a tactical conundrum - 40k

[Quigglebert]

the turn 4 of a random game length capture and control, you are playing guard, your forces remaining are a near full strength conscript squad, a mostly crippled but not fleeing infantry platoon with heavy weapon teams,2 autocannons and a lascannon team, a stormtrooper squad with valkerie support and a leman russ battle tank with no battlecannon but lascannon still works.

your opponant is tau, they have 2 squads of fire warriors, one devilfish a hammerhead, railgun armed, 2 broadside battle suits and 2 full squads of crisis suits with fuision blasters and burst cannons yet to arrive via deepstrike,

the game is tied at one objective a piece, how do you win the game

It really depends. What characters do the IG have, where is everyone, what's cover like, who's got line-of-fire on the Hammerhead, what's the Valkyrie kitted out with etc.?

Ideally, leg the conscripts at the Broadsides and tarpit them, take out the Hammerhead with the Russ's lascannon, the stormtroopers can move towards the objective and get the heavy weapons teams into a piece of cover somewhere in the middle of the battlefield (or close to it). The infantry platoon is fucked, probably, but you've made for a tough ask, as Crisis Battlesuits usually own Guard.

Sorry, mate.

i was the tau player in this situation, i wanted to see how other people would try to handle this, also the next turn one squad of suits got destroyed, stupid scatter dice

as for cover it was a city scape with decent fire lanes and some nice area terrian

the valkerie is basic fit, the infantry platoon still has hvy weps, iron hand was the officer in charge, which i forgot to mention

 

[LogicNProportion]

>Conscripts

Unless you have Chekov, you lost from the beginning.

That, and Tau seem almost designed to cripple Guard armies.

Sorry bro.

 

[willsham45]

Take out troops that are able to take an opjective then take out anything fast so they cannot contest in a hurry.
So prioritis troops, fast skimmers, then maybe go for the broard sides and then the hammerhead.
Keep tanks out of sight of the big guns maybe position them to force the fireworriors into the open.
When Battle suits apear only use surfitaint force not everything, so maybe storm troops maybe lascannons asuming there is nothing better to use on them.

 

[Okysho]

Reschedule the game, get some basilisks, try again...

This. The Guard are known for the tanks and artillery range. I play against a guy who regularly plays guard and have had my ASS handed to me almost every time (I play marines)

He sits there on the edge of the board, firing earth shakers from ONE BASALISK taking huge bites out of my significantly smaller numbers.

One bask, two leman russ, (one of which has all guns upgraded to Plas cannons) and a master of ordinance (meaning he gets an orbital bombardment EVERY FREAKIN' TURN!! Yeah it has more AP, but why can't my Chapter master do that!?)

Every single one of his guard squads have a voxcaster so they can recieve orders (like "bring it down" or "first rank fire, second rank fire") Those bastards took out my terminators in one phase!!

I've never actually won against this guy. Try this strategy!! NO ONE can out-range the IG.

 

[Davey Woo]

Here's the plan.
Use anti-vehicle weapons on all the vehicles/battlesuits.
Use the autocannons on anything still standing.

Do I win? I have no idea how to play as Imperial Guard, I much prefer the Blood Angels, the Death Company seem to solve so many problems on their own...

 

[Joshimodo]

Stop using a (still) terrible army? I mean, IG mechanised teams are decent, but c'mon. The infantry is terrible.

Use your heavy weapons and focus on those vehicles, especially the suits. Keep in cover at all times. Try to outlast the infantry or stay out of line of fire.

That, and Tau seem almost designed to cripple Guard armies.

Sorry bro.

Nah, Tau seem more like a Tyranid killer. Being a Tyranid player, it seems that way. Huge ranged advantage, but feeble in CQC where my 'Nids excelled.

Frankly, IG have plenty of counters, with the exception of Space Marines, who's severely limited numbers and relative mobility make them fairly easy targets.

 

[Irony's Acolyte]

I hire orcs to kill them for me. A lot of orcs.

I can do that, right? I'll promise them shiny stuff or somethin.

'EY BOSS! DIS 'UMIES PROMISIN' SHINY STUFF! LET'S GO KRUMP DA OTHER LOT!

OT: I'd say focusing on taking out the Hammerhead so it doesn't tear holes in your Troops and work on taking out those Fire Warriors. Essentially, like a true IG general, everything but the critical units (the Troops who can capture the objectives) are expendable. It might be a bloody victory, but at least it might end up a victory.

Also, 40k problems like this are rather hard to figure out when you can't see the board.

 

[SckizoBoy]

i was the tau player in this situation, i wanted to see how other people would try to handle this, also the next turn one squad of suits got destroyed, stupid scatter dice

as for cover it was a city scape with decent fire lanes and some nice area terrian

the valkerie is basic fit, the infantry platoon still has hvy weps, iron hand was the officer in charge, which i forgot to mention

Ah, good 'ol Strachan, he does toughen up an army, so what was the result in the end? If the heavy weapons squad managed to get onto high ground with good kill-channels, I'd start praying if I didn't have good fast attack units!

With that lost Crisis squad, would've been a lot tighter, eh...

 

[Simriel]

without knowing board positions, terrain, lines of fire e.c.t I can't really advise. I also don't know wargear, a big factor in any game.

 

[Jared Domenico]

It's been a while since I cracked open either codex, so I'm running off of memory here.

First thing's first: keep the conscript squad moving to the objective, hopping from cover to cover and out-and-out running to get where it needs to go. Their BS is garbage and their only value is objective grabbing.

Keep the Leman Russ firing at the hammerhead, at best destroying it, at worst preventing it from shooting it's conscript-squad killing blast template. At terribly, well, you can write obscenities on the hull.

The heavy weapon teams should at first aim at taking down those broadsides - the autocannons and lascannon should bring them down in a turn or two. After that, switch targets to either the surviving crisis suits or the hammerhead if it's not destroyed yet.

The valkyrie and storm troopers should work in tandem to tear down the firewarrior teams by the standard drop-and-pop. Scoot a valkyrie over to within 12 inches of - A - firewarrior team, unload the stormtroopers, and open fire. Engage a single squad at a time, preferably using the valkyrie as cover from the second squad if terrain can't do the trick. Rinse and repeat for the second squad. If both squads are taken down and you still have stormtroopers left, and the Tau player still has crisis suits, switch targets to the crisis suit teams.

 

[MNRA]

Assumptions:
The IG have the turn.
There is adequate cover for all ground units.
Only the units listed are the units on th table (i.e. No drones for the Tau nor Commisars for the IG etc.)
The Fire warriors are 6-man strong, the conscript are 18.
You will need some of the emperors luck to have a fighting chance

Step 1: The conscripts should run -hugging cover- towards the enemy objective. If they stay in cover and have a good spread, nothing the tau has will inflict any serious casualities on them and you are free to taunt him for being a silly goose who wastes shots on conscripts. Even if both crisis suits squad land and fire all they have at the poor sods only ten conscrips will die (rough statistics) and wasting either the hammerhead or the firewarriors on his is -again- silly. Railguns will do nothing and the large blast has too high a chance of scatter (along with a 4+ cover save) to do any real damage. Hence you get not only a good blob to swamp and tarpit any batle-suits and/or bradsides, but you can also hunker on the enemy objective if you can reach it.

Step 2: The leman russ and the lascanon-squad both fire at the broadsides, there is roughly a 75% chance that at least one of them will go down since they lack shield drones. (Two shots with 4+ to hit, 2+ to wound, insta-kill)

Step 3: Ignore the fire warriors unless they are within rapid fire range, if so kill them with mass flash lights from your own rapid firing units. If they are in the devilfish, which i highly probable (and hence have a chance of closing in on you next turn for a rapid fire) use the autocannons to hopefully score a stun or better. Statisticaly (again, roughly) you should have a 50% chance of scoring a glancing -or better- hit from your four shots. If this fails don't worry. With six rapid firing warriors you will still only losse about 3 gudsmen, which no biggie.

Step 4: The Valkyrie needs to have as high a chance of survival as possible and should probably turbo boost, with luck the enemy will only have a single broadside and the hammerhead left, and waaay more targets than guns so hopefully it will be safe until next turn. Deploy the Storm troopers either on near the broadsides (in cover) to draw fire or keep them on board if you feel certain that the Valkyrie will survive. The reason for this is that this is your only reliable counter to the crisis suits. The flyer and the units within will make an absolute mess since you have AP3 hot shots as well as the two hellstrike missles. Idealy you should boost to a position far from your own objective but near the enemies, as any Crisis suits landing to take out the Valkyrie will then be too far away to thraeten your own objective in the remaining span of the game, while your stormtoopers will shoot up the crisis suits (or assault) and then go in to contests the enemy stronghold. If you have too few troopers to score a good two dead suits (Statistically you'd need eight Storm troopers) you can run up to the objective an go to ground. With a 3+ save the tau will either have to CC you or waste a lot of fire.

During the tau turn I'll assume that the Russ as well as several guardsmen die, probably at least one HV-Weapon squad. If the gunsihp goes down = oh dear. Anything else is prety much expendable as long as you're holding your own objecve.

In turn five you have to drop the Storm troopers and fire them plus everything from the Valk at one of the crisis suits. The conscripts (who tend to get ignored and should still be resonably near full strength) should keep running towards the broadsides, the objective, or -if the Tau player was really unlucky/stupid, try to assault his crisis suits. The Guardmen and their weapons should focus on the devilfish this turn (if it still lives) as a single broadside will do nothing now that the only target is a Valk without missiles and it's far more important to deny the enemy mobility. If you've focusd fire right (and had a good ammount of luck) the only thing that can reach your entrenched objective should be a single unit of crisis suits. If your concripts or storm troopers manage to deny the enemy their objective (just keep hugging terrain and the hammerhead will score mabe 2 kills per shot -essentially nothing-). You've more or less won at this point. At worst you'll end up with both sides denying their enemies the objectives and you'll have a nice draw at least.

This is of course based on quite a bit of luck, but times were pretty dire considerng what the IG had left so you may as well go for broke. Also, this math is done off of the top of my head, so a few mistakes may have snuck in

 

[Quigglebert]

thats the best i heard, the game ended a tie as my devilfish and internal squad contested the guard objective and the storm troopers took out my other fire warrior squad, the hammerhead ended up with no railgun the crisis suits that made it, minced the conscripts and then got locked by stracken, the broadsides in the end only stunned the russ, but that was poor luck