AoS Ugh, Empire...

Hello people,

I need your help again.

Recently I've been talking to my friend who plays Empire. He has a
state reigment,
empire handguners,
empire knights
empire cannon.
Empire general

My troops are:
2 x Saurus Warriors units
2 x skink warriors units
1 x skink starpriest
1 x Slann
1 x Ripperdactyls
1 x Salamander

I'm finding it difficult to handle the large range on all of his shooting troops (for reference handguners have long rifles giving them 30" and cannon is 40").

My question is how do Seraphon players handle the Empire? I can't outrun them (at least I don't think so) and if I get close enough I'll get blasted.

EDIT: I now have a Slaan, rippers and a salamander in order to better balance the two armies.

Any help would be much appreciated,
Thank you very much.

 

As an Empire player myself. Make use of terrain as best as you can for either blocking line of sight or cover bonus. Besides that run up as fast as you can because the handgunners/crossbowmen and the cannon crew suck at close combat. With the cannon focus your attacks on the crew making the cannon a worthless piece of scrap metal. As they are 2 separate units! Use the skinks to do that and the saurus for getting those knights

 

Either this or get yourself some rippers or chameleons. Some well placed buildings and terrain features will boost your save and help you get closer. Run your Starpriest behind the saurus and summon starlight to make them harder to hit. And get your skinks to surround their shooting and shoot first. But you don't have a lot of synergy with your current load out.

 

Summoning is a good thing to use here, spawning mook units in front of your lines to use as human(ish) shields can save your main fighting force. In addition, making use of terrain as cover to dart behind is valuable, try to stay out of their line of sight as much as possible. If you can get a strong enough dedicated melee unit into those gunners, you've won.

 

Thank you both for your responses,

I'm sorry for not keeping you up to date with my current situation against my Empire friend but there are some things you should know regarding potential strategies.

I now have a Slann, Ripperdactyls and a salamander (I can proxy these to make the armies more balanced).

I would like to use summoning as @Bainbow has suggested but we have decided to nerf summoning. (One of our players used Nagash )
The new summoning 'house rule' is that we can only summon one unit/model per turn so as much as I would like to use meat shields they aren't going to be an option.

@StealthKnightSteg How have Seraphon players shut down your hand gunners? Is it me or does it seem ridiculously difficult given they can have +4/+3 with 2 damage? (Through buffs with the empire general).

My empire friend and I have also had a rule disagreement that I was hoping you could solve. The issue is basically can he use his shooting weapons with his hand gunners if they are in close combat? That doesn't seem very logical to me considering they also come with melee weapons. Also can he shoot into close combat as well?

EDIT: Never mind apparently that can happen. Would dropping the Rippers straight in front of the hand gunners work? Or will they just get blasted to bits before I can even get the attacks going?

Thanks,
Indominus

 

Ah yes, Nagash. The only thing in the game that I consider to be OP. However, the meat shields still works. While you're darting behind cover, your meatshield unit would be stood way out in the open in order to serve as a distraction and draw fire. At the very least, it will be at least partially blocking the gunners' line of sight. So you only really need one unit of warriors for this tactic. (Warriors are the best for this because they get summoned in larger numbers and are tall enough to block line of sight.

Side note, at my place we decided unanimously to not nerf summoning because we looked at the rules and discovered that it doesn't actually need any nerfing, it's secretly balanced already. Rules state that whomever kills the highest percentage of the enemy's army wins. So the way we chose to interpret that is that if the enemy only has five models at the start of the game, you only need to kill five models in order to kill 100% of his army. This way if somebody starts with five models and then summons a bunch of units, he's at a huge disadvantage because we only need to kill five models to get 100%, and this now could very easily be to just kill five models that he just summoned, like five zombies. So then all you need to do there is to kill six models in order to exceed 100%, and it becomes impossible for the summoning opponent to win because you killed more than 100% of their army while they cannot kill more than 100% of yours unless you summon.
Does that make any sense?

 

With rippers added, you can now use the batallion scroll for the skink patrol, now drop those rippers in for a sneak attack and wipe those handgunners / cannon of the board before they can take your rippers out! (also blottoad near there helps!)

 

While the first half of this makes sense to me, the second half seems a bit odd. If you're not counting summoned units toward the army size, why should they count towards army models killed? Not counting them toward army model count would, to my understanding, basically mean not counting them as part of the army, rather as part of the spells which summon them, so should they really count towards army models killed for percentages?

It makes more sense to me that they wouldn't count for army models killed if not counted for army size. This would mean that you would have to kill one of the five models he initially brought to the battle in order to get your percent of army killed. He would have to protect these five models very carefully with his summonded units in order to stand a chance in this situation. He's still at a disadvantage because the five models have giant targets painted on their heads and are worth 20% each, but isn't at the point where he basically can't send any units into combat for fear of losing 20% per model.

Summoning has always been a little confusing to me , what are your thoughts on this?

 

I think this would probably be the most straightforward way of handling things, along with some chameleons and summoning as plan B.

 

It's right in the rules; "Models added to your army during the game(for example, through summoning, reinforcements, reincarnation and so on) do not count towards the number of models in the army, but must be counted among the casualties an army suffers." The game in it's four page rule set is quite intuitive and gives an inherent balance that people don't see. Built in to make you think about how to use your summoning to win, without granting your opponent the win through slaughtering your summoned units. An added layer if strategy that you must think about.

 

Oh right, thanks for the explanation, now I feel stupid for not reading the rules thoroughly enough!

 

Haha! I missed it too the first time. My opponent pointed out how badly I lost after I thought I had it won! Lesson learned!

 

But that's the thing. Everything is overpowered now, so things just get more fun when people go for OP tactics. When in 8th it was just a couple of OP armies, now it's a free for all. Which makes it a shame when people see OP tactics and say that they won't use them because they want to be good sports.

 

That said, I'm very happy that this one kid at my place, only 14 or 15 at a glance, not only figured out the same OP Empire gunline army that I designed (I've got an OP design for every army specifically so that when people tell my Seraphon are OP, I can give them a design for their own army) but the lad actually made it better than I did, without using non-Empire units. Credit to that kid, I need to play him at some point.

 

Oh by the way, Empire handgunners do not have Long Rifles. Only the unit champion has one, so the entirety of the unit save for one guy have a range of 16".

 

Well that would be a lot of armies and it would take foooooreeeeverrrrr to type them all up, could you just ask for a specific army?