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That is not the point. The point is that I can't feel sympathy for their supposed human fragility when they can just point a gazillion I.W.I.N. artillery batteries at everything that so much as breathes at them. Or call in their stormtroopers (we are super-elite enough to match other races AND we are fragile humans at the same time! LOVE US!), and so on.

I won't buy that Guardsmen are somehow courageous for standing and fighting when a shot with a common low-dog IG meltagun will solve any huge-alien-problems without headaches.

In the game itself, four or five guardsmen will reliably beat a Marine in melee. Err, lol? Modern day martial arts masters can easily beat dozens of trained soldiers in close combat, and when you add huge size and super-armour, it would be like fighting a charging rhino with your fists.

Massive battle tanks and huge ordnance batteries that turn battlefields into cratered charnel fields where even the most powerful foes are left dead and mutilated are pretty par for the course for IG fluff.

The poor bloody infantry die to hold off the scary things long enough for those tanks and artillery to get into position

 Ashiraya wrote:
In the game itself, four or five guardsmen will reliably beat a Marine in melee. Err, lol? Modern day martial arts masters can easily beat dozens of trained soldiers in close combat

probably not, especially if any of them are packing knives and spades. A couple of trained soldiers? Maybe (though many soldiers today would also be considered quite competent martial artists), but three or four, much less dozens? Haha nope. Unlike movies (where fight scenes with incredible martial artists take many weeks of practice and long hours of choreographed filming), opponents don't just wade in one by one as they're whacked in turn and just try and throw a punch, usually they'll come in together and do things like grab arms, swing blades, trip legs, grab hair/heads, grapple, etc. A human (even a Space Marine) only has so many limbs and eyes, can only do so many things at once, while the elite guy is throwing a kick and taking one guy out, two others are grappling with his head from behind while another is going for his legs.

Contrary to popular opinion, numbers and sheer mass will generally defeat skill, there's a reason most martial arts events (boxing, wrestling, judo, taikwando, etc) also have weight classes and don't try to do silly things like pit one highly skilled guy against half a dozen lower ranked guys.

 Ashiraya wrote:
But what is so incredibly jarring is that they also are trying to bludgeon their way onto the OP scene - I simply can't buy that the common guardsman is a courageous little soldier in a world of devilish danger and deserves sympathy when I see some IG fan happily ranting about how guardsmen carve apart Ork Nobz in melee, gun down ten Space Marines wíth a tank shot, Harker kills a Ravener in melee by crushing its throat with his biceps, and so on. It's just nothing short of absurd and makes the faction impossible for me to like. They need to decide what they want to be. Until then they will continue to be rather dull.

But does anyone really say things like "guardsmen can carve apart nobz in melee"? It's a common and reasonable claim in a tactics discussion since IG blob squads are great in melee (even the worst conscripts can win if there's a hundred of them throwing dice at you), but I don't see this happening in fluff discussions. I think pretty much everyone agrees that guardsmen in melee against elite melee units are simply dead fluff-wise, even if the tabletop game always gives you at least a 1/6 chance of success on every roll.

And you have to separate out the Catachans from the other IG. Catachans are a deliberate parody army, and most of their fluff is meant to be so stupidly powerful that nobody takes them seriously. But the fact that a Catachan hero slaughters everything with his bare hands doesn't mean that anyone thinks a normal non-parody guardsman could do the same.

 Psienesis wrote:
The other thing to remember is, while the individual Guardsman isn't very good (fluff or crunch)... heavy artillery doesn't give much of a feth how expensive your power armor suit is. A 200mm shell still pastes you across the country-side, and the IG has a *lot* of 200mm shell-throwing machines.

This. The IG are defined as an army full of meatshields backed up by awesome tanks. The meatshields give you the "common man against a galaxy full of horrors" stories, the tanks give them the chance to be a relevant army instead of just getting slaughtered in the background until the space marines arrive.

Before you post such bs.. Read the core rulebook.
Close Combat in 40 k is not only described as a fistfight. A real military close quarter Combat is not only done with the hands.
It involves shooting from pistols from a very near distance, knife attacks etc.
Is also Stands exactly like this in the core rulebook.
Five guardsmen against a Marine...maybe they attack him with autopistols, stab knives in weak armour points, shoot lassen through visor from small distance etc.
And just for your Knowledge.
I have trained with British SAS Troopers, brillstein Security guards and so on.
I Never Never ever faced someone who was able to Beat 5 attackers at once. You get Beat down through sheer volume.
N8

 Ashiraya wrote:
The point is that I can't feel sympathy for their supposed human fragility when they can just point a gazillion I.W.I.N. artillery batteries at everything that so much as breathes at them.

1) That's kind of the point of the story. Guardsmen are mere humans, and their only hope for survival is that they have some tanks/artillery/whatever available to make up for their nonexistent hope of winning with their own weapons.

2) Artillery isn't an "I win" weapon in the fluff. Fluff-wise it takes time to aim at a target (time that you won't have if a space marine drop pod lands next to you), is often unavailable because the idiots running the Imperium's logistics delivered a bunch of extra food and power swords instead of artillery shells, etc. The only reason IG artillery seems like an auto-win fluff-wise is that GW's authors have trouble understanding any kind of tactics beyond "run screaming at the enemy with a chainsaw sword" and constantly put space marines and similar elites into wars of attrition for entire planets.

Or call in their stormtroopers (we are super-elite enough to match other races AND we are fragile humans at the same time! LOVE US!), and so on.

Please pretend that the awful abomination of a storm trooper codex was never published. Real IG storm troopers are the best human soldiers armed with very nice guns, but not a match for a space marine 1v1.

In the game itself, four or five guardsmen will reliably beat a Marine in melee. Err, lol? Modern day martial arts masters can easily beat dozens of trained soldiers in close combat, and when you add huge size and super-armour, it would be like fighting a charging rhino with your fists.

Game mechanics =/= fluff. Everyone knows that the chance of punching a space marine to death instead of just breaking your fists hitting a solid wall of armor is nothing more than an abstraction for gameplay reasons. Guardsmen can kill space marines in melee because GW decided that (almost) every roll has at least a 1/6 chance of success and at least a 1/6 chance of failure. Outside of a heavily abstracted tabletop game that is limited by a random number generator that can only work in 1/6 increments this would not be true. Just like we all know that a common guardsman doesn't have a 1/6 chance of surviving a direct hit from a titan's main gun.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 winterwind85 wrote:
I Never Never ever faced someone who was able to Beat 5 attackers at once. You get Beat down through sheer volume.

That's because you've never faced anyone wearing power armor. Fluff-wise you could empty your entire load of pistol ammo into a space marine and all you'd do is maybe scratch the paint a bit, and you could punch them until all the bones in your arms are broken and never even do that much.

 winterwind85 wrote:
Before you post such bs.. Read the core rulebook.
Close Combat in 40 k is not only described as a fistfight. A real military close quarter Combat is not only done with the hands.

And I never asserted otherwise.

 winterwind85 wrote:
It involves shooting from pistols from a very near distance, knife attacks etc.
Is also Stands exactly like this in the core rulebook.
Five guardsmen against a Marine...maybe they attack him with autopistols, stab knives in weak armour points, shoot lassen through visor from small distance etc.

They shoot him with autopistols (which promptly bounce off his armour plating or maybe, maybe hit a weak spot where they maybe draw a little blood but otherwise won't really do much at all), stab him (see previous), and if they shoot him in the eye they must get the right angle to actually pierce visor, eye and brain and actually kill him. If they only shoot his eye out it won't even slow him down as long as he has autosenses.

And just for your Knowledge.
I have trained with British SAS Troopers, brillstein Security guards and so on.
I Never Never ever faced someone who was able to Beat 5 attackers at once. You get Beat down through sheer volume.
N8

Please, tell me more of your combat experience in the 41st Millennium. I am thrilled of how you beat alien monsters the size of flatbed trucks, or more relevantly perhaps people in power armour, in melee. Oh wait.

Peregrine's posts

Eh, fair enough. I still feel they are trying to fill two roles at once by being underdog and not underdog simultaneously.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 winterwind85 wrote:
And just for your Knowledge.
I have trained with British SAS Troopers, brillstein Security guards and so on.
I Never Never ever faced someone who was able to Beat 5 attackers at once. You get Beat down through sheer volume.
N8

Please, tell me more of your combat experience in the 41st Millennium. I am thrilled of how you beat alien monsters the size of flatbed trucks, or more relevantly perhaps people in power armour, in melee. Oh wait.

Says the guy who prompted the above comment with sillyness about current real life martial artists simultaneously engaging dozens of foes...

If you're gonna toss a silly retort like that back at someone who may have actual close combat training, try not to have started that line of conversation with a ridiculous statement in the first place.

If marines functioned like the fluff you would never lose when playing them. Conversely, Imperial Guard would always lose except for their characters. Abstraction for the sake of game balance.

Ok,ok i got it... Nerdrage:-) sorry.. Thought you were serious.
Really.. Them the whole Concept of closeups Combat in 40 k is.. Obsolete.. How many years combat experience does the normal Chaos Marine ?
8000?10000?
So.. A Single Chaos Marine should be able to rape whole,squads of smurfs?

 winterwind85 wrote:
Before you post such bs.. Read the core rulebook.
Close Combat in 40 k is not only described as a fistfight. A real military close quarter Combat is not only done with the hands.
It involves shooting from pistols from a very near distance, knife attacks etc.
Is also Stands exactly like this in the core rulebook.
Five guardsmen against a Marine...maybe they attack him with autopistols, stab knives in weak armour points, shoot lassen through visor from small distance etc.
And just for your Knowledge.
I have trained with British SAS Troopers, brillstein Security guards and so on.
I Never Never ever faced someone who was able to Beat 5 attackers at once. You get Beat down through sheer volume.
N8

Did you ever fight an armored ape swinging a chainsaw?

But yes, close combat means short range shooting, grenades, everything.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:

 winterwind85 wrote:
And just for your Knowledge.
I have trained with British SAS Troopers, brillstein Security guards and so on.
I Never Never ever faced someone who was able to Beat 5 attackers at once. You get Beat down through sheer volume.
N8

Please, tell me more of your combat experience in the 41st Millennium. I am thrilled of how you beat alien monsters the size of flatbed trucks, or more relevantly perhaps people in power armour, in melee. Oh wait.

Says the guy who prompted the above comment with sillyness about current real life martial artists simultaneously engaging dozens of foes...

If you're gonna toss a silly retort like that back at someone who may have actual close combat training, try not to have started that line of conversation with a ridiculous statement in the first place.

Perhaps it was hyperbole, but fact remains that numbers really isn't as great an advantage as many think. Not even near. You get in the way of each other, and if you are going to swing and shoot you may hit your friends. This is especially true in the case of Eldar, but Marines are not only tough, they are also lightning-fast.

I do not consider my original statement ridiculous, though. Perhaps a tad vague - 'trained soldier' and 'martial arts master' is not very specific - but it's definitely within the realm of possibility.

Claiming some kind of authority in debates of battling sci-fi monsters because you have fought humans in real life (in a condescending manner to boot) is not something I am impressed with.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Modern day martial arts masters can easily beat dozens of trained soldiers in close combat.

That's so unbelievably wrong.

 TheSilo wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
Modern day martial arts masters can easily beat dozens of trained soldiers in close combat.

That's so unbelievably wrong.

Actually, yes. Scratch the 'easily' part, I admit that is wrong.

But someone who focuses on close combat (in addition to being exceptional enough to be a master and so on) is far above generalist soldiers, and as stated numbers is not that great of an advantage against someone who knows how to counter it.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Eh, fair enough. I still feel they are trying to fill two roles at once by being underdog and not underdog simultaneously.

But you have to fill those roles simultaneously. Look at it this way: every army needs something cool to make you say "wow, I want that". If an army is bad at everything and gets slaughtered every time until the real heroes of the story arrive very few people are going to have any interest in them (just ask the poor SoB). Tanks fill that role for the IG, they're the one thing that gives them a chance of winning and maybe even inspires a little envy from the other factions.

 TheSilo wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
Modern day martial arts masters can easily beat dozens of trained soldiers in close combat.

That's so unbelievably wrong.

Well if that martial arts master was Mike Tyson, and the trained soldiers were weaponless, and came at him one at a time...

 Peregrine wrote:
But does anyone really say things like "guardsmen can carve apart nobz in melee"? It's a common and reasonable claim in a tactics discussion since IG blob squads are great in melee (even the worst conscripts can win if there's a hundred of them throwing dice at you), but I don't see this happening in fluff discussions.

You've obviously missed the 10,000 discussions with Melissia and Lynata where they've asserted that Guardsmen sergeants and Commissars are a match for Astartes, along with the all the attempted justifications for Cain holding his own against two Khorne Beserkers in melee and Gaunt nd Eisenhorn bisecting Marines in combat.

It does't usually take the form of Guardsmen spank so much as Space Marine penis-envy. A lot of IG fans and SoB fans have a chip on their shoulder about Space Marines and take delight in low-balling them.

This. The IG are defined as an army full of meatshields backed up by awesome tanks. The meatshields give you the "common man against a galaxy full of horrors" stories, the tanks give them the chance to be a relevant army instead of just getting slaughtered in the background until the space marines arrive.

But they don't, is the thing.

Gaunt's Ghosts is the most popular and best-selling Imperial Guard series in the Black Library, and it's chalk-full of nonsense like the Ghosts destroying armies many times their number and holding their own against forces that outnumber, outgun and out-tech them. It's also filled with plenty of plot-armor for individual characters, with many Guardsmen clearing entire rooms of enemies by themselves or dying in glorious last-stands but not before killing many-times their own number first.

Case in point, Ghost-Maker has a fantastically lulz scene in it where a lone Guardsmen kills dozens of Traitor-Guard by himself in a fire-fight by back-flipping and somersaulting around duel-wielding pistols.

To be fair, all of Abnett's writing is like that, Gaunts Ghosts or no. Brothers of the Snake was even worse, with absurdities like a single tac squad slaying literally thousands of Dark Eldar in a single close quarters engagement...

 BlaxicanX wrote:
It does't usually take the form of Guardsmen spank so much as Space Marine penis-envy. A lot of IG fans and SoB fans have a chip on their shoulder about Space Marines and take delight in low-balling them.

Marine fans in general bet berated a lot, but it's not like fans of other factions (particularly Eldar, Tau, IG) are any less biased and prone to show it.

 Vaktathi wrote:
To be fair, all of Abnett's writing is like that, Gaunts Ghosts or no. Brothers of the Snake was even worse, with absurdities like a single tac squad slaying literally thousands of Dark Eldar in a single close quarters engagement...

It's true, he's really bad with the plot-armor. Probably the worst in the biz. I crapped my pants when I read Titanicus when I got to the part where two Skitarri died killing something like 20+ traitor-skitarri in a stand-up gunfight.

But it's "badass" when he writes about anyone that's not a Space Marine benefiting from it.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:
It does't usually take the form of Guardsmen spank so much as Space Marine penis-envy. A lot of IG fans and SoB fans have a chip on their shoulder about Space Marines and take delight in low-balling them.

Marine fans in general bet berated a lot, but it's not like fans of other factions (particularly Eldar, Tau, IG) are any less biased and prone to show it.

Tau and Space Marines are probably neck and neck for the most loathed faction on this site, I imagine.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
In the game itself, four or five guardsmen will reliably beat a Marine in melee. Err, lol? Modern day martial arts masters can easily beat dozens of trained soldiers in close combat

probably not, especially if any of them are packing knives and spades. A couple of trained soldiers? Maybe (though many soldiers today would also be considered quite competent martial artists), but three or four, much less dozens? Haha nope. Unlike movies (where fight scenes with incredible martial artists take many weeks of practice and long hours of choreographed filming), opponents don't just wade in one by one as they're whacked in turn and just try and throw a punch, usually they'll come in together and do things like grab arms, swing blades, trip legs, grab hair/heads, grapple, etc. A human (even a Space Marine) only has so many limbs and eyes, can only do so many things at once, while the elite guy is throwing a kick and taking one guy out, two others are grappling with his head from behind while another is going for his legs.

Contrary to popular opinion, numbers and sheer mass will generally defeat skill, there's a reason most martial arts events (boxing, wrestling, judo, taikwando, etc) also have weight classes and don't try to do silly things like pit one highly skilled guy against half a dozen lower ranked guys.

Untrue. 3 Olympic-level fencing masters are a match for 50 amateur fencers.




The result is far closer than what you had suggested. Initial odds were more than 15:1!

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
In the game itself, four or five guardsmen will reliably beat a Marine in melee. Err, lol? Modern day martial arts masters can easily beat dozens of trained soldiers in close combat

probably not, especially if any of them are packing knives and spades. A couple of trained soldiers? Maybe (though many soldiers today would also be considered quite competent martial artists), but three or four, much less dozens? Haha nope. Unlike movies (where fight scenes with incredible martial artists take many weeks of practice and long hours of choreographed filming), opponents don't just wade in one by one as they're whacked in turn and just try and throw a punch, usually they'll come in together and do things like grab arms, swing blades, trip legs, grab hair/heads, grapple, etc. A human (even a Space Marine) only has so many limbs and eyes, can only do so many things at once, while the elite guy is throwing a kick and taking one guy out, two others are grappling with his head from behind while another is going for his legs.

Contrary to popular opinion, numbers and sheer mass will generally defeat skill, there's a reason most martial arts events (boxing, wrestling, judo, taikwando, etc) also have weight classes and don't try to do silly things like pit one highly skilled guy against half a dozen lower ranked guys.

Untrue. 3 Olympic-level fencing masters are a match for 50 amateur fencers.




The result is far closer than what you had suggested. Initial odds were more than 15:1!

They're all coming in one at a time, they're not attacking from multiple directions, very little in the way of ganging up, more than half of them are sitting back 30 feet away most of the time, they're only aiming for a very small and specific target in the most defensible possible place (small object on the chest), etc.

Not a great example. If they'd been trying to kill him, he'd have been done for in the first 15 seconds.

I have taken on if I recall about 7-1 in Live Steel Combat in an open battle and did well for a few minuets, but the key factor with that one was intimidation.
I took out the first three very quickly and the other four backed off and had to regroup before a focused charge took me down.
Now I did have reach on them and most of them it was there 1st time in full armor.
The key though was they had to make a quardinated effort to take me down after having to back off.

"Live Street Combat"?

 BlaxicanX wrote:
"Live Street Combat"?

Live Steel Combat, you know all of us in 65lbs of Armor waking each other with real [though blunt] weapons.

 Anpu42 wrote:
I have taken on if I recall about 7-1 in Live Steel Combat in an open battle and did well for a few minuets, but the key factor with that one was intimidation.
I took out the first three very quickly and the other four backed off and had to regroup before a focused charge took me down.
Now I did have reach on them and most of them it was there 1st time in full armor.
The key though was they had to make a quardinated effort to take me down after having to back off.

But those are amateurs, not professional soldiers like the IG, who will have received fairly extensive CQC and H2H combat training.

 Psienesis wrote:

 Anpu42 wrote:
I have taken on if I recall about 7-1 in Live Steel Combat in an open battle and did well for a few minuets, but the key factor with that one was intimidation.
I took out the first three very quickly and the other four backed off and had to regroup before a focused charge took me down.
Now I did have reach on them and most of them it was there 1st time in full armor.
The key though was they had to make a quardinated effort to take me down after having to back off.

But those are amateurs, not professional soldiers like the IG, who will have received fairly extensive CQC and H2H combat training.

Do count in the intimidation factor though. You have some pretty strong instincts telling you to not try to punch that huge armoured monster and instead back off.

 Psienesis wrote:

 Anpu42 wrote:
I have taken on if I recall about 7-1 in Live Steel Combat in an open battle and did well for a few minuets, but the key factor with that one was intimidation.
I took out the first three very quickly and the other four backed off and had to regroup before a focused charge took me down.
Now I did have reach on them and most of them it was there 1st time in full armor.
The key though was they had to make a quardinated effort to take me down after having to back off.

But those are amateurs, not professional soldiers like the IG, who will have received fairly extensive CQC and H2H combat training.

They did have about a year of training under them, but it you look at it.
Me the Experienced with 5 years of experience [Space Marine?] vs the Newbs [Guard?] is not a bad example of what that could be like.
If they had not backed off, I probably could have taken them.

 Anpu42 wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

 Anpu42 wrote:
I have taken on if I recall about 7-1 in Live Steel Combat in an open battle and did well for a few minuets, but the key factor with that one was intimidation.
I took out the first three very quickly and the other four backed off and had to regroup before a focused charge took me down.
Now I did have reach on them and most of them it was there 1st time in full armor.
The key though was they had to make a quardinated effort to take me down after having to back off.

But those are amateurs, not professional soldiers like the IG, who will have received fairly extensive CQC and H2H combat training.

They did have about a year of training under them, but it you look at it.
Me the Experienced with 5 years of experience [Space Marine?] vs the Newbs [Guard?] is not a bad example of what that could be like.
If they had not backed off, I probably could have taken them.

It is not equivalent. For the sake of the argument, let's say that the experience is. But the Space Marine not only has more training and experience, he is also far faster, stronger, tougher and (depending on your source) smarter than the Guardsmen can ever be. He also wears super-armour. So the difference is even greater.

Also, OP is thinking wrong about conscripts.
They are 3pp. for 90 pts I can get 30 guys on the table. for 25, they will be going nowhere with fearless and zealet.

 vipoid wrote:
Honestly though, other than the silly Harker one, they seem quite reasonable.

Did they told you about Yarrick getting his arm cut off by a big boss, then decapitating the boss with his other hand, cutting of the power klaw, and then WITH HIS ONLY REMAINING ARM, WHILE HIS STUMP IS STILL PISSING BLOOD AWAY, LIFTING THE HUGE POWER KLAW OVER HIS HEAD?
Totally reasonable.

 Peregrine wrote:
And you have to separate out the Catachans from the other IG. Catachans are a deliberate parody army, and most of their fluff is meant to be so stupidly powerful that nobody takes them seriously. But the fact that a Catachan hero slaughters everything with his bare hands doesn't mean that anyone thinks a normal non-parody guardsman could do the same.

Armageddon Orks Hunters are a match for Catachans. They scalp orks.