| 1000 points of nasty tricks | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: 25th October 2011 - 02:59 PM (239 Views) | |
| Quarrel | 25th October 2011 - 02:59 PM Post #1 |
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Arbitrator
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This is a take on the usual trick I trot out when feeling vindictive. Its cornerstone is a rather heaping pile of combined cheesiness in the general's unit that usually results in any character that comes into contact with them being quite thoroughly trounced. I have yet to find any character in a 1000 point list able to take on his mob... Lords (Total: 143) Warlord – Heavy Armour, Shield, Trickster’s Helm, Portents of Verminous Doom 143 Heroes (Total: 244) Chieftain – BSB, Heavy Armour, Shield, Sacred Banner of the Horned Rat 144 Warlock Engineer – Level 2 100 Core (Total: 377) 23 Clanrats – Full Command, Shields, Poisoned Wind Mortar 188.5 21 Slaves – Shields, Musician 54.5 20 Slaves – Shields, Musician 52 20 Giant Rats – 3 Packmasters 84 Special (Total: 136) 3 Rat Ogres – 2 Packmasters 136 Rare (Total: 100) Plagueclaw Catapult 100 Total - Exactly 1000 Essentially the plan has the Clanrats and Slaves forming a solid phalanx in the middle of the board, with the general and BSB parked firmly inside the Clanrats and the Slaves holed up in front of them. Until the Slaves start taking casualties, they're working at Ld 10 with rerolls, which lets them hang around in combat long enough to let the artillery and magic soften up anything I'm too worried about. The Moulder units play flanking forces and usually do surprisingly well - the Rat Ogres being wonderful for fighting anyone else's Ogre equivelants due to their (relatively) high Initiative. The real meat of the plan (And it shows from the amount of points sunk into it) is the ability to completely neutralize any enemy character, no matter how tooled up the Exalted Champion or Orc Warboss might be. Sacred Banner drops the enemy Ld by 1 within 12", and forces them to reroll successful Ld tests when in base contact. Portents of Doom reduces enemy Ld by 1 when in base contact. Trickster's Helm lets me pick an enemy character at the start of each Close Combat phase. He has to make a Ld test (At -2 Ld, rerolling successes. A Ld 8? 9? Exalted Champion is suddenly rather worried) and if he fails, he's completely paralysed, can't attack and is struck automatically. The Warlord and Chieftain then proceed to either smack about the character or just focus on murdering his buddies. Once combat is handily won, the enemy tests on his massacred Ld, promptly flees and is run down. Ogres, Orcs, Chaos, Elves, Beastmen, this trick has murdered any nasty combat unit that it has seen - admittedly Chaos are more worrying than most - their rank and files are remarkably good at generating their own Combat Res and remarkably bad at curling up and dying, but if someone has forked out for an Exalted Champion and a unit of Warriors to carry him around in, there won't be enough points left to afford him much in the way of anything else - the artillery has a field day wearing down that one. There are a couple of changes I might make - I added on 3 Giant Rats and a Slave to fill out points, but I might go for the Shrieking Blade on the Warlord instead - stacking Fear on top of everything else would be good fun, and make the enemy infantry less of a worry (Except for Frenzied/otherwise immune nonsense, but you can't have everything.) Edited by Quarrel, 25th October 2011 - 03:05 PM.
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| Kimzi | 25th October 2011 - 03:23 PM Post #2 |
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The one and only.
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That sounds scary!
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| ,,,^_^,,, Proud owner of Clan Yersinia Pestis ,,,^.^,,, | >-- Possessed Mordheim Warband --< | |
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| Quarrel | 25th October 2011 - 03:38 PM Post #3 |
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Arbitrator
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It mostly works from people underestimating the unit - they see a couple of Skaven characters and assume they'll be nice and squishy. Each of the magic items is pretty innocent by itself, and then by the time people realise what they're getting into it's too late to be getting out of it. Of course, the other trick to pull in 1000 points is a Grey Seer - there aren't many armies that can get a level 4 caster in a game that size, particularly not one as effective as a Grey Seer. |
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| Kimzi | 25th October 2011 - 03:51 PM Post #4 |
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The one and only.
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Yeah, I see now. Magic items are very important in this game. I always underestimated them, but now I see they really are worth investigating. I am quite new to Fantasy so I am still learning all the tricks, and this post is quite helpful, thanks.
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| ,,,^_^,,, Proud owner of Clan Yersinia Pestis ,,,^.^,,, | >-- Possessed Mordheim Warband --< | |
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| Quarrel | 25th October 2011 - 04:27 PM Post #5 |
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Arbitrator
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My best advice for that is don't necessarily go for the obvious ones - fancy swords and awesome armour might be tempting, but you're going to get a lot more mileage out of something like the Shadow Magnet Trinket (-1 for the enemies to hit an entire unit with ranged attacks - really nasty if you put it in with say, a Screaming Bell or a Plague Furnace). The other thing to look for is synergy. That merits saying several times in a row, so I'm going to do just that; synergy, synergy, synergy. The first example that springs to mind is from 40k, but it illustrates the point nicely; I've got a squad with a number of Death Cult Assassins - these are quite nasty close combat troops; high initiative, multiple attacks, high weaponskill, ignore enemy armour saves. By themselves, they're very efficient at what they do. But if I have an Inquisitor to lead them, he can take a neat item: Rad Grenades - these reduce the enemy's toughness by 1 in the first turn of combat. Then he can get Psychic Powers, one of which is Hammerhand. It can be used to raise the Strength of my own squad by 1. Against a T4 enemy, this suddenly changes my Assassins from wounding on 4+ to wounding on 2+, nearly doubling their combat effectiveness. I can then make the squad even more nasty by including a couple of Crusaders - compared to the Assassins they are practically useless for killing enemies, but they have the equivelant of a 3+ Ward Save, this lets me soak up shooting that would instead be tearing apart my vulnerable Assassins. Each of the four parts of the strategy are useful and effective, but putting them together gives me a squad with all the toughness of the Crusaders, while having the killing power of the Assassins vastly increased by the character. The best part is, each of these options is relatively cheap - compared to most really dedicated close combat units from other armies, I'll probably be coming in cheaper as well! There are a lot of ways to do things like this in Fantasy - with Magic, Magic Items and Special Rules, one of the big things to keep in mind is looking out how they work combined with each other, not just alone. Stormvermin with Skavenbrew might be quite nasty, but cast Bless with Filth on them and suddenly you're getting Poisoned Attacks on top of Frenzy or Hatred - the extra attacks/rerolls will generate even more Poisoned hits and you get more bang for your buck! |
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| Kimzi | 25th October 2011 - 04:31 PM Post #6 |
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The one and only.
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Very nice advice and a great explanation, thanks! I shall go and investigate soon and see what I can come up with. It looks interesting, and a fun, sneaky way to win wars. |
| ,,,^_^,,, Proud owner of Clan Yersinia Pestis ,,,^.^,,, | >-- Possessed Mordheim Warband --< | |
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| Koroviev | 25th October 2011 - 05:06 PM Post #7 |
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Clanrat
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I've used the same warlord/BSB (with some extra items for defense/damage) in higher point games. I personally never make him my general, and instead keep him in the mix near my seer general/slaves, it lets me play more offensively. I feel like the warlord's unit is still somewhat susceptible to losing combats and killing defensive lords is tough without a bonus strength item (wither could help, but high AS is still a serious pain). The size of your units is really low to me, even at 1000. Edited by Koroviev, 25th October 2011 - 05:08 PM.
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| Mathusala0 | 25th October 2011 - 07:05 PM Post #8 |
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The Evil Underlord
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your slaves are rerollable leadership 10 until they take about 2 casualties. and against a good player of any of those teams they will just beat down the reat of your army. sure you may kill characters but that should not be a game winning list. I have one word to say to your opponents. magic will tear that apart quite easily as you have no strong caster. Edited by Mathusala0, 25th October 2011 - 07:05 PM.
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![]() The Glossary of Common Underempire Lingo The Skaven Guide to competitive list building (8th Edition) The Skaven Castle Formation | |
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| Borgomos | 25th October 2011 - 07:15 PM Post #9 |
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Warlord
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Mathu has a point. At this point level i would definitely get at least a dispel scroll for magic defense. The enemy characters could also be mobile powerhouses. My occasional opponent sports a Chaos Sorceror of Tzeench on Disc. 1+ armor 3+ ward with crazy mobility tends to do all kinds of wreck to my battleline |
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| koffietje | 26th October 2011 - 12:22 PM Post #10 |
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Warlord
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The closest you can get to your enemy when deploying on an original WH table... is 24 inch. No matter how good your charges are, that means you need to do at least 1 run to get to your opponents enemies. (And so does he...or she...) I dont know about you, but most of my opponents have this nasty habbit of bringing stuff along that shoots from a fairly large distance. (Like well...pretty much anything). all they need to do, to make your army turn tail and run like a bunch of ...yeah...skaven... is to kill 6 of your slaves or clanrats in one shot. With a cannon, or a larger group of archers or a lucky magic spell...they got you AND your warlord running in completely the opposite direction you want them to go. And sure...leadership 7 with +2 two is a nice Ld 9. But with an average of 12... that means you got 25% chance of fleeing. That is 25 percent IF you get within two turns towards an enemy unit. Imagine that your opponent gets to start the battle. He can diminish your units with magic and shooting. (He ll probably stay just where he is at that point, leaving you to cross the full 24 inch) . Thats one phase of shooting already. Then its your turn...you shoot, magic, run ... (in reverse order probably...) And then once more its his turn again. Shooting, magic, ... still staying where he is. and then you have to cross the final 14 inch with your unit. ( thats throwing a 9 with the dice...) So 25 percent chance of succes. If not...he gets one more turn of shooting and magicaning you up again. I think your units will be destroyed completely before you even get to the other side of the table. We have strength in number. 24 is not a good number. |
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against.................. won ............ lost Skaven...................1...................0 High Elfs.................1....................1 dark elfs.................0....................0 chaos warriors.......0....................0 demons..................0....................0 dwarves.................2....................1 bretonian................0....................0 empire....................0....................0 lizards.....................0...................0 tomb king................0...................0 vampires.................1...................0 beast men...............1...................0 wood elfs................0....................0 | |
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