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So, as all the foot players on here know, the biggest hurdle of playing a foot horde IG in 6th has been one key problem.

Taking the fight to the friggin enemy.

We can shoot the hell out of them, we can outlast them, we can provide so many scoring units its not even funny, but the problem remains. How do we cross the field and finish the fight?

And hence the thread. I figured we could discuss ways of making a more aggressive IG foot/hybrid army, and try and brainstorm a way out of this dilemma.

I have been fixing the problem by overwhelming numbers and firepower. Basically, I shoot my opponent so much my infantry don't have much to worry about when they move up. I also use stormtroopers and marbo to disrupt firebases and deathstars, which splits the enemy's fire even more and buys my guardsmen time to move into position. Every player I've fought against, has said the exact same thing "There's just to fething many of them to kill." Not everyone likes to play the human wave MSU infantry tactic though, so this isn't for the faint of heart. It also requires a ton of extra work to make it work, and I would like a slightly more simplified approach to breaking the enemy lines, if that makes sense.

I've seen other ideas mentioned, from the merely unusual (Ailaros's 30 stormtrooper lists for example) to some really oddball ones, like one guy who was thinking of making an uberblob with Yarrick and running it up behind a bunch of demolishers, possibly with some ogryn support.

So, how do you plan on getting across the table and grabbing those home objectives? No idea is too crazy or out there at this point. This is a thinktank so we can figure out some ideas on how to break out from our own half of the board. Try to be civil guys, our lists are all still very different at this point, so there's going to be clashes of opinion. Just keep in mind what works for one guy may not work for you.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
like one guy who was thinking of making an uberblob with Yarrick and running it up behind a bunch of demolishers, possibly with some ogryn support.

Umm.... is that me? XD

Anyways, great thread. I was going to make something like this so we could discuss tactics and share strategies (FOR THE EMPRAH) but seems like you were a step ahead of me. I cannot get any games in (haven't been able to for the last month or so) but looking at my schedule, seems like I'll be able to grab some games soon enough. I'll post battle reports and share my blob-o-doom with Yarrick behind line of Demolishers tactic.

Crazy idea number one: Al'rahem with conscripts. Dump so many bodies on a flank that they will slaughter everything, or drown them in bodies. I doubt it would work but you did say brainstorm, and I have never heard of someone outflanking conscripts before.

I agree with the screening Idea. It's how I'd cross a battlefield with the IG... basically Blitzkrieg on a TT. Tanks first Infantry second, all supported by flanking, air support, artillery, or what have you.

Here are some ideas I've been mulling with.

Al rahem, 4 flamers in a chimera.
5x PIS with melta or plasma or krak.
2x Stormtroopers with 3x plasma/pistol in chimeras.
Supported by hellhounds, LR exterminators, and a small gunline platoon.

PCS, PIS, or smaller SWS advancing behind a russ or hellhound wedge squadron. With the changes to shooting, you can keep guys out of LoS and alive as they advance.

Simple flat-out chimeras. They can go 18 inches a turn now, so cramming a couple right down the throat could get a few squads in their face quickly. Bring enough higher threat targets to keep the heat off them.

Mobility,,,

Are you factoring in use of any vehicles. I think a vendetta or two are pretty includeable in any footlist and providing them with a fairly cheap effective scoring unit could be good (IS, Special weapons squad or PCS). I think combining any more than 1-of the mobility characters is a bad idea (Creed, Harker, Al-rahem) but using one may be a good idea.

I also think combining any of the above with Penal Legionnaires could be a good plan. Well, could be if you include anything but Al-rahem). But Penals are paper, so you'd need to treat them as such, use long range fire support to clear out backfield objectives.

I'm not a huge fan of using allies to augment Guard units, typically I prefer for them to fill a role that my army normally wouldn't have access to.

However, this would be a very funny (and annoying) unit:

1x Rune Priest with Terminator Armor (or Runic Armor, your choice)
50x Conscripts

For a total cost of 320 points, you have 51 guys. Put the Rune Priest in the front, so any shots will be resolved against his 2+ armor save. If for some reason he fails it, you LOS to a Conscript. Either way, the squad is LD 10 and has ATSKNF and Counter Attack just in case.

Then use the Rune Priest to get the Prescience Divination power, and just deal with the other one, unless of course you roll 2 better powers. Even with BS2, they'll be rerolling hits so that's effectively BS3. With Forewarning, you have the ability to give your entire squad a 4+ invulnerable save!

Making the Rune Priest Psychic Mastery 2 isn't a terrible idea.

 Vladsimpaler wrote:
For a total cost of 320 points, you have 51 guys. Put the Rune Priest in the front, so any shots will be resolved against his 2+ armor save. If for some reason he fails it, you LOS to a Conscript.

You do LOS! before saves in a mixed armour unit. Also, it would be pretty hard to hide 50 men behind the priest, units that are not shooting from directly in front would probably hit conscripts.

The issue with running your guys behind the tanks is that most other armies want the tanks to get close to them. If they are forced to shoot lascannons or missile launchers at av 14 from afar they are wasting shots. If you bring the tank into melta range they are quite happy.

The obvious answer is flyers. Blow people off the board and then send in the valkyries to drop guys off on objectives. I got my butt handed to me this way this weekend. The guy was running 2 vendettas and a valkyrie with vets inside and 2 20 man blobs as part of a doubles tournament. So that definitely works as "combined" strategy.

If you mean to not include flyers as part of a combined strategy (as I am attempting) it gets a lot harder.

I've been running a foot IG army with Elysian allies out of IA 8. Does pretty well, if a bit too glass cannon.

As a newer foot IG player, I appreciate the work that's being put into cracking the foot puzzle.

I'm going to be trying out two squads of 10 Stormtroopers in my next game, along with a powerblob and commie.

I think Al'Rahem has lost a lot since 6th hit in the way of impacting a game. They can no longer pop up on a flank, shoot and assault. The best way to run Al'Rahem now seems to be with Chimeras.

 Trickstick wrote:

 Vladsimpaler wrote:
For a total cost of 320 points, you have 51 guys. Put the Rune Priest in the front, so any shots will be resolved against his 2+ armor save. If for some reason he fails it, you LOS to a Conscript.

You do LOS! before saves in a mixed armour unit. Also, it would be pretty hard to hide 50 men behind the priest, units that are not shooting from directly in front would probably hit conscripts.

Not a big deal, regardless you'll still have the Rune Priest to absorb some shots. And yeah granted you'll have units hitting the conscripts, but then they're not focusing on other, much more important parts of your army. It's a bullet sink.

i personally like to tie up my enemy with Melta-vets dropping from Vendettas and marbo. while they spend a few turns doing trying to kill them i go a head and run as far as i can up the board with MMM! and the usual 6 inches

I've thought about running some SWS's with x2 melta and a demo charge in some vendettas, but until I stumble across $200 for some valks, that won't be happening. So in the meantime, I'm trying to think of other options.

I really am liking the idea of the "death blob" with Yarrick, maybe a priest or 2, with plasma/fist vets as support, and maybe some cheap infantry squads to run ahead of the Demolishers and keep back melta guns. It'd be a rediculous list, and would be hilarious to watch, and I'll deffinitely try it the moment I can get a hold of some demolishers.

Will it be effective? Probably not, but man will it look cool.

Honestly though, I do believe we're going to have to rely on breaking key targets with shooting and then moving in to mop up afterwards with the infantry. IG was never intended to be a blitzkrieg force that pops up and wrecks face. We're slow to get going, but designed to be impossible to stop once we're up to speed. We need to play to our strengths, and build up momentum. Cracking key firebases and damage dealers, like enemy tanks, artillery, deathstars, and monstrous creatures is key to this. How you go about this isn't important, stormtroopers, russes, artillery, HWS spam, it doesn't matter. What is important is that you crush the enemy. You find him, and you wipe him out. AKA he can run, but he can't hide. Cover the table in guardsmen and move up in a wall of pain, leaving his few survivors to cower behind buildings and hope they can make all their cover saves. They choke up movement lanes, slow down more mobile enemy units trying to get to your line, and pen him in, forcing him to bunch up and become fodder for your templates.

I know this sounds crazy, but I've been using it to great effect so far in 6th. Every game I won was due to this strategy of always moving up and forcing the enemy to react to my plans, not the other way around. Every time I tried to stay back and gunline, it ended in me losing. When we sit back, the enemy has time to pick targets, think out his plans, focus fire. If you move everything up, and throw tons of cheap throwaway units at him, he simply won't be able to kill everything he needs. He's either killing your tanks, your HWS, your deepstrikers, your command elements, or your fliers, but he can never kill everything at once. I've had opponents who were literally so overwhelmed they had to ignore Marbo sitting in the middle of their deployment in a desperate attempt to clear a 4 man infantry squad off an objective. It requires tons of infantry ( my Feasts of blades list had almost 120 infantry models in it) and always suffers heavy casualties, but it's shaken up every player I've gone up against, even the vets at my store, who fight the really scary cheese lists on a daily basis. Tourney armies especially just don't have enough seperate weapons to kill all that they need per turn, since they can only shoot a set number of units. I've watched players have to choose between shooting one of 3 infantry squads next to his squad, a leman russ 20" away, a squad of stormtroopers behind him, a CCS in the open that was begging to be shot, and 2 HWS's with lascannons lining up shots. Played right, it can be depressing to fight against. Played wrong though... well... let's just say it ain't pretty...

Right, so the problem I've found isn't necessarily mobility, the problem is survivability. 6th edition basically ensured that guardsmen will melt like snow to a blowtorch unless they're actually, physically in a ruins, or piece of area terrain. Mobility doesn't actually seem to be THAT tough. As mentioned, I've been running my 30 stormies, and that puts a hell of a lot of stuff somewhere else, and I guess I can see al'rahem for this role as well. If you're slightly desperate, you can always throw guys in a vendetta and parachute him on to stuff.

No, the problem, as I'm slowly starting to understand it, really is durability. You can try to pack some more durable units in, but there are problems. Russes are tough, but if you put them in the front, they're just going to be melta/CC fodder. Ogryn are tough, but it's actually possible for your opponent to sort of just ignore them, and they also have some hard counters that can lose you an entire batch in a single go (like, say, a certain necron vehicle that can throw down a line of S10 hits.

And in any case, this doesn't give your INFANTRY more durability, it's just a screen that you put in front and hope for the best. This, I think, is where the real problem lies.

So one way, as Moustaffa notes, is to reduce the damage by reducing your opponent's killing power. This is a classic guard way, but I kind of waver on it.

Firstly, guard has a tradition of being kings of firepower, but I don't think that idea is actually all that true anymore. In the last 2 years, we've gotten venom and warrior+raider spam which puts out a HUGE number of shots, mostly BS4, mostly Ap5, and often twin-linked (to say nothing of blaster and darklight spam). We've gotten new grey knights which are crazy at shooting now. Newcrons put out absurd firepower now. Guard doesn't even have quite the same monopoly on large blast templates that it had in the past. Since the advent of fliers, other armies have added a lot of shooting as well. Back in the day, guard only had to worry about a muzzle-to-muzzle gunfight against Tau. That's really not true now.

But then we need to talk about this durability problem. We can still throw out a lot of HWSs, but against smart opponents, they'll all be wiped off the board by the end of turn 2, and you can't shoot guns when you're dead (and you can only scarcely shoot guns when you've gone to ground). Furthermore, artillery, while being a bit more powerful, is also a bit easier to kill. You still have russes, but russes have always had a pretty lousy cost to killing power ratio, so when you're talking about putting down killing power, this causes problems.

Basically, it feels like guard shooting is either high enough in quantity, but too low in durability to really get enough out of it, or durable enough to put down the shots, but it doesn't actually put out more firepower than other armies anymore.

Another way of handling foot guard durability problems, of course, is trying to make the guardsmen themselves more durable. One way, of course, is to do things like take an aegis, but then you're stuck with an aegis.

Another way, perhaps, would be to start taking foot vets with carapace. 100 points vs. 50, but equally durable (per point) as taking twice as many regular guardsmen, at least as far as being out in the open is concerned.

Another option, though suffering from the ogryn problem is to take conscripts. If you're going to have the guys in front do nothing more than die, then you can do it at a lower up-front cost. Of course, this requires you to have a lot of extra models lying around.

Another option would be to just start your guardsmen in reserves. Literally don't make them a target until you've had a chance to soften things up a bit. Of course, this basically kills any initiative or field position you had, and basically sticks you in a reactive role.

You could also rely on the old bodies over bullets way by just frigging packing in the PISs, but this creates a killing power liability (among other problems), and it's rather a risk in a world where long-range anti-horde firepower is higher than its ever been.

In any case, this is a really tricky problem, after all. No small part of it has to do with the fact that you can really only ever employ like one strategy before you start running out of points to implement a second.

---

Oh, and the other problem with the "kill them first" approach is time. Guardsmen are REALLY fragile now. You've REALLY got to cut down your opponent's killing power before you can make a reasonable advance on foot. This means it might be until turn 3 or 4 before you've finally rendered the board sufficiently safe for your remaining guardsmen.

What we need is a plausible way for guardsmen to start advancing turn 1 or 2.

Just an idea, but maybe take a Librarian, and droppod (or if you want BA DoA) two squads in, nothing draws hate like droppods in the middle of your lines, I suppose another thing you could try is use Daemons as allies and drop some Bloodletters in.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:


I know this sounds crazy, but I've been using it to great effect so far in 6th. Every game I won was due to this strategy of always moving up and forcing the enemy to react to my plans, not the other way around. Every time I tried to stay back and gunline, it ended in me losing. When we sit back, the enemy has time to pick targets, think out his plans, focus fire. If you move everything up, and throw tons of cheap throwaway units at him, he simply won't be able to kill everything he needs.

I don't think it's crazy at all. As a long time guard player, I learned how to use my army much more effectively when i started playing Tyranids as a second army, because i learned the value of flooding the enemy with threats. My guard army used to be a pretty standard gunline. and always struggled to get out of the d-zone. Playing 'nids forced me to think long and hard about encircling the enemy, boxing them in, pushing them back off objectives so that my fragile gaunts could camp them happily. The losses were horrendous; nearly every game resulted in me nearly being tabled, but winning convincingly on objectives.

Now as a guard player i use a hellhound, a 20 blob of lasgunners, outflanking harker vets in a chimera and melta stormies in a valk to force my enemy's target priority. This also helps with the 'durability' problem Ailaros mentioned. By aggressively using 'pop' units to influence target priority, you can take the heat off your damaged units. My last game was won by the last two guardsmen surviving from my from my 'naked' blob - after firing at them for most of the game, my enemy felt compelled to start targeting the stuff that was actually killing him, and the surviving two guardsmen took the game winning objective.

For this approach to work you really need a combined arms force, and a lot of balls. You also can't neglect the fast attack options, as they are what let you win the game in the movement phase. There is a lot of value in simply being there first.

@Ailaros: the plausible way to advance is with a big-ass foot blob, no guns, a commissar and a vox for move move move! You are gonna lose a heap of guardsmen anyway; make it the ones that you really don't care about. It works surprisingly well. Just make sure to back them up with a variety of other threats so that the enemy cannot destroy them at leisure without seriously risking some of their key units in exchange.

I still stand by the Ogryn wall of meat, I have seen what it can do and the fact that they provide vehicles cover (big fellas) is just wonderful.

Although not pure IG, using Uriah Jacobus with them seems like it could put it closer to Death Star status, and make people really edgy with them around (pack in some of the sweet mass MSU and they will not know what to do).

Jimole wrote:the plausible way to advance is with a big-ass foot blob, no guns, a commissar and a vox for move move move! You are gonna lose a heap of guardsmen anyway; make it the ones that you really don't care about. It works surprisingly well. Just make sure to back them up with a variety of other threats so that the enemy cannot destroy them at leisure without seriously risking some of their key units in exchange.

The problem is still durability. If my opponent kills more inches of guardsmen than I can reliably move forward in a turn, then I'm not actually taking ground. I'm just loosing guardsmen to hold the same ground.

In 5th ed, units got a 4+ by-unit cover save with hidden weapon upgrades. In 6th ed, none of that is true.

I'm having a hard time seeing how a Napoleonic tactic of "hey, I've moved my guys all the way up here, you're screwed" is supposed to actually work in a game where killing power is more important than your ability to temporarily hold ground.

As for "how am I going to kill all these targets?" It's what target prioritization is for. It wont' take long against a skilled opponent to whittle down your first-rate units and eat into your second. It seems like a overwhelming strategy only works when all of the units you're attacking with are credible threats (like DoA BA or some GK strategies). In the case of guard, they can take down your flimsy high-firepower units, and then simply munch down the thread ladder at ease.

 Jimole wrote:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:


I know this sounds crazy, but I've been using it to great effect so far in 6th. Every game I won was due to this strategy of always moving up and forcing the enemy to react to my plans, not the other way around. Every time I tried to stay back and gunline, it ended in me losing. When we sit back, the enemy has time to pick targets, think out his plans, focus fire. If you move everything up, and throw tons of cheap throwaway units at him, he simply won't be able to kill everything he needs.

I don't think it's crazy at all. As a long time guard player, I learned how to use my army much more effectively when i started playing Tyranids as a second army, because i learned the value of flooding the enemy with threats. My guard army used to be a pretty standard gunline. and always struggled to get out of the d-zone. Playing 'nids forced me to think long and hard about encircling the enemy, boxing them in, pushing them back off objectives so that my fragile gaunts could camp them happily. The losses were horrendous; nearly every game resulted in me nearly being tabled, but winning convincingly on objectives.

Now as a guard player i use a hellhound, a 20 blob of lasgunners, outflanking harker vets in a chimera and melta stormies in a valk to force my enemy's target priority. This also helps with the 'durability' problem Ailaros mentioned. By aggressively using 'pop' units to influence target priority, you can take the heat off your damaged units. My last game was won by the last two guardsmen surviving from my from my 'naked' blob - after firing at them for most of the game, my enemy felt compelled to start targeting the stuff that was actually killing him, and the surviving two guardsmen took the game winning objective.

For this approach to work you really need a combined arms force, and a lot of balls. You also can't neglect the fast attack options, as they are what let you win the game in the movement phase. There is a lot of value in simply being there first.

@Ailaros: the plausible way to advance is with a big-ass foot blob, no guns, a commissar and a vox for move move move! You are gonna lose a heap of guardsmen anyway; make it the ones that you really don't care about. It works surprisingly well. Just make sure to back them up with a variety of other threats so that the enemy cannot destroy them at leisure without seriously risking some of their key units in exchange.

The problem is that bodies, in and of themselves, are meaningless. Well, not to holding objectives, but to everything else.

What's the point of having 60 guardsmen somewhere if they're not going to kill something? Especially when they are much easier to wipe off the table than they were before.

The credibility of PISs seems greatly reduced. Spamming them, therefore, just seems like a bad idea.

 Ailaros wrote:
The problem is that bodies, in and of themselves, are meaningless. Well, not to holding objectives, but to everything else.

What's the point of having 60 guardsmen somewhere if they're not going to kill something? Especially when they are much easier to wipe off the table than they were before.

The credibility of PISs seems greatly reduced. Spamming them, therefore, just seems like a bad idea.

2 things Ailaros, and I'm not trying to be a jerk, so bear with me.

1. Your store seems to be on the verge of list tailoring for you almost every game. Which should be quite complement. You've literally played foot guard so much younve either scared people into tailoring or screwed the entire meta. This however brings me to my first point. You're facing armies designed to kill lots of guardsmen. How do we beat this? well, i solved it by, shockingly, taking more guardsmen. If your opponent thinks he hates 70 guardsmen, wait till he fights a 140 of em. Maybe you should try slimming your list down for a game and taking more infantry? For example, if i don't have at least 100 Guardsmen and 3 leman russes with tons of heavy weapons, I don't feel confident at all. And my guardsmen aren't just meatshields either. They're all packing a meltagun and depending on my mood an autocannon, and my opponents learned very quickly that ignoring them to shoot the "dangerous" stuff just meant they died to my infantry squads. You of all players should know that even the humble infantry squad can kill its fair share if you play it right.

2. One reason why we might see very different results is that we fight different types of opponents. My store is EXTREMELY competitive, and are constantly sending guys to go to tourneys. However, their tourney styled lists rely on small elite units. Many dont have more than 15 units in any given game, and I tend to easily double if not triple them on the unit count. My strategy literally overwhelms them. You don't seem to have this "problem" though. You've faced some...crazy lists... and so they're not countered as hard by this style as my store tends to be. This is a theory though, I know you dont do a report of every game, so maybe we missed that time you fought draigowing 3 times in a row.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, @ Jimole, while you run your list a bit differently it seems, we seem to share the same results. Usually the squad thats taking the objective is at or below half strength, and I consider myself to be doing great if I've lost less than 2/3rds of my guardsmen. However, I've been learning how to force my opponent to make tough decisions, and it' what's been winning me games. My favorite line so far has been been "Are you sure you want to shoot the HWS? what about that russ about to open up on the guys that had to abandon that rhino? Or those 4 guardsmen hiding on the objective way across the board? Or maybe you could kill the stormies right behind you?" etc. etc.

I need to try hellhounds or devil dogs now that i think about it, because I like your idea of "in your face" units to help draw fire. Hellhounds do a ton of damage at decent range anyways, so even if your opponent ignored it it wouldn't be a bad choice. Just slap a multimelta on that bad boy and it could scare just about anything. Yeah a vendetta is scarier, but a hellhound doesnt cost 80 bucks Which boils down to the same old adage I've been going by

"if your opponent is able to focus down your key units, you didn't bring enough of them" It goes for PiS, it goes for russes, it goes for HWS's. Heck, mech players have been living by this rule for years. Yeah a chimera sucks on its own, but when you have 15 they're almost unstoppable. It's a key strength of all IG units, especially foot armies. we just ned to figure out the best way of achieving the magical bmore bodies than they have bullets equation"

Aslo. excuse all the edits, my phone sucks and this was a LONG post, so i had to break it up into chunks.

Uhm... As I read through this topic I've discovered that nearly every post has at least one "While my footsloggers die en-masse, my Vendettas/Russes/'Hounds/Arty delivers the pain." sentence. But then... Are we even talking about foot IG? Because in my book, you have foot IG when your armour is your Storm Troopers and you have 0 AV stuff in your army. Taking vehicles into the picture would only turn the army into a 'hybrid' and kill the essence of 'foot' (negating the enemy AT by simply not taking vehicles).

So if the answer to the current problems of the foot lists is "Mech up buddy!", then it is kinda' like everyone admits that 'foot' is dead and 'hybrid' is the new way to go... What is sad, but guess its true :(.

I'm finding this discussion very interesting, and I have been enjoying reading every post so far, keep it up guys!

I haven't played point levels above 1000 points yet (I'm playing in a campaign), but I should get to play a 1200 point game next week. So far I have won against Tau and SW, and lost to Necrons and IG.

I'm still trying to find a solid core for my army build in 6th edition. So far I have used a 30 man platoon, a flamer PCS in Chimera and a veteran squad in a Chimera as the core of my army. As support I have tried different Leman Russ variants or/and a Medusa. I can still get the blob tactic to work with a Psyker and commisar, just as long as my opponent doesn't field any barrage weapons.
The 3x 10 man PIS's have survived every game so far, both in a big blob and as separate squads - my only problem is that they pose such small threat to the enemy that often they won't bother shooting at them at all. So far I have been fielding them with the cheap GL+AC (and sometimes power swords as well), but I should probably start fielding them with plasma+AC or power sword + melta, I just don't have all those special weapons yet.

The flamer PCS hasn't been working very well as they never get in range of anything before their chimera is wrecked. The only time I get a proper use out of them is when someone is stupid enough to charge them or their transport, so I have considered giving the Chimera to another squad instead and field them differently.

The plasma vets have been doing great, although I have had some severe problems with necron vehicles so I have started considering fielding more melta again, both in chimeras or with stormtroopers.
The Medusa is as good as it was in 5th, if not better, but with the huge buff to barrage, I have been thinking about to convert some barrel extensions to field them as Basilisks instead - that way they should also survive longer.
The problem is that I don't want to play a static gunline, I want to be as mobile as possible. Unfortuately, I haven't get to try out my agresive Lord Commisar list yet because in the campaign we play with one random list out of three possible, so you almost never know what tyo get to play and what you have to play against.

Through all of 5th I played hybrid IG and I still do, but the more I think about it, the more it has changed. Tanks being hit on 3's now hurts a lot and the allowing of "sniping" sergeants and heavy/special weapons out of squads hurts even more. I should probably get more infantry, but I don't know exactly what the best way to field platoons with tanks is yet.

Whilst I have not had a chance to play an all-foot list in 6th, I have given it some thought (like many of you) and can’t see any easy way out (bar allies, but kind of defeats the point, no?).

My initial thoughts for an advancing combined squad is to go 3x10 PIS wCommissar & special weapons (melta/plasma), unsure about heavy weapons but either auto/bolter for increased chances to hit when moving, and 1x10 PIS with a flamer to advance in-front of the blob for a 5+ cover save against most things.

Drawbacks are easy enough to spot; kill the squad in-front first, which won’t be that hard (i.e. no cover) then start shooting/assaulting the blob. It’s also a fair lump of points in games of 1500pts or less, and I think you would need at least two of these platoons, preferably three, to stand any chance of making headway into the enemy DZ or have enough bodies left at the end to claim objectives.

Assuming two blobs with melta and one with plasma and all have autocannon comes to ~830 points (including 3x PCS w/4x flamer) but does give you 138 scoring troopers, 6 melta, 3 plasma, 9 autocannon and 15 flamers (!). Massive liability in KP games with 6x easy KPs for the PCS and lone PIS (although the PIS can be merged in with the blobs). Add in one or two cheap CCS for orders (+ ~ 150pts) then fill up the rest with HWS (2x LC, 4x AC) or (4x LC, 1x AC) and you’re at about 1500pts and have no supporting units, other than the HWS/CCS. I can’t see it doing that well TBH.

I’m also rather attached to a Bastion (with or without Quad gun) as a base for my CCS and a HWS (lascannons) which gives them the benefit of AV14 protection and a decent vantage point. (By-the-by, our group does not place fortifications before terrain (if only through the efforts of one player) as it’s too easy to be TFG and place a massive LoS blocking piece in-front of it. Sigh). Also helps hide/cover the artillery, if you’re taking any, which is probably a good idea.

I think re: HWS survivability; they’ve always been fragile and must be treated as expendable, to a certain extent. If you’re pinning all your hopes of anti-tank on your two squads of lascannon HWS and they get blown off the board in a turn (not unlikely), then what? IMO, foot guard needs some saturation here; the type of firepower that is bad for the HWS (S6+) could be diluted if you have multiple threatening targets that would require that type of fire to get rid off effectively. Sentinels is all I can really think of at the moment and including them doesn’t make it an all-foot list (well, all Infantry). If you’re not opposed to having some armour in with your guardsmen then artillery, sentinels and the hellhound variants should all be solid choices. Sentinels and Hellhounds have the added bonus of being scoring units in 1/6th of games, which is nice!

Other than that, others have already suggested lists with Al’rahem in, although in an all-infantry army I think his platoon will lack serious punch & range when they arrive; mounted in Chimeras with plasma/melta and autocannons would be the way to go; especially now the plasma guns have a larger threat area when entering the board. BS3 plasma still isn’t great, however.

Stormtroopers look more appealing now than 5th which is fantastic, as I’ve got a squad of Karskrin that need painting! Still pretty vulnerable after dropping in but nowhere near as much as regular Joe 5+. The ability to get them where you need them reliably is huge, too, as is the cover save change; making their AP3 more useful than ever before.

If you’re going to take armour in your foot list, Artillery is where I’d go first. They give your army the ability to hit targets that you otherwise can’t see/reach/get to. This is incredibly handy when most other armies can literally run rings around you in transports, etc, and forces them to come to you which is what you want – get the enemy within 12” and let loose FRFSRF/special weapon glory. Easy enough getting up the table if your opponent can’t stop you when most of his stuff is dead. I would happily take almost any of the artillery pieces we have access to, except the Medusa – it’s too fragile a vehicle with such a threatening gun to be in LoS of the enemy guns and for a meagre amount of points you can get an AV14 chassis that only has a bit less range (30” for Demolisher (6”+24”) or 42” for Medusa (6”+36”) which, when the enemy generally advances towards you, isn’t that big of a deal.

Other ideas would be a large blob of PIS (4-5xPIS) with attached Lord Commissar to act the same way as an individual PIS above, but covering as much of the rest of your army as possible. Follow up with smaller blobs of 2x10 PIS, or just individual PIS to take objectives, etc. Still not a great plan, as the LC can be picked out (gotta fail that 2+ LoS sometime) or the blob can be shot apart and holes punched through by a canny player. It’s also a lot of points for, essentially, a meat shield.

So, does foot guard only work at higher points levels, where you can take these large, expensive blobs and boat-loads of HWS and not worry about them dying so much? Or would they be better at the smaller points levels (1000-1500) where the opponent’s list might not have the tools to deal with you properly, without tailoring of course?

I’m hoping to get some games in soon with an infantry list but the only models I’ve painted recently have been tanks… and I like playing with tanks.

Something I've been thinking (tried to some extent on a kitchen table, against Orks- like game #1 and #2 ever played at a friend's house to show him the game...so yeah, little place or actual time to spread the blobs around but still-)
but, how about the 'creeping barrage' idea?

Either with mortars (got more of them) or similar arty (Grifon)
1- Barrage About
2- force pinning tests
3-???
4-Forward to profit!

Granted, you might need numerous of them to work, and many armies can manage to resist the pinning effect (either make the test, or simply immunte to them) but still- with 6-9 mortars, you can spread those blast all over, either ripping a squad apart or hitting 2-3 ones, and with 2-3 pinned squad (or even, 6-9 mortars raining death) your oponent better choose to shoot the infantry to try to get those mortars, behind the troops.

I do not really get it with all that "we have more bodies than our opponents have bullets" tactics. Also I do not see a problem in IGs mobility. Move move move provides it. Bigger problem I see is the survivability of platoons. To be more exact, non existence of it. I play a 40-man blob in a 1000 points game and it is crushed almost every game. Yes, I can win those battles, but only because of allies and vehicles I use. I played against Eldar, against various marines and against DE. The basic marine squad is cheaper than the blob of guardsmen in the terms of survivability, firepower and CC skill per point. In 6th edition, guardsmen have no save at all. How many guns in troop choices does not have AP 5? I know about orcs and guard. Tau have AP 5, DE have AP 5, Eldar have AP 5, Necrons have AP 5, Grey knights have AP 5, all the marine codices have AP 5 troops. With new wound allocation and cover rules, there is no save for IG Infantry squad any more...

You say "flood your enemy with bodies". The problem is that the guardsmen are not so cheap you can have so many of them to make this works. At least not in my meta. You know how many points a single squad of Space Wolves GH with 2 plasma guns cost? 160 points... You can have a 20-man blob with plasmas and some heavy weapons for the same cost. But it will die faster from shooting, it has lower firepower, it can not fight in CC and hope to win, it has not concentrated firepower, it can not hide so well or get cover save so well, it will probably kill itself with those plasmas. You know that, statisticaly speaking, lasgun needs 18 shots to kill one marine? Bolter needs 2,25 shots to kill a single guardsman. Thanks to the concentration of those bolters you can almost always count with the fact you will fire all of them. But lasguns? If you have a blob or two you have to spread out in order to survive blasts or templates. You will almost never get all your guns in a blob to fire (I never did). So you can not outshoot your enemy. What will you do with those guard bodies? You can have many of them but they will do less than a few marine squads or few chimeras with veterans. If you could concentrate all of those platoon bodies and make them all fire, it would work. That is alas not possible. I do not believe that foot guard is a good and competitive choice anymore. Not without allies, not without vehicles...and then we are not talking about foot guard anymore.

 Lothar wrote:
I do not really get it with all that "we have more bodies than our opponents have bullets" tactics. Also I do not see a problem in IGs mobility. Move move move provides it. Bigger problem I see is the survivability of platoons. To be more exact, non existence of it. I play a 40-man blob in a 1000 points game and it is crushed almost every game. Yes, I can win those battles, but only because of allies and vehicles I use. I played against Eldar, against various marines and against DE. The basic marine squad is cheaper than the blob of guardsmen in the terms of survivability, firepower and CC skill per point. In 6th edition, guardsmen have no save at all. How many guns in troop choices does not have AP 5? I know about orcs and guard. Tau have AP 5, DE have AP 5, Eldar have AP 5, Necrons have AP 5, Grey knights have AP 5, all the marine codices have AP 5 troops. With new wound allocation and cover rules, there is no save for IG Infantry squad any more...

You say "flood your enemy with bodies". The problem is that the guardsmen are not so cheap you can have so many of them to make this works. At least not in my meta. You know how many points a single squad of Space Wolves GH with 2 plasma guns cost? 160 points... You can have a 20-man blob with plasmas and some heavy weapons for the same cost. But it will die faster from shooting, it has lower firepower, it can not fight in CC and hope to win, it has not concentrated firepower, it can not hide so well or get cover save so well, it will probably kill itself with those plasmas. You know that, statisticaly speaking, lasgun needs 18 shots to kill one marine? Bolter needs 2,25 shots to kill a single guardsman. Thanks to the concentration of those bolters you can almost always count with the fact you will fire all of them. But lasguns? If you have a blob or two you have to spread out in order to survive blasts or templates. You will almost never get all your guns in a blob to fire (I never did). So you can not outshoot your enemy. What will you do with those guard bodies? You can have many of them but they will do less than a few marine squads or few chimeras with veterans. If you could concentrate all of those platoon bodies and make them all fire, it would work. That is alas not possible. I do not believe that foot guard is a good and competitive choice anymore. Not without allies, not without vehicles...and then we are not talking about foot guard anymore.

I agree with this. I think the only time I take armor saves is when my chimeras explode and the guys inside take a hit. This prevents me from ever wanting to actually walk over and take objectives with my guardsmen until almost the enemy models have been remove from the board.

For the most part, all the killing that I do is from the tanks that I bring and the few chimera plasma vets that I take as counter attack units. The PIS contribution seems to be a bonus. I give mine lascannons so perhaps once a game 1 out 5 hit something and cause damage.

The only reason that my PIS survive is because they are generally the smallest threat on the board. My opponents don't want to waste high strength long range firepower on plinking off guardsmen so they focus on the tanks and transports. In turn the PISs are ignored and can take their lascannon potshots. Whenever they are focused on, the PISs disappear in a hurry. Their only way of surviving is to be ignored.

That's why I think that a combined approach is important. If you bring an assortment of tanks, transports and infantry then the infantry can get lost in the shuffle and they can survive a long range fire fight.

This of course only works if you're content to sit back and shoot while sending Marbo or some stormtroopers to play in your opponents back field. If you need to go forward to capture objectives this becomes much more difficult. That's when you get into range of all the anti-personnel AP-5 weaponry that wipes whole squads away.

The easiest solutions to this problem of objective capture is to bring flyers, more tanks or allies. At this point you're not really playing foot guard anymore. The question that we're all faced with is how important is it for us to continue to play foot guard.

MrMoustaffa wrote: You're facing armies designed to kill lots of guardsmen. How do we beat this? well, i solved it by, shockingly, taking more guardsmen. If your opponent thinks he hates 70 guardsmen, wait till he fights a 140 of em.

But that's not enough. Even with triple-digit guardsmen, I've been tabled once and nearly tabled twice in the last 5 games I've played. Back in the day when those 120 guardsmen all got a free 4+ save against shooting, and had hidden upgrades that made them good enough to actually kill things in close combat, 120 was too many guardsmen for my opponents to handle. Now it is not.

I'd think in order to get that same old effect, we'd be talking about bringing more like 160 guardsmen at 1850 points, but I don't know if that would fix the problem. It would be a lot of dudes, but its killing power would be non-existent.

MrMoustaffa wrote:My store is EXTREMELY competitive, and are constantly sending guys to go to tourneys. However, their tourney styled lists...

Yeah, my store is also very competitive, but unfortunately doesn't send anyone to tournaments. I think my life would be easier if I saw more tournament lists on the other side of the table. A league, though, has none of the things that shoo away horde armies, so my opponents have to actually take stuff to handle foot lists.

infinityandbeyond wrote:I think re: HWS survivability; they’ve always been fragile and must be treated as expendable, to a certain extent. If you’re pinning all your hopes of anti-tank on your two squads of lascannon HWS and they get blown off the board in a turn (not unlikely), then what? IMO, foot guard needs some saturation here; the type of firepower that is bad for the HWS (S6+) could be diluted if you have multiple threatening targets that would require that type of fire to get rid off effectively.

The problem is that saturation doesn't work unless you have equally credible threats. If your opponent saw 3 lascannon HWSs and 3 lascannon sentinels, you know which your opponent is going to shoot his autocannons at first.

The other problem, too, is cost. Yes, an autocannon team only eats up 75 points, but if it only gets to shoot once, it's not that good of a deal. More importantly, it means you're actually not bringing as much killing power as you think.

Lothar wrote:You say "flood your enemy with bodies". The problem is that the guardsmen are not so cheap you can have so many of them to make this works. At least not in my meta. You know how many points a single squad of Space Wolves GH with 2 plasma guns cost? 160 points...

Right, and this is where spamming becomes more dubious. If guardsmen are having a problem being good for their cost, even their very low cost, then spamming them is exacerbating the problem as much as it is solving it.

Lothar wrote: You know that, statisticaly speaking, lasgun needs 18 shots to kill one marine? Bolter needs 2,25 shots to kill a single guardsman. Thanks to the concentration of those bolters you can almost always count with the fact you will fire all of them. But lasguns? If you have a blob or two you have to spread out in order to survive blasts or templates. You will almost never get all your guns in a blob to fire (I never did). So you can not outshoot your enemy.

And this, really, is where the problem lies. No hidden weapons means that you're going to have a very, very hard time concentrating your killing power (I've already been noticing this a fair bit). More often than not, whenever an opponent's unit is near my stuff, they're only having to worry about like a meltagun and a couple of autocannons from my PISs. That's not a lot of killing power in any one place at any one time. The same is true, of course, for close combat.

If you can't win any local engagement, then you have to rely on attrition. This has always been the guard way, but now guardsmen die way too quickly to actually WIN a war of attrition...

Great thread. I've been contemplating the same issues.

In 5th I ran 4 squads of Vets in Chimeras with 2 PISs in Vendettas, so much scoring AV12 it was really hard to deny them an objective.

Now I wonder what is really going to work?

I had a thought, since I have Chimeras anyways I was thinking of taking a 20 and 30 man blob with assault weapons and commissars, buying them 5 chimeras and marching them up behind the chimeras for cover.

This could be improved by adding LR Demolishers in behind them to create a big roving threat wall.

The Blobs+Chimeras+commisars+say plasma guns in this case works out to 675, not terribly expensive, and they'll be out of LOS in the best cases, or get 5+ cover in the worst, plus you're putting up seemingly juicier targets that are really just a smoke screen.