Vanguards

[Forteller]

Elo folks,

Was wondering, specifically for Vanilla and mostly about BA armies,
would a list focused around vanguards work? I am talking the works
3 x 10 vanguards splitting into 6 x 5 all with proper upgrades, maybe some
blood priests dropping after em, some honour guards with melta/plasma/flamers
that sort of thing.

Can you tell me if they re worth it or not? What would they need to work properly and at what points are they viable? How should such lists be played? What should i avoid? Thanks a mil!

Cheers!

[plawolf]

Well, 30 vanguard vets with jump packs will set you back 945pts without any upgrades. Assuming you want a power weapon and power fist per 5 men, that will cost you another 195pts.

3 priests with jump packs only will cost you 225pts.

If you take the cheapest HQ of a captain or librarian, you are looking at 1365pts before you take any troops.

Its not going to work at 1500pts plainly, but at 2000pts, that leaves you 635 points for troops and anti-tank.

You can get 2 decently equipped 10 men assault squads and have a hundred odd points to play around with or 6 bare bones 5 man squads if you want to go that route. So the list is possible at 2k, and it may even be fun for a few games against certain lists, but its going to be a one trick pony and will probably not do too well against many other builds.

Anything with heavy mech is going to give you problems as your vanguards cannot shoot when they HI, so you are going to need thunderhammers or good rolls for powerfists to break them out of their transports unless you get lots of 5 men assault squads and give them meltas to hope they can pop a transport for the vanguards. You could also attach priests to the RAS to try and get the vanguards in FNP bubbles.

The biggest issue is point efficiency. In typical games, you will struggle to find enough high point cost enemy units worth while to trade 2 or 3 five men vanguard squads against never mind 6. Although I suppose with 6 vanguard squads and potentially another 6 RAS squads all dropping in and engaging stuff, the normal issue of the vanguards being shot to bits after they kill whatever they HI-charged is less of an issue.

As I said, its doable, and might produce some amusing and fun games, especially if you get luck with the reserve rolls (aided by DoA) and have a large portion of your force drop all over the enemy early on and swamp them. But its going to be a temperamental list and bad reserve rolls can really hurt you.

Its also going to be hard to make this a take all comers competitive list, especially one that performs well consistently.

I would expect this to be a fairly fun list to play, especially the first few games when no-one expects it, but results will probably drift to the extremes of either you completely wiping out the enemy or getting owned yourself.

Let us know how this list fairs if you do decide to make something like it, would be interesting to see if my theory works in practice. Or not. :P

[greenstuff777]

I think if you shave some down and take scouts as troops you all good...more later working out the list

[fuzzbuket]

well if you kit them out proper youll not fare too bad, the problem is when hammer plasma pistpol meltabombs fights orks and when power sword SS fights nids