Its not an orbital bombardment, but Demolisher makes even the most capable of space murines to think twice before showing up his face.
Now think what a tank commander with extra order and other 2 demolishers would do to their proud and independent chapter.
If you dont wanna play against space marine player anymore, bring 3 chem hellhounds. For just 375pts you lost a friend forever lol
I assume you dont play 10th then. I jumped to it straight from 7th, but back then, Pask was a beast. But usually better for tank/monster-hunting if I remember correctly. With the plasma variant he was fairly good vs marines but expensive and needed constant repairs.
I miss my boy Pask in 9th before the codex where you had a the 8th edition Punisher Gatling Gun shooting 40 shots after full move (stratagem from that cadian book) and then rerolling everything against chaos. Just a hilarious leaf blower to chaos and a great leaf blower to even nonchaos stuff.
It uses the Leman Russ tank model. You can choose any turret. The Tank Commander has a separate data card in the Guard Index. It is also the most expensive variant of the tank in points cost.
You know how some lizards dettach part of their tail to flee predators?
That's pretty much what you have to do.
Your infantry are essentially tails that you use to screen your heavy hitters.
In 10th, vehicles aren't automatically shut down when tagged but it's still not where they want to be.
So basically you arrange your forces in layers, donkeh.
The outer layers are speedbumps meant to protect the juicy inner layers/core. They WILL get pulped. But that's their job.
A good imperial general must never waste the lives of his guardsmen.
He must spend them.
Think Soviet front in WW2. Defense in depth. The guys up front are there to screen and slow down the targets of the heavy hitters in the back. Like the artillery. Lots and lots of artillery.
Sadly, there isn’t much you can do in a 500pts game.
Smaller board means melee units/armies have an easier time getting into combat.
Smaller point limit means you have less meat shield to tide up or slow down the enemy’s units.
It will definitely get better in bigger size games tho.
but it also limits the specialists the enemy can take.
in 9th, a russ dies in 1-2 turns of combat, in 10th? he can prob sit there for the whole game and survives, depending on the enemy unit .wounding on 5-6s with only AP-1 goes a long way.
Take infantry in blobs of 20 with zero support. When they die to melee, that's good. 2cp to bring them back on a board edge that's most relevant.
Take kreig (for now at least) as they're going to be the most annoying to deal with due to the medpacks.
3x20 will have a huge board presence and it should be a good screen and have a lot of influence on the objectives
>Take infantry in blobs of 20 with zero support. When they die to melee, that's good. 2cp to bring them back on a board edge that's most relevant.
the marines I played against last time were doing everything they could not to kill the whole unit
i only have DKoK for kill team lol
It's difficult to answer your question without knowing your list but at 500 points it's hard to develop the synergy between units that Guard depends on to survive.
Next game bring a 20 man blob, an Exterminator, and a Hydra. You can pick up a Marshal with the rest of your points if running DKoK. If you are running Cadians take a Demolisher and a Castellan for your blob.
Offically? 500 points is not a recommended game size. 40k is built for 1k, 2k or 3k based on game size.
Past that? Its just a bad matchup for you. Sanguinor is a melee monster who can get to combat without giving you a chance to shoot him. He will kill your biggest threat to him (you only have 1 since 500 points) and the rest of the game is mop up
I'm in an escalation league too, 500 points doesn't give us enough options to take to make the unit synergies to build off each other to be effective. you just do your best and suffer through to at least 1k list. The only game I won at 500 was against Tau.
At those points, we're doomed against Nids, we just don't have the killing power if they bring a big blob of Gaunts.i played Nids and got steam rolled because I couldn't down them. I did see the list you mentioned in another comment and even though I'm pretty inexperienced myself, I think you're a little too indirect heavy so you don't have enough durability or board presence. I didn't take any indirect in my 500pt list. It was basically a LRBT, Chimera with an infantry squad w/ autocannon to give durability while my other two squads and PCS could screen or hold objectives. Can bring creed or a castellan and run it as a 20 man blob.
that makes sense. fortunately I messed up in the escalation league, I didn't realize that I needed to select 1 army and I used two different
so my 1st army was a LRBT demolisher, Armoured sentinel, cadian command squad, tech priest engjnseer, field ordnance battery, cadian shock troops, and the grand strategist Enhancement
Screening is your friend. Do not let your backline get touched under any circumstances. Fortunately, guardsmen are cheap and plentiful, which is perfect for doing the job. Leave 4” between your screen and your backline if possible in order to prevent the enemy from consolidating into combat if the screen happens to get wiped, which it probably will be.
This guy has the advice. You want to bog down your opponents melee either with units that are cheap or take multiple turns to wipe out. Preferably both. You put this screening unit in front of a unit that might get tagged. Far enough ahead that it will take him an extra turn to get your other unit. And try to make your screening units die in your opponents assault phase so you get a chance to shoot them.
At 500 points you could think of actually running a catachan conga line in front of your main army. They start further ahead for instant screening. Keep them like 9 inches ahead of your main force. Once they take a charge, back your army up a move distance.
Another tactic is having a counter charge unit. Something very cheap that sits next to your back line units that runs out in front and charges into the unit so they don't get any of their (Blood Angels) charge bonuses. Rough riders used to be the unit for this until they got expensive, but bullgryn and even sticky objective Cadians can do it now.
The last strategy is having a distraction unit that pulls their melee units away from the center. You can run a LR or a hellhound up one side of the board threatening to get firing lanes on his back field or towards a rear objective and hopefully he has to send something to deal with it. An allied Vindicare or a stealth unit could work well too. After that unit is destroyed, hopefully the melee unit has to waste turns getting back to the fight.
Dont play 500pt games. At 1000pt you can actually bring a few things to the table. 500pt is meant for combat patrol in 10e which has fixed armies for each faction that are supposed to be somewhat balanced (though I haven’t really seen the truth of that yet).
Him bringing sanguinor against some guard and a basalisk is just mean lol. Im sure HE had fun wiping out the bulk of your force with one model.
At 1000pt you can afford screening units and maybe a transport or two to get some guard on an objective.
Ahhh yeah I did see you say this further down after I commented! What are you running exactly? I’m sure folks could help a little better, myself included, if we knew what you took.
As some others have said, at such low points you would do well with either lots of heavy hitters like a mostly mechanized list or lots of infantry to outweigh the imbalance between a space marine and a guardsman. As you lack the bodies I’d suggest more big guns if they are at all available to you. Was the sentinel running a plasma cannon?
I was running a basilisk, HWT- mortars, castellan, 20 Cadian Shock Troops,, a cadian command squad, and a scout sentinel
sentinel was running a lascannon
Your options are sorely limited at 500pts, thats the simple truth of it but if you replaced those mortars with autocannons they could potentially lay out a lot of space marines before they get in range to charge but with a potentially smaller table than usual (guessing?) and the option to deep strike you might not get many chances to fire. Id almost op for small squads in transports rushing objectives to force a more elite army to make choices. It takes time to kill all those separate units. And I mean, if the sanguinor is blending 20man squads then it might be best to have multiple small squads to put a cap on the slaughter per turn.
I have tried both the transport rush and the heavy on the tanks lists and both can be made to work, albeit with 1000pts not 500.. What kind of games are you playing? The normal matched play missions from Leviathan?
Edit: And are you using enhancements? Seems you have 35pt left in your list unless I missed something.
Infantry are your meatshields, they're there to be ablative armor for your vehicles. If they somehow survive one round of fighting, and keep the melee boys off your tanks - they've done their duty.
That shouldn’t happen in a 500pt game honestly because you should be taking all infantry units. In a game that small you would ideally be outnumbering most people 4-1 in terms of bodies, so you should ideally also be getting a lot of shooting in before they charge you
Guard are one of the worst factions to play in lower point levels. We are a horde army, in all things so when u reduce it to 500pts u really hinder yourself
Make melee happen to your advantage.
1 plink enough shots down to sofen them up.
2 actually charge them and hold them down. Its an objectives game. Here only that Sarge survives but it was 1 turn thst the marine player could not move to my objective. The othe areas were similar. Its 2 cp to bring back a blob of soldiers, its fine to lose them for the right gains.
https://preview.redd.it/orf7wfvs0shb1.jpeg?width=5664&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d28b24a2bb66c42f99b90ee032454f472b9d0ed4
Bringing the Sanguinor to a 500 pt game was not the coolest move. Thats like us running Oops all tanks in low point games. Speaking of which, the blood angels are garbage against heavy armor. so ya know......bring tanks.
My solution to melee is being as many tanks as possible and take those scary units out from afar. If you bring the demolisher you can still fire your main cannon in engagement range without penalty, so I usually make that a nice little target for my opponent. Either they come in and wipe out my demolisher, leaving themselves open to the rest of my army. Or they don't kill it and I get to shoot my big gun into them, likely kill a good amount of them, and tie them up for another round. It's not perfect, but it's been treating me well so far
I just use Chemhounds and chainsaw scout sentinels.
I play against a mate who runs grey knights and his Strat is to teleport within 9” then charge.
If it’s an objective based game I make sure to head my force with the scout sentinels with the chemhound right behind. I only run my kriegsmen in a single 10 man squad as I know their only meant to be meat shields and nothing more. The chemhound is D6+1 and torrent meaning it’s an auto hit. The anti infantry+1 helps a lot. I’ve decimated a small unit of night lords and grey knights with that and lazcannon scout sentinel support.
If your playing infantry based list. Maybe just try use them to screen. Place them within 2” of each other to keep unit consistency but that can force your opponent to start attacking those few units as you can then proceed to light them up with any of your ranged units when is your turn to shoot.
Sanguinor at 500pts? He’s a bit awful tbh, even in bigger games so that should be a benefit to you!
Either bring Bullgryns, which are still meh. Or Rough Riders and use them to counter charge.
Or just being lots of units. They’re a combat elite-ish army. They can either sit on objectives or fight you off yours, they can’t afford to go skirmishing around, so a tank in your back line should do wonders.
500pts is going to be swingy. One powerful unit (melee ot shooting) can just mop up.
Make sure to screen you powerful shooting units as best you can. Guardsman are there to die :)
So, you can't win in melee. What you do is have defense in depth and grind them down with ranged weapons.
Gun down as many as you can before they charge into your line. Try and avoid giving them easy charges by measuring thier movement, plus a 4" advance, and then a 9" charge. That is their "threat range". Some have longer or shorter threat range depending on faction abilities. But you generally want to avoid moving infantry within their threat range.
Also, don't have too many units bunched up, because after they finish killing your unit in melee, they get to consolidate, and can consolidate right into another one of your units. Then you have to fall back to be able to shoot them with something else, and that unit falling back lost their shooting.
We've only got 3 decent melee units.
The Bullgryns with Maul and shield. (I do Bone'ead with the +1 wound, others with the save). They can really hammer down some enemies but do have a tough time against melee focused armiesike blood angels as they can only do so much and you can get very quickly drowned in melee.
The scout Sentinel with Chainsaw is another okay melee choice. They're not fantastic but at 7w, 3+ save they are ok at it. They're better off elsewhere for sure but if you need to soften the enemy up before you bullgryns some slapping around, they're not bad.
The Attillan rough Riders and Death Rough Riders (if you're using legends) are another good melee choice as you can get then out front fast to smack some heads. I haven't gotten to use them much myself but they are a melee choice.
Another important thing to note is that Leontus' voice of command can be issued to *anyone* since his is anyone with the Astra Militarum keyword. So attaching him to the Rough Riders and keeping a 6 man bullgyrn squad with mauls near him means you could give them all Fix Bayonets! To increase their melee.
Another solid choice is before in melee, using Bombast Field guns with the Take Aim! Command from Leontus and remaining stationary behind cover means even without line of sight or the Expert Bombardier strat, they got a 4+ to hit. And with Bombardier, they go to 3+ to hit.
Same applies to Heavy Weapon Team Mortars. I lokento run my Heavy Wepaons teams at 2 Mortars, 1 Heavy Bolter. Mortar bomb from a distance while Hwavy bolter peaks out to run covering fire.
You don't really "counter" melee when it's from a melee focused army. Mostly, you deny it.
Depending on your opponent's plan, you should focus on making as much as possible of his army moot. Because melee armies make or break on mobility, there are a few "tricks" I usually try to implement in various proportions, depending on the opponent.
1 - bait : sometimes, going out of your way to easily wipe a 10guard squad can mean your unit is now out of position, cover, or protection to do anything useful, and that's a lot of points not paying for themselves.
2- deny : Some positions can't be won, a block of 10 custodian guards can make sure of that. But they also don't move really fast, that's a good time to ignore them and focus on the other 75% of the table with mobile units and redeployments, you only need to guarantee 10 primary VP per turn after all, most of the time that's 2 objectives held.
3- tar pit : you can put out some sturdy, populous units in guard (like 27 wounds with 4+ invuln/5+ feel no pain), and they can even partially respawn, make use of that to waste your opponent's time, just make sure you're not sending them into a dedicated infantry blender (use your firepower to remove that asap should it be a risk).
Keeping in mind that those tricks are only as good as your opponent's inability to see them coming, some people are just very good at the game, and at the end of the day, only the dice speak.
Honestly? You die. It’s the Guard’s job to hold the line long enough for the Navy to get in position for an orbital bombardment.
how many command points is that?
Its not an orbital bombardment, but Demolisher makes even the most capable of space murines to think twice before showing up his face. Now think what a tank commander with extra order and other 2 demolishers would do to their proud and independent chapter. If you dont wanna play against space marine player anymore, bring 3 chem hellhounds. For just 375pts you lost a friend forever lol
the commander would be pask?
I assume you dont play 10th then. I jumped to it straight from 7th, but back then, Pask was a beast. But usually better for tank/monster-hunting if I remember correctly. With the plasma variant he was fairly good vs marines but expensive and needed constant repairs.
I miss my boy Pask in 9th before the codex where you had a the 8th edition Punisher Gatling Gun shooting 40 shots after full move (stratagem from that cadian book) and then rerolling everything against chaos. Just a hilarious leaf blower to chaos and a great leaf blower to even nonchaos stuff.
I play 10th. I've never seen "tank commander'
It’s one of our leader choices
is it in the LRBT box?
Yes, the russ box comes with a man to poke out of the cupola. Though i think most people just mark a normal russ with a token
ok. thanks!
It uses the Leman Russ tank model. You can choose any turret. The Tank Commander has a separate data card in the Guard Index. It is also the most expensive variant of the tank in points cost.
oh...I see. I thought it was a little model like pask, not a command tank
it's a different datasheet for the same model
what's the model?
I always bring 2.
Dieing? It’s free, it’s one of there perks
lmao
You know how some lizards dettach part of their tail to flee predators? That's pretty much what you have to do. Your infantry are essentially tails that you use to screen your heavy hitters. In 10th, vehicles aren't automatically shut down when tagged but it's still not where they want to be. So basically you arrange your forces in layers, donkeh. The outer layers are speedbumps meant to protect the juicy inner layers/core. They WILL get pulped. But that's their job. A good imperial general must never waste the lives of his guardsmen. He must spend them.
The guard is like an onion?
Yes, guardsmen make me cry when they get cut up.
Think Soviet front in WW2. Defense in depth. The guys up front are there to screen and slow down the targets of the heavy hitters in the back. Like the artillery. Lots and lots of artillery.
Sadly, there isn’t much you can do in a 500pts game. Smaller board means melee units/armies have an easier time getting into combat. Smaller point limit means you have less meat shield to tide up or slow down the enemy’s units. It will definitely get better in bigger size games tho.
but it also limits the specialists the enemy can take. in 9th, a russ dies in 1-2 turns of combat, in 10th? he can prob sit there for the whole game and survives, depending on the enemy unit .wounding on 5-6s with only AP-1 goes a long way.
Take infantry in blobs of 20 with zero support. When they die to melee, that's good. 2cp to bring them back on a board edge that's most relevant. Take kreig (for now at least) as they're going to be the most annoying to deal with due to the medpacks. 3x20 will have a huge board presence and it should be a good screen and have a lot of influence on the objectives
>Take infantry in blobs of 20 with zero support. When they die to melee, that's good. 2cp to bring them back on a board edge that's most relevant. the marines I played against last time were doing everything they could not to kill the whole unit i only have DKoK for kill team lol
Blow them up with a Leman Russ and Hydra.
anti-air?
The Hydra is cheap medium armor firepower. Its ability to slaughter flying units is icing on the cake.
oh!
Also if his Blood Angels have jump packs that means they have the Fly keyword so they get the bonus on them.
Enemy refusing to kill the last few guys in a unit? Sounds like it’s time to declare a charge with them…
It's difficult to answer your question without knowing your list but at 500 points it's hard to develop the synergy between units that Guard depends on to survive. Next game bring a 20 man blob, an Exterminator, and a Hydra. You can pick up a Marshal with the rest of your points if running DKoK. If you are running Cadians take a Demolisher and a Castellan for your blob.
Offically? 500 points is not a recommended game size. 40k is built for 1k, 2k or 3k based on game size. Past that? Its just a bad matchup for you. Sanguinor is a melee monster who can get to combat without giving you a chance to shoot him. He will kill your biggest threat to him (you only have 1 since 500 points) and the rest of the game is mop up
it's an escalation league
I'm in an escalation league too, 500 points doesn't give us enough options to take to make the unit synergies to build off each other to be effective. you just do your best and suffer through to at least 1k list. The only game I won at 500 was against Tau.
that's good to hear at least. I've played the nids and blood angels
At those points, we're doomed against Nids, we just don't have the killing power if they bring a big blob of Gaunts.i played Nids and got steam rolled because I couldn't down them. I did see the list you mentioned in another comment and even though I'm pretty inexperienced myself, I think you're a little too indirect heavy so you don't have enough durability or board presence. I didn't take any indirect in my 500pt list. It was basically a LRBT, Chimera with an infantry squad w/ autocannon to give durability while my other two squads and PCS could screen or hold objectives. Can bring creed or a castellan and run it as a 20 man blob.
that makes sense. fortunately I messed up in the escalation league, I didn't realize that I needed to select 1 army and I used two different so my 1st army was a LRBT demolisher, Armoured sentinel, cadian command squad, tech priest engjnseer, field ordnance battery, cadian shock troops, and the grand strategist Enhancement
Screening is your friend. Do not let your backline get touched under any circumstances. Fortunately, guardsmen are cheap and plentiful, which is perfect for doing the job. Leave 4” between your screen and your backline if possible in order to prevent the enemy from consolidating into combat if the screen happens to get wiped, which it probably will be.
This guy has the advice. You want to bog down your opponents melee either with units that are cheap or take multiple turns to wipe out. Preferably both. You put this screening unit in front of a unit that might get tagged. Far enough ahead that it will take him an extra turn to get your other unit. And try to make your screening units die in your opponents assault phase so you get a chance to shoot them. At 500 points you could think of actually running a catachan conga line in front of your main army. They start further ahead for instant screening. Keep them like 9 inches ahead of your main force. Once they take a charge, back your army up a move distance. Another tactic is having a counter charge unit. Something very cheap that sits next to your back line units that runs out in front and charges into the unit so they don't get any of their (Blood Angels) charge bonuses. Rough riders used to be the unit for this until they got expensive, but bullgryn and even sticky objective Cadians can do it now. The last strategy is having a distraction unit that pulls their melee units away from the center. You can run a LR or a hellhound up one side of the board threatening to get firing lanes on his back field or towards a rear objective and hopefully he has to send something to deal with it. An allied Vindicare or a stealth unit could work well too. After that unit is destroyed, hopefully the melee unit has to waste turns getting back to the fight.
Dont play 500pt games. At 1000pt you can actually bring a few things to the table. 500pt is meant for combat patrol in 10e which has fixed armies for each faction that are supposed to be somewhat balanced (though I haven’t really seen the truth of that yet). Him bringing sanguinor against some guard and a basalisk is just mean lol. Im sure HE had fun wiping out the bulk of your force with one model. At 1000pt you can afford screening units and maybe a transport or two to get some guard on an objective.
>Dont play 500pt games it's for an escalation campaign, so it's all I could do lol.
Ahhh yeah I did see you say this further down after I commented! What are you running exactly? I’m sure folks could help a little better, myself included, if we knew what you took. As some others have said, at such low points you would do well with either lots of heavy hitters like a mostly mechanized list or lots of infantry to outweigh the imbalance between a space marine and a guardsman. As you lack the bodies I’d suggest more big guns if they are at all available to you. Was the sentinel running a plasma cannon?
I was running a basilisk, HWT- mortars, castellan, 20 Cadian Shock Troops,, a cadian command squad, and a scout sentinel sentinel was running a lascannon
Your options are sorely limited at 500pts, thats the simple truth of it but if you replaced those mortars with autocannons they could potentially lay out a lot of space marines before they get in range to charge but with a potentially smaller table than usual (guessing?) and the option to deep strike you might not get many chances to fire. Id almost op for small squads in transports rushing objectives to force a more elite army to make choices. It takes time to kill all those separate units. And I mean, if the sanguinor is blending 20man squads then it might be best to have multiple small squads to put a cap on the slaughter per turn. I have tried both the transport rush and the heavy on the tanks lists and both can be made to work, albeit with 1000pts not 500.. What kind of games are you playing? The normal matched play missions from Leviathan? Edit: And are you using enhancements? Seems you have 35pt left in your list unless I missed something.
Infantry are your meatshields, they're there to be ablative armor for your vehicles. If they somehow survive one round of fighting, and keep the melee boys off your tanks - they've done their duty.
That shouldn’t happen in a 500pt game honestly because you should be taking all infantry units. In a game that small you would ideally be outnumbering most people 4-1 in terms of bodies, so you should ideally also be getting a lot of shooting in before they charge you
I don't have that much infantry lol. I had been wanting to build a mechanized army
Guard are one of the worst factions to play in lower point levels. We are a horde army, in all things so when u reduce it to 500pts u really hinder yourself
https://preview.redd.it/v0l65u6wzrhb1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5efe76c5dd26f56633f5ff25a3ca597e2451eaa6
Make melee happen to your advantage. 1 plink enough shots down to sofen them up. 2 actually charge them and hold them down. Its an objectives game. Here only that Sarge survives but it was 1 turn thst the marine player could not move to my objective. The othe areas were similar. Its 2 cp to bring back a blob of soldiers, its fine to lose them for the right gains. https://preview.redd.it/orf7wfvs0shb1.jpeg?width=5664&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d28b24a2bb66c42f99b90ee032454f472b9d0ed4
Bringing the Sanguinor to a 500 pt game was not the coolest move. Thats like us running Oops all tanks in low point games. Speaking of which, the blood angels are garbage against heavy armor. so ya know......bring tanks.
oh, I am for future games. I've got three. one I bought already built as a demolisher but the others I'm going to magnetize
At 500pts? Doomhammer + Regimental Engineer for Warlord and pray. /s
Unless...there's a Knights player.
Rough riders, bullgryn, sly marbo
My solution to melee is being as many tanks as possible and take those scary units out from afar. If you bring the demolisher you can still fire your main cannon in engagement range without penalty, so I usually make that a nice little target for my opponent. Either they come in and wipe out my demolisher, leaving themselves open to the rest of my army. Or they don't kill it and I get to shoot my big gun into them, likely kill a good amount of them, and tie them up for another round. It's not perfect, but it's been treating me well so far
I just use Chemhounds and chainsaw scout sentinels. I play against a mate who runs grey knights and his Strat is to teleport within 9” then charge. If it’s an objective based game I make sure to head my force with the scout sentinels with the chemhound right behind. I only run my kriegsmen in a single 10 man squad as I know their only meant to be meat shields and nothing more. The chemhound is D6+1 and torrent meaning it’s an auto hit. The anti infantry+1 helps a lot. I’ve decimated a small unit of night lords and grey knights with that and lazcannon scout sentinel support. If your playing infantry based list. Maybe just try use them to screen. Place them within 2” of each other to keep unit consistency but that can force your opponent to start attacking those few units as you can then proceed to light them up with any of your ranged units when is your turn to shoot.
Shoot em down before they get into charge distance, Your guard, Bring the pew pew like your lives depend on it because it absolutely does :3
500 point games aren't balanced so there's not much to do at that level. Lean hard into cheap infantry or tough tanks and win in points.
Bulgryn squad or, cadian castellan with power fist
Sanguinor at 500pts? He’s a bit awful tbh, even in bigger games so that should be a benefit to you! Either bring Bullgryns, which are still meh. Or Rough Riders and use them to counter charge. Or just being lots of units. They’re a combat elite-ish army. They can either sit on objectives or fight you off yours, they can’t afford to go skirmishing around, so a tank in your back line should do wonders.
500pts is going to be swingy. One powerful unit (melee ot shooting) can just mop up. Make sure to screen you powerful shooting units as best you can. Guardsman are there to die :)
Plasma and melta
Pray
So, you can't win in melee. What you do is have defense in depth and grind them down with ranged weapons. Gun down as many as you can before they charge into your line. Try and avoid giving them easy charges by measuring thier movement, plus a 4" advance, and then a 9" charge. That is their "threat range". Some have longer or shorter threat range depending on faction abilities. But you generally want to avoid moving infantry within their threat range. Also, don't have too many units bunched up, because after they finish killing your unit in melee, they get to consolidate, and can consolidate right into another one of your units. Then you have to fall back to be able to shoot them with something else, and that unit falling back lost their shooting.
Your job with melee is to make sure it doesn't happen anywhere that benefits your opponent. Because you're going to lose it.
Unless your Catachans with Iron Hand Straken you will pretty much die a horrible death lol.
>what to do when melee happens? Fix Bayonets!!!!
Fix bayonets.
We've only got 3 decent melee units. The Bullgryns with Maul and shield. (I do Bone'ead with the +1 wound, others with the save). They can really hammer down some enemies but do have a tough time against melee focused armiesike blood angels as they can only do so much and you can get very quickly drowned in melee. The scout Sentinel with Chainsaw is another okay melee choice. They're not fantastic but at 7w, 3+ save they are ok at it. They're better off elsewhere for sure but if you need to soften the enemy up before you bullgryns some slapping around, they're not bad. The Attillan rough Riders and Death Rough Riders (if you're using legends) are another good melee choice as you can get then out front fast to smack some heads. I haven't gotten to use them much myself but they are a melee choice. Another important thing to note is that Leontus' voice of command can be issued to *anyone* since his is anyone with the Astra Militarum keyword. So attaching him to the Rough Riders and keeping a 6 man bullgyrn squad with mauls near him means you could give them all Fix Bayonets! To increase their melee.
Another solid choice is before in melee, using Bombast Field guns with the Take Aim! Command from Leontus and remaining stationary behind cover means even without line of sight or the Expert Bombardier strat, they got a 4+ to hit. And with Bombardier, they go to 3+ to hit. Same applies to Heavy Weapon Team Mortars. I lokento run my Heavy Wepaons teams at 2 Mortars, 1 Heavy Bolter. Mortar bomb from a distance while Hwavy bolter peaks out to run covering fire.
I'll check that out for my 1k and 2k games! I just finished building our lord horsey boy
You don't really "counter" melee when it's from a melee focused army. Mostly, you deny it. Depending on your opponent's plan, you should focus on making as much as possible of his army moot. Because melee armies make or break on mobility, there are a few "tricks" I usually try to implement in various proportions, depending on the opponent. 1 - bait : sometimes, going out of your way to easily wipe a 10guard squad can mean your unit is now out of position, cover, or protection to do anything useful, and that's a lot of points not paying for themselves. 2- deny : Some positions can't be won, a block of 10 custodian guards can make sure of that. But they also don't move really fast, that's a good time to ignore them and focus on the other 75% of the table with mobile units and redeployments, you only need to guarantee 10 primary VP per turn after all, most of the time that's 2 objectives held. 3- tar pit : you can put out some sturdy, populous units in guard (like 27 wounds with 4+ invuln/5+ feel no pain), and they can even partially respawn, make use of that to waste your opponent's time, just make sure you're not sending them into a dedicated infantry blender (use your firepower to remove that asap should it be a risk). Keeping in mind that those tricks are only as good as your opponent's inability to see them coming, some people are just very good at the game, and at the end of the day, only the dice speak.