Hey guys haven't posted in a long time I was reading up on the BRB just now about throwing in a BSB chief with skavenpelt into a saurus block. as i am reading it correctly, you can place your chief off to the side of the unit, and if you go 6 wide, you can prevent R+F units from attacking him. of course you would need to drop in a scar vet and a champion to block challenges. Check page 98 in BRB and more importantly check the Make Way! rule on page 100 either way frenzy saurus seem nasty.
It will work great until you hit an enemy unit that is as wide or wider, then the Chief will be in contact and die very very quickly. Take a Saurus Horde and it will be a bit harder (and you max out on extra attacks), but he's still far from safe. Personally I prefer to take as few risks with my Battle Standard as I possibly can.
first off, no you do not prevent rank and file units from attacking him. a 5 wide unit can still chose to contact your unit with its corner in between the skink and the saurus unit. that means that the guy on the corner in his unit gets to hit your BSB. sure a normal trooper (and his support guy behind him) are unlikely to kill the skink in a single round, but against most opponents he will be dead in 2 rounds of fighting. if you get to charge, you can indeed chose to place the skink outside combat (again assuming that his unit is 5 20mm models wide), and you will win against must such units. however, he could then chose to combat reform, widening his front allowing a bunch of models to hit (and kill) the skink. he will most likely lose his unit though since he will have few ranks left and you should win combat. however, you are paying about 120 points to get a grand total of 5 extra saurus attacks. for the same 120 points you could buy 10 more sauruses, making your unit 8 wide instead of 6. this would give you 6 extra attacks. granted, you can not use these attacks against narrow units, but the only such units that really exists are zombies and goblins. and you will beat them anyway. It is a gimmick that costs you quite dearly in points AND you risk having your BSB killed since he has 2W T3 and a 5+ save. Im not saying it will never work, but if you went the other way? get a saurus BSB on foot with no flag. give him good armour And a good weapon and he will still not cost much more than the skink. (I mean like LA, enchanted shield and SOM). He has T5, has a 2+ save and 4 S6 attacks. You are exchanging 7 basic saurus attacks (since he replaces a model in the front rank) but you gain 4 WS5 S6 attacks. Chances are his damage output will outshine the effect of the lost sauruses AND you do not risk your BSB in such a careless manner as before. the only unit where i would ever consider the skink chief an option is a unit of cold one riders, or better yet, a unit of cold one riders with scar veterans for the first rank. then you get some REAL use for those extra attacks (the new chaos FAQ strongly suggests that the cold ones will get the extra attack from frenzy too). Im not saying any of these suggestions are competitive or even decent, but they do have a much better rationale behind them.
You are not likely to find a lot of people to take this interpretation. But one interpretation of the FAQ is that Horned Ones are do not count as a magic item for list purposes since they are a normal mount in all on table respects. If you don't count taking Horned Ones as a magical item, a Skink could ride a Horned One and take the Skavenpelt banner. Then the Skink would be able to join a Saurus Cavalry unit without slowing the unit down or being especially exposed (since it would enjoy a 3+ Armor save and not stick out like a sore thumb). Very few people will buy the Horned Ones don't count as a magic item argument though. Probably for friendly games only. I have some vague plans to make mounted skink conversions but I fear by the time I get them done, the new army book will come out and eliminate horned ones altogether.
mounted scar vet lance? woah. For reference: Yeah, it's a typically hard one to interpret. Bloody GW. My interpretation is the same as yours: that a horned one counts to the model cost, but not the magic item quota.
actually its not that hard to interpret providing your quote is correct word for word. it is ONLY a cav mount . seems very clear to what they intended. go by RAW as the VC are playing they can raise hexwraiths 1+ wizard level . So we must take advantage of GW's sloppy wording aswell
Score, I may take one in an upcoming map campaign since I'll be stuck with a Skink priest as my sole character for a while. Would horned ones still be limited to one per army?
Does anyone have the army builder software? I'd be interested to see how that program defines the Horned One. To the original topic, I agree that the Skavenpelt Banner is garbage. The only time I'd consider taking a Skink Chief BSB is with the Stegadon Warspear on an Ancient Steg.
It might be usable if you where runing a ticktacktoe list , with a big group of terradons, you could run one terrradon chief with the banner joined to the unit. (yea, terradon rideing characters can join units) could be fun.