Tutorial Realmshaper Engine Guide.

The RSE is great defense against normal ranged shooting and melee. However, it is not that great against magic as it increases your size to be targeted and offers no defense against mortal wounds. Lucky for us, we have some of the strongest magic and can deal so much damage in the hero phase. As a result I think it is more of a liability for most armies to go into the RSE as if the opponent does jump in you can turn it into a microwave oven pumping celestial deliverance and endless spells into the RSE to fry anything stupid enough to go inside.

Endless spells are very nice with the RSE as theyhit everything inside. Slamming a pendulum into it when it has a hero and a unit in it can be devastating.

At the same time, most armies do not have our magical abilities and can not dish out the mortal wounds like we can so if we hope into the RSE we are probably better off than if we were not in it.

 

The effect of the RSE will also heavily vary depending on how you play. Usually we only play with 6 terrain pieces + whatever faction terrain, but I have seen battle reports (especially Miniwargaming) where there is almost more terrain than table.

 

so many edits

 

Would it be worth putting something about placing Arcane Ruins in the opposite deployment zone to the Realmshaper if the option is available to you, so your opponent has to pick between you getting the Realmshaper or +1 to cast etc?

 

I can’t claim credit for it - it was @Killer Angel who had the idea!

 

@Killer Angel
Great analysis.
I think more often than not getting into the RSE will hurt the opponent more than it will help. We just have so much MWs that having a bigger base just helps us. Getting your opponents ranged units and heroes closer to your kroak means more celestial deliverance and more endless spells.

But even if you are worried that the opponent can take great advantage of the RSE, you should still deploy the RSE. As you said there is almost always a place you can put the RSE where it is of little value. 6" away from a unused board edge for example. But you should still have it on the table for the off chance that you might want to teleport a skink mage to use it for a few MWs. Having that option is worth putting it on the board in a useless position. It gives options which are always better to have.

 

And here people were ridiculing me in the initial thread for big brain thought about using the RSE to make your opponent make decisions ...

Good tutorial @LizardWizard . I'll be watching this one too.

 

My issue with not placing the RSE within a deployment zone is that it seems like a waste of time, at least if you want to use the MW ability. It simply takes way too long to deploy inside and use the ability.

You will use 1 turn to run/teleport a Wizard nearby. Next turn you will use the movement phase to deploy inside, but you have to wait yet another turn since the ability is used in your hero phase.

This means in the absolute best case, you wont be able to use it until turn 3, and also likely lose the support buffs from said Wizard (Im assuming a Skink hero) in at least 2 of the turns. Stuff will likely be outside of 18”, so its a 50/50 if you can zap a unit.

Whatever hero you put inside the RSE would likely have provided a better output by staying near your other dudes for buffs/command abilities.

Now if we are talking about blocking off a part of the board coupled with bound Endless spells, then we are talking imo. Otherwise I will always throw it in a deployment and hope for the 50/50.

 

we got a lot of MW, but we kinda suck at just nuking a single target into oblivion. Yeah, if there's a support hero & a unit or 2 of ranged units they'l quickly get decimated by AoE spells because each of them gets hit very easily now. But if it's simply 1 unit it won't really suffer from being in the RSE. It's easier to hit, but it also has a larger range itself, and it's now protected from regular attacks. Which is probably worth the tradeoff for most units, assuming they stay in range of whatever they need to hit of course.

Which Imho, is the main reason this tactic is probably not going to work very well in practise when your opponent has halfway decent ranged troops. A skilled opponent won't stick say 2 celestar Ballista's & a lord ordinator in there. He'l stick 1 ballista in there which has more than enough range to be usefull, and is all that's needed to deny you the RSE anyway.

Imho, unless your opponent has no (decent-ish) ranged troops then garisonning it will rarely be outright detrimental for your opponent unless he stuffs too many units in it (thus making Kroak's job too easy) or if he garissons it while nothing of value is nearby (e.g. no point in garissoning it while all the objectives are on the other side of the battlefield...). And if your opponent is willing to garisson an RSE in the middle of nowhere he's probably not very good anyway...

 

But in this case we can just ignore that particular ballista and go for other forces. And, in my experience, single ballista doesn't do much with long range attack. I struggle to think about anything, except Nagash, which can really mess our game by garrisoning RSE. Must stuff either not that much important or needs to be mobile or have more than 20 wounds combined. If you are concerned about long range stuff - you can win some distance by placing RSE exactly 6" away from the edge. You will still benifit from it, but still screw your opponent, if they decide to garrison it.

Alternatively, placing it on the edge of the deployment zone will allow you to tie your opponent's long ranged units with fast stuff. It depends, when you go one or another, but after a couple of tests, I feel like we overestimated RSE's benifits for opponents on paper.

At least, I haven't heard any negative feedback regarding RSE and my own experience is fairly good. It's just annoying that all other faction terrain is simply "plug 'n' play" while we'll only be able to use ours half the time. But we didn't chose Seraphon, because it is an easy army to play, did we?

 

I'm probably in the minority but I really like the realmshaper engine rules (new AoS player, long time fan of Lizardmen from WFB days).
In general I dislike the faction terrain for one reason, if you buy the model your army is just better. No points cost, no downside, it's just flat out better.
This one is interesting and a great way to do faction terrain. It needs thought and can be a downside if poorly placed or unlucky, but is actually interactive with the enemy. They could use it, and need to change their game to take it into account. To me this makes good rules.
I didn't initially like the idea that our realmshaper could be garrisoned by the enemy, it didn't seem to feel right. But thinking about it there are many narrative reasons how and why they got in there and are now holding it against us. I have completely turned my thoughts round and love that now, and can use it to add story to my games.