Pete Haines

Pete: The re-release of Codex: Imperial Guard comes at an auspicious time. Finally the Cadian Shock Troops plastics set is available and suddenly there is a whole new flavour of Imperial Guard army to be collected. The Imperial Guard have got to be the easiest army to identify with, being fundamentally, well, human. They are pitted against the might of hideously powerful alien killing machines and prevail through determination, firepower and a bayonet with some guts behind it. Moreover they are well-equipped with some of the heaviest weapons imaginable mounted on their awesome battle tanks. This alone makes the army a favourite of the tread-head or 'tank fancier' fraternity which I must confess to being a member of myself.

I had expected the task of reworking the Imperial Guard codex to be a relatively easy one (fool that I was). Naturally enough though life cannot be allowed to be simple and the arch-daemon of awkward timing flapped maliciously into the picture. Before the release of Codex: Imperial Guard the preceding codex would be Codex: Eye of Terror. Pretty obviously any campaign set around the Eye of Terror would inevitably involve the Cadian Shock Troop regiments and these would therefore have to be one of the armies covered in the campaign codex.

This made things tricky as the Cadian list would have to initially dovetail with the old Imperial Guard Codex and then seamlessly switch to point at the new codex when it was released. Equally importantly I had to be sure that the Cadian rules fitted within the broader context of the Imperial Guard and wouldn't be invalidated by the new Imperial Guard Codex. The consequence of all this is that it seems an age ago that I sat down and tried to list what issues I wanted to address in the new Imperial Guard list.

Essentially the old list seemed to be rattling along reasonably well. I had two main observations about current Imperial Guard armies and practices. Firstly the Imperial Guard armies I saw all seemed to be remarkably similar in composition - each seemed to be based around a Demolisher, a Leman Russ and a Basilisk. None of them seemed to make much use of the Elite options on the list and all of them preferred to not actually move if they could help it. This made them a bit predictable and I wanted to give the army some diversity back. I had to be fairly cautious though because if I overdid it then the Imperial Guard army might become a human wave of bayonet waving maniacs capable of trampling over the likes of the Tyranids and that would just be wrong.

Secondly there wasn't much that made them visibly part of the Imperium of the 41st millennium. Commissars were not being used that much and there wasn't any other weirdness to mark Guard armies apart. I have always been fascinated by the 'real world' armies of the 20th and 21st centuries and understand that a lot of players use the Imperial Guard army as a sort of homage to them. Warhammer 40,000 is big enough to absorb a homage and still have its own distinctive qualities though and I wanted there to be more Imperium madness available.

My answers to these problems were deliberately minimalistic. I did not want to create a new Imperial Guard army, just make a few interesting tweaks that wouldn't annoy anyone with an existing army.

Next: Part 2