Taking Advantage of Your Quad-Gun

With flyers and fortifications now in the game, its important that you are able to shoot and actually hit things with your Quad Gun, or for that matter your Icarus Lascannon if that is your cup of tea. Having used these now for several games, I have some distinct ideas on how to best use them with the armies I have been playing. Hopefully some of these will translate into other army types as well, but I am only going to share what I know from my own games.

The Quad-Gun is a fantastic piece of equipment for your armies. Its primary stat lines is that it is a 48" Heavy 4 skyfire, interceptor, and twin-linked gun S7 AP4. It also has a T7 W2 with a 3+Sv. Since it is often not part of the unit, it can be picked out and targeted, which is its biggest weakness. However, if they are shooting at it, they are not shooting at my troops. It will often get a cover save as well, since you should have at least one or two guys standing in front of the gun.

The advantages of skyfire and interceptor are obvious. With skyfire it has the ability to shoot at flyers with full BS, and with interceptor you can shoot at arriving reserves at the end of their movement phase. if you intercept, you cannot fire the Quad-Gun in the next turn.

The rules for shooting it are the following....
One model in base contact with the gun emplacement can fire it instead of his own weapon, following the normal rules for shooting. This is the part that is invaluable, and allows for the shooter to take advantage of abilities or powers that are available to him.

For example: An imperial guardsmen infantry squad. They receive an order to "fire on my target". The gun is already twin linked, and now with this order to the firing model, the target must re-roll successful cover saves.

Its important to note that its the model in base to base contact that gets to shoot the gun. This also allows for some crazy firing ideas. For example, in last nights game I had two Quad-Guns. I had two 20 man platoon infantry squads manning each Aegis Defense Line. My Commissar Lord joined the first 20 with two lascannons and was placed in base to base with the Quad-Gun. This gave my Quad-Gun a BS5 Twin-linked with orders. My second unit of 20 had a infantry squad Commissar with them, so it was firing at BS4 with the Commissar in base to base with the gun.

All of this together made my Aegis Defense Lines relatively strong to break, and put out a great amount of firepower.

Now the fun part.... How to hamper an Aegis Defense Line of your opponents. Following the standard rules for terrain placement...... when its your turn, simply place the largest terrain piece right in front of your opponents Quad-Gun. Make it hard for them to get too many shots off. Terrain placement is extremely vital in 6th edition, and is incredibly strategic. Use it to your advantage!