Shouldn't ground forces pretty much only hold territory?

>>52810078
Because it turns out it's enormously more efficient to use things like air and artillery support as support and not as a replacement for ground forces.

>>52810078
Well, that's because:
Fun and rule of cool.
PEW PEW PEW
RATATATATATA

>>52810078
Refusing to send trillions to their death on the cold ground is defying all of human tradition. The Imperium is all about that shit.

>>52810078
Look at any war thats been fought in the last century. Turns out all the firepower in the world cannot hope to defeat a guy in hole in the ground. This is why we need ground troops

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>>52810078
>bomb made to explode hits shield and explodes
>drop pod made not to explode hits shield and doesn't explode

I don't really see why this is so hard for you to accept.

>>52810078
Because maybe you want the stuff at least partially intact instead of a smoldering pile.

Also, in 40k a man with a gun is cheaper than a bomb because grimdark.

>>52810078
Oh boy im sure i can conquer and hold a valuable industry block using explosive devices!

Not every planet has a shield, in fact, i think none actually have a shield. Youre thinking of fortresses, almost all of them have those. Most imperial invasions begin with naval bombardment, claim air superiority, ground forces land, artillery barrage, armoured assault, then ground troops go in. Atleast thats how the guard handle it, marines usually use a rapid insertion shock attack behind enemy lines to eliminate leadership and/or cripple the enemy ability to make war.

>>52810078

Because it's cheaper to wash the blood and gore of heretics out of the streets and grinding the bodies down to corpse starch then it is to rebuild whole sections of a Hive that's been around for thousands of years.

>rebuild 20 hives and associated industry

Vs

>Conscript another 10 million men and make a few lasguns to cover losses

Gee idk. Plus it's heavily implied that most factions actively avoid using ships to fight because they are fuckexpensive and difficult to replace in case they get hit by planetary defenses and other ships. In fact I remember reading in a codex a while back where both fleets sat on other sides of the planet just dropping troops off.

Pretty sure sacrificing a few million guardsmen and tractor tanks is cheaper than the ship-borne heavy ordnance on most imperial vessels.

Besides, the object of most wars is to capture the planet, especially when imperial organizations tend to rate infrastructure over lives.

>>52810078
I mean really, why would you have wars in space in the first place other then ideology since land and resources can't really be the issue.

>>52810078
It's because in 40k, ships are expensive as fuck, men are cheap, and everyone is too retarded to rebuild most anything they break.

Almost all the industrial assets on an Imperial/Heretical world cannot be replaced within an acceptable timeframe for an acceptable cost. If you park your army in proximity to these structures, your forces can't be bombarded without also costing the enemy the strategic resources they're trying to capture.

Even when you don't have assets to capture, indiscriminate bombardment on battlefields that reach a planetary scale cause immense and, for the races of 40k, irreparable (given what they're willing to spend) damage to a planets biosphere. It's more efficient to commit your genocides by hand (which is surprisingly easy, the Rwandans did it with machetes using a relatively small amount of men in a small amount of time) than it is to blast an entire planet's surface into rubble with explosives capable of piercing sophisticated bunkers - even if these are non-nuclear, you've just put enough dust into the atmosphere that you've caused an ice age that, if you're lucky, will only cause a mass extinction that a plant can recover from given several millions of years without expensive terraforming.

Interstellar war is just flat out stupid - fighting for keeps entails unbelievably large-scale wars of attrition, and fighting to win entails WMD use that, if you're lucky, your side might survive to some extent.

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>>52810078
>inb4 muh plantery shields that can stop a bomb but can't stop a fucking drop pod
can't inb4 something made in 1980

>>52810078
stop posting