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Why would it have to be mostly negative? Marines and spiky marines are getting straight benefits with no downsides.

Aye, straight benefits are what we need. I honestly do not see why the Guard have to be the only codex to have to take downsides with its faction based benefits.

As SM CT's have no downsides, I'd be pissed if our regimental doctrines came with downsides.

PIUS_2 wrote:
Mix and Match IG tactics!

Give us a bunch of regiment ability that have a couple positive but mostly negative traits to represent the diverse nature of the guard.

Example Ideas:
Stubborn: +1 LD in melee but cannot fall back.
Distinct Uniform: Enemy weapons can hit these models 4” beyond their normal range. +1 leadership if not in combat.
Behind The Lines: Deepstrike 12” away, free overwatch shooting for enemy if in range when drop. -1BS. (Represents lack of supplement, take Veteran IG to represent elysian ish guys)
Large Squads: Infantry, Vet, and conscript squad may have 10 extra guys, -1 leadership if they lose +10 guys. Lose 2” range on weapons if more than 10 guys in squad.
Close Combat Specialists: Re-roll to wound rolls of 1 against targets that are less than 12” away from their unit. Weapons with more then 18” range reduce the range profile on their weapons by 2”
Melee Specialists: 1+ WS, -2 LD if no enemies within 12"
Sharp Shooters: Weapons with more then 18” range have plus 2” range, -2 LD in combat
Arrogant: Instead of armor save bonus, +2 leadership in cover
Lightly Equipped: +2" when advancing, -1 armor save

Put Lightly Equipped and Sharp shooters and you sort of get Tallarn. Stubborn + arrogant + distinct uniform = Mordian ish guys. Behind The Lines + All Vets = ~Elysian ish troops. Stubborn + Sharp shooters + Melee Specialists = A Dysfunctional Regiment

Great things set back by terrible ideas and disadvantages that no one will want to select to play.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I got one...

You Win?: You win game, but someone punches you in the gut.

I feel if conscripts get nerfed guard lose their status as top dog, going down to second. Conscripts need to be toned down, currently it's an unarguable statement. Scions aren't that big of a problem tbh, I've never had them do anything even remotely good when I face them, deny their DS and they're left camping objectives. I do think plasma should be less of an auto take, maybe a weapon profile that forces an overcharge to do proper damage to vehicles. HWT are the bane of my existence, but that's just a fundamental flaw in my own army (Necrons).

However.

Guard tanks need a buff, not the anti horde ones, but the bigger ones. Everything from the LR to the bane blades need some attention. Everything else I've seen so far isn't so bad, not everything is great but if these problems are addressed guard would become very well balanced I feel

 Klowny wrote:
I feel if conscripts get nerfed guard lose their status as top dog, going down to second. Conscripts need to be toned down, currently it's an unarguable statement. Scions aren't that big of a problem tbh, I've never had them do anything even remotely good when I face them, deny their DS and they're left camping objectives. I do think plasma should be less of an auto take, maybe a weapon profile that forces an overcharge to do proper damage to vehicles. HWT are the bane of my existence, but that's just a fundamental flaw in my own army (Necrons).

However.

Guard tanks need a buff, not the anti horde ones, but the bigger ones. Everything from the LR to the bane blades need some attention. Everything else I've seen so far isn't so bad, not everything is great but if these problems are addressed guard would become very well balanced I feel

Who gets first, will they be on the chopping next?

Tbh, and this is going off tournament lists, once conscripts (and maybe a few other outliers) get attention everything after that looks fairly balanced.

It's just that conscripts are so glaringly OP ATM that they have saturated top level play. Remove them and the variety becomes much much more prominent.

Guard are in a good spot once scripts have been toned down, give them a slight buff to tanks and they're a very well balanced army (internally).

I think Chaos in general would go to the top, but again they have brims that will also need attention.

And all of this is pre index's. But as it stands that's what I think needs to be done

 Klowny wrote:
Tbh, and this is going off tournament lists, once conscripts (and maybe a few other outliers) get attention everything after that looks fairly balanced.

It's just that conscripts are so glaringly OP ATM that they have saturated top level play. Remove them and the variety becomes much much more prominent.

Guard are in a good spot once scripts have been toned down, give them a slight buff to tanks and they're a very well balanced army (internally).

I think Chaos in general would go to the top, but again they have brims that will also need attention.

And all of this is pre index's. But as it stands that's what I think needs to be done

I don't see that. yes conscripts need to be toned down, but units otherwise seem still weak.

In a vaacum maybe, but look at what your army offers compared to most?

Everything is dirt cheap. I remember my friend complaining that one of his units cost 15 points for an add on, taking the unit to over 150 points. I get 10 basic infantry for 120 points..

You get CP out the eyeballs. For a lot of armies it isn't possible to field a playable brigade.

Like I said, buff your tanks and your armies fine. There are ALOT worse armies out there. The majority of the xenos are laughably incompetent besides 1-2 units, which is not the case for most of the imperium armies


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'm also not saying that you don't have weak units, but every army has weak units.

If your tanks became more viable, and you still have a solid infantry base to build upon, and you can have multiple different builds that are legitimately good, your index is balanced.

I came from this in 7th. I could build my army many different ways and still be playable while still having a lot of good choices. Not everything in 7th necrons was good, a lot was bad, but on a whole it was widely accepted as having very good internal balance.

I'm not trying to turn this into another complaint thread, I personally think you guys are in a very good spot atm, and still will be if they give out some nerf bats

 Klowny wrote:
In a vaacum maybe, but look at what your army offers compared to most?

Everything is dirt cheap. I remember my friend complaining that one of his units cost 15 points for an add on, taking the unit to over 150 points. I get 10 basic infantry for 120 points..

You get CP out the eyeballs. For a lot of armies it isn't possible to field a playable brigade.

Like I said, buff your tanks and your armies fine. There are ALOT worse armies out there. The majority of the xenos are laughably incompetent besides 1-2 units, which is not the case for most of the imperium armies


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'm also not saying that you don't have weak units, but every army has weak units.

If your tanks became more viable, and you still have a solid infantry base to build upon, and you can have multiple different builds that are legitimately good, your index is balanced.

I came from this in 7th. I could build my army many different ways and still be playable while still having a lot of good choices. Not everything in 7th necrons was good, a lot was bad, but on a whole it was widely accepted as having very good internal balance.

I'm not trying to turn this into another complaint thread, I personally think you guys are in a very good spot atm, and still will be if they give out some nerf bats

Then we have a lot of sub par, most tanks, the chimera, command squads, veteran troops, ogryns, bullgryns.

Like I said this whole time, tanks need a buff. After that you'll have 4 bad units out of a whole codex? Not bad at all.

That is pretty bad still.

 NenkotaMoon wrote:
That is pretty bad still.

This has to be a troll. I'm sorry, having only 4 bad units in an army in 8th is phenomenal. Have you seen or played any other armies? The large majority of units form a lot of codex's are would be considered 'pretty bad'. I understand wanting to have all your units be viable but it's just not the case. The only army that had every unit he good-really good was 7th elder.

Your basically saying you want your army to be on that level. There's nothing wrong with wanting to have the OP broken codex, but trying to claim that while also saying it's in the interest of 'balance' is ridiculous.

 vipoid wrote:

PIUS_2 wrote:
Mix and Match IG tactics!

Give us a bunch of regiment ability that have a couple positive but mostly negative traits to represent the diverse nature of the guard.

Example Ideas:
Stubborn: +1 LD in melee but cannot fall back.
Distinct Uniform: Enemy weapons can hit these models 4” beyond their normal range. +1 leadership if not in combat.
Behind The Lines: Deepstrike 12” away, free overwatch shooting for enemy if in range when drop. -1BS. (Represents lack of supplement, take Veteran IG to represent elysian ish guys)
Large Squads: Infantry, Vet, and conscript squad may have 10 extra guys, -1 leadership if they lose +10 guys. Lose 2” range on weapons if more than 10 guys in squad.
Close Combat Specialists: Re-roll to wound rolls of 1 against targets that are less than 12” away from their unit. Weapons with more then 18” range reduce the range profile on their weapons by 2”
Melee Specialists: 1+ WS, -2 LD if no enemies within 12"
Sharp Shooters: Weapons with more then 18” range have plus 2” range, -2 LD in combat
Arrogant: Instead of armor save bonus, +2 leadership in cover
Lightly Equipped: +2" when advancing, -1 armor save

Put Lightly Equipped and Sharp shooters and you sort of get Tallarn. Stubborn + arrogant + distinct uniform = Mordian ish guys. Behind The Lines + All Vets = ~Elysian ish troops. Stubborn + Sharp shooters + Melee Specialists = A Dysfunctional Regiment

I don't really understand what you're trying to accomplish here. Surely picking a regiment should be a reward - not a punishment?

I might have not explained correctly :c

Regiment traits that specialize how your army plays. Getting certain traits together is a good idea with certain army builds but getting all of them, like the ones that contradict each other, at once should be a bad idea. With purely positive traits you would just pick all the traits possible. The imperial guard has a lot of diversity and I just thought that having traits you can mix and match would add more flavor.

 Klowny wrote:

 NenkotaMoon wrote:
That is pretty bad still.

This has to be a troll. I'm sorry, having only 4 bad units in an army in 8th is phenomenal. Have you seen or played any other armies? The large majority of units form a lot of codex's are would be considered 'pretty bad'. I understand wanting to have all your units be viable but it's just not the case. The only army that had every unit he good-really good was 7th elder.

Your basically saying you want your army to be on that level. There's nothing wrong with wanting to have the OP broken codex, but trying to claim that while also saying it's in the interest of 'balance' is ridiculous.

Not wanting any units to be bad =/= wanting all units to be OP

It's about wanting a codex that lets you build the army you like, instead of one that incentivises just a couple cookiecutter builds.

That other armies have the same problem (or worse) is not a good argument against wanting GW to fix it.

PIUS_2 wrote:

I might have not explained correctly :c

Regiment traits that specialize how your army plays. Getting certain traits together is a good idea with certain army builds but getting all of them, like the ones that contradict each other, at once should be a bad idea. With purely positive traits you would just pick all the traits possible. The imperial guard has a lot of diversity and I just thought that having traits you can mix and match would add more flavor.

I get that but the downsides for these are just crippling and the upsides are so weak as to be meaningless in comparison (the only exception is Sharpshooter).

If you want weak buffs that emphasise flavour, that's fine. If you want stronger buffs that are balanced by downsides, that's okay (but seems weird when other armies are getting straight buffs). However, feeble buffs balanced by harsh downsides . . . why?

Help me figure something out here. Would it be far to say that platoon commanders just can't compete with company commanders? The latter has better stats and senior officer. Lists I see just spam company commanders. Is it even worth having platoon commanders?

In a similar vain, ordinary infantry squads sit inbetween veteran squads and conscript squads, lacking the firepower of the former and the numbers of the latter. I have a solution to that which is probably very controversial...make the regular infantry squad have all the options of the vet squad, and "veterans" simply become an upgrade to infantry squads. So you can leave it up to the player to decide how far to go with regards to upgrades.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
Help me figure something out here. Would it be far to say that platoon commanders just can't compete with company commanders? The latter has better stats and senior officer. Lists I see just spam company commanders. Is it even worth having platoon commanders?

Yeah, that's accurate. Even aside from the stat differences, Platoon Commanders pay 20pts per order, compared with 15pts per order for the CC. I think platoon commanders should really be 15pts.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
In a similar vain, ordinary infantry squads sit inbetween veteran squads and conscript squads, lacking the firepower of the former and the numbers of the latter. I have a solution to that which is probably very controversial...make the regular infantry squad have all the options of the vet squad, and "veterans" simply become an upgrade to infantry squads. So you can leave it up to the player to decide how far to go with regards to upgrades.

A couple of questions:

1) If you upgrade the Infantry to Veterans, would they still be troops?

2) Would this really solve anything? I mean, if people are taking veterans instead of Infantry squads and you replaced the Veteran entry with a Veteran upgrade for Infantry Squads, wouldn't that just make the Veteran Upgrade an auto-take? If you see what I mean.

3) Do you think 3 special weapons (along with a Heavy Weapon and a Heavy Flamer) might be a bit much for basic infantry?

The thing is though, I actually find myself taking Infantry Squads far more than Veterans. Infantry lack the BS and special weapons of Veterans, sure, but they put more bodies on the table and they're troops. That's really helpful when you're trying to fill a Brigade or Battalion.

That said, it might be nice if they could take an extra special weapon. I think someone suggested earlier that you could maybe split their special weapons into 'Flamer or Grenade launcher' and 'Plasmagun or Meltagun', which would be nice. I'd also love it if they could take a Heavy Flamer in place of a heavy weapon.

A lot of the problems I think with Veterans and Infantry Squads is there being not much distinction. Vets get better BS and a few more special weapons, but survival wise they die like regular infantry squads and have the same morale. Infantry squads lack mass, unable now to be made in larger sizes so less suitability. It also make certain units even more priority for opponents, aiming for squads with meltas. This would be fine if such squads could survive better. Your looking at usually half the squad dead after someone shooting at it and more from morale without a commissar, and from my experience that is first turn usually.

That's why in part a sense conscripts are so big theses days. They can survive after the first turn and still be able to shoot and be at least somewhat offensive against the opponent. Meanwhile everything else is dead.

Another thing, there are just better options. Why pay for Veterans when you can get scions, which do the job flat out better and are only troops, saving that elite slot for commissars or ratlings, a platoon commander, or something else entirely.

I think platoon commanders would be fine if they were in the HQ slot. While 20 points does make them a slightly less efficient source of orders, being in the HQ slot would make them a slightly cheaper HQ tax.

So the choice between CC and PC would become "is he there for the orders or the HQ tax?"

 vipoid wrote:
Yeah, that's accurate. Even aside from the stat differences, Platoon Commanders pay 20pts per order, compared with 15pts per order for the CC. I think platoon commanders should really be 15pts.

I agree. Making them 15pts would help them out a lot. They issue half the orders, so they should cost half the points. I'm open to the idea of moving them to HQ too.

 vipoid wrote:
A couple of questions:

1) If you upgrade the Infantry to Veterans, would they still be troops?

2) Would this really solve anything? I mean, if people are taking veterans instead of Infantry squads and you replaced the Veteran entry with a Veteran upgrade for Infantry Squads, wouldn't that just make the Veteran Upgrade an auto-take? If you see what I mean.

3) Do you think 3 special weapons (along with a Heavy Weapon and a Heavy Flamer) might be a bit much for basic infantry?

To the first, yes. To the second, good point. It would probably require a limit, which might make the whole thing pointless. I was thinking you'd spend CPs to upgrade them. Which might actually encourage you to spam cheap basic infantry units to get them. To the final point, I was thinking that if it's ok for skitarii it's ok for us. However, I was also thinking that maybe real heavy weapons could be limited to heavy weapon teams, and infantry squads get either a heavy stubber or heavy flamer in addition to 3 specials. I don't think people would like this though.

 vipoid wrote:
That said, it might be nice if they could take an extra special weapon. I think someone suggested earlier that you could maybe split their special weapons into 'Flamer or Grenade launcher' and 'Plasmagun or Meltagun', which would be nice. I'd also love it if they could take a Heavy Flamer in place of a heavy weapon.

I was thinking of that too. Like grenade launchers don't count and are a separate upgrade.

I can honestly not see a problem with conscripts outside of 'new tank syndrome' and 'alternative meta syndrome'. Simply put this is the first time in ages that Conscripts have been viable and thus Guard players are taking them. None Guard players have not seen them in ages, essentially making them new, and are thus calling them overpowered instead of looking for weaknesses. Given time weaknesses will be found and exploited. Additionally the current Meta still revolves around small armies of elite dudes with great equipment and saves and thus most armies are built to counter small but tough units such as Primaris Marines and the like. As such these armies are equipped with high-cost high-power weapons that are expressly designed to punch through heavy armour and high toughness units, but which lack the sheer volume of shots to kill massed hordes of smaller, weaker, targets. As such it seems to the players running these armies that hordes of cheap infantry are 'overpowered' when they are not.

As to our tanks, there is no denying that the LRBT series needs a lot of love and many buffs. For a start, the basic battle cannon has such a tiny explosive yield that it only performs as well as a hand grenade thrown by a grunt, the Exterminator that needs twin linking and maybe a RoF boost, the Demolisher that scares nothing.....
They all need a lot of love.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
Help me figure something out here. Would it be far to say that platoon commanders just can't compete with company commanders? The latter has better stats and senior officer. Lists I see just spam company commanders. Is it even worth having platoon commanders?

In a similar vain, ordinary infantry squads sit inbetween veteran squads and conscript squads, lacking the firepower of the former and the numbers of the latter. I have a solution to that which is probably very controversial...make the regular infantry squad have all the options of the vet squad, and "veterans" simply become an upgrade to infantry squads. So you can leave it up to the player to decide how far to go with regards to upgrades.

You are spot on with platoon commanders. As somebody else said, they should be 15

In regards to infantry squads, they are a cheap way to fill out a brigade and get 9 CP.

I'm of the opinion that conscripts are riding the high end of the power curve just a little bit, mostly due to the change in the wound chart making them more resistant to S5, and the near-ubiquitous AP5 turning into AP0.

This latter is somewhat mitigated by the changes to the cover system making it nearly impossible for them to get cover though, and even if they do it's only a +1 to their save that can be negated instead of a straight 4+/3+ (remember heavy cover?) that can't. So in the vast majority of practical tables they've effectively gone from 4+ to 5+, rather than the 7+ to 5+ most people see when they mathhammer planet bowling ball. After all, the most common type of terrain by far is area cover, which is smaller than a conscript blob (so they can't get entirely within it, which matters now) and doesn't block LoS. Forests, most ruins (the more intact ones can block LoS, the less intact ones don't), waist-high walls, pipes, trenches, etc., all fall into that category.

Heck, I remember in earlier editions, if I really didn't want a conscript blob to go anywhere I could give it an Incoming! order to give them a 2+ cover save. Opponents should be glad they'll almost never see higher than a 5+ now, imagine how hard they were to kill with a 2+.

I don't think it's really quite strong enough to require adjustment though, it just makes them a strong threat that people need to have a plan for, and right now they don't have a plan. The real differences aren't in their durability (even in 7th, a commissar protected them from Sweeping Advance insta-deletion), they're just as durable as they ever were, even slightly less durable in a cover-rich board.

What has changed is their relevance: the rest of the army is actually worth protecting now (at least artillery and other infantry units are), the new wound chart allows them to at least tickle things that would have been immune to them before, and the model-based objective system allows them to seize objectives reliably where before they could only contest at most. As long as the they're irrelevant nobody complains about their strengths, because they could just ignore them both in list-building and on the table.

Of course, I'd rather not be irrelevant TYVM. But people are getting their panties in a twist because before, "take all comers" has pretty much assumed that all comers worth mentioning would be T4+ and have a 3+ or better save. Even in 7th of course one of IG's strongest strategies was to subvert that expectation with power-blobs. Your list didn't necessarily have to be strong, because your opponent would almost never be built to deal with it. Now with the edition change the list is strong, and our opponents are still not built to deal with it. I don't think that situation is likely to last.

"NOBODY expects the Astra Militarum!" isn't the best trait to hinge a faction's balance on, because either people will start to expect it or you'll have to start asking *why* nobody expects it. Though I suppose it's also possible that T3/5+ models have been irrelevant for so long, even GW has forgotten to make models to deal with them. And so the kind of high-volume S3 weapons that would be ideal for that are quite rare outside of the lasgun itself.

Plasma needs to be increased in points, even if it's only for Scions. They are paying the points balanced for BS4+ models when they should be paying BS3+ prices, 7 vs 13.

That's why I think it was wrong to make blast attacks a random dice roll whilst still requiring a roll to hit. It should have been an increase in relation to the target units size. A battlecannon for example could have had 6 attacks basic with D3 damage, increasing to 12 attacks if the target unit has 10 or more models. Statistically, only half of those attacks ever hit. That's your variable.

Also, another thought about grenade launchers. What if their strength was increased to 4 and 8 respectively? You could say that the grenade they shoot is a bigger version of the thrown one. With my other suggestion, you'd either have 6 strength 4 damage 1 attacks or 1 strength 8 damage D3 attack. This would make the grenade launcher comparable to the flamer and the plasma gun.

EDIT:

Whoops, conversation has moved on.

 vipoid wrote:

PIUS_2 wrote:

I might have not explained correctly :c

Regiment traits that specialize how your army plays. Getting certain traits together is a good idea with certain army builds but getting all of them, like the ones that contradict each other, at once should be a bad idea. With purely positive traits you would just pick all the traits possible. The imperial guard has a lot of diversity and I just thought that having traits you can mix and match would add more flavor.

I get that but the downsides for these are just crippling and the upsides are so weak as to be meaningless in comparison (the only exception is Sharpshooter).

If you want weak buffs that emphasise flavour, that's fine. If you want stronger buffs that are balanced by downsides, that's okay (but seems weird when other armies are getting straight buffs). However, feeble buffs balanced by harsh downsides . . . why?

I thought they were all decent trade offs if you built certain army lists but I think I just suck at balancing things in my head >_<
I'd still like something that addresses kill points with our small squads and something that gives incentive for officers to "lead by example" or just hide in the back. But I guess those could be fixed with stratagems.

A stratagem that ignores the lost of a non-character infantry unit (with concern to victory points) that cost a certain point value (80 or less?) or power level (4 or less?), and one that gives officers who are in combat extra buffs.

Eh, there's already a global strategem that auto-passes a morale test. So having one that takes a single model off the test would be both redundant and vastly inferior.

 ross-128 wrote:
Eh, there's already a global strategem that auto-passes a morale test. So having one that takes a single model off the test would be both redundant and vastly inferior.

I'm bad at explaining, I mean for victory points, having a bunch of squads that are cheaper and die faster then other armies makes missions where the goal is to kill as many units as possible hard for Imperial Guard

PIUS_2 wrote:

 ross-128 wrote:
Eh, there's already a global strategem that auto-passes a morale test. So having one that takes a single model off the test would be both redundant and vastly inferior.

I'm bad at explaining, I mean for victory points, having a bunch of squads that are cheaper and die faster then other armies makes missions where the goal is to kill as many units as possible hard for Imperial Guard

Right on the money. Same with Tau drone spam (surprisingly cool and worked if not for it being a no mercy mission).