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Now that 6th edition has come and obliterated power blobs, i seem to be lost with IG foot tactics and my lists are regressing to hybrid gunlines which aren't really effective nor fun to play with, and dont fully utilize the power of Infantry Platoons. (before i came to the 6th ed dakka ig threads)

I appreciate that there have been various articles concerning 6th ed guard and i would like to thank the people participating for clearing up a lot. However what brings me to post this topic is the fact that i dont feel that platoons are being outfitted that effectively with the current lists i have been seeing, in my opinion, while i do agree that normal guard squads should be supplied like this:

PIS: Meltagun, Autocannon

I find that the equipment given to PCS' should be geared towards assault like their superior command squads instead of just having a autocannon, in a format similar to this. (note that this is just an example layout and there are many other variations you can preform)

PCS: PF, 2 Flamers, 2 CCW- 55

Here are some reasons why they should be geared like this
- Since the normal PIS has a meltagun, that obviously implies commanders will want to move their guys up and so assault PCS' can secure the infantry squads against assaulting troops who could possibly tear apart the infantry who have no equipment to defend against such a situation
-This assault capability makes the army more balanced and allows for the platoon itself to stand a chance in assault, rather than relying on ogryns who are expensive and cant be everywhere at once a major detractor if you are facing an all-assault army
-Assault PCS' can be secured and hidden in the ranks of the regular infantry (the enemy wont know what hit em!)
-They can be armed with flamers which enables them to scorch enemies to death before delivering the killing blow with the assault
-The autocannon PCS usually is static while friendly units advance, this makes orders more difficult to pass due to range. the assault PCS solves this problem.

Basically the point is to use them as a counter charge unit and along with other fellow assault command squads (4 in the list i am currently formulating) and to be the hidden hammers of hammers of the foot guard platoon amongst the ranks of guardsmen, now that blobs have been sadly destroyed.

Thank you for reading, i look forward to a constructive conversation about this. feel free to scrutinize and add your opinions wherever you see fit.

Special thanks to Aliaros for providing a lot of inspiration for this idea from his awesome batreps and playstyle.

I would disagree that the standard loadout should be autocannon/meltagun

autocannon/plasmagun is in my opinion a better loadout due to its longer range. Now that you can snapfire the autocannon on and shoot the plasmagun and all the flashlights at 24" whilst on the move means that mobility has massively increased for foot guard. You can leapfrog the PIS forwards to capture objectives or backwards to move away from enemy assaulters with one unit firing on the move whilst another fires at full effect.

If you're using the PCS as a counter-assault squad just go with 4x flamers. Lots more damage both in your own shooting phase and in overwatch

Chimera_Calvin
autocannon/plasmagun is in my opinion a better loadout due to its longer range. Now that you can snapfire the autocannon on and shoot the plasmagun and all the flashlights at 24" whilst on the move means that mobility has massively increased for foot guard. You can leapfrog the PIS forwards to capture objectives or backwards to move away from enemy assaulters with one unit firing on the move whilst another fires at full effect.

Good point Calvin, but i think i'll go for half melta, half plasma as there needs to be some mobile AT in the foot guard army, and if a land raider or any heavy armor pops out im going to be in some trouble, in addition the melta has been beefed up with the +2 on the damage chart which will pave through any enemy vehicle which will really help dealing with mech. Plus i get to Instant Death space marines

About the flamer combination i feel its best to keep 2 CCW's as i need the extra choppiness for the attacking i will be doing and those guys give me 8 attacks on the charge. and since i have four command teams i feel 8 flamers is going to be a overkill

Thanks for your help Calvin, i'm definitely going to add more PG's into my platoons

You can NEVER overkill flamers.

I run infantry squads with just plasmaguns because I like to keep them mobile (I can't justify spending 10 points for a bs1 weapon), and fireball PCS behind them to counter-attack when in range, and give out run/frsrf orders.
5 or 6 squads can be everywhere on the table at once, and gives you something to respond with quickly, without worrying much if a squad or two dies because they're only 65 points.

But don't you think that packing Autocannons in your army are an effective way to stop mech right in its tracks as well as infantry, and you wont always be moving with the tactic of leapfrogging.

I use lots of Russes and HWS squads to bring the heavy weapons.

I'm not sure 6th has obliterated power blobs, but they're mobile now, rather than static. I'm currently having success with 50-man blobs with 5 flamers, 5 power mauls, krak grenades, a ministorium priest and either Belial (Dark Angels) or Uriah Jacobus (SoB) for Fearless, and it's been working very well. Unwieldy, but universally lethal. Tanks, MCs and infantry all fall under its boots.

Anyway, apart from that, guard infantry platoons are tricky beasts. I'd normally always put PCSs and CCSs in Chimeras with a bunch of meltaguns, but if you're not doing that, the question is what should they do? I'm not convinced I'm sold on the idea of having them as assault units; I struggle to find a situation where 5 guardsmen are scary, power fist or not. Additionally, it's rare for one of my PIS to survive a charge long enough for counter charging to be an option; they're usually run down on the first assault phase. I'd instead consider going for 4 flamers. Anything that hits your lines will probably massacre a PIS in a single round of combat, so in your next turn, while the enemy unit is exposed, you walk over and inflict 4-flamer's worth of damage. The PCS can subsequently charge if they want to.

Second option is just additional shooting capability. Give them an autocannon and lend weight to the fire of the rest of the army, with the handy addition of being able to shout orders. Dull, but an option.

Aside from PCS, I've found myself taking lots of heavy weapon squads. 75 points for 3 autocannons isn't shabby, especially if you have decent cover for them. And you can take lots of them. I also do not take meltaguns in PISs, but then, i usually have CCSs and PCSs in chimeras for the melta threat.

Here's an idea, perhaps load the platoon infantry squads with just melta/plasma, and concentrate all your heavy weapons into HWS's. This way, the infantry can always stay mobile and provide a true "melta hedge".

This strategy would harken back to the medieval tactic of running blocks of pikemen screening archers behind them. The pikemen would hold back cavalry and enemy infantry, allowing the archers to fire unharrased.

Now, imagine a wall of 60pt guardsmen squads with a melta gun, PCS's with x4 flamer dispersed throughout them, while 7-8 heavy weapon teams, artillery, and leman russes fire unopposed behind them. Meanwhile, Marbo, stormtroopers, and vendettas with SWS's and vets armed with meltas and demo charges drop around the map, eliminating key targets and causing chaos all over. Once the enemy has been ground down, the guard advances foward in a giant human wave. Might be viable, but I haven't had a chance to test this tactic yet. Ideas?

Yeah, thats pretty much the tactic I advocate. Keep your mobile stuff mobile, your shooty stuff shooty.
My infantry squads are an aggressive screen, that moves forward always to keep the enemy out of range of my big guns in the back. Russes, CCS, HWS, Artillery are the things that do the actual killing. And forward elements, deepstriking, outflanking, or driving (I use allied SoB) can act as surgical strikes to tie up prime targets.

dakka farta wrote:PCS: PF, 2 Flamers, 2 CCW- 55

I like that, it seems like a good mix if you have a few of them. Good way to get the PF some backup firepower while maintaining attacks and cheap bodies. I think PF + 4x Flamers is a little too expensive for one of the squishiest targets in the game. Just 4 flamers is another (good) story, but the OP is going for a nice angle here imo.

I've been playing guard since 2005, and I've got to say, what to do with PCSs has been my longest, most difficult problem. As you say, with being so relatively weak and flimsy, you really can't use them in an offensive role, other than by giving them heavy weapons and plinking the whole game. Using them like an SWS will just get them killed if they're not in a chimera.

I agree in principle that shooty PISs are advantaged by choppy officers, but I've never been able to get fully behind choppy PCSs. In order to make them properly choppy, you've got to spend a fair amount of points on them, giving them an eviscerator priest or a powerfist commissar. I'm able to rationalize doing that once (in which case, I have a choppy CCS), but doing it again is a little more difficult. Especially when the JO only has a single wound, and only two attacks, and no refractor field.

I guess I haven't seriously considered a throwaway choppy PCS like you've put up, but I do somewhat question what it's going to accomplish. With only W1, T3, Sv5+, and at I1, that powerfist officer is never winning a challenge against anything. If you're in a couterassault role, where you don't have to worry about challenges much, then he'll show up and kill 1 model, and if he's in a safe situation, kill another.

It just seems like its too fragile to be able to widely use him in a lot of roles, and he's just not quite killy enough, even at his bargain prices. You can alleviate this somewhat by throwing 60 (or 90 with a medic) more points at it, but now we're no longer talking about a cheap unit, and its killing power value still isn't great.

On a related note, I've so far been able to find 3 configurations that seem to suck the least. The "fireball" PCS (although I usually only take 3 flamers so that they can pick up a stray wound without losing a special weapon), but that's really only good at counterattacking light infantry, which your lasguns can usually handle. Does mildly okay against power armor deepstrikers, though.

The second has been to give them a lascannon. Yeah, they're only going to throw down a couple of hits a game, but making 50 points back with a lascannon isn't that terribly difficult. Moreover, it keeps them a relatively low threat, which means they might actually survive, and with the long range, it means that they're going to actually DO SOMETHING, and starting turn 1 to boot.

The other one I've tried on rare occasion and now have more of a reason to now is a 4x sniper PCS. Like the lascannon, it will start possibly killing turn 1, and will have an even lower threat limit than a lascannon. Perhaps even moreso, though, it has new abilities to be disruptive in 6th. Parked next to a CCS for BiD or FoMT, you have some good opportunities to be obnoxious with precise shot, and it's still pretty cheap.

In any case, the real problem with all of these PCS options is getting it to be able to actually do some damage. It's a small, fragile unit stuck with BS3 and an officer that isn't anything more than a sergeant with one extra weapon option. Squeezing any usefulness whatsoever can be really tricky.

... which is why the PCS is my traditional place to pillage points from when I need just a few more points to make something else useful somewhere else...

MrMoustaffa
Here's an idea, perhaps load the platoon infantry squads with just melta/plasma, and concentrate all your heavy weapons into HWS's. This way, the infantry can always stay mobile and provide a true "melta hedge".

This strategy would harken back to the medieval tactic of running blocks of pikemen screening archers behind them. The pikemen would hold back cavalry and enemy infantry, allowing the archers to fire unharrased.

Now, imagine a wall of 60pt guardsmen squads with a melta gun, PCS's with x4 flamer dispersed throughout them, while 7-8 heavy weapon teams, artillery, and leman russes fire unopposed behind them. Meanwhile, Marbo, stormtroopers, and vendettas with SWS's and vets armed with meltas and demo charges drop around the map, eliminating key targets and causing chaos all over. Once the enemy has been ground down, the guard advances foward in a giant human wave. Might be viable, but I haven't had a chance to test this tactic yet. Ideas?

Now that is something i would be willing to try, nice idea moustaffa

Thanks for the compliment on the unit murdog

McGibs i'm starting to see the point your getting across now, thanks for the help

As for Aliaros, i feel the same way but imo usually when i stick them with a lascannon and mount them up on a piece of terrain or give them snipers like you said they dont do anything because of their BS, and so they become useless and so what i am proposing is to treat them like they are useless and put them up for assault. i'm not talking about one PCS but 3 or even more! so the idea would be to hide in the ranks of the PIS' and when the regular infantry get charged, pile in and surprise your enemy with a PF hit and resolve the let the enemy resolve the majority of their hits against the guardsmen. while the PF might not do much, the extra chainsword attacks will pack an additional punch along with the flamers. 70 points for 12 regular attacks and 4 PF attacks on the charge sounds pretty reasonable to me. what do you think? if they are useless, we should treat them that way

Well, the problem here is that anything that's hitting your lines nowadays is likely to just run over whatever it touches in close combat. What you're proposing only works in an environment where your opponent gets into assault, the squad survives, and then you enter the close combat the next turn with the PCS. I guess if you're still trying to make power blobs work, this would be possible, but if you've split your blobs back apart, then any action your PCS is doing is very likely going to be a fresh, unsupported charge, which I very much doubt the ability of the powerfist officer to survive long enough to do damage.

In non-blob guard, you're going back to speedbumps, which makes a shooty PCS make a lot more sense.

I just use them as cheaper, more efficient SWS's usually. It's my favorite use for them, and other than lack of demo charges, they fufill the same roles for cheaper, with better LD, and more slots.

They're the first thing I look at when I need a cheap melta team to drop out of a vendetta for example. I also use them occasionally to help buff numbers in a chimera wall. Mixed in with vets, their low cost (115pts for a x3 melta PCS for example) helps them add bodies and hitting power to a mech list.

Otherwise, they're cheap objective sitters who die horribly only when my opponent has nothing better to shoot at, which is rare

Autocannons lost a bit of bite in 6th ed thanks to the new damage table for vehicles. You're only blowing up on a six. So I'm going to be leaning more towards lascannons, even though they've never done me well.

I prefer having the PCS filled with flamers, that way there is a solid amount of anti horde sitting just behind your main guys ready for when your front lines crumble. I had meltas in special weapon squads and hid then inside my horde of guardsmen too. 2 squads is 6 meltas that isn't fairly expensive and means my grunts can focus their fire all on stuff they can harm, rather than having a squad of guardsmen all stand and watch as the meltagunner tries to strike down that tank or walker.

omgitsduane wrote:Autocannons lost a bit of bite in 6th ed thanks to the new damage table for vehicles. You're only blowing up on a six. So I'm going to be leaning more towards lascannons, even though they've never done me well.

I prefer having the PCS filled with flamers, that way there is a solid amount of anti horde sitting just behind your main guys ready for when your front lines crumble. I had meltas in special weapon squads and hid then inside my horde of guardsmen too. 2 squads is 6 meltas that isn't fairly expensive and means my grunts can focus their fire all on stuff they can harm, rather than having a squad of guardsmen all stand and watch as the meltagunner tries to strike down that tank or walker.

Autocannons never really get kills by pens for me. We get kills by hullpoints. Autocannons are great at that. The volume of shot for the strength is just awesome. Take a bunch of them, and focus your fire on a few things you REALLY need dead. Every pen/glance you get is one point less you need to shave off. You usually only need 3 to wreck something. Think of all the times in 5th where you glanced/penned something 15 times before it finally died. Now all you have to do is get 3, and the vehicle is wrecked.

If anything, autocannons got BETTER.

Autocannons did NOT lose. What they lost in the ability to destroy vehicles outright (which was never the best of odds against anything but AV10 in the first place), pales, PALES in comparison to what they gained by being able to glance vehicles to death.

S7 was scarcely ever a threat to AV12. Now it's probably the biggest, especially on a multi-shot platform.

... enter the autocannon HWS...

Aliaros
any action your PCS is doing is very likely going to be a fresh, unsupported charge

Not necessarily as any foe attacking a guard line will have to deal with a hail of fire from the shooting phase plus overwatch, and thats probably going to put a dent in any foe (especially the special weapons). Also the squad might get lucky and score some kils. so they are going to be attacking a unit whom have been battered heavily with few attacks and men thats when the PF is going to deal killing blows.

Also since CCS's are geared towards assault don't they need support?? or at least some other units to balance the role of assault amongst the army, i said the same thing with ogryns you cant be everywhere at the same time. And with these cheap small units for ONLY 65 pts (i made a recalculation) you can distribute some power packing JO's who atleast have a chance at smashing a MEQ or two to pieces and they only need 4 tactical space marine kills to get their points back. I just feel that the assault in foot guard needs to be more balanced throughout and i just have images of termies ripping through entire platoons while the ogryn and CCS are tied up elsewhere.

i'll be playing a game soon and i'll let you guys know how this combination worked
PCS: PF, 2 Flamers, 2 CCW- 55

And about autocannons i totally agree with moustaffa and aliaros they're awesome and really help stop mech spam something i've learned countless times

dakka farta wrote:

Aliaros
any action your PCS is doing is very likely going to be a fresh, unsupported charge

Not necessarily as any foe attacking a guard line will have to deal with a hail of fire from the shooting phase plus overwatch, and thats probably going to put a dent in any foe (especially the special weapons). Also the squad might get lucky and score some kils. so they are going to be attacking a unit whom have been battered heavily with few attacks and men thats when the PF is going to deal killing blows.

Well, but you're missing my point. Whatever touches your guardsmen in close combat is likely to wipe them away. The PCS is likely going to be charging a unit that is not currently engaged in a close combat on your turn.

When this happens, you're going to have to deal with overwatch, which is going to be pretty rough on such a small squad, and then you're going to have to deal with challenges, which will probably kill off your officer before he gets a chance to swing. Then you have to deal with the fact that all enemy attacks are going to go onto your tiny, fragile PCS.

It's possible to ameliorate this somewhat, but the fact is that 5 squishy guardsmen are insanely futzy to use in an offensive role like this. You've also got to remember other things, such as if your PCS is really a threat, then your opponent will likely spend some amount of effort to kill them (and it doesn't take much to end a PCS).

dakka farta wrote:Also since CCS's are geared towards assault don't they need support??

They do, but not so badly. A senior officer comes with WS4, W3, and a 5++, which makes it much, much more survivable than a junior officer. A senior officer can also take bodyguards, and a super-standard that also gives it a reroll to failed morale checks if it survives. Also, with WS4 and A3, it's also killier than the junior officer. Basically, it has the killing power of two junior officers, and the survivability of three.

A CCS can be a properly choppy points for a bunch of points, while a PCS can only be sort of choppy for somewhat fewer points.

Very true Aliaros, i guess you right and they are very fragile but i am going to try them anyways, and see whether they actually do something in a practical situation.

i'll let you know how they preformed after my game.

I don't think either is very choppy, especially when compared to a nakid infantry squad that dishes out 22 attacks on a charge. 5 man squads with 4 special weapon slots are built to be shooty not choppy.

With the new cover rules I think pcs/ccs do best in a box. The av12 front and 4+ cover is pretty solid protection. The rest of the platoon will do great in area terrain or behind an aegis line, it's best to keep them on foot so flashlights can be massed.

I had the game and i have to say they preformed quite well, and managed to do the role of counter-assault quite well with the flamers burning one GK termie and in the ensuing assault a PF hit smashed the brains out of another GK with the other CCW's another, i have to say they did a lot more than when i previously gave them a HWS and sat them down.

Although i was thinking whether i could switch my entire support segment of the foot platoons to artillery, namely Medusas as i felt the mixing and matching i did with my support units wasn't focused. would that be a good idea? As i can keep the aggressiveness of my army as Medusas are pretty darn awesome and tend to blow apart most things with their 10 str.

One thing that i felt i should also share is adding gunslinger plasma pistols to your stormie sergeants, drop them next to a terminator squad and fire and you'll see for your self what 6 plasma shots can do