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Hello, most of my experience is with Xenos, but Ive heard IG is not the best. Never really looked at them, but Ive always liked the tanks.

Took a peak at IG Codex and their heavy support line seems really strong. T of 6, strong guns, lower point cost per gun dmg.
Only bad thing is the hit of 4+, but if rerolling ones it ain’t too bad.

Am curious what tank line IG struggles with. Most of the heavy supports seem good, armored sentinels seem good, and the super heavies do too. Can even have a tank hq for an all tank army.

Guard suck because 9th is a game of buff stacking and guard still have an early 8th edition codex with few buffs to stack. The stat line looks ok at first glance but that stat line is all you get. Compare that to other factions where you have a similar stat line, but also full hit and wound re-rolls, bonus AP, extra hits on 6s, shoot twice, etc, stacked up on that single unit. Sentinels and Baneblades add insult to injury by being less effective than their points worth of LRBTs. You end up with a one-dimensional army where a couple of units, demolisher tank commanders and full payload Manticores, are decent but the drop in power from there is immense.

And no, you can't take an all-tank army. Technically the rules allow you to but you pay a crippling CP penalty and with no screening units to keep your tank out of melee you get one shooting phase at most before your units are all locked down and effectively dead.

Guard struggle with having good looking tanks, lol. Leman russes are such toy looking models--blech.

Meng started copying them with their world war toons line

But seriously, though, they just don't do well on what we'd consider a "9th edition board" with BS4+ and not much for buffs. If they had some kind of obsec for the flamer tanks or if dozer blades were an addon that could be used offensively on the charge or something, they might be in business.

Quasistellar wrote:
Guard struggle with having good looking tanks, lol. Leman russes are such toy looking models--blech.

Meng started copying them with their world war toons line

But seriously, though, they just don't do well on what we'd consider a "9th edition board" with BS4+ and not much for buffs. If they had some kind of obsec for the flamer tanks or if dozer blades were an addon that could be used offensively on the charge or something, they might be in business.

"The leman Russ is ugly"
Never has a more wrong opinion been stated so boldly sir.

Quasistellar wrote:
Guard struggle with having good looking tanks, lol.

Lmao yeah I think the LRBT and transport models is what initially steered me away… Unfortunate the LRBT is so dominant, I think the baneblade line is one of the cooler models, and could definitely get behind manticores, deathstrike, and hydra.

A few models give rerolls of 1 to hit and wound, but I do suppose the psykers and other buffs arnt as dominant…

It sounds like Ig was the last 8th Ed codex, I guess they’ll be last on plate for a 9th, or maybe a 10th Ed, update?


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 Backspacehacker wrote:

Quasistellar wrote:
Guard struggle with having good looking tanks, lol. Leman russes are such toy looking models--blech.

Meng started copying them with their world war toons line

But seriously, though, they just don't do well on what we'd consider a "9th edition board" with BS4+ and not much for buffs. If they had some kind of obsec for the flamer tanks or if dozer blades were an addon that could be used offensively on the charge or something, they might be in business.

"The leman Russ is ugly"
Never has a more wrong opinion been stated so boldly sir.

I wouldn’t say it’s ugly, but definitely has a more animated feel to it!

Animated?

Its pretty grounded on actual WW1 tanks.

One of the reason I went with Krieg over regular Guard way back then was the fact that their artillery was the workhorse, instead of the Russes, they're not particularly good looking tanks.

CadianSgtBob wrote:
Guard suck because 9th is a game of buff stacking and guard still have an early 8th edition codex with few buffs to stack. The stat line looks ok at first glance but that stat line is all you get. Compare that to other factions where you have a similar stat line, but also full hit and wound re-rolls, bonus AP, extra hits on 6s, shoot twice, etc, stacked up on that single unit. Sentinels and Baneblades add insult to injury by being less effective than their points worth of LRBTs. You end up with a one-dimensional army where a couple of units, demolisher tank commanders and full payload Manticores, are decent but the drop in power from there is immense.

And no, you can't take an all-tank army. Technically the rules allow you to but you pay a crippling CP penalty and with no screening units to keep your tank out of melee you get one shooting phase at most before your units are all locked down and effectively dead.

Go ahead Bob, tell us more about how you don't know how to make or play a vehicle heavy army.

ccs wrote:
Go ahead Bob, tell us more about how you don't know how to make or play a vehicle heavy army.

Please do tell me how you get around the blast rule in melee, Baneblades having poor efficiency, etc. And remember that "vehicle heavy" is not the same thing as "all tanks".

marcman wrote:


It sounds like Ig was the last 8th Ed codex, I guess they’ll be last on plate for a 9th, or maybe a 10th Ed, update?

Nah it was 6th codex in. About 3 months after 8e launched.

Quasistellar wrote:
Guard struggle with having good looking tanks, lol. Leman russes are such toy looking models--blech.

You meant primaris and chaos, right? Both the impulsor and the repulsive absolutely look like a toy compared to a russ. And let's not even start with cartoonish deathguard models, daemons or silly infantry primaris.

CadianSgtBob wrote:
Guard suck because 9th is a game of buff stacking and guard still have an early 8th edition codex with few buffs to stack. The stat line looks ok at first glance but that stat line is all you get. Compare that to other factions where you have a similar stat line, but also full hit and wound re-rolls, bonus AP, extra hits on 6s, shoot twice, etc, stacked up on that single unit. Sentinels and Baneblades add insult to injury by being less effective than their points worth of LRBTs. You end up with a one-dimensional army where a couple of units, demolisher tank commanders and full payload Manticores, are decent but the drop in power from there is immense.

And no, you can't take an all-tank army. Technically the rules allow you to but you pay a crippling CP penalty and with no screening units to keep your tank out of melee you get one shooting phase at most before your units are all locked down and effectively dead.

So, when you say you CAN’T take an all tank army, you mean you CAN. But you don’t like it.

Andykp wrote:
So, when you say you CAN’T take an all tank army, you mean you CAN. But you don’t like it.

If you're a masochist who enjoys losing 100-0 with no hope of telling any story other than "wow our tanks suck, we all got slaughtered without achieving anything" you can. Normal people can't.

CadianSgtBob wrote:

Andykp wrote:
So, when you say you CAN’T take an all tank army, you mean you CAN. But you don’t like it.

If you're a masochist who enjoys losing 100-0 with no hope of telling any story other than "wow our tanks suck, we all got slaughtered without achieving anything" you can. Normal people can't.

How badly are you playing that all tank army if you fail to deny a single point to your opponent and also fail to score ANY of your picked secondaries or primary?

That sounds like a piloting issue you have there Bob, not all just the list.

Also Im team LRBT, it was iconic when I was a young boy entering the hobby and it still holds a special place in my heart.

 Gir Spirit Bane wrote:
How badly are you playing that all tank army if you fail to deny a single point to your opponent and also fail to score ANY of your picked secondaries or primary?

You do understand the concept that not all statements are 100% literal, right? You can nitpick about how you think you'd manage to score a few points and make it a 90-35 loss but it's never going to be close. Without any screening infantry at all even an empty transport can touch a tank in melee and lock it down forever. And as soon as that happens you lose your ability to do anything but hope to roll enough saves that you die slowly and score a token few points to avoid the shutout.

9th is a game of moving around the board, claiming and holding objectives. IG are bad at doing both.

If the game was about a pure shootout, IG (especially tank-lists) would probably do alright.

 MinscS2 wrote:
9th is a game of moving around the board, claiming and holding objectives. IG are bad at doing both.

Not by design though, just by outdated rules. I mean if they had superior shooting and their tanks were durable enough they could win games by preventing the opponents to score. Tau aren't that different and they are competitive. I'm pretty confident that with the 9th codex they'd be solid mid tiers at the very least.

 Blackie wrote:

 MinscS2 wrote:
9th is a game of moving around the board, claiming and holding objectives. IG are bad at doing both.

Not by design though, just by outdated rules. I mean if they had superior shooting and their tanks were durable enough they could win games by preventing the opponents to score. Tau aren't that different and they are competitive. I'm pretty confident that with the 9th codex they'd be solid mid tiers at the very least.

I don't disagree with you statement at all, a new codex may very well fix their current issues.

But currently they do struggle to claim and hold objectives.

Voss wrote:Animated?

Its pretty grounded on actual WW1 tanks.

It's really excessively tall but the hull is short and the turret is too small. It's like a cartoon rendition of a tank.

The Mars-Alpha is a significant improvement, but IMO the Mortian does it better, drawing from the excellent Macharius design:

Yeah the main gun going right through the tank commander has always been an issue for me. Not to mention the bore of the weapon itself. It's got a bunch of nice details on it though.

Ah, they just fitted a saddle over the breech, and gave all tank commanders cowboy hats

Voss wrote:
Animated?

Its pretty grounded on actual WW1 tanks.

This is actually a really fun point. Presumably the reason the tanks look "animated" to (whoever said that) is because they look similar to what a cartoon tank looks like. Here's where the fun starts. So, looney toons is strongly rooted in WWI and (especially) WWII era stuff. IG and looney toons tanks look similar because they are both based on the real thing.

(Off-topic side note/fun fact, the "clang clang clang went the trolly" song that shows up in looney tunes decently frequently is about a woman holding hands with a handsome stranger dude she doesn't have the nerves to talk to as they ride the street car)


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Also, if you're fighting chaos, you can stack a few buffs up on a tank commander, (I only recently realized vengeance for cadia can be used for regular shooting, not just overwatch), but that's about as good as it gets for guard in that respect.

I always felt like IG tanks where the only tanks in the game that looked like actual proper tanks. Space Marines only have APCs, Xenos have flying things, Primaris have flying APC things, too, Mechanicum has Walkers and floaty things 'n stuff, Ork vehicles are overall not my cup of tea and surely don't look like tanks (okay, Grot tanks actually do).
Only the Deimos Predator has a T-54 vibe that I really like, but that’s a special case.

Btw, Ork Flyers in my eyes look closest to actual working planes, funnily enough.

The Leman Russ does have things going for it - T8, a 2+ save and Armour of Contempt means small arms can basically get stuffed.

It's also one of very few tanks to get Objective Secured (in a spearhead, anyway). A lone model will still struggle because an Objective Secured unit, even if its only 3-5 infantry, can still steal the Objective back, but few tanks can even do that.

Blast turret weapons are an issue for melee but don't sleep on heavy flamer sponsons. If you know you're charging in, 3D6 flamer shots each round is a pretty acceptable substitute for swords and axes.

I don't have a pic handy, but Russ look excellent with the big Primaris Repulsor Executioner turret, far more MBT like. Shame it is so expensive to get them!

I've never run a pure tank list but in recent games virtually my only useful units have been LRBT and Chimera. LRBT are the only thing that seem to inflict any damage and have a reasonable survivability to be able to take the fight to the other side. Anything infantry just melts instantly so have to hide at the back. The only way to get infantry to any objective outside the deployment zone is stick them in a Chimera for the journey. Yes the Chimera will explode after the troops are dropped off but I've been having fun just charging them at enemy troops before they pop, I've caused a surprising number of kills that way.

From my experience Guard infantry is having far more struggles then the armour is. However that is just degrees of struggle when in reality the whole codex is but that's not going to change for a bit so may as well have fun in the mean time!

As for looks I'm a big fan of the LRBT. A WWI design shortened and a WWII turret plonked on top, ridiculous. It's recognisable, has good presence, and it's got character. Also with fewer fine details and chunky build it is an excellent playing piece, it will take a fair bit of battering with no visible damage.

Adding to locarno's post, by my understanding, taking a LRBT (or better yet, a tank commander) with demolisher cannon + hull heavy flamer + heavy flamer sponsons and taking the gunnery expert custom regiment trait means that (when the enemy is w/in 12 inches, which isn't hard on these tiny modern maps) you get to reroll every damage type die (i.e., the d6 in Heavy d6), so that's potentially 2d6 for the demolisher and 3d6 for the heavy flamers all being rerolled which can do nasty things.

Recently took an almost pure 1250pt tank list against tksons in tempest of war. Gunnery expert + spotting detail Spearhead with all demolisher+ 3x heavy flamers, a pair of armored sentinels (missile launcher for flexibility), and a full payload Manticore. Had 15 heavy flamers in total lol. Lost pretty badly, but had a ton of fun doing it. We played two rounds before we ran out of time and it was already pretty clear that I wasn't going to be clawing my way back (his scarab occult termies had plodded their way into charging range of most of my remaining tanks). The mortal wound spam is devastating against our tanks...it bypasses all of our spiffy new defenses. Any remaining wounds can then be chipped off via weight of dice in the shooting phase. Your only chance is to bring psykers of your own and hope you can get a few denies in (at least make them have to think about things). I should note, I definitely made some mistakes, so it probably should have been a bit more even, but I'd still probably lose on points.

Yeah: T8, 2+ AoC save is great....until mortal wounds show up.

But yeah, heavy flamers are a nice choice, as are (if you can find the points!) Multimeltas with 4 shots between sponsons.

The punisher gatling might be worth a look in that it doesn't have the issue of blast firing at melee range. It is pretty anaemic damage per shot, of course, even if you get 40 a turn.

Finally, in a pure tank force: track guards. If you need tanks to do take and hold, you need to keep your speed up. And keeping speed up whilst retaining grinding advance is important too.

Incidentally this is a list that actually did ok in a tourney.
https://www.goonhammer.com/competitive-innovations-bonus-paris-gt/

What a IG Tank line struggles with is basically anything that does melee and comes at you fast.
They will tag your tanks and diminish your firepower.

Tank lines also hate 'max X# number of wounds per phase' models. As they only have one phase, shooting.

That being said, a 2k spearhead is definately mid-tier competetive. I've taken spearhead lists to tournaments and did quite allright,
The firepower of 7+ Leman Russ tanks is very hard to withstand for most armies out there.