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I don't play guard, nor do I have any immediate plans for starting an army, but I was curious.
Do full out artillery armies work? I mean, filling out heavy slots with things like basilisks, medusas, and colossi, then rounded off with some infantry squads and a master of ordinance. Maybe a few sentinel teams with searchlights to pick out targets for the long-range indirect fire during night-fight.
Has anyone tried an army like this in regular games? It seems to me like it would be a lot of fun, just laying down all kinds of templates every turn.

It happened alot in 5th, and is still viable in 6th.

Take a cheap HQ Primaris psyker or 2

Take 2 Platoons various options there

3 Vendettas in your fast

Heavy is a virtual artillery desert table.

If you want to kill things dead, sure.

If you want to win ever since most games are objectives, probably not.

Artillery works well in support of other things, but on it's own it's extremely fragile, and dies very quickly. ANYTHING that deepstrikes can kill it very easily, so you don't tend to see a lot unless somebody is goofing around with a silly list

Artillery is like nutmeg, a little is festive, but a lot will quickly overpower. No, artillery is like alcohol, at first its fun and exciting, but too much will give you problems. No, artillery is like sour cream, a little dab will do you.

The thing is that artillery is rather specialized, which means two main things. Firstly, it means that if you dump a lot of points into it, there are going to be gaps in your killing power, no matter how much you buy different kinds of pieces to try and get some overlaps. Secondly, artillery is really good at what it does (well, except when it isn't), which means you really don't need to double or triple up so much.

Generally, the best application of artillery is going to be to pick a few of the same kind of piece to really hammer down one main kind of target type, and then build the rest of the list to handle everything else, or the reverse, where you build a balanced list that just has problems with one thing, and you take some artillery to fill the gap.

In any case, the biggest problem with artillery guard is the cost. A squad of 3x medusas, 3x colossuses, and 3x basilisks is going to set you back 1215 points. It may have impressive killing power against up to three units per turn, but what's the rest of your list going to look like? Probably just a few bare-bones infantry squads of some sort that won't have any staying power.

As moustaffa said, games are won by boys, not toys.

 Ailaros wrote:
Artillery is like nutmeg, a little is festive, but a lot will quickly overpower. No, artillery is like alcohol, at first its fun and exciting, but too much will give you problems. No, artillery is like sour cream, a little dab will do you.

The thing is that artillery is rather specialized, which means two main things. Firstly, it means that if you dump a lot of points into it, there are going to be gaps in your killing power, no matter how much you buy different kinds of pieces to try and get some overlaps. Secondly, artillery is really good at what it does (well, except when it isn't), which means you really don't need to double or triple up so much.

Generally, the best application of artillery is going to be to pick a few of the same kind of piece to really hammer down one main kind of target type, and then build the rest of the list to handle everything else, or the reverse, where you build a balanced list that just has problems with one thing, and you take some artillery to fill the gap.

In any case, the biggest problem with artillery guard is the cost. A squad of 3x medusas, 3x colossuses, and 3x basilisks is going to set you back 1215 points. It may have impressive killing power against up to three units per turn, but what's the rest of your list going to look like? Probably just a few bare-bones infantry squads of some sort that won't have any staying power.

As moustaffa said, games are won by boys, not toys.

Unless Heavy Support is scoring, which happens 1/6 of the time. Then the toys will also win the game.

That's assuming artillery ever lives to the end of turn 5, which I can assure you, it will almost never do.

Yeah count me curious, considering I am going to field an actually Death Korps siege regiment, all my heavy slots will be fill with immobile arty.

So will most of my elites one, come to think of it.

So many templates <3

Everybody loves templates!

Already have 4 large templates in a 731 points army

Happygrunt wrote:Unless Heavy Support is scoring, which happens 1/6 of the time. Then the toys will also win the game.

MrMoustaffa wrote:That's assuming artillery ever lives to the end of turn 5, which I can assure you, it will almost never do.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't killing your artillery give your opponent victory points? Your opponent wouldn't even need to know what an objective is to win a game against artillery guard on that mission.

 Ailaros wrote:

Happygrunt wrote:Unless Heavy Support is scoring, which happens 1/6 of the time. Then the toys will also win the game.

MrMoustaffa wrote:That's assuming artillery ever lives to the end of turn 5, which I can assure you, it will almost never do.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't killing your artillery give your opponent victory points? Your opponent wouldn't even need to know what an objective is to win a game against artillery guard on that mission.

While that is not entirely true, point taken.

So I guess it would be too fragile to hold up against much then. At least, in a game under 2k points.

Though I think if you placed your terrain well you might be able to hide at least some of your army, then surround it by blobs.

Beware of artillery squadrons. If that first shot misses big then your other two are guaranteed waste. I have learned that the hard way. You could add a "spotting griffon" but that still doesn't give you a sure bet, especially since you can't subtract BS for indirect fire anymore.