Editing Scale Bearers (section)

==Tactics and Strategy==

Upon taking his place as the Primarch of the XVII Legion, Tiran Osoris sought to completely reform the methods of fighting employed by the Legion. Hit-and-Run attacks are effective but time-consuming. Tiran refocused his Legion's methods of fighting to one of a more direct combat in open terrain. He introduced his own "Three Legs of Warfare," a philosophy that idealized Strength, Speed, and Endurance as the pillars upon which a successful campaign was built.

Strength is used at the beginning of every campaign and the end of any action. During the opening of an offensive campaign, the Scale Bearers perform massive orbital bombardments and air strikes on any military fortifications present on a target planet. This forces their opponents from their defensive positions and puts them on the move, where the Legion is superior. Any attempt to build new fortifications will be met by further strikes to prevent their opponent from being able to become stationary. Every action ends with some form of massive, multidirectional attack. The Legion always brings more men and bolters to bear than are necessary for the attack, preventing the enemy from ever gaining the upper hand or the ability to regroup and counterattack.

Speed is as vital as strength. In an attack, striking suddenly and without warning turns pure strength into overwhelming power. In all other facets, being faster than your opponents allow you to control their movements and determine how an attack will play out. It is used to outmaneuver and outrun the foes of the Imperium until their exhausted troops find themselves in the perfect killing grounds of a Scale Bearers Ambush.

Endurance is required throughout. Running faster is not enough to outlast a foe. You must also run longer and further. Endurance defines the entire ethos of a Scale Bearer's assault. Tiring their foes does nothing if the Legion itself is too exhausted to fight.

These three pillars come together to define the overall strategy of a Scale Bearer war. The Legion draws the enemy from their defensive positions through various means, exhaust their foes, and ambush them with massive surprise attacks. In this way, massive battles are fought and won quickly and efficiently.

This strategy has been largely successful for a number of reasons. Attacking an exhausted foe with overwhelming firepower causes far more enemy troops to surrender. Few men will flee from such a force. Higher ranking enemy officials see massive battles lost in a number of hours with little to no Legion casualties and quickly begin to contemplate the Imperium's terms of surrender. Keeping such battles away from civilian populations means less damage to planetary infrastructure. This reduces the time required for the planet to finish its reconstruction and become a productive member of the Imperium. Tiran's compassion for the people drove him to take greater efforts in appeasing the civilian populations. He was also known for giving planets longer "grace periods" from Imperial tithes to ensure that a planet could truly become more self-sufficient before the Emperor needed fresh troops and supplies.

As effective as his overall strategies were; there were times where the Legion could not employ them to their fullest. Many Hive Worlds had their military fortifications intermingled with civilian populations and little to no space to maneuver large forces away from population centers. To combat this, the Legion would often employ propaganda and other psychological tactics to encourage evacuations from military targets combined with his signature sudden and overwhelming surgical strikes. These would often be deployed in such a way as to keep the majority of the fire (both friendly and enemy) directed away from civilians.