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A thread for general discussion about IG.

In the fluff, the imperial guard is made up of millions of men, and thousands of tanks.
However on the tabletop i see mainly armour heavy lists.

What do people think about making guard abit more intune with the fluff of massed infantry being thrown into the meatgrinder?

But they DO have loads of tanks, you said so yourself!

I'm thinking more about the ratio of armour vs infantry. I always imagined an IG army of 100's of infantry backed up by a few bits of armour.
However i mostly see the bare minimum on infantry then everything else maxed out with armour.

Most Guard players I've come across (and that an't many were I dwel) don't like the losses we have to endure during a battle, lots will say thats part'n parcel with being a IG player so to counter the high atrition rate we have moved over to a heavy armour lists...no one likes seening huge swaths of our force being chopped up by chainswords by power armoured clad psychotics.

That being said I run a heavy Armoured Sentinal list with a singel Hydra, two LRBT's four Chimmies (the chimmies are for the CC and PIC or Vets if I use them). Its by no means a competative list but its resonably well rounded one and verry fluffy for the 142nd's background story.

The forces used in 40k don't represent anything approaching a normal formation. Most armies rely on hand picked formations for most actions (marines of all stripes, eldar, dark eldar) while the hordes simply dont' have enough models to really represent the horde.

In the fluff (As in most real life armies) armor and infantry mix well above the company level. The idea of what's essentially a mechanized platoon (melta vets plus ccs) being supported by a mix of heavy armor, air support,and artillery is pretty preposterous for most actions.

I've always assumed that the game shows the main action, like in a movie. the endless waves are off in the distance.

Ribon Fox wrote:Most Guard players I've come across (and that an't many were I dwel) don't like the losses we have to endure during a battle, lots will say thats part'n parcel with being a IG player so to counter the high atrition rate we have moved over to a heavy armour lists...no one likes seening huge swaths of our force being chopped up

Yeah, tell it to the Soviets in World War 2. I think the guard force structure used to be quite good, based around Platoons with so many squads in a Platoon, fielding a single company of 3-4 Platoons would be impressive but still only 100-120 Men. The modern 5th edition means most players have 2 Power Blob squads, 6-8 Vehicles, a HQ Section then something like Ogryns , Ratling stormtroopers or a valkyrie and a Sentinel (because every guard player buys one, uses it and goes meh, never to buy another). Oh and buy a Vanquisher the AP on that makes MEQ's go splat even more than the standard BC.

5th Edition never really encapsulates the Grand feel of the imperial guard, APOCALYPSE games well thats another story!

Polonius wrote:

I've always assumed that the game shows the main action, like in a movie. the endless waves are off in the distance.

+1


The tabletop is a series of cutscenes, where the action is these 5-6 turns of gameplay.
The background covers the whole day, like the movie uses most of its play-time to get to the scenes, so fluff and game may never get identical.

Did you see anyone refueling or rearming anything? No, because the rules tell ya all participants have enough of it to cope with the turns of a game.
In the fluff, units do refuel, rearm , repair, sleep, eat, move on, a game would need another scale to cover that all. (raise tablesize, forces, time ).

Background may support more infantry than vehicles, still the men also are transported with vehicles and IG marching on foot for days isn't really an option
when you think of the effect railroads had in WWI. Remember every guardsmen has more imperial citizens supporting him, be it food, ammo, etc.

The impression of the IG is screwed if you just look at the illustrations from GW.
Generally amassed infantry would not survive in an environment where artillery, orbital bombardments, flyers and weapons with high rate of fire are available.
Thus most pics are like these old paintings of battles, lots of artistic freedom and usually the higher up in the foreground ( who payed for the painter ) got a
most heroic pose ,maybe even a horse to sit on...( whilst hiding in a bunker at the "real" battle ) .

Additionally the IG is standardized but still a contribution of thousands of different worlds, so tech level may vary and some of these worlds really put a lot of
ressources into the equipment of the IG regiment recruted. Common transports aren't seen in tabletop ( trucks for example ) and none of the supply units.
You see the armor, but you don't see the staff, supply and repair crews.
Tabletop is all about the cool impressive stuff, so valks and tanks, and why not?
IG has almost any possible build of army, but infantry is only one of them, not the only one.

I am aware of this crappy imagination of drowning the enemy in dead guardsmen. But thats not what tactica imperialis advices to do.

To mwnciboo;
I can understand where your comming from, back in the good old days of 2nd edition you could go mental with the number of IG squads due to the crappy Army points alocation system. As for the armour save, I didn't bother 90% of the time due to those pesky modifiers
Back when you could run bestmen hords as meat shields and the heavy weapons team could be left on there own as the rest of the squad moved foward, and the Orbital Bombardment rule and...Commisar Yarick the ard'ist man in the whole god dam game...opps...sorry..OT

My point is that it dosn't always have to be what the "Meta" crowd says it has to be. Granted Armour now plays a huge part on the table top now and rightly so, as the rule change so do our tactics. The mass infan gunline formation has a use, a time and a place.
Sadly it becomes nigh on imposible to use said tactic due to cost (Oh the cost!) and unsporting types that come running at you with aformentioned chainswords or worse, chainfists or lighting claws (remember those nightmares in 2nd?)
By all means if you can get the old WW1 gunline to work again then Kudos to you (and tell me how you did it )

Besides I like my Iron Chickens, thay always become a pain to the other player as they almost always discount them, at their own misfortune

If you take a look at the potential of the Guard list, they are indeed hordes of infantry paired up with a hellishly huge number of tanks. The IG army, disregarding point values and filling out all FOC slots, can have a mindboggling 120 some odd bodies for each Troop Choice. The next closest horde army comes to only a paultry 30 models per troop choice. On top of that, each Infantry Squad can have a Chimera, as well as the Command Squads. This combined with their option for tank squads brings the number of tanks they can potentially field to about 50 or so, whereas most other armies would be lucky if they can have 10 (the next closest would be the Blood Angels, being able to take 17 land raiders). And 40K is still largely small-scale skirmish like others have said. a true "battle" would be an apocalypse game, where there is literally swarms of guardsmen due to their low cost.

The new edition's enhanced vehicle favoring (I've only played this one, but this is what I've been told), irks me too. I'd like to rely primarily on infantry to get the job done. That really appeals to me. But I can't, because I have to deal with 3 LRBTs, Chimeras, and some Valkyries. So my Infantry stays in the transports, and something else deals with everything.

Unfortunately, this is the state of Warhammer today.

Imagine your forces are defending against an imperial guard beachead/foothold/planet strike, and you are facing their most elite armored divisions and special forces, while the rest of the guardsmen are waiting for a sizable beachhead to be established before joining the fight.

mace1024 wrote:A thread for general discussion about IG.

In the fluff, the imperial guard is made up of millions of men, and thousands of tanks.
However on the tabletop i see mainly armour heavy lists.

What do people think about making guard abit more intune with the fluff of massed infantry being thrown into the meatgrinder?

The IG has billions of regiments, each consisting of thousands of troops. Much like real armies, they have divisions and regiments composed entirely of armor and/or mechanized troops, as well as drop troops. There are far more armored regiments in the IG than there are Space Marine chapters by several orders of magnitude, and likewise, Mechanized regiments and airborne drop troop regiments. Even Krieg, famous for its footslogging Siege regiments, fields some mechanized and armored regiments. Armageddon fields almost exclusively armored and mechanized regiments, thousands of them.

There's nothing unfluffy about armor heavy IG armies. Certainly it's a lot more fluffy than many of the SM and Eldar lists you see flying around these days.

That said, even mechanized IG armies tend to have lots of infantry. My 17 vehicle list has 85 infantry in it still, about 33% more models just in infantry than you'll see in a MEQ or Eldar army.

mace1024 wrote:What do people think about making guard abit more intune with the fluff of massed infantry being thrown into the meatgrinder?

I'd think you play a horde guard army like I do.

Ribon Fox wrote:Most Guard players I've come across don't like the losses we have to endure during a battle

This is pretty much it.

Casualties are always shocking, and casualties that are supposed to represent human beings are all the more so. It's easy for one to feel bad for the "poor little buggers" and choose to eschew casualties, which, along with the fact that they're actually viable now, has lead to the increase in mech lists.

Meanwhile, if you play timidly with horde armies, you tend to lose. Even I call my battle report series "blood conquers all" to reinforce the fact that I win because I take casualties, not in spite of it...

Ailaros wrote:
Meanwhile, if you play timidly with horde armies, you tend to lose. Even I call my battle report series "blood conquers all" to reinforce the fact that I win because I take casualties, not in spite of it...

This actually irked my friend alot when he tried to play gunline guard. While he didnt scoff at the fact that his army outnumbered mine 4 to one (I was playing Nurgle Marines) he was fabbergasted at the difference in casualties (in reality though, he was beating my ass. Every turn he would kill one Plague Marine, wheras I would kill maybe 3 guardsmen per turn, which means he was still beating me by 7 points a turn). He eventually gave up the game due to one of my Oblits taking out his Russ's Battle Cannon (it was never destroyed or even stunned, the Battle Cannon ended up as the only thing I popped on the russ), but I think the psychological aspect of loosing so much more actual models took a toll on him.

Slowly moving masses of infantry with heavy tanks backing them up; platoons soaking up wounds like a sponge; the downpour of lasgun shots obliterating even space marines; that's what I think of when I hear of Imperial Guard, and that is the way my friend plays them. Slowly moving masses of infantry with armored support is the fluff, no?

Ribon Fox wrote:Most Guard players I've come across (and that an't many were I dwel) don't like the losses we have to endure during a battle, lots will say thats part'n parcel with being a IG player so to counter the high atrition rate we have moved over to a heavy armour lists...no one likes seening huge swaths of our force being chopped up by chainswords by power armoured clad psychotics.

That being said I run a heavy Armoured Sentinal list with a singel Hydra, two LRBT's four Chimmies (the chimmies are for the CC and PIC or Vets if I use them). Its by no means a competative list but its resonably well rounded one and verry fluffy for the 142nd's background story.

This man speaks the truth. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing 100 infantry swamp a small hold out of chaos marines.

There is nothing more dismaying to see them all cut down in sweeping advances and massed bolter fire. Not nice, not nice at all.

On the other hand, coming from a terminator focussed list with space marines, it is nice to know that every loss you take as imperial guard is exactly 1/8th of a terminator. I dare say 8 guardsmen would beat a lone terminator.

Ive had mephiston walk through 30 infantry and it honestly didnt phase me, its quite satisfying to see the look of glee on your opponents face to see so many models being removed and secretly know that he really only has killed 150 points of infantry.

I think it has more to do with most people not wanting to paint all the minis.

I have an infantry guard army. Yet to play it, but its going to be hard to deal with all the death it shall receive.

Jaon wrote: its quite satisfying to see the look of glee on your opponents face to see so many models being removed and secretly know that he really only has killed 150 points of infantry.

This is the consolation prize I often give to my opponents. They may have lost the game, but they DID get to kill a whole lot of guardsmen.

My "acceptable" range of casualties goes from 0% all the way up to 85%. A couple people have been able to break that threshold, but only about half of the time do they win.

I think Ailaros has a point. When going hoard, it is difficult to table that player.

MADLarkin wrote:I think it has more to do with most people not wanting to paint all the minis.

+3 QFT FTW. This is the real reason.

I just played a game with mostly infantry. Instead of vehicles i went with Heavy Weapon Squads. I had a few sentinels to flank, but it was my men that won the day. Its a pain to field that many models...i really dont like proxy-ing unless i have to. I say play your army as many different ways as you can. Find a meathod you like and go with it. And pretty much any Guard Force is fluffy...as long as you can give it a reason. I like the thought of it being cinematic, like a movie. I think thats right on.

I play Horde IG with combined squads (not cheap with Vostroyans, I tell). But I can also fit in a Leman Russ or two quite comfortable as well.

Polonius wrote:I've always assumed that the game shows the main action, like in a movie. the endless waves are off in the distance.

That's what I've always thought of it as. The tabbletop shows the critical point of the field, where the tide sways one way or another.

mwnciboo wrote:Oh and buy a Vanquisher the AP on that makes MEQ's go splat even more than the standard BC.

Huh? Please tell me you mean the Executioner.

I play guard Swarms. I have Roughly 260 guardsmen.
I have 10 tanks/Aircraft.

I say thats fluffy.

Ah yes did I say that only 90 are unpainted?
Well I did now. Painting them is the easy part.

Terminus wrote:

mwnciboo wrote:Oh and buy a Vanquisher the AP on that makes MEQ's go splat even more than the standard BC.

Huh? Please tell me you mean the Executioner.

Lol. With the vanquisher, you only make one marine dead at a time, but BOY does it make him dead...

The really strange thing about this comment is that the battlecannon's Ap3 already makes them go splat. It's not like a demolisher or something else would make them any deader.