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With the current tourney scene until the new SM codex comes out, what is considered the most competitive 1750 list for Imperial Guard?

-All infantry +deep strike/infiltrating?
-3 Leman Russ 3 Hellhounds based army?
-Some hybrid of IG with Demon hunter/witch hunters? (particularly now with Book of Never Running)
-Some other type of list?


Also, an inquisitor lord w/psychic hood and probably some mystics seems almost mandatory at the moment...anyone else believe this as well?

It seems after 18 reads no one wants to touch this one...

unlike many other armies, guard is not so cut and dry when talking about best.

I've been playing the HELL out of guard, trying to find something to use for the GT... I've tried everything you could imagine, most of it sucks...

Here are a couple I'd recommend. These lists are absoultely in the context of the fifth edition, ork friendly environment. If you see something that doesn't look right, I didn't pick it for fluff or for cool models, it's just better than it used to be.

My suggested build

6x chimeras with heavy bolter or heavy flamer and pintle stubber
junior officer x2 with melta guns
infantry squad x4 with flamers
3x hellhounds
3x leman russes with heavy bolters

Learning how to play with this list is as hard as it gets, if you'll need those meltas you'll have to be an expert on protecting them. Guard can't really put out enough shots to kill orks fast enough, so I think this list counters that by not giving the orks anything to charge. They charge chimera, they dont get to consolidate , guys fall out, flamers added to orks

6 multilasers, 6 stubbers, 9 heavy bolters, 3 templates and 3 pies isn't great firepower, but an entirely armor 12 army is a little bit frustrating for most.

If you are ok wih just auto-conceding kill points games (wait you are playing guard, you are doing that anyway) then take a last chancer list. Take the hellhounds and the russes, but leave the chimeras and guardsmen at home. Just fill the next 1,000 with veterans with meltas, and chancers with flamers/meltas. Thats a decent list as well.

I'm hoping we are still next for codex after marines as the rumors state, we need it, and I love guard!

I've run an IG SOB list in 5th and done well with it. At 1850 I's run something this.

Command platoon - 4 X plasma
Command platoon - 4 X Plasma
2 X 10 IG melta, Missile
50 conscripts
2 X 10 SOBs in Rhinos, books, hvy flamer, brazier, melta
2 hell hounds
10 rough riders
2 leman's
1 demolisher

gaurd doesnt suck at all, you can rock people with gaurd if you know what you are doing. you just dont have auto win matchups like you can get with other lists and it is tougher to get slaughters with gaurd.

i ran a bassie with improved coms, 2 ruses, 3 hellhounds and the rest dropping infantry with maxed special weapons. you can easily pack in an obscene amount of meltas, plasma and flamers that all drop in and smash your opponant in the face. the trick is trying to use the improved coms to get as many of your squads dropping in on the same turn as possible.

a good compliment to the list was an inquisitor with a hood, tarrot, and mystics backed up with a callidus. the inquisitor was a hugely useful tool stopping psychic powers, helping to get first turn and deffending against deep striking opponants. The callidus is useful for obvious reasons.

the strength of this list is that you have no infantry on the board to start, thereby making your opponants anti infantry weapons useless. You have 5 tanks that the enemy can shoot at (obviosuly the bassie should be hidden) and often this overwhelms his ability to do much damage to you. no taget is safe from you as you can drop and fire indiectly and you are highly mobile for taking or contesting objectives.

often, when the army drops in it hits so hard your opponant cant really recover, and then overwhelms him with targets. When I got a good turn three drop and the entire army came in (good odds for this with improved coms) the game was often over at the end of the turn as my drop troops would just maul my opponant.

you can punk hordes with ease, its truly a missmatch, meqs or mechanized armies fall pretty easily too. mech eldar was a fun match up as well, you should be crushing the star panzies pretty easily.

the toughest matchups are nidzilla and crons. Nidzilla because your tanks arent much good against them and your infantry usually just cant kill the MCs the turn they drop, and crons because they can keep your tanks stunned all day and the WBB really hurts gaurd, more so than with other armies.

also, a mech gaurd list is tough as you overload your opponant with av12+ tanks, neutralizing his small arms fire.

but as has been said, it depends on you, but i personally feel that the mixed tank heavy, dropping gaurd army was most effective. I played mine frequently in competetive play and i had a lot of success with it against a wide variety of armies. although i have to admit i won more consistantly with Marines and tended to have bigger wins too. Gaurd are just a lot more fun to play and more satisfying to win with.

When I play guard, I still use the doctrines. My favorites right now are Grenadiers, cameleoline (an extra +1 to cover saves, hell yeah), Chem inhaler (no neg modifiers in close combat means you can last more then one turn), and sometimes light infantry (to outflank his army). Now I don't use all of these at the same time. I always use grenadiers, having 3 units of stormtroopers on the board as troop choices with a chimera each, makes getting to objectives a lot easier and they can hold it longer. The other one I always take is the cameleoline. I give it to my regular platoon and command squads. I then have them hold my objective or get to the closest objective and hold it. I always try to get them in cover and if the shooting gets to heavy, they go to ground. In a ruin that gives them a 2+ cover save. Kind of hard to kill enough to make them run. I also use a basilisk or two. The barrage rules for cover are great, since cover is determined from the center of the template, most of the time the target will not get a cover save. The rest is just what ever I feel like taking. I usually know who I will be playing against and make a list some what geared towards them, but still keep it flexible enough to play anyone. Dos your tourny allow IA vehicles? If it does the hydra and the griffon are two great models to take. The hydra is great for taking out skimmers and the griffon will kill tau fire warriors, eldar, and IG quickly. Lastly the best piece of advice it find a way to kill your opponents "troops" as fast as possible. If he can no longer capture the objectives. The most they can hope for is a draw.

Guard in 5th?

Yeah I'm gonna have to pass on this one and say 'I don't know yet'. We're all back to square one as far as Guard tacticas go (apart from Our Lord God Stelek, who's had it worked out since the first time he looked at the 5th Ed rulebook, let alone read it).

Once we get together to play some 5th games, I'll be hammering my Guard, starting with standard style lists and then I'll see what sticks.

BYE

At least you are catching on, HBMC. I'm not anyones lord or god though.

Guard need Sisters support to take objectives (and hold them).

Guard can run heavy mech, a mix of foot support (usually drop troops) and mech, or all foot.

Lots of options now.

I highly recommend a couple Sisters squads and mortars in large numbers. 12+ is a good start in a foot army.

LRBT + Hellhounds....plus drop troops or chimeras.

Those are very solid lists, and minimize the KP punch to the gut.

There actually is a sort of appeal to an army where you can comfortably concede a third of your games. Catch your opponent early, shake his or her hand, and walk around the room checking out people's paint jobs until your next match.

I'd say that if you still want to use doctrines, chem inhalers, iron discipline and sharpshooters are all pretty much a must. My personal list is

Heroic Senior Officer, standard, medic, plasma, launcher
x3 infantry platoons with 3 squads (one melta, one plasma, one launcher) and their three officer teams (x4 plasma, x4 flamer, x4 launcher)
x4 heavy weapon team, HB, LC, AC, ML
Hellhound
2 basilisk tanks

I don't use doctrines, but if I did I'd be using close orders drill and iron discipline. This army has served me quite well in my games. It lacks a degree of infantry firepower, as the infantry haven't any heavy weapons, but the idea is simply to swarm the objective with bodies while the teams and the tanks kill anything threatening them. When the pile of infantry do shoot, it's in excess of 150 shots plus special weapons, usually enough to break whatever is in front of me.

Course, kill points will dick you over, but I can't find a way around that. So I figured I'd get good at what I got, not what I want.

I'm really hoping that the eventual new IG book gives Gaurd a break Kill Points wise. It'll be rough to basically auto-lose a third of your games.

Ozymandias, King of Kings

A break would be nice for kill points, but I played a game the other night where it was SM against my IG, 1500 points per side. In the end I won by 5 to 4. Now I had a lot of units going to ground while in cover, making them harder to kill off. Then I just blasted away with my basilisk and sentinel's. It really went back an forth, but the more of his unit's that I killed the less he had to shoot back with. Some of his unit's even got pinned by the barrage. All in all it was a fun game to play, and I did not have to auto concede.

I don't use doctrines, but if I did I'd be using close orders drill and iron discipline.

One of those is FREE and very useful, the other costs 5pts and is especially useful at rallying the last couple of men and saving the KPs Guard are struggling with.
Even ignoring the potential of free Drop Troops, I just can't think of any justification for not using doctrines apart from making the game easier for the opponent.

And you did that already, by choosing Guard

Last Chancers

I'm not taking doctrines cause I'm not getting them in the next book, and I don't want to build my army around them.

Last Chancers + spamming as many heavy weapons as you can hammer works well.

Does anyone play armoured company lists?

Are they even legal anymore?

I remember a dude used to bring an all tank force to tournaments! It looked good. It does well against certain other armies but is beaten up by a lot of other lists. Haven't seen an armoured company for ages. How about one of them! you can grind around ramming and tank shocking everything if guns get shot off.

Solid Armored Company loses horribly because you have very few guns. They're great guns, but you don't have many. Wasting two Leman Russ shots to finish off one Marine in cover to get that last kill point or knock him off of an objective just isn't efficient fire allocation.

Likewise the 'hit on rear armor' deal is pretty much auto-lose against monstrous creatures. It takes too many shots to knock down 6 carnifexes before they run up and crunch your tanks.

Armor + infantry support works very, very well though. I run 7 armored vehicles (10 counting sentinels... w/e) with 50 footsloggers and drop elites and they do fine. Even in KP missions against just about anything but full on Horde I can either come out ahead or table my opponents.

Last Chancers might be competitive but I agree that it feels like a gimmick army as HMBC and others have stated, and is against the concept of guard I prefer to play. Was looking for a more normal guard list (either all infantry or massed tank, or with some allies) but it seems that almost any list will have 15+ kill points and almost auto lose 2/5 games at the GTs. Just ridiculous to almost auto lose a gamebefore you even deploy. Plus, would each independent subteam of last chancers count as a kill point in itself?

Ture, they do give up 1 kp per sub unit and 2 for Kage and Schaffer. But, the player breaks them into sub units at the start of the game(I think durning deployment) so for KP games, they can be 3 kill points in one big squad of plasma death.

I gotta say Stelek, you're the only one who sounds genuinely confident at all about this, but from a theoryhammer perspective, you're making a frightening amount of sense. They're a little overpriced, but a 20-man mob with BS4 and the retinue rule suddenly make a list packed with mandatory "you lose" options look a lot better. Triple Hellhound, triple Russ, mortar HQ to cower in abject terror/avoid giving away its KP in relevant missions, a few Book of St. Lucius mobs and job's a good'un?

Considering how the minimum requirements of the IG Codex have shifted in the past, if you hold your breath on things that may or may not be in the next one, you're in danger of passing out. There is always the possibility, however faint, that the customers might get a little input and end up with a fun and playable codex.

...I don't know why I'm so optimistic today, one post I'm talking about how AP- S3 weapons are some good and this one I'm expressing hope for the future of the current dead codex and GW rules development in general...maybe I finally HAVE gone off the deep end...

Actually if we can destroy the commercial viability of their products and scare away their investors, we might get a situation like that of the Shadowrun CCG, where the whole thing was abandoned when the original company flopped, was bought up cheap by a former fan, and enjoyed a brief renaissance before slipping back into obscurity. If PETA can get McDonalds to start electrocuting instead of bleeding the chickens it uses in the McNuggets, we might have a shot at getting a little change around here.

I'm confident. Taking my IG to Vegas and I expect to do fairly well. True, I've only played six games so far, with three wins and three draws. Infantry, sentinels, and a couple of hellhounds along with that 'mandatory' DH Inq with Mystics and a Callidus. I actually expect to have a harder time with objective missions than with Kill Points. KP can be played SAFH style, form a gun line and shoot your opponent down like the dog that he is. Objectives require maneuver and movement, degrading the infantry's shooting.