Apocalypse-scale campaign (Apocalypse)
Since the Imperium's Great Crusade, this had been the official shorthand for a campaign of immense scale.
The Apocalypse-scale campaigns fought to date could easily be counted, but every one had been brutally vicious.
(PS: Under the tabletop rules, the benchmark for an "Apocalypse" game is over 3,000 points, though there is no strict, hard-and-fast points requirement, let alone any special house rules people might use. You can simply think of it as a "super-sized, super-WAAAGH!" war. Here in China, players currently barely manage to organize one "Apocalypse"-scale game a year.)
(PS: One Warlord Titan costs 3,500 points, ten Krieg troopers cost 65 points, Yvraine costs 100 points, and the Living Saint Celestine costs 160 points.)
This time, to eradicate the "green plague" that had remained embedded in Imperial territory, the four-man provisional regency council-Roboute Guilliman, Sanguinius, Lion El'Jonson, and Dorn the Stone-had assembled a military force of unimaginable size.
Hundreds of millions of Astra Militarum troops had been mustered. From the fearless Death Korps of Krieg to the Savage Riders of feral worlds, they swept toward Octarius like an invisible net.
The regency council's iron fist smashed through the rotten political compromises and mutual commercial favors that had long plagued the Imperium. On numerous planets, nobles who refused to cooperate with the "Ork Expedition" were summarily executed as traitors, then replaced by Macragge-style technocratic governments under the protection of the Ultramarines.
Even the taxes collected by the Imperium's Department of the Interior were requisitioned. Apart from essential allocations, everything was poured into this war.
Once Guilliman had used his strength and political acumen to bulldoze those rotten Imperial Nobles and idiotic administrative bodies, freeing up vast reserves of manpower and military resources,
Lion El'Jonson, Primarch of the First Legion, formally assumed overall command.
In strategic ability