Something else to consider is that all primitive worlds in
40k have
regressed to that state- stone-age tribes didn't make it to some far flung world in their current state after all. They all arrived on advanced space craft.
That means something happened that drove the regression (such as lack of access to a key resource) which may explain why the worlds are unable to advance further again.
It probably also explains why there are very few worlds with a stone-age level of technology but with significant political organisation (like early real polities like Sumer or the Aztecs)- once you have the knowledge of metalworking, it is very unlikely a politically organised state would lose that unless there were no accessible ferrous sources on world. Iron metalworking is fairly easy with the knowledge of how to do it. Stone age ferals worlds are probably very rare because they have to have regressed to almost no organised society in order to not be able to support metallurgy.
Remember, these worlds will not match our historic cultures, because they have dropped from a level of tech with interstellar travel. With that caveat, historical nations anywhere from the Roman or Seleucid Empire through to Napoleonic France or the Tokugawa Shogunate would likely be considered feudal worlds if they existed as single planets in the Imperium. Probably even up to nations like the Confederacy that were just starting to industrialise. Nations with a technology level akin to the Athenian Empire or Ancient Egypt or the Incan Empire likely wouldn't exist in the Imperium with any sort of regularity, because worlds with that level of organisation would be unlikely to lose the ability to work iron. Feral worlds seem to be distinguished by a lack of urban centres, yet still often have metal weapons despite a political organisation no greater than villages.
Commissar von Toussaint wrote:Iracundus wrote:The author tackles this concept of the "barbarian" warrior being better than the civilized, which he disagrees with and argues is a myth with the few outlier examples of such non-settled peoples triumphing sticking in the memory over all those other times when they failed against sedentary people and their states.
I'm not saying it's true, I'm saying the fluff does have some real-world support. R.E. Howard was all about how Conan the Cimmerian's pure wild fury would always defeat decadent civilization.
A huge part of the bias in favor of "barbarians" was the success of nomadic raiders against sedentary peoples. It is true that in the pre-industrial age, the premier "weapons system" was a horse archer trained from birth to his trade. Very hard for anyone to stop and impossible to eliminate since the vast Eurasian continent provided limitless strategic depth into which they could withdraw.
Cavalry ruled the Steppe, but horse archer forces rarely penetrated far outside of it where different forces were more effective. This is just an example of environment dictating tactics. Equally, horse archers and cavalry in general suck at taking fortifications (for example), which is why Hungary massively strengthened its castles and walled settlements after the first Mongol invasion, and suffered much less in the later ones. The aformentioned issues with forage mean you could wait out a horde of cavalry with enough stockpiled food.
The other factor that was key in the decline of massed horse archers was the development of the war wagon. Mobile cover paired with light, mobile artillery and other ranged weaponry was nearly impossible for purely cavalry forces to defeat. The concept was developed by the Czechs but later Cossacks used war wagons to great effect against Tatars and similar steppe peoples.
