So we have seen a fair bit of information so far on 10th and so far it’s looking good. However, i want to put some thoughts and ideas, both good and bad, on guard in 10th. There is not a huge amount of information specific to the guard apart from the faction focus article.
Overall, i am looking forward to the new guard, however, there are a few issue that I foresee. I say issues, they might not be issues as we don’t actually have nearly enough rules to decide what’s and issue and what’s not.
The first thing that jumped out at me when i read the faction focus article and that was the new orders. While the orders look good and all are useful, it was the fact that there seem to only be 6 orders in total, for both armoured and infantry units. Now, the six orders can easily be used by both types of unit and will give a good bonus to the unit, however after having just been given 18 orders, it feel like a step backwards. On its own I don’t necessarily see this as a negative thing but when combined with a couple of other factors, it does seem more so. The first factor is the orders range, which is back down to just 6 inches and also doesn’t appear to bounce between squads. This means that you’ll have far less orders to issue, even with officers going back up to two orders per character. At one order per officer, it’s going to feel quite lack lustre. This is even more so for armoured units. Having to keep your tanks or other vehicles so close together reduces their mobility and ability to dominate the battlefield with their firepower.
The second issue to this is the changes to Vox casters. The new rules for these have nothing to do with order and are instead about gaining command points. While it is nice to gain additional command points, there are a lot of conditions to gaining them. Not only do you need to use a stratagem on the unit, you need an officer in range and you need to roll a 5+, so all in all, it’s unlikely that you will get many command points over the course of a game. Why the Vox caster does not enhance the orders range i don’t know, even if it doubled the range, i would have taken that over the CP generation.
When you combine all these things, the reduced orders, short range, no bouncing and Vox caster no longer having an effect, orders, while still useful, don’t seem nearly as powerful or useful as they were. As i said above, we still don’t know how many orders officers will get or if vehicles will get additional range, as it stands i do think this is a minor nerf to the guard.
There is a minor offset to the no bouncing of orders, that the new squads can be taken in squads of 20. This means that you’ll get more bang for your buck with each order, however it’s still not quite as good as being able to bounce an order to multiple units. The 20 man squads are good for many reasons, not only is there a greater output of fire from the squad but it will also have an effect on battle shock. With twice the number of men, you’ll need to loose twice as many men in order to need to worry about battle shock. The other good thing about the 20 man squads come from the fact that battle line units are restricted to 6 units of any one type. If you wanted to run more than 60 men in the only 10 man squads you would have to look else where, now with 20 man squads you can take up to 120 men, which for some might still be restrictive, but for me it should work out nicely.
The reduction in AP is something that might go either way.Firstly it helps us with our poor saves, meaning that we will get our full same more often than not, keeping the guardsmen alive for longer, however, it also means that were not going to be dishing out as many wounds to our enemies. This seems especially true for some of our bigger guns, such as the Leman Russ and artillery, like wyverns. While i do think that this a good move in general, it feels bad as some of our weapons have only just got the boost that they needed in our last codex. Also the reduction in the number of weapon profiles is a bit of a negative, weapon like the death strike have taken a bit of a nerf when they have only just felt like they were where they should always have been.
The changes to leadership will also be interesting. The way morale works and the new battle shock rules will mean that guard will most likely suffer most battles and might find it hard to run proper infantry lists. Characters like commissars will be very important and what their special rules do will also be critical to keeping infantry squads working. Hopefully they will enable us to ignore battle shock tests, probably through the loss of one or more guardsmen or they will have a very low leadership value making passing the tests easier.
In relation to commissars is the fact that many guard squads can have two separate leader units attached, rather than one like many armies. Having two attached will be interesting, especially as command squads seem to only count as one choice. That means that in theory you could have a squad size of 26, with 20 guardsmen, a command squad and a solo character. In addition to this what’s going to happen to the command squad advisors? At the moment they are just added to the command squad, will this happen in 10th? Or will they be separate characters that you attach to units?
There are currently a lot of unknowns with the new edition and there have been a number of additional previews and leaks since I started writing this article, so some of this will have probably changed. However i will be writing a full review on the new guard when we get all the rules and i will also go through each of my army lists and look at the changes that will need to be made (again!) and also look at how i think they will work in 10th.
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