AoS What’s the best way to equip skinks?

I have two boxes of skinks left to build and I’m thinking boltspitters and star bucklers. Would there be any scenario where you would realistically want to give a skink a javelin or club?

 

And here was me thinking they always had clubs or some other sort of hand weapon as a backup.

 

?

 

If you give them javs and run them in a big unit they have chameleon skinks level stats. At the end of the day though skinks are pretty awful at fighting unless you build a list around skinks fighting. I would say boltspitters just for the range however.

 

I've always liked the look of 40-strong units with javelins on paper. In theory they could dish out some good damage but I think getting all 40 dudes within 8 inches is pretty difficult - and if you pull it off, they probably get blown away in the following turn.

I think the niche for javelins is small, but those increased odds of wounding suit them to small squads in small games (750-1000) where they can slowly chip at soft units over the course of the fight.

 

Honestly if I wanted skinks to work I'd take 40 with boltspitters, a skink chief and prophet and bastiladons/stegadons.

With that set up they hit on 2s rerolling 1s wound on 5s. You can also give the big monsters +1 to hit and reroll 1s.

 

Javelins & shields in 8th edition

 

I am going to be mixing it up for me, if the skinks are going to screen my other troops then I will give them javelins and shields because they will no doubt be getting close to the enemy.

However, other roles might suit the longer range of the bolt spitters.

With the nature of the "double turn" I find having a line of skinks screening your hard hitters means the enemy will have a much harder time hitting my important dinosaurs and infantry first. The enemy, bogged down by those agile skinks will be then exposed to a counter charge.

 

In my experience using them*, they’ve been fairly rotten in shooting and combat(never do that) phases, unlucky dice perhaps and I’m not a stat cruncher by any means. So I ended up with half mine as bolt/moonstone clubs half javelins/bucklers and only use them as screens and *supported* objective grabbers.

As for the spares...they’re waiting to be kitbashed into chameleons.



*friendly games, I don’t play tournaments or the like.

 

Boltspitters and Shields. Great harrassing unit, if they start doing damage, they for sure will attract enemy fire. Which is one of the reasons why they are great

 

It depends, If I play big units of 40, I put Boltspitters and moonstone club, so they have 2 attacks in combat.
But in small units of 10, I prefer Boltspitter + shield as if they get caught in combat, they are almost dead already.

 

i would say javelin are nice since the new EotG. 20 Skinks with Javelins they can shoot immediately
with 4+ 4+ is not that bad

 

Yeah, but if you summon them with the Slann javelin skinks are pretty useless. you got to deploy them 9" away and you can`t move.

how many times will you get to summon 20 skinks with the EOTG?
I have played a few times with the EOTG but most of the time i didn`t roll 14-17, so no skinks most of the time.

However, summoning skinks with the Slann was no problem.
Too bad they arrive at the end of the movement phase, so javelins skinks are not an option (9" away)

Can you summon a unit of 20 or can you only summon units of 10?

So, what is the best option to build your skinks, javelins or boltspitters ?

 

you can Slann summon Skinks in a 20 man unit for 12 or 18, I don't recall which one as I'm at work and no book in front of me lol.

 

for Slann summoning the blowpipes are better, for EotG Javelins.
now its on use to decide