I was thinking about making a stealth/sniper guardsman sort of like a character from Gaunt's Ghosts. I obviously went with guardsman at first thinking about how I would create such a character. Some thing didn't feel right, you get the skills you need much too late in the career to be of any help. Then I took a look at the assassin tree and every thing fell in place.

Is there any resaon to go with Guardsman over Assassin to create a sniper?

I would talk to the GM about taking the guard starting equiptment but the one thing I would be concious of is not "does that assassin make a good sniper" but "does he make a good guardsman". Basically do the skills and advances available to the assassin allow you to play a guardsmen effectively and not just make it an assassin. From my experiance the Assassin (never gone one but played alongside them) is very mobile and agile character which I dont really associate with a guardsman. I havn't looked over the assassins talents and skills so I dont know if making a guardsman like character is easy or not but I think as long as you were willing to restrict yourself from taking uncharacterful advances it will probably be ok.

Kaihlik

So, I lvl my guardsman to sniper with about 10K+ XP, cool now I'm a compatent sniper. But if I would have taken assasin I'd have access the same skills at 1K+ XP. And as assassin sniper at 10K+ xp would make a Guardsman Sniper look realy bad and he would have a lot more skills. So, the guardsman snierp tree just looks like it was tacked on to the career in case you missed out making him as assasin and are trying to do some high level career damage controll to become a half-ass assassin.

I'm ranking my current guardsman up to be a tough close combat Storm Trooper, which seems to be what a guardsman will do very well.

imperial guard do not start as snipers. In Gaunt's Ghosts they are regular guard, then the best shots are chosen as snipers - and the elite are chosen as scouts.

assassins start as assassins - which can mean sniper.

so if you want to play a guardsman who becomes a sniper you go through the ranks and earn it.

if you want to start as a sniper from your early training - the guard doesn't do that.

I never understood that.

Stormtrooper is rank 8, as is Commander and Sniper.

Captain is rank 7. Lieutenant rank 6, as is Scout. But Chaliced Commissar is rank 3, which is equivalent with a Armsman?

A few new alternate ranks would make more sense.

well, technically, I'd prefer guard as a more durable sniper. Somethings you should look at when playing a Sniper are; You need Str, Ag, Bs, and Per to be an all around sniper. Str for climbing, Ag for stealth movement (if your that kinda sniper), Bs (obvisouly), and Per (for spotting targets or other things your party cannot, which is also helpful alot of other things)