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pretre wrote:You want a platoon of normal humans to take down superhuman armored marines, giant ork killers, daemons, aeons-old eldar, etc so on in the first turn? You might be asking a bit much of your guard.

Give them all shotguns/assault weapons like the one's I had mentioned to the OP earlier and I'd wouldn't think it impossible. Or are we delving into the fluff aspect of it?

AnomanderRake wrote:Assault from the back: Sure. Fine. How badly do you think you'll get shot up by the rest of the army on the way?

Wyches: How many? Sixty Wyches? That's your full Troops allotment there. Guard can put a hundred and fifty men on the table with one Troops choice. Are you still so confident of your Wyches' victory? How are you going to get them to close-combat without being chewed up by the blob squad's guns or it's supporting fire?

Kans/Blood Talons: Grenades on everyone, power fists on Commissar/officer.

Wraithlord: It has two Attacks. Assault it with one squad. There. It will never get anywhere or do anything for the rest of the game unless it gets a supporting assault. Congratulation. You've neutralized a 100+-pt-model with a 50-pt Guard squad.

AV11 front walker: Again, grenades. Volume of attacks will handle the whole 'roll against WS to plant' problem.

Kroot: How are you proposing to get into assault without getting shot to bits by the blob squad/their fire support?

10 Sisters with two flamers: Lasguns. Lots and lots of lasguns.

The point of the Guard assault unit in the current Codex isn't to kill stuff per se, it's to make sure all the stuff doesn't kill you. If the other guy's running an assault army, a thick wall of melee grunts in between them and the tanks can make the difference between life and death.

Frag Grenades are S4. Good luck damaging av11? S6 can't harm Av13 blood talons, and needs 4+ to hit and a 5+6 or 6+4 to bother kans in any meaningful way. Most fast skimemrs can move flat out to survive fire, and then move 12" to get over your blob. Tanks can tankshock 12" through it.

Let's do a quick comparison of wyches vs guardsmen in assault. ASsuming you get your power weapons to the fore...

15 Wyches with 3 shardnets and a heckatrix with agonizer is 210 points, meaning you already have a 40 point advantage. If you want a commissar, we can include an agonymonculus to even everything out. If you want to do even points, 10 wyches with 2 shards and an agony heck is 150, which is 3 infantry squads.

With the first example - 41 hits, 27 hit, 14 wound, 9 die. Agonizer 3 hit 2 wound 2 die. Assuming somehow that all remaining 39 hit back, we have 44 hits, 22 hit, 11 wound, 5 die. Ld is failed on 4+, wyches win initiative 3/4 of the time and sweep.

Second scenario, if not possible to kill the commissar, things go about the same on attacking, except you lose 2 more wounds. In return, you need to allocate 7 attacks to the haemonc to wound it, so unless you're doing that, things go the same +1wound from comms attacks and FNP brings back 3, meaning only 3 die. Ld is taken on Comm's unaltered ld, battle continues - 10 die on your side, but only another 2 on mine. Then 10 more, and another 1. Then you begin losing sergeants.

If hits are allocated to both commissar and haemonc, IG lose once commissar dies.

If even points, 18 hits, 9 wounds, 6 die, and 2 agony kills. Assuming all remaining 22 hit back, 25 hits, 13 hit, 7 wound, 3 die. Ld is failed on 4+.

Alternatively, 10 wytches stay in raider and shoot you with impunity for 200 points X6, assaulting when they can easily sweep you or get downed. If you're blobbing, you're spending much less on important things, like weapons. I can also send in units one at a time, to die on your turn, while I shoot you on mine.

Kroot: plenty of ways. the 75 points of kroot just have to reach your blob, they don't have to be all that I started with.

Lasguns can't hurt rhino delivery.

Guard blobs waste valuable points on a gimmick, and are only effective when fronted by power weapons, led by strakken, and loaded with fists. This will kill 1, maybe 2 small units before folding to any dedicated assault unit, or firepower, and wastes 750 points.

chrisrawr wrote:Guard blobs waste valuable points on a gimmick, and are only effective when fronted by power weapons, led by strakken, and loaded with fists. This will kill 1, maybe 2 small units before folding to any dedicated assault unit, or firepower, and wastes 750 points.

Even though I'm not a proponent of Guard Blobs, they do make a pretty good tar pit as a stand alone unit.

Alternatively, 10 wytches stay in raider and shoot you with impunity for 200 points X6, assaulting when they can easily sweep you or get downed. If you're blobbing, you're spending much less on important things, like weapons. I can also send in units one at a time, to die on your turn, while I shoot you on mine.

This is heresay. Going outside the comparison doesn't help your argument because the Guard can counter Raider Spam with impunity regardless of what troops you take.

For a single guardblob of 50 men you must spend at least 310 points (30 pcs, 30 commissar, 250 for 5 50 point infantry). If you buy only one of them, that's 4 hydras-worth of units. That's 2 meltavets in chimeras, or 1.5 in vendettas. Its a unit that can bring nothing to the table on its own, and when combined with the rest of the codex, is still not a good choice, as it's directly countered by popular options in most other codecies. If you add power weapons to it (you can add 10 normally), that's 410 points. "It does its job when I spend enough resources on it and support it with other units" means it doesn't do its job.

I'm not invalidating guard blobs as tarpits. They can hold most assaulters for 3-4 turns, this is not being disputed. I'm evaluating them against a cheap, popular assault unit with much less models and much more flexibility, and showing how easily they are NOT 'good in assault', or any variation of that idea.