Friday, April 24, 2009

Imperial Guard Codex: My Tactic

The reason I started playing Warhammer 40,000 and Games Workshop games in general was because of the Imperial Guard. The plastic Catachans were my first army. After playing with them for years in different varieties, I really came to like army lists that consisted only of guardsmen. I loved playing games having 95+ models on the board in a 1000 pt game. Was also great fun when the opponent had many tailored lists and would pull the "anti-tank list" out of the bag as soon as I would say Imperial Guard. Little did they know, no tanks were going to be in the sights of their lascannons.

All-infantry guard lists, while lacking in versatility(movement, objective claiming, etc.), are very good at winning if you take target priority seriously. Target priority(as well as a good selection of weapon variations) is the key to winning with all-infantry guard armies. When beginning your shooting phase choose the next turn's most serious threat and shoot it until it disappears(using the weapons most likely to do so before resorting to less likely methods), only then do you move to the second most serious threat.

To some this may seem like a boring way to play, just throwing volley after volley of shots across the table, but seeing a fully painted all-infantry guard army on the table is a great sight. Sure there are armies that will have a high success rate against this style of play and objective games can only be won by tabling opponents, but both can be won. With the new codex even killpoint games are not a terrible choice if you combine infantry squads.

Well those are my thoughts on how I play IG if I want to be competitive. If playing for fun I like to cook up all types of variant lists involving lots of close combat, allies(including Kroot mercs, SoB, and Daemonhunters), fully mechanized, etc.

Next time I'll post my all-infantry list I have been working up to use a couple hundred Steel Legion models I have lying around.

1 comment:

  1. I used to play an all infantry SM list but when they took away my infiltrating(usually half the list) I went to mech. Might try a marine horde sometime again but probably not in a timed event.

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