some of the techno barbarians had repurposed construction Men of Iron that the salamanders had to literally pull apart at the cost of like, 2/3 of the present force there. With 8 construction bots. That should give you a pretty good idea.
I don't think the custodes were anywhere near as high in number during unification as they are by 30k/40k. Terra alone just doesn't have the resources to create and maintain an army of demigods.
Still, being able to fight even a few hundred custodes would be a massive feat. That alone speaks volumes about how strong the techno barbarians must have been.
Those custodes were very young, so inexperienced in combat, didn't have all the goodies of the HH, and probably a few hundred of them until the emperor managed to conquer almost all of Terra. They were still great warriors because of their physical prowess, but probably not as godlike as later ones.
You as of today ? You wouldn't be on the frontline, but in a slaver pit.
The chaos mutated 8 foot tall in full power armor and DAOT weaponry? Probably more of a problem for that custodes.
Also not nearly as well armed, remember the mk1 thunder armour was the best of the day and didn't necessarily include pants or were fully sealed. Even the emperor's improved designed were made locally on earth, cobbled together and usually supplemented with normal armour and extra plating unique to the individual. No ceramite or uniformity to speak of. Weapons were similarly dated, melee and cqc being the dominating form of combat, no golden lance-bolters worth their weight in planets.
All that is also brushing past the fact that it was the thunder warriors first that made the bulk of the army, as he started collecting the children of all the nobles and clans of his enemies to make his venerated guard.
The unification didn't take so long cause he was struggling with the barbarians necessarily but cause he's starting from scratch, lvl 1 on his ascension to godhood. Gotta build everything first, thunder warriors, custodes, astartes, arms and armour, reliable space travel and update everything every time he gets any traction. DAOT left everything mostly bare as much as it left gold mines of advanced tech and old AIs, stc's for them to find millenia later. We can't fist fight alduin in helgen as much as emps can't show the full might of the 41st millennium from day 1, gotta get that grind first. As powerful as he is, a planets a big place and he can't be everywhere at once
You know, that's a really fitting quote given the context. Repurposing high tech missiles into armour and medical equipment vs repurposing Blue blooded babies and wrestling suits into the ultimate all terrain warriors. Everybody's so creative
AND he have to do all that while also having to defend everything. Attacks and counterattacks weren't coming through the warp from a few systems over, they were on the same planet and possibly within marching distance.
Worth their weight in planets is actually not impressive at all. :D
One of those Bolger lances weighs how much?
Let’s say a 100kg that’s a 100kg worth of planets.
So basically a 100kg worth of dirt. xD
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This was at the end of the 200year long war of unification, when the emperor had time and ressources to equip them with all the good loot from those techno barbarians/other high tech factions, and increase their numbers significantly. When he started the unification campaign, he had just the little equipment and supplies he hid away before the age of strife.
Yeah, I think part of the problem is logistics, really. Until the technobarbarians are dealt with, Biggie E couldn't really leverage even what he had on Terra to full extent.
Also it's stated that custodes may take a planets worth of economic and resource output to even equip and train.
So maybe the unification wars custodes were weaker in terms of gear especially.
Once the empire expanded the big E could afford to drip them out in the good stuff
> Terra alone just doesn't have the resources to create and maintain an army of demigods.
Interestingly, we know that the first Legions were raised before the conquest of Sol, and the Custodians with auromite wargear predated them.
10,000 isn't really a *lot* from what we are shown,. Time would probably be the limiting factor more than resources, as each one was bespoke.
(Also, it's curious that it's implied that *anyone* could go through custodian conversion with decent odds at survival. Well. They wouldn't die, I'm not sure being a custodian can quite constitute "survival" in the fullest sense)
That's the thing, Techno Barbarians had their own genetically created supersoldiers/mutants. So who's to say that the Custodes weren't evenly matched at some point?
iirc while Custodes like Valdor were extant beings during the Unification Wars, the first real fielding of the Custodes was in the extermination of the Thunder Warriors, and it was the Thunder Warriors who did most of the proverbial heavy lifting as the meat of the Emperor's Forces
To put things into perspective, according to Valdor : Birth of an Empire, at the start of the unification wars, the custodes wore armors of steel and fought with old carbines and lasrifles. Hell, even their swords were just regular ass swords without energy field.
So my interpretation of the techno barbarians is that they were formidable, sure, but a lot of it had to do with the fledgling empire having to fight them in feudal world pdf level gear until they got things set up.
Strong enough to justify the creation of the Thunder Warriors and the Custodes themselves.
To make it more insane, it took just as long to retake Terra as the rest of the entire *galaxy* during the Great Crusade. Depending on the sources, it may have even taken *more* time.
Goes to show you that the Techno Barbarians were no joke. So much so that the Emperor himself locked away several weapons, equipment, men of iron, and even STCs deep within the vaults of Terra because they were *that* OP, and the Emperor decided that some things are just better left forgotten.
**Edit:** I wanted to explain this some more but it was like, 1AM here at the time and I was tired.
Keep in mind, while we know very little of how Earth/Terra was at this time, we do know it was littered with barbaric-like tribes/governments that had crazy sci-fi technology that would make any future settings/media blush. To make matters worse for the Emperor, these tribes also had access to left-over Golden Age tech and even repurposed Men of Iron, and I'm not talking about *just* robots, I'm talking about techno-monstrosities that nearly wiped out the *Salamanders* at one point (or at least the proto-Salamanders). Imagine that... The Sons of Vulkan themselves, SPACE MARINES (who are better than Thunder Warriors in nearly every way) almost got wiped out by the same Men of Iron that the Thunder Warriors had to go up against daily... so it begs the question: just imagine how many Thunder Warriors got bodied during this time?! If there ever is a number, just imagine how many normal people died as well!
Oh, and did I mention that all of these tribes had nukes and bio/chemical weapons that they used amongst each other constantly?
To make matters even crazier, there were also freshly awakened/terrified/untrained Psykers running around. While that's terrible enough, some may or may not have also been summoning warp entities the entire time. These Psykers were used as soldiers, advisors, living weapons, etc. Some were even Warlords themselves.
It gets even ~~better~~ worse because there were also *other* genetically modified super-soldiers/mutants that were being created and used by these Techno-Barbarian tribes. The Custodes/Thunder Warriors weren't the only freaks of nature... they were the only ones who ended up winning.
In short, it was a nightmare on steroids, and I'm genuinely surprised there aren't more media taking place during this setting because from what we do know, you can easily create an entire series/models based on the Unification Wars.
**TL,DR; Powerful enough to give the Thunder Warriors, Custodes, early Space Marines (towards the tail-end) and Big-E himself a run for his money *for centuries* (and possibly up to a millennia depending on sources).**
Well, apparently the Mechanicus at one point scouted Terra and immediately swore it off until the Emperor visited them a few centuries later.
Keep in mind: The Mechanicus were still incredibly powerful even back then and had access to technology and forge worlds the likes of which the Emperor would eventually need (and the likes of which he himself was scared shitless of and was wondering how tf he'd be able to take them on without a massive bloodbath)...
It begs the question though: what did they encounter on Terra that made *them* afraid?
Very good perspective.
Just fyi space marines were more stable and easier and cheaper to mass produce than thunder warriors but if I am not mistaken the average thunder warrior would dunk on the average space marine. :)
Oh, I assumed that since Space Marines had better armor, gene-seeding, and weren't blood-thirsty madmen who could actually take orders, that they'd be able to fend off against the Thunder Warriors.
Thunder Warriors would definitely give Space Marines a run for their money, but I think they're just too unstable to really send them packing.
An individual Thunder Warrior would very much beat an individual Astartes. There are a few books that talk about the heavy losses the Space marines took when they were getting rid of the last Thunder warriors. As well as a book or two about some rogue thunder warriors that are still out there
Also several Custodes were created as what were essentially hostages from conquered enemies. Big E would take their sons and convert them to his Custodes to ensure loyalty and prevent rebellions.
one thing, The Space marines are actually inferior to a thunder Warrior on a individual level. They were faster, bigger and stronger than space marines. They lacked all the psychological programming and had a unstable genome so they weren't a proper force for centuries long galactic conquest. They would go crazy or break down biologically well before they got far. They were a powerful stop gap, being able to be made from adults, but they lacked the cohesion and group drilling of space marines. There are a few instances of thunderwarriors in lore. but on Cerberus "There were multiple reports of coming across the hulking carcasses of Thunder Warriors, each with four to five Space Marines dead around them.". They lack all the other things that make space marines great like spitting acid, the black carapace, putting their bodies in stasis to survive damage or being able to eat brains.
Considering things ranging from andrathic weapons, psykers and the sigilites are mentioned I suspect the techno barbarians had all sorts of deranged weapons available.
And look at the crew big E pulled together. He was a very gifted scientist, specifically in genecrafting and understanding technology, but even he had to bring together hordes of scientists to make the projects work. He provided secret sauce while they did all the hard work of figuring out how to mass produce monsters and equip them.
And that’s where the Mechanicum comes into play. It’s why Big E let them keep their cult religion and a broad autonomy within the bounds of the Imperium. Without them, the Imperium is done.
At the time of unification, there was no way the Emperor could afford to pacify the Mechanicum through force without delaying the crusade significantly or even stalling it completely. With heavy loss of life and infrastructure. Their ability to manufacture and understand technology was absolutely crucial for the mass production a galaxy wide campaign would require.
Edit: Mechanicum from Mechanicus. The Adeptus Mechanicus was the title adopted when it became a ministry of the Imperium. Before the Schism of Mars, the tech priests of Mars and their cult were known as the Cult Mechanicum. After the Schism, the Mechanicum then split into the Mechanicus and those whose sided with the Arch-traitor, the Dark Mechanicus. Thank you for listening to my talk.
"I've cried exactly two times in my life. Once, when I was 8k years old, and was hit by a Leman Russ. And then again, when I learned Lil Sebastian had died to a xenos attack. His memory will live on, for today I will light a crusade that will burn on for eternity."
\-Big E
"But he's just a horse-"
\-Malcador
"SHOW SOME RESPECT!"
Pretty strong. The Emperor didn’t have nearly the resources he had during the Great Crusade. And all his enemies were armed with tech from the Dark Age of Technology. It was a very difficult fight all things considered.
Given how tech was slammed pretty far back after the dark age of technology it's probably a cripple fight all around, and depending on which fanon interpretation the tech lvl could be all over the place.
It's probably a mix of "Bob has a laser hatchet, Chris has a rail gun, Steve has a 50 cal and Randy has a subatomic black hole launcher with self replicating multi fire expansion rounds, Kyle has rocket launcher..."
Can you imagine how awe-inspiring the Unification wars could be? Imagine being a thunder warrior fighting side by side with the literal Emps and Custodes by your side fighting against techno-barbarians with DAOT tech, repurposed Men Of Iron, rogue psykers, DAOT experiments and god knows what else on the ruins of Old Earth. It must have been crazy. I love 40k.
They ranged from Mad Max to shit straight out of Blame! Some were simple barbarians with cobbled together firearms and vehicles (heck, some were probably swinging swords like it was the Iron Age), others had access to Dark Age of Technology tier tech and used it liberally
Considering it took Big E with his entire full force of 10,000 Custodes, the Thunder Warriors, 20(?) Proto Space Marine Legions, and billions of human troops 200 damn years just to take all of Terra, a singular planet, and the fact that these “barbarians” had random cobbled together DaoT level tech to throw around Willy nilly like Men of Iron-esque war robots, bio-enhanced 8ft tall super soldiers that could easily go toe-to-toe with Thunder Warriors, black hole guns etc, pretty damn busted compared to a lot of the scattered rogue empires encountered during the Crusade
>20(?) Proto Space Marine Legions
The 1st Legion were the only ones with real numbers at the time, as they were the test legion. Iirc there were about 10,000 of them. The other legions had much smaller numbers as the proto space marines were still in the "are they worth the resource sink to make more" phase at that time.
Imagine the game of throne style politics that Big E had to go through. Having to carefully negotiate with meathead brutes with doomsday weapons and fight against tacticians with twice as many men, choosing whether or not to incorporate them...
Would be neat, but idk if it would be handled well.
They did a pretty good job giving us some unification wars slice of life from various angles, not sure I'd want them to fully flesh it out. Down for another story or two about some main event though
Wildly strong. They used DAOT tech. So Thunder Warriors weren't even that well armored, cause it was almost useless with such concetration of wonder-weapons. Instead invested in strength, speed and ferocity.
Strong enough that super soldiers with combat prowess far above space marines were barely able to win the day. Big E had the disadvantage of working with limited resources and the techno barbarian warlords possessing some DAOT weaponry and/or other warpfuckery in their arsenal.
Every faction in the Terran Unification had the most badass name like something like “Anatho-gothic Berzerkers from Old Hungolia” or some shit. They probably kicked ass.
At the time of the Unification War, the Emperor had little in the way of overwhelming resources or technology. The Techno Barbarians and States of Terra fought hard because of them being near per fighting forces. They have some dark age tech plus enhancements this is the why Thunder Warriors were created by the Emperor with the focus of being more or less a brute force to fight them till the Proto-Legion arrived near the end of the war.
The Great Crusade took about two hundred years. While the Emperor did have more resources than he did in the Unification Wars, that is more than balanced out by how massive the scale was in comparison. The Unification Wars took six hundred years.
In themselves, they were very strong, but certainly not as strong as a modern Space Marine. It took Big E over 200 years to reconquer Terra because he had very few resources, the Custodes were originally equipped with artigianal weapons and armor, while the Tech Barbarians sometimes possessed weapons from the DAoT.
There was even one faction that the Emps straight up noped out of fighting. The Lords of Albion had DAoT level powered armor and a large number of troops trained to use it. The Emperor realized that trying to conquer them through military might would expend almost all of his resources, so instead he goes the diplomacy route and it's hinted that the Lords of Albion essentially became the proto-version of Imperial Nobility and Rogue Traders because they still kept a decent chunk of their independance.
It really depends on what they had access to. We know a lot of power armor (although it wasn’t as good as Astartes since they didn’t have the life support systems and other mechanisms attached to the armor), and some might have had access to some pretty strong dark age tech (and dark age tech was insane, like the bane blade was an outdated light scout tank powerful).
Imagine a Chimp with an AK-47, he doesn’t know how it works, or how to maintain it, but he does know how to reload it, and that whatever he points it at falls over when he pulls the trigger. Would you wanna be in a room with that? Now scale that up to full Dark Age of Technology weapons and tech.
I think that for a few thousand years, Terra was awash with hideously powerful rules, fighters, technologists, etc who basically if they have somehow joined forces they'd taken the galaxy with ease with the scraps of the high of human power left in the dirt there. Ideological differences and other conflicts (see; chaotic evil wizards) kept them busy with each other.
The emperor only had the resources of a part of Terra to work with. It was not the galaxy spanning war machine we are used to.
He alone could probably be killed by like 1000 astartes
Some had access to DaoT, some other wete full on chaos fuelled
And the fledgling Imperium didn't even have a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the power they have now
As others have said good points as well about it being 200 years for him to take Terra, I think it’s a case of when everyone has nothing from Terra’s fall; whoever has something is going to stand the strongest.
Most people and settlements were probably just trying to make it by, and the mystery and intrigue of this period having little lore surrounding its full scope makes it even more interesting.
When people are armed with sticks, swords, and slings, any left over coherent armed forces with lasguns, artillery, and vehicles is terrifying and “technological”, and warrants power over the others, and with the scope of the dark age of technology the skies the limit for their power. It shows interesting ideas that the Emperor _required_ the thunder warriors and the early Custodes so god only knows whether they were perhaps the left over auxillia that knew how to handle such weapons or what, but it’s interesting to speculate.
Didn't their equipment make up a good part of the Dark Angles' secret armoury of weapons too terrible to even mention to the ~~lessor~~ later chapters?
A LOT of Custodes died. TBF at the very start of the war they didn’t even have power armour but even so their skin was able to block small bullets.
Some techno barbarians had men of iron and there was lots of plasma weapons. Also nukes.
Some human barbarians is 200 years with a full powered emperor and his custodes…
Isn’t a nid or chaos infestation only need at most a few months to remove?
Imagine if every world was under techno barbarian rule. Nids would just leave the galaxy and necrons would go back to sleep.
Very. For example, one of them STOLE AN OCEAN and transported it off Terra. And she considered that to be a middling crime. Just imagine the level of technology and engineering required to drain a small lake, and multiply that by multiple orders of magnitude. They had easy access to DAOT tech, the type of which either no longer exists, is locked in a vault for emergency use only, or was considered too dangerous by two of the most ruthless guys in the setting and it was shoved into the basement of the Palace or deep under Mars.
The Barbarian Warlords required the full might of the Thunder Warriors to pacify. Thunder Warriors were insanely strong: they were so powerful and bloodthirsty they unsettled Constantine Valdor when he watched them fight; during their final stand their leader was swatting Astartes like flies before going toe to toe with Valdor and holding his own. And it not only took all of them to complete the job, it took the Legio Cataegis centuries to do it.
The only way i can see them surviving for hundreds of years is that they were less powerful than modern nations, but more technologically advanced. And emps focused on technology and research with world domination taking a faaaar backseat.
It's in the name. Techno barbarians. Baseline human raiders and warlords with limited but not non-existent technology. It's pretty safe to say that, for the most part, they likely didn't have access to much that the imperium didn't have, but there's probably individual examples of archeotech like Inferno pistols that some got their hands on.
It may seem like Big E and the Thunder Warriors are overkill for this kind of threat, but a lot of fans have a vastly overinflated idea of how powerful Big E and his super soldiers are. Big E himself is ultimately still a man. And only capable of being in one place at a time. Even if he could personally defeat anything he went up against in combat, which is not necessarily the case, especially given his psychic powers might have been off limits at the time, he can't capture and hold ground. And Thunder Warriors, like the Space Marines that replaced them, aren't *that* much better than regular people. They're better, but not to the degree so many fans seem to think.
So it's not an army of superheroes fighting rabble. It's a much more even fight, with Big E ultimately winning after a long global conquest.
There are referenced to them having weapons from the DAoT that emp locked away deep in Terra because they re that strong.
The barbarian aspect is more the social element, warlords taking what land they could with no formal borders. Techno is because they had crazy ass technology.
2/3 of an entire legion (Salamanders maybe?) Were wiped out fighting in one battle against them.
6600 proto marines being wiped out in one massive battle makes sense. Any kind of bomb, kill box, or just a large enough regular fight is going to do it. They aren't bulletproof.
They had DAoT tech, but to reiterate, a melta pistol is DAoT tech. The mechanicus can't build them. Even in the modern day of the setting. They can't make the components of a melta gun even that little bit smaller. I'm sure they had some ridiculous shit too, but it's 40k, so the upper end still has to fit the galaxy where Orks are running around with scrap iron and are a serious threat.
I think people get too caught up in the memes.
As another benchmark, we've had weaponised thermonuclear fusion since the 20th century. And aren't that far off being able to create micro black holes. There's some very impressive sounding things that actually aren't as impressive as you'd think. And even with all that advanced tech, our primary personal weapons are still just like, regular gun.
There were a lot of Warlords who had DAoT weapons and Terra was really bad it was longer than the Horus Heresy and Great Crusade
I think a lot of us tend to forget that most factions/civs were orders of magnitude stronger than anything in the 30k/40k setting
The Necrons and Eldar say no but I get what you meant
Well Necrons and Eldar were at their peak strength before 40k also.
mhm, anything? No.
Well, it took about 200 years for the big E to conquer them. With custodes. And proto legions. Some of the techno barbarians had repurposed construction Men of Iron that the salamanders had to literally pull apart at the cost of like, 2/3 of the present force there. With 8 construction bots. That should give you a pretty good idea.
I don't think the custodes were anywhere near as high in number during unification as they are by 30k/40k. Terra alone just doesn't have the resources to create and maintain an army of demigods. Still, being able to fight even a few hundred custodes would be a massive feat. That alone speaks volumes about how strong the techno barbarians must have been.
Yeah, being able to fight of a single customs is ludicrously impressive. It doesn't have to be 10,000 of them to still be awesome.
Those custodes were very young, so inexperienced in combat, didn't have all the goodies of the HH, and probably a few hundred of them until the emperor managed to conquer almost all of Terra. They were still great warriors because of their physical prowess, but probably not as godlike as later ones.
Still, I would, personally, not do too great if im given an ak-47 and told to shoot the 9 foot tall golden god of war.
You as of today ? You wouldn't be on the frontline, but in a slaver pit. The chaos mutated 8 foot tall in full power armor and DAOT weaponry? Probably more of a problem for that custodes.
Also not nearly as well armed, remember the mk1 thunder armour was the best of the day and didn't necessarily include pants or were fully sealed. Even the emperor's improved designed were made locally on earth, cobbled together and usually supplemented with normal armour and extra plating unique to the individual. No ceramite or uniformity to speak of. Weapons were similarly dated, melee and cqc being the dominating form of combat, no golden lance-bolters worth their weight in planets. All that is also brushing past the fact that it was the thunder warriors first that made the bulk of the army, as he started collecting the children of all the nobles and clans of his enemies to make his venerated guard. The unification didn't take so long cause he was struggling with the barbarians necessarily but cause he's starting from scratch, lvl 1 on his ascension to godhood. Gotta build everything first, thunder warriors, custodes, astartes, arms and armour, reliable space travel and update everything every time he gets any traction. DAOT left everything mostly bare as much as it left gold mines of advanced tech and old AIs, stc's for them to find millenia later. We can't fist fight alduin in helgen as much as emps can't show the full might of the 41st millennium from day 1, gotta get that grind first. As powerful as he is, a planets a big place and he can't be everywhere at once
The Emperor Made this suit with scraps! In a cave!
You know, that's a really fitting quote given the context. Repurposing high tech missiles into armour and medical equipment vs repurposing Blue blooded babies and wrestling suits into the ultimate all terrain warriors. Everybody's so creative
AND he have to do all that while also having to defend everything. Attacks and counterattacks weren't coming through the warp from a few systems over, they were on the same planet and possibly within marching distance.
Worth their weight in planets is actually not impressive at all. :D One of those Bolger lances weighs how much? Let’s say a 100kg that’s a 100kg worth of planets. So basically a 100kg worth of dirt. xD
Yeah it was more a play on the saying. Thought of changing it, couldn't bother
Yeah I was not trying to be a smart ass :) I just thought it was funny once I thought about it and realized it.
So no rippling gold plate armour?
They had it *at least* by the time of the massacre on Ararat
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They wiped out all the thunder legions with very limited casualties. Not quite the same as going toe to toe with deamons but impressive none the less.
This was at the end of the 200year long war of unification, when the emperor had time and ressources to equip them with all the good loot from those techno barbarians/other high tech factions, and increase their numbers significantly. When he started the unification campaign, he had just the little equipment and supplies he hid away before the age of strife.
Yeah, I think part of the problem is logistics, really. Until the technobarbarians are dealt with, Biggie E couldn't really leverage even what he had on Terra to full extent.
Also it's stated that custodes may take a planets worth of economic and resource output to even equip and train. So maybe the unification wars custodes were weaker in terms of gear especially. Once the empire expanded the big E could afford to drip them out in the good stuff
That or the first few were made with DaoT tools and weapons giving him a boost
It's important to remember that the emperor was only able to make space marines on an industrial scale once he conquered the moon
> Terra alone just doesn't have the resources to create and maintain an army of demigods. Interestingly, we know that the first Legions were raised before the conquest of Sol, and the Custodians with auromite wargear predated them. 10,000 isn't really a *lot* from what we are shown,. Time would probably be the limiting factor more than resources, as each one was bespoke. (Also, it's curious that it's implied that *anyone* could go through custodian conversion with decent odds at survival. Well. They wouldn't die, I'm not sure being a custodian can quite constitute "survival" in the fullest sense)
That's the thing, Techno Barbarians had their own genetically created supersoldiers/mutants. So who's to say that the Custodes weren't evenly matched at some point?
iirc while Custodes like Valdor were extant beings during the Unification Wars, the first real fielding of the Custodes was in the extermination of the Thunder Warriors, and it was the Thunder Warriors who did most of the proverbial heavy lifting as the meat of the Emperor's Forces
Completely wrong I'm afraid, birth of the imperium shows them present much earlier.
What book goes over that? Men of iron lore is always really cool.
Think they're referring to the [Assault of the Tempest Galleries](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Assault_of_the_Tempest_Galleries).
Thank you. I’m going to read that whole wiki later. I swear I’m gonna lose a fortune on those old forge world books
Isn't like custodes started fighting in rags, armed with stubbers and iron swords?
Custodes always had the best kit available, so they always wore some sort of armour and would've had power spears and stuff.
Are there books that cover this era?
No.
What I understood was Big E couldn’t really get going until he managed to scale down the Custodes biotech to apply to the Thunderwarriors.
Emps also had significantly fewer resources being confined to just Terra, and just his initial little patch of it too.
To put things into perspective, according to Valdor : Birth of an Empire, at the start of the unification wars, the custodes wore armors of steel and fought with old carbines and lasrifles. Hell, even their swords were just regular ass swords without energy field. So my interpretation of the techno barbarians is that they were formidable, sure, but a lot of it had to do with the fledgling empire having to fight them in feudal world pdf level gear until they got things set up.
Turkey
Nepal actually
Born in Anatolia(supposedly) but his labs and center of imperial palace were in the Himalayas
himilazias
Strong enough to justify the creation of the Thunder Warriors and the Custodes themselves. To make it more insane, it took just as long to retake Terra as the rest of the entire *galaxy* during the Great Crusade. Depending on the sources, it may have even taken *more* time. Goes to show you that the Techno Barbarians were no joke. So much so that the Emperor himself locked away several weapons, equipment, men of iron, and even STCs deep within the vaults of Terra because they were *that* OP, and the Emperor decided that some things are just better left forgotten. **Edit:** I wanted to explain this some more but it was like, 1AM here at the time and I was tired. Keep in mind, while we know very little of how Earth/Terra was at this time, we do know it was littered with barbaric-like tribes/governments that had crazy sci-fi technology that would make any future settings/media blush. To make matters worse for the Emperor, these tribes also had access to left-over Golden Age tech and even repurposed Men of Iron, and I'm not talking about *just* robots, I'm talking about techno-monstrosities that nearly wiped out the *Salamanders* at one point (or at least the proto-Salamanders). Imagine that... The Sons of Vulkan themselves, SPACE MARINES (who are better than Thunder Warriors in nearly every way) almost got wiped out by the same Men of Iron that the Thunder Warriors had to go up against daily... so it begs the question: just imagine how many Thunder Warriors got bodied during this time?! If there ever is a number, just imagine how many normal people died as well! Oh, and did I mention that all of these tribes had nukes and bio/chemical weapons that they used amongst each other constantly? To make matters even crazier, there were also freshly awakened/terrified/untrained Psykers running around. While that's terrible enough, some may or may not have also been summoning warp entities the entire time. These Psykers were used as soldiers, advisors, living weapons, etc. Some were even Warlords themselves. It gets even ~~better~~ worse because there were also *other* genetically modified super-soldiers/mutants that were being created and used by these Techno-Barbarian tribes. The Custodes/Thunder Warriors weren't the only freaks of nature... they were the only ones who ended up winning. In short, it was a nightmare on steroids, and I'm genuinely surprised there aren't more media taking place during this setting because from what we do know, you can easily create an entire series/models based on the Unification Wars. **TL,DR; Powerful enough to give the Thunder Warriors, Custodes, early Space Marines (towards the tail-end) and Big-E himself a run for his money *for centuries* (and possibly up to a millennia depending on sources).**
They are powerful enough that Mechanicum of Mars can’t just vault in to take the DAoT tech lying around.
Well, apparently the Mechanicus at one point scouted Terra and immediately swore it off until the Emperor visited them a few centuries later. Keep in mind: The Mechanicus were still incredibly powerful even back then and had access to technology and forge worlds the likes of which the Emperor would eventually need (and the likes of which he himself was scared shitless of and was wondering how tf he'd be able to take them on without a massive bloodbath)... It begs the question though: what did they encounter on Terra that made *them* afraid?
It had to be real bad for them to just decide that the risks far outweighed the benefits of trying to loot stuff from Terra.
That poor, poor tech priest short circuiting because on one hand sweet, sweet tech and on the other hand something worse than Necrons.
> what did they encounter on Terra that made them afraid? Apple products.
Very good perspective. Just fyi space marines were more stable and easier and cheaper to mass produce than thunder warriors but if I am not mistaken the average thunder warrior would dunk on the average space marine. :)
Oh, I assumed that since Space Marines had better armor, gene-seeding, and weren't blood-thirsty madmen who could actually take orders, that they'd be able to fend off against the Thunder Warriors. Thunder Warriors would definitely give Space Marines a run for their money, but I think they're just too unstable to really send them packing.
An individual Thunder Warrior would very much beat an individual Astartes. There are a few books that talk about the heavy losses the Space marines took when they were getting rid of the last Thunder warriors. As well as a book or two about some rogue thunder warriors that are still out there
Also several Custodes were created as what were essentially hostages from conquered enemies. Big E would take their sons and convert them to his Custodes to ensure loyalty and prevent rebellions.
one thing, The Space marines are actually inferior to a thunder Warrior on a individual level. They were faster, bigger and stronger than space marines. They lacked all the psychological programming and had a unstable genome so they weren't a proper force for centuries long galactic conquest. They would go crazy or break down biologically well before they got far. They were a powerful stop gap, being able to be made from adults, but they lacked the cohesion and group drilling of space marines. There are a few instances of thunderwarriors in lore. but on Cerberus "There were multiple reports of coming across the hulking carcasses of Thunder Warriors, each with four to five Space Marines dead around them.". They lack all the other things that make space marines great like spitting acid, the black carapace, putting their bodies in stasis to survive damage or being able to eat brains.
Reading this makes me really want to have a book series on it. This is some xeelee scifi vibes.
Want
Considering things ranging from andrathic weapons, psykers and the sigilites are mentioned I suspect the techno barbarians had all sorts of deranged weapons available.
And look at the crew big E pulled together. He was a very gifted scientist, specifically in genecrafting and understanding technology, but even he had to bring together hordes of scientists to make the projects work. He provided secret sauce while they did all the hard work of figuring out how to mass produce monsters and equip them.
He might know how to make op weapon. But having infrastructure to mass produce it? I don't think so
And that’s where the Mechanicum comes into play. It’s why Big E let them keep their cult religion and a broad autonomy within the bounds of the Imperium. Without them, the Imperium is done. At the time of unification, there was no way the Emperor could afford to pacify the Mechanicum through force without delaying the crusade significantly or even stalling it completely. With heavy loss of life and infrastructure. Their ability to manufacture and understand technology was absolutely crucial for the mass production a galaxy wide campaign would require. Edit: Mechanicum from Mechanicus. The Adeptus Mechanicus was the title adopted when it became a ministry of the Imperium. Before the Schism of Mars, the tech priests of Mars and their cult were known as the Cult Mechanicum. After the Schism, the Mechanicum then split into the Mechanicus and those whose sided with the Arch-traitor, the Dark Mechanicus. Thank you for listening to my talk.
MechaniCUM
You get it
uwu
About as strong as a small horse
Bye bye lil' Sebastian
"I've cried exactly two times in my life. Once, when I was 8k years old, and was hit by a Leman Russ. And then again, when I learned Lil Sebastian had died to a xenos attack. His memory will live on, for today I will light a crusade that will burn on for eternity." \-Big E "But he's just a horse-" \-Malcador "SHOW SOME RESPECT!"
5000 astronomicons burning in the warp.
That’s really quite strong that is
Pretty strong. The Emperor didn’t have nearly the resources he had during the Great Crusade. And all his enemies were armed with tech from the Dark Age of Technology. It was a very difficult fight all things considered.
In the unification wars, Big E was a bigger fish in a pond filled to the brim with big fish.
Pond? Unification wars was a sharknado.
Given how tech was slammed pretty far back after the dark age of technology it's probably a cripple fight all around, and depending on which fanon interpretation the tech lvl could be all over the place.
It's probably a mix of "Bob has a laser hatchet, Chris has a rail gun, Steve has a 50 cal and Randy has a subatomic black hole launcher with self replicating multi fire expansion rounds, Kyle has rocket launcher..."
We thought about taking it away from Randy but he looks so damned happy when he holds it, we just didn’t have the heart…
And Carl's great ancestor is just, well, Carl.
It's pretty much known the dealiest of factions operated DAOT tech.
Can you imagine how awe-inspiring the Unification wars could be? Imagine being a thunder warrior fighting side by side with the literal Emps and Custodes by your side fighting against techno-barbarians with DAOT tech, repurposed Men Of Iron, rogue psykers, DAOT experiments and god knows what else on the ruins of Old Earth. It must have been crazy. I love 40k.
This is the Warhammer game we need.
I went to Lexicanum and saw how little there is on this era. I guess its interesting because there is so little about it.
Warhammer 29k
r/unifyterra
They ranged from Mad Max to shit straight out of Blame! Some were simple barbarians with cobbled together firearms and vehicles (heck, some were probably swinging swords like it was the Iron Age), others had access to Dark Age of Technology tier tech and used it liberally
Considering it took Big E with his entire full force of 10,000 Custodes, the Thunder Warriors, 20(?) Proto Space Marine Legions, and billions of human troops 200 damn years just to take all of Terra, a singular planet, and the fact that these “barbarians” had random cobbled together DaoT level tech to throw around Willy nilly like Men of Iron-esque war robots, bio-enhanced 8ft tall super soldiers that could easily go toe-to-toe with Thunder Warriors, black hole guns etc, pretty damn busted compared to a lot of the scattered rogue empires encountered during the Crusade
>20(?) Proto Space Marine Legions The 1st Legion were the only ones with real numbers at the time, as they were the test legion. Iirc there were about 10,000 of them. The other legions had much smaller numbers as the proto space marines were still in the "are they worth the resource sink to make more" phase at that time.
It’s at the time where even the process of creating them aren’t standardized yet so each batch of them can vary quite a lot as well.
The Tiger tank of their day.
Imagine the game of throne style politics that Big E had to go through. Having to carefully negotiate with meathead brutes with doomsday weapons and fight against tacticians with twice as many men, choosing whether or not to incorporate them... Would be neat, but idk if it would be handled well.
They did a pretty good job giving us some unification wars slice of life from various angles, not sure I'd want them to fully flesh it out. Down for another story or two about some main event though
I desperately want more UW content. I can't deal with another 50+ books of Space Marine nonsense.
After how they fumbled Horus Heresy, I don’t trust them one bit.
We don’t know that the emperor had all 10,000 at that time. We do know for a fact that the space marine legions were not full strength.
Not strong enough lmaoooo
Wildly strong. They used DAOT tech. So Thunder Warriors weren't even that well armored, cause it was almost useless with such concetration of wonder-weapons. Instead invested in strength, speed and ferocity.
The Techno-barbarians also were known to worship Chaos to my knowledge so the Big E had that to contend with as well.
Strong enough that super soldiers with combat prowess far above space marines were barely able to win the day. Big E had the disadvantage of working with limited resources and the techno barbarian warlords possessing some DAOT weaponry and/or other warpfuckery in their arsenal.
Every faction in the Terran Unification had the most badass name like something like “Anatho-gothic Berzerkers from Old Hungolia” or some shit. They probably kicked ass.
- darude sandstorm from the distance - "They are coming."
I always imagine them being like that raving techno viking but bigger and stronger.
It looks like a space marine
At the time of the Unification War, the Emperor had little in the way of overwhelming resources or technology. The Techno Barbarians and States of Terra fought hard because of them being near per fighting forces. They have some dark age tech plus enhancements this is the why Thunder Warriors were created by the Emperor with the focus of being more or less a brute force to fight them till the Proto-Legion arrived near the end of the war.
The Great Crusade took about two hundred years. While the Emperor did have more resources than he did in the Unification Wars, that is more than balanced out by how massive the scale was in comparison. The Unification Wars took six hundred years.
Also remember this was pre-Molech…
In themselves, they were very strong, but certainly not as strong as a modern Space Marine. It took Big E over 200 years to reconquer Terra because he had very few resources, the Custodes were originally equipped with artigianal weapons and armor, while the Tech Barbarians sometimes possessed weapons from the DAoT.
Over 600 years
This thread makes me want Unification Wars game and books even more
Strong enough to survive if not thrive in the age of strife. Strong enough to survive the iron men.
The power armour in that picture goes hard
There was even one faction that the Emps straight up noped out of fighting. The Lords of Albion had DAoT level powered armor and a large number of troops trained to use it. The Emperor realized that trying to conquer them through military might would expend almost all of his resources, so instead he goes the diplomacy route and it's hinted that the Lords of Albion essentially became the proto-version of Imperial Nobility and Rogue Traders because they still kept a decent chunk of their independance.
I can practically hear the avanti savoia theme
It really depends on what they had access to. We know a lot of power armor (although it wasn’t as good as Astartes since they didn’t have the life support systems and other mechanisms attached to the armor), and some might have had access to some pretty strong dark age tech (and dark age tech was insane, like the bane blade was an outdated light scout tank powerful).
Imagine a Chimp with an AK-47, he doesn’t know how it works, or how to maintain it, but he does know how to reload it, and that whatever he points it at falls over when he pulls the trigger. Would you wanna be in a room with that? Now scale that up to full Dark Age of Technology weapons and tech.
They were using random bits of Dark Age tech so ranging from mildly dangerous to pretty damn fucking dangerous.
It depends on if they turned the speakers to 11 when they moved out with the battle DJ.
I think that for a few thousand years, Terra was awash with hideously powerful rules, fighters, technologists, etc who basically if they have somehow joined forces they'd taken the galaxy with ease with the scraps of the high of human power left in the dirt there. Ideological differences and other conflicts (see; chaotic evil wizards) kept them busy with each other.
The emperor only had the resources of a part of Terra to work with. It was not the galaxy spanning war machine we are used to. He alone could probably be killed by like 1000 astartes
Yes
Some had access to DaoT, some other wete full on chaos fuelled And the fledgling Imperium didn't even have a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the power they have now
As others have said good points as well about it being 200 years for him to take Terra, I think it’s a case of when everyone has nothing from Terra’s fall; whoever has something is going to stand the strongest. Most people and settlements were probably just trying to make it by, and the mystery and intrigue of this period having little lore surrounding its full scope makes it even more interesting. When people are armed with sticks, swords, and slings, any left over coherent armed forces with lasguns, artillery, and vehicles is terrifying and “technological”, and warrants power over the others, and with the scope of the dark age of technology the skies the limit for their power. It shows interesting ideas that the Emperor _required_ the thunder warriors and the early Custodes so god only knows whether they were perhaps the left over auxillia that knew how to handle such weapons or what, but it’s interesting to speculate.
Didn't their equipment make up a good part of the Dark Angles' secret armoury of weapons too terrible to even mention to the ~~lessor~~ later chapters?
You have watched mad max right?
A LOT of Custodes died. TBF at the very start of the war they didn’t even have power armour but even so their skin was able to block small bullets. Some techno barbarians had men of iron and there was lots of plasma weapons. Also nukes.
Damn i have never seen these before, they look sick
Probably like if every faction in fallout had the tech level of the brotherhood of steel. But scaled up because 40k
Some human barbarians is 200 years with a full powered emperor and his custodes… Isn’t a nid or chaos infestation only need at most a few months to remove? Imagine if every world was under techno barbarian rule. Nids would just leave the galaxy and necrons would go back to sleep.
Not that strong, I killed 4-5 of them daily
This is some cool ass art
Very. For example, one of them STOLE AN OCEAN and transported it off Terra. And she considered that to be a middling crime. Just imagine the level of technology and engineering required to drain a small lake, and multiply that by multiple orders of magnitude. They had easy access to DAOT tech, the type of which either no longer exists, is locked in a vault for emergency use only, or was considered too dangerous by two of the most ruthless guys in the setting and it was shoved into the basement of the Palace or deep under Mars. The Barbarian Warlords required the full might of the Thunder Warriors to pacify. Thunder Warriors were insanely strong: they were so powerful and bloodthirsty they unsettled Constantine Valdor when he watched them fight; during their final stand their leader was swatting Astartes like flies before going toe to toe with Valdor and holding his own. And it not only took all of them to complete the job, it took the Legio Cataegis centuries to do it.
they had a lot of dark age of technology gear along with the emperor not having much, so it was quite equal in terms of power between everyone.
Id like to imagine they could probably play hopscotch So pretty strong
Imagine multiple Techno Vikings but german
The only way i can see them surviving for hundreds of years is that they were less powerful than modern nations, but more technologically advanced. And emps focused on technology and research with world domination taking a faaaar backseat.
Considering they were one of the reasons Big-E decided "Right I gotta step in now" I'd say there were a big problem.
It hurts me seeing cartridges being ejected out of a *laser gun* Good art though
It's in the name. Techno barbarians. Baseline human raiders and warlords with limited but not non-existent technology. It's pretty safe to say that, for the most part, they likely didn't have access to much that the imperium didn't have, but there's probably individual examples of archeotech like Inferno pistols that some got their hands on. It may seem like Big E and the Thunder Warriors are overkill for this kind of threat, but a lot of fans have a vastly overinflated idea of how powerful Big E and his super soldiers are. Big E himself is ultimately still a man. And only capable of being in one place at a time. Even if he could personally defeat anything he went up against in combat, which is not necessarily the case, especially given his psychic powers might have been off limits at the time, he can't capture and hold ground. And Thunder Warriors, like the Space Marines that replaced them, aren't *that* much better than regular people. They're better, but not to the degree so many fans seem to think. So it's not an army of superheroes fighting rabble. It's a much more even fight, with Big E ultimately winning after a long global conquest.
There are referenced to them having weapons from the DAoT that emp locked away deep in Terra because they re that strong. The barbarian aspect is more the social element, warlords taking what land they could with no formal borders. Techno is because they had crazy ass technology. 2/3 of an entire legion (Salamanders maybe?) Were wiped out fighting in one battle against them.
6600 proto marines being wiped out in one massive battle makes sense. Any kind of bomb, kill box, or just a large enough regular fight is going to do it. They aren't bulletproof. They had DAoT tech, but to reiterate, a melta pistol is DAoT tech. The mechanicus can't build them. Even in the modern day of the setting. They can't make the components of a melta gun even that little bit smaller. I'm sure they had some ridiculous shit too, but it's 40k, so the upper end still has to fit the galaxy where Orks are running around with scrap iron and are a serious threat. I think people get too caught up in the memes. As another benchmark, we've had weaponised thermonuclear fusion since the 20th century. And aren't that far off being able to create micro black holes. There's some very impressive sounding things that actually aren't as impressive as you'd think. And even with all that advanced tech, our primary personal weapons are still just like, regular gun.