8th Ed. Overcoming the Odds... My Force to take on Warriors of Chaos

[Lizards of Renown]

I think that you are thinking about winning the game in the sense of tabling them, or almost tabling them. I don't think that is feasible, I would plan around winning with around a 300-400 point margin.

I think you just want to ignore their blocks. Evade them as much as you can, Walk Between Worlds can help with that. If you would take a lot of skinks, say 4-6 blocks, you can start deploying those and deploy your monsters, cowboys and TG Slann block as soon as you know where their slow blocks are (hint, you are going to put your TG at the opposite end of the table).

Like that, you can keep them marching for a good 2-4 turns, making their impact as small as possible. This leaves you to deal with their fast units like blood crushers, unkillable bsb, manticore and of course their Daemon Prince, because they will be on you fast. You want to make sure that they will die if they charge your TG (maybe get things like Wyssans Wildform or lore of Light buffs to pump them up), with your cowboys and monsters on the flanks ready to charge.

This makes it so that your magic has some turns to do damage. Searing doom puts some hurt on for example Bloodcrushers, so you can weaken them like that. Salamanders can work against chaos blocks, you can let them fire in them for VP while you evade them with the rest of your army. Magic and perhaps some luck will be needed when fighting the BSB and the Daemon Prince, that part is what makes their army so strong, there are simply little answers for them. Like that, if you can split up their forces, they are beatable. Especially your skinks won't do a lot of damage, but one or two wounds a turn our unit (especially on a manticore) do ad up over time (which you are creating by evading them). The most important thing your skinks do is being deployed first however, so you can put your other important stuff in safe places, far away from the enemy.

When using this strat, I actually prefer the bolt throwers above massive blow pipes. Hand of Glory makes it so they might even hit (and it is a nice spell to switch out early with high magic while still having impact), and rolling that one 6 on say a Bloodcrusher or a Daemon Prince does feel great. Like that, I have found that you can nickle and dime then down a bit, it also really helps if they misscast at some point (take soul of stone to prevent that for yourself).

Any of this makes sense? I think Sauri blocks are fine, just not for this matchup, which leads the army to a pretty different place.

Sounds brilliant.

It seems if I'm going to go for that tactic then I may as well go all out, meaning salamanders and razordons running around shooting and avoiding combat, skinks avoiding combat whenever possible, etheral Slann with arabyan carpet and then the great bow stegadons shooting until last minute, with a Cold One bus with the cowboys ready to hit anything that becomes too big of a problem.

Have you played the layout you gave above? How did you find it?

 

[Lizards of Renown]

I think that you are thinking about winning the game in the sense of tabling them, or almost tabling them. I don't think that is feasible, I would plan around winning with around a 300-400 point margin.

I think you just want to ignore their blocks. Evade them as much as you can, Walk Between Worlds can help with that. If you would take a lot of skinks, say 4-6 blocks, you can start deploying those and deploy your monsters, cowboys and TG Slann block as soon as you know where their slow blocks are (hint, you are going to put your TG at the opposite end of the table).

Like that, you can keep them marching for a good 2-4 turns, making their impact as small as possible. This leaves you to deal with their fast units like blood crushers, unkillable bsb, manticore and of course their Daemon Prince, because they will be on you fast. You want to make sure that they will die if they charge your TG (maybe get things like Wyssans Wildform or lore of Light buffs to pump them up), with your cowboys and monsters on the flanks ready to charge.

This makes it so that your magic has some turns to do damage. Searing doom puts some hurt on for example Bloodcrushers, so you can weaken them like that. Salamanders can work against chaos blocks, you can let them fire in them for VP while you evade them with the rest of your army. Magic and perhaps some luck will be needed when fighting the BSB and the Daemon Prince, that part is what makes their army so strong, there are simply little answers for them. Like that, if you can split up their forces, they are beatable. Especially your skinks won't do a lot of damage, but one or two wounds a turn our unit (especially on a manticore) do ad up over time (which you are creating by evading them). The most important thing your skinks do is being deployed first however, so you can put your other important stuff in safe places, far away from the enemy.

When using this strat, I actually prefer the bolt throwers above massive blow pipes. Hand of Glory makes it so they might even hit (and it is a nice spell to switch out early with high magic while still having impact), and rolling that one 6 on say a Bloodcrusher or a Daemon Prince does feel great. Like that, I have found that you can nickle and dime then down a bit, it also really helps if they misscast at some point (take soul of stone to prevent that for yourself).

Any of this makes sense? I think Sauri blocks are fine, just not for this matchup, which leads the army to a pretty different place.

Like literally spreading my points out so much that it will be very difficult for him to pin anything substantial down while I whittle away with magic and shooting (plus some specific combats with cowboys or COR)

 

[ASSASSIN_NR_1]

etheral Slann with arabyan carpet

The idea is good, but unfortunately is not allowed (unless I've missed it in an FAQ), since the Slann's palanquin rule says that he is never considered a model on foot for the purposes of ,among other, magic items, so no carpet for him.
Maybe he is just too fat for the carpet or his sense of balance aint too great

 

[Lizards of Renown]

The idea is good, but unfortunately is not allowed (unless I've missed it in an FAQ), since the Slann's palanquin rule says that he is never considered a model on foot for the purposes of ,among other, magic items, so no carpet for him.
Maybe he is just too fat for the carpet or his sense of balance aint too great

Yeah. got excited and then re-read rules. Blast.

 

[ASSASSIN_NR_1]

Yeah. got excited and then re-read rules. Blast.

The exact same thing happened to me

A substitute for the mobility is a Skink Priest with the Cloak of Feathers to use Arcane Vassal through, which isn't too bad considering there are 3 sniping spells and the rest you'd probably want to cast on a block of warriors anyway (apart from the one mostly useless spell in the lore), and if all goes well you'd want to go into combat then, at which point avoidance is not a big deal.

 

[airjamy]

Sounds brilliant.

It seems if I'm going to go for that tactic then I may as well go all out, meaning salamanders and razordons running around shooting and avoiding combat, skinks avoiding combat whenever possible, etheral Slann with arabyan carpet and then the great bow stegadons shooting until last minute, with a Cold One bus with the cowboys ready to hit anything that becomes too big of a problem.

Have you played the layout you gave above? How did you find it?

I have used the setup described, and actually won a finals of a tournament against WoC with it so I would have to see it worked pretty well. I must say that I got pretty lucky, his Prince took some wounds due to a miscast, and then failed to kill my cowboy in two rounds of combat, who managed to then kill him at the end of that second round of combat, 1v1. Armor of Destiny did some work. But still, I only got those 1v1 rounds of combat because I deployed far away from his main blocks so his Prince was alone (and even if the cowboy would have died as I expected I could still finish him off with another cowboy/magic).

I don't think having a solo Slann against them works, the Daemon Prince is fast enough to corner and kill your Slann if you do that, as he also has magical attacks so ethereal does nothing. I also think you need a Slann to win as you need strong magic to win, and the only way to keep your Slann alive over a longer game is with TG, so i feel like 30-40 TG are mandatory in this matchup..

 

[airjamy]

Sounds brilliant.

It seems if I'm going to go for that tactic then I may as well go all out, meaning salamanders and razordons running around shooting and avoiding combat, skinks avoiding combat whenever possible, etheral Slann with arabyan carpet and then the great bow stegadons shooting until last minute, with a Cold One bus with the cowboys ready to hit anything that becomes too big of a problem.

Have you played the layout you gave above? How did you find it?

I also don't think you need a buss, as that only costs points and bleeds combat res. 2-3 solo cowboys with great weapons are all you need. They don't have a lot of shooting, and most magic on them is ineffective (especially as they don't know which one has the Dawnstone and who had the Armor of Destiny).

 

[Lizards of Renown]

I also don't think you need a buss, as that only costs points and bleeds combat res. 2-3 solo cowboys with great weapons are all you need. They don't have a lot of shooting, and most magic on them is ineffective (especially as they don't know which one has the Dawnstone and who had the Armor of Destiny).

Wicked!

Okay, so I'm factoring back in the TG unit. I'm taking Skink Heros on two stegs so that there is at least a decent chance of hitting people with the great bow. Will forget about the bus, I agree with you completely. Will stick with having several cowboys tooled up for combat.

I thought of taking three blocks of skinks each with one Krox mainly for the leadership boost (as I know that even with the Krox they are pretty floppy in combat) and they will be basically be running away for the entire game as much as possible unless cornered and then otherwise 3 units of 10 skirmishers just to annoy the *bleep* out of him really and slow him down further.

I'm trying to work it so that I've got some salamanders, razordons and a Solardon so I've got max shooting/magic power.

We'll see how it does.

Highly depressing that my schedule doesn't see any opening to actually PLAY the dratting game any time soon. Thankfully I'm a geek at heart and working over army lists warms my cold blood.

 

[Karnus]

Another option for the demon prince is boosted amber spear (thank you to @NIGHTBRINGER for that one). S10, D6 Multiple wounds would soften him up.

 

[ASSASSIN_NR_1]

I'm taking Skink Heros on two stegs so that there is at least a decent chance of hitting people with the great bow.

Unless you have agreed with your opponent that you can use your hero's ballistic skill for the stegadon's howdah, sadly it is not allowed, even if it would make perfect sense and make the bow actually do something.

 

[Lizards of Renown]

Unless you have agreed with your opponent that you can use your hero's ballistic skill for the stegadon's howdah, sadly it is not allowed, even if it would make perfect sense and make the bow actually do something.

Interesting, I've re-read the rules on this several times as I wanted to be sure and nothing I've read makes me think I can't use the Hero's BS for the great bow shot (or for the giant blowpipes for that matter). It says in the army list that the Skink Chief replaces one of the crew, i.e. he is now one of the crew. In the Giant bow rules it says that one of the crew fires the bow, one of which is the hero. Is there a rule I'm not thinking with? Or some kind of a FAQ or errata issued?

 

[ASSASSIN_NR_1]

Interesting, I've re-read the rules on this several times as I wanted to be sure and nothing I've read makes me think I can't use the Hero's BS for the great bow shot (or for the giant blowpipes for that matter). It says in the army list that the Skink Chief replaces one of the crew, i.e. he is now one of the crew. In the Giant bow rules it says that one of the crew fires the bow, one of which is the hero. Is there a rule I'm not thinking with? Or some kind of a FAQ or errata issued?

I will grant you that it looks very much like it is possible, and I can't actually find anywhere where it specifically says that you can't, but I will link to 2 threads where the question was asked:

http://www.lustria-online.com/threads/skink-chief-stegadon.14830/

http://www.lustria-online.com/threads/skink-chief-on-stegadon.12742/

I'd love it if the Chief could shoot the bow, and it's not too far fetched rule-wise and would by no means break the game, so maybe you could ask your opponent beforehand to see if he'll allow it.

 

[Lizards of Renown]

I will grant you that it looks very much like it is possible, and I can't actually find anywhere where it specifically says that you can't, but I will link to 2 threads where the question was asked:

http://www.lustria-online.com/threads/skink-chief-stegadon.14830/

http://www.lustria-online.com/threads/skink-chief-on-stegadon.12742/

I'd love it if the Chief could shoot the bow, and it's not too far fetched rule-wise and would by no means break the game, so maybe you could ask your opponent beforehand to see if he'll allow it.

Bugger

 

[airjamy]

Wicked!

Okay, so I'm factoring back in the TG unit. I'm taking Skink Heros on two stegs so that there is at least a decent chance of hitting people with the great bow. Will forget about the bus, I agree with you completely. Will stick with having several cowboys tooled up for combat.

I thought of taking three blocks of skinks each with one Krox mainly for the leadership boost (as I know that even with the Krox they are pretty floppy in combat) and they will be basically be running away for the entire game as much as possible unless cornered and then otherwise 3 units of 10 skirmishers just to annoy the *bleep* out of him really and slow him down further.

I'm trying to work it so that I've got some salamanders, razordons and a Solardon so I've got max shooting/magic power.

We'll see how it does.

Highly depressing that my schedule doesn't see any opening to actually PLAY the dratting game any time soon. Thankfully I'm a geek at heart and working over army lists warms my cold blood.

I would not take any Krox, your skinks are not meant to be in cc. If they are, they will die which is ok if they have done their job, a Krox is not going to change anything about that. And about the LD, yeah it will be hard to make them regroup. You can however try to set it up that they run towards your Slann, which will make then regroup instantly especially if you have the banner if discipline+BSB+general combo. 3 units still seems slim to me, often it happens with me that they catch 1-3 units, leaving the rest of them to run around and do damage the rest of the game, bit that is up to personal preference of course.

I never actually thought about skink heroes using the bows, feels like that should be totally possible but appearantly it is not. I don't think it would even be good, in combat a Prince or any chaos unit really could just pinch of the skink, and then you would have to deal with low LD monstrous reactions tests.. but the idea is really cool, it should be possible.

Let us know how your game went if you go and play it, I would be interested to know how it worked out!

 

[Lizards of Renown]

I would not take any Krox, your skinks are not meant to be in cc. If they are, they will die which is ok if they have done their job, a Krox is not going to change anything about that. And about the LD, yeah it will be hard to make them regroup. You can however try to set it up that they run towards your Slann, which will make then regroup instantly especially if you have the banner if discipline+BSB+general combo. 3 units still seems slim to me, often it happens with me that they catch 1-3 units, leaving the rest of them to run around and do damage the rest of the game, bit that is up to personal preference of course.

I never actually thought about skink heroes using the bows, feels like that should be totally possible but appearantly it is not. I don't think it would even be good, in combat a Prince or any chaos unit really could just pinch of the skink, and then you would have to deal with low LD monstrous reactions tests.. but the idea is really cool, it should be possible.

Let us know how your game went if you go and play it, I would be interested to know how it worked out!

Okay fair enough, more skink blocks it is then. I'll make them 10 strong each so that it is REALLY annoying to him (half cohort and half skirmishers) as he'll be basically wading through skinks the whole game and I can probably then sneak the skirmishers past him to annoy him from the other side.

Yeah, @ASSASSIN_NR_1 pointed out a discussion on this forum where they say that the Heroes can't fire the bow. I get it, but seems like that's why they were given the option of having the Steg as a mount. Surely no-one in GW in their right mind thought that some lizardmen player would go "oh, hold on, I can put a SKINK HERO on top of the steg! That will make the SkinkHero/Steg combination UNBEATABLE in close combat! I'll do that!".

We all know that a skink hero is about as useful as an ejector seat on a helicopter in hand to hand.

(Sigh) Yes, I really want to play the game but right now I seem to have angered the Old Ones and no opening in the next month... Ah well, I've put out some mouse-traps in the house and any that get caught will be sacrificed to Sotek... Maybe that will help.

 

[ASSASSIN_NR_1]

Yeah, @ASSASSIN_NR_1 pointed out a discussion on this forum where they say that the Heroes can't fire the bow. I get it, but seems like that's why they were given the option of having the Steg as a mount. Surely no-one in GW in their right mind thought that some lizardmen player would go "oh, hold on, I can put a SKINK HERO on top of the steg! That will make the SkinkHero/Steg combination UNBEATABLE in close combat! I'll do that!".

To be fair, he does have some use on a stegadon, since it allows even more of your army to be comprised of stegs is that is your jam and if he is the general or BSB he will get an additional 6" to his bubble range.
If you really look for stuff he can give you could bring up that is is the only way to give stegs Magic Resistance however pointless that is or have a potentially very nasty charge with the egg of quango.

We all know that a skink hero is about as useful as an ejector seat on a helicopter in hand to hand.

I mean if you can angle it right at the enemy I bet it would do some damage

 

[Lizards of Renown]

To be fair, he does have some use on a stegadon, since it allows even more of your army to be comprised of stegs is that is your jam and if he is the general or BSB he will get an additional 6" to his bubble range.
If you really look for stuff he can give you could bring up that is is the only way to give stegs Magic Resistance however pointless that is or have a potentially very nasty charge with the egg of quango.



I mean if you can angle it right at the enemy I bet it would do some damage

Yeah. Don't get me wrong, I love Stegadons with their toughness 6, thunderstomp, etc. etc. but they tend to be a bit hit and miss. I think I need to play a bit more aggressively with them as I tend to hold back so that I can definitely get the charge.

Ah well.

 

[Lizards of Renown]

I would not take any Krox, your skinks are not meant to be in cc. If they are, they will die which is ok if they have done their job, a Krox is not going to change anything about that. And about the LD, yeah it will be hard to make them regroup. You can however try to set it up that they run towards your Slann, which will make then regroup instantly especially if you have the banner if discipline+BSB+general combo. 3 units still seems slim to me, often it happens with me that they catch 1-3 units, leaving the rest of them to run around and do damage the rest of the game, bit that is up to personal preference of course.

I never actually thought about skink heroes using the bows, feels like that should be totally possible but appearantly it is not. I don't think it would even be good, in combat a Prince or any chaos unit really could just pinch of the skink, and then you would have to deal with low LD monstrous reactions tests.. but the idea is really cool, it should be possible.

Let us know how your game went if you go and play it, I would be interested to know how it worked out!

How big did you make your Skink regiments in the tournament you played?

And, honestly, how does this ****ing redirector thing work? I haven't been able to find a good description/advice thread. I guess you put your crappy unit at an angle to the opponent's so that they have to charge you to move forward, but would be forced to turn diagonally? Don't they just ignore the crappy unit (like a small Skink cohort) and continue on towards something else? (like in this case, my TG and Slann unit which will end up being worth 800+ points and a major prize to destroy)

 

[Lizards of Renown]

@NIGHTBRINGER @Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl @ASSASSIN_NR_1

Have you guys got any good threads going on redirectors?

 

[Karnus]

@NIGHTBRINGER @Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl @ASSASSIN_NR_1

Have you guys got any good threads going on redirectors?

@Scalenex linked a very nice thread on all things redirection from the high elf forum in his skink chief tactica ( http://www.lustria-online.com/threads/different-skink-chief-roles.12562/ ). The principles assume you are using a great eagle but a lot of the fundamentals can be used by any high movement unit.

link:
http://www.ulthuan.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=33028