Horus no-Heresy

Could chaos have taken the imperium down during what is now known as the Horus Heresy if none of the primarchs or Imperial forces turned traitor? Could they have just used daemons, xenos and mortal worshippers and not space marines?

Definitely not.

Ask yourself this question.

Do you cut down all your crops all at once leaving no seeds to sew a next harvest?

Humans are left alive to generate more fuel. It's more efficient that way. Especially when loyalists and adversaries die in tandem with one another.

At the instant moment of the heresy? nope. the sheer size of the imperium could go toe to toe with virtually any force in the galaxy even if they conquered every planet not yet under the emprah's control.

The closest the empire got to losing was when that exact thing happened, but 2000 years after the heresy. The Beast Wars had the empire fight the galaxy's biggest player, a super massive orc waaagh on firm route to galactic conquest that could literally teleport moon sized ships and nearly conquered terra.

According to nu-chaos lore, the gods are independent of mortals and have always existed. Also their goal is more or less to merge the warp with reality so they can freely shape and destroy everything, so losing on purpose makes no sense to their strategy.

>Codex Imperalis is nu-canon now

Fucking newfags I swear.

Get with the times you old fart.

>if none of the primarchs or Imperial forces turned traitor?
Fuck no. They acted because what Emps was doing was a serious threat to them. There's a reason they call him their Anathema.

>chaos is so powerful they already won lmao
>still needed to corrupt half of the imperium to have a chance
>still needed to ambush 3 legions to take them out of the fight
>emperor unable to directly intervene the whole time
>warp magic fuckery
>bring all 9 traitor legions to terra against 3 battered loyalist legions
>still fucking lose

Chaos possessed every advantage in that fight and still fucking lost. BL chaos fanboys are actually making chaos look even stupider by hyping them up as this completely unstoppable threat who wants to destroy everything when they've lost almost every major conflict they've been involved in

Chaos is weak. Only Orks, Necrons and Tyranids have any chance at beating a fully united imperium

Somewhere ADB just shat himself with rage.

Not a chance. Daemons are pathetic, there's never been a single campaign that Chaos achieved anything without the CSM doing the actual work. With all the Primarchs united against them any daemon armies that popped up would get shot down in short order.

To be fair, Horus didn't NEED to ambush the loyalists at the DSM, but why fight them straight up and risk far higher losses when you can just slaughter them instead?

All of that will be retconned to be just as planned, just like the Black Crusades.

I'll just leave this here.

This, daemons are only really scary when there's a huge ass warp storm nearby, and at that point the world is already fucked without the daemons even being there.

I think the reason chaos discussion generates so much ass-devastation seem so delusional is because there's a masssive disconnect between what the lore SAYS chaos can do, and what we've actually seen it do. They keep telling us that chaos is this lmao we already won just as planned unstoppable threat, yet in almost every major campaign they are involved in, they possess every advantage and still manage to fucking lose. It doesn't make sense if we're going with this stupid narrative that chaos has a goal and it's to destroy all of reality. If Khorne can swing his sword once and corrupt an entire sector or slice a planet in half, or nurgle can drown a perfectly sterile planet in plague just because it offends him, why the fuck are they holding back? If we go with the older narrative that chaos actually needs the material universe to sustain itself, then the "just as planned" losses make a bit more sense.

Everyone is missing the point. In every instance of this new chaos lore, they've fucked themselves over.
>morty close to conquering Ultramar but had to deal with Khorne and tzeentch attacking his holdings
>tzeentch fucks over Khornes takeover of Armageddon
> blood crusade ended because war in the rift
That's the whole point of 8th ed chaos, they can't unite for shit, but if they did they could easily overrun the galaxy. Meanwhile, every faction has, to some capacity, stood against the common foe, even the Orks and tyranids on Octarius and the Orks and imperials on Armageddon.

How the fuck is this old shit revised?

>even the Orks and tyranids on Octarius
I'll give you Armageddon, but the Octarius incident was more 'Blood Crusade gets spitroasted by Orks and Nids while Orks and Nids were actively killing each other' than "standing against a common foe".

The Blood Crusade's brief entry into the Octarius War probably broke the 24/7 monotony of 'kill bugs/kill greenskins' that had been going on for who knows how long by that point.

Well, the Emperor wouldn't have been interned on the Golden Throne because Horus never wounded him.

As such, he'd probably have found a solution for Chaos, finished the construction and conquest of the webway, and so on and so forth. As such, it is likely that the Imperium would experience a golden age.

They'd still have issues dealing with the Tyranids, I think, purely because they are innumerable.

Certainly, things would screw up royally later. It was said that the Emperor was pretty close to spawning a new God of Chaos, although it is unknown if this is true and what the effects of this would be.

Certain things like the cacodominis, the pale wasting and some of those other threats expunged by the imperium might still pop up, but overall the imperium would be pretty unstoppable assuming none of the primarchs turned to chaos. The webway pretty much frees them from ever needing to go into the warp, so even huge chaos storms wouldn't be as big of a problem as they are now. Logistics would be insanely Efficient as well.

I don't really see the Orks being allowed to ever get to truly threatening levels, though they're so hard to exterminate they'd give the military something to do. The initial tyranid fleets would be minor threats, but once the larger parts of the fleet start showing up, even a united imperium would be hard pressed. Necrons might also pose a threat if they were to unite, though the imperium has the advantage of being able to destroy them in their sleep before they even reanimated

>Necrons might also pose a threat if they were to unite, though the imperium has the advantage of being able to destroy them in their sleep before they even reanimated
Worst comes to worst, the Imperium could probably retreat to the Webway against Necrons anyway, unless the 'crons can science their way inside.