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I will take a stab at devils advocate, even though I see quite a bit of cheese in the codex imo.

Guard cannot hold objectives, and they will drag turns out since they amount of dice rolling is a bit appalling. What that means is the heavy hitting fast moving compact forces can still win.

Yeah you have conscripts packed on that objective, but your giant ass army has gobbled up two turns in 2.5 hours. If I'm going second that means I can remove those models easily (They are conscripts) and take the objective. Next match.

Guard suffer from the same issue as Tau, their BS is garbage. For vehicles I see too many people focus on KILLING tanks instead of just gimping tanks. That short moving, terrible shooting tank is a non-factor when you strip wounds off it. (And guard don't have marker lights, ha!)

Finally, I'm not sure why people are still worried about conscripts, CRUSH them. Take some anti hoard weapons instead of plasma guns in your army. Way too many people focus on, "This plasma gun is great against terminators and vehicles so I'm going to only take it." Take units with flame throwers, frag, and pistols, charge up the table and pin that wimpy unit in combat. (Get behind them so they cannot fall back.) Nearly every army has a turn one/two charge unit, USE THEM.

A well balanced guard list is really hard to beat. Conscript spam or scion spam is not.

Every weapon your fire at conscripts puts the IG player further and further ahead. They want you to CRUSH them. That means you aren't crushing something actually valuable. IT's a lose/lose proposition for IG opponents.

 sfshilo wrote:
Finally, I'm not sure why people are still worried about conscripts, CRUSH them. Take some anti hoard weapons instead of plasma guns in your army. Way too many people focus on, "This plasma gun is great against terminators and vehicles so I'm going to only take it." Take units with flame throwers, frag, and pistols, charge up the table and pin that wimpy unit in combat. (Get behind them so they cannot fall back.) Nearly every army has a turn one/two charge unit, USE THEM.

Check the math on those anti-horde options. The vast majority do not favor the player trying to kill the conscripts. Not to say that you should not take any of those weapons, but the reason why conscripts are so good is because the hard counter weapons do not do their job well enough. You end up spending way more pts than you should just trying to take out the conscripts while the meat of the AM army is killing you. Even as many as 150 conscripts with support still only represent ~25% of a full 2000 pt army. The rest of the points can be poured into pure shooting units like tanks, heavy weapons teams, artillery etc, and guard has some of the most efficient options in this category as well.

sossen wrote:

Check the math on those anti-horde options. The vast majority do not favor the player trying to kill the conscripts. Not to say that you should not take any of those weapons, but the reason why conscripts are so good is because the hard counter weapons do not do their job well enough. You end up spending way more pts than you should just trying to take out the conscripts while the meat of the AM army is killing you. Even as many as 150 conscripts with support still only represent ~25% of a full 2000 pt army. The rest of the points can be poured into pure shooting units like tanks, heavy weapons teams, artillery etc, and guard has some of the most efficient options in this category as well.

The main problem is volume of fire. As a small elite army you'll just never have the volume of fire to match conscript spam. There aren't any weapons that do enough shots, which is why they should make stuff like barrage weapons scale with the number of models in the target unit.

Martel732 wrote:
Everything you shoot at conscripts is wasted. Don't ever forget that. The IG player WANTS you wasting rolls on those guys.

Then how do you reccomend I get into striking distance of his tanks?

You don't. That's the beauty of the ig.

I'm starting to realise that anti hoard weapons basically don't exist anymore.

 sfshilo wrote:
I will take a stab at devils advocate, even though I see quite a bit of cheese in the codex imo.

Guard cannot hold objectives, and they will drag turns out since they amount of dice rolling is a bit appalling. What that means is the heavy hitting fast moving compact forces can still win.

Yeah you have conscripts packed on that objective, but your giant ass army has gobbled up two turns in 2.5 hours. If I'm going second that means I can remove those models easily (They are conscripts) and take the objective. Next match.

Guard suffer from the same issue as Tau, their BS is garbage. For vehicles I see too many people focus on KILLING tanks instead of just gimping tanks. That short moving, terrible shooting tank is a non-factor when you strip wounds off it. (And guard don't have marker lights, ha!)

Finally, I'm not sure why people are still worried about conscripts, CRUSH them. Take some anti hoard weapons instead of plasma guns in your army. Way too many people focus on, "This plasma gun is great against terminators and vehicles so I'm going to only take it." Take units with flame throwers, frag, and pistols, charge up the table and pin that wimpy unit in combat. (Get behind them so they cannot fall back.) Nearly every army has a turn one/two charge unit, USE THEM.

A well balanced guard list is really hard to beat. Conscript spam or scion spam is not.

I think your underestimating the amount of firepower it takes to kill 20 conscripts.

It takes 54 Heavy Bolter (str5 ap -1) shots to kill 20 Conscripts for a Marine player (2/3 hit, 2/3 wound, 1/6 save)
43 Assault cannon shots.
68 bolter shots.

How much firepower do you have to remove a single conscript squad after Guard has been shooting you for 2 turns?

Starting to realize?

Martel732 wrote:
Starting to realize?

I'm very slow on the uptake.

It's not really directed at you. I must admit, I was merely apprehensive about how the changes to flamers and blasts would play out, but now that I see the full glory of GW's error, I was FAR to reserved in my concern.

There need to be more guns with extra shots against big units. Flamers could be 2d6 vs 10+ models. Actually, I could see all of the old blast weapons getting a rule like that, such as the demolisher has. It would put them back in their old place of being the anti horde weapon of choice. Maybe make it 11+ so that all our fixed squads were not horribly annihilated and everyone just takes 9 model units when they can.

The best you can do is try to pack in as many 48" AT weapons as you can get and pray for LoS vs IG.

I think the changes to blasts and templates mattered less than the absence of AP.

Flamers will never hit more than 1-3 guys in older editions if they spread out (which they will, if you have flamers). Small blasts hit 1, mostly, and large blasts hit 3-5 or so depending on formation.

What has really changed, I think, is that conscripts now get their armour save against most everything (instead of not getting their armour save against most things).

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I think the changes to blasts and templates mattered less than the absence of AP.

Flamers will never hit more than 1-3 guys in older editions if they spread out (which they will, if you have flamers). Small blasts hit 1, mostly, and large blasts hit 3-5 or so depending on formation.

What has really changed, I think, is that conscripts now get their armour save against most everything (instead of not getting their armour save against most things).

Maybe. Or maybe it's a synergistic combination of both, and the immunity to psychology and the virtual immunity to melee via the fallback mechanic.

Martel732 wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I think the changes to blasts and templates mattered less than the absence of AP.

Flamers will never hit more than 1-3 guys in older editions if they spread out (which they will, if you have flamers). Small blasts hit 1, mostly, and large blasts hit 3-5 or so depending on formation.

What has really changed, I think, is that conscripts now get their armour save against most everything (instead of not getting their armour save against most things).

Maybe. Or maybe it's a synergistic combination of both, and the immunity to psychology and the virtual immunity to melee via the fallback mechanic.

The Immunity to Psychology has existed since 2nd, IIRC. Certainly since 3rd.

And the immunity to Melee existed in 5th with the "Send in the Next Wave" iteration in that edition, where you just evaporated the conscripts then shot the enemy (and put the conscripts back somewhere else).

The biggest problem with this edition I think is allowing 1st Turn Charges. It forces gunline armies to turtle even harder than they used to do.

I don't think 1st turn charges has a thing to do with it. Even when 1st turn charges go off, they accomplish nothing because you can't lock anyone in CC to protect yourself from beta strike.

Martel732 wrote:
I don't think 1st turn charges has a thing to do with it. Even when 1st turn charges go off, they accomplish nothing because you can't lock anyone in CC to protect yourself from beta strike.

Right! I think that is a symptom. I think GW allowed first turn charges, so gunline armies turtled, and everything devolved into "party at the turtling gunline" and an entire game, literally from the top of turn 1, of people caught in close combat.

So they just said "here's a way to get out of combat."

Maybe. Close combat outside of invisible death stars has been total trash for some time now, though. This is just a new and exciting way to make melee suck.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I think the changes to blasts and templates mattered less than the absence of AP.

Flamers will never hit more than 1-3 guys in older editions if they spread out (which they will, if you have flamers). Small blasts hit 1, mostly, and large blasts hit 3-5 or so depending on formation.

What has really changed, I think, is that conscripts now get their armour save against most everything (instead of not getting their armour save against most things).

The thing is, the fact that you had to space out was in itself quite a hard counter against hordes. At maximum coherency you were vastly increasing your footprint, lowering the amount of shots you get and weakening yourself in melee. Whilst removing templates has probably been a good move for ease of play, nothing has replaced their ability to influence how a horde is played. Now you can put so many bodies in such a small area that you can just overwhelm the enemy with bodies.

From what I've seen, they don't start clumping until all the deep strikers are committed.

Conscripts could still do their main job is they were issued no guns at all. That's the problem.

Martel732 wrote:
From what I've seen, they don't start clumping until all the deep strikers are committed.

I used to ask my opponent if they had blasts. If they said no I knew I was going to have a much easier time. The sheer difference in rapid fire shots when spaced vs clumped made blasts so valuable for taking on hordes.

I didn't use blasts, but I used a ton of templates.

I won't be playing in tournaments until this is fixed. I will also refuse every game against imperial guard that comes up. Sorry. Your cheese army isn't fun to play against. Curb stomp someone else.

I won't refuse them, but I'll make it clear their "victory" has as much weight as all the Eldar "victories" against BA.

I will continue to play them like I would have in 7th edition, as in I won't gloat on a win and won't belittle them specifically for playing guard if I lose.

Martel732 wrote:
I won't refuse them, but I'll make it clear their "victory" has as much weight as all the Eldar "victories" against BA.

That sounds like completely pleasant way to finish a game.

About as pleasant as playing it on my end. Except one takes 4 hours and one takes 20 seconds.

Martel732 wrote:
About as pleasant as playing it on my end. Except one takes 4 hours and one takes 20 seconds.

So you'd suffer through 4 hours of doing something you don't like just to make your opponent feel bad at the end of it?

Sounds delightful.

They don't feel bad, trust me. They know EXACTLY what they are doing.