Imperial Guard Armor in a Combined Arms Force

As an Imperial Guard player, most of your opponents will focus most of their attention on your vehicles. You are best served by having that attention focused on your vehicles as heavily and as long as possible. To do so, I offer 3 basic principles: Range, Pain, and Position. These are all interrelated, and I will discuss the relationship between them as well.

1. Range – Simply put, a shaken tank shoots nothing. Where practical, fire at your opponent from outside of his effective range. The best defense isn’t armor, it’s not getting hit with anything dangerous. Note that range includes making your tank harder to be hit by deepstrikers as well as considering what is already on the table.

2. Pain – A tank that isn’t hurting anyone may be forgotten. Hurt your opponents in some way at every practical opportunity, even if you’re just blocking LOS, get your tanks into the action. If your playgroup uses Imperial Armour, a Griffon with Infernus shells is the best pain-per-buck against any non-fearless army.

3. Positioning – Place and move your tanks so that they must be considered by your opponents. Often, a Leman Russ placed near the center of the board as your first heavy will cause a cautious opponent to deploy poorly. Even a strong player will have to respond to a Leman Russ in the center of the board, and this creates lots of opportunities for your other weapons to be more effective. Droptrooper Sentinels can strike at the rear and sides of opponents with devastating effectiveness. If there is adequate cover, hide a Basilisk in the far corner. Many opponents will charge to get inside the 36″ guess range; anticipate this and use your support vehicles and infantry to turn this maneuver into a slaughter.

4. Putting it all together – If you’re any student of military doctrine, you know about overwatch and enfilading fields of fire, and all that sort of hullaballoo. And you can pretend all of that applies to 40K, if you want to. However, I think one basic rule applies to the use of IG vehicles – look for the best way to concentrate pieplates, templates, and normal shooting on something, shoot it until it is dead, then shoot something else.

Use the Basilisk to drive your opponents out of their defensive holes, then batter them with battlecannon (or, if closer, try 3 HB sponsons and a pintle heavy stubber), fry them with Inferno cannon, and take potshots with flanking Sentinels. I cannot overstate how nice drop Sentinels are; it costs no points and the option to drop them has won me several games against good opponents.

Remember that your tanks are very shiny, but most of your points will be in your men. It may be better to offer your opponent a shot at a Leman Russ, if this means the squad doesn’t fire at an advancing infantry squad.

Buildout Advice – This is how I tend to take my vehicles onto the field. I don’t find extra armor worthwhile for some of them.