How many Guardsmen would it take to defeat a Custodes strike force?

[Tyzuris]

The strike force is as follows:

15 Custodes with Guardian Spears, four Sagittarum Custodes with Adrastus Bolt Calivers, two Terminator Armour equipped Custodes, three Venetari jump pack Custodes. For maneuvering purposes the Custodes strike force has three Venerable Land Raiders.

Assume the battle has a combined arms force of Imperial Guard and the battlefield has two scenarios:

a) large metropolitan city like NYC, etc..

b) open-field type battle.

How many Guardsmen would you figure out to be needed to take out this strike force?

 

[The Whispering Monk]

Soooo...just guardsmen...no tanks or arty?

 

[Tyzuris]

Soooo...just guardsmen...no tanks or arty?

They have tanks and arty as well.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

Also...I'm not sure the Land Raider can actually transport Custodes. (At least not per rules, but we can probaly just say 5 will fit...maybe just 3.) What they need are their golden transport vehicles instead.

So 24 Custodes and 3 Tanks vs...let's say a Regiment of Imperial Guard would be enough. Especially if they are well equipped with tanks and heavy/special weapons.

 

[Ash's Boomstick]

It very much depends on the Guard regiment used, some are dedicated assault troops, some are fast attack, other recon and obviously some are experienced tank and armour killers. So its possible the experienced ones would need less than others.

 

[Agent23]

I think they are both playable factions,so maybe check their stats.

 

[Tyzuris]

It very much depends on the Guard regiment used, some are dedicated assault troops, some are fast attack, other recon and obviously some are experienced tank and armour killers. So its possible the experienced ones would need less than others.

I am trying to pin down an OOM, so considering in lore it takes squads of Space Marines to take out a Custodes, I would hazard a questimate that the rough OOM to take out two dozen Custodes working together may be in the 100k Guardsmen.

Especially when Custodes are so damn fast (faster than Space Marines), so they may be quite hard to take out with conventional Imperial Guard heavy weaponry because by the time artillery round is aimed, fired and arrives at a location, the Custodes may as well be miles away. And the same problem goes for tanks. Custodes may outrun the tank turret's traverse rate making it damn hard for a tank to land a hit on them.

So Imperial Guard heavy weaponry is too clumsy to deal with Custodes, and lighter weapons and infantry far too weak to stand against them in a battle.

 

[Aldarion]

How many Guardsmen would you figure out to be needed to take out this strike force?

One, at sufficient velocity.

Anyway...

I am trying to pin down an OOM, so considering in lore it takes squads of Space Marines to take out a Custodes, I would hazard a questimate that the rough OOM to take out two dozen Custodes working together may be in the 100k Guardsmen.

Especially when Custodes are so damn fast (faster than Space Marines), so they may be quite hard to take out with conventional Imperial Guard heavy weaponry because by the time artillery round is aimed, fired and arrives at a location, the Custodes may as well be miles away. And the same problem goes for tanks. Custodes may outrun the tank turret's traverse rate making it damn hard for a tank to land a hit on them.

So Imperial Guard heavy weaponry is too clumsy to deal with Custodes, and lighter weapons and infantry far too weak to stand against them in a battle.

Problem is that the lore is rather inconsistent. In early Gaunt's Ghosts novels, you have Guardsmen basically mowing down Chaos Space Marines, with implication being that it takes a platoon at most but likely no more than a squad to take out one Space Marine. In other books, number is far higher, and when you look at the shit that Guilliman pulls off in his rebirth novels, or Custodians in The Carrion Throne, it is easy to imagine that it would take hundreds of guardsmen at least to take one out. Especially since heavy weapons would be too clumsy to hit one.

 

[Megadeath]

I am trying to pin down an OOM, so considering in lore it takes squads of Space Marines to take out a Custodes, I would hazard a questimate that the rough OOM to take out two dozen Custodes working together may be in the 100k Guardsmen.

Especially when Custodes are so damn fast (faster than Space Marines), so they may be quite hard to take out with conventional Imperial Guard heavy weaponry because by the time artillery round is aimed, fired and arrives at a location, the Custodes may as well be miles away. And the same problem goes for tanks. Custodes may outrun the tank turret's traverse rate making it damn hard for a tank to land a hit on them.

So Imperial Guard heavy weaponry is too clumsy to deal with Custodes, and lighter weapons and infantry far too weak to stand against them in a battle.

Yeah, you're running into the problems of inconsistency of lore, and plot vs lore. The thing is, it doesn't really make sense to say they're "too fast" for artillery. I mean, "They move before artillery hit them." is a solved problem. It's not unexpected. You use sufficient artillery, and bracket their movement. You don't shoot where they are, but where they're going to be. Since they're advancing on your line, establishing a rolling wave of artillery fire in front of the line is pretty effective. It's something we've done since before ww1 and the guard should be able to emulate. Similar for individual fire. It doesn't actually matter at all if a guardsman hits the target he's aiming at, if he bothers to aim at all. It matters what proportion of the volume in front of them can be filled with unaimed fire, and how few individuals can occupy the space that isn't occupied by enemy fire. At far lower numbers than you're suggesting that volume is not significant.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

Going by fluff / worldbuilding, pretty much *no amount* of Guardsmen could defeat any number of Custodes. The Custodes' combination of mobility, resilience, and firepower simply cannot be beaten by simple brute force numbers, and that is the *only* card the Guard can play. . .

. . . although if you go all the way with fluff, literally no non-traitor Imperial would ever fire upon a Custodes. While the Imperium has any number of, "My authority supersedes yours!" cards, the Custodes are the ultimate one because they are literally direct representatives of the Emperor Himself.

 

[Emperor Tippy]

Going by general lore?

No amount of Guardsmen are a threat to the Custodes. Even assuming that the Guardsmen are willing to fight them in the first place.

The average Custodes is, lore wise, supposed to be superior to "named space marine veteran hero" level. They are also also equipped with literally the absolute top tier, best, most super special, wargear around. And are all combat geniuses (on every level) superior to anything but the Primarchs themselves.

Going by the worst of the Custodes showings in the various bits of fiction or game balance levels (stupid making Custodes playable), a Regiment or so probably.

 

[Husky_Khan]

What are the best weapons the Imperial Guard might be typically equipped with (or have available to them) that would be most useful against Space Marines, Chaos and otherwise.

Beyond ya know.... variations of bombardment spam?

 

[ShadowArxxy]

What are the best weapons the Imperial Guard might be typically equipped with (or have available to them) that would be most useful against Space Marines, Chaos and otherwise.

Beyond ya know.... variations of bombardment spam?

Heavy weapons squads with heavy bolters, autocannons, and lascannons are useful if the SMs can be drawn into a killing zone; the problem being that SMs themselves basically have better and more powerful versions of those crew served heavy weapons as their regular handheld weapons with zero mobility tradeoff.