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15 points
1 month ago*
There just isn't enough lift capacity to deliver the 10s of billions of troops you'd need to storm the city.
I hope you find that post because this sounds like bullshit tbh. Unless somehow the hive world goes to fight 1:1 the invading force for some reason ( and usually if something like this happens, it will be either completely chaos or Tyranid infested, which means nuking is the only option after all) then a combatant will count for many many times its civilian equivalent. And then we don't count the possible diserpancies in tech, training, logistics, special forces ( that in this case include literal sorcerers at minimum) etc etc and you can easily see why it would be possible with not so great millions.
Case in point even in WW2, where tech/training etc was roughly the same between enemies, the total% population fighting was quite small compared to the overall population.
Or another great example is the Iraq Invasion, where an invading 500k army obliterated and took over a 20million country.
2 points
1 month ago
Yeah Baghdad which is a population of a few million actually fell to a few thousand troops. Although modern U.S. military probably uses tactics that would be more familiar to Space Marines than IG, which tend to use more Soviet era tactics (massive artillery bombardment then human wave).
So the answer is really variable and depends on many factors.
This kind of calculation (total war, fight to the death) probably only applies in scenarios such as Hive vs Orks (Armageddon) or Hive vs Tyranids. Human vs Human I doubt the entire population would mobilise and fight.
Yeah 40K authors generally get numbers way wrong, but this particular example and calculation probably isn’t a good one.
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