Tutorial The art of Summoning

I know, I just generally find that uninteresting. It has a tendency to devolve in an arms race of speed to be the one that shoots first instead of the one that outmanouvers the other. It's less interesting to me.

Yup, sadly making the game longer, or take more turns, would require some rather fundamental changes which is unlikely to happen to say the least.

 

I really think that Chameleon Skinks should be rated as good.

Their shooting is slightly less hard-hitting than Razordons (unless you are facing Chaos Daemons in which case it is a close call). Where they do better is with longer range. This has a couple of advantages; picking off characters and taking advantage of buffing auras.

When picking off enemy heroes the 12" range of razordons is very marginal on the turn they arrive. The enemy hero only has to be 4" back from the front lines to be out of range, that usually means they can still be buffing the front lines. The chameleon skinks can reach 7" beyond the nearest model with their blowdarts which will be able to reach out and touch a lot of weaker heroes in buffing position. If you see this sort of opportunity summoning the chameleon skinks rather than the razordons may be the right move.

The second advantage of their range is just the additional chance that you can land them near the Astrolith Bearer and shoot with the re-rolls without exposing the Astrolith itself to so much danger or retaliation. An extra 4" may not seem like much but when your opponent has to make an extra 4" on a charge it really does shift the odds.

The ability to fade out and then reappear absolutely anywhere is of course still great and this is a unit you should be able to summon on turn 1 or 2 even in a modest summoning list so they threaten all sorts of nonsense with their crazy positional play options. Summoning them on turn 4 into hiding really will force your opponent to put decently substantial forces onto every objective they hope to hold due to their ability to then arrive anywhere on turn 5. It is an objectives game and threatening all the objectives in this way can seriously tie up the sort of weakened forces we usually see this late in the game.

Some realm rules cripple Chameleon Skinks because they are a dedicated shooting unit. When playing with those realm rules summon something else unless you are looking to use their chameleon ambush for a very specific tactic.

 

That pretty much sums up my love of AoS and why I'm absolutely not interested in trying out 40k, atleast for the time being.

 

I think there's only 1 problem with chameleons, their stats are sorta underwhelming. What makes em good is their teleporting. But their actual damage and combat potential isn't exactly special. Outside of minor heroes they're not going to snipe anything, and with look-out-sir this has become even worse. It makes em overall underwhelming in most situations.

House-rules won't change that the damage and such is all balanced around 5 turns as well. Without either playing giant games, or fiddling with the stats of basicly everything involved you're going to be playing with mostly wiped out armies very quickly.
But yeah, it could be significantly worse. At least AoS does consistently seem to make it till turn 4 before it becomes Obvious who won.

 

And talking from experience from a lot of games, that does not happen as often as one would think! Turn 5 matters!

 

meh, most games I've had so far turn 3 it starts to look questionable for one side, turn 4 it's decided and turn 5 is generally little more than a formality. But yeah, it stays exciting relativly long given the amount of nonsense that instantly wrecks stuff.

 

Also, I think some mention should be made of our summoning not really scaling with game size, unlike that of other factions. There's some small difference between a 1000 point and 2.5k game thanks to the endless spells, but it's not massive. Only the EoTG's can provide a significant boost in terms of summoning, but they work so differently it's essentially adding a 2nd summoning mechanic and not scaling our main summoning.

And lastly I think we should include what to do when summoning doesn't/won't work. Or well, what will we have our slann do then. Similarly, hybrids between summoning and wrecking face with Kroak could be discussed and in how far this actually works well.

 

You both make valid points and I had to put some thought into why I cannot quite agree with you having recently switched to summoning razordons. In many situations the choice for me will be a simple one between Chameleon Skinks and Razordons; if I want an efficient shooting unit those are the best candidates at a number of conjuration points which I will have early in the game.

Razordons shooting has an average output of 4.7 wounds from two razordons
Charma Skinks shooting has an average output of 4.2 wounds from 5 skinks

None of our other summonable shooting units are in the same league as these two when it comes to shooting efficiency against most things (it is only vs 2+ saves that the rend on some begins to be more useful).

Chameleon Skinks are not as good as our most efficient summonable shooting unit but they are the only other comparable choice for the role IMO.

The reason why I will still be summoning Chameleon Skinks is that Razordons are undercosted in points. They are such a solid all-round bargain that really I cannot think of a good reason to take less than all the models you own in your initial list. Given that I will never have over 16 Razordon models due to their monetary cost I would rather put them in my list from the start than have them sitting on my tray ready to be summoned one or two at a time. On turns one and two I probably have no razordons casualties available to summon back - even if I did I might look at the table and decide that adding a different variety of positional threat from the skinks might be worth the small drop in shooting efficiency.

So to an extent I think that having tried using them both ways my conclusion is that summoned razordons are not as excellent as razordons you simply put in your list - leaving Chameleon Skinks as the next best shooting unit option to summon.

As for "save your points for something big" that is a strategy choice. It is not a choice I think I will be making very often.

 

They'l Always have their uses as summons on account of being one of the few options with an 16"+ range attack that we have. They'l still be underwhelming though as their stats just aren't amazing, too much of their power is put into their teleporting. And their teleporting suffers greatly from being summoned later in the game given that teleporting costs an entire turn. As such summoning them will Always make em feel weaker than they should. Saving the points for something bigger and shinier is probably going to be more impactfull, but of course there's the trade-off that waiting a turn to get something shinier might just be too late.

Anyways; tl:dr; they're underwhelming to summon, but being one of the few summons with a halfway decent ranged attack they'l have their uses simply on account if us having nothing else that can pull a similar ranged attack...

 

Judging them on paper I still just see them as 10% less shooting output than razordons in return for 25% better range; a trade-off I will quite often be happy to make when selecting a shooting unit. The comparison looks a lot worse when putting them in a list due to the bargain-basement points cost of razordons.

If that makes them underwhelming then I do not really see how you are judging razordons excellent. I happen to agree that razordons are excellent but have concluded from playing both ways that they are more excellent when you just put as many of them in your list as you have the models for.

 

Razordons have the advantage of also functioning in melee & having an overwatch mechanic. This makes em excellent for summoning as you can summon them in a keylocation like a chockepoint, unleash some ranged firepower & then have them work as a neat little roadblock which will also do some significant damage on whatever tries to get through the chokepoint. Basicly, summoning is an absolutly briljant way of getting your razordons in a position where they can perform optimally.

In contrast, the chameleons don't get any advantage from being summoned. It doesn't give them better/easier positioning than they'd achieve on their own. They don't have the defensive stats to be a surprise roadblock. And they don't have the firepower to be a surprise artillery piece or sniper to rip apart an enemy. All you achieve by summoning chameleons is that you have some minor extra ranged firepower, which has its uses, but isn't mindblowing.

To be honest, this is kind of the issue with nearly the whole set of 12-point summons. They're neither as cost-efficient as the 6 point ones nor as devestatingly powerfull as the big dinosaurs we get with 18 or 24, they're all merely "decent". The 12 point summons kinda need to be able to be buffed up after being summoned to really get those nice "aha, just as planned" use-cases.

 

I will probably be fielding some chameleon skinks today (if I play it may be canceled). The reason is because y opponent is using skarbrand in his original build and I need a way to nuke him. Between these and Kroak’s spells plus a burning head I may be able to wipe him out. If I play then I will post how they did.