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As said, I'm running Traitor Guard and really want to go the route of no vehicles. Sentinels at most. So what should I have to know from blobbing to commissars. Tell me what I need to know.

1. Get squad of 50 Guardsmen with Krak Grenades, flamers and Power axes and for good measure a commisair
2. Ally with wolves get rune priest w/divination
3. Take the primaris psyker with biomancy.
4. ???
5. Profit.

Not doing WAAC Tournament Play, Allying with Alpha Legion for fluffyness. I do however, desire semi competitive play, one thing I was wondering was whether to take 3 autocannons and distribute them amongst infantry squads or create a heavy weapons squad. Any tips on that?

Know that foot guard got turned on its head in 6th edition. While it is possible to run A blob huddled around a space marine ally, or a lord commissar, but that's about it, blobs are dead.

The dakka community has been working on the problem. Some have done MSU guard, rather than blobs, another idea I've tried is dura-vets (foot vets with grenadiers), and I've actually been having some reasonable success with conscripts and send in the next wave.

If you don't want vehicles otherwise, then you're going to want to invest heavily in your elites slots. I'd particularly recommend stormtroopers. I've been playing with 30 of them recently, and they've been doing great.

So, Ailaros, would a Squad of 10 with Autocannon be acceptable, are heavy weapons good to have in basic infantry squads, does this mean the death of the commissar?

Are heavy weapons squads they preferred way to bring heavy weps to the table?

Ok, so as a heads up, you can write a friggin book on Foot IG if you wanted to and still not cover all of it. Reason I mention this is because Foot Guard has a stiff learning curve. It will be rough in the beginning. You will have losses. You will have opponents shake their head and go "why don't you bring tanks?", "I think you should look into chimeras", or the classic "wow, guardsmen suck." But once you start learning the do's and don'ts, you'll get much better at it. You'll go from where your opponent sees your guardsmen as target practice, to where they learn to hate them, a unstoppable wall of flashlights and T-shirts that can make their heroes roll so many saves it isn't even funny. But if you can stomach the learning curve, you will go on to have one of the most manly armies a person can field in 40k, and that has always been worth it to me at least.

Now, on to actual advice. Cool idea for the army, I've considered this myself. Make sure to look into those cultists once the new chaos codex is out. They seem to be for all intents and purposes much better conscripts, so I would most definitely look into them as a way to not only shore up your numbers, but to draw shots from your more important platoons and just to make a fluffier army overall. Other than that, we can't really help with the chaos half till the codex comes out.

On to the guard part. You are going to need A LOT of guardsmen. I'm not talking "oh 60 guardsmen will be fine". Bare minimum you'll usually see in a strong foot guard 1,000pt list would be around 80-90, preferably more. Guardsmen are not space marines, they die quick. Your only real strength is numbers, and the ability to hit the dirt harder than any other troop in the game to take advantage of cover. How you achieve this is up to you, as we're still figuring out the best way to take our guardsmen. Carapace vets, never ending waves of respawning conscripts, or rank after rank of platoon infantry squads are all viable choices, so read up on some of the other guard threads and battlereports to get the specifics for each.

I'm a fan of MSU platoon infantry squads, and 20 man blobs, which are essentially slightly bigger versions of them. I'm stuck on the issue of heavy weapons going in the infantry squads or staying in seperate squads, as there are strong arguments that can be made for both. What I will say is that for an autocannon HWS, you can buy 7 and a half autocannons for your infantry squads. Logic would tell you that you want the autocannons in the infantry squads, at least in my eyes. Autocannons are also cheaper (so not a big deal when the squads die) and also do better on the move, as they still have a 1/3 chance of hitting. Lascannons on the other hand are quite different. For the price of a lascannon HWS, you can only buy 5 lascannons for your line squads. Here, I like to get them for the HWS's, as you don't really lose on numbers of them, and the concentration of firepower more than makes up for it. 3 or 4 lascannon HWS's with 8-10 infantry squads running autocannons can put out a ton of dakka, and its been my favorite setup so far. Toy around with it some though as there's a lot of ways to go with it. The main rule though is that if its not an autocannon or a lascannon, it's probably not worth buying. The other heavy weapons aren't that great for the price (Missile Launchers), or simply just fill roles the rest of your army fills just fine on their own (heavy bolters, Mortars).

Other tips I can give is that Regimental Standards are MANDATORY (you did buy CCS's right?) learn your orders by heart, and never forget to use them, and to never underestimate or overestimate the humble lasgun. Regimental standards will stop your guardsmen from running quite a bit, and orders can do everything from increase your lasgun firerate by 50-33% to twin linking against vehicles and regrouping fleeing squads. Don't ever use them as a crutch, but they are an incredibly handy tool that our codex has, and foot guard can use orders to their potential moreso than any other IG army. As for lasguns, the more you shoot the better. A single lasgun only has a 1/18 chance of killing a marine. But when you've got 20 plus lasguns with FRFSRF in rapid fire range kicking out 3 shots apiece... well... let's just say that's a whole lotta diddly.

Anything else you had questions about OP?

(80) Company Command Squad with Plasma Gun and Regimental Standard
(75) Primaris Psyker
(35) Platoon Command with Flamer
(120) Combined Squads with 2 Autocannons
(35) Platoon Command with Flamer
(120) Combined Squads with 2 Autocannons
(105) HWS with 3 Lascannons
(40) Scout Sentinel with Autocannon
(40) Scout Sentinel with Autocannon

Don't really know where to go from here? More platoons with 2x infantry squads combined with autocannons?

What points total are you working towards OP?

1250 to start out with.

First of all, bring all your weapon upgrades. A PCS with a flamer is just as bad as a PCS with no weapons at all and costs more points. Everyone that can take a melta or plasma gun should have one by default, with the exception of a flamer squad or two with max flamers. Then everyone that is going to be sitting in one place for at least a turn or two gets an autocannon or lascannon.

Second, all-foot IG is a bad army. You have very limited mobility, no chance of survival outside of cover (such as when you have to move to claim objectives), and you don't have the biggest guns that are really useful for dealing with stuff like AV 14 and flyers. While it can be a good idea to bring a heavy infantry platoon element in your list, an all-foot list will almost always be inferior to a foot list that brings tanks in support of the infantry.

ah ok cool. Just some warnings, sentinels aren't amazing, but they can do well if played right. I usually outflanked mine to get side shots. Other than that I just treated them as fearless autocannons on legs.

Other than that, you need ways to provide killing power in the backfield. Sentinels are a good start, but you'll need more. Marbo is an excellent choice in low points games, and only requires one model to use, so he's easy to try out. He never scatters from where he's placed, and his BS 5 drastically lowers scatter on his demo charge. Also, look into stormtroopers with melta, plasma, or even flamers. They can provide pretty accurate deepstrike with a reroll on the scatter, and can murderize pretty much anything point for point in their weight class if used properly.

Other than that, get some sort of special weapon on your infantry squads (meltas are best, but arguments can be made for plasmas as well) and I think you'll be off to a good start.

This is something I would recommend for a guy starting out, with me trying to keep as much of your list as it is, merely adding onto it.


That's a lot of dakka, bodies, and a fairly decent ability to make the enemy uncomfortable if he hides on the back edge. It's a bit of a gunline, but if you kill everything scary on turns 1 and 2, the game will turn into a mop up operation from there.

Peregrine wrote:A PCS with a flamer is just as bad as a PCS with no weapons at all and costs more points. Everyone that can take a melta or plasma gun should have one by default...

Hmm, an interesting reversal, given your comments not two days ago about PCSs:

Peregrine 478171 4800998 wrote:The question then is how do you upgrade them to give them a chance of doing something, without overpaying? This is where the flamers are awesome, they might be weak a lot of the time but they make up for it the few times they're awesome and remove entire units from the table.

Anyways...

rickross wrote:Don't really know where to go from here?

Double your troops count.

The main problem with foot guard at the moment is that, even though you have a lot of guys, they're still dying too fast for you to be able to do anything with them. You have the most recent two Matt Ward codices (that can outshoot guard), and 6th edition (which did a lot of things to mess up horde armies) to thank for that.

Recently, I've been having 120-man armies getting tabled by turn 4 or 5. It's why I've switched over to infinitely respawning conscripts...

 Ailaros wrote:
Hmm, an interesting reversal, given your comments not two days ago about PCSs:

Read more carefully. I said a PCS with a flamer, singular, is worthless. A PCS with four flamers is a potentially useful unit, as long as flamer units are a minority of your total weapon upgrades.