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This may seem like an odd question, but I am really kind of at a loss here.

My main opponents are Blood Angels, Eldar, Emperor's Children, Grey Knights and Tau.

I have tried sincerely to cut down on things. I stopped bringing the Conscript horde with Commissar, I cut down on the number of vehicles I bring and some games I even bring less units than I should (100 to 200 points less).

I'm still winning with seemingly minimal effort. My tanks just never die unless it's to massed melta firepower, my infantry always perform really well. I'm not even rolling all that well. It's getting to the point where my opponents don't want to play against me anymore and it's getting disheartening.

Surely someone else is having this problem?

Play them as R&H instead.

 mrhappyface wrote:
Play them as R&H instead.

What is R and H?

Just you wait til T'au get their codex.

Those tanks will be lighting up like a bonfire on 5 Nov. I get a funny feeling T'au are going to go top tier again alongside Necrons come March.

Also, is not in part an issue on your opponents bringing naff lists? BA, Eldar and GK shouldn't have an issue popping vehicles.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 TheCrazyCryptek wrote:

 mrhappyface wrote:
Play them as R&H instead.

What is R and H?

Renegades and Heretics

Leave indirect fire weapons. Makes a huge difference. Or, just play with 33% fewer points.

 TheCrazyCryptek wrote:
This may seem like an odd question, but I am really kind of at a loss here.

My main opponents are Blood Angels, Eldar, Emperor's Children, Grey Knights and Tau.

I have tried sincerely to cut down on things. I stopped bringing the Conscript horde with Commissar, I cut down on the number of vehicles I bring and some games I even bring less units than I should (100 to 200 points less).

I'm still winning with seemingly minimal effort. My tanks just never die unless it's to massed melta firepower, my infantry always perform really well. I'm not even rolling all that well. It's getting to the point where my opponents don't want to play against me anymore and it's getting disheartening.

Surely someone else is having this problem?

Do you have example lists? Some specifics? It's hard to go off this, and this comes off rather...oddly.

For example, how are your tanks not dying? IG tanks aren't tougher than anyone elses, they shouldn't need overwhelming massed melta-fire to kill, at least any more than anything else. Can you detail how your opponents are failing to kill your tanks but successfully kill tanks from other factions? If they can kill a Rhino, Fire Prism, Devilfish, Stormraven, Predator, or Wave Serpent, they should be able to kill a Hellhound, Russ, Chimera, Taurox, or Valkyrie.

The IG aren't so powerful that you should be steamrolling everyone with zero effort playing dramatically under-points armies with consistency. If you really need to tone things down, it really doesn't take much effort, half the book isn't seeing the table for a reason. Bring any of the plethora of bad units in the codex. Run Deathstrikes and Chimera mounted Ogryn backed up by Vanquisher Russ tanks and unsupported Conscripts as troops. Nobody should have trouble beating that.

That said, Grey Knights and Tau are really bad competitively, GK need a total book re-write almost and Tau need a codex, but there really needs to be more specifics here, otherwise we're just gonna get another meta-flaming thread.

 Vaktathi wrote:
For example, how are your tanks not dying? IG tanks aren't tougher than anyone elses, they shouldn't need overwhelming massed melta-fire to kill, at least any more than anything else. Can you detail how your opponents are failing to kill your tanks but successfully kill tanks from other factions? If they can kill a Rhino, Fire Prism, Devilfish, Stormraven, Predator, or Wave Serpent, they should be able to kill a Hellhound, Russ, Chimera, Taurox, or Valkyrie.

Well, to be fair, Russes are T8 so Plasma, Rockets and Melta don't do as much damage against them than other vehicles: rhinos, razorbacks, predators, Ork vehicles, Eldar vehicles, etc.

IG has access to much cheaper t8 than most armies for sure.

The specifics go mostly as follows.

The BA player goes very heavy on Primaris Marines and Terminators with a lot of short ranged fire power with some Devastators hanging back,

Tau opponent goes heavy on suits with fusion weapons and pulse weapons with a few Hammerheads and Pathfinders.

Eldar player has a good mix of Dark Reapers, Dire Avengers and Hemlock Wraith fighters with some Falcons in there too.

GK player has a smaller army, it's almost entirely Terminators mounted in Land Raiders.

Emperor's Children player runs all noise marines with Lucius, Fabius and a Land Raider. Oh, and a few Las-preds.


Is the problem here that they all run kinda elite lists? I'm just noticing it after typing it out. Is this edition really that bad for small units?

The Tau and Eldar player should be doing better than they are, what's the experience in your group I.e. how long have each player been playing for?

Primaris and terminators is a good way to never win with ba.

Martel732 wrote:
Primaris and terminators is a good way to never win with ba.

I thought BA were a good way to never win?

With the Eldar player in particular, it always seems to go the same way. He is always able to cause a lot of damage to my tanks, but not destroy them before I kill his big tank killing units, namely the Hemlock's with the D-scythe.

With the Tau player, he usually drops in those suits and causes serious damage to just about everything, but when I shoot back, I almost always wipe those suits that flanked out. The damage I'm causing is more than I'm taking. It seems to be a recurring theme.

The Tau player is fairly new, he just started last year and this is his first army. The Eldar player however is a veteran, he's been playing for years and years.

What missions are you playing? Are you playing with progressive scoring?

 mrhappyface wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Primaris and terminators is a good way to never win with ba.

I thought BA were a good way to never win?

They can beat a lot stuff in 8th, but not usually dark reapers or IG.

You dropped the Commissar and Conscript blob?
Despite the nerfed Commissar and Conscript blob being a terrible waste of points?

If you want to be less competative try playing with...

Death Strike Missile Launchers.
Ratlings.
Commissars.
Command Squads with Standards and Medics.
Junior Officers.
Armoured Sentinals.
Tempestus Scions on foot.
Veterans with Meltaguns.
Chimeras.

But seriously, some of those matchups you should not be floorwalking so easily.
Have you considered changing mission types?

Do you win because you table them? On Victory points? Do you play Malestorm?

We usually played Matched Play on Eternal War missions

Try ITC combined arms missions first. Eternal War heavily favors park and shoot.

 mrhappyface wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
For example, how are your tanks not dying? IG tanks aren't tougher than anyone elses, they shouldn't need overwhelming massed melta-fire to kill, at least any more than anything else. Can you detail how your opponents are failing to kill your tanks but successfully kill tanks from other factions? If they can kill a Rhino, Fire Prism, Devilfish, Stormraven, Predator, or Wave Serpent, they should be able to kill a Hellhound, Russ, Chimera, Taurox, or Valkyrie.

Well, to be fair, Russes are T8 so Plasma, Rockets and Melta don't do as much damage against them than other vehicles: rhinos, razorbacks, predators, Ork vehicles, Eldar vehicles, etc.

In some sense, sure, but Russ tanks were not called out specifically (there's a lot of other tanks in the IG army), Plasma is not a dedicated anti-tank weapon and shouldn't be relied upon for such, Meltas were specifically mentioned as working, and Krak missiles aren't a huge part of most of these factions arsenals.

Additional information is needed

 TheCrazyCryptek wrote:
The specifics go mostly as follows.

The BA player goes very heavy on Primaris Marines and Terminators with a lot of short ranged fire power with some Devastators hanging back,

Tau opponent goes heavy on suits with fusion weapons and pulse weapons with a few Hammerheads and Pathfinders.

Eldar player has a good mix of Dark Reapers, Dire Avengers and Hemlock Wraith fighters with some Falcons in there too.

GK player has a smaller army, it's almost entirely Terminators mounted in Land Raiders.

Emperor's Children player runs all noise marines with Lucius, Fabius and a Land Raider. Oh, and a few Las-preds.


Is the problem here that they all run kinda elite lists? I'm just noticing it after typing it out. Is this edition really that bad for small units?

Mostly they look like they're not terribly competitively built armies, which may be the issue. Most of these armies would have difficulties against any competitive list. Hammerheads are about the worst MBT in the game right now (at least in terms of engaging other tanks) and the Tau army as a whole *realllly* needs a Codex. Primaris and Terminator heavy BA is not playing to the strengths of the core rules or the BA specialties really. The GK army probably won't do well against most anything in the current metagame (I own a very similar GK army), try having them proxy it as a Custodes list and they'll have a lot more luck methinks but armies like that always have issues. The EC army looks very heavily themed, which, again, I wouldn't expect to do outstandingly well if you're running competitive lists. The Eldar list is the only one that pops out as being largely built around competitive stuff.

So, broadly, it sounds like you're running competitive IG lists against these, and you'd probably get much the same result doing the same thing with many other armies. I can't see the BA or GK lists doing spectacularly well against the Eldar list noted for example, at least from whats presented here.

Again, just try taking more of the less popular IG units, try taking Doctrines that aren't as tuned to the list as the ones you have been using, take upgrade options you normally wouldn't, and you should be fine. You can absolutely very definitely make an unplayable mess of an army with the IG codex with relatively little effort.

EDIT: as noted by others above, try different missions too, the rulebook ones in general tend to push gunlines, fast MSU or Deathstars, and your IG are about the only ones that fit into any of those categories.

Imperial Guard is king of eternal war. Try stuff like maelstrom or ITC. Maelstrom is heavily luck based but can be fun for a goofy game. ITC give you very balanced missions that will radically change how your army plays. An IG army that dominates eternal war will ha e a very different time in ITC. ITC also tends to reward a variety of playstyles, most missions reward objective and killing as well as other secondaries.

Also, change first blood to "first strike" where each player gets a VP as long as they kill a unit in their first turn. That way the person who gets first turn doesn't just get a free point for winning a dice off.

Don't play eternal war.play maelstrom or play the ITC-missions. This will help a lot.

First turn is bad enough without first blood in the game.

Martel732 wrote:
First turn is bad enough without first blood in the game.

I still don't know why they left that in with 8E, it was stupid when they introduced it, stupid when they kept in in 7th, and it's still stupid in 8th

It serves no purpose I can think of other than to just reinforce first turn value.

Old habits die hard. Just like IGYG. Unit activation is the way to go.

Well, things changed in 40k. Terrain doesnt matter, range doesnt matter, movement doesnt matter.
What does matter is rolling enough dice. LRBTs can shoot twice if not moved too far. Other AM units have evastating shooting too.
We have a local AM player with one Baneblade, four LRBTs, infantry and whatnot. Really hard to beat these days.

Terrain actually matters quite a bit most of the time. Less so against weapons that ignore LoS. Especially with marines vs AP 0 shooting.

Range matters, but IG has the longest ranges.

Movement matters, but IG doesn't have to move in eternal war.

Don't pretend that terrain mattered vs scatbikes. Cover didn't matter vs them, and they could fly around nearly any LoS blocker.

I was our resident win-button guard player until
a. I got bored and stopped updating my 5th-6th-7th edition army with new toys
b. I was surpassed about 5 weeks later - he's having the same problem I did in that 'its not particularly fun'

You'd think that against each other we'd have a grand time - and we do - but turn one decides the game.

Our respective answers included :
Use Eradicators/Exterminators as the standard russ
Over-invest in single units so that one good shot ruins your battle plan
Use extensive fortifications so that you're easier to outmaneuver
Play Index IG against anyone who doesn't have a codex yet

and naturally,

Play Index IG

Also, If you can find a way to play that involves the ever mystical movement phase taking longer than a 5 step jig, you're going in the right direction.

 TheCrazyCryptek wrote:
We usually played Matched Play on Eternal War missions

I think this is the key, and I believe it's not been emphasized enough in this thread. Parking lot armies like IG tend to have some trouble garnering points in an objective based games, or at least it makes the game more interesting because it forces you to be mobile sometimes. With enough LOS terrain and objectives on the board you should have a harder time as IG (maybe start with Maelstrom since they are laid out neatly in the BRB, but I'd say ITC is better albeit more complicated). At the very least the games will feel more fun and varied when the objectives are drawn randomly (like in Maelstrom) or the objectives are as important as killing things (ITC).

They don't REALLY have trouble, because Move move move exists, but we can pretend it does.

Well, at least a tad more than comparing who does the most damage when parked.