They're not necesarly weak and very much have their uses. Knights are probably our single best pick if you want battleline that actually does something, but don't want your battleline to be the focus of your army. Knights have good enough stats to be able to actually put up a fight at minimum size without requiring several supportive buffs which none of the other battleline options do. There's however 2 issues that Knights have. 1) They only have 1 effective tactic if you want to use them as the backbone of your army, namely stacking command abilities on them. Which is expensive & unreliable as there's too many things that can go wrong. 2) They're merely "decent". They don't have anything shiny like loads of rend or special attacks to make em stand out, and their charge attack is simply too unreliable to have that be their thing (even in a firelance). However, if you simply want capable battleline then they are definitly a good pick. Just don't threat them like you would a 40 man saurus warrior death star or an elite unit like gore-grunta's, dracothian riders or skull-crushers. In short, they're actually good battleline instead of a tax if you don't want your battleline to be the focus of your army. Temple guards are also actually rather good. They have amazing stats. There's just one problem. Mortal wounds are so stupidly common in AoS its just kinda stupid & a great deal of those attacks are ranged on top of that. Which just makes them rather difficult to use as you have to put in excessive amounts of effort to avoid the mortal wound spam... If however you can manage to do this then they are essentially immortal, which is what makes em so hilarious in skirmish.
If you are trying to minimize battleline tax then 10 man units of Skinks are the best option. Additionally, they are normally better at holding objectives than Saurus Knights are simply due to their Wary Fights ability. Saurus Knights are not without their uses, but they are not among our strongest units. If you are looking to build power list then I would avoid them unless you are building the single drop EotGs summon spam list. You can make the other Knights list work. Just keep in mind they are normally the second best at their archetypes.
Other armies have objective holders too, like gryph hounds or frost sabres or small units of 10 crappy marauders. Knights will win that fight and clear that far off obejctive for 90 points vs skinks who have the wary fighter, but in groups of 10 deal 0 damage and won't keep others off of the objectives. I won a game against phoenix elves the other day with that. I was able to kind of take him by surprise as I ran 5 knights around each end on blood and glory while we all had a death ball (thunderquake vs phoenix and dragon master with all their buffs) and was able to teleport razordons where I could take 6+ of the crappy, basic objective holding, 10 man units models off of his objectives on both sides and thus end the turn with 5 knights vs 4 or less crap elves and outright get the win on turn 3.
Im doing a Fang of Sotek build and I wanted to know how I could fit in a Dracothion Tail or Firelance Starhost into the mix. How many knights should I invest?
10 man units of skinks are terrible if you want your battleline to actually do something beyond existing and standing in the way. Admittadly, existing and standing in the way can be very valuable when it comes to say holding objectives and as such skinks see great use in the competitive scene. But they're absolutly terrible if you'd want them to do literally anything else. Knights on the other hand are actually capable of taking and protecting an objective from the enemy as @dinoSTARZ gave a good example of. This extends to other situations, like assaulting an out of position support hero with Knights or finishing up a wounded unit. Small skink units don't stand a chance in hell of doing any of that. All in all this makes Knights the absolute best battleline if you want your battleline to actually do something. It's not just minimizing wasted points on battleline tax, it's a matter of filling battleline tax with units that are actually capable of doing something beyond merely existing and standing in the way. Now unfortunatly for Knights most seraphon list use their battleline only as objective grabbers and cannonfodder. And skinks are good enough for that and cheaper so they see vastly more use. And thus Knights don't get used despite being superiour. There's simply no need for actually capable battleline, our slanns and big dinosaurs will do the heavy lifting anyways, the battleline is merely taken to sit on an objective.
All the things you mentioned are why I say Saurus Knights are pretty much always your second best choice and never you best. MPP for game affect they are less efficient than almost every unit except for poor Kroxigors. Skinks at a maxed unit of 40 cost 240 MPP. Knights at a maxed 20 cost 360. Skinks in 40 man units will almost always deal more damage than 20 Knights. Same goes for Warriors vs Knights. If you only want to run a min size unit with the sole purpose of flanking players who under estimate their ability to fight knights over objectives then sure, they are in that case ideal. Knights are not trash, but they are only competitively viable in a DT battalion. Even then, they are not the part of DT that causes them to see competitive play.
You would likely be sinking too many point into Battalions if you Run FoS and DT. The extra MW on the Knight's charge is not worth the point cost of the battalion. If anything I might just bring 10 Suaurus Knights to act as a screen and engage the enemy to hold them down while your Warriors march up. You shouldn't need one of their battalions to make good use of them in FoS.
That's the point. Knights aren't what you take as your death-star or as your fancy elite unit of doom. Knights are what battleline tax should be as they both provide the bodies for objective grabbing and the stats to actually be usefull should they be needed in a fight. Unfortunatly for Knights, actually capable battleline isn't favored in AoS, deathstars & elites supported by minimum cost fodder for objective grabbing are what AoS seems to revolve around. Which is something that's oddly common in pvp games to be honest, it's kind of funny.
@Tokek mind sharing your list and strat for a tail build? seems like you know a lot about it. I'm running shadow + eternal right now but with mostly skinks I feel that my army lacks aesthetics.
I'd also like to add that when you're fielding Knights, especially units with 10 or more models, it's handy to have also a starpriest. Not only you can count on a spell that doesn't diminish your potential of summoning points, but the serpent staff will actually be very useful, especially if you are using the command ability of the scarvet for additional bite attacks: at that point, each model is going to do 4 bite Attacks (1 for the Saurus and 3 for the CO). 10 models will do 40 bite Attacks, and the serpent staff will actually do something.
They have by far the best synergy with the serpent staff yea, given that they actually have a decent number of bite attacks in a unit. It's a shame multiple starpriests isn't that good though, too few spells to cast and they're useless outside of their spells and staff, otherwise taking a starpriest for each unit of Knights would be quite effective.
I doubt if I will have a finished list before about March or April of next year, which is fine as right now I am happy playing my escalation league and not really that bothered with playing big AoS tournaments. What I am doing is experimenting with sub-sets of the list at stages of the escalation league and seeing how they work. Right now I would say that the 3-way combo of Saurus Knights, Scar Vet on Cold One and Starpriest is a solid chunk of synergy so long as you have CP available. Part of my challenge to preserve that will be to build the rest of the list so that the CP are not often needed elsewhere. They have had enough table time now for me to be fairly confident that the stacking CP change in AoS 2 is quite significant for the way this component of the list works and that therefore moving forwards with Dracothians Tail is building on solid foundations. At this stage I could not really say whether I will end up with a 10/10/5 set of Knight units or 10/5/5 - it largely depends on how future games go both with the knights and with other list elements. I am pretty sure I will not be running any units larger than 10 because I find them unwieldy with their base size and - for my current level of positional skill at least - not that effective. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of questions in my mind about what will work but those will need more time on the table before I will be jumping to any conclusions. Broadly my emphasis will be on mobility and the ability to pop up dinosaurs when and where I want them to put opponents on the back foot which - in my opinion - is the signature strength of the Tail. A lot of that is down to my preferred playstyle: I would almost always prefer to set up the win in the movement phase.
I run 10 kinghts as a hammer to my thunderquakes anvil. I dont need cp for the rest of my army so they can alway be buffed 1-2 times, and for how cheap they are it works great. The firelance though, and running lances is a trap. If you do the math hand weapons will alway do more average damage. And i would not run any less or more than 10.
No they won't. Unmodified: Blades force 0.44 saves per attack Lances force 0.33 saves per attack plus 0.0833 mortal wounds. If the target has a save that's 5+ or better lances force more actual wounds on average, if the save is 6+ or there is no save blades do better. Ward saves like disgustingly resilient don't factor in as they affect both normal and mortal wounds. Also, since lances have a worse hit-chance they'l benefit more from buffs as the relative increase will be bigger. Also since they have a bonus on wound rolls they'l benefit more from buffs there as well. Hence, lances are on average better, and benefit more from whatever buffs you can throw on them to increase their wound and hit rolls. However, they have a larger standard deviation and are thus less reliable and will often feel worse.
I don't think you take Firelance + Tail for the extra damage, you take it for the ability to dictate the flow of the game with units coming "out of nowhere" with a good chance of making the charge. Whether they come at Kaoteq's command or teleport with LoSaT the additional 3" charge distance transforms the chances of getting into the fight on your turn and hence having the first activation. That is not really about the Knights so much as the playstyle that those battalions open up.
I've used Knights a lot, and they are always underwhelming. They don't do nearly enough damage, they don't last nearly as long, they aren't nearly as fast as you want them to be, and they aren't nearly cheap enough to justify the fact that they are "meh" across the board. I thought two units of 5 complimented a unit of 40 warriors well in a Bloodclaw battalion, but thats about it. I think a better save or more lance attacks would go a long way to helping them out.
For me fixing Knights, making them really worth it, would be this: - Give them 9" move so they are actually faster than infantry. - 4+ save instead of 5+, or something similar. Some save rerolls for example.
To be honest I'd love for our shields to be changed to "reduce rend by X (-1 for units, -3 for sunbloods, -2 for the other heroes) & give a 5+ ward save against mortal wounds". It'd give us some much needed tools to deal with mortal wounds, it'd make our shields relevant against all rend attacks instead of only against only a subset & yet it wouldn't be such a big change as to cause our defenses to snowball out of control as regular attacks are just as effective as they've Always been.