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8th Ed. Those Damn Gunlines

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Jungle Swarm

Eggish

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So I recently played a game against an empire player and was shot to pieces. His army was centered around 5 war machines and 40 hand gunners. If it weren't for outmaneuvering him with my salamanders there wouldn't have been much i could have done. So my question is how do we deal with this gun-line cheese?

-Eggish
 
I have found 2 methods:

1) run a light slann(high movement) or a life slann (less damage taken)

2) take a tn of shooting and a very offensive slann like fire or death and out shoot them
 
You could always meet cheese with cheese. Field 6+ units of skirmish skinks and a large block of TG. The skinks form a front screen while the TG & Slaan go behind them. Deploy the TG in only a single rank to reduce the number lost to cannon balls and then march forward. On turn 2, the skinks will be blasting handgunners to bits with poison shooting while the slaan and TG are not far behind. If he charges with knights or anything else, let it happen as the TG are only 8" behind and can gladly grind it out with the empire.

On a more serious note, gunlines are what they are - a beastly punishing hail of lead for 2-3 turns and then very squishy once engaged in combat. The key is to get into the lines as soon as possible and just accept the fact that you are going to lose some troops getting there. A skirmish screen will help protect more important troops from handgun fire and the lore of light & heavens both have good spells for reducing the threat of opposing shooting. A couple units of chameleon skinks in cover of some sort will help cause panic checks on handgunners while remaining well protected against return fire since they will be at least -3 to shoot at. The key is to minimize the damage on the approach and get into combat where the shooting cannot affect your troops.
 
he can kill your skinks, salamanders, terradons and stegadons. but after that you will be right in if face with your combat blocks relatively unscratched. you will win then.

if he doesnt shoot at your light units he can hurt your combat blocks, but then you should be able to take out the warmachines, and even damaged saurus blocks should be able to win against handgunners.

your skinks can stay in a line in front of the sauruses, making BS shooting very very poor against you. if he shoots at your skinks, they are skirmishers and thus hard to hit. his he shoots at the sauruses, they get cover from the skinks and thus are pretty hard to kill too. the warmachines are very dangerous, so you will just have to go full throttle forward and hope there is enough of your army left over to beat his handgunners. tbh there should be, and then you have it in the bag. use magic to protect/heal your key units and whatever you do DO NOT HESITATE. if you do, you die.


as a side note, this type of army is rarely fun to play with or against. dwarfs have it tough now and many of them have moved on to other teams from sheer boredom.
 
Thanks for those fast replies guys. Typically I can rely on camo skinks to shut down the war machines i the first few turns. My real issue was getting into combat with the hand gunners, anything that dared charge it got blown to pieces on the charge. That was NOT fun to lose my Saurus Cav second turn (used timewarp to make a very unexpected charge.)

I am liking the idea of sending forward some fodder. Just wondering how big the units should be? typical I would take units no more than ten strong but would it be worth while to make them slightly larger so the last longer?
 
lore of light phas protectoin, engine of the gods wardsave and go for it :)
 
Ferocious said:
lore of light phas protectoin, engine of the gods wardsave and go for it :)
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That is exactly what I would do. I would also use chameleons to get to any war machines that I could target on the first turn.
 
lore of light is just the most offensive and protective lore their is, yeah off and defence! also playing dwarves depends on your enemy :) if u can lure him out a bit than u win the game, if u cant, it will be up to u to claim as many points with out losing too many
 
I'd try a Lore of Heavens Slann and maybe a backup Skink priest or two for extra spells (and give one the Forbidden Rod for extra power dice).

Curse of the Midnight Wind would make your skirmishers even harder to shoot at, Ice Shard will penalize shooting. Extra good if you are charging handgunners because you can penalize his stand and shoot and then make them even softer when close combat happens. The real reason to take Heavens is to plop down Comet markets along his back table edge to punish him for being so standoffish with his troops.
 
Good points. Take Tetto'ecko and use the reroll for the comets fall to help take them out as well.
 
Just read over the rules again for warmachines. Has anyone ever used Dwellers to instant kill one?
 
dwellers has very short range. if you are that close you usually dont have to worry about warmachines. Also, you could chose between killing a warmachine (150p) or half of a big unit. most often you chose to go for the unit.

however, it is perfectly valid to try and take out that grudgethrower with dwellers. its just a matter of what you prioritize.
 
Lord Tsunami said:
dwellers has very short range. if you are that close you usually dont have to worry about warmachines. Also, you could chose between killing a warmachine (150p) or half of a big unit. most often you chose to go for the unit.

however, it is perfectly valid to try and take out that grudgethrower with dwellers. its just a matter of what you prioritize.
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If you can successfully cast Dwellers against a Dwarf opponent you are either very lucky or you are playing against an inexperience Dwarf player. We throw enough power dice down to get spells past the Dwarfs dispels but we can't expect to get our best spells past them without double 6s.


Kharn The Betrayer said:
how high is the Ld on dwarf crews?
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9. Every single modle in the Dwarf list has Ld 9 except Dwarf Lords and Slayers (who have Ld10).
 
You Might be better off with the lore of Shaddow...?
Against Dwarves.
 
obviously you have to go for doubble 6s. with 6 dice it isnt too unlikely. however, a slann is one of two things (along with a dark elf with the dagger) that can actually chuck enough spells with 2-3 dice to overwhelm a dwarfs magic defense. It doesnt always work, but with lore of life you can cast 5-7 spells on an average turn and he will not be able to get them all since he will need to throw one more die than you to dispel them (usually). He can hold off for a turn or so with dispel runes but not for the whole game.

however, he will most likely save his dice for dwellers and allow some other lesser spells to go through instead.
 
I've also found that when I do play life I like to throw 5(+1) on dwellers as my first spell, then if they stop it I an still get off all my other spells with little or no resistance
 
I play dwarfs, so i know whats iritate me :p
Play some chameleons :p lore of death - purple sun, og go to take their leadership down :p
Lore of metal... that´s work good against dwarf.. with their good armor saves. lore of heaven and the comet, if you havde both the comet and purple sun, he need to dispell both, thats even hard for a dwarf :)
But plenty chameleons and skink skrigmisher :p Stegadons are just canon feed, big massiv unit is primary target for grudge thrower, so small unit will be the best i think, and shoot again!

Lore of fire can be good too, big ass fireball will do well against a warmachine, sadly you have nothing to use the flamecage for :/

You can also run a big unit of sarus, and lore of life and give them some thougness and hope they will cross the board...

if you want big units ill go for a skroxigor unit, with lots of skinks, like 3 kroxigors and 42 skinks, you will losse so much before you get to him, and sadly he can take out the kroxigors with grudge thrower and canons, cause they don´t have look out sir....

Meller
 
Meller said:
Lore of metal... that´s work good against dwarf.. with their good armor saves. Meller
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I'd like to see your battle reports and army lists if you've posted them anywhere.

I have perused Bugman's Brewery a lot, and I haven't seen much to differentiate most lists from the two local Dwarf players' lits. Hordes of great weapon troops seem pretty standard. Whether they are miners, longbeards, regular warriors, quarrelers, rangers or the mighty hammerers, it's mostly armor saves of 5+ across the board. Not exactly screaming out for the Lore of Metal particularly for larger units (which is most of them.

Fluffwise, dwarfs should have the best armor. As the rule books currently work, they do not.
 
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