Guard, Guard, Guard

Ok, not quite what i promised. But, i still havent had a indepth look at the coolminiornot guide.

Anyway to make up for it, here are some thoughts on the up and coming guard codex

So for those of you who haven’t seen the leaked sheet


Now if this is all true, this I fear will make guard one of the hardest armies out there!Since I started playing 40k back in third edition, guard have always been seen as the whipping boys of 40k along with dark elder. Now GW last incarnation produced some cool models and a good set of working rules which when used properly can still challenge any of the main competitive armies out there. Proof of the pudding is the guard army which appeared 7th at the Throne of Skulls/GT heat 1 in 2008. Now this could be put down till people lack of experience with the new 5th edition, but to be honest most of the top players, shouldn’t have been troubled by the changes to the rules if they where that good.

Now along with another horde army, orks (which seems to be the way GW is going with armies for various reasons, ££££) the main changes are going to be points and correction of kill points for the guard, while giving them a load of cool new toys. Now a reason I suspect GW has put more tanks in this book than any other I know, is probably to allow people to use models in apoc and fun games a lot easier than making separate data sheets and a whole lot of hassle trying to find rules.

But the main thing I’ve noticed from my rumour gathering and this data sheet is the sheer amount of tanks there guard are going to have access to with lots of blast weapons. Now in 40k blast weapons are very, very nasty and when you take into account the average dice role on two dice is 7 coupled with the guard BS 3 means on average the templates will be moving 4 inches. Considering it’s a large template that most guard tanks fire, you should always hit something especially against horde armies and I imagine this will ignore most armour including marines. Failing that the guard are gonna have access to lots of weapons that have a medium/low strength with lots of shots (heavy bolter etc) and can force saves through sheer number of shots. Now this is balanced by the BS and hopefully cost. But I’ve got a feeling tanks are going to be cheap as chips.

Along with this, if you can have cheap infantry, which is a high probability, this makes a rather deadly combination. With the changes in assault rules it’s kinda dangerous to assault stuff without back up. A platoon of guard (30 to 40) is gonna be a hard thing to kill or move off an objective, especially if in cover and they got rapid fire range. So unless you can engage multiple units in order to give yourself time to wade through the bodies, you probably going to get flash lighted to death!

Now a lot of this is speculation from the sheet, but with the trend in previous horde like armies (orks) I could see the guard becoming horribly evil (for once). But we shall wait and see, if I get anymore info from anywhere ill be sure to post it up!