Iron Warriors

[Duodecimo]

I hear on 40K forums a lot about certain grand companies of the Iron Warriors, like Insane Psychopath's 5th Grand Company army. Is there any particular difference between grand companies' tactics and/or selected troops, or is it just at the whim of the hobbyist which grand company his army is a part of?

[Legatus]

I don't think grand companies are further described anywhere. I have not read any of the horus heresy books, but seeing as they are mainly a narative and not army background I don't think they will have much information on that matter. Perhaps occasionally in a story one specific grand company is mentioned by name, like the one you mentioned, or a certain captain with his grand company is described, but there are no detailed descriptions of marine legion organisation or grand company organisation I know of.

 

EDIT: I just realized that some random guy on a forum saying "I don't think there is information on that" is hardly convincing. I am basing my assertion mainly on thorrough reading of the Index Astartes articles and all Chaos Codices since 2nd Edition.

[Iron-Daemon Forge]

Back in the pre-heresy days the Space Marine where not in chapter of 1000 Marines, but instead fighting companies. For Iron Warriors we had Grand Companies, 12 each with 1000 Space Marines. So that would be 1000 Space Marines for each Grand Company.

 

The Iron Warriors were organised as a number of Grand Companies each commanded by a Warsmith. Originally each Grand Company would have had a similar organisation, totalling around 1,000 Space Marines. At the time of the Heresy, the Legion had at least twelve Companies, although with the widespread deployment of many small detachments of the Legion at the time it is impossible to be sure if this figure of around 12,000 fighting Astartes

 

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Iron_Warriors

 

I put mine as the Iron Warriors 5th Grand Company because there my favrout number. There a whole list of Grand Companies & what user has them over on the Iron Warriors 4th Grand Company fourm.

Game term there no impack, just more fluff/theme/background for the army.

 

There nothing diffrent as such, just think of it how in a Marine chapter you have a 1st Company, 2nd, 3rd, etc..... but with more troops. After the heresy all the No of troops change as memeber started going there own way's be it because they wanted to rule by themself/not follow the current warsmith, been exile from there grnd company, wanted to follow one of the chaos gods, etc...

 

IP

[Legatus]

Well it seems my reading of the Index Astartes was not as thurrough as I thought. ;) More to the point, I only remembered that the horus heresy books give legion sizes of hundreds of thousands, which I chose not to rely on, but I also thought other numbers had not actually previously been given. Should have double checked the IW Index Astartes before posting. It is good to know there is a definitive stated size of a Legion. Based on the amount of successor chapters created from the Ultramarines after the heresy (23 chapters with about 1000 men each) I would have estimated a Legion to have between 25,000 and 50,000 marines, with less for the smaller legions like Space Wolves and Salamanders.

[chillin]

Because legions were WAY larger then current s/m chapters (10X maybe).

So the grand company of a legion might have as many marines as some s/m chapters (maybe 1000), while a company of a current s/m chapter whould be much smaller (100 maybe).

I know that BL grand copanies had @1000 marines as well and like I said a company is @ 100.

Legions used to have 10, 000 marines each as opposed to the 1000 that a chapter might have.

[Hellios]

Well it seems my reading of the Index Astartes was not as thurrough as I thought. :P More to the point, I only remembered that the horus heresy books give legion sizes of hundreds of thousands, which I chose not to rely on, but I also thought other numbers had not actually previously been given. Should have double checked the IW Index Astartes before posting. It is good to know there is a definitive stated size of a Legion. Based on the amount of successor chapters created from the Ultramarines after the heresy (23 chapters with about 1000 men each) I would have estimated a Legion to have between 25,000 and 50,000 marines, with less for the smaller legions like Space Wolves and Salamanders.

 

Ultramarines I think had the greatest numbers, I would imagine the Thousand sons had the smallest number as the legion had roughly a thousand marines when Magnus took charge (hence the name) although numbers grew afterwards he was still way behind :D and I doubt he would have caught up.

[Askari]

Heprobably still had more than ten thousand. The Emperor's children started with only 200 marines and eventually grew to the size of an average legion so the 1ksons could have easily increased their size more than ten fold. The salamanders were the smallest legion even before Istvaan V because of Vulkan's screening methods.

 

but yeah, the iron warriors grand company size isn't standard and some are the size of a chapter or two while others are barely the size of a space marine company. The iron warriors have become very fractured and prone to in fighting so grand companies' numbers are constantly changing. But iron warriors also have large armies of slaves numbering from the hundreds to thousands and tens or hundreds of thousands unlike normal space marines that don't have human armies under their direct control since the Horus Heresy.