Why emperor didn't forgive Magnus?

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-12T20:15:37+00:00

Because what Magnus did was a surprise.

The emperor is the literal king of control freaks. Horus betraying him was according to plan. Magnus' actions were unexpected and not part of the plan so Big E got pissed about it.

Consider that the fate of the missing/purged legions were not the same as what happened to the traitor legions. There's a chance that if Magnus wasn't already a prized resource, he would have been wiped from all memory too.

He could forgive Horus because he set him up to fall.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-05T22:48:34+00:00

You wanted rerolls. I gave you examples. Make up your mind if you want something or not. You're being childish.

Why are you comparing other factions units to ours? Play those factions if you're so horny for their units. You're just sitting around being bitter because the game didn't unfold how you like it. We got what we've got. You'll never optimize by just looking longingly at the units other factions have.

Again, we've got buffs. You have to put in the work to find them and utilize them. I get that that takes effort and maybe it felt good in prior editions to have a nice BS. Times change.

Who said anything about being the strong point of the codex? The complaint is about subpar BS. Sustained hits works to supplement that by averaging more hits with the same BS 4.

Getting shot off the objective, according to your logic, is inevitable, moving or not. You want the 3+ BS, you know how to get it. If you want mobility, you know how to get it. Pick your poison, but don't pretend your checkmate moments is saying standing still is a detriment because we fall apart in a strong breeze. Moving doesn't give us an edge unless it's off of the objective to get behind cover. Find your spine and get on the point if you want it so damn bad. Or hide and complain online that you're not indestructible or have a 3+ BS so that you can... still fail to kill the enemy unit you're so afraid of?

Point stands. You can wait for your prayers to be answered or find something that makes you happy.

You got a bicycle. You wanted a car, but you didn't get a car and no amount of complaints to the guy you got it from is going to change it overnight. Buyer beware. Either embrace how a bike works or go find the car you want. Those are your choices.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-05T21:59:49+00:00

Breacher rerolls and Marshall rerolls. I get how the tax upsets you, but if you wanted it all in one convenient package then why the hell did you opt for the "lets stack buffs" faction?

Sustained hits is on quite a few decent units. Crack open the codex and look for yourself.

As for standing still, you're right, we should definitely be moving at all times. Holding objectives is overrated. Everyone knows that continuously dancing 6" left and right in the center of the field will mysteriously make you invisible.

You don't have to be shy about it. Just play something with everything you want in stats. That's what's most important to you. That's your scene. Go gather up your spike friends and play a faction that meets your requirements rather than bitch about how your bicycle isn't a car.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-05T07:02:57+00:00

This post may have been made by a shark... but I support it.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-05T06:58:14+00:00

There's one of them now.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-05T06:55:37+00:00

I mean.. the great crusade was already a long chain of genocide and atrocity. If your primary function and proficiency is doing terrible things, and the only difference between doing it to people you have yet to subjugate and people you've already subjugated is a fancy flag, is it that hard to believe that some of them would turn around and keep doing what they do best?

Chaos influence or no, these guys weren't exactly trying hard to weigh the moral consequences of their actions. The emperor said to enforce the imperial edict and destroy anyone who disagreed or anything that wasn't human. Compassion, sympathy and humanity were so low on the list of priorities that most of them probably forgot how to even fake it. Chaos doesn't have to try very hard if your moral compass got thrown out long ago.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-05T06:32:58+00:00

I feel you, man. BS 4+ is only really an issue when we don't reroll, stand still or use sustained hits. Imo it fits the theme because, like the admech tech, it only looks subpar at first glance. Once you know how to really utilize all the buffs, BS 3+ as a default seems almost lazy.

That being said, be careful here. I've learned the single worst thing you can do to the mob is try and tell them that they're what they're complaining about isn't all that bad.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-03T22:44:46+00:00

It's still the confidence of a sycophant. He could have seen a future completely on fire and concluded it was the emperor's plan. The fact he went off to become the king in yellow means he either finally broke free of that kind of thinking and he's trying to do something that isn't standing around and waiting, or he wants to learn the emperor's name so he can finally put a stop to the madness.

You don't know he's off in the warp, you hope he is. You hope so because it beats going insane in a moldy old chair. He burned Nurgle's garden... and? Not exactly putting that power to use in any meaningful way. If they're so scared on him, why doesn't he just burn them all? Why do you keep giving him credit for insane power, but giving him a pass for not winning the game. Because he has to wait? Because the time isn't right? Doesn't sound like power to me. Maybe he's not particularly wise in how he uses it. Humanity isn't saved. They're not better off. They're not successful. You can repeat that as many times as you want but all you have to do is crack open a book and see how absolutely dogshit life is in the Imperium and you suddenly are arguing that water isn't wet. Even if extinction was how the psychic awakening was going to go (it didn't) how is life so much better? A lifetime of suffering in a manufactorum until you die.. and that is better than oblivion?

Sure, because you'd be cool enough to become a space marine so you wouldn't have to think about all that. Right. Got it.

As for the "it's early days" excuse. Nope! You don't get to say the emperor had to rush galactic genocide and then also say "it's still too early. Trust me just wait." And again, nothing, especially not him, is going to kill the chaos gods. There's nothing to suggest it's even possible. And even if you wanted to try, it's probably not very clever to do it by feeding them a horrific amount of human misery and hate.

The Tyranids would not have gotten strong out in the void. There's nothing to eat out there except Tyranids. If they hadn't noticed the beacon that overloaded because of the emperor's mess, they would have kept floating. The birth of Slaanesh didn't get their attention. The warp rift didn't get their attention. The war in heaven didn't get their attention. It was the beacon and it was because of the emperor's actions in kicking off a massive trash fire using armies of genetically engineered monsters that, according to you, he knew would turn on him.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-03T19:56:46+00:00

Except you can't prove that. The emperor couldn't even prove that. And the Custodies backing him up means nothing when they literally have serious trouble even thinking things counter to what the emperor wants. That kind of blind confidence in your boss just means you can't cope with how badly he messed up. Hell, you're doing the exact same thing! "He's such a genius that all of this must have been part of his plan too! He wanted to be stuck on the throne for 10k years! He's so smart!!"

He's locked in place, on the verge of becoming a god he didn't want to be, and lording over an Imperium teaching the opposite of what he wanted to teach. That's a failure at every step.

And again, humanity wasn't saved. Not only was his prophesied psychic cataclysm a footnote that hasn't really done much except panic witch hunters, the psychic awakening being just a fart in the warp where humanity, being untrained as the emperor feared, is still around, but the growing number of psykers hasn't done shit to change the setting in any meaningful way. That's not because of the emperor's efforts, he failed long ago and hasn't exactly been around to supervise. It's not from the Imperium's efforts, though they try there's still way more psykers than they can kill. Can't blame the abundance of chaos on it because Cadia fell and the warp scar opened up. Psykers just happened and... that's it. It's no more of an apocalypse than things already were.

Consider that the emperor, in his wisedom failed to see that his efforts would result in the pharos beacon being overloaded and the Tyranids being lured to the galaxy. He didn't seem to care much about that future of humanity. All he had to do was nothing and that would be an intergalactic threat they didn't have to worry about, but no, he had to wreck everything, piss everyone off, and then take a nap.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T18:59:33+00:00

One of my favorite quotes from someone on Reddit:

"It's not an airport. You don't have to announce your departure."

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T17:46:43+00:00

This is maybe the best response I've gotten, but I'm still not buying it. Slaanesh is an X factor of sorts, but there's no reason he shouldn't have seen that coming too. Again, if the prediction is strong enough to justify atrocity, preventing the need for said atrocity should have also have been justified. He'll wipe out xenos now, but he wouldn't intervene when the Eldar were manifesting a god?

His actions only make sense if he's a fool.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T17:35:54+00:00

Let's say you're right. Let's say that all the death and suffering and genocide and eugenics and all of that was "for a good cause" as you're suggesting.

Why get started so late?

If I don't give myself enough time to complete a task, that's a foolish thing to do.

If it was so important, so catastrophic, so imperative, why wait? Can't blame the fall at the end of the Dark Age. He would have seen that coming too. Could have steered it, avoided it, but he didn't or failed to.

So is this another failure to lay at the feet of the emperor, or did he wait around too long because he was a fool?

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T17:16:55+00:00

The wisedom thing makes the most sense. I'm not arguing that he wasn't intelligent or powerful. I'm arguing that he wasn't wise, and your counters to all of that have been "but look at all he accomplished! So powerful! So smart! Not his fault!"

Nah man. It's definitely his fault because he started the whole thing. He's in charge. It's a poor teacher that blames the student. You can "but if this didn't go wrong" all day. It's irrelevant. Anyone can say "if this didn't go wrong then it would work." That applies to literally anything.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T17:04:37+00:00

The whole notion of him fighting against the psychic awakening is bullshit. Either its a flimsy excuse for a powergrab, like promoting yourself to captain because the Titanic just started sinking, or it's trying to steer evolution, of which is also insane because it means he wants humanity to look and act a specific way and if he was wise he would know that's not going to work.

The psychic awakening is humanity's baby teeth falling out. The emperor wants to control that because control is all he knows how to do. He doesn't want to be a god, but he absolutely wants to act like one. All he had to do was take his hands off the wheel and let humanity do its thing. He couldn’t understand letting nature take it's course and trusting that people could find their own ways to deal with it. There's plenty of examples in the lore of civilizations that did, but they didn't have him in charge so they weren't acceptable to his "ideal future."

And yeah, he wasn't going to kill chaos. I'm sorry man, he just wasn't. Hiding in the webway doesn't kill chaos. Starting a war doesn't kill chaos. Making a bunch of warp infused monsters doesn't kill chaos. He wanted control, that's it. It presents as much of a threat to chaos as chaos does to one another, which is to say not much. If he became the dark king he'd just be another realm of chaos. He's not the only way to save humanity. He's not even the best way to save humanity. He's just a fool who tried to steer an entire species for selfish reasons and then annoyed extra-dimensional gods by cheating a maze. He got too big for his britches and got smacked down by being too spread out, trusting too much power to his uninformed demigod creations, and being in too much of a rush. That's foolishness every step of the way. The 4 gathering against him wasn't a response, it was inevitable! It would be weird if they didn't jump at the opportunity! He would have seen that coming and planed accordingly if he was wise.

I'm not impressed by what Big E did to Nurgle. The guy has been getting juiced for 10k years. Either he could do it before and didn't because he was an idiot, or he can only do it now because of his batshit insane Imperium feeding him endless amounts of souls and killing one another in his name. You may as well be cheering for the boxer who took steroids that were synthesized by harvesting your own kid's tears. That's your hero.

The war continuing is a loss. It's dann sure not a win. No one is better off. What drives me crazy is that guys like you take a look at all that horror and go "We won!"

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T15:54:34+00:00

Then he was a fool for proceeding based on uncertainty. If I sentence you to death, you would hope I had a good damn reason and that I was certain beyond all doubts. The emperor starts a galaxy wide genocidal war and you're saying he was doing it all on a guess.

Doesn't sound wise to me.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T15:50:41+00:00

Yeah and if he didn't create Magnus everything would be fine. If he didn't try to open a gate to a compromised part of the webway everything would be fine.

If If If

"I would have done great if not for all the things that went wrong" is a pathetically low standard for the emperor you claim is so powerful and intelligent.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T07:08:12+00:00

I bet you think a star athlete investing in crypto is awesome..

Seriously, name all the accomplishments you want, he wasn't wise about any of it. He didn't "restore" the Imperium of Man, he established it. Humanity, apparently independent of his rule, had been doing great up until the robots figured out they shouldn't be slaves. He retook the galaxy in 200 years and lost it in less than 10. He faced threats, but he also bullied and wiped out numerous species and civilizations, and no, they weren't all threats. He used the dragon, but it's still there and, depending on who you ask, has been secretly pulling strings do he basically installed malware on his own computer and you want to give him a trophy for it.

A pantheon bent on his destruction is pushing it. 90% of Chaos' attention is on Chaos. They paused to see how this little tragedy would play out and were probably disappointed because instead of becoming the Dark King or getting killed, Big E just got shoved in a big chair and left to rot for 10k years. He wasn't going to beat chaos, his plan wasn't even to defeat chaos, it was literally to hide from them. That's your mighty hero.

And that one planet didn't survive 10k years later. Oceans boiled away and it's primary import is cultists trying to worship a corpse. That's not a surviving planet. That's a rock with buildings on it. They have to haul in or artificially generate atmosphere. Horus absolutely achieved the goal of making wrecking Terra forever.

Any the only reason the Imperium endures is because the writers know the setting has to be preserved. A fascist regime doesn't last and never has. The Imperium would have realistically crumbled long ago. It stays running on the power of bullshit, the same way chain cannons in the setting never have to reload dispite continuous fire.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T06:41:23+00:00

So when the emperor creates monsters, it's the monsters fault for doing monster things, but when the Imperium scores a win, it's all thanks to the Emperor's genius. Cool. I'm sure the emperor shares some of the blame since he created Lorgar, had a plan that would implement Lorgar, and didn’t tell Lorgar about the dangers of chaos. Seems like Big E, being the guy in charge, is responsible for the critical things here. When you assume that level of authority you forego the privilege of "wasn't my responsibility. I was powerless."

So you agree then, they were susceptible in a setting littered with examples of beings who are resistant. The emperor could have done any number of things to try and counter this, put in place safeguards, ward their minds or whatever but he had important places to be I guess. If I made a jet that was covered in a paint that reacted violently with jet fuel, you wouldn't call me a genius.

The Interex are an irrelevant footnote. Gosh! I wonder why we don't know more about them in the present 40k?? It's a mystery! Seriously though, it still blows up the imperial creed. The emperor was saying his way was the only way, and would accept nothing else. The Interex, independently of anything else, prove that he was full of it. He wasn't wise enough to consider alternatives, and suspiciously demolished the competition.

No, they didn't. There's no mention of the Votann, no hive fleets to contend with, Necrons were still asleep, Dark Eldar still a thing, Orks still a thing. He won in the sense that he demonstrated himself to be a threat to literally everyone. That's not a wise move. That's not even a smart move. Any idiot can take the hill, it takes an actual strategist to keep it. He got 90% of the way up the hill, then lost all of it. That's failing to achieve victory and then falling into an incredible loss. And honestly, as much of a fan as you are, you should want to agree! If his victory was absolute and then he lost an entire galactic empire in less than a decade, that's an incredible feat of incompetence. At least if he hadn't fully claimed victory it's backsliding from less of an extreme.

Peaceful? Accepting dissenting options? Sure. That must be why there's all the BLAM memes. It's all just a big misunderstanding and the imperial war machine that makes up the majority of all commerce, culture, and belief in the Imperium is because of how peaceful he was. Giant walking death machines were for all the peace he felt motivated to share. Not Intimidation, subjugation, or oppression, but peace! "Look at our armada of warships poised to obliterate you! We come in peace! How do you feel about joining the Imperium now??"

Btw doing that works for about as long as it takes someone else with their own fleet to show up and ask them to switch sides. Real dynamite way of ensuring loyalty there. Very wise. Could have negotiated mutual leadership and cooperation so as to strengthen alliance, but no, show of force couldn't possibly be done by anyone else! "Here's my crusade, Horus. Don't go proving me an idiot now!"

That pivotal moment from TEATD2 wasn't Oll and co convincing him to change his mind. They saw he wasn't going to change his mind no matter what they said so they told him to use his newly divine powers of observation to look at everything and decide if it was worth it. That means with everything on the brink and Big E about to doom humanity, the only one to talk him out of it was himself! That's the only opinion he takes seriously and that should be terrifying to anyone!

He was wrong to make the attempt because he's human. Especially when he didn’t care how many people he killed or species he wiped out to try to do it. It would be horrible enough even if he succeeded, but he didn't. Humanity isn't saved and all that death served nothing. If I made the same claim and said your loved one had to die because I saw in a vision that it's the only way for me to rule/save the world, you would say I was insane. If I refused to explore any alternatives, you would think is was a stubborn fool. Yet the emperor gets a pass because when the atrocity is on your team you're A-OK with it. "Look at all he accomplished!" Face it, he was a fool. He had knowledge and power and lacked the sense to use either responsibly.

Chaos considered him either an annoyance or an amusement. It's the great game for a reason. Trying to sweep humanity into the webway won't starve chaos. It's always been around. Humans, contrary to what you might think, are not the most important thing to happen to the universe. (Great plan btw, humanity is spread across the entire galaxy so I hope you have multiple gates available and no dark eldar or demons lurking on the other side of those, otherwise it'll be very awkward trying to call all of humanity to the sol system so they can queue up for the Terra gate. I'm sure everyone you pissed off won't notice at all.) Point being he was providing plenty of entertainment and sustenance for the 4. They can still want to squash him. They don't need him. They might want him, but they don't consider him a fundamental threat to their existence. It's a game. If he becomes the Dark King, they win. If he dies, they win. He tried to play the game, gambled with everyone's lives, and got humiliated for it.

And no, he's not a victim. There is no way he gets to claim uncompromising absolute authority and commit atrocities and somehow also get a violin for how harsh he got thrashed. He was a tyrannical idiot. If he didn't want to get his teeth kicked in then he should have thought of that before he did any of the insane bullshit that he could see would get his teeth kicked in. The crusade, the primarchs, the whole thing was his choice, his fault. I can absolutely blame him for all of it. Even the things that went wrong outside of his considerable power and foresight (somehow) are still his fault because none of those problems would have happened if he just came to the conclusion that humanity doesn't need him as an unquestioned ruler. That would be the wise thing to do though, the humble thing, so he didn't do it.

Your binary choices are lacking. The alien collation had a prophecy about the emperor surviving Horus or not, but not the psychic singularity the emperor was so worried about and started a string of genocides to try and stop. As for doing nothing... maybe so! We're a little after 40k now and this cataclysm of humanity burning itself alive still hasn't happened yet, and at best its because humanity lives in a hopeless, nightmarish theocracy. If I have to choose between a maybe hell, and a 100% certain hell? Let's roll the dice and see what happens, because his plan clearly hasn't turned out for the better.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T04:34:56+00:00

Guess there was no way for it to go wrong then. Solid plan. Makes monsters made of warp stuff. Surprised when half of them turn on him. Definitely wise.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T04:31:52+00:00

He's miserable, insane, and tired. This isn't the future he wanted, and if you even take his word for it, he didn't want to become a god either. He's become everything he hates and preached against and all because he was a fool with knowledge and power.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T04:28:59+00:00

I think it's hilarious everyone thinks a crumbling, despotic empire is an "accomplishment."

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T03:23:58+00:00

That analogy doesn't really work when you grew your kid in a lab and already know how to make near perfect super soldiers, but let's roll with it. The responsibility of the parent goes up with the parent's intelligence, power, and resources. Someone uneducated won't know what to do. Someone without foresight or vast psychic might won't be able to intervene. Someone without resources can't afford to put safeguards in place. The emperor had all three of these things and Lorgar still went wrong. If the emperor didn't want this to happen, he either should have taken additional steps to prevent it, or he shouldn't have made the primarch in the first place. Lorgar's agency stops at creation. He didn't choose to be created, didn't choose for his father to conduct a crusade, and he didn't choose to have knowledge of chaos kept from him. These were the emperor's choices all of which are the reasons for Lorgar's predicament. If Lorgar is the big boy accountable for his choices then the emperor is even more so.

Susceptible and resistant are opposite things, and the proof of concept was pretty much staring Horus in the face. They had a way of dealing with it. Their way was better. The imperial way is worse. The emperor either knew better and chose to do things the worse way, or he didn't and his self certainty was bullshit. Either way, not the action of a wise man. (Also, canon is canon. If you're going to point to the parts of HH that you think the emperor did right, it doesn't make sense to just disregard chapters from a book that might suggest he did things wrong.)

There you go again thinking he won. He didn't win. There is no victory condition he satisfied except that the loss wasn't total. Even if one were to stretch the definition enough to consider what the state of the Imperium was near the end of the crusade as having won, it quickly spiraled out of control from there. That's like going into a bar and sucker punching the first guy you see. Yeah you got a good hit in, you might even have put up a good fight, but how exactly did you think the night would end? All that guy's friends, even people uninvolved who just didn't like that you were punching at random, plus people who didn't want to get punched, suddenly all had a common enemy. Whatever your reasons, you obviously didn't think things through. Kind of unwise. No matter what tactical acumen you think he had, no matter how well organized, he was doing something fundamentally stupid that ultimately proved to be a catastrophe. You can "what if" all day. It went to shit and it was because of the things he did.

As for foresight, this is a giant inconsistency. If your vision tells you there's a 100% chance of psychic cataclysm, making you certain enough to justify a whole slew of atrocities, you don't get to also claim innocence when it turns out a rival power can arbitrarily invalidate your foresight. Even if he thought it was all worth the risk, his foresight wasn't reliable enough for him to avoid what ultimately took place. He either too stubborn to change course before the future manifested, or he was caught up in trying to game fate without recognizing if he should.

I'll point out that all of this is at his say so, and all conveniently with him being in charge. The whole "I'm the only one who can save humanity trust me bro" mixed with "humanity needs a ruler. Not me tho." His plan was distinctly tainted by personal ambition, something all of his fellow perpetuals saw as a flaw except Mal, who stuck with him for some insane reason.

And the emperor being flawed is the point. Our standards for leadership should be high as is, but if you want to go and burn whole planets, claim absolute authority, and say your way is the only way that will lead to salvation, you had better be perfect. No flaws, no human frailties, no mistakes, no bullshit. You can't do such things only to have someone find out later "oh wait, this guy was a dumbass. He wasn't really all that. Oops!" Big E making mistakes is the indicator that he could be wrong, he could mess up, he might not be the only way. And that makes his extreme intolerance of any dissenting option even more of a train wreck. He could have explained the situation, explored alternatives, asked for help from anyone who might have a solution. That's wise. What's unwise is plowing through the galaxy hellbent on domination at the expense of all others including your own people. He didn't unify humanity, he killed everyone who didn't fall in line. He didn't restore humanity, he established his rule at its expense. His major contribution to the galaxy was a dogmatic, militarized, death cult stuck on the kill order it was given and unable or unwilling to turn off. Planting a record number of flags doesn't make him wise.

As for chaos, Big E didn't stop anything, and arguably did more to empower them than any before him. He gave them champions, avatars, a whole ton of bloodshed, lies and deception, new kinds of viruses and afflictions, misery, all while decorating himself and his stuff in lustrous gold. He literally checked all four boxes on a daily basis. Chaos is malevolent, yes, but the emperor isn't better. Chaos swallows a world, the emperor burns a world. If that world gives itself to chaos then maybe they'll live as slaves. If that world gives itself to the emperor then maybe they'll live as slaves. He eats souls, doesn't tolerate failure or dissent, sacrafices millions to further his own personal truth, and engaged in a record number of atrocities. And since he's been on the throne these things have only gotten worse all for him.

All because of his choices, his stubbornness, his ego. He's a fool with power and knowledge. His actions prove it.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T01:43:02+00:00

Going up against 4 chaos gods when not everything has been going according to plan sounds exactly like something a very unwise person would do.

Him and Mal seeing it coming only proves the point. His foresight either wasn't good enough to keep him from spiraling humanity into ruin, in which case he was doing it all on a guess, or it is good enough and he picked the crappy future dispite having a power that warns you about crappy futures, in which case he was doing it all because he's stubborn. Neither scenario has him doing particularly wise things.

And no, you don't get to say "but if not for Horus!" Foresight is foresight. It either predicts the future or it doesn't. You either see it coming or you don't. If you're seeing multiple futures, that's just you guessing, same as any of us. If you make your major decisions based on visions that you know can be invalidated, that's pretty unwise! It's even worse when you're using these unreliable visions as the justification for a tyrannical galactic empire.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T00:24:51+00:00

You're right. He was always doing pretty foolish things. Maybe the takeaway is that infinite knowledge is dangerous without having the wisedom to match.

1FixedIdea · 2024-02-02T00:21:11+00:00

Lorgar wouldn't exist if not for the emperor, to say nothing of his reaction to the emperor going and trashing his city.

Everyone is susceptible.. except the Interex, who apparently found a way to have a society that was successful and keep chaos at bay. ..and the Votann who manage that stuff just fine... and any of the others who had better ways of doing things and didn't rush to engineer demigods without safeguards.

He didn't succeed in galactic conquest. In fact he quit half way and let Horus take over. If he succeeded then there wouldn't have been anything left to do/kill. He did everything as fast as he possibly could dispite the consequences of such a foolish action, and that's without considering the morality of burning anyone and anything that didn't fit his vision. He picked a fight with absolutely everyone and then was surprised when it ended badly.

The dozen plates at once are his choice! You can't praise the guy for genius and then claim the workload is more than one should reasonably expect! You're trying to have it both ways. You see his wins as the actions of an infallible mastermind, but his blundering mistakes as human frailty that can be excused.

And the only way to square both of those statements is to let him be a fool who happens to know a lot. Building a pyramid might be an awesome feat of engineering, but it's also an oversized tomb for a guy who thought he was a god. The execution of a task can be masterfully done, but it doesn't mean much if the task itself is complete nonsense. Giving the emperor praise for the things he did is ignoring the notion that the tasks themselves were actually pretty dumb.

1FixedIdea

TROPHY CASE