Imperial Guard

I've had the beginnings of an Imperial Guard army since shortly after they first released the Steel Legion miniatures back during the Third Battle for Armageddon promotional campaign. I bought the Steel Legion army deal off someone on Waryammer who didn't want it anymore, and built on that.

The main thing keeping me from fielding an IG army on the table has always been the numbers of troops I've had available. Under the previous codex you had two troop options: Infantry Platoon and Armored Fist Squad. The problem was that for every Armored Fist that you took, you had to also take an Infantry Platoon. I barely had enough infantry models to field a minimum size Infantry Platoon with an an Armored Fist Squad, so my options were always extremely limited. Combine that with many of my other models butting up against each other in the force organization chart, and I was lucky to be able to put 750 points on the table.

The reviews of the new codex I'd seen all talked about how guardsmen had dropped in cost, and made it sound like you were going to need even more troops to field an effective IG army. I figured that meant no IG for me in 5th Edition 40K, but then I actually read a copy of the book and discovered that in addition to the old Infantry Platoon, there are now two other Troops choices, neither of which requires that you first have an Infantry Platoon, and both of which only require ten models. This gives me a lot more options to construct viable lists using only my existing models.

In addition to new Troops choices, there are also new HQ choices, including the Lord Commisar and Commisar Yarrick, which mean I can take single model HQs, instead of the five model count Company Command Squad. Sure, my lists are likely to be far from optimized, but they will let me put up to 1900 points on the table without assembling a single new model! I see my Eldar staying on hiatus for the time being, and some 40K games with my IG in the near future.