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I recently acquired a guard army - I am self conscious about taking it to the local gaming store though - it contains almost 100 models in a standard game.
I don't want games to take forever for my opponent, I'd run out of friendly games pretty quickly that way - any advice for how to pick up the pace for moving/shooting?

Playing with close friends has taught me games can peter out well before the halfway point if speed of play is not taken into account - tips?

 zgort wrote:
I recently acquired a guard army - I am self conscious about taking it to the local gaming store though - it contains almost 100 models in a standard game.
I don't want games to take forever for my opponent, I'd run out of friendly games pretty quickly that way - any advice for how to pick up the pace for moving/shooting?

Playing with close friends has taught me games can peter out well before the halfway point if speed of play is not taken into account - tips?

Know your rules BY HEART. That's what slows the game down more than anything. A good foot guard player can easily play at 2,000pts without significant slowdown, provided he knows his rules and isn't constantly flipping through the book. Know your stats, know your orders, know your weapon profiles, know how infantry react to pretty much anything, etc. Make a flash card if you have to, but make sure you can play quickly and do everything you need to without flipping through your book. Whenever my games take a while, its often because my opponent dragged the game out, or didn't know his own rules that well. That's the biggest hurdle. Don't goof around during your turn, and knock your stuff out quickly. Make your opponent pay attention to your rolls as well, because sometimes they'll get distracted and then ask you to roll again, which only slows it down more.

In the meantime, play small games, and use small amounts of infantry at first to get used to them. I wouldn't go over a 1,000pts, and would use a couple of tanks to cut down on how many infantry you need. A pretty good foot guard list can have a russ and roughly 80 to 90 guardsmen in it easily, and once you get above 1k the number can jump even higher. I'd say do a few 500pt games with a couple of platoons. Then bump up to 750 and add a tank. Once you hit the 1,000pts mark, maybe throw in some SITNW conscripts, or just add a few more infantry squads, and you should be golden.

All it really takes is practice practice practice. Just pay attention and know your codex. No different than any other army really. Oh yeah, and one more tip. Start planning your moves during your opponent's turn. Get a rough idea of what you want to do, so that by the time it does come around to your turn, you can start moving models and rolling dice right away. That helped me a ton when I was starting out. Hope that helps OP!

Mech up, don't move, sit there and shoot at them.

- Use a lot of dice instead of only a few.

- Measure and move only your first model of every unit and then, if you want to make friends out of who you are playing, allow them to help you move your models, it will half the time it takes to move your army and they will be:

1. Grateful for doing what most players consider sacrilege - allowing another to touch their models.

2. You will become one of the most popular people in your club because you are friendly.

If this fails, consider rewriting your footslogging list to be a more veteran centered list. Your units will be able to do more, be more expensive, and need less to do have the same effect. I'd pilot small lists if you're cautious.

As moustaffa said. Practice.

Also, the one thing not mentioned yet, don't goof off during your opponent's turns. Once your opponent is done, you should be moving your first model within a few seconds, and already know where you want everybody to be going.

The one thing I'm curious about here is your opponents. If your foot guard horde is surviving for 4 or 5 turns with basically all its models in tact, I think your opponent is doing something wrong. Usually for me, a game goes like:

deployment - 10 minutes
1st turn - 20 minutes
2nd turn - 15 minutes
3rd turn - 5 minutes
4th turn - 3 minutes
5th turn - 30 seconds

My opponents are good enough at killing off my guardsmen that by the end of turn 3, I usually just don't have all that many guardsmen left on the table. If I've only got 10 guys left, it's not going to take long to move and shoot them.

That or I've won so comprehensively that my opponent has conceded by the end of turn 4, and so the game is made shorter that way.

For one final thought, how long are your games taking? I mean, if you're playing 1500 point games that are taking 3 hours, then that's GOT to mean that your opponent is also going really, really slowly, so certainly deserves a healthy share of the blame for the game taking so long and moving so slowly.

it just takes practice to move and shoot guardsmen.

Know how many models are in each unit, measure the models that are out of range and subtract them(and any casualities) from the total.

Thats all there is to it. Practice, practice, and more practice.

That's a thought worth mentioning. If your opponent starts goofing around, remind him you've got to go too. If he gets upset, just say "Dude, I've got a 100 guardsmen, do you want to be here till closing time?"

That always drove me crazy. I've had games where a dude with 9 rhino chassis would take almost as long on his turn to move and shoot as it took me to move and shoot 3 russes and a 100 guardsmen, just because he'd goof off, chat with people (DURING A TIMED TOURNEY) and waffle back and forth on shooting. Then my turn would come up, I'd move everything quickly as possible, and he'd whine about me taking too long....

Dude almost got a spess mehreen shoved up his nose

 GreyHamster wrote:
Mech up, don't move, sit there and shoot at them.

^ Excellent guide on how to give your opponent the most boring game possible and murder your chances of people being interested in games with you.

MrMoustaffa wrote:

Dude almost got a spess mehreen shoved up his nose

ROFL

Ailaros wrote:

For one final thought, how long are your games taking? I mean, if you're playing 1500 point games that are taking 3 hours, then that's GOT to mean that your opponent is also going really, really slowly, so certainly deserves a healthy share of the blame for the game taking so long and moving so slowly.

I think part of the problem was the game was simply too large for our proficiency level - it was 4 guys, 3000 points per side, and the BRB was being cited frequently because of mix-ups with the old rules. After an hour or two, only two turns had been completed. Part of it was the other team was almost entirely proxy ("the dreadnaught counts as what? which ones are noise marines?")

I suppose I need to practice fast dice and know relevant rules fully. Thanks for the advice fellas!

Ah, yeah.

The first thing (other than having everybody read and re-read the rules. If you want a print-out of the things that have changed from 5th to 6th, click here. If you know what the changes are, it might help learning them), is to play at much, much smaller points levels. Start out with 1v1 games at 1,000 points or fewer, and multi-player games with no more than 750 points per person.

Not only will this speed things up, but it will drastically cut down on the number of proxied models.

Another tidbit is color-coding your squads via the edge of each models base, so you know which model belongs where at any given time. Makes it easier for both players to identify which squad is where for shooting and moving, etc.

Especially if you get a nasty multi-unit combat at some point in the game.

Ailaros wrote:
Start out with 1v1 games at 1,000 points or fewer, and multi-player games with no more than 750 points per person.

KplKeegan wrote:Another tidbit is color-coding your squads via the edge of each models base, so you know which model belongs where at any given time. Makes it easier for both players to identify which squad is where for shooting and moving, etc.

Good plans all. Thank you. Practice it is.

I find to speed up movement, if you do have a blob, measure the first few models out, ask your opponent "is this fair?" and then, Maintaining the same formation quickly hop all the other models up the same distance. It speeds up movement at the cost of a bit of precision-but usually for me playing orks, as long as we've bweb clear about where the closest models are, as long as the others aren't clearly being hopped up further than they should go, no big deal.

Might cause just a bit more consternation with who can double tap with guard, but so long as you're willing to back down occasionally on "ok maybe he moved up a little far, call it just a single shot on him" you should have no trouble with a casual opponent.

Yeah, I also routinely make small movements without measuring. Not like, moving guys upfield, but if I need to rearrange guys on top of a bastion to give different weapons a better line of sight, or if I've got someone in the ground floor of a ruin that I want to move out of line of sight, or other fiddly movements that I know are definitely less than 6", I don't even bother with the tape measure. Haven't had anybody complain yet, especially since I do properly measure everything else.

I've also, of course, done the thing above. If you've got a block of guys, it really is only the ones in front that are important to measure. Usually in the first few turns of the game, the guys in the second or third row will move LESS than the guys in the front row, as a way of making sure that I've got better displacement against blast weapons.