New player, looking for advice on a casual list. I expect to face various opponents, though primarily they will be Dwarves and Vampire counts. Scar-Vet -L. Armor/G.Weapon -Venom of the Firefly Frog Skink Chief -Steg. Lance -Stegadon Skink Skirmishers (10) Skinks (8) -Standard -Kroxigor Saurus Warriors (18) -Standard/Spears Razordons (2) -Xtra Skinks x 1 Works out to 997. The general idea is to have the Saurus in the center with the Scar-vet, flanked by the Skink cohort and Steg, with the Razors on the flank with the Skinks. The skirmishers screen the line, hopefully baiting and fleeing anything nasty that comes close. What I'm looking for is comments/criticism regarding the list - any holes that need to be filled? As well, do you see any problems that I will run into when playing the list? Thanks!
At 1000 points, I think you should have an Engine of the Gods. Your magic defense right now is 2 dispel dice... Add an engine with a skink priest and it goes to 3. Diadem of power bumps it to 5. The engine of the gods is great against those armies you mentioned. The 5+ ward against shooting will help against dwarves while the VC take str 5 hits instead of str 4 from the Burning Alignment power. Your scar-vet's items are strange... it is nearly pointless to give him poison if he's already doing str 7 attacks with his great weapon. Poison helps low strength things wound more often. I think one character should be fine in a 1000 point game, just from my experience. I would take a single Engine of the Gods skink priest, and drop the chief and scar-vet for now. Your skink block is illegal... while it is true you need 8 skinks per kroxigor, the minimum unit size is 10 skinks. I also wouldn't take a banner unless you are going to make the unit bigger. You could make the unit bigger if you dropped the scar-vet and increased the skinkage from 8 to say 21. Then I'd go full command, but if you're keeping it a small unit, adding a banner is just free points to the enemy and will attract victory point hunters. I like the saurus warriors, that's how I plan on running them myself. However, don't be afraid of dropping a few if you need points, as the main power behind these guys is the front two ranks and their spear attacks. I assume you are running them six wide? I'm strongly in the camp of salamanders being better than razordons. Taking your likely opponents as examples... Dwarves are well armored and not immune to psych, though some are immune to panic. You are almost guaranteed to have at least one large armored block of warriors of some kind. -3 to armor save means only ironbreakers and characters will have a save against the salamanders. The tendency of dwarves to bunch up makes the salamanders' template weapons even more powerful against them. Vampire counts also tend to run with a good number of blocks, though they are of course immune to psych. They do have a nasty tendency to regenerate though, and the flaming component of salamanders negates that. If he takes blood knights, you'll have a lot better chance killing them with salamanders to penalize their armor and stop regen. You just need to find room for some terradons, and you're all set!
Oops...had a brain fart on the skinks - thanks for pointing that out! To answer your question, the scar vet's purpose was to kill things to make up for lack of CR - VoFF was there for magical attacks. I see what you are saying though - characters are eating up points. One final question: Wouldn't a lvl 2 priest w/diadem and EoTG produce 4 DD by himself? What do you think about these revisions? List 1: 1000 pts Priest -lvl 2/Diadem/EoTG Skink Skirmishers (11) Saurus Warriors (18) -Standard/Spears Salamanders (2) -Additional Skinks x 2 Terradons (4)
I'm liking the new version. The diadem is a great item.. against the dwarves you can try to pop off a few spells since you won't need dispel dice, though they will likely have 4 or 5 dispel dice. Vs vamps those 6 dispel dice should get you pretty far. The 6 dispels might be more than enough. The only thing I might consider is dropping the priest down a level and using those points to get full command (add musician and champion) for the saurus and maybe an extra skink or two. Otherwise I'd be pretty comfortable fielding that. Terradons are great at attacking entrenched soft targets. Anything that's tough to hit or to target but has low toughness will be wiped by their drop rocks attack. Just be choosy about what you target. Against dwarves, you want to blast his organ gun if he has one. That thing is death! Aside from gun crews, your best bet will be to target his gunners and crossbowmen. Vamps I'm not sure what all you'll face, but the drop rocks should work well against his skirmishy stuff, bats, and possibly varghulf. Just don't bother dropping them on very heavily armored cav or large cheap units, unless you can gain a tactical advantage or you have nothing better to target.