Iron Warriors
| Iron Warriors | ||
|---|---|---|
 |
||
| Battle Cry | "Iron Within, Iron Without!" | |
| Number | IV | |
| Original Homeworld | Olympia | |
| Current Homeworld | Medrengard | |
| Primarch | Perturabo | |
| Champion | None | |
| Specialty | Siege warfare | |
| Allegiance | Chaos Undivided | |
| Colours | Black, gold, silver | |
Iron Warriors are a bunch of badass pricks, who are also robotic. They enjoy torturing, maiming, and burning down their old shit. A Chaos Legion specializing in breaking sieges (as in, taking a fortified location, though logically this should mean that they can do this and break out of a siege) which is shown in their love of artillery and greater focus on ranged combat, which stands in contrast to the other Chaos Space Marine legions who are far more disposed to melee combat (that doesn't mean that Iron Warriors won't punch a few skulls out, though!). Their troops are excellent close-range fighters and close-quarters combatants, and they often make use of special weaponry. They take no shit, but nobody at GW can decide on how they want to portray the Legion. Like we care what they think anyway. They also have a fetish for hazard stripes, which they make liberal use of in their colour scheme. It is as though they wish to say "do not use the side of my bolter as a step."
They also have a lot of Obliterators, which are a bunch of muscle blobs armed to the teeth on top of their heads (being Chaos guys, they have shit like that). Literally. They themselves are a walking arsenal, because they can MAKE WEAPONS OUT OF THEIR BODIES!
Iron Warriors are also the batshit insane sickfucks behind the Daemonculaba. They're the only Chaos Space Marines who don't break down in maniacal laughter constantly, as they see this as a sign of weakness. They're not terribly fond of Daemons (like the Word Bearers or the Black Legion are), though they will make use of them (unlike the Night Lords who don't even like Chaos), and they aren't closet loyalists like the Alpha Legion.
Many of Black Library's authors are quite fond of them for being more "realistic" and "gritty" (total bullshyte) than the other traitor legions and they are one of the most frequently appearing Chaos Space Marine Legions. But they haven't been in so much as one video game, so hah. Actually they've been in the entire Dawn of War 1 series as a Chaos faction, they just weren't in the campaign.
Taking inspiration from their primarch, they display great facility in setting traps. The most notable of which was the "iron cage incident" where the Iron Warriors built a twenty square kilometer fortress on Sebastus IV at the close of the Horus Heresy, with a massive fortified bunker at the center. They leaked information that allowed the Imperial Fists to track them there and Rogal Dorn himself promised to bring back Perturabo in "an iron cage". The Fists assaulted the fortress, taking huge casualties in doing so as the Iron Warriors fell back to split their advance and draw them into kill zones. Eventually the Fists expended all their ammunition and resorted to knife-fighting. When the Fists finally broke through to the central bunker, they discovered it empty, the Iron Warriors having withdrawn. The entire purpose of the fortress was just to bait and exhaust the Imperial Fist's forces, turning their own legendary determination into a liability that lead to their own deaths and the humiliation of their legion. Just As Planned. While the iron cage incident was the most notable, the Iron Warriors do plenty of other things like it on a smaller scale, such as firing fixed position guns into civilian habs to bait the enemy into counter-attacking, then evacuating through underground trenches and detonating explosives when the opposing forces comes investigating.
They used to be incredibly badass with special rules for having more heavy weapon options including tanks and artillery but Gav Thorpe (who's basically Matt Ward's husband) decided that spikey marines should be inferior to loyalists in every way possible.
Graham McNeill wrote a book that was mostly about them. Called 'Storm of Iron', surprisingly, and it featured a boatload of Imperial Fists, Iron Warriors (surprisingly) and a whole load of dickery, including traitorous techpriests, countless rows of geneseed (not being used to make more Speehs Mehreens, unsurprisingly. <--- Why WH40K's so Grimdark), and a daemon prince. Not forgetting the countless Imperial Guard and Titans. ...Tell me again why the Imperials lost?