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Detailed Tactics: How Many Tanks?!
#mailbag How many tanks do you bring in your Astra Militarum army, and how does the number of tanks change your approach to the game? This is a pretty solid question and lays itself out in a spectrum from zero tanks to all the tanks. I have been in the list building apps many a time wondering if eight hulls is too many or if two Rogal Dorns and nothing else was enough -- or if this whole Recon Guard thing with zero tanks is truly as broken as some of the internet thinks it is. This question does boil down somewhat to the Detachment you bring. With some guard detachments like Recon Element having no synergy with tanks and squadron keywords that come with them and other detachments like Hammer of the Emperor that affect vehicles exceedingly well. We'll cover all the cases in this piece, starting with the special one, but I don’t feel there is a hard and fast wrong answer as to how many you bring, as much of the time any of these could be a tournament winner with the right build and play. For simplicity's sake I will be including transports in the hull count. While they aren’t “tanks” in the IRL military definition of the term, we are going to focus on hulls with the squadron keyword.
A Special Case for Recon Guard
Armoured Sentinel. Credit: RockfishI'm going to address the elephant in the room: Recon Guard. This Elephant brings 170+ infantry to the table and won the Las Vegas Open 2025 (Part 2) in the hands of Wesley St. Hines aka Nemo the Fish. It is affectionately known as Recon Guard. I’m going to from personal experience that Recon Guard is its own special animal. It plays the game in its own way. This army usually contains zero tanks and sometimes a single Scout Sentinel which sits in back of your lines to scam your opponent’s “Bring it Down” secondary objective. Recon is an S-tier army in accomplished hands and may be one of the most broken lists I have piloted. That said, it’s not for the faint of heart; it’s mentally and physically taxing and requires a lot of focus and positioning while adding additional pressure from the clock.
So yes, Recon Guard is broken. It doesn't run any tanks but thankfully, it’s not the only way to pilot the Astra Militarum to success.
Now, on to the rest of the article.
Photo Credit: Scott Horras "Heresy"
0-3 Tanks
This is the bottom of the spectrum. This is territory where the tanks are supporting cast members instead of the stars of the show. You can also be brave and bring one of the super heavy options. Heck, some lists might not even have any tanks at all. This is typically an army which has a bunch of other things going on, forgoing vehicle hull presence and using infantry or mounted options as the main attractions. Popular low-tank-count lists (that aren’t Guard Recon) would be Grizzled Company lists. These can go a number of directions, with the shooting support often coming from a healthy amount of Tempestus Scions or Kasrkins. You will see far more 20-man Cadian Shock Troop bricks, 5-man Cadian Command Squad + Ogryn body guards or Attilan Roughriders featured here. Ogres of either variety, Ogryn or Bullgryn, are also popular. This list will often have a high count of MSU units that are very useful and expendable. A common take here is two Rogal Dorn Commanders, and then everything else. This creates some very good firebase support where the tanks stand in firing lanes and support the rest of the army. The tanks run by themselves and don’t need to worry about order range since they can just order themselves in this case. You will also see singleton Rogal Dorn Commander variants here that may bring two transports like the Chimera or Taurox for the Dorn to order around. With 2-3 orders depending on the Detachment, it’s a nice bonus to be able to use Move Move Move on those transports full of Kasrkins or other infantry.
This mode of play means your tanks are often not scoring the primary. This puts your opponent in a sticky situation of having to solve multiple problems at once. Do they attempt to answer the guns that are tabling them, or do they focus on the primary scoring elements of the list? It can often be hard to do both, which is the advantage here. You will be able to keep your tanks safe from melee threats as they stand in the back guns pointed at objectives. This will keep them out of trouble from most tanks' major weaknesses, getting tagged in combat. With only one fall back and shoot option available in one lesser played detachment in Hammer of the Emperor this is the thing you want to avoid if you can. 
Photo Credit: Scott Horras "Heresy"
4-6 Tanks
This is one of the most common builds with Astra Militraum armies and often a "Goldilocks" zone for list design. With two tank commanders, you have just enough orders to go where you need them. These lists will sport some tanks, some transports and sometimes a specialty unit that grants a buff or debuff. These specialty units could be things like the Hellhound, Leman Russ Exterminator or perhaps a backfield Basilisk. This list could also look like a mechanized assault list, featuring three or more transports in addition to a couple tanks with complementing units. With more tanks you often have more guns pointing down range, so your gameplan is shifting more towards a shooting strategy as far as how you are interacting with your opponent. You will force respect across many of the firing lanes of the table versus just disrespecting space that doesn't have a tank or enough tanks to deal with the threat. Tanks are also fast. With the trusty Taurox scout moving 6 due to Kasrkin and then moving 12+3+D6 and dropping its payload that can still shoot and act, it has some incredibly advantageous options available. Being able to use grenade and drop a Kasrkin melta-mine and shoot said unit on your opponents deployment zone line is game changing. Just the threat of this alone will make your opponent deploy differently. These lists give up some of their points spent on MSU units and pour them into these additional hulls. This means the hulls may be used in the early game skirmishes or for actions and secondaries instead of those missing MSU units. It is not uncommon to disembark from a transport, drop your payload off behind a ruin and drive the transport out to die for the Emperor while it scores 5+ secondary points. This unfortunately means that more tanks are going to get touched, but we can plan around this a little by using tanks with flamers or decent non-blast shooting in positions that protect our Rogal Dorns. This approach to the game is going to be more balanced; we're often playing the game similarly to the less tanks option but with fewer use it and lose it options or action monkeys that aren’t the transports themselves. You will need to be aware of your vehicle positioning for orders to get the most of it but with either not needing every vehicle to be ordered or by bringing two commander units these needs can be satisfied. You won’t really run into many instances of being traffic jammed by your own army with how vehicles and infantry can move around each other freely. You have room to fit in very cheap and effective screening units and can even bring a couple dedicated melee units to flush things out of ruins or counter your opponent charges This tank count and mode of play is where I expect many Astra Militarum players to fall. It is a fine goldilocks zone for a reason.
Photo Credit: Scott Horras "Heresy"
7+ Tanks!
Alright, we have arrived in bring ALL the tanks territory. We are still bringing a modicum of infantry which are often just going to be in transports, along with enough tanks to fill your deployment zone and rain down hellfire onto anything that dares stand in a shootable lane. These lists carry some of their own challenges, like needing more orders and sometimes creating their own traffic jams, but these are all able to be dealt with. These lists often start with once again one to two Rogal Dorn Commanders as well as multiple Leman Russ chassis. The Vanquisher variant is pretty darn cheap for a Leman Russ chassis profile and carries a decent array of guns, including its main gun being a 6+d6 damage rail gun equivalent. You often see 2-3 of these in this style of list. Then we start adding in the specialty hulls. You often want at least once since you will be activating in multiple places and can only use a stratagem for a buff in one place. Then there's any transports we might bring. So an example might be 3 Rogal Dorn variants of your choice, 2 Vanquishers, a Hellhound and 2 Chimeras. We can deviate from relying on Rogal Dorn commanders for our orders. This is the territory where I like to start including Lord Solar Leontus. This enables you to have 4 orders in Grizzled Company, which along with the help of a Cadian Command Squad +10 Cadians can use these orders at 24 inches. With 7 orders being available to your Squadron keyworded units, you have quite a bit of room on your order economy and order positioning. Further, since you no longer need multiple Dorn Commanders you can save some points and bring a regular Rogal Dorn which is actually quite a bit better at dueling other guns in firing lanes as it can blank a shot that gets through. Once you get past the 6 hull count you will start to run into issues of either not being able to deploy the unit without getting shot or having to deploy it far to the rear where it might be blocked by its allies. This is where you begin looking into reserves. Since the tank might miss getting orders unless you use Snap to It, you can often use your Hellhound or Exterminator here to apply the status needed along the edge of maps like GW 2, 4, or 6. The map matters a lot more to this army than the others and I really like this type of list in teams. In a teams environment I could use this as a defender list and guarantee it ends up on a shooting favored table This still has room for early game non-vehicles like Catachans or 5 man horse units to play the game before only having hulls to do the work. This may not be possible if you take say 10 tanks and I think at that point we are little too skewed to one side, but this still could work. You may need to get creative in the end game and things like staging Leontus’s squad later in the game to score the middle objective on turn 5 are pretty clutch. More tanks does expose us to the great weakness we mentioned earlier of getting tagged. If we don’t have screening units that aren’t tanks, we are also exposed to things like ingress melee and deepstrike shooting, so you will want to stack your vehicles in such a way that your 85 point transport is the thing being traded into instead of a Leman Russ or Rogal Dorn. Another weakness that may be exploited in the early game is how immobile your army can become from being move blocked. Jail strategies shine into this sort of list, as they often don’t carry melee elements to counter charge or heroically intervene. Astra Militarum vehicles historically don't fly, so getting pinned in your own deployment zone is a real threat. Some lists will try to prevent this a little with their own infiltrating units to block or screen. Some forgo it entirely as the meta they are in may not have any jail centric lists. Well there we have it on tanks! I hope you dear reader can rely on this to be informed on just how many tanks YOU want to bring.Thank you for being a Warhound Patron! Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or message us on Discord.
