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I'm new to this game and wanted to get into it. Ever since I was a kid, I always had loads of army men and tanks which why I am looking to take interest in this hobby.

I'm looking for an Imperium Guard army build that involves swarming and grinding the enemy down. I'm not interested in the small and elite forces like the space marines.
I'm more of sending a large group of men until the enemy runs out of ammo and their armor breaks. In short, welcome to the grind.

What I am looking for is a lot of soldiers and a few tanks or artillery for support. As for points. Let's start with 500(to get started) and see what I need for 1500(long term goal).

Not really possible. The enemy can kill far, far more guardsmen than you can bring, that's just the nature of 40k.

If you really want to bring masses of men to the field, I'd build a list around an ADL for that 4++, or you can use allies for buffs.

I would ask you if you have picked up the IG codex yet? That is probably the best place to start.

Hrm... wouldn't Chenkov and his "Send in the Next Wave!" rule match this goal?

 Psienesis wrote:
Hrm... wouldn't Chenkov and his "Send in the Next Wave!" rule match this goal?

Yerp.

Sounds like he wants big blob squads. so that + a commissar for some fearless blob action.

SYKOJAK wrote:
I would ask you if you have picked up the IG codex yet? That is probably the best place to start.

What you recommend from IG codex? Now just reading IG codex and look like it will take a while.

Look into your HQ options and the Orders they can provide.

Specifically, you're looking for a guy named Chenkov and his special rule "Send In the Next Wave!".

This gives you endless waves of gak-level Conscript soldiers that you can keep sending every time they get wiped out. From memory, this mob of Conscripts can be 50 models strong at the maximum.

And they *will* get wiped out. Probably several times over the course of the battle. This is why some people put a unit with a Lord Commissar near them (not attached to them) to provide his Ld bubble to keep them in the fight.

However... that's just one guy and a rule. You're going to need the Codex to actually create an army with the basic requirements for legal table play.

 Psienesis wrote:
Hrm... wouldn't Chenkov and his "Send in the Next Wave!" rule match this goal?

They can be used to piss people off and claim objectives. They're not game-winners though.

IG Hordes rarely are these days. They're far better off gun-lining and artillery-dropping, but that's not the kind of army the OP is looking for.

Are you interested in getting up close and personal or a horde sitting in their trenches and wearing down the enemy through attrition.

The first is hard to pull off without allies but the second is pretty decent.

At 500 points just get a company command squad and a couple of platoons (50+130+130 = 310 pts) then you have to ask if you want some tanks or to stay with the foot sloggers.

If you want a tank get a basic leman russ and run it naked. This will give you a 460 pts army which you can plop some melta guns on 4 of your troopers to bring up to 500 pts.

If you want foot sloggers then just throw some lascannons on your infantry squads and take a flamer or two in a couple of squads to run up to objectives. At 500 pts you should do okay.

If you just want a big old gun get a manticore and blast your opponent with one of the most powerful weapons in the game.

Welcome to the guard, BTW.

 ansacs wrote:
wearing down the enemy through attrition.

Wear them down through attrition. Commander Chenkov. sounds like my type of guy. Anybody that marches his men through a minefield to clear a path for his tanks know
how to use human resources well.

So army build is.....

Commander Chekov (50 points)
80 Conscripts (320 points)
Basilisk (125 points)

Leaves me with 5 points left. Basilisk to pound away support or big hitters while 80 conscripts come charging into the fray.


Second Imperial Guard Army Build

5 infantry squad (250 points)
2 Basilisk (250 points)

Hold off the enemy while the basilisk pound them into dust.

go for vets w/melta, 100 points each, thats 40 models with 12 meltas. with enough for a CCC and maybe a named char. you have decent firepower and AV there. I Like vets in carapace as I can use karskin models then, and those are the best models for IG inf imo.

I wanted to do the exact same thing as you when I started guard! This is coming from real experience, I always loaded up on conscripts and the enemy always killed them. I always took Chenkov and commissars too, but those pie plates really took them out. Sure they came back, but useful? No. Also the BS of 2 really sucked and I rarely ever hit, averaging maybe 10 hits 2 kills out of 50! Don't do what I did.
I would advise (for an average of only 50 more points) to take the same number of men in infantry squads instead, because that BS 3 really helps out. A gunline of Leman Russes and Basilisks is always great too, and I've found the original battle tank and the Demolisher work the best and are the most points effective, along with the basic Basilisk or Medusa.
Equip your infantry squads with autocannons too to get the most bang for your buck (point) out of them, and just go full gunline with the list. For objective cases you should probably bring a vendetta or two as well to carry in veterans, because you really need some fast moving objective grabbers.
As much as I'd like to say an infantry swarm list is viable right now (and I wish I could, I play Catachans), it really isn't. Flyers such as vendetta's are where it's at right now and you might want to think about investing in them.

Good luck from a fellow swarm guard player
-Color Sgt. Kell

That is an illegal army. Also I would avoid chenkov until you get up to a 1000+ pts army as the best (and only really useful ability) is Send in the Next Wave on the conscripts (once they die you can bring them back on as a fresh unit).

I also agree with Sgt. Kell that conscripts sound awesome but they fall flat on their face in games due to the BS2 and not having special/heavy weapon options. Plus even the basic list I proposed would be between 55-85 men.

Look into Imperial Armor - the new Death Korp Assualt brigade rules allow ENTIRE PLATOONS to respawn when destroyed - it's possible to try and if you do guardsmen that are immune to shooting casualty leadership checks are the way to go !

Valhallans. Definitively has to be Valhallans.

Chenkov + Conscript Squads = fun

Death korps of krieg forgeworld stuff is definitely the way to go for foot hordes. They have heavy artillery carriages, assault brigade, thudd guns, and more unique foot based grind the enemy down stuff than any other army; even Valhallans (as valhallans only have 1 character). However if you are just starting into the game and army I would not recommend making that your entry point. It is expensive and requires a working knowledge of the game community.

Valhallan style guard is probably the way to go as the rules and models are all available on GW.

I do recommend looking at some of the forgeworld stuff though as it is fantastic.

 Lynata wrote:
Valhallans. Definitively has to be Valhallans.

Chenkov + Conscript Squads = fun

That's the mean reason why I wanted to try this. Who doesn't want to send countless soldiers against the enemy?
But for competitive, I got to find something that really works.

@pic, is that a russian charging with just his bare hands? Badass! This is why I want to play as Imperial Guard.

Dorcas wrote:

 ansacs wrote:
wearing down the enemy through attrition.

Wear them down through attrition. Commander Chenkov. sounds like my type of guy. Anybody that marches his men through a minefield to clear a path for his tanks know
how to use human resources well.

So army build is.....

Commander Chekov (50 points)
80 Conscripts (320 points)
Basilisk (125 points)

Leaves me with 5 points left. Basilisk to pound away support or big hitters while 80 conscripts come charging into the fray.


Second Imperial Guard Army Build

5 infantry squad (250 points)
2 Basilisk (250 points)

Hold off the enemy while the basilisk pound them into dust.

Just to point out. You cannot run conscripts or infantry squads on their own. They must be purchased as a part of a platoon which consists of at least a platoon command squad and two infantry squads minimum. You can add more squads to that including a single squad of conscripts (if I remember right). A common mistake people do with IG (at least around here) when they start the hobby, And Chenkov is not an HQ choice. He replaces the platoon commander from the platoon command squad so you need either a Company Command squad or a Lord Comissar as your HQ (I recommend one of the two).

Shooty armies can kill a lot, but going through 300+ guardsmen in 6 turns will tax a lot of armies to the max. Infantry platoons are dirt cheap, and with the right support they can also hurt a lot of armies badly. One just needs the proper balance.

 ansacs wrote:

At 500 points just get a company command squad and a couple of platoons (50+130+130 = 310 pts) then you have to ask if you want some tanks or to stay with the foot sloggers.

If you want a tank get a basic leman russ and run it naked. This will give you a 460 pts army which you can plop some melta guns on 4 of your troopers to bring up to 500 pts.

Seeing how conscripts are better off in bigger point game, I think I'll focus on this instead.

1 company command squad
2 platoons
1 tank
and some upgrades for my units.

Now the question is, how to build it. I got myself familiar with the rules so I could get myself at least an least what I want.
What's the most popular type of army? I want to build my army to specialize to kill that army. Min-Max all the way.

Spetulhu wrote:Shooty armies can kill a lot, but going through 300+ guardsmen in 6 turns will tax a lot of armies to the max. Infantry platoons are dirt cheap, and with the right support they can also hurt a lot of armies badly.

Your opponent doesn't NEED to kill 300 guardsmen to win, though. Horde armies have their own problems with mobility and force concentration that start to multiply on themselves once you get much past about 125-150 models on the table at a time.

Also, it's definitely possible to kill 300 guardsmen. Especially since that many guardsmen means that you're spending so many points on carriers that you're just not going to have the points left over for any real guns.

Which is the problem with chenkov. Let's say you're serious about throwing down some conscripts, and giving them the "invincible mode" upgrade. Looking at just the basics...

CCS - standard

PCS - chenkov
PIS
PIS
Conscripts (20) - SitNW!

PCS
PIS
PIS
Conscripts (20) - SitNW!

... costs you nearly 450 points, and you have pretty much no killing power whatsoever.

And you still have the force concentration problems. And we're still in a rules edition where casualties come from the front, and a codex environment where cover saves are irrelevant, which means that you're never actually getting guardsmen upfield. All they're likely to do is move forward and die, and the next turn the guardsmen behind them run forward, and only really make it up to the point where the last guys died before they, themselves, are killed. And so on, and so forth. Always moving forward, never actually getting anywhere.

Don't get me wrong, playing against horde guard would be a fun game to play, but if you're wanting to do anything other than just get tabled (or very badly beaten) most games you play, without every really getting to do much more than unpack and repack a giant pile of guard miniatures, then you're out of luck. If we were talking 5th ed, then yeah, but we're not. The OP is wanting to play a game in a way that the game can't be played in.

... on the plus side, by the time the OP gets around to painting 300 guardsmen, there will probably be a new rules edition out. Whether or not it restores the ability to run foot armies outside of the turtle-castle-oh-emperor-not-the-face! way, well, we'll just have to wait and see.

After painting 100 guardsmen and removing them all by the third turn, you'll regret this decision.

Dorcas wrote:
[That's the mean reason why I wanted to try this. Who doesn't want to send countless soldiers against the enemy?
But for competitive, I got to find something that really works.

@pic, is that a russian charging with just his bare hands? Badass! This is why I want to play as Imperial Guard.

Competitive depends on the environment. In a high end tourney environment an IG swarm army is not competitive. In a normal store meta it can be. Using Checknov is fine, but not completely limiting to only one unit type. Support your blobs of conscripts with infantry squads supported by leman russ tanks. One hit wonders don't succeed often, so just having hordes of conscripts charging will be boring to play and easy to counter. The conscripts waves will ulimtately cover only a small percentage of your total force cost and you can fill out the rest with the forces that will ultimately hammer the enemy into submission.

Yes that russin is empty handed because they didn't have enough guns for everyone early on, so the concept was charge with the rest when someone with a gun drops, take his gun and keep going. Of course the machine guns behind them to make sure they didn't retreat took away some of the badass aspects of it as they really had no choice. Die by enemy fire or die by friendly fire isn't much of an option.

Skriker

... incidentally, this is where Commissars came from.

 Ailaros wrote:

And you still have the force concentration problems. And we're still in a rules edition where casualties come from the front, and a codex environment where cover saves are irrelevant, which means that you're never actually getting guardsmen upfield. All they're likely to do is move forward and die, and the next turn the guardsmen behind them run forward, and only really make it up to the point where the last guys died before they, themselves, are killed. And so on, and so forth. Always moving forward, never actually getting anywhere.

Don't get me wrong, playing against horde guard would be a fun game to play, but if you're wanting to do anything other than just get tabled (or very badly beaten) most games you play, without every really getting to do much more than unpack and repack a giant pile of guard miniatures, then you're out of luck. If we were talking 5th ed, then yeah, but we're not. The OP is wanting to play a game in a way that the game can't be played in.

+1 to this, very well said. Between the Tau Master Race, Eldar shenanigans and White Scars/TFC love playing swarmy IG sucks big time. Last time I tried, a White Scar army r*ped me in every hole so horribly it wasn't even funny .

OP don't believe all these people saying that foot guard cannot compete.

IG foot armies with a tank or two do great under 1000 pts. Few armies can field a balanced list at this point level and IG is one of those chosen ones.

At armies over 1000 pts you will need to start playing games with allies and forgeworld to cover the deficits in the codex. There are numerous strategies to cover these weakness from scouting platoons using white scars allies to heavy carriage artillery lines. This is a more advanced discussion but we can definitely get into it.

Just to give an example of a truly nasty foot swarm list; I field 9x earthshaker heavy artillery, 4x sabre defense platform, platoons, with SM allies (bikes) that I cannot get anyone to play against any more. I have never lost with it and games using the list are frankly hilarious but boring. Just because you may not win with a list type does not equate out to the list type not being able to win. Giving such advice to a new player is emotional outburst due to frustration with your own performance.

Now without vendettas, manticores, and forgeworld guard is not competitive above 1000 pts. I can agree to that.