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okay, so i was reading through the new November White Dwarf magazine, and as usual the first thing i turn to is the Battle report.
It was as usual, Imperial guard VS another race. This time it was Dark Eldar.
I Cant believe how bad the imperial guard get beat in almost every single battle in a white dwarf magazine.
Has anyone else noticed this? or is it just me who is an imperial guard player>?

The imperial guard have lost since 2009 :
*Tyranids
*Eldar x2
*Dark Eldar
*Orks
etc

Any reasons behind such a large lossing streak???????
:L
sorry if any one is offended by this, i just had to tell people about this lossing streak in the White Dwarf magazines.

IG are an easy whipping boy to pin up when something needs to look good. You aren't going to get the same level of butt-hurt when IG get beat as if the Ultramarines lose a game ("oh god, they can't ever lose!") and they are ubiquitous, they have clear reason to fight just about anybody. The White Dwarf crew also plan out battles and results in advance. They've flat out said that they replay something until they get the result they want or just re-write it. Their objective *most* of the time is not to portray realistic games (they make all sorts of rules and army errors all the time), but to push product.

IG get massacred in the fluff all the time. Compared to the average Guardsman, just about anything is dangerous. One Hormagaunt isn't going to scare a Space Marine, but dear lord that lasgun-clutching Guardsman is good as hamburger.

I suspect it's down to this.

Folks who buy guard know they are 'just poor old humans fighting and dying in droves against all the gribbly things of the galaxy' so don't blink or worry overly when they lose their umpteenth battle report (due I might add to gakky army lists, poor deployment and poorer play, did you see that list taken against dark eldar this month... mother of thraka that sucked balls aplenty!).

Space Marines are the poster boy of GW, they also tend to be sold in big numbers to a lot of the younger players (who also still buy the most White Dwarf magazines), if they started losing in battle reports, it might actual dent their sale or perception in the eyes of their prime market.

Marines always win! (unless they're space wolves and my orks are wearing them like a glove puppet...)

Guard had it so bad that their previous two bat-reps using a new codex resulted in losses. Granted, the 3rd edition codex army was run by Jervis (who laments his own lose streak many a time) and the 4th by Pete who did away with the most obvious choices and went for an all-infantry force because he felt like it, even going as far as predicting how it would end. The current codex bat-rep was a good one though, two out of three games ended in wins, not bad, but still a long way to go sadly.

It always made me and my gaming buddies chuckle, when WD had a battle report and they commented that 'the first time we ran this game it was over in 2 turns!' or some such.

Those games would have been more interesting to read about.

It doesn't help by the fact that the guard lists in said Battle reports are crap!

I think the reason is the guard has the bestest models overall, so they need to be showed off, so the new army being advertised always has to win so the kids will buy the new models thinking new models = easy win, so the guard end up always losing, except for when they're the new army.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect

Usually in Warhammer 40000 fluff and books. Anytime an army or faction is shown in a Codex or article not about them, you better believe they're getting their butts kicked by whoever it is featuring. The big hammer of the Imperium has to be shown getting its butt handed to it in order to show how serious the threat is.

Games in White Dwarf are marketing gimmicks, nothing more.

I have no confidence whatsoever that they even actually play a game for those battle reports. Really, it's taking things with cool models that GW wants to sell and then carefully positioning them to look awesome for a couple of blown-up pictures.

As far as I'm concerned, there isn't even a single die rolled.

Yea all the white dwarf battle reports might as well be fan-fiction.

Though even being lies, it's always nice to hear the guard losing.

I like fiction, that's why I get WD. I also like the pictures. It would be good if it wasn't a marketing gimmick, I mean, when I say the result of the battle reports I pretty much laughed it was so out of proportion.

I've seen a few batreps when the new army loses; it sticks in my mind for exactly the above reasons. (I don't keep all my old WDs, but didn't the skaven lose to dwarfs when their new codex came out?)

From reading WD reports, they seem to be based around fluff and, I assume, available painted models. So an army that needs to use some kind of extreme tactic to do well (an ork horde, or an IG mech force) is going to struggle against an enemy that is more all round (insert obvious example). I also suspect that, if you want to showcase a new army, you'd go for the better models with cooler effects.

Ultimately the same outcome, but possibly less deliberate by WD. I must be getting naive in my old age.

I think lots of people imagine the guard (at least fluff-wise) as being the underdogs who only manage to slow the tide of invasion. Myself included; I chuckle when something stupid happens that wipes out 10 guys in a single fell swoop. They're not superdoubleplusgood (x2) like space marines are. They're just ordinary guys in a sea of things that have railroad spikes for teeth or that can make minds explode from across a battlefield.

I know this issue of WD (and the batrep in particular) is getting a metric ton of grief, but one thing did strike me:

The Dark Eldar army in the batrep is ENTIRELY the new models (and not even all of those). None of the older units (Talos, haemonculi, warp beasts, etc.) were included. Clearly the batrep wants to showcase the new gorgeous models and not the old, ugly crap. In addition, it HAS to showcase whatever they have painted up at the moment.

Is it possible that hamstringing the Dark Eldar with those conditions meant that you would either need a totally lame Imperial Guard army, or one that would wipe the DE off the map? I mean, it seems like a tank heavy IG army would have creamed this army.

I'm not enough of a IG or DE player (at all), so I could be totally off base on this. However, it seems reasonable that such a restricted choice of units on the DE side meant that a lot of potential IG armies would have been a real mismatch.

The thing is, GW seems to really like showing off the Imperial Guard as an inept entity most of the time, full of clumsy soldiers with zero training and all those other things. The current codex certainly seems to share this view an awful lot, turning them into idiots that only hold the line because someone shouts at them to do just that. The way things are described right now it makes me wonder if the Macharian Crusades ever happened at all.

Here's a pretty good description of the Imperial Guard according to WTF, D&D?!:

Zack: Remember on the old GI Joe cartoons how whenever they had a really big job there would always be a bunch of those generic dudes in green uniforms hanging around? The Imperial Guard are those dudes.

Steve: They're not tough, but you get a lot of them.

Zack: They're so not tough that even their own book is full of pictures of them being killed by different aliens and enemies. The Space Marine book is all glory to the Space Marines as they gun down Orks or Eldar or whatever. The Imperial Guard are just straight up getting murdered in cold blood by whoever they are up against.

Steve: They make up for that with all of their sweet tanks though.

Zack: Yeah, tanks are real sweet. I like the artillery tanks that are super useful in a game where everybody is swinging chainsaws at each other. Maybe they could upgrade that so it has a giant bayonet on the barrel.

Steve: Or some tusks.

Anyone remember the craptacular movie Aliens Vs Predator:Requiem? There was a unit of National Guard (actors who couldn't even hold their rifles correctly) that were slaughtered wholesale by what appeared to be 2 or 3 aliens. THAT's the IG.

It's demoralizing at times seeing how everything in the game beats a guardsman. I just have to keep reminding myself that the 40k universe is horror. That Hive tyrants are basically all Alien queen size... that ork boyz are approximately the size of 3 Lou Ferrignos each... that one Space Marine is equivalent to the Master Chief from Halo on steroids, that Eldar can move faster than the human can blink, etc. etc. It's a huge, cruel, nasty and dangerous universe.

I like IG being a bunch of dummies with lasguns. There's plenty of elite armies out there if thats the theme you want. I always feel like IG are the underdogs, and that makes it more fun when they actually do win

From what I understand. White Dwarf used to be really cool way back when.

Honestly I read them around the time I started and all what they really do is cram pictures in your face and taunt you to buy them.

The only thing I really got out of them was this poster with all the Baneblade variants that is still on my wall.

Speaking of old issues, does anybody remember the issue where they had a bat-rep between Schaeffer's Last Chancers and an army of Chaos Marines? Complete with Dirty Dozen questionnaire that could net you a box of Last Chancers! "Where's Donald Duck?" Now that was a great issue that showed off some good Guard stuff.

Necros wrote:There's plenty of elite armies out there if thats the theme you want. I always feel like IG are the underdogs, and that makes it more fun when they actually do win

FTW

Does anyone remember when the 5th edition for the imperial came out and it was being showed off in the WD?
the triple battle reports?
haha! those people are so crazy! i was reading the army lists and looking at the pictures in the apocolypse battle (against chaos) and on the army list it shows three squads armed with flamers and lascannons. It says under the picture 'flamer and lascannon' and then i flick through the pictures of the battle...and what do you know....AUTOCANNONS INSTEAD -.-
i was confused for ages

AD YEAH wrote:Does anyone remember when the 5th edition for the imperial came out and it was being showed off in the WD?
the triple battle reports?
haha! those people are so crazy! i was reading the army lists and looking at the pictures in the apocolypse battle (against chaos) and on the army list it shows three squads armed with flamers and lascannons. It says under the picture 'flamer and lascannon' and then i flick through the pictures of the battle...and what do you know....AUTOCANNONS INSTEAD -.-
i was confused for ages

Now that, that is why WD is a piece of turd.

I remember before I took my 10 plus year break from the game when WD battlereports were actually good and Im sure they used to play them back then (hell I can remember an old IG vs Elder report that had proxied models for alot of the IG stuff) I miss old skool GW =(

was that battle report in the 80's/90's? cause i remember that one, my dad kept them since 85 and i loved goin through them...i think i know that one, and guard won it? :L
good times good times (:

Yeh the IG lists are bad that they use, plain bad.

Also IG feels like the guy from pro wrestling that no one can remembers name, just a guy to beat down and look good as far as white dwarf is concerned, the hard working downtrodden whipping boys of the emperor.

I think its done intentionally to illustrate the power of the newest army being promoted....I mean if you are new to GW and were interested in the newest release (DE), why would you want to buy them if you just saw them get served a loss in White Dwarf? Sorry to say....but i think GW treats the IG as a punching bag!

The problem with WD battle reports is that they have to use the studio collections for everything, which is full of stuff that just isn't that effective. If WD battle reports used the players' own armies instead that would be awesome. I have some issues from the early-mid 2000's that were like this, and the battles are a lot more interesting.

MunkeyKungFu wrote:It doesn't help by the fact that the guard lists in said Battle reports are crap!

That seems to be true for all armies selected in WD battle reports. It always seemed to me that whoever is playing in the WD battle reports just selects from what the 'Eavy Metal team has painted up for that particular army, and is kind of forced into his unit selections. And the 'Eavy Metal team only paints enough of a particular army to have a decent amount of examples from whatever Codex they are painting.

And its a damn shame. I used to love the old school battle reports that had armies painted by the dudes that are actually playing.

NELS1031 wrote:

MunkeyKungFu wrote:It doesn't help by the fact that the guard lists in said Battle reports are crap!

That seems to be true for all armies selected in WD battle reports. It always seemed to me that whoever is playing in the WD battle reports just selects from what the 'Eavy Metal team has painted up for that particular army, and is kind of forced into his unit selections. And the 'Eavy Metal team only paints enough of a particular army to have a decent amount of examples from whatever Codex they are painting.

And its a damn shame. I used to love the old school battle reports that had armies painted by the dudes that are actually playing.

This is exactly what I said right before you. I'm actually thinking of writing Jervis and asking about it, whatever good that will do.