Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Topic, including conscriptz??

100-200 would be your ideal.
What you really want to ask is how many tanks is too many?
Answer: you can never have enough IG tanks.

I frequently field about 100 dudes. There's not really a thing that's to many guardsmen. I gotta say though transportation (espescially Valkyries...) and deployment are a bit of a hassle, and when dudes die it's not so easy to keep tack of who goes where. 10+ squads with diffrent weapon combos becomes quite the hassle to sort in the death pile. It can easily slow down tournaments. These are minor details though, because there's nothing quite like conquering the enginered super human psyker monsters with regular dudes desperatly fighting as hard as they can. Guards are just awesome.

I'd say after 150 dudes deployment becomes an issue but 'cept for that go nuts.

 mrhappyface wrote:
100-200 would be your ideal.
What you really want to ask is how many tanks is too many?
Answer: you can never have enough IG tanks.

I have 0 tanks in my army, ah!

I can answer this in one letter.

∞

You needz allz the guardzmans all the times.

All of them.

Now.

Any less numbaz is the  looz.

No gruardsmenz is not allowed ever.

 Bobthehero wrote:

 mrhappyface wrote:
100-200 would be your ideal.
What you really want to ask is how many tanks is too many?
Answer: you can never have enough IG tanks.

I have 0 tanks in my army, ah!

What kind of heretical guard army do you have!?

Krieg Siege list.

 Bobthehero wrote:
Krieg Siege list.

Ah, so assume you have more than enough artillery to make up for the lack of tanks?

 mrhappyface wrote:
100-200 would be your ideal.
What you really want to ask is how many tanks is too many?
Answer: you can never have enough IG tanks.

This times 1000.


The more IG armor you have, the better.

I have a friend who loves fodder and planned a list. I talked him down from 450 to 392 including Commissars. The list genuinely frightens me since anything built for MEQ,TEQ,or vehicles has a low shot count unless it's a template. A take all comers list would suffer from the endless tarpitting speedbumping hordes. It would be worse if Chenkov was still a thing.

I have over 90+ armored units (or they are considered "vehciles") in mine.

Can't have enough.

"Enough Armor" is called heresy


I havn't counted troops on the ground. But I have plenty of them. Need more Skitarii though.

I've been running about 225 infantrymen in my Cadian Battlegroup lately but honestly once you get to about 150 you start really running out of real estate on the table if you have anything like the correct amount of terrain and the list itself is pretty subpar. I've been thinking about switching to a Castellans list for that sweet respawning but there's so much firepower out there that I think it'll still struggle to be competitive.

 Verviedi wrote:
I can answer this in one letter.

∞

∞ x2
Is the ideal amount of guardsmen to bury the enemy in.

- Sir! Intelligence reports the enemy can't swim!
- Good. Drown them in bodies.

"Sir, the enemy tanks... they hover"
"Holy Emperor how will our men clog up their tracks and halt their advance now?"

 n0t_u wrote:
"Sir, the enemy tanks... they hover"
"Holy Emperor how will our men clog up their tracks and halt their advance now?"

YOU PILE ON TOP OF THEM UNTIL THEIR GRAV SYSTEMS GIVE OUT AND THEY CRASH TO THE GROUND AND CONTINUE TO PILE ON UNTIL THEIR HULLS COLLAPSE!!!

OR BRING YOUR OWN GRAV TANKS

 Verviedi wrote:
I can answer this in one letter.

∞

Exalted.

When you spend too many points you have too many.
When a TWC unit destroys something that costs more than it does you don't have enough.

There is no upper limit on guardsmen except what you can carry to the game and the points limit. Also occasionally space in your deployment zone, I once saw a guard army have to keep a couple of squads in reserve after he realised they wouldn't all fit with the inch between them and slightly larger gaps between squads he was doing. (note this was vanguard strike so it had the smallest deployment area.)

 Nerak wrote:
I frequently field about 100 dudes. There's not really a thing that's to many guardsmen. I gotta say though transportation (espescially Valkyries...) and deployment are a bit of a hassle, and when dudes die it's not so easy to keep tack of who goes where. 10+ squads with diffrent weapon combos becomes quite the hassle to sort in the death pile. It can easily slow down tournaments. These are minor details though, because there's nothing quite like conquering the enginered super human psyker monsters with regular dudes desperatly fighting as hard as they can. Guards are just awesome.

I'd say after 150 dudes deployment becomes an issue but 'cept for that go nuts.

Try painting squad numbers on the bottom of their bases, that way you don't have to keep checking each weapon against your list, you just immediately know where to put each guy after looking at him for 1 second.

 roflmajog wrote:

 Nerak wrote:
I frequently field about 100 dudes. There's not really a thing that's to many guardsmen. I gotta say though transportation (espescially Valkyries...) and deployment are a bit of a hassle, and when dudes die it's not so easy to keep tack of who goes where. 10+ squads with diffrent weapon combos becomes quite the hassle to sort in the death pile. It can easily slow down tournaments. These are minor details though, because there's nothing quite like conquering the enginered super human psyker monsters with regular dudes desperatly fighting as hard as they can. Guards are just awesome.

I'd say after 150 dudes deployment becomes an issue but 'cept for that go nuts.

Try painting squad numbers on the bottom of their bases, that way you don't have to keep checking each weapon against your list, you just immediately know where to put each guy after looking at him for 1 second.

Thanks for the tip. I just might do that.

Or numbers on their shoulder pads/stripes of colors.

I divide my guardsmen into platoons based on their shoulder pad colour.

At the moment, I've never had an issue differentiating between my red, blue and yellow platoons, with black for veterans and company command squads, and I could probably afford to add more platoons and their colours as I go (grey, white, green, purple, brown, etc etc)

The answer lies in how patient your opponent is going to be waiting for you to deploy all the little bastards

I think that once you have enough Infantry Platoons to fill a CAD you could probably stop. So that's only 918 guardsmen.

I wouldn't say it's necessary to go double-CAD or anything like that, but it might be worth it to try to keep up with horde armies like Space Marines.


Somewhat unrelated, I figured out how many points a maxed out Infantry Platoon with all possible upgrades would be and I came up with 2791 points.

That's not counting anything from outside the platoon like Commissars or Priests or whatnot. I might not have figured it right though, I was using one of those army builder programs.

It certainly involved a lot of bad decisions, like plasma guns and missile launchers + flakk for as many people as possible, relic plating on every Chimera and krak grenades for Heavy Weapons squads. If I was made of money it would be fun to show up to an Apocalypse event with just one HQ slot and two Troops slots filled but having way over 5,000 points.

Trick question, you can NEVER have too many Guardsmen

If you have so many Guardsmen (or any number of models really) that cause games to consistently be over 3.5 hours long that is too many.

That's a full hour longer than I want my average game to take. Outside of that, have at, Commander.

When the amount of Guardsmen exceeds the amount of Dakka which is equel or greater the amount of Imperial Guard Tanks ever needed, than you know you have too many Guardsmen.