|
The Imperial Guard, now known as the "Astra Militarum", are a specific army or faction in the ''Warhammer 40,000'' and ''Epic'' tabletop games and universe. The army itself is characterised by being capable of fielding a multitude of lightly armoured infantry in combination with some of the toughest and most powerful tanks in the game.〔 In the game universe, the Imperial Guard is a colossal military organisation consisting of trillions of men and women supported by millions of tanks each from thousands of different worlds and systems within the Imperium of Man. The Imperial Guard was first introduced to the game in ''White Dwarf'' 109, January 1989. In April 2014 a new codex was released for the 6th Edition of the game, along with a number of new plastic kits. Such models included plastic versions of Ogryn's and Scions (previously named Stormtroopers) which had been metal. A plastic kit of the Hydra (previously a Forge World model) also became available. In addition to the new kits and models, the Imperial Guard had a name change to the Astra Militarum in line with Games Workshops shift away from generic naming of their intellectual property. ==Overview== The Imperial Guard (previously the Imperial Army, now the Astra Militarum) is a fictional colossal military organization, consisting of many hundreds of thousands of armies throughout the Imperium, and forming the vast bulk of the Imperium's military machine. Unlike the Space Marines, who are an elite unit that rely upon precision strikes against the enemy's critical assets to carry the day, the Imperial Guard relies on massed assaults made up of endless waves of infantry and armor to achieve victory. "If a Space Marine assault is likened to a surgeon`s scalpel, the Imperial Guard assault is likened to a sledgehammer blow" It is this battlefield strategy that has earned the organization the moniker "The Sledgehammer of the Emperor". It also earns the Guard the reputation as a meatgrinder, whose commanders are more than willing to spend their soldiers' lives for the smallest of gains or in the most suicidal defensive actions. Each Imperial Guard regiment is usually raised from a single world and numbers between 500 and 750,000 fighting soldiers, supported by a huge array of light and heavy armored vehicles. Each regiment also has its own entourage, consisting of support staff, camp followers, suppliers, tech-priests, doctors, religious leaders and the like. When thousands of regiments are grouped up into large fighting forces, they are issued far larger assets such as planetary-scale artillery and super-heavy tank regiments from thousands of Munitorum armory, fortress, and staging worlds. Although a player may field a mixed force of these armor, artillery, and infantry units on the table-top, in the game universe, the composition of any one regiment is fairly uniform; that is, an infantry regiment will contain thousands of foot soldiers with only a minimal number of support vehicles and an armored regiment will consist of little else save its tanks. This policy was put in place by the Imperium to prevent, or at least minimise the damage from, large scale mutinies in the wake of the Horus Heresy, as no one regiment constitutes a complete, self-sufficient fighting force in its own right. Regiments are drawn from all types of planets of the Imperium from Fortress worlds such as Cadia, where the entire populace is raised under arms from birth, to Feral and Medieval worlds, and the contributions of some planets over the ten thousand years of the Imperium run into the billions of regiments, if not more. The Imperial Guard are constantly at war, freeing worlds from Chaotic or alien influence, or defending them from the same. The Imperial Guard rely upon the Imperial Navy for transport to and from war zones. The Imperium's naval and ground forces are kept strictly separate such that a mutinous general will not have access to an integrated military machine. That was not the case with the pre-Horus Heresy Imperial Army, which had no such strict distinction. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Imperial Guard (Warhammer 40,000)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|