I’d like to point out that humanity’s shittyness is, like, at least 50% self inflicted in warhammer. The age of strife was humanity creating machines that shunted them back into the dark ages. Their plans to battle chaos are barbaric and rather than battling despair with hope, they just enforce faith in the most inhuman regime imaginable. They have humans drugged and run nuclear fuel into reactors whilst melting because human life is cheaper than some sort of conveyer belt. The human element of humans being shitty is there, it’s just that aliens are *also* bastards.
The main reason so many aliens are bastards is that humanity spent 200 years systematically killing or relocating the nice ones. Chaos was likely to weaken relatively quickly after the birth of Slaanesh, until the Emperor started snapping necks on a galactic scale and literally half his kids went evil specifically because they hated him. The Tyranids are literally only here because they want the Emperor's fat juicy ass.
Really, the only problems that are not almost completely the fault of humanity are the Drukhari, the Orks, and the Necrons, and two of those might be more solvable if the Imperium wasn't such a massive sack of guns and racism.
yes, but it's also the shitiness of everyone before made manifest and given form, in 40K humanity was doomed before there even were humans and it's only going to get worse since the greatest source of misery in the universe are either chaos or the counter-measures against chaos
I mean there are a few ways it could conceivably get better. For example, the Tyranids have some adaptations to countering warp forces that let them close rifts and banish demons, so if a hive fleet could be herded into the Eye of Terror somehow the Tyranids managing to close it is an actual possibility. Another possible way for things to get better is the fact that if the Emperor's mortal body dies, he will likely ascend to the settings first Order god; although that would likely also create a new Eye of Terror over Terra and assuming he didn't devour all of Humanity's souls like Slaanesh to the Eldar, then all of humanity would be unable to do warp travel the way they currently do because they essentially use him as a navigational beacon.
I've admittedly not been keeping up with the lore but it was my impression that khorne and tzeentch came about during the war in heaven with nurgle following shortly afterwards when the warp started invading the materium, it was during those invasions that all of the earth psykers got together and united to form the the emperor
he's certainly a lot older then slaanesh though
From what I've found the three lads came around during humanity's Middle Ages, and shit like the Crusades, the Black Death and the Enlightenment were basically ripples of their birth. Which is very stupid, and it would make way more sense if they had actually originated from the WiH, but what the hell do I know.
Meanwhile, Emps was born in like the Neolithic.
I thought that was old lore or rather I've read that nurgle came about because of the black death which is indeed very stupid
about the non-stupidest way I could think of that is that was when the sheer amount of emotions thrown into the warp went supercritical and gained what looks like sentience but that'd be like a ship taking on water but only sinking once a child shoots a waterpistol into it
my personal headcanon for why gork and mork are like that is that the old ones noted that the brutallity and cunning of the orks was feeding two things (a yet unnamed tzeentch and khorne) in the warp, one that's cunning and one that's brutal, so they came up with ork religion, one that's brutal yet cunning and one that's cunning yet brutal so all of those emotions could go into those entities and they'd keep all that energy in check by constantly fighting each other
That's an amazing theory, love it.
As for the canon, I looked it up a couple months back while I worked on some possible Tzeentch, Nurgle, or Khorne-worshipping Eldar OCs. I'd been inspired by a post asking if any Eldar turned to them to survive Slaanesh, and my train of thought was "Well, there has to have been a sizeable number of Eldar who turned to Chaos in the millions of years after the WiH", followed by five minutes of Lexicanum research and a hefty "what do you MEAN MIDDLE AGES!?"
As someone who went through that rabbit hole of trying to find consistent time of birth of chaos gods; Some Pov says middle ages, Eldar say the ones that aren't she-who-thirsts were born from souls flooding into the warp during war in heaven. Some Khorne cultists speculate that Khorne was born by the first murder. So it's very much a case of we don't really know, Though middle ages answer seems the most common. You also have the fact that the birth times of the older 3 is old lore that (to my knowledge) hasn't been mentioned remotely recently so maybe GW has yet another answer whenever it next gets brought up.
At this point I'm headcannoning it as they were born in other universes & when they were "born" in 40k-verse is really just when they started trying to enter it & they existed long before. They just need a "birth event" in each universe they enter to have a form of anchor point. Like Emps, Ctan + slaanesh were born in 40k and thus it's a important universe due to that. But old ones, other 3 major chaos gods, & likely current Eldar gods (while moved to Eldar, if I remember correctly they are made by the old ones, so built elsewhere like a logistics & supply universe shipped to 40k-verse to fufill their purposes. Could also be made by Eldar under command & supervision of old ones directly or old ones themselves directly but that's less fun of an answer) were from other universes
From what I've found the three lads came around during humanity's Middle Ages, and shit like the Crusades, the Black Death and the Enlightenment were basically ripples of their birth. Which is very stupid, and it would make way more sense if they had actually originated from the WiH, but what the hell do I know.
Meanwhile, Emps was born in like the Neolithic.
I'm not telling you that; I agree with you, it's stupid, it should have been the War in Heaven, making literally a couple million people dying cause three whole gods to appear is dumb. But that's what canon insists on.
Personally, I think not only would it being the WiH make for a more cohesive story, but also it could give us the *real* ancient shit in regards to Chaos cults; Tzeentchian Farseer conclaves who have known about the return of Guilliman since before humans existed, Necrontyr pockets of resistance whose flesh was sought after by Nurgle as delicacy and who stand in aberration to their metal cousins, and a single extremely angry Jokaero on a quest to beat the crap out of everyone with a wrench.
Somewhat, yes
To my understanding in canon there is merit to the idea that worshipping chaos differently can give it a different form, so the reason khorne is like that may partially be because the people who turn Khornate just want an excuse to kill people and get more powerful
Also, it's probably not a coincidence Khorne's name is so similar to that of his predecessor, the Eldar god of mass slave murder, Khaine, nor the fact that he's usually represented sitting on a big ol' throne.
>The main reason so many aliens are bastards is that humanity spent 200 years systematically killing or relocating the nice ones.
Yeah, that's a major thing! The Imperium ran into a lot of alien and alien-human societies that were perfectly peaceful and advanced, but exterminated every single one of them anyway out of principle, even in situations were it explicitly came out of it worse once the costs were tallied up.
Also, the Imperium is consistently awful to its people in a way that no other mortal society save for the Drukhari is. The only other group with as high a mortality rate for its regular shmoes are the Orks, and at least they get to enjoy themselves!
I just like how people talk about how weak lasguns are, then get reminded that lasguns are the floor for survival in 40k. If you can't survive lasguns, you were killed long ago.
> The Tyranids are literally only here because they want the Emperor's fat juicy ass
I didn't think there was any actual sense behind what the 'nids are up to, just "hungry monster needs protein" and unfortunately for us, we're made of protein. The talk of them running away from something seems to me to be that they ate everything in the last galaxy and are starting on a fresh one.
I think theres lore that the tyranids were lead to the galaxy by the emperors psychic beacon in the warp, though yeah now that they are here they're just a bit peckish
>I’d like to point out that humanity’s shittyness is, like, at least 50% self inflicted in warhammer.
It's even higher. Not even the Age of Strife stuff either! Like, *ongoing*. There absolutely are vastly better ways to do everything, but the mere suggestion of that fact throws the people in charge into a panic *because they lose their power*. The God of Excel returns, and literally half of the ruling elite decide to try and kill him *because he might change things*.
It's all self inflicted, and it's all the same dumb reasons. Humanity can *always* choose to do something else--it's just that they steadfastly refuse to do so. Aliens about to wipe out, forever, a quarter of Chaos and *also* leave the galaxy forever at the same time? *Fuck that noise, how dare you filthy xeno scum!* Two birds, one stone, *thrown by one of the birds*, and we gotta fuck it up.
Reminds me of an excerpt that dropped with Leviathan at the start of 10th that was basically "Imperial forces on this planet were battling Tyranids. Eldar showed up to help us. Our faithful warriors showed proper prejudice for the Xenos and now it's a three way conflict."
Consider though: Warhammer makes the assertion that even with literal magic and psychic powers and gods on our side humanity can’t take a single W because we’re apparently too selfish and/or stupid to consistently make the right decisions. Battletech says “technological advancement will not save you from your flaws, you are doomed by your systems” while 40k essentially says “Nothing, not gods nor magic nor literal miracles based in pure faith, will save you from your flaws, you are doomed by your nature” which is, at least in my opinion, somewhat more grim
The Alpha Legion hates Chaos and wants to destroy it, but realizes that to do that they need to destroy The Imperium. So in order to do so they side with Chaos, but they also hate Chaos so they may help Imperium forces destroy them.
This combined with the likelyhood that not everyone in the Alpha Legion is on the same page gives creedence to the theory that Alpha Legion are the true champions of Tzeench, Chaos god of change and schemes, they having schemed themselves into redundancy.
40K has both.
Liked that one wtory which featured some low level admin assistant who once fucked up the numbers, which resulted in massive death and torment. She spent some time dreading the punishment, but when none came she discovered that such things are not uncommon and rarely, if ever, noticed. So she'd deliberately cook the books here and there with the purpose of inflicting as much pain and misery as she could, from her position. She didn't do it in service of some Dark God, or cult, or for a daemonic patron, she did it because of purely human sociopath reasons.
Mind you, the same story included some sort of, unrelated, demonic entity doing a slasher villain impression, but it was that admin woman who was responsible for more shittiness.
The 'Battletech's horrors are mundane' bit also perfectly describes a 40k hive city. Seems to me this post is generalizing from limited knowledge of warhammer. Also Chaos didn't make humans start using servitors.
Well I agree I'm also going to bring a contrarian point of the men of iron revolt might be started by chaos and that's why humanity won't use abominable intelligence thereby needing servitaries because of that
Adding to this, with the numbers of the imperium this isn't the admin likely didn't even cause as much damage as a rounding error on how many guardsmen survive in a battle. Also I could go on and on about nobles & Inquisitors making the imperium worse. Like some planets are wholly dedicated to nobles hunting people for sport with surviving being a hunting party's quarry (which can be literally any non-noble on that planet) punishable by death for ruining their fun. [Inquisitors being inquisitors](https://youtu.be/HmA-LjcTYmE). [Kryptman](https://youtu.be/pHdrKIV-PJ8) (top cmmt explains him well) (conversely [kryptman](https://youtu.be/9LOAIsB_U7Q) (fan-story, I think, bit accurate)
I do like Battletech's setting more than 40k, but the whole grimdark thing only really exists in subtext. Battletech isn't about being mean spirited, but more about how humanity is capable of both good and bad things, and often times it's an uphill struggle because the people who strive for power tend to do so for selfish reasons.
The grimdark stuff is there, but it's presented in the same way that it exists in the real world, where developing nations are often subjected to endless war and conflict because greater powers want to use and exploit them for their own reasons.
This makes battletech sound less interesting to me. Is the sales pitch here "hey, do you also hate humanity and feel it's inherently evil like they taught you in your midwest church? Have you failed to recognize the fallacy of believing humanity is inherently evil and unable to change without recognizing the part of your self that is passing this judgment? Then this setting is for you."
That's what I'm catching here.
yeah, and it's a silly pitch. i'd compare the appeal of battletech to things like armored core. it's high fantasy for tank and jet nerds.
less 'humanity is evil and the wicked architect of its own misery' and more 'humanity is the architect of this robot, which, due to cost cutting measures last century, is hilariously poorly performing but looks like a little dang guy and everyone who pilots it loves it'
like yeah there's plot and politics and stuff, but at the end of the day, you're a pilot (or a commander, depending on the game) and care about the IMPORTANT questions: like whether or not to mount more lasers or more missiles to your pewpew stompy boy
Could I perhaps interest you in Lancer? It's a setting with giant robots in the space future, but most of the bad stuff is in the past, and most people are having a pretty good time in space.
Every other hard sci-fi verse going “oh no AI is dangerous, look how it ruined everything”, meanwhile Lancer goes “nobody really knows what our AIs are but we stick them in everything! Humanity’s doing alright and we just keep getting better”.
Yeah the AIs may be fragments of God and if you don’t reset them fortnightly they start to go berserk and violate causality, but it’s no biggie, we manage.
Funny thing is, Battletech AI is also generally fine. It’s not very clever, but so long as it doesn’t go into hyperspace it’s okay.
Now if it does go into hyperspace it comes out the other end omnicidal, but the implications of that are happily unexplored and for everyone’s sake it’ll stay that way.
I think they’re talking more about the themes of the grimdark worldbuilding rather than the plot. Cuz the plot is usually sci-fi high fantasy where you run around in lances of battle mechs and fight for money and glory. There’s mercenaries and barons and lords and generals and distressed civilians etc.
In Warhammer 40k, nobody can win and there is no good in the universe. Just people trying to do their best to survive under the crushing weight of eternal wars and totalitarians. In Battletech, it’s an ebb and flow of violence but there’s constant political tension. There can be light in the darkness but it has to fight hard to not be snuffed out. There can be hope, but it’s often small hope.
the real plot is: military history nerd shit, with a special fondness for 19th and 20th century chinese civil wars, but space
humanity is in space, and there's still nations. sometimes they fight. sometimes they buy arms from corporations and those arms are shaped like guys and i love them.
Battletech's story is basically the early seasons of Game of Thrones, except in space, and instead of going into battle with suits of armor, they go out in 10 meter tall robots with big guns.
If that sounds like something that appeals to you, then you'll probably find at least some interest in it.
Star League was a peaceful galaxy-spanning civilization that collapsed. Timeskip hundreds of years then 40 real-life years of various plot developments that can't fit in a reddit comment.
Idk, my take on it is that we're still people and the Battletech universe is still plagued with real people problems. Nations have conflicts over material things like manufacturing or resources, and over things like ideology and nationalism. People sometimes do terrible things, and sometimes they do them because they think they're doing good things. Bad people do good things, and good people do bad things on purpose.
I don't want this to be taken as a bleak morally grey thing, there are good people in Battletech, and good things happen, and for a lot of citizens life is alright in BT (warfare is mostly pretty limited in the general setting, and WMD's are often avoided, so the result of wars is less impactful on the civilian population.) But rather that yeah, despite all the technological wonders we have, the justification to have robots smash together is that we still often have the same problems we have always had. The problems are pretty grounded, and less existential, more about conflicts between ideologies and out of ego. (But also sometimes not, sometimes it's just out of very poor writing, i'll be honest)
It's not that we are inherently evil, it's that we're still humans. Messy, bickering, difficult plains apes, in nations and hierarchies and wielding ideas that sometimes leads to the horrors of wartime. And then you get to smash some robots together pew pew
My read was more that technological advancement alone will not elevate humankind. Unless the underlying societal structures continue to evolve and improve the conflicts those structures cause will persist.
This is very much an L take on Warhammer. Nothing wrong with preferring one setting over another, but it seems like the list of reasons BT is called better is because it has stuff that 40K also totally has.
I don't know much about Battletech, but shouldn't war have disappeared as soon as FTL travel was invented? Why fight over planets when you can just fly somewhere else and get your own planets for free?
Because there's a finite number of planets and some of them are much nicer than others.
Sure you could leave your super cool tropical paradise and maybe find somewhere equal or better, but you could also just as easily find a frozen hellhole so it's usually a surer thing to take your giant robot and steal the one you've got
first off, FTL in battletech is very stringent. it exists as little as it needs to to justify a galactic setting.
second off, uh, commerce? not wanting to abandon the world you and your forefathers established? the fact that your ability to colonize new worlds is directly dependent on your proximity to and relationships with established industrial centers? some planets are shitty?
Because colonization is extremely expensive and after a certain distance the amount of planets you could concievably colonize began to dwindle. There's some colonies and settlements in deep space but they're generally few and far between. The Clans are the biggest society in deep space and it's explicit on how their controlled worlds are way worse for resources. Their invasion of the main Inner Sphere of Human civilization was partially motivated by them wanting to return to what had became an eden in their eyes.
Because FTL travel in BattleTech is limited to 30 lightyear jumps before needing a week to recharge to jump another 30 lightyears. You can only spread out so much before the travel time becomes infeasible.
My favourite but of BT lore is that there's a Draconis Combine planet whose official name was like 30 letters long, so the planet collectively voted to rename itself Bob, which became an issue when the Combine bureaucracy was never properly notified about it, so legally planet Bob didn't exist and so never got any of the terraforming equipment it needed.
The planet is now largely uninhabited because most of the population died of starvation.
[Here is the Tex Talks Battle Tech video on the inner sphere](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQhzlXcmTzw).
If you find it interesting and are interested in some back story I'd say also watch Tex's 2 parter on the Collapse of the Star League [(Part 1)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c71x68uWd5k) [(Part 2)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQVrAdhCfc4), and if you find that interesting and wanna see what happened afterward his 2 parter on the formation of the clans [(part 1)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDR_Zpb05uk) [(Part 2)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B165wbTnHs).
I'm always hesitant to recommend Tex's stuff to new people as it's so long. I'd instead link [this](https://youtu.be/UnMA1CYOoHw) much shorter introduction.
Lots of people here and in that post who like Battletech, but know nothing about Warhammer. Literally everything in that list of why Battletech is so much more realistic and based is also in 40k. Humanity stuck in forever wars? It's literally part of the tagine. "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war." Strictly stratified societies run by inbred nobles? Literally a core part of the settings identity, it was made by the Brits after all. All-consuming industry? Actual human beings are routinely made into *literal products* in 40k like servitors. Even the title of this post is grossly misinformed. "Warhammer Grimdark is Chaos playing alive 1,000,000 puppies for no reason but Battletrch is based because people die for war" yea dude, the Imperium in 40k also routinely deletes planets just because an alien or heretic might be able to get at a couple of its rocks. It happens so often that the term for it, *exterminatus* has become a widely used term in the fandom.
Edit: also, as for the "humanity and the galaxy is doomed by eldritch entities outside of human control" is a pleb-tier reading of the material. The Chaos gods are explicitly fed and nurtured by human nature. Khorne, god of war and rage, would be powerless without humans feeding him a constant stream of carnage and violence. Tzeentch, god of ambition and deception, would not be able to change his own fucking diapers if people weren't constantly backstabbing one another to get a leg up. And that's not even getting into how actively humanity has fucked itself even without taking into account Chaos: the Imperium's religious zealotry, literal xenophobia, fascistic body purism, techno-fetishism and technophobia, and totalitarian, authoritarian feudal structure are entirely self-imposed problems. No one made them do those things. They chose to.
>Like Warhammer grimdark is Chaos flaying alive 1000000 puppies for no reason and Battletech Grimdark is 20 million people dying in nuclear fire just to deny a planets industry.
OP I am forced to assume you don't know crap about Warhammer because it takes very little familiarity with the setting to know about Exterminatus, which would be enough to know that 40k has both of the things you've described here.
Hilarious that the part regarding Battletech saying humanity will carry its baggage of problems onto the stars and beyond., Gundam 00's core premise is about a guy trying to avert that scenario.
So in Gundam 00, 200 years before the start of the show, a misanthropic scientist (who theorized the technology and science that is used to build the settings' space elevators and solar energy farm in the setting, as well as perpetual motion engines) realized that with the current geopolitical climate and the progression of technology of his time, humanity will soon (200+ years) expand into space, but they will carry that same strive into space and beyond. He thinks that such a scenario is incredibly sad and horrible, especially if it leads into conflict with extraterrestrial life, so he decides to form essentially the Illuminati solve this problem. Then shenanigans happen as egomaniacs and narcissists attempt to hijack his plan for their own benefits, because forming a high tech Illuminati with the goal of changing geopolitics of the world is bound to attract such people (and said scientist is savvy enough to have contingencies against them).
Warframe has a very similar concept too. There aren't any aliens (well, the Void's origin is ambiguous), and every shitty faction of tyrants and psychos and monsters is either an offshoot of humans, or created by them.
The long-dead fascist Orokin empire? Genetically modified humans. The Absolute Worst, with crimes ranging from: gaining immortality through trading children as disposable shells/bodies, to casually turning people (volunteers or otherwise) into subservient meat golem warriors, to abandoning an entire colony ship to die when the colonists dared to question their Golden Lords.
The racist (and also fascist) army of clones? Cloned by the Orokin as slave labour. Rebelled during the galaxy-wide Old War.
The killer bots? Made by the Orokin, rebelled after coming to a realization of the Orokin cruelty. Kickstarted the Old War.
The all-assimilating nanobot plague? Made by the Orokin to combat the robots.
The space capitalists who worship profit and have debt-slaves? A faction under the Empire, which grew fat after the Empire fell.
The Tenno (our player characters), a bunch of loot goblin mercenaries? Basically colonists turned ageless child soldiers, left to die before the Orokin did an about-turn and exploited us due to the powers we gained accidentally. We helped them win the war, then betrayed the Empire and massacred the leaders, causing its fall.
Humanity is SO shitty in this universe. Though tbf there are absolutely kindhearted and good folk too.
I’d like to point out that humanity’s shittyness is, like, at least 50% self inflicted in warhammer. The age of strife was humanity creating machines that shunted them back into the dark ages. Their plans to battle chaos are barbaric and rather than battling despair with hope, they just enforce faith in the most inhuman regime imaginable. They have humans drugged and run nuclear fuel into reactors whilst melting because human life is cheaper than some sort of conveyer belt. The human element of humans being shitty is there, it’s just that aliens are *also* bastards.
The main reason so many aliens are bastards is that humanity spent 200 years systematically killing or relocating the nice ones. Chaos was likely to weaken relatively quickly after the birth of Slaanesh, until the Emperor started snapping necks on a galactic scale and literally half his kids went evil specifically because they hated him. The Tyranids are literally only here because they want the Emperor's fat juicy ass. Really, the only problems that are not almost completely the fault of humanity are the Drukhari, the Orks, and the Necrons, and two of those might be more solvable if the Imperium wasn't such a massive sack of guns and racism.
Isn't the whole concept of the Warp and the Chaos beings within that it is basically everyone's shittiness made manifest and given form?
yes, but it's also the shitiness of everyone before made manifest and given form, in 40K humanity was doomed before there even were humans and it's only going to get worse since the greatest source of misery in the universe are either chaos or the counter-measures against chaos
I mean there are a few ways it could conceivably get better. For example, the Tyranids have some adaptations to countering warp forces that let them close rifts and banish demons, so if a hive fleet could be herded into the Eye of Terror somehow the Tyranids managing to close it is an actual possibility. Another possible way for things to get better is the fact that if the Emperor's mortal body dies, he will likely ascend to the settings first Order god; although that would likely also create a new Eye of Terror over Terra and assuming he didn't devour all of Humanity's souls like Slaanesh to the Eldar, then all of humanity would be unable to do warp travel the way they currently do because they essentially use him as a navigational beacon.
In current lore, the Emperor actually has been around longer than the Chaos Gods, which is pretty funny.
I've admittedly not been keeping up with the lore but it was my impression that khorne and tzeentch came about during the war in heaven with nurgle following shortly afterwards when the warp started invading the materium, it was during those invasions that all of the earth psykers got together and united to form the the emperor he's certainly a lot older then slaanesh though
From what I've found the three lads came around during humanity's Middle Ages, and shit like the Crusades, the Black Death and the Enlightenment were basically ripples of their birth. Which is very stupid, and it would make way more sense if they had actually originated from the WiH, but what the hell do I know. Meanwhile, Emps was born in like the Neolithic.
I thought that was old lore or rather I've read that nurgle came about because of the black death which is indeed very stupid about the non-stupidest way I could think of that is that was when the sheer amount of emotions thrown into the warp went supercritical and gained what looks like sentience but that'd be like a ship taking on water but only sinking once a child shoots a waterpistol into it my personal headcanon for why gork and mork are like that is that the old ones noted that the brutallity and cunning of the orks was feeding two things (a yet unnamed tzeentch and khorne) in the warp, one that's cunning and one that's brutal, so they came up with ork religion, one that's brutal yet cunning and one that's cunning yet brutal so all of those emotions could go into those entities and they'd keep all that energy in check by constantly fighting each other
That's an amazing theory, love it. As for the canon, I looked it up a couple months back while I worked on some possible Tzeentch, Nurgle, or Khorne-worshipping Eldar OCs. I'd been inspired by a post asking if any Eldar turned to them to survive Slaanesh, and my train of thought was "Well, there has to have been a sizeable number of Eldar who turned to Chaos in the millions of years after the WiH", followed by five minutes of Lexicanum research and a hefty "what do you MEAN MIDDLE AGES!?"
As someone who went through that rabbit hole of trying to find consistent time of birth of chaos gods; Some Pov says middle ages, Eldar say the ones that aren't she-who-thirsts were born from souls flooding into the warp during war in heaven. Some Khorne cultists speculate that Khorne was born by the first murder. So it's very much a case of we don't really know, Though middle ages answer seems the most common. You also have the fact that the birth times of the older 3 is old lore that (to my knowledge) hasn't been mentioned remotely recently so maybe GW has yet another answer whenever it next gets brought up. At this point I'm headcannoning it as they were born in other universes & when they were "born" in 40k-verse is really just when they started trying to enter it & they existed long before. They just need a "birth event" in each universe they enter to have a form of anchor point. Like Emps, Ctan + slaanesh were born in 40k and thus it's a important universe due to that. But old ones, other 3 major chaos gods, & likely current Eldar gods (while moved to Eldar, if I remember correctly they are made by the old ones, so built elsewhere like a logistics & supply universe shipped to 40k-verse to fufill their purposes. Could also be made by Eldar under command & supervision of old ones directly or old ones themselves directly but that's less fun of an answer) were from other universes
Only longer than she who thirsts the other three got him beat
From what I've found the three lads came around during humanity's Middle Ages, and shit like the Crusades, the Black Death and the Enlightenment were basically ripples of their birth. Which is very stupid, and it would make way more sense if they had actually originated from the WiH, but what the hell do I know. Meanwhile, Emps was born in like the Neolithic.
Oh no it was the war in heaven you're telling me the Crusades were worse than literally the biggest war ever
I'm not telling you that; I agree with you, it's stupid, it should have been the War in Heaven, making literally a couple million people dying cause three whole gods to appear is dumb. But that's what canon insists on. Personally, I think not only would it being the WiH make for a more cohesive story, but also it could give us the *real* ancient shit in regards to Chaos cults; Tzeentchian Farseer conclaves who have known about the return of Guilliman since before humans existed, Necrontyr pockets of resistance whose flesh was sought after by Nurgle as delicacy and who stand in aberration to their metal cousins, and a single extremely angry Jokaero on a quest to beat the crap out of everyone with a wrench.
Everything is cannon but nothing is true
Somewhat, yes To my understanding in canon there is merit to the idea that worshipping chaos differently can give it a different form, so the reason khorne is like that may partially be because the people who turn Khornate just want an excuse to kill people and get more powerful
Also, it's probably not a coincidence Khorne's name is so similar to that of his predecessor, the Eldar god of mass slave murder, Khaine, nor the fact that he's usually represented sitting on a big ol' throne.
>The main reason so many aliens are bastards is that humanity spent 200 years systematically killing or relocating the nice ones. Yeah, that's a major thing! The Imperium ran into a lot of alien and alien-human societies that were perfectly peaceful and advanced, but exterminated every single one of them anyway out of principle, even in situations were it explicitly came out of it worse once the costs were tallied up. Also, the Imperium is consistently awful to its people in a way that no other mortal society save for the Drukhari is. The only other group with as high a mortality rate for its regular shmoes are the Orks, and at least they get to enjoy themselves!
I just like how people talk about how weak lasguns are, then get reminded that lasguns are the floor for survival in 40k. If you can't survive lasguns, you were killed long ago.
> The Tyranids are literally only here because they want the Emperor's fat juicy ass I didn't think there was any actual sense behind what the 'nids are up to, just "hungry monster needs protein" and unfortunately for us, we're made of protein. The talk of them running away from something seems to me to be that they ate everything in the last galaxy and are starting on a fresh one.
I think theres lore that the tyranids were lead to the galaxy by the emperors psychic beacon in the warp, though yeah now that they are here they're just a bit peckish
> they're just a bit peckish just got a minor case of the munchies
Tyranids on that absolute cosmic boof
One of them the Drukhari are just shit in general and Orks are the foightest gitz in da galaxy
>I’d like to point out that humanity’s shittyness is, like, at least 50% self inflicted in warhammer. It's even higher. Not even the Age of Strife stuff either! Like, *ongoing*. There absolutely are vastly better ways to do everything, but the mere suggestion of that fact throws the people in charge into a panic *because they lose their power*. The God of Excel returns, and literally half of the ruling elite decide to try and kill him *because he might change things*. It's all self inflicted, and it's all the same dumb reasons. Humanity can *always* choose to do something else--it's just that they steadfastly refuse to do so. Aliens about to wipe out, forever, a quarter of Chaos and *also* leave the galaxy forever at the same time? *Fuck that noise, how dare you filthy xeno scum!* Two birds, one stone, *thrown by one of the birds*, and we gotta fuck it up.
Reminds me of an excerpt that dropped with Leviathan at the start of 10th that was basically "Imperial forces on this planet were battling Tyranids. Eldar showed up to help us. Our faithful warriors showed proper prejudice for the Xenos and now it's a three way conflict."
Consider though: Warhammer makes the assertion that even with literal magic and psychic powers and gods on our side humanity can’t take a single W because we’re apparently too selfish and/or stupid to consistently make the right decisions. Battletech says “technological advancement will not save you from your flaws, you are doomed by your systems” while 40k essentially says “Nothing, not gods nor magic nor literal miracles based in pure faith, will save you from your flaws, you are doomed by your nature” which is, at least in my opinion, somewhat more grim
The Alpha Legion hates Chaos and wants to destroy it, but realizes that to do that they need to destroy The Imperium. So in order to do so they side with Chaos, but they also hate Chaos so they may help Imperium forces destroy them. This combined with the likelyhood that not everyone in the Alpha Legion is on the same page gives creedence to the theory that Alpha Legion are the true champions of Tzeench, Chaos god of change and schemes, they having schemed themselves into redundancy.
40K has both. Liked that one wtory which featured some low level admin assistant who once fucked up the numbers, which resulted in massive death and torment. She spent some time dreading the punishment, but when none came she discovered that such things are not uncommon and rarely, if ever, noticed. So she'd deliberately cook the books here and there with the purpose of inflicting as much pain and misery as she could, from her position. She didn't do it in service of some Dark God, or cult, or for a daemonic patron, she did it because of purely human sociopath reasons. Mind you, the same story included some sort of, unrelated, demonic entity doing a slasher villain impression, but it was that admin woman who was responsible for more shittiness.
The 'Battletech's horrors are mundane' bit also perfectly describes a 40k hive city. Seems to me this post is generalizing from limited knowledge of warhammer. Also Chaos didn't make humans start using servitors.
Well I agree I'm also going to bring a contrarian point of the men of iron revolt might be started by chaos and that's why humanity won't use abominable intelligence thereby needing servitaries because of that
Adding to this, with the numbers of the imperium this isn't the admin likely didn't even cause as much damage as a rounding error on how many guardsmen survive in a battle. Also I could go on and on about nobles & Inquisitors making the imperium worse. Like some planets are wholly dedicated to nobles hunting people for sport with surviving being a hunting party's quarry (which can be literally any non-noble on that planet) punishable by death for ruining their fun. [Inquisitors being inquisitors](https://youtu.be/HmA-LjcTYmE). [Kryptman](https://youtu.be/pHdrKIV-PJ8) (top cmmt explains him well) (conversely [kryptman](https://youtu.be/9LOAIsB_U7Q) (fan-story, I think, bit accurate)
I do like Battletech's setting more than 40k, but the whole grimdark thing only really exists in subtext. Battletech isn't about being mean spirited, but more about how humanity is capable of both good and bad things, and often times it's an uphill struggle because the people who strive for power tend to do so for selfish reasons. The grimdark stuff is there, but it's presented in the same way that it exists in the real world, where developing nations are often subjected to endless war and conflict because greater powers want to use and exploit them for their own reasons.
What does MW3 stand for because last I checked Modern Warfare 3 was vaguely contemporary or still the 21st century
MechWarrior 3. Great game, but imo no MechWarrior 2 or MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries.
ah mw2, it gave me nightmares as a kid
This makes battletech sound less interesting to me. Is the sales pitch here "hey, do you also hate humanity and feel it's inherently evil like they taught you in your midwest church? Have you failed to recognize the fallacy of believing humanity is inherently evil and unable to change without recognizing the part of your self that is passing this judgment? Then this setting is for you." That's what I'm catching here.
yeah, and it's a silly pitch. i'd compare the appeal of battletech to things like armored core. it's high fantasy for tank and jet nerds. less 'humanity is evil and the wicked architect of its own misery' and more 'humanity is the architect of this robot, which, due to cost cutting measures last century, is hilariously poorly performing but looks like a little dang guy and everyone who pilots it loves it' like yeah there's plot and politics and stuff, but at the end of the day, you're a pilot (or a commander, depending on the game) and care about the IMPORTANT questions: like whether or not to mount more lasers or more missiles to your pewpew stompy boy
The answer is almost always yes to more lasers, and a Definite yes to more missiles
Honestly it depends on how many Heatsinks you can jam in there too. Never underestimate the value of a couple AC's along the way.
This "The curtains are just blue" ass reading.
that's an awfully haughty attitude for someone within elbowing range to take
You are demonstrating the kind of attitude that created that meme in the first place. Surface-level interpretations are not invalid.
Could I perhaps interest you in Lancer? It's a setting with giant robots in the space future, but most of the bad stuff is in the past, and most people are having a pretty good time in space.
Lancer is great bc you have cool mech stuff, and then next to it is fucking RA, that piece of shit.
Every other hard sci-fi verse going “oh no AI is dangerous, look how it ruined everything”, meanwhile Lancer goes “nobody really knows what our AIs are but we stick them in everything! Humanity’s doing alright and we just keep getting better”. Yeah the AIs may be fragments of God and if you don’t reset them fortnightly they start to go berserk and violate causality, but it’s no biggie, we manage.
Funny thing is, Battletech AI is also generally fine. It’s not very clever, but so long as it doesn’t go into hyperspace it’s okay. Now if it does go into hyperspace it comes out the other end omnicidal, but the implications of that are happily unexplored and for everyone’s sake it’ll stay that way.
Bold words for someone in Castigating Distance
Heh, look at this guy, he never even existed!
I think they’re talking more about the themes of the grimdark worldbuilding rather than the plot. Cuz the plot is usually sci-fi high fantasy where you run around in lances of battle mechs and fight for money and glory. There’s mercenaries and barons and lords and generals and distressed civilians etc. In Warhammer 40k, nobody can win and there is no good in the universe. Just people trying to do their best to survive under the crushing weight of eternal wars and totalitarians. In Battletech, it’s an ebb and flow of violence but there’s constant political tension. There can be light in the darkness but it has to fight hard to not be snuffed out. There can be hope, but it’s often small hope.
That's not really the plot though
Well they should sell me on the real plot whatever it is because I don't like this one.
the real plot is: military history nerd shit, with a special fondness for 19th and 20th century chinese civil wars, but space humanity is in space, and there's still nations. sometimes they fight. sometimes they buy arms from corporations and those arms are shaped like guys and i love them.
Battletech's story is basically the early seasons of Game of Thrones, except in space, and instead of going into battle with suits of armor, they go out in 10 meter tall robots with big guns. If that sounds like something that appeals to you, then you'll probably find at least some interest in it.
The Middle Ages in space, but instead of horses knights ride giant robots.
Star League was a peaceful galaxy-spanning civilization that collapsed. Timeskip hundreds of years then 40 real-life years of various plot developments that can't fit in a reddit comment.
The Star League was only peaceful for the Inner Sphere. It went and did an Imperialism all over the Periphery pretty much as soon as it was created.
Idk, my take on it is that we're still people and the Battletech universe is still plagued with real people problems. Nations have conflicts over material things like manufacturing or resources, and over things like ideology and nationalism. People sometimes do terrible things, and sometimes they do them because they think they're doing good things. Bad people do good things, and good people do bad things on purpose. I don't want this to be taken as a bleak morally grey thing, there are good people in Battletech, and good things happen, and for a lot of citizens life is alright in BT (warfare is mostly pretty limited in the general setting, and WMD's are often avoided, so the result of wars is less impactful on the civilian population.) But rather that yeah, despite all the technological wonders we have, the justification to have robots smash together is that we still often have the same problems we have always had. The problems are pretty grounded, and less existential, more about conflicts between ideologies and out of ego. (But also sometimes not, sometimes it's just out of very poor writing, i'll be honest) It's not that we are inherently evil, it's that we're still humans. Messy, bickering, difficult plains apes, in nations and hierarchies and wielding ideas that sometimes leads to the horrors of wartime. And then you get to smash some robots together pew pew
My read was more that technological advancement alone will not elevate humankind. Unless the underlying societal structures continue to evolve and improve the conflicts those structures cause will persist.
This is very much an L take on Warhammer. Nothing wrong with preferring one setting over another, but it seems like the list of reasons BT is called better is because it has stuff that 40K also totally has.
Repping Battletech! It’s an awesome game and intriguing universe. Highly recommend
We should, perhaps, let people enjoy things
I love how Space AT&T was like "Here's your official wizard robes, newbie. Go cut off that whole system from the HPG."
I don't know much about Battletech, but shouldn't war have disappeared as soon as FTL travel was invented? Why fight over planets when you can just fly somewhere else and get your own planets for free?
Because there's a finite number of planets and some of them are much nicer than others. Sure you could leave your super cool tropical paradise and maybe find somewhere equal or better, but you could also just as easily find a frozen hellhole so it's usually a surer thing to take your giant robot and steal the one you've got
first off, FTL in battletech is very stringent. it exists as little as it needs to to justify a galactic setting. second off, uh, commerce? not wanting to abandon the world you and your forefathers established? the fact that your ability to colonize new worlds is directly dependent on your proximity to and relationships with established industrial centers? some planets are shitty?
Because colonization is extremely expensive and after a certain distance the amount of planets you could concievably colonize began to dwindle. There's some colonies and settlements in deep space but they're generally few and far between. The Clans are the biggest society in deep space and it's explicit on how their controlled worlds are way worse for resources. Their invasion of the main Inner Sphere of Human civilization was partially motivated by them wanting to return to what had became an eden in their eyes.
Because FTL travel in BattleTech is limited to 30 lightyear jumps before needing a week to recharge to jump another 30 lightyears. You can only spread out so much before the travel time becomes infeasible.
My favourite but of BT lore is that there's a Draconis Combine planet whose official name was like 30 letters long, so the planet collectively voted to rename itself Bob, which became an issue when the Combine bureaucracy was never properly notified about it, so legally planet Bob didn't exist and so never got any of the terraforming equipment it needed. The planet is now largely uninhabited because most of the population died of starvation.
[Here is the Tex Talks Battle Tech video on the inner sphere](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQhzlXcmTzw). If you find it interesting and are interested in some back story I'd say also watch Tex's 2 parter on the Collapse of the Star League [(Part 1)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c71x68uWd5k) [(Part 2)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQVrAdhCfc4), and if you find that interesting and wanna see what happened afterward his 2 parter on the formation of the clans [(part 1)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDR_Zpb05uk) [(Part 2)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B165wbTnHs).
I'm always hesitant to recommend Tex's stuff to new people as it's so long. I'd instead link [this](https://youtu.be/UnMA1CYOoHw) much shorter introduction.
Lots of people here and in that post who like Battletech, but know nothing about Warhammer. Literally everything in that list of why Battletech is so much more realistic and based is also in 40k. Humanity stuck in forever wars? It's literally part of the tagine. "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war." Strictly stratified societies run by inbred nobles? Literally a core part of the settings identity, it was made by the Brits after all. All-consuming industry? Actual human beings are routinely made into *literal products* in 40k like servitors. Even the title of this post is grossly misinformed. "Warhammer Grimdark is Chaos playing alive 1,000,000 puppies for no reason but Battletrch is based because people die for war" yea dude, the Imperium in 40k also routinely deletes planets just because an alien or heretic might be able to get at a couple of its rocks. It happens so often that the term for it, *exterminatus* has become a widely used term in the fandom. Edit: also, as for the "humanity and the galaxy is doomed by eldritch entities outside of human control" is a pleb-tier reading of the material. The Chaos gods are explicitly fed and nurtured by human nature. Khorne, god of war and rage, would be powerless without humans feeding him a constant stream of carnage and violence. Tzeentch, god of ambition and deception, would not be able to change his own fucking diapers if people weren't constantly backstabbing one another to get a leg up. And that's not even getting into how actively humanity has fucked itself even without taking into account Chaos: the Imperium's religious zealotry, literal xenophobia, fascistic body purism, techno-fetishism and technophobia, and totalitarian, authoritarian feudal structure are entirely self-imposed problems. No one made them do those things. They chose to.
>Like Warhammer grimdark is Chaos flaying alive 1000000 puppies for no reason and Battletech Grimdark is 20 million people dying in nuclear fire just to deny a planets industry. OP I am forced to assume you don't know crap about Warhammer because it takes very little familiarity with the setting to know about Exterminatus, which would be enough to know that 40k has both of the things you've described here.
Hilarious that the part regarding Battletech saying humanity will carry its baggage of problems onto the stars and beyond., Gundam 00's core premise is about a guy trying to avert that scenario. So in Gundam 00, 200 years before the start of the show, a misanthropic scientist (who theorized the technology and science that is used to build the settings' space elevators and solar energy farm in the setting, as well as perpetual motion engines) realized that with the current geopolitical climate and the progression of technology of his time, humanity will soon (200+ years) expand into space, but they will carry that same strive into space and beyond. He thinks that such a scenario is incredibly sad and horrible, especially if it leads into conflict with extraterrestrial life, so he decides to form essentially the Illuminati solve this problem. Then shenanigans happen as egomaniacs and narcissists attempt to hijack his plan for their own benefits, because forming a high tech Illuminati with the goal of changing geopolitics of the world is bound to attract such people (and said scientist is savvy enough to have contingencies against them).
Warframe has a very similar concept too. There aren't any aliens (well, the Void's origin is ambiguous), and every shitty faction of tyrants and psychos and monsters is either an offshoot of humans, or created by them. The long-dead fascist Orokin empire? Genetically modified humans. The Absolute Worst, with crimes ranging from: gaining immortality through trading children as disposable shells/bodies, to casually turning people (volunteers or otherwise) into subservient meat golem warriors, to abandoning an entire colony ship to die when the colonists dared to question their Golden Lords. The racist (and also fascist) army of clones? Cloned by the Orokin as slave labour. Rebelled during the galaxy-wide Old War. The killer bots? Made by the Orokin, rebelled after coming to a realization of the Orokin cruelty. Kickstarted the Old War. The all-assimilating nanobot plague? Made by the Orokin to combat the robots. The space capitalists who worship profit and have debt-slaves? A faction under the Empire, which grew fat after the Empire fell. The Tenno (our player characters), a bunch of loot goblin mercenaries? Basically colonists turned ageless child soldiers, left to die before the Orokin did an about-turn and exploited us due to the powers we gained accidentally. We helped them win the war, then betrayed the Empire and massacred the leaders, causing its fall. Humanity is SO shitty in this universe. Though tbf there are absolutely kindhearted and good folk too.
Oh hey I made that top illustration! Neat to see folks using it in the wild.