A guard player before Guard was cool

[roncarlin2002]

Greetings!

I have lurked on BoLS for a few years now, and have occasionally added my 2 cents worth in the comments, but finally I have taken the dive and joined the lounge. I have been playing Guard since early 3rd edition, and I have managed to raise all 3 of my sons as 40k players (Ork, Tyranid, and Marines).

[Ork E Nuff]

Played Orks from day one, still do. Don't win alot, but still have a great time. My oldest son, 23, was introduced to the game at age 10, he loved it, I gave him his first army and helped him paint it over a Christmas leave. Good times...

[Omit]

Good old guard, I still hold onto my chicken walker sentinel form 13 years ago, you know back when we could have assault cannons on them.

[Slurpeemourne]

Welcome! As an old schooler, I'm interested to know if you felt like something was lost in the translation of the IG into 5th ed. As a recent inductee, I don't have any experience with the previous codex, but leafing through it, I was intrigued by the regimental doctrines -- in practice, were they as flavorful and interesting as they appeared on paper, or was it a matter of seeing the same options in every IG army, always? Also, how did you feel about the relegation of the abhumans to outliers? Do you miss what was lost?

[gredert]

Welcome! As an old schooler, I'm interested to know if you felt like something was lost in the translation of the IG into 5th ed. As a recent inductee, I don't have any experience with the previous codex, but leafing through it, I was intrigued by the regimental doctrines -- in practice, were they as flavorful and interesting as they appeared on paper, or was it a matter of seeing the same options in every IG army, always? Also, how did you feel about the relegation of the abhumans to outliers? Do you miss what was lost?

I have also played IG since third, and it has changed a lot. Today the list is very good, with a broad array of choices that give us arguably the most flexability in the game, and those choices are very competitive for the most part. But I do feel the way the op feels, and have said myself many times I played Guard before it was cool to play Guard. I remember on more than 1 occasion beiing told at a tournament "oh, you brought Guard, thats neat". In third we had 2 books, 1 with standard platoons, tanks, and abhuman choices, and while similar to todays book in layout, much less competitve, and involving WAY less armor (mech squads could not make up your only troop choices, you needed a platoon to take an Armored Fist squad, and we had 5 or 6 tank/arty varients, 1 per slot). The other was a book decicated to Catachan jungle fighters, with special characters and choices only for them, and cool things like buying mines to plant in terrain features secretly.
In fourth we had the doctrines you mentioned. They were ok, but after that book I may have played 6-10 games of 40k and moved exclusively over to Fantasy because I hated 4th, and disliked that my book forced me to take special powers but lose out on units I enjoyed fielding, or take those units but have less of the special powers that you almost needed to have to play effectively.
So while I miss the days of 3rd ed IG, the new book is good so there is no point getting all nostalgic about the old stuff in my opinion.

[TSINI]

I'm also a fellow 3rd ed guard player myself.

I think the game changed somewhere after 3rd became 4th ed that really changed the tone of armies you'd see on the table top. It may be down to the increase in luxury spending over the past 15 odd years, but you only used to see armies that players had a Passion for, mine was guard, been hooked on them since I first saw a GW leaflet with tallarn desert raiders surrounding a basilisk, unfortunately my local GW didn't have any tallarn, so I got valhallans and the rest is history. I'm on my second major guard army, with a little dallying in nids recently (well, you gotta have something to shoot at havent you?), and I've enjoyed every game as a lowly guardsman, still do