Hi all, I am adding a steg to my temple army, i am going to use the special choice with the bolt thrower, but before i assemble it wanted feed back to make sure its my best option. My army is still in the trial stage, but after my chaos dwarfs i miss bolt throwers, and poisoned is even better.
The bolt thrower is pretty much useless actually. A combination of poor BS on the skinks and the fact that every turn you will be either moving or in combat (it is a massive waste of points if you sit back and shoot with it) means that on the couple of turns you do shoot, at best you are looking at hitting on 5's so its going to do basically nothing. Combat is where you want the mighty stegadon. An ancient is a better option, the giant blowpipes are a silly concept but can damage infantry either just before you charge, or after you have gone through a unit and you are lining up your next charge.
Depends what you've got in your list and Stegs role. I tend to use him as a cannonball catcher, and that's why I use special stegadon.
I rarely run a normal Steg. It's always worth paying the few points extra and take an Ancient. That extra point of strength applies not only to your 3 attacks, but more importantly to all your Impact Hits and Thunderstomp attacks, which over the course of a game makes it very worthwhile. You also get an extra +1 save and a (slightly) more useful ranged weapon.
Special steg has it uses too, IMHO it is better in All a round list than ancient, being cheaper and poisoned bolt thrower can lucky shot odd wounds from monster, warmachines etc.
The Ancient is worth about 40pts more than the regular for what it can do. If points are tight taking a regualr steg is a good way to save a few points. If you have points spare then the Ancient Steg is a valuable upgrade.
Then you can't take more than one. But just giving my 2 cents on special stegadons, their shooting is very unreliable. I recently ran a game where it shot 6 times, and missed every single time..
Wasn't the question. You can't run any stegs if you don't have enough points left in the section or total that applies...
Well, the Ancient is nice with those poisoned darts, but I don't like to plan on using them all the time. I prefer my Stegadon to be charging Another nice thing about using a normal Stegadon is that it doesn't pose as much of a threat to your opponent (they will often think) and so you can get it into some better situations for charges.. The ancient definitely has the edge on charges and with his thunderstomp because of the higher strength.. I guess it all comes down to where you have point available and if there aren't enough to do what you want, is it important to your battle-plans to have him in there at all.. Decisions decisions... As for the special or rare slot, I only ever use one unit in the rare slot (2 Salamanders) and I only ever use two slots in special units (a small unit of CoK and a unit of Chameleon Skinks) so I don't really have to worry too much about what type of Stegadon I take..
Personally I'm having some success with running two regular steggys at the moment (or one as a hero mount) - one tends to look like a h/e chariot but that's an optical illusion!
Chief with Warspear on a regular steg works pretty well, but I have no intention of shooting the bow I want him charging into cc. But I will admit the extra point of STR and lower AS on the Ancient is nice.