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Thought that occurred to me as I sit here, clipping and filing and gluing (even more) guardsmen - how many individual guardsman models do you, Dakka-ites, reckon there ought to be in an IG army? How about in mech? Or in gunline? Or in powerblob? You get the idea! Nevermind (for the moment) the tanks, artillery, all that gubbins - what about the poor little grunts who carry the lasguns and their command squads?

A minimum of 50 for an all veteran army.
For a platoon based army... well that's gonna be a touch more.

I see your questions and raise you a "How many points?"

there is never too many. the imperium never runs out of men, just points to fit them all into.

Depends. Usually, it's 1 squad per 500 points, but for IG, I'd say 2 per, especially with platoons. For powerblobs it's more like 3 per 500.

6 full strength platoons obviously.

You'll need to find people that play with the whole game store, instead of just one table.

I ran about 100 in a 1750 point game yesterday, but I had plenty of armored support and 10 were Stormtroopers. I can't think of a really good rule of thumb; you just figure out how many feel "right" after playing a while.

Having been devilishly countered with a points query, I'll respond with '1500-2000' because >2000 is the land of 'oh sweet mercy what'.

Meanwhile I'll be over here... buying more men.

My short-hand is 1 blob (20 dudes huddling around a commissar) + 1 blob per 500 points. Assuming you do a cheap power blob option, this means you're spending 660 of 1500 points on 4 power blobs at that level, meaning you're not even spending half your points on the primary purpose of your army. Anyone who recommends less than that is probably recommending too few points spent on bodies in a foot horde.

My army comes in at 115 men at that points level with no particular effort to maximize or minimize bodies on the field. If you're going for a pure vets army you're unlikely to reach 100 men regardless of points limit. Short answer: I dunno, a hundred?

Mine totals in at ~70 in 1500 points. In a pure Vets army you won't get more than 70 Guardsmen on the field (6 x 10 Vets, 2 x 5 CCS) . In a platoon army? Well...depends how many boxes of troops you buy...

L. Wrex

The rule of thumb I'm building towards will be to have 1 guardsmen per 10 points (so 200+ in a 2000pt list). This is easy to build to even with weapons and such, but once you take some deep-striking stormtroopers, maybe marbo, etc, it gets below that. As long as have >150 in a 2000 point list, I'd say it's still a true horde army.

You can never put enough squishy humans between your Leman Russ' and the enemy!

My hybrid list at 1500 tends to have about 67-77 guys in it. That's counting HWS as 6 guys. A lot of it depends on what type of list you run. If you're a horde player like Ailaros or i-bounty... then you'll have more, if you're running mech vets then you'll have about 70-80 absolute max.

I own well over 100 Guardsmen, probably closer to 200
____

Hmm... Probably more like:
200 "Imperial Guard" infantry
100 "Witch Hunters" infantry

Including vets, penal legion, Special. Heavy, and command, I've got about 111 guardsmen. I don't have a tweaked tourney army, but I always liked the idea of the classic guardsmen army so mine leans toward a fairly static gunline of guardsmen and tanks. I don't play much, but I figure that's enough for me for anything up to 2000 points or so. Still I do occasionally entertain the idea of building a few more platoons as an excuse to buy some figures other than the Pig-Ironed Cadians I have now.

Guard Horde 1850 = 147 models, although 10 of those are Heavy Weapons teams.

2 Auto cannons, 6 lascannons, and 7 heavy bolters(1 on harker).

10 plasma guns, 10 Grenade launchers, and 9 Flamers.

I could Shave off another 80 points in upgrades to add a Heavy Weapon squad with 3 Autocannons.

I have enough guardsmen to prevent any deepstrikes from landing on my table edge. No power blob yet, but it seems like an excellent idea from what I read on other threads.

Thousands.

I have 100 in my apoc list

There is just one answer to this question.
It doesn't matter what point level, what list or what tactics, the following rule ALWAYS applies:
There are never enough Guardsmen on the field.

My ork playing friend and I have a similar philosophy when it comes to solving problems on the table: "throw more boys/guardsmen at it"

In my last match I ran 80 guardsmen, 2 PCS, Straken, 3 HWS, 10 Stormies, 2 vendies, a valk, marbo, a punisher, and a demolisher. Needless to say, I was angry when we rolled for spearhead as deployment... to sum it up, if you need to ask, you don't have enough guardsmen