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I have yet to play them - rookie yes.

Everyone at the FLGS talks about them as if they can dish out huge pain.

Talk of psychic powers making your leadership zero, massive gun lines and so forth.

What makes them tick, what are their favourite tricks or 'cheese' and how do you give yourself (as SM or CSM player) a better than average chance of beating them?

Imperial Guard is my feared army because they can hurt me 2+ turns before i can begin to hurt them (most games). As a tyranid player I need to be close to dish out the pain, while IG (and to a degree Tau) prefer to keep the fight at longer than arm's reach and shoot all day. Tau don't have as many strong shots but have higher mobility with their crisis suits, while IG are fairly sit-and-shoot with much higher strength guns and templates and blast markers.

Lots of players detest losing 1/2 to 3/4 of their models in the first couple turns of the game, so i would Imagine that is why IG is a 'feared army'

PS they are not impossible to beat. I have done it a few times, as unlikely as that may sound.

Leman Russ / Basilisk in back lines with a chimera wall in front.

Vendetas outflanking same as bane wolfs.


Basically yeah I fear when ever I see a guard army if cover saves wernt so easy to get I probaly wouldent be as scared but due to they are even guard without chimeras are hard to kill.

I've vsed guard two times lost both times and allied with them onece and massacred some poor marines, it was the guard that did most things .

YOu also have to remember that guard can pretty much out number any army as well. If you do the all infantry army which I field, you are looking at over 150 guardsmen in 1500 points. No upgrades, just strictly flashlights and heavy weapons. It can be a power house to those armies that can't shoot much.

However, they key to beating guard is not in wiping them from the table, but in focusing on the objective. If you get a kill points scenario, you are in good shape as you can probably wrack up some kill points extremely quickly.

Cliff's Notes version:

IG has a plethora of high strength weapons ranged 36"+. They can touch you on turn one, and many armies can't touch them back. And by "touch", I mean "knock your head clean off".

IG has greater special weapon density than most armies, especially MEQ armies. Combine this with the previous point, and you're damned if you do and damned if you don't; you can't afford to sit back and get shot to pieces, but advancing means you simply get shot by more guns.

AV12 vehicles are a 'sweet spot' that makes even modestly strong heavy weapons (Str 7, Str 8) unreliable. When every vehicle is AV12 or higher, and there's fifteen of them sitting on the table, the armored wall is monstrously tough to crack.

IG armies are literally two armies; the first army you deal with is the vehicle wall, the second army you deal with is the guys inside of the vehicles. This makes them hard to deal with by assault-centric armies, who wreck a transport, and then eat the special weapons fire of the guys inside.

IGs can manipulate their reserve rolls. This means that even if they're going second, they can leave everything in reserve and go 'first' again with 2/3 of their army. No matter what, the opponent is getting alpha struck.

Guard are powerful, but they also have some pretty big weaknesses.

First of all, anti-tank. Yeah, I know. The thing is, almost all of their long range vechiles are firing blast, barrage, or ordnance, using a BS of 3. These are not accurate weapons. They are terrifying because of the blast, but they don't hit their mark that reliably.

Other than their tanks, IG can take lascannons and autocannons on their troops. Autocannons are pretty flippin' fantastic against rhinos and landspeeders, but anything tougher than that and they start to look pretty lame. And their lascannons are innacurate, expensive, and they are carried by paper infantry. The only way to make them accurate is "Bring it Down!" but that means the guys firing the lascannons are in the open, vulnerable to anti-troop fire and assault.

The one reliable long distance anti-tank weapon that IG has is the Vendetta, which is definitely awesome, and probably underpointed. But then again, flying around above all the cover saves is not where an AV12 vehicle wants to be. Missiles or lascannons will make quick work of vendettas, and they're always the #1 target because they're the one IG anti-tank unit that always hits its target from long range.

Now, IG's anti-tank is a lot more reliable up close. You can have triple melta veterans, and quad melta company command squads and platoon command squads, which can be augmented by "bring it down!" when required. But that's not all sunshine and lollipops either. You have to get awfully close to use meltaguns, and IG up close will DIE. It doesn't really matter who they're fighting, they're just ridiculously fragile. And once they're up close, the unified wall of AV12 chimeras turns into a series of AV10 sides, i.e. a bunch of smoking craters. Not to mention that if they can get close enough to melta you, you can melta them back.

IG is an army that depends pretty strongly on going first, or at least having a really good first turn with its shooting. If IG doesn't pwn you on the first turn or two, it's not gonna, not if you're a close-up army with some assault power. IG do sort of have assault defense, like stubborn blob squads and a Straken mega-unit, but neither of those are ideal. The stubborn blobs might suck to assault, but flamers still evaporate them, and it's not all that hard to actually beat your way down to the last man as long as you soften them up first. And Straken costs a boatload of points, and his unit is still quite fragile, relying on 5+ saves with FNP.

The Psyker Battle Squad is a nice unit for sure, but it only seriously messes up enemies on foot who have no leadership defense or psychic defense (can you say "Tau and Necrons"? ). And the PBS is a lot more fragile than most people think, you just have to open that chimera. Inside, you will find a bunch of guys with 5+ saves. Blowing up the chimera can kill half of them easily. Any Perils test kills d3 of them. And if you kill the Overseer, easily done with torrent of fire, they ALL DIE. Though TBH, if you torrent them with bolters, they're basically all dead anyway.

Anyway, I'm not saying Guard aren't good, they surely are. But they have some major weaknesses. Just recently I was trying to select a new army, and I was close to picking IG, but in the end I didn't do it because of the flaws I mentioned. They have too many important holes in their list that I don't like.

What concerns me about guard is the number of front armor 12 vehicles they can field. A lot of times, unless the whole purpose of your list it to kill AV 12, you will not have the firepower necessary to kill an fully mechanized IG army.

Playing SoB, I hate full mech IG. Throw a couple of decent tanks in the back some outflanking vens and it's an uphill fight.

Now if you were full infantry, that would be awesome.


It is always nids that give me the most trouble. Most of the games I've played against IG have been great, always on the edge until the very end of the game.

As for Chimeras, fast stuff S5ish zoom up the side as a counter. Generally you'd want stuff like Missile Launchers to deal with the armour, with the added ability to mop up the troops that fall out.

Draw the Leman Russes to where you want them, then Melta. Can be pretty hard to do, but using the surrounding cover to help works a fair bit. When that fails for me I march up a SoB sqaud with 2 meltas and a VSS with Melta-Bombs. Add Spirt of the Martyr after letting their numbers thin a bit, and it's fun to watch a small squad of Battle Sisters walk up towards a LRBT or Executioner, shots bouncing off them; only to unleash Meltary vengence on the tanks.

In grimdark 40K, the flashlight is the scariest thing...
____________

As I see it, it's the combination of mass bodies, mass armor, and mass shooting.
It's all intimidating no matter how actually efficient all that is.

Guard are countered by deep strikers and similair units. Since all guard tanks cept for the scout sentinel have front armour twelve at least, as soon as you get behind there gun line with melta and powerfists 'coughtermiescough' you can annihalate their tanks, who invariably have rear armour ten. Unfortunately, they have so much infantry it's sometimes impossible to get through them to the tanks. Plus, they're a fast army, with all the valks, stormies, chimeras and hellhounds so you cant count on being out of sight because then they'll come to you. The only thing that can safely beat guard all the time is other guard, if its a typical ig gunline vs a mix of bassies (to get rid of the guardsmen), stormies (to get behind the tank line) and a line of hws to stop chimeras or hellhounds from straying too close. Also, massive amounts of melee units 'coughnidscoughorkscough' can overwelm them in cc where theyre weakest.

Guard is the reason I take a mixed force of drop pods and rhinos. I try to bring 3 of each. In all the forces I play.

IG hurt. I know people say they miss allot but man when they don't miss stuff just melts. the scarriest thing is facing a really good IG player. The Vendetta is just an overkill vehicle in my opinion. and whoever gave it the ability to outflank must really love the guard.

Ixe wrote:Guard are powerful, but they also have some pretty big weaknesses.
...

Thanks for your excellent post.

As an imperial guard player, I can honestly say I've lost a fair number of games. As such, the guard are beatable (at least, if you're playing against me). There are two big things I'd note about the guard.

1.) the guard is a fear-based army. It has artillery that can wipe out half your army turn 1. It can present 10 AV12 targets per 1000 points, or it can throw 150 infantry models at you per 1000 points. The guard is cheap, which means it is redundant. Good guard commanders generally spam at least one type of thing with the purpose of overwhelming you in the deployment phase with the purpose of getting you to deploy/move in the way THEY want you to. This is only more achieved through some specific fear units like vendettas, manticores and psyker squads. A such, the first thing you need to do against a guard player is to grit your teeth.

2.) the guard is a specialist army. Guard units are cheap enough and specializable enough that in the hands of a competent player they can do some VERY scary amount of damage. Nobody fears the guard player who takes a bunch of autocannons and a couple lascannon+heavy bolter leman russes. Everybody fears the guard player who brings two manticores, two hellhounds and a hedge of 3x meltagun squads. If the guard commander can put the right units at the right place at the right time, they will always grossly out-power you in any particular local engagement. Furthermore, units are so cheap that it's not that you're fighting ONE specialized unit, like the one whirlwind or the one ironclad drednought in a space marine army. No, with the guard you're fighting 3 manticores, or 6 3x meltagun SWSs. Just killing a unit or two does not neutralize their effectiveness.

Of course, specializing does come with liabilities. The first liability is that guard units are universally fragile. As such, if you have the mobility or length of reach of guns to pour a lot of firepower on a single unit type. If your opponent forgot to bring several extra units that are good against heavy armor (like if they're relying only on tanks to get rid of your heavy armor), then it is very possibly to strip your opponent of all of their anti heavy armor. Good commanders will always have redundancy, but bad commanders won't, and even the good ones still have to deal with this liability inherent to their army.

The second major liability to the imperial guard is that they're slow. Vehicles can only move 6" and still put down their infamous firepower. Same for troops. They have some units that can temporarily move fast (like deepstriking or outflanking), but once they hit the board, they all move at the speed of foot. Even their dedicated transport is neither fast, nor is it a skimmer, nor can it deepstrike, making even a mechanized guard list look slow by comparison. The whole point with speed is that it allows you to try and gain local fire superiority. This will be difficult if your opponent is good with movement and deployment, but it's far from impossible. Once you crack the shell, your guard opponent is going to be forced to scramble to bring slow reinforcements to plug the gap, meaning that once you attain local fire superiority, it's actually not all that difficult to KEEP it.

As such, defeating a guard army is much more nuanced than identifying their cheese unit and killing that, and then running over everything else. Defeating a guard army means studying their lists for weaknesses you can exploit and then taking advantage of their mistakes in deployment to apply firepower to their own high-firepower, but very low durability units.

Hope this helps.

I've vsed guard two times lost both times

You've vsed twice and lost

does this mean you have just recited poetry at them.
I think IG are immune to such tactics but I could be wrong.

Im thinking all the infantry can be handled

Its the tanks and artillery in discussion above which sounds scary

Solution seems to be:

1. Long range Lascannon shots from cover - troops with lascannon, maybe in rhino or behind a hill etc, Devestators/Havocs
2. Infiltrated or podded meltaguns
3. Land Raider Godhammer ( )
4. Orbital strike

Otherwise (less attractive) is termis with chainfists/combimelta - but like above my guess is easy to bog them down

Anyone have experience dealing with Manticores and Deathstrike missiles?

In the case of Sisters, it's high-strength AP3 pieplates that annoy me, especially combined with autocannons.

I wouldn't call it fear, but the puzzlement trying to balance of trying to kill footsloggers or tanks. Almost every army has some problem when playing against Guard.

Every army (except possibly Tau) can't out shoot the Guard. Either they lack range or the volume of deadly templates.

Pretty much every army can whip (Kroot yes, Tau no) the poor IG in CC, but getting there could be hard.

Loricatus Aurora wrote:Im thinking all the infantry can be handled
Anyone have experience dealing with Manticores and Deathstrike missiles?

As a Guard player... I'll let you know practically no one uses the Deathstrike.

The Manticore, on the other hand....I would say DS a pod with, well, anything, the AV is 12/10/10, so if you go to the side, it's pretty dang easy to pop. Remember, a single weapon destroyed result kills all the remaining rockets.

Gavo wrote:

Loricatus Aurora wrote:Im thinking all the infantry can be handled
Anyone have experience dealing with Manticores and Deathstrike missiles?

As a Guard player... I'll let you know practically no one uses the Deathstrike.

The Manticore, on the other hand....I would say DS a pod with, well, anything, the AV is 12/10/10, so if you go to the side, it's pretty dang easy to pop. Remember, a single weapon destroyed result kills all the remaining rockets.

Deathstrike = point sink. I really like the Manticore a lot, it can really put a hurting on a unit rather easily.

I'm scared of IG because I primarily play 'crons, and 'crons can't deal with IG armor very well.

Well, the deathstrike has a use: it's useful against people who are foolishly trying to run gunlines even though it's two editions out of date. "Oh, so you're castling, eh?"

As for artillery, drop pods full of meltaguns do very unfortunate things to them. This was already true in 4th ed, but it's even truer now that other things (like lascannons) aren't as useful against them. That or outflaking meltaguns. Or outflanking with meltabombs. Really, the issue isn't killing them, as they're very fragile - the issue is surviving long enough to get a few good shots in. Survival is greatly increased by things like showing up out of nowhere in a drop pod.

And as for facing infantry, you've got to be a little careful. Not only can they pack a lot of special weapons, but their metagame threat is more subtle (if not also more dangerous). I mean, sure, an infantry squad isn't going to do nearly as much damage as artillery, but it's got to be frustrating to blow 10 whole squads off an objective and still have there be five more squads on an objective (while there are still even more squads that are trying to contest yours). They don't need to do damage or even have particular durability in order to still win a guard player games.

What makes the IG so tough, at least in my opinion, is the codex is very undercosted on too many units for what they do. Then on top of this they have answers for pretty much everything that you can throw at them and their units have great synergy.

Chimera Armor 12 front with 5 fire points with a multi laser + Hvy Flamer or Hvy Bolter that carries 12 for only 55 points. Usually with 3 Melta guns inside with a hvy weapon using an autocannon. Some times 3 Plasma Guns instead of the Melta Guns.

Psychic Battle Squad Several uses. Lower their leadership and force break test with shooting or pinning and the target is testing with a ld of 2. Synergy combo this with a Calladius Assassin with a Neural Shreddar ( Flame Template with no armor save allowed, str is tested vs LD with the Neural Shreddar at an 9, So 8 vs LD 2 is 2+ to wound ).

Inquistor Lord with Mystics Old rules for Psychic hood which is the entire table rather then 24 inches such as a normal hood for psychic defense. Also any unit that deestrike with in 4d6" of this unit ( test is made immediate when they land ) the unit may fire at it, this is free shooting. The 2 Mystics allow another unit within 12" to take the shot instead, so my unit of x2 Medusa's will take the shot. No other army can untilize this ally nearly as well as IG.

Vandettas / Valks This unit with Veteran Troops inside with Melta bombs and Demolitions, can allow a first turn kill on a Land Raider. If you go first your opponent can do nothing about it. A very undercosted unit for what it does. Valks rain down destruction and become a total thorn in your butt until you deal with it, but for 150ish points its worth being a fire magnet.

Hydras Great unit but you need to get it from Forge World or model it yourself. This unit is the answer to skimmers and melta bikes as they get no special saves for turbo boosting or moving flat out. Doubles up as a great anti light vehicle gun as well

Manticore The unit that makes people pay for grouping to closely to each other. Only 4 turns worth of shooting but almost pays for itself and then some in spades.

Medusa This is my personal favorite, some other IG may very but usually take 2 and it rocks the field with heavy fire. Also is clutch or broken when used in combo with Inquisitor Lord and Mystics.

Straken This character has insane stats and force multiplier abilties that put most 200+ Marine HQ to shame for only 95 points.

Orders Need a target to gain no cover? Np. Need that unit of 50 IG to get 3 shots each rather then 2? Np. Need your heavy weapon teams to get twin linked weapon shots? Np. Need to move at double speed? Np

Officer of the Fleet and Astropath Not flashy units but they can cripple the opponent with subtle table wide abilities. -1 to opponents reserve rolls and flanking units can be made to reroll the side they come in on. The other allows your units to gain a +1 on reserve rolls.


Some of these by themselves is no big deal. When its combines together is when you go oh my god, what the hell were they thinking. If I am missing any other combos, forgive me as I type this in some what haste.

When I play nids I infiltrate a squad of 20 Genestealers with a Broodlord as close to the IG as possible while still trying to get a 4+ cover save from terrain. They hide behind the terrain and wait until any gaurd or rear AV 10 vehicles appear then lay into them. IG can be slaughtered in CC and against a vehicle, with 42 rending S4 attacks I can normaly achieve at least three rolls on the AP table. I tend to heavily rely on cover when facing them and try to cause chaos on turn 2 with a deepstriking Trygon Prime which can unload 12 shots on the nearest IG unit and some raveners which can fire their thorax deathspitters. It normaly causes a large amount of casualties.

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:

I've vsed guard two times lost both times

You've vsed twice and lost

does this mean you have just recited poetry at them.
I think IG are immune to such tactics but I could be wrong.

No being is immune to bad poetry.

Maybe Dark Angels should go write some bad emo poetry then, it might increase their W/L ratio.

I can still never understand why an IG Chimera is better armored than a Space Marine Rhino.

Rhinos have to divert more power to the engines to transport three hundred kilogram badasses and lose out on the shield/weapon/engine ratio.

Gavo wrote:Remember, a single weapon destroyed result kills all the remaining rockets.

Where did you get that from? It's not armed with a manticore launcher, it's armed with 4xStorm Eagle Rockets.

eNvY wrote:I can still never understand why an IG Chimera is better armored than a Space Marine Rhino.

It doesn't. The armor is just more focused towards the front than the Rhino's armor.

The Chimera is designed to move in formation, helping to prevent side armor shots. The Rhino is designed for rapid deployment and swift maneuvers, and so its side armor increased at the cost of its front armor.

*mutters something unkind about Chibi Bodge-Battle's signature image... or more appropiately, how damn huge it is*

Huh, that is a damned interesting argument,Scott. I cannot find anything conclusive against it. Looks like my two Mantis just got a lot cooler!