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Just wanted to see what people had to say about what armies were best against Imperial Guard and in turn how to beat them.

Well IG can be beaten pretty easily by many armies in KP missions.

In terms of which army, I think SW can beat IG pretty easily... 3 ML longfang squads will tear apart chimeras, vendettas and etc. Its actually easier for IG to deal with rifledreads, predators, vandicators and etc at long range due to the large amount of AP8-10 they bring. But longfangs in area terrain is such a pain for IG to deal with. Also SW can disrupt IG gunlines pretty efficiently with wolfscouts, TWCs, and Jotww. Once the guardsman are on foot, they will get slaughtered by greyhunters.

Any strategies on how to beat SW, then?

I think infantry heavy IG and/or Leman Russ hulls are much better off against Longfangs than mech IG. If tailoring armies is not a desire or option, I'd strongly consider reserving stuff and coming in off the board edge. It will let you use terrain to maximum advantage and those static long fangs will not have shots against the juiciest stuff.

All Bikers space marines. IG hates anything that gets into their lines and the bikes can turbo into their face with a 3+ cover save and then wreck everything.

- TH/SS Terminators and Vulkan lists in general.
- Necrons
- Long Fang spam (if on an open board with little/no cover)
- Anything that is fast, durable and has a decent toughness + save.

L. Wrex

DarthDiggler wrote:All Bikers space marines. IG hates anything that gets into their lines and the bikes can turbo into their face with a 3+ cover save and then wreck everything.

This pretty much goes for any fast army. Take an fast eldar force, they can move forward and start shooting at the AV10 sides of chimeras on turn 2.

The way to counter that is to not have a static IG force. Use vets in chimeras. Use Russ' as they can move and shoot.

Other IG tools, such as manticores (and to a lesser extent hydras), are incredibly powerful but very static. They need to stay hidden behind enemy lines to be effective as they have weak armor. A fast opponent will tear them open.

DarthDiggler wrote:All Bikers space marines. IG hates anything that gets into their lines and the bikes can turbo into their face with a 3+ cover save and then wreck everything.

Agreed. I run a bike heavy list with Vulkan and lots of melta. Vehicles get popped and troops get rapid-fired and assaulted. I've had a lot of success against IG with this build.

As for a counter... I hate seeing lots of autocannons or the standard LRBT. Wounding on 2+ hurts. More guys isn't the answer unless you load up on heavy weapons and do not blob up.

I was looking to make a blob army, so thanks for the warning. Maybe I can do blobs and LRBTs?

As a heads up, marine/eldar bike armies are not very common. I've only ever seen one in person (the one I play).
Before you tool your army up to fight against them, realize that its not something you will see every day.

Alright, thanks. I'll keep it in mind. Surprising that it would be so rare, unless a really common army type can wreck it easily.

hellspawn22 wrote:Alright, thanks. I'll keep it in mind. Surprising that it would be so rare, unless a really common army type can wreck it easily.

The marine bikes are expensive to buy ($ and points) and are a finesse army. The popularity of Venom spam doesn't help either.

Ironically, mech IG has difficulties against gunline foot IG.

Pure infantry space marines is actually surprisingly good against IG as well, but I can't remember the last time someone built such an army.

Wildstorm wrote:The marine bikes are expensive to buy ($ and points) and are a finesse army..

They are very pricey dollar wise. Bikes cost $15 a pop new, and you will want to customize them all, as the default bike looks dumb. This requires a lot of trading with friends or buying bits off ebay. Below is a pic of my standard 1750 list, and you can see how I modified every biker to look unique.

Wildstorm wrote:The popularity of Venom spam doesn't help either.

I've noticed a weakness of the army since the BA codex came out. While poisoned weapons have caused a problem, I find the bigger issues are from the new BA/GK models that are popular. These models are high-point and low-count models with a lot of killy potentional. This causes people to start bringing more plasma as counters, which also happens to be a great counter to bike armies! When the meta was all melta, my bikes did better than today when people are bringing a variety of weapons.

As mentioned, they are also not a forgiving army, and a few mistakes can really add up. A few bad dice rolls can really screw your day as well.

This really depends if your running Mech Guard or Straken Horde Guard.

Mech guard the worst common are MSU Mech Space Wolves and MSU Mech Grey Knights. They put hard to disrupt firepower that you can't just stun or shake and eat your guys in assault.

Straken Horde Guard bad match ups include Grey Knights with purifiers and land raider lists.

any army that can drop onto the table, and begin the assaulting (like BA) is hard to get over as a guard player. nids are beatable, but you have to kill the right creatures quickly. usually that's down to the dice. but for out and out pain in the arse, i'd say all drop armies.

the problem with drop armies is that you can only shoot at what you see. they dont spend the entire game on the table unlike you. not to mention if you dont manage to kill every single model that drops, you'll have to deal with it for a turn or two. then by the time he's dead, you have another unit to destroy.

In playing Mech IG I haven't had trouble with too many armies. The only armies that have given me a hard time are Deathwing (if your opponent's dice are hot 3++ is nigh invincible) and Kan Wall Orks (again if your opponent has hot dice you won't stop those Kanz fast enough to prevent the inevitable).

As for Space Wolves I haven't really found them to be a hard matchup. I played a buddy's Drop Wolves list (with the 3x6 Long Fangs) and utterly wrecked it, but I had to play the Reserves game to do it right. Another friend of mine runes Wolfstar which PBS tends to punk rather handily. Nothing funnier than watching a 500+ point unit run off the table on your first turn of shooting.

Ya I have Mech IG and I also haven't ran into too much trouble. Probably the army I have problems with sometimes is the Blood Angels and the drop podded furiosos. Those can really hurt my tanks badly sometimes if I dont destroy them fast.

Deathwing in 1500p I have lost many times. Huh...

Thanks for the info. I'm starting to form plans on how to beat these guys based on what I've heard. But a lot of it seems to be player-specific. It seems that Space Wolves are generally considered the worst, with drop armies in general being bad. Within those armies, however, the difficulty seems to be inconsistent.

I prefer the fluffy IG, which in my view is blobs as meat shields for artillery and LR, supported by 2 vendettas and some HWTs on larger games. Because I do not run a tight, competitive list, I tend to have variable success:

I always lose to DA because I cannot kill the 25+ terminators fast enough with the fluffy list. They just teleport in front of my lines, survive one round of moderate punishment, and then proceed to smash my blobs to pieces while hiding in CC from the big guns. The commissars keep the guardsmen fighting but after a couple of assault turns, there is nothing left and then the tanks simply die. I would probably be more successful if I load up on executioners and vendettas, which I consider unfluffy and the beardy-git win-at-all-costs way out. My opponent's decent dice don't make it any easier either.

The DE were a problem for awhile, until I put together and painted my hydras, and got some more experience fighting them.