Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

what about when close combat finds you? I'm new to Dakka and this is my first post. I am a newb and play IG. My friend likes to play GK. I know that IG troops are speed bumps or bubblewrap, etc. But my friend likes to deep strike his Termies and Mordrak with his ghost pimps and decimate my squads holding my objectives. A beefed up CCS with Straken has been my only defense. However this is a point sink and not guaranteed to work. Hiding troops in Chimeras is a waste because of the AV 10, all I do is suffer wounds when he blows them up in assault. The rear AV 10 is the Achilles heel of the Russes as well. Vets with plasmas work for one round of shooting before they get assaulted and killed, maybe two rounds if in a Chimera. I must be doing something tactically wrong. I've not tried Ogryns but I hear that they just take an extra round to die but cost as much as Terminators. Rough Riders are good for one charge, then die like dogs. With all the points and effort to guard my objectives I have hardly anything left to go after his objectives. Surely I am not the only one who's been pimp smacked like this. I feel like a quarterback getting blitzed and sacked on every play. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

forge world and imperial armour can help,though failing that listen close my young friend.

dploy as close togther like this

X=guardsman
Y=chimera
Z=Leman russ
____=board edge







XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
YZYZYZYZYZYZYZYZYZYZYZY
________________________


the clos proximity of the guard will mean his deep striking units will deepo strike a little back.if he does get into combat,so what,he kills a squad and then you hve a full army pointing guns at his beloved mordrak.though he must be doing something right if hes using mordrak,giving you a full turn to gun them down.take guys with orders like move,move,move to get to the objectives quicker,and first rank second rank in the opening stages.

gun for his troops first wipe them out out so he cant capture.

Yes, by using full spacing you can wrap your cheap infantry completely around the tanks and command units, so your opponent will be unable to assault the expensive stuff straight off.

There are two ways to go from there: either take naked infantry squads that will lose combat horribly and break in 1 round (clearing the way for you to fire at him) or take big combined squads with power weapons and commissars, probably with straken hanging around behind them yelling encouragement. Such a squad (usually 20-40 men plus 1 commissar) will wear down elite combat units like terminators, they don't have many attacks, so as you lose handfuls of 5-pt guardsmen, they lose 40+ point terminators!

The "lots of men with hidden power weapons" technique works well against most GK squads but emphatically not against purifiers, so against them you want to make sure you break in one turn if assaulted, and shoot them up! Purifiers are very expensive units that aren't any tougher than ordinary marines, so IG should have the tools to deal with them.

PS to regain the initiative you might consider marbo. He's not 100% reliable but is cheap, and his demo charge is one very accurate shot that you can place where you need it the turn he arrives. Very useful against armies of elite infantry like GK.

I run a pure foot slogger force, the tactics I use is to have a front-line force of two 30-man (with 3 commissars in each) power blobs with hidden PW, these guys are mainly my fodder, the PWs are relatively cheap and can cause some damage. They also (as described above) keep enemies from deep striking near me by spreading them around a bit. I also have Straken w/ 4 melta guns running around providing these guys with furious charge and Counter charge. He's also able to issue the order first rank fire... which has devastating effects on terminators.... don't know why

Next up I run 2 groups of Lascannon/plasma gun toting vet squads to take out +2 saves, the higher BS makes these guys great for being a support unit to your weaker front-line, put them in cover and you get a nice 4+ save.

Lastly I have my auto cannons and Mortars in the rear corner, they provide artillery and are great for tank busting.

The way I try to set myself up is as follows...

O=HWS
X= Vet squads
+= Fodder

++++
+++++
XX ++++
O X ++++
OO X ++++

^obviously not to scale

better keep to small easily destroyed squads as fodder so they beat them first round,kill them first time and end their turn in range of 1st rank 2nd rank and ranged weapons

True, but the way I see it, a unit tied up in combat is a unit I'm not worried about. If my blob keeps a terminator squad or assault marines locked in combat for 2-3 rounds, then they've done their job.

a squad tied up in combat can easily kill your foces,a squad thats dead cant and leaves more units alive

Remember that a squad can move the same speed a vehicle can move and shoot, and in the case of the Leman Russ variants, they can shoot their main weapon and another weapon when moving 6". So with blob squads you could theoretically keep them contstantly bubblewrapped as they ponderously creep forward. Spread them out 2" apart max cohesion and you make it harder for them to deep strike and easier to cover your vehicles.

The best scenario is for them to charge, your squad to survive the first round of assault, then either break or die on your opponent's assault phase. This deprives him of shooting with that squad on his turn, but lets you cut his unit to ribbons. Since many assault units depend on getting into assault to stay alive, it can be a way to destroy his army piecemeal.

Play your strengths, protect your weaknesses. In a long-ranged shooting war, Guard excel with lots of long range high str weapons and high frontal armor. The flip side is pretty much everything has AV10 in the back making them weirdly vulnerable to assault, so you want to deprive your opponent of this opportunity.

worst case scenario is taking big units,him charging and taking two rounds to win,ie in your turn,and then moving,shooting and assaulying on his turn,over and over.

Cursed Dice wrote: With all the points and effort to guard my objectives I have hardly anything left to go after his objectives. Surely I am not the only one who's been pimp smacked like this. I feel like a quarterback getting blitzed and sacked on every play.

Welcome to the club - I've had similar experiences. Some ideas:

Try a combo of hydras, colossi, executioners, and HWS with AC. The AC pop the rhinos, the hydras pop the SRG, the colossi drop the shells on the MEQ in cover, and the executioners drop the plasma on the terminators. Bubble-wrap them with cheap troops in small weak sacrificial squads that do not take more than 1 turn to die. Think of them as ablative living armor and a way to block off a large area of the map. Add a vendetta or two, with melta vets to grab objectives and do AT, depending on the mission. Creed is a nice HQ for this build, since more orders means more HWS shooting TL. You can also take a lord commissar to give the HWS Ld10, so they hear the orders.

The bottom line is to hit him where it hurts while denying him his bonuses and advantages:

- Rhinos are most cheaply popped by AC, so take HWS.
- SRG usually flat out on the first turn to get the cover save and use machine spirit to shoot melta. Hydras ignore the movement save, while bubble wrap makes it difficult for the meltas to get in range of your tanks.
- his MEQ can fire from inside a stunned/shaken vehicle. So, pop the rhino to make them come out.
- he likes to put MEQ in ruins for cover saves, so use colossi which ignore cover saves and are AP3.
- his terminators are afraid of plasma, so use executioner variants for your LR. I like sponsons for extra plasma, but it is not a must.
- if he has purifiers, he wants to assault as many models as possible, so instead feed him small ablative troop squads one at a time
- he wants to win the assault on your turn, so don't feed him large commissar blobs that will keep him safe in close combat

Necrontyr40k wrote:- he wants to win the assault on your turn, so don't feed him large commissar blobs that will keep him safe in close combat

I don't really consider getting hit with 12 power weapon attacks per phase "safe", even if they are only S3.

they're safe if their hitting before them,on 3s,wounding on 3s,2s with hammerhand,and ignoring armour saves ,with instakillon a psychic test,or no test if they have a banner.the guard hit on 4+,wound on 5+ and only the survivors get to fight.then the daemon hammers get to fight,and any modla the is hit suffers instantdeath because its S8,then they lose and die in a sweeping ad vance,forfeiting an objective and losing a whole platoon

Grey Knights don't have the attacks to eat through a guard blob, those power weapon attacks tuebor is referring to are on only 4 guys, who are testing on stubborn leadership 9. Each Grey Knight killed is a useful attack, the first 26 wounds dealt by the Grey Knights kill base guardsmen.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In my experience, Guard Powerblobs don't keep their targets safe, they merely kill them at a leisurely pace.

Biophysical wrote:Grey Knights don't have the attacks to eat through a guard blob, those power weapon attacks tuebor is referring to are on only 4 guys, who are testing on stubborn leadership 9. Each Grey Knight killed is a useful attack, the first 26 wounds dealt by the Grey Knights kill base guardsmen.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In my experience, Guard Powerblobs don't keep their targets safe, they merely kill them at a leisurely pace.

Ain't that the truth. I've had a Power Blob withstand the brunt of Ork charges and win. I'm pretty confident that a power blob could take on squads of Grey Knights and win.

And sure you're hitting on 4's and wounding on 5's, but when you have 12 power weapon attacks it all evens out. Even 2 dead Grey Knights a turn is a reason to be happy! haha

not if you run away and lose 30 blokes to a nem halberd wielding captain who would almost auto matically catch you because

Gk termies are not built/to fight blobs, but purifiers are...

Demo charges scare gk termies to the point where many players won't deep strike them.

Also the thing is, unless you're horribly unlucky, you are not going to run away. You're testing on unmodified LD 9 which you are able to reroll if you fail. You folks are really underestimating power blobs.

but the pointis you lose a lot of men,good men,who die to defend humanity.feed him cannon fodder and lose 10,then he gets blown up.he loses 25% of his points,you lose 5%

Deadshot wrote:but the pointis you lose a lot of men,good men,who die to defend humanity.feed him cannon fodder and lose 10,then he gets blown up.he loses 25% of his points,you lose 5%

Dude, people have shown you a solution where you can win combats without losing a single whole unit, just the lasgun-carrying filler models. Why on earth would you insist on throwing squads into the chopper one by one, which is death in a kill points mission, besides making it very hard to prevent being multi-charged. Guard can get lots of infantry, not an infinite amount. Sacrificing squads is a necessary evil, not a way to win.

Exactly. Its not that the blob squad will just hold them longer. In most cases they will actually win, while in the process giving your big guns a chance to shoot something else.

its more in lijne with guard fluff.their philosify is not so different to orks.orks think the best way to is just keep hitting it untill they dont get up,and then keep going.Guard style is through unlimited forces into a meat grinderuntill the enemy run out of meat.but remember that fearless guard take additional wounds for no retreat.

Deadshot wrote:its more in lijne with guard fluff.their philosify is not so different to orks.orks think the best way to is just keep hitting it untill they dont get up,and then keep going.Guard style is through unlimited forces into a meat grinderuntill the enemy run out of meat.but remember that fearless guard take additional wounds for no retreat.

You just described how a power blob works. Also, power blobs are Stubborn, not Fearless so they don't take any extra wounds for No Retreat If a blob needs to take a leadership check they do so on Ld 9, which they can reroll by killing one of their sergeants. I've been using blobs for about 4 months now and I've never once had one run away. In fact, I think I've only lost two or three Sergeants in the deal.

Really, things like Grey Knights (except Purifiers, of course) are the ideal targets for power blobs. Grey Knights have all these fancy upgrades that don't help at all against Guardsmen (example being Daemonhammers when they're already wounding on 2+ with Hammerhand) so they end up very inefficient for killing 5 point Guardsmen. The power blob just slowly eats through them just as fast as it does to regular Marines or Terminators.

You brought up Instant Death which doesn't matter to Guardsmen because they only have 1 wound anyway.

any IC would be craping himself though,at tough ness 3,asartes gren. launchers on scout bikers firing kraks can instant death.

i think the power blob is more of a tar pit.meat grinder is were you simply through away an inexpensive unit to blast a battle cannon into a small powerful one.

Deadshot wrote:any IC would be craping himself though,at tough ness 3,asartes gren. launchers on scout bikers firing kraks can instant death.

i think the power blob is more of a tar pit.meat grinder is were you simply through away an inexpensive unit to blast a battle cannon into a small powerful one.

The handful of Guard ICs are fragile enough that they'd be in trouble in combat regardless. I don't think I've used a single IC since 5th edition came out.

I played what you'd call "meat grinder" lists in 3rd and 4th and frankly I got tired of my Guardsmen being used solely for damage control and trying to slow things down. Instead of my Guardsmen fleeing from the enemy and dying dying horribly they go out, kick some xenos in the teeth and then die horribly. Clearly power blobs aren't the only way to play Guard infantry but they're certainly viable and I find a refreshing change of pace from the way I had to play in 3rd and 4th.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I'll have to give the ideas a try next time I play him .

i use nids and use my rippers to lure out termies andHQs by using spinefists and then laughing as they die under 19 genestaelers and a BL

Even a frag missile/grenade isn't as deadly as people make it out to be. Most people will use krak on SM simply because you're almost guaranteed the kill on a hit. With IG most opt for the frag simply because a krak is almost a waste. with proper spacing you can reduce the amount of models under the template to 3-4. Then factor in scatter, the chance to wound, and then the save and you've lost maybe two out of that initial four. IMO this is acceptable losses.

Also, if you did want to break and run away so that your other units can shoot into them, you simply allocate your wounds to the commissar. The downside to this is that there's a chance your entire unit could be wiped out by a single space marine shooting all the men in the back... miraculous.

Combined squads is what makes the Infantry squads deadly. If you go into battle hoping everyone will return to see there wives and children you won't get far.

check the following
-he only has a 5+ invulnerable to shooting or a 4+ (3+ with librarian) in cover
-if he's running paladins, most of your AP2 weapons are S8 or better already
-you lack psychic defence (which is bad but not game breaking)

So you're options
-plasma lemans, or leman demolishers, all can roll around and shoot, AV14 is difficult to deal with for grey knights and you won't be CC'd very often because you remembered to spread out and terminators are slow, pop smoke if you get the first turn, if he decides to shoot and not spread out you should be able to absolutely wreck any squad that drops in with multiple pie plates of armor ignoring doom, if you buy these in singles think about extra armor.
-Psyker battle squads are super-excellent for reducing leadership just before you drop pinning ord blasts on the enemy (hard to close combat when you are pinned!), or you have a 1/3rd chance of rolling a 1-2 for AP and bypassing armor, a Str6 blast that bypasses armor 1/3rd of the time for ~70 points? its a cheap threat at worst and it only has to kill 1 or 2 terminators and it was a good buy (or help them break once!
-Marbo or det back vets are horrifying against terminators (usually marbo not the vets), you are basically 1 hit roll away from killing several terminators, a whole squad if you are lucky and he shoots instead of spreads out upon deepstrike.
-heavy weapon teams are generally not a good idea, but if you are buying infantry for roadblocks a few autocannons never hurts
-as above, you can combine your infantry squads and give them commisars and lots of power weapons, these are nice roadblocks, rough riders and ogryns are used in conjunction with these as are priests, but power blobs are usually go big (all infantry) or go home, maybe get one or two for roadblocks since it will be difficult for 5-10 terminators to really do enough casualties to wipe them in a turn.

He won't be assaulting the power blob with TH/SS terminators but with purifiers. So, the math is rather different - first you get shot with storm bolters ( hit on 3+, wound on 3+, no armor save, so roughly one dead guardsman per stormbolter), then you get assaulted and immolated, and then you get hit with power blades before your initiative. That is many more kills before you even swing back with the power weapons. So, you lose by a lot, test on Ld9 with stubborn, and if you fail you get to reroll, but you lose 3 of the power attacks, because you have to execute one of the sergeants. If you stay, he is safe from your big guns during your turn. This means he faces 9-12 power attacks maybes, after he immolates you and kills you at higher initiative, instead of facing 5 plasma templates from your executioner, artillery, and a ton of lasgun fire. I think CC is a very much safer place for him to be.

He won't be assaulting the power blob with TH/SS terminators but with purifiers.

Or a dreadnought. The powerblob will wind up costing more than the dread, and will happily grind marine infantry squads (Most of them, anyway. Things like purifiers, 10x GH w/ standard squads, etc. need not apply here.) ....but a dread can tarpit them indefinitely unless he brings along a priest, which follows the very unfavorable IC rules in this situation, or has actually paid for some krak grenades, increasing the cost of the blob even higher.

Blob runners need to make sure to take out walkers as soon as possible.