What would be wrong with having Skink shooters with a range of 18" to 24" ?
(How short is the range of the Stegadon Bolthrower?!)
"Open up a niche..."?
That seems like, apologies in advance,
nonsense.
From what untrustworthy source did this notion that there must be "a niche" originate? How did it manage to infest your thinking? What steps can you take to cleanse your contemplations??
Do Explain.
The issue is that currently skinks are cannonfodder unless mounted on some bigger dinosaur, and even then the actual skink still isn't impressive. This rather limits the options we have. If you make em better than normal skin weapons there isn't much reason to take those, and making em better than the mounted ones raises the question as to why the mounted skinks don't just use these weapons. Especially on the stegadon seeing as they're on a howdah, they won't be bothered by the mount moving, at least a skink riding a terradon has an excuse for not being able to wield a bow
The only remotely decent option would be a new special kind of skink with some special abilities like chameleons do, but that'd still largely have the same issues...
For example for bows:
If we go past 20" they're starting to outrange solar engines and past 25" they outrange the stegadon. This'd be weird seeing as a puny skink is would now be outranging siege-grade weaponry. Which seems a bit extreme an ability for fodder.
If we go for 16" they equal boltspitters in range, so we'l just pick whichever has better stats the other one becoming irrelevant. If they're equal in stats it's purely cosmetic and wouln't serve much of a purpose.
This leaves 16.1"-19.9", which in practise just really leaves 18" as an option. However, giving 2" over boltspitters would make em significantly better, and seeing as boltspitters are already 5+/5+/-/1 it's not like we have much room to make a trade-off for the range. Which means they're probably going to end up just being flat out better than boltspitters thanks to the extra range (hell just look at how little javalins are used despite having better stats..)
Hence, there's really no niche to fill with em currently on normal skinks.
This leaves the option of a special units like the chameleons.
Now again, these can't really go for 20"+ given that they'd be outranging siege weapons while still being "mere" skink. This means we can't have them significantly outrange chameleon skinks (at most 3") and since chameleon skinks can teleport such a small increase isn't that much of a boon.
How about stat-wise then? Chameleons already have 2/3+/4+/-/1, and normal skinks have 1/5+/5+/-/1 going to 1/3+/5+/-/1 in a sufficiently large horde. This doesn't exactly leave room for differentiation in this aspect either.
A special rule then? Chameleons already have double damage on a 6+ hit-roll and the ability to teleport and bonus in terrain. There isn't that much room seeing as it's stil only a puny skink with a fairly normal bow, but at least something could be made up here. However, if you make up an actually decent special effect here it raises the question why the various mounted skinks don't use the bows as I pointed out earlier. Especially the javalins on the stegadon and bastillidon have awefull statlines and don't have much of an excuse to not wield better stuff.
Hence as a "special" type of skink it doesn't really have its own place either without making things at least a tad weird.
All in all, this doesn't really leave any niche for bow skinks to fill without either making other weapons irrelevant or leading to weird situations where a "mere" skink with a bow can outshoot a magical solar engine or where for some inexplicable reason skinks mounted on howdahs choose to use vastly less effective weapons. Admittadly, not like GW always seems to care much about such trivialities as a unit actually filling its own niche or a unit making sense, but still
