Yes it is. Sadly. It is only a wild guess but I think 1:1 my money would be on the Vampire on his dragon. His blood boil spell can be pretty strong on multi-wound models, and he has 14 wounds, an unbuffed 3+ save , he profits from the ward save as well, and can heal himself once. I'd say he will probably win. He is also more mobile. If the Seraphon player is unlucky that guy will use its attacks to kill a few guards before the carno can reach the dragon to do damage, thus tipping the balance a bit towards the Skellies. And yes I think at 1000 points Seraphon are a bit limited.
Versus the nighthaunt army: First off: screw nighthaunt and their mortal wounds Secondly: Screw Mannfred Thrid: Why does all our big expensive stuff seem so relativly weak compared to other armies big expensive stuff... Spoiler: Preferably I'd take the following and use its long range heavy firepower to nuke Mannfred into oblivion, after which the rest should be easy to wipe up Leader: Kroak (540) - Phoenix stone - Master of Defense Engine of the gods (240) - Phoenix stone Battleline: behemoths: Bastillidon (300) - Solar engine Stegadon (260) - Skystreak bow This could also be 2 stegadons or 2 bastillidons, whichever combination works best really. Other: Skink handlers (40) Razordons (60) Battellion: Thunderquak starhost (120) total 1560 But seeing as this list doesnt have any battleline I can't :'( So alternativly I'l take: Leader: Slann (260) - Phoenix stone - Master of Defense Engine of the gods (240) - Phoenix stone Battleline: 3x 10 skinks - blowpipes. behemoths: Bastillidon (300) - Solar engine Stegadon (260) - Skystreak bow This could also be 2 stegadons or 2 bastillidons, whichever combination works best really. Other: Skink handlers (40) Razordons (60) Battellion: Thunderquak starhost (120) total 1520 Again, use ranged firepower to annihilate Mannfred, then switch to mortis engine. Skinks are pretty much solely there as fodder, and the razordon is only there to get the battalion. The others seem to be much less of a threat in comparison.
sigh... For the one on one I'd try to bank on the carnosaur going first, using his command ability on himself at which point he should be able to pour out a horrific amount of wounds. Hopefully killing the vampire before retalation. The blood boil spell and general combat prowess of the vampire is going to be a pain to deal with, but it's the only vaguely viable solution I can see at this point level... it's either that or havig a sunblood go absolutly bonkers (they can theoreticly deal 63 wounds or something in one turn so it's possible )
O and btw against your mournghouls: Leader: Kroak (540) Master of defense Phoenix stone Engine of the gods (240) Phoenix stone battleline 3x 10 skinks (240) Blowpipes behemoths: 2 x Bastillidon (600) Solar engines if you want to focus 1 mournghoul at a time and want to truly abuse your range. Ark of soteks if you want to spread out damage over various mournghoul to get them all wounded as quickly as possible so they become less effective. With 3 mournghouls this might actually be a good idea. Plus kroak can provide the focused fire with his 3 spells. Other 3 skink handlers (40) 2 Razordon (120) 1 balewind vortex (120) Thunderquake host (120) 2020total. Put kroak on the balewind, he's untargetable for the entire opposing army apart from the banshee which is never going to kill him with her maximum of 2 wounds/turn. Use kroak and the bastillidons to protect the others. Nuke the mournghouls down one by one relying on your vastly superiour range AOE and considerable healing to win. Doesn't seem too hard as long as you dont have to play an objective
Ok, next one: Wanderers. This is purely academic for now because I know nobody who plays Wanderers, but why not. I heard we are not exactly good against them because they can build very good shooty lists. Glade Guard and Waywatchers can shoot with rend higher than -1 (which hurts us a lot), and their Eternal Guard seems to be similar to our Saurus Guard. Anyone who has played against them who can provide us with one or two lists and some ideas to handle them?
Just looking at the PDF's at the GW site they basicly have the following pro's and con's: Pro's: Very very shooty Spellweavers can ressurect slain models Fast Bonusses from being in cover Con's: Fairly squishy, most models have 1 wound and a save of 5+ or worse. Mediocre bravery Based on this I'd field bastillidon's and stegadons. The solar engine and skystreakbow have rend which will mean virtually guaranteed wounds if you hit. On top of that dealing multiple points of damage per attack will mean they'l rapidly destroy entire units. And they can survive the return fire reasonably easily. They're probably not going to outright win a ranged fight, but they should be devastating while they advance. If at any point you roll well you're liable to annihilate entire units at once, especially with their mediocre bravery. Furthermore, a shadowstrike host will be effective. They'l solve the issue of needing to catch the stupid aelves by just dropping on top of them. However, a shadowstrike is probably only going to be good to take out some priority target. If you use them be prepared to basicly lose the entire host to your opponents retaliation afterwards. A skink priest with priestly trappings for re-rollable saves will help our melee troops survive being pelted while they advance. Combine all of these and you have a shadowstrike let by a priest and a thunderquake host. Hide the priest amoung our big dinosaurs and I'd say we'd probably outlast their shooting thanks to our big dinosaurs. The remainder of the shadowstrike can go on a suicide mission to pick off their general or something similar. Apart from that the main question will be if you're allowed to catch up and engage. None of their troops are really going to survive a melee engagement for long. Provided you can catch them virtually anything we have will kill them. Unfortunatly we're not particularly fast and there's nothing really stopping from running around us in circles while shooting.
That's pretty close to my own assessment of the situation based on what I read until now. But perhaps I am missing some sort of synergy there... With the Wayfinder and Waywatcher's abilities buffing bravery and lowering opponents' hit rolls I wonder if they can actually become more sturdy than they look. Not quite sure perhaps I missed even more. But a Shadowstrike and either Eternal or Thunderquake sound pretty good and should help us to survive the first two round. After that they might be in trouble since on first glance it seems they don't have much except good shooting.
Even with the higher bravery they'd still be horrificly squishy, as for their saves. If they're allowed to use everything they have then during the shooting phase they'd have the following: use the waywatcher command ability (-1 to hit when being shot at) The nomad's prince's bird eats one of your eyes (-1 to hit) Mystic shield (+1 to save) Shield of thorns (re-roll failed saves, deal mortal wound to an attacker on a roll of a 6) Their best defensive units have a base 4+ save. This is reasonably sturdy. Now let's take a bastillidon with solar engine. In this case he ends up with 2d6/6+/3+/-1/2 versus a 4+ re-rollable save with +1. Now the rend and mystic shield cancel out. 2d6 attacks average 7 and 7/9th attack wounds per turn of which 0.194 actually wound dealing 0.388 damage/turn. Without all these debuffs/buffs the bastillidon would actually do: 2d6/4+/3+/-1/2 versus a 4+ 7 attacks -> 2.333 wounds -> 1.1666 gets through dealing 2.3333 damage/turn. Now at first glance going from 2.333 wounds to 0.3888 per turn seems like an increadible improvement. But there's a couple of caveats. 1) It requires 4 units just to pull this off (sister of the thorn, a nomad prince, a waywatcher and a second wizard or the mystic shield). 2) 1 of the effects only works against ranged attacks 3) 1 of the effects only works if you wounded the attacking model with the specific attack. 4) Both spells can only be put on one unit, leaving other targets vulnerable. All in all, they require quite a lot just to minimize the damage from 1 opponent. And on top of that it'd require going first so that you don't get blasted to pieces in the first turn. So meh, unless they have a perfect start and you purposely attack their buffed up unit they should not be all that sturdy.
*dusts off thread* back to SCE as an example, but it applies to others as well: deep striking units. Example: SCE have a bataillon called Hammerstrike Force consisting of two groups of Retributors (for example. Could be other Paladins as well) and one unit of Prosecutors, and it basically allows them to deepstrike anywhere on the board and receive bonuses when doing so, similar to our flyers in the Shadowstrike. Another ability is the (awesome) Celestant Prime's ability to wait in Azyr and deepstrike at some point. I wonder how we deal with such situations. We cannot block the whole board, there will always be some point 9" away where they can land. We cannot alpha strike them because they are not on the board. Same is Kharadron Overlords with their dropships. Or even other Seraphon. I can imagine using Gryph Hounds as allies and hope we can shoot the crap out of them using Skinks if they teleport in. I dislike that we cannot use Seraphon units but I see no chance to survive such strikes otherwise. A squad of Retris popping in next to almost anything of our army will be extremely deadly. Of course we can try and snipe the Prosecutors, but with the move they have it is pretty likely they run toward our lines in the first turn and put down their friends before we can even act. As for the Celestant Prime: That one is even worse. If he pops in after the second turn he has the ability to insta-snipe almost everything we have if he makes the charge. Fortunately he cannot be buffed before he strikes, but with his ability to change one dice to a result of his choice he is pretty likely to make that charge, and six attacks 3/2/-3/3 are VERY deadly. Plus the (maybe multiple) D3 mortal wounds on one or more units within 24" without a hit roll or anything we can do against it. Strangely though not _THAT_ many SCE players seem to use him. Am I missing something?
Razordons would probably be our best defense against this sort of stuff if you want to stick to purely seraphon. Apart from that the only option we really have is to just suck it up and survive the initial charge. An eternal starhost or bastilidon could potentially be used to guard important stuff. As for the celestant prime; it's expensive, (by SCE standards at least) SCE basic units are already terribly powerfull so he doesn't add as much as you'd expect. And to become truly monstrous he needs to stay off the board for ages, which doesn't mix well with the fairly low turn limit in AoS. 6 3/2/-3/3 attacks sound impressive, but that's still only going to hit twice on average, which would result in a 6 wounds assuming his rend breaks the opponents save. And that's igoring opponents like a bastillidon that laugh at his rend. Or a unit of skeleton warriors that laugh at 6 wounds/turn... It's just kind of underwhelming unless it spends an eternityin the heavens and never actually joins the battle....
Deathrattle actually has it surprisingly well against SCE, because of the ward save and LOADS of wounds in their tarpit units. But Seraphon are a synergy army. They surely won't target our Skinks but our more valuable assets. I disagree about the Eternal Starhost I think. Celestant Prime or Retributors will just melt an Eternal Starhost in one round by using mortal wounds. Retris become a lot worse against Guards if you can debuff them using Starlight but you cannot do anything against the Starsoul Maces. ....hmm I guess I will be able to see how it goes soon. I heard there is a Celestant Prime in the works by a friend.
The starhost works, provided there's not a load of (reliable) mortal wounds so depends on what they're facing. The celestant prime is probably too reliable. The retributors it depends if they're being buffed somehow and how many there are. 5 retributors without buffs will only roll 1.6 6's on average, That's doable-ish. A shadowstrike the eternalstarhost will only care if it contains terradons and they get to fly over them at full strength.
I think the 6es are not what I fear, but that two in each group of five Retris can have Starsoul Maces, which basically means 2D3 mortal wounds per turn that you cannot prevent at all. When they get a double turn (and probably even if they don't) they can kill a whole unit of Guards without rolling a single dice.
Ah, I keep forgetting that thing, too used to the AoS starterbox which only has 3 retributors and no special stuff. Yea that makes em more problematic. Anyway, the guard was more a general "if you're facing deepstrike stuff they might be able to take the brunt". Depending on what actually is showing up in the deepstrike they may or may not be good.
Man I am SO glad my opponent doesn't play maces either. IMO they are really OP. Especially since you can take two in five. In all other armies such weapons are one in five and/or require a roll at least. Damn poster boys.
Meh what annoys me more is that there's 3 other retributors standing in the way and there's no way to target the specific one (bar some exceptional abilities). At least stuff like a skaven warpfirethrower is just the one weapons team. I can shoot it and ignore the other skaven. You can't do that here....
Yeah there are not many units that can target models. Aleguzzlers come to mind, and I think some Tzeentch units as well. Regular troops have to cause 9 wounds before even starting to damage the Mace dudes.
Has it been discussed how we do against Goblins? Specifically Moonclan Grots. I believe my first game will be against an opponent with: x2 Monstrous Squigs x3 Grot Fanatics at least 1 unit of cave squigs a giant massive crapton of grots. Just lots of them. Over 100 easily. I'm not sure about anything in this game as I've never played before, so IDK what the leaders are. I just was only able to recognize lots of pointy hat goblins with spears, he showed me the giant squigs and I know he has 3 guys with ball and chains. He also runs Cunning Ruk? He said he can put out 900 shots in a turn but said since I am new he would not use that list on me. My army if I am allowed full points is 1500 Saurus Oldblood on Carnosaur Saurus Scar-Veteran on Carnosaur Saurus Scar-Veteran on Cold One Skink Starpriest x15 Saurus Knights, Alpha, Wardrums, Icon, Lances x15 Saurus Guards, Alpha, Wardrums, Icon x20 Saurus Warriors, Alpha, Wardrums, Icon Since I know 0 tactics or anything I imagine I'll get trashed since I don't even know what grots do.
Game against grots ? Time for our -1 bravery to shine. My suggestion : Go to GW's site, download some of the scrolls you recognise, read them and try to understand how they work !