"Greetings,
I am an old 40K player that has decided to re-enter the fray. I quit playing some time ago when my space marine army was consumed by a house fire. After that my interest drifted away.
Recently I found a local hobby store that runs 40K game nights once a week. After watching a few games the old desire to play returned. As luck would have it, the hobby store is full of mostly new players. The store is starting an escalation league in a few weeks. They will start at 1000 points and advance through 1250, 1500, and 2000 points.
After much searching I decided to try imperial guard. I have tried to sift through the huge quantity of available information on the net and somehow arrived to your blog. I don’t have enough practical data to know the advice here is better than elsewhere, but I have found that your advice comes with explanations and thought processes. This seems to be very much not the norm (its good cause I said so).
Below is my 2000 pt list. I’ll work on breaking it up after I know where I’m going to end. Any advice or commentary would be greatly appreciated. Since I’ll be purchasing everything as we go, any units are possible.
HQ 160 Company Command SquadAutocannon, Melta Gun, Vox, Master of Ordinance, Chimera
TROOPS
105 Platoon Command Squad Flamer x4, Chimera
100 Infantry Squad
Commissar, Vox, Autocannon
70 Infantry Squad
Autocannon, Melta Gun
70 Infantry Squad
Autocannon, Melta Gun
165 Veteran Squad
Chimera, Melta Gun x3, Autocannon
165 Veteran Squad
Chimera, Melta Gun x3, Autocannon
ELITES
145 Psyker battle Squad
Chimera, + Psykers x3
145 Psyker battle Squad
Chimera, + Psykers x3
FAST ATTACK
140 Vendetta
Heavy Bolters
140 Vendetta
Heavy Bolters
HEAVY SUPPORT
150 Hydra x2
190 Lemam Russ Battle Tank
Plasma Sponsons
190 Lemam Russ Battle Tank
Plasma Sponsons
That leaves me with about 65 points to spend. I’m would like to keep it a hybrid army, but other than that am open to any suggestions.
Thank you for the great blog,
Tom"
Hey Tom, glad you're getting back into the game and enjoying the blog! Sorry for the late reply and to hear you lost your army :(. That would suck. In regards with your list, it's very solid overall but there's a couple of things I'd want to change here and there so we'll look at those.
Vendettas first of all should really have triple lascannons. Imperial Guard by their nature have a bunch of anti-infantry and with PBS + Russes, you've got those bases covered. Having 3 rather reliable and mobile lascannons is very useful and although it makes these guys huge targets, they are excellent buys. The only issues here is your only squads which can hop in and go for a ride to alpha strike are the Vets yet you need some midfield presence which they provide. We could slot in some special weapon teams or other Vet squads but we'll see what we have at the end.
The CCS also has a bunch of extra stuff which isn't really needed. Master of Ord is a pretty unreliable ord template and again, you've got a bunch of anti-infantry already and do you really need more? Not particularly. You can simply replace him with an Astropath so your reserves are more reliable if you decide to go for reserves but as an army with effective bubble-wrap and a fair amount of armor, not really needed either but it does offer flexibility in your deployment. I'd probably add another meltagun or two for insurance if needed. These guys could go into the Vendettas but you lose orders on your combined squad if you do so.
The Infantry blob and PCS are both fine as are the PBS in Chimeras. I'd going to assume all the Chimeras are ML/HF setup? If not, change it to that.
Which brings us to Heavy Support. LRBTs and Hydras = good but you don't need the Plasma sponsons on the LRBTs. It ads a lot of firepower and anti-MEQ but if you want to do that, add in the Executioner anyway and squad it up with a cheap LRBT. Don't think you really need that personally though but it's certainly an option. For now let's downgrade the sponsons on the LRBTs. If we squad them up leaving them bare is a fine option though if we leave them solo probably adding heavy bolters would be good. I would like to try and add in another Hydra Squadron though so let's squad the LRBTs up without sponsons and add 2x Hydras. We save 80 points dropping the sponsons and have the 65 left over so we just need to find 5 points which is easy enough; lose a flamer.
This ends up adding 2 extra chassis and a bunch more S7 shots at the cost of some plasma cannons which is a fair trade when you've got the anti-infantry you do. We don't get the SWTs we wanted in the end for the Vendettas but we can use the CCS or Vet squads as needed if an alpha strike is required which opens up some deployment options for the Guard army. You can still shave points by dropping the Astropath/Officer from the CCS and add more meltaguns but I'll leave that up to you (you can also drop the Voxes for the same reasoning).
So the end list looks like:
CCS w/meltagun, Vox, Astropath, AC, Chimera
2x 8x PBS, Chimera
PCS w/3 flamers, Chimera
3x Infantry Platoon w/AC, meltagun + Vox, Commissar
2x 10x Vets w/3x meltaguns, AC, Chimera
2x Vendetta
2x LRBT
2x 2x Hydra
Totals: 2000 points (assuming 65 points spare from original list)
13 tanks
57 infantry
