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I'm recently getting into 40k, read all the lore and the books and painted random miniatures for years now but I've never actually played because getting into an already established gaming group is tough business. Sometimes I think nerds are harder on initiates than street gangs.

Anyway, I've decided to play IG because my gut feeling just draws me to them. Looking at the models I love the Vostroyan ones, i NEED to paint some.


So my question to you guys in the know is what is the viability of a Vostroyan army? There seems to be one infantry set and one command squad so there would be a lot of identical looking models in the army and they are quite a bit more expensive than cadian or catachan.

I was thinking of building the entire army around veteran squads without a single standard platoon and give them all carapace armor.

The reason for this would be to make a smaller more elite IG army instead of a horde army. Something between vanilla IG and space marine. It's main purpose would be to help with the cost and redundancy of an all Vostroyan army. And then I could make the whole thing mechanized with some chimeras and hopefully (in my imagination) create a harder hitting elite guard army.

I know this probably sounds completely crazy and most likely is a bad idea, but as I've no actual game experience I really don't know. Any feedback would be welcome.

Well, you're probably in the wrong section, but yes, the army-type you have laid out is absolutely possible, it is even highly competitive. With the new codex, mech-guard with vets backed up by heavy support is a very competitive playstyle, check out battlereports titled IG gauntlet games + I think shep's games. Two players that have tested mech-guard against the toughest builds out there right now

Illumini wrote:Well, you're probably in the wrong section, but yes, the army-type you have laid out is absolutely possible, it is even highly competitive. With the new codex, mech-guard with vets backed up by heavy support is a very competitive playstyle, check out battlereports titled IG gauntlet games + I think shep's games. Two players that have tested mech-guard against the toughest builds out there right now

Oh, sorry about that, this was my first post here. What section should I be putting this in because I'm sure I'll have tons of follow up questions. i want to check it all out before I buy those models.

Thanks for the heads up on the battle report. I thought there might be some craziness to taking all vet squads instead of standard platoons and platoon command squads, but it sounds like it can be done.

If those questions are mainly about mech-guard tactics, then you are probably in the right place, but if they are mainly about the vostroyan model-line, I would probably go with general discussion.

You've identified the main modelling problem - there are only a limited number of Vostroyan models, so you're going to need to do a whole lot of converting, and converting them isn't that easy (as opposed to some other regiments, especially plastic ones). You could maybe save a little money by having 'lowly' units like Penal troops in more humble generic uniforms rather than the fancy uniforms of your 'proper' elite Vostroyans (who will naturally want someone to look down on).

From a Tactics perspective, I see no problem with a mechanised army list as Illumini says.

So I say go for it, so long as you're a keen converter.

In addition to going mechanized the main concern I have is going all vets and all carapace armor on every squad, is that going to get me completely killed and only make my opponent laugh?

Yeah, I wish there was a plastic vostroyan or plastic karskin kit that could be bashed.

I really just want to increase the point cost of my standard units so I don't have to buy a billion and a half guardsman and then paint them all, and if i went carapace I really should do something like use vostroyan or karskin because I think it would be a little bit of a stretch to use normal cadians and just say they all had carapace armor.

If you really want them to be many points/model then just take them as vets, grenadiers doctrine (carapace armor), lots of special weapons, upgrades, etc.

Carapace is pretty decent value on mech-vets, you don't need it, but it is handy for when you get out of the chimera + when the chimeras blow up. Each squad will probably cost around 160pts + 55-65 for a chimera, so around 225pts for each troop-choice.

A basic set-up would be something like this, everything with a chimera, carapace and 3-4 special weapons. From that base, you add tanks and other stuff you want:
CCS
CCS

VS
VS
VS

So you see that a good base consist of 40 men, although if you really want to go low on men, you could go as low as 25, but then you're probably closing in on an armoured company instead.