So, now that we know Tau are on the table, what do people think? Personally, if Guard become an option, I'd drop whoever my my current character was (Probably a Salamander) in a heartbeat. As for how to make them playable, I think the Squad Leader idea is near-perfect, especially with the alteration that you switch to one of the other Guardsmen when your Sergeant is killed. Field promotions are a fact of life for the Guard, after all. Also, what is all this bullshit about "hot-shot Lasguns"? Those are sniper weapons! Snipers, criminals, and those from poor worlds! A real enhanced Lasgun is called a Hellgun, and is hooked to a large (usually backpack or belt) power source, giving it enhanced penetration and sustained fire capabilities, while giving it enough power and cooling to allow it to fire many rounds! It's what Stormtroopers and those Guardsmen from rich worlds use, and I won't hear anything about any retcons. Also, if when Guard become a playable faction, I would like to be able to select for higher fire rate or more damage, being able to blow my entire power pack in five or ten rounds of torso-vaporising power, or being able to fire for a hundred, hundred and fifty shots of suppression. That would be good.
I would seeing the guards playable as well or at least something (human) the inquisition would be fine too.
The IG are still fundamentally different,both gameplay and lore-wise. But since the Necrons,a faction belived to be NPC only,is on the table too,i would say that with time they will come. Also,have you ever played the OFPWH40K mod?They have a system for lasguns/laspistols thats just like you described:either use the entire pack in 4 shots and down that Necron Warrior or fire 30 low power shots that will keep units at bay and still kill fragile units like Cultists.
The Squad-Leader idea is terrible, last try to explain why: Being in Control of a Squad of NPCs doesn't give you the advantage you need against Enemies THIS Strong because the NPC Soldiers don't know how to properly take cover or conceal them self which is getting them killed fast. Than we have the issue of properly controlling them, if they shoot for them self.. you just need to give them Plasma Rifles (which the Guard has Access to even on Private Rank) and they will hit almost every time.. unless they get killed before that.. which they will in most cases. So Infiltration becomes impossible, your guys are either useless or one-shot machines and they WILL get stuck in Doors and what not.. So it becomes a huge unecassary Gamble Also it's just unnecessary work to build up an Squad-System when there are Plenty of Regiments which follow the Quality above Quantity Rule and Equip their Soldiers properly, like you said your self TacticalError, rich Worlds do that! So why not use that? The Guardsmen for himself has already some advantages over most of his Enemies like: much smaller Hitbox, much more usable Cover, better at infiltration because he is not an colorful Closet running around... and he STILL can use Weapons like Melter, Plasma Rifles and so on. So just keep the Guard at home til the Vehicle Addon arrives and let them Shine THEN.
Yeah, I guess... I was going from my proposed/speculated class for Dark Millennium, waybackwhen. As for giving me a carapace-armoured badarse being able to equip everything from a hellgun or grenade launcher with Krak and Frag rounds to a plasma rifle or meltagun, while carrying equipment to call down hell from mortar batteries or something, able to work in a squad of like-minded players from a Chimera or operate a Leman Russ, all I can say is: Yes, please!
Hot shot lasguns aren't snipers. They only have a range of 18", where a standard lasgun has 24" same as a bolter. The sniper lasgun is the long-las. Hellguns are actually obsolete, hot-shot lasguns are their replacement. On the tabletop they have the same stats though. And the main problem with the squad system, as mentioned before, is that controlling the AI squaddies would be like herding cats. That and when IG is represented in games, we don't need the 50:1 ratios that Space Marine fanboys fap to in the novels. On the game side of things (both videogames and tabletop/pen&paper) we traditionally range between 3:1 and 2:1, with particularly good gear putting us almost (but not quite) at parity. The rest of the difference is made up with strong vehicles and clever use of support powers. The game side of 40k has its own internal logic and there really isn't reason to abandon it just because Matt Ward or C.S. Goto released a new novel.
The playing as a squad idea idea would be literally the worst thing to control in this game especially in a competitive game unless they make your AI companions literally aimbot your foes (and even then it'll be a terrible idea), anyone who can't see this immediately just doesn't understand how incredibly hard it would be both for developers to balance and players to utilize effectively. I think Guardsmen should be more of a "roman" style army where they work best in formations and in large numbers with discipline as a large part of their combat style, it should only attract people who are interested in working as a team to achieve victory and as such when they fire a volley of 20 shots per volley or so it should be sufficient to force marines, orks and eldar to seek cover or be annihilated. Having player leaders like commissars, sergeants and so on provide buffs for the Guardsmen that increase their health, damage and possibly accuracy would be more plausible to make them an effective fighting force that works best when they are all coordinating together and as such would most likely be best represented as a clan faction where 30-40ish people work together using almost line-battle tactics, trenches and such as well as coordinating their aim into volleys of death, heavy weaponry like autocannons, heavy bolters, plasma cannons with more accuracy on these than other races as they are mounted on a tripod, artillery ranging from light mortars to ship battery fire which can obliterate incredible amounts of the enemy albeit at a large resource cost and finally vehicle legions of death. Have a look at a game called Red Orchestra 2 to see what I mean, they would be advancing slowly with artillery and sniper support covering them as they advance and fire together as a group upon their foes with the ability to possibly call reconnaissance valkyrie runs or something as well as off-map and on-map artillery to crush their foes before charging forward and finishing off their weakened enemies, adding some kind of "morale" for artillery to deal damage to would be a nice touch as well, so enemies that are close to artillery strikes get reduced health, vision, speed, accuracy, etc. I'd see them as an army that requires a lot of leadership so people would fill the higher ranking roles per region for their squad and then can slowly build up groups into fireteams, battlegroups or whatever to get access to the higher ranks of command and later on orbital artillery and such to support them more effectively. Because honestly, if a handful (like 6 or 7) of guardsmen are reliably taking out space marines it's going to be very disappointing. There's plenty of ways to balance the race and remain true to what makes them unique in 40k although it will mean that the army has to stick to certain playstyles to be effective and to be honest, I think that's a good thing because I would expect the same thing for Space Marines, Chaos Marines, Eldar and Orks. I'd say something like thirty las body shots to kill a marine, probably about six to eight to the head but this is just me thinking, no idea how long the TTK for weapons in the game is at the moment so.
This is pretty much what I've been saying. We don't really need squads, because Guardsmen can be given other advantages besides just raw power. Honestly, I expect bolters to be killing in anywhere between 3 and 5 hits against SMs. I know this sounds short, but bolters have a very low RoF. 240 RPM=4/s, meaning that even that estimate range is basically a full second +/- 0.25. In shooter terms, that's a TTK of "slow as molasses". Anything longer and I would be worried about the status of ranged weapons in general. For lasguns, we can take advantage of the fact that there are hundreds of patterns of lasguns and very few of them have been given concrete RoF characteristics. The pattern we use could easily happen to be capable of full auto somewhere between 600 and 780 RPM (10/s-13/s). At 720 RPM, a lasgun that needs 9 hits to kill would have the same TTK as a bolter that needs 3 and 15 hits would be the same as a bolter that needs 5. If you want the lasgun to have a slightly longer TTK even after RoF is factored in, you could make the bolter 4 hits and the lasgun 15, or do 4/12 but make the RoF lower than 720 (ie 600-660). If you want to be absorbing a metric ton of hits, you could give the lasgun an M16's 900 RPM (15/s) and make it take ~15-20 hits to kill (it would still end up within ~0.25 seconds of the bolter's TTK). Or you could go with all of the above, having each stat set be a different pattern or even different power settings on the same pattern. The lasgun is a remarkably flexible weapon, to the point that the balance team can pretty much do whatever they want with it (though past a certain power point they should start calling them "hot-shot").
They could also make quite some Money of those Patterns.. creating a Lasgun for every play-style there is without making it overall better than the Standard-issue Lasgun. And while i'm tapping into that Field... Customization is absolutely HUGE with the Guard. Aside of the most iconic Symbols of the Imperium you can literally change EVERYTHING. No Army comes close to the Guard except for the Orks on individualizing your Character. That's a Plus because.. we all Like to customize, the more the Better!
