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When will we ever find a solution to foot guards mobility.......

Anyways, what about maxing out special weapons squads in 2 platoons with a variety of weapons including flamers, meltas etc.

That tactic imo will make the footguard more moblie, while you may have to cut costs with your HWS teams, i think it would be worth it as indeed they will be more up in your face and are generally shielded by the PIS' who can take the casualties.

Together with hellhounds they can take the fight to the enemy, the SWS can bring a tough melta hedge to your army as well which will be very useful.

Basically what i am trying to put forth is the saturation of SW's unto units that dont really catch your opponents eye (let the LRs attract the attention)

I don't know, I really don't have all that much faith in AV12 vehicles. Every once in awhile I try and take one, only to remember why I don't. In an AV12 shield wall, you're doing just fine, but one or two AV12's alone around a throng of goobers just doesn't... quite... have the staying power I'd like.

Anyways, I just put up an attempt at dura-guard. Input appreciated.

 Ailaros wrote:
I don't know, I really don't have all that much faith in AV12 vehicles. Every once in awhile I try and take one, only to remember why I don't. In an AV12 shield wall, you're doing just fine, but one or two AV12's alone around a throng of goobers just doesn't... quite... have the staying power I'd like.

Anyways, I just put up an attempt at dura-guard. Input appreciated.

Ah, but if there is some fire focused on the AV 12 then the squishy guardsmen are not being shot. It's a trade.

bogalubov wrote:

 Ailaros wrote:
I don't know, I really don't have all that much faith in AV12 vehicles. Every once in awhile I try and take one, only to remember why I don't. In an AV12 shield wall, you're doing just fine, but one or two AV12's alone around a throng of goobers just doesn't... quite... have the staying power I'd like.

Anyways, I just put up an attempt at dura-guard. Input appreciated.

Ah, but if there is some fire focused on the AV 12 then the squishy guardsmen are not being shot. It's a trade.

Odds are, those shots would be high strength/low AP weapons that most of the time only have one or two shots. Not ideal for shooting guardsmen anyway.

I have been thinking of adding in a carapace vet squad in my IG army for more thrusting power. However, I don't think that maxing out on Veterans is the right way to go. Your list doesn't seem to have the staying power of previous foot guard lists. Multiple 10 man squads, even with 4+ saves, scare me.

I've mentioned this before, but I think it's worth repeating: Pure Foot Guard (Defined as no vehicles) is going to present a lot of challenges, and looking at it from a codex perspective it's obvious why. There are not "Foot Guard" Heavy Support or Fast Attack choices. These are typically choices that, point for point, hit really hard at range and move quickly (respectively). This means you're relying on your Troops choices to do things that they are, point for point, inefficient at. To contrast, look at the Elites section, which Foot Guard has at least one really strong choice in (Stormtroopers). They do what Elites typically do well (force concentration), but in an all infantry list are also effectively tasked with Fast Attack duties (getting over there to disrupt enemy formations) and Heavy Support duties (killing stuff in general).

Most armies can't put together a good list using mostly the Troops section, it might be overly optimistic to think that Guard can do the same in this edition.

Sadly judging from what everyone's been posting and thinking, seems like the traditional Gree- I mean Flak Armour Tide is quite... useless in 6th Ed. So what answer do we have left for this?

Well just like several people suggested, meching up seems to be the only viable option to field a non-Chimera Guardsmen army. As Ailaros mentioned in other places, Leman Russ and other armour (MrMoustaffa, tell me how that Hellhound/Devildog does on the field) seems to be a must-include in any foot lists.

So my only question is.... is pure-footlist completely dead?

No, I'm not ready to give foot guard up as dead yet. There are still options to be hashed and combos to be tried.

As biophysical notes, it used to be possible to make a great guard army with nothing but troops and HQ. This has disappeared. I don't think it took the entire play style with it, though.

 Ailaros wrote:
No, I'm not ready to give foot guard up as dead yet. There are still options to be hashed and combos to be tried.

As biophysical notes, it used to be possible to make a great guard army with nothing but troops and HQ. This has disappeared. I don't think it took the entire play style with it, though.

I agree with Ailaros. Pure Footguard may be gone, but an army with a strong backbone of on foot infantry is still viable, I am sure of it.

Certainly the most "Heavy Support"-like option for Foot Guard is Heavy Weapon Teams. I think there's an interesting possibility of taking vast amounts of these guys as your damage dealers, base squads (with flamers, probably) as objective grabbers, and Stormtroopers/Marbo as hunter-killers.

A 1200 points core could get you:

2 Lascannon Teams (210)
3 Autocannon Teams (225)
3 Mortar Squads (180)

10 x PIS w/ Flamer (550)
2 PCS (60)

This gives you 24 heavy weapons to alpha strike with while your cheap as chips squads are running hellbent forward. The key (and I think this could be important to many foot guard formations) is to run your advancing squads in columns, rather than waves. As one squad gets shot (with the special weapon and sergeant in the back), most of the Guardsmen will get cover from enemies that aren't directly ahead of them, because they'll be shielded to their left and right by other files. The squad will be eaten back, with special and Ld 8 going last, but the leading edge of all the adjacent squads will still be at their starting position. The enemy can split fire, eating the leading edge of all the squads, but that leaves all the squads with some strength, which any 40k player knows will bite you in the ass in the end game.

Imagine the formation below, but taken out to 10 squads wide. Each letter is a different squad. The "F" is the squad's flamer, the "S" it's sergeant.

A B C
A B C
A B C
A B C
A B C
A B C
A B C
A B C
F F F
S S S

The major weakness of this squad is multi-charges, as the enemy can engage many squads at once, although there's lots that can be done to prevent it. It's just something you have to watch out for.

Either Lord Commissar or CCS would be good HQ choices, and Storms/Marbo are the obvious elites

Well, you don't have to deploy the same way every time. Just deploy in columns normally, and then switch it over to lines when you come across a blood angels player, or whatever.

Right, that's one of the ways to avoid multicharges. I think it may have merit for advancing, though. I can't try it myself, I don't have that many plain lasgunners to field so many squads.

A thought on force concentration: Even in 5th, when mortars were bad, they were good at force concentration. You could have mortars all over the board, and they would all be able to shoot at the same thing. Artillery (mortars included) is still good at this.

True. Too bad mortars are so terrible. I suppose they do have an easier time of it than other HWSs. You can always get a couple of HWSs in great lines of fire and in cover, but after like two or three, you're talking about HWSs that have crappy lines of fire, crappy cover, no access to orders, etc.

I've actually found that deployment is one of my more problematic parts with foot guard as of late. You've got to cram the guys in to have any degree of force concentration, but then you start to suffer from having a packed in deployment zone where everything is tripping over everything else.

You know, there might, possibly, be a HWS answer here, and that is in heavy bolters. Heavy bolters are awful enough that they might not actually attract that much fire from your opponent, at least, not nearly in the way autocannons or lascannons will. All you need, then, is something to break open the transports, and you'll have something that can sweep at least the infantry off the field. Plus, more importantly, it works against fliers. With BiD, you're looking at a hit or two, which means that you can start to dismantle them.

I havent actually played games with my IG yet because Iv been finishing off some other armies first and trying to figure out what I should take for a foot list.


I noticed that you have a list with 30 stormies Ailaros and Im curious as to how you use them. I also like the lidea of using a large amount of them as essentially the hammer of the army.

I started 6th ed with a unit of 10x stormies with flamers on a whim. I'd long wanted to use a squad like this, but I'd never really had an excuse. The numbers for how they work out against infantry look so good, but they were always somehow... dubious.

I started 6th with a 10x unit of stormies, and they have gone so fantastically so far, that it didn't take me long to find points to fill my elites slots with them.

They don't always work as planned (see my current game for example), but even when they have terrible luck, or things really don't go their way, they STILL feel like one of the most valuable assets in my army at the moment.

Which is great, because stormies are awesome. I'm glad I finally have an excuse to spam them.

Rolling meat wall.
2 or 3 platoons, each with 3 infantry squads, each with a single commissar.
Squads of 30, led by commissar push foward, backed up by command issuing orders.
Commissar hangs back to provide stubborn.
Heavy weapon teams, SWS and Company command fill the back field.
A trio of Valkyries drop smaller scoring units.
The idea is massed firepower, backed by stubborn blobs. Unlike the more expensive power blobs, these guys have a different job. Tie up the enemy, until you want the fight to end (which you do by appling wounds to the commissar). This should buy you time to close in with shooty support squads and gun down the enemy caught in the open. Sure, for 30 to 40 points more you could take power weapons; but you don't want power weapons. You want to keep the commissar out of the fight initially, and bring him into base to base as your numbers dwindle; ultimately losing combat and getting swept on your opponents turn. Rather than taking power weapons, I'd consider Krak. It counters light vehicles, and even scares monsters a little.
If you can halt you're opponents forward movement, you can then start to drop scoring units all over out of the flyers.

Or, just spam 10 man infantry squads. Spread the leading squads wide to block multiple charges and limit your opponent to killing 1 or 2 squads a turn. If he's only killing 60-120 points on his turn, you're rapid firing and heavy weapons will take their toll on him.



-Matt

It is only natural that we all struggle with the problem of advancing guardsmen across the field. It is, after all, our armies weakness. The 'multiple threats' approach is the only tactic I have had work consistently. Yes, a skilled opponent will priorities targets wisely and make the job that much harder, but that is where the skill of the match lives.

At the end of the day, foot guard is always going to suffer from this problem, and I doubt there's any real way around it. The fact is that if you ignore most of your army's FOC to focus on one aspect almost exclusively, your force is going to be a one-trick pony. The guard is meant to be a combined arms force, and if you ignore heavy support and fast attack options then you are going to end up with a rock-paper-scissors army which will do well against certain armies but hardly have a chance against others. Same goes if you run a tank-heavy list with few infantry.

I think that the only 'pure foot' solutions to this problem is to take a healthy amount of units with deployment options - anything that can outflank or infiltrate, such as an Al'rahem platoon, harker vets, marbo, and storm troopers. A big unit of Ogryns would certainly help too. I would equip my front ranks of guardsmen with nothing at all, as they will certainly be dying fast so why waste points on weapons for them? Of course this will completely negate their ability to engage anything that isn't infantry, but when the problem is covering ground you really don't want them sitting back to fire heavy weapons anyway, and you would be surprised how many guardsman you can buy when you shave those points off.

On a side note, I've been playing around and had some success with an old-school 'armoured fist' platoon, being two or three basic infantry squads and a pcs in chimeras. While not pure foot, you can still field masses of these guys and they are actually able to cross the field. 295 points for 25 scoring bodies riding in chimeras with ML and HF is comparable in cost to a well-equipped space marine tactical squad, and will easily destroy the tacticals in a solo fight, even without any special or heavy weapons. Their mobility and threat potential will ensure they take a a lot of heat off your more vulnerable footsloggers, and the flaming chimera wrecks will give your groundpounders some cover to boot!

Id suggest a 20 man static platoon with HW withloads of HWT then we have an outflanking platoon Al Rahem with 30-50 men lots of SWS then 2 outflanking vendettas each with a squad of vets in have an astropath to pretty much gurantee a turn 2 entry

I'm going to playtest the Carapace Vet setup thoroughly in my coming games. I'll let you guys know how it works out

Yeah, I'd like to know before my game next monday. I still fear for it a little, as there are still heavy bolters and autocannons in the world, but it shows promise.

What I'm going back and forth on is the balance between troops and HS in this setup. It would be nice to know just how fast the troops sections fold so I can know if I need to peel some points from HS to cram in more vets.

So, if an army is no longer caring about killpoints, perhaps try MSU Rough Riders? They scream suicide unit (one use explosive lances), are fast (gain ground) are cheap for the core unit.

At worst they flop and buy some time for the rest of the men, at best... well I'm not sure what exactly 5 horsies can accomplish.

Rough riders seem better to me as fast melta teams. Now that they can move 12 inches, and have fleet, they get into range pretty quick as long as you can keep the heat off them.

I've been busy past couple of days, and have to leave in a sec, so bear with me if I cover things previously mentioned. I will be reading over the thread tonight.

I will admit that unless it's a thousand points or under, I won't be bringing pure infantry any more. Anything higher, just requires far too many models to make it worthwhile, many of which I don't own. Pure foot guard can absolutely crush other lists in small points though. Armies that I've struggled against at high points have been getting tabled by my foot lists at low points games, since they lack the points to buy their heavy hitters, while we have no such issue.

I guess now I'm technically a "hybrid" player, if we're being technical, due to my love of Leman Russes, but I still think, and more importantly, play, like a foot commander. They remain the focus of my army, everything else is secondary, and added to support the Foot horde.

Really I find that pure Foot is usable but not reliable. It makes it a gamble and if the enemy has the right weapons you SHOULD lose. I like to run Hybrid lists that can camp, assault or do a mixture of the two. Here is one of the lists I have been running with success in 6th Edition.

To be fair, though, being a foot guard player never required you to use ONLY INFANTRY EVER. I mean, I consider myself a foot guard player, and in like 3/4 of my games (including 100% of the games played above 1000 points) I ran at least a couple of russes or artillery pieces or something.

Aesthetically speaking, I consider the foot-hybrid-mech spectrum to relate to the inchimeradness of the troops and HQ sections, rather than if there are any vehicles at all.

I think foot guard is based on many soldiers and some support (Artillery/Leman). Mech guard is based on chimeras and some support (again some long range firepower).

In the end, I see every list which is rellying on chimeras like a mech/hybrid list.

btw.: I have a friend at our LGS. He is playing 6 chimeras in his list and he still calls it a foot guard.

^^ I always thought that foot guards is just that... Just foot. Because AFAIK, the whole purpose of foot guard is to troll the enemy AT firepower by simply denying the armour. Buf if you take mech into a foot list then you kinda' defeat the purpose, and your army becomes 'hybrid'.

Isn't limiting this to foot IG already assuming that you have disqualified most of your best options?

Maybe take some BA assault marines, if you want to play a foot army that a large portion of which will be wanting to sit around, and most of which is fragile, I think you already have your answer.

Moving forward and taking the fight to the enemy is what some tanks and air and allies impart upon IG, some people choose to forego those options for thematic reasons or for strategic reasons, but a general should know not to dwell so much on the limb he's cut off.

 AtoMaki wrote:
^^ I always thought that foot guards is just that... Just foot. Because AFAIK, the whole purpose of foot guard is to troll the enemy AT firepower by simply denying the armour. Buf if you take mech into a foot list then you kinda' defeat the purpose, and your army becomes 'hybrid'.

Not entirely, though. Russes provide a target for anti-tank, but only serious anti-tank. All of those missile launchers and splinter cannons and autocannons and rokkits are still useless if you're bringing only infantry and russes. Likewise, if you're good about keeping artillery out of LOS, it likewise invalidates a bunch of stuff.

Plus, it doesn't make sense for an all-foot list that includes a single vehicle to be called a hybrid list unless a list that's full of vehicles that includes a single infantry model isn't also no longer a mech list.

Almost all guard lists contain at least one infantry model and at least one vehicle. If this means that all guard lists are hybrid, that's fine, but I like to use a more narrow definition of hybrid than that.

 Ailaros wrote:

 AtoMaki wrote:
^^ I always thought that foot guards is just that... Just foot. Because AFAIK, the whole purpose of foot guard is to troll the enemy AT firepower by simply denying the armour. Buf if you take mech into a foot list then you kinda' defeat the purpose, and your army becomes 'hybrid'.

Not entirely, though. Russes provide a target for anti-tank, but only serious anti-tank. All of those missile launchers and splinter cannons and autocannons and rokkits are still useless if you're bringing only infantry and russes. Likewise, if you're good about keeping artillery out of LOS, it likewise invalidates a bunch of stuff.

Plus, it doesn't make sense for an all-foot list that includes a single vehicle to be called a hybrid list unless a list that's full of vehicles that includes a single infantry model isn't also no longer a mech list.

Almost all guard lists contain at least one infantry model and at least one vehicle. If this means that all guard lists are hybrid, that's fine, but I like to use a more narrow definition of hybrid than that.

Exactly. I use russes all the time, and I still troll enemy anti tank weapons constantly. Most weapons, like autocannons and rockets, are almost completely useless against russes, and REALLY useless against guardsmen. I've also noticed that Russes will draw every ML in an enemy army, even though the enemy knows he can only glance it, even when there are plenty of bunched up infantry he could kill instead.

As for the whole foot/hybrid/mech, I really see it as how many chimeras do you bring. Do you bring none? You're a foot guard player. Doesn't matter how many other tanks and other things you cram in, your infantry are all on foot. Hybrid tends to have 2 or 3 chimeras, but there is still a platoon that has some sort of job that is filled by being on foot. It's a hybrid of a foot and a mech list, hence the name. A mech list would be a list that literally has all, or almost all, infantry inside chimeras. That's how it delivers its troops, and that's how it's played.

Hence why you'll get foot IG players with 6 leman russes or a mech player that literally runs nothing but chimeras. The mindset of how you take your troops, to me at least, seems to define what kind of mindset your army follows above all else.

 Ailaros wrote:

Not entirely, though. Russes provide a target for anti-tank, but only serious anti-tank. All of those missile launchers and splinter cannons and autocannons and rokkits are still useless if you're bringing only infantry and russes. Likewise, if you're good about keeping artillery out of LOS, it likewise invalidates a bunch of stuff.

Well, missile launchers can now hurt Russes pretty badly with some good rolls and autocannons (and most of the other mid/high strength stuff, like missile pods or psycannons) are good against infantry as well (And splinter-cannons? What about splitner cannons? The are totally anti-infantry... Maybe it is supposed to be Dark Lances?). And you can't keep your arty ouf of LoS every time you want.

So if you mix up xyour foot list with mech then you will end up with an average army, what has armour and flesh, but the 'flesh' part is just happens to be on foot. So your enemy can still utilize his full firepower in its intented role (target the armour with AT and the flesh with AP). And he can utilize it even better, since the flesh is out on the plate, ready to receive his daily AP firepower dose from the start.

 Ailaros wrote:
Plus, it doesn't make sense for an all-foot list that includes a single vehicle to be called a hybrid list unless a list that's full of vehicles that includes a single infantry model isn't also no longer a mech list.

Hah, it doesn't make sense to include only one vehicle in an all-foot list . And the posters here talk about multiple vehicles ("bunch of arty", "russes" and so on).