Dawn of War Codex

Hi there, folks. I have some suggestions regarding IG. Being a player since vanilla DoW2 i feel that imperial guard faction really need some facelift and i'll try to explain it with my crappy English as much as i can.

Squad sizes
Currently imperial guardsmen have the biggest model count in their squads, even compared to the tiranids, orks and chaos heretics (which is not quite lore friendly). That general feeling about imperial guardsmen being expendable and cheap, meatshield infantry is a common misconception created by DoW games (Heroic speehhhs mehreens saving the day again while weak guardsmen being slaughtered). Quite the opposite, imperial guardsmen are mostly highly profficient soldiers capable to take a good fight by their own.
1. Guardsmen should not receive additional squad members with their leader upgrades.
I'm really tired of giant GM blobs. 7 guardsmen with a sergeant upgrade, 8 guardsmen with a commisar is pretty optimal model count.
2. To compensate model loss, each guardsmen model should become stronger by its own.
Currently 9 man GM squad with a sergeant having AFAIK 940 hp. Leave the same HP pool for a 7 man squad. The same goes with the commisar upgrade - 8 models should have an HP pool of 12. Besides HP, lasgun fire and melee DPS should be slightly better to compensate.This will also represent leaders boosting morale of their squads, making them fight harder.
3. Remove the doubled/tripled reinforce rate from GM squads. With such model count they will not need it anymore. Such a thing is more suitable for some sort of tiranids, which are really expendable lore-wise.
4. Make the commisar execution work as a suppresion breaker. The current execute ability have a very limited use. With the ability to break suppression the comissar will have much more sense.
5. The quantity of special weapons received should be lowered to 1 per squad instead of 3. DPS of such a special weapon should be increased by 66%.
6. Give guardsmen chaos rising animations and voiceovers. Seriously, chaos rising voices are much, much better! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcA9uFiybRY
7. Possibly add the alternative leader to choose from - ministorum priest. If you choose priest instead of comissar you will receive other benefits, like fanatiscism from DoW1 or some kind of damage boost that Dire Avengers have with their warlock. AFAIK you guys have an acolyte model which is a dude with eviscerator which can come in handy in such case.
8. Replace dragon teeth roadblock models which can be built by guardsmen with proper sandbags. Make this sandbags uncrushable by sentinels. Speaking of sentinels - their crushing potential should be lowered. They're light walkers after all. Maybe they should be able to walk above cover without breaking it. Sentinels are often used to crush enemy cover right in the firefight which is not how it supposed to be used i suppose.
9. Make the large ranged squads (Termagants, guardsmen, dire avengers, shootas, heretics with grenade launchers, stormtroopers of all sorts) take cover properly, like they do in campaign. In campaign even large squads strethcing out their formation and use cover as it should be used. Its hard to explain, just load the first mission of campaign with IG and try to send guardsmen squad into cover. You will feel the difference. Currently these squads maintaining their formation no matter what wich preventing them to take cover properly.

I hope that something from this list will have some attention from the devs. Anyway, lets have some discussion about this.

Loving the elite mod by the way. You guys done an awesome job mainaining this game alive.

Gaurdsmen are actually very expendable. The way it works ingame is very lore friendly.

We do not want to have squads take full cover as in the campaign because you lose control over your units this way.
They also would bunch up a lot making them get instawiped by a ton of abilities.

The GM commissar execution can offer you great value and is quite unique. It basically allows to just retreat your GM if you're out of position before an engagement or anything really and just make them stop and turn around anywhere. There are tons of uses to this.

A straight on suppression breaker might be way too much as fully upgraded GM are already deadly enemies. Note also that the LG and the LC have anti-suppression wargear, making your suggestion a little redundant. The fact that those abilities are not on the GM themselves also underlines the concept that they need support from more specialised units in order to succeed.

Edit:

On your suggestion towards special weapons, which probably only affects plasma guns: Having three models using special weapons kind of balances their damage and also differentiates them from Tac plasma guns. Three GM attacking the same model of an enemy squad is quite unlikely, which limits their ability to burst them down one buy one. This slightly reduces their effectiveness especially against CSM/TSM. For the flamers I think it's not that much of a difference if you have one strong flamer damaging a squad or the same damage distributed to three. It might even be an advantage to have three as it may be more likely to hit all models of an enemy squad with the splash damage.

This is a balance first mod. So lore arguments for balance changes are invalid. The mod tries to keep it lore friendly but it is a secondary goal.

1. Why should these changes be done from a balance perspective? What stuff are the current GM struggling against that they shouldn't struggle and how would this change that?

2. What other implications would this change have.

You are essentially asking for a rework of an unit so it does have quite an impact on the game.