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"I'm not much of a gamer, but a suicide SWS in an outflanking Valk with 3 demo charges sounds absolutely awesome"
I dont have my codex on me ATM but i dident know they could do that.

i always bring mine with flamers and deploy them infront of the rest of the platoon.
its a cheep squad thats quite effective for orks and nids, and if they get assaulted they most likely will get killed, letting me get another round of shooting in. (if the person im fighting getd that close)

ZOMBIE CAT wrote:"I'm not much of a gamer, but a suicide SWS in an outflanking Valk with 3 demo charges sounds absolutely awesome"
I dont have my codex on me ATM but i dident know they could do that.

I don't have mine handy either, but I'm sure you can put them in a Valk - just get the Valk to outflank by using CREEEED or something...

All Valkyries can outflank, you don't need Creed. Seriously, people, this is elementary stuff. RTFM

The dodgy BS skill is a risk but over all take them for nice concrete box openers. Your assualting troops will thank you.

I ment the part about giving them 3 demo charges, i thought they could only take one.

i dont use the demo charges that often, IIRC its a 20pt thing, so if your takeing 3 of them, at +60 pts, you might as well just take vets.

Fantastiawesome.

Well Iv just put my order into FW. Going to start with 500pts of IG get a feel for the army and then expand them.

This is the 500pt list if anyones interested.



I'll have plenty of special weapons extra so as I expand the army I'll give the SWS a go and see if they work out for me or not.

Your infantry platoons need upgrades. No exceptions.

If you're going to get special weapons because you're thinking of putting them in SWSs, then still get them, but put them in your PISs and PCSs instead.

The only special weapons I could have afforded would have been flamers or grenade launchers, both of which dont seem that amazing.

When I expand the army I'll mosy likely put some special weapons in the platoons.

At 500pts I dont see it being much of an issue.

Flamers are good, and grenade launchers are better than nothing.

Didnt actually realise that grenade launchers had a split profile, they dont seem so bad now.

They are. Instead of having one useless profile, they have two worthless profiles.

Flamers likewise are pretty bad. In a few circumstances they can be good, but getting into those circumstances is nearly impossible without deepstriking or from a deep defensive position.

It's kind of sad that the weapons you get in the box are basically the worst options you can take in a squad. On the plus side, with a little knifework, those flamer and grenade launcher arms can be used to have them carry plasma and meltaguns.

I dont think I would be using flamers much.

But surely for a few pts a grenade launcher isnt that bad?

If you have absolutely nothing to spend the points on. Most cases, I think I'd rather have a sniper rifle, which at least comes with rending and the long shot pinning. Furthermore, if you're talking about 10 points for two grenade launchers, you're talking about 10 points that could have been spent on a meltagun, or an autocannon, or a power weapon, or other things that will kill more, bigger, or more consistently.

Gasp! Ailaros recommending an autocannon in any circumstance?!

*looks to the sky to see if it's falling... it is*

Don't misconstrue my support for the autocannon here as love for the autocannon, so much as a less burning hatred than for the grenade launcher.

So far people seem mostly to say, your infantry guys need upgrades, just not really flamers or launchers.

I dont see myself putting a heavy weapon in the infantry units because most of the heavy weapons I have I see as taking out high toughness targets/light vehicles. Flashlights arent good for that so the squads shots would be wasted when shooting at these targets.

SWS seem to only be good for suicide missions because they will be priority targets. That and if your taking plasma you might as well go vets for more bodies/better bs.

This leaves me with having special weapons in the CCS and/or PCS.


I think what will happen is I will just end up trying a bunch of combinations with the special weapons and see what works best for me in my games.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ailaros wrote:Don't misconstrue my support for the autocannon here as love for the autocannon, so much as a less burning hatred than for the grenade launcher.

Lol ok.

So, the deal with upgrades. Yes, the primary weapon of a guard squad is its small arm, and it would be a mistake to only look at the squad by means of its upgrades. However, upgrades are still worth taking.

The main reason for this is because of efficiency of killing power. Yes, I know that shooting a meltagun at a tank is wasting the other lasguns, but there's more to it than that.

When you give a guardsman a meltagun, you are increasing the cost of the squad by 10 points, and by the opportunity cost of losing the lasgun. For this cost, however, you receive a benefit. In this case, it's greatly improving the squad's effectiveness (by allowing it to kill vehicles), for a pretty small cost increase. The overall killing power to points ratio is actually improved.

Furthermore, you are saving on the overhead cost of carriers. If you don't want dreads to charge into close combat and screw up your infantry squads, you need to have some meltaguns nearby to discourage that kind of behavior. If you give three infantry squads a meltagun, you're just paying for the meltaguns. If you give the infantry squads nothing and take a seperate SWS, you're paying the cost of the guns AND the base cost of the SWS. Once again, the upgrades are more efficient (assuming that you're only upgrading squads that you would have brought in the first place).

Secondly, upgrades give you better effectiveness overall because of things that play out on the field. If you give your troops upgrades, they're no longer relying on other units (which may be dead) to handle things for them. This kind of "insurance" makes your army more durable over all. Also, while SWSs may give you the ability to concentrate your firepower a little better, making every unit effective by giving them upgrades means that you've got better coverage of your killing power. Nobody likes being attacked where they didn't have killing power nearby to stop it.

Upgrades are more reliable, because at least some of the weapons will always be where they are needed, on more, tougher to kill units, that can't just be picked off by focused enemy fire and thus cause the rest of the list to be critically unsupported in some way and ultimately fall apart. Add to this the fact that you get more killing power over all, due to increased efficiency, and the case for taking weapon upgrades wherever you can is rather compelling.

On a final note, I'd add that you also need to take time into consideration here. A single squad with a few different upgrades and some small arms doesn't need to be doing the same thing EVERY turn. A meltagun only needs one shot to "earn its points back", which means a meltagun can still be worth bringing even if the squad spends the other 5 turns shooting at targets that the meltagun isn't particularly good against. I'm currently setting up my infantry squads with power weapons, meltaguns and lascannons for this very reason. Turn one (and maybe 2), the lascannons open up and will probably deliver on their cost in the initial volley(s). Then, for the rest of the game, they can go after stuff to FRF with lasguns or BiD with meltaguns, whichever seems most valuable (note that they actually have the option of pursuing what is more valuable, an option lacking without upgrades), and the power weapons mean that the blob as a whole can't just be sucker-punched in close combat (and can charge stuff of opportunity).

Without upgrades, the unit has to more or less rely on what my opponent chooses to be, and how he presents those units to me. If there isn't anything that is within striking distance that lasguns are good against, then that squad is just dead weight on my list. The main reason I dislike grenade launchers and flamers is precisely for this reason. Those weapons only do what lasguns already do, which means that the squad has the same capabilities and limitations, but is now slightly more expensive.

With good upgrades, the unit can handle any unit at any range. There are no obvious weaknesses, and the unit has the ability to handle whatever would be the most valuable thing to handle at any given time. What my opponent brings and what he does with it has much less impact on my ability to get what I want. Moreover, the units are more self-sufficient, which means that they don't have to hope and pray that other units aren't neutralized before they're needed most. More predictability, more durability, more killing power.

Take weapon upgrades.

special weapn squads with meltas drive my deathwing nuts.

nuff. said

Aye my mate hates the flamers, especially with the loss of consolidation into units in this edition. I can have a unit go down to boyz and know the Special Flamer squad will rip them a new one in my following turn.
Its very rare a guard unit survives contact with a twelve man trukk mob.

Of course if I didn't play Orks 80% of the time, I'm sure I would shuffle other things in. However for me and the circustances I find myself in, Flamers are pretty awesome.

Ailaros wrote:So, the deal with upgrades. Yes, the primary weapon of a guard squad is its small arm, and it would be a mistake to only look at the squad by means of its upgrades. However, upgrades are still worth taking.

The main reason for this is because of efficiency of killing power. Yes, I know that shooting a meltagun at a tank is wasting the other lasguns, but there's more to it than that.

When you give a guardsman a meltagun, you are increasing the cost of the squad by 10 points, and by the opportunity cost of losing the lasgun. For this cost, however, you receive a benefit. In this case, it's greatly improving the squad's effectiveness (by allowing it to kill vehicles), for a pretty small cost increase. The overall killing power to points ratio is actually improved.

Furthermore, you are saving on the overhead cost of carriers. If you don't want dreads to charge into close combat and screw up your infantry squads, you need to have some meltaguns nearby to discourage that kind of behavior. If you give three infantry squads a meltagun, you're just paying for the meltaguns. If you give the infantry squads nothing and take a seperate SWS, you're paying the cost of the guns AND the base cost of the SWS. Once again, the upgrades are more efficient (assuming that you're only upgrading squads that you would have brought in the first place).

Secondly, upgrades give you better effectiveness overall because of things that play out on the field. If you give your troops upgrades, they're no longer relying on other units (which may be dead) to handle things for them. This kind of "insurance" makes your army more durable over all. Also, while SWSs may give you the ability to concentrate your firepower a little better, making every unit effective by giving them upgrades means that you've got better coverage of your killing power. Nobody likes being attacked where they didn't have killing power nearby to stop it.

Upgrades are more reliable, because at least some of the weapons will always be where they are needed, on more, tougher to kill units, that can't just be picked off by focused enemy fire and thus cause the rest of the list to be critically unsupported in some way and ultimately fall apart. Add to this the fact that you get more killing power over all, due to increased efficiency, and the case for taking weapon upgrades wherever you can is rather compelling.

On a final note, I'd add that you also need to take time into consideration here. A single squad with a few different upgrades and some small arms doesn't need to be doing the same thing EVERY turn. A meltagun only needs one shot to "earn its points back", which means a meltagun can still be worth bringing even if the squad spends the other 5 turns shooting at targets that the meltagun isn't particularly good against. I'm currently setting up my infantry squads with power weapons, meltaguns and lascannons for this very reason. Turn one (and maybe 2), the lascannons open up and will probably deliver on their cost in the initial volley(s). Then, for the rest of the game, they can go after stuff to FRF with lasguns or BiD with meltaguns, whichever seems most valuable (note that they actually have the option of pursuing what is more valuable, an option lacking without upgrades), and the power weapons mean that the blob as a whole can't just be sucker-punched in close combat (and can charge stuff of opportunity).

Without upgrades, the unit has to more or less rely on what my opponent chooses to be, and how he presents those units to me. If there isn't anything that is within striking distance that lasguns are good against, then that squad is just dead weight on my list. The main reason I dislike grenade launchers and flamers is precisely for this reason. Those weapons only do what lasguns already do, which means that the squad has the same capabilities and limitations, but is now slightly more expensive.

With good upgrades, the unit can handle any unit at any range. There are no obvious weaknesses, and the unit has the ability to handle whatever would be the most valuable thing to handle at any given time. What my opponent brings and what he does with it has much less impact on my ability to get what I want. Moreover, the units are more self-sufficient, which means that they don't have to hope and pray that other units aren't neutralized before they're needed most. More predictability, more durability, more killing power.

Take weapon upgrades.

Well I do think that if Im going to give my infantry upgrades it would be meltas and power weapons because they seem the most useful for lessening the weaknesses of the infantry. (Combat and vehicles)


The main reason I have a dislike for anti-tank weapons in infantry killing units is because of my DE, I like having units specialised for different roles rather than multi purpose. For the DE it worked well for me.

Thats whys Im building a 500pt list first so I can get a feel for the army, I suspect going peoples opinions of the guard that they are better off being tooled up for multiple roles rather than specialised.