AoS Skirmish ideas

(...pix that do not display inline drive me nuts...)

 

I ran a 50point game with a Starpriest, 3 Rippers, and 7 Skinks, tore the guy apart.

 

That's how we do it

Which race/army did you play against?

By the way, 3 rippers are frightening...

 

It was Death, I'm not super savvy on them but it was a Wight King, a couple Spirit Hosts i believe, and some cavalry

 

Nice! Congrats @Archkyrie11 keep us posted on any other games you play!

 

I'd imagine the rippers did most of the work there? What were your skinks equipped with?

 

The rippers did a lot of work and the skinks were equipped with boltspitters and shields. We did the scenario where the objective is in the castle on the corner of the board, I forget the name offhand I don't actually own the book yet, but my rippers flew in and I had my skinks sit on the walls and shoot down.

 

Did your skinks actually manage to hit anything? That's been my problem when fielding them so far in the campagn mode :S

 

Sounds like a largely situational win there I'm afraid... Skinks are normally fodder for pretty much anything, sounds like keeping them on a wall out of range led them to be able to do something productive.

Rippers are definitely a decent unit... Sadly one of the only decent ones we have.

 

I agree with you, they are quite useless if you ask them to put out some damage...
I think their real purposes are:
- to distract enemy models by shooting at them. They won't kill anything, so the point of shooting is maybe to tempt them to charge your Skink (and not your more valuable units). And possibility to use this trick several times by benefitting from the Wary Fighter ability;
- to redirect charges
- to run fast towards objectives
- to give cover to models behind them (depending on how you treat Line of Sight)
- to increase the number of models in your warband in order to be less vulnerable to Battleshock Tests

 

They can kill things sometimes if you are lucky I had a grot who hits on 5s wounds on 5s kill a pink horror in cover in a match so they can get the lucky shot here and there. I totally agree with @Freddy25 though. They are there to be a nuisance more than anything.

 

My skinks pretty much rushed the objective and sat there, started shooting and hoped for the best while the rippers flew around and did the damage. The skinks did inflict fair amount of wounds for 5s and 5s though.

The Starpriest though, Arcane Bolt is devastating in Skirmish.

 

A question. How does the celestial cohort of those battleline units work here?

 

It doesn't sadly

 

Even without maxing those units to 20?

Now that's sad

 

Unfortunately still no. The rules for skirmish says each model is a unit so you have 20 units of 1 Skink basically.

 

I and my friends play differently, even if we are not sure if it'sthe right way: we TREAT every model like a singular unit, but in reality models with the same name (es. Skinks, Zombies, Chaos Warriors, ...) belong to a single unit.

This implies a couple of things:
- being a single unit, they CAN GET those bonuses granted by having more than X models in the unit (so 20+ Skinks get the first bonus, 30+ get the subsequent bonus)
- being a single unit, you are allowed to use the special weaponry following the rules which say "one every X models in the unit can be equipped with a Y", even if models appear as individual entities.
- being a single unit, special units able to cast a spell can still do it, but since it is often described only ONE spell may come from the unit in the Hero Phase, only one model in play can cast that spell.
In other words, playing Skirmish you could have let's say 15 pink horrors on the battlefield, but since they come from a single unit only ONE of them has the right to cast the spell its unit is allowed to cast (no more magic spam).

The only things this "treating a model like a unit on its own" changes from the AoS basic rules are:
- models with the same name (so from the same unit, in my view) can be equipped with different basic weapons (i.e. I have 2 skinks, I can chose one to have the boltspitter and shield and the other to have the javelin and club)
- models with the same name may be more than 1 inch away from each other
- models with the same name (so again from the same unit, IMO) can be in cover separately, which means a model does NOT need to have its entire unit in cover to get the +1 Save bonus, and different models from the same unit can be in cover or not independently.

Don't know if everything has been written in an understandable way

 

I like it! You can always talk to your opponent and have your own house rules too @Soul Zenmuron.

 

Seems legit to me. Thanks, @Wazz and @Freddy25

 

No worries! Have fun!