Send some BC’s with extra hand weapons into their flank. They won’t last long against those suckers!
The Flying Beaver
Well, Skaven tend to rely a lot on the bait and flee tactic with the Skaven slaves. You could do much the same tactic using Hobgoblins, and if they don’t take the bait just shoot them to death with your bolt throwers/Earth Shaker/whatever.
Outhording them with Hobgoblins might not be a bad idea. Soak up shots, bait and redirect. Basically use their sneaky slave tactics against them, but with a green tinge.
Wallacer
Stand fast, hold your ground, pound them with missile fire and watch them run.
Xander
-Earthshaker one of the flanks repeatedly to prevent these models reaching combat. Skaven thrive on bringing multiple large units into combat, upping their CR. Deny them this.
-Blunderbusses are your friend here. Consider multiple smaller units, as their toughness isn’t brilliant, and you’ll need all the shooting you can get!
-Remember that under the new rules weapons teams are more easily targeted.Make sure to take full advantage of this!
-Either use your BCs as a strong flanking unit (as was suggested), or keep them in reserve to quickly counter the tunneling teams.
-If you have a unit of wolf riders, put them on march-blocking duty.
This is all of course from a theoryhammer point of view.
Ellimist
I would say go a little cheesey. Skaven like cheese (they are rats.) Two Earthshakers, at least four bolt throwers, maybe a death rocket, some Big Uns or Orc Arrer Boyz, A couple of big blocks of warriors several units of 10 BBs (S3 but with a width of 10 models or a width of 5 at S4, x however many units, x models in their units=lots of wounds!) and a few srocerers. That is also theoryhammer.
Hashut’s Blessing
psyche…
the terror causing taurus is the place to begin…
and if allowed take a hellcannon… good bye rat boyz…
metro_gnome
Have naked hobgoblins infront of your CD blocks, if you position them right, you can now get it so that they have to charge the hobgoblins instead of the CD (at which point the hobgoblins flee, forcing a fail charge which allows you a charge in the next turn); or they get charged by Both the Hobgoblins and the CD (note, it has to either be both or just the HGs for this to work)
I agree with sending in a Bull Taurus to put the fear of the Horned Rat into the little buggers. Failing to field a Bull Taurus because of points cost, I would try and barbecue their characters, and give them an even lower leadership, and of course pound them to Hashut’s fiery hell with missle fire.
Earthshakers and death rockets simply can’t miss against the horde. Take units which deal damage to multiple models: Blunders, bolt throwers, earthshakers and death rockets are your friends hear. As has been mentioned, psychology is your friend against Skaven. Causing panic tests should be the aim, so concentrate your fire until you’ve done 25% damage, then move onto a new target. Hobbo wolfriders are great a) for crossfire purposes and b) taking out any of those nasty war machines you miss with your magic users. On the subject of magic skaven spells are nasty. And watch out for the skitterleaping assasin with the orbs - he can take out your best character in a single go!
In recent experiences with a skaven player, i found something quite interesting. We were getting together for a well overdue night of gaming, and decided to play a smaller 500 point game and a larger 1500 point game. It became clear that the army works differently in different situations, much more so than our own. As we tend to rely on artillery and agressive movment, as well as defense, our tactics tend to be rather similar, no matter the size, or terrain. The Skaven army tends to work diofferently. In the 500 point game he simply hunkered down and used superior movment to move in a large group of woods, and fire out at me with his ratling gun. In this case (smaller games) use hobgobs to claim further quaters and dwarfs to claim closer ones. DO NOT PURSUE A FIGHT! If you try to attack him ina piece of terrain he is suted for, you will be DEFEATED! In the 1500 point game, his army became massivley more aggressive. I suppose this is rather normal with horde armys though.
As I mentioned before, Skaven tend to rely a lot on the bait and flee tactic with the Skaven slaves. You could do much the same tactic using Hobgoblins, and if they don’t take the bait just shoot them to death with your bolt throwers/Earth Shaker/whatever.
I remain convinced that the key to beating Skaven is to out horde them with Hobgoblins.
These hobgoblins can then be marched right up into the face of his slaves to force them to charge you (and thus ruin his bait and flee tactics).
Use 2 Earthshakers againt the Skaven. Pound his clanrat units with them. Fire the bolt throwers against the clanrat units as well.
Clanrat units are the core of his army, everything else is just gravy.
Consider using Death rockets as well. Against a horde army they will probably hit something even if they miss their intended target.
Well, first post here at CDO and might as well (as Skaven player) show some good intentions by posting some tips for playing against my fellow kin. grins…
First off, Skaven depend a lot on their superior numbers. This is partly due to the whole Strength In Numbers rule (meaning that the more ranks they have, the longer they’ll stick around), but also due to the fact that the more units they can field opposite to yourself, they can much easier ‘force’ you into making moves that benefit them through deployment/ carefull manoeuvring (sp?).
Secondly, Skaven shooting is nasty. Even while under the new 7th edition targeting rules the weapon teams have become far more vulnerable then during the previous edition, they have not lost the slightest bit of their firepower. Either if it’s a weapon team to guard ‘gaps’ in the scenery or the more hard-hitting jezzails, you can be assured that one round of shooting (where they don’t blow themselves up) is going to hurt.
Third: Beware of Skaven magic… Even while the Skaven magic casters aren’t the greatest in the world (personal opinion from experience), the Skaven magic lore remains to be one of the more devestating ones you can face. This is usually restricted to the warp-lightning spells, but the remaining spells in the lore (with perhaps the exceptance of Pestilent Breath, which is only usefull in combat where a Skaven doesn’t want his magic casters to be…) are just as well quite nasty.
Now there are a couple of things that Skaven armies fear:
- Being flanked;
- Large templates;
- Leadership tests.
The flank charge is still one of the most feared scenario’s a Skaven warlord has to take into account and therefor many will either employ weapon teams (ratling guns in particular are quite good for this job) or small, cheap units (slaves or giant rat packs) to ‘plug’ gaps in the scenery through which flanking forces might threaten the Skaven army.
The easiest way to deal with this is template weapons (earth shaker IIRC, or otherwise the hell cannon) that can ‘crack open’ one such gap and exploit this immediately by thundering through that hole with bull centaurs. As mentioned earlier, these are a horror for Skaven once these thunder into the flanks, due to a combination of high speed and high strength.
Still, large templates remain to be a horror to Skaven and as Chaos Dwarves have more then enough warmachines to threaten the Skaven army, tunneling teams can likely be a common sight. In that case, I’d prepare to face multiple tunneling teams as the quicker the Skaven can deal with the warmachines, the less punishment it has to take on the way to the opponent. A usual sight are two teams of five each with poisoned handweapons.
Countering this is easiest done by keeping a small (fast) force in reserve, such as either bull centaurs, wolf riders or a character on a big gribbly flying monster… Do mind that they usually show up around turn three (unless your Skaven opponent is known to roll really well), so the reserves might have to stay back for a while.
Leadership tests is one of those other horrors for Skaven and they will usually try to keep their main units (clanrats, plague monks, combat support units) within range of the ‘leadership bubble’ of the general. This way, they can guarantee themselves to keep on moving towards the opponent.
Panic tests are therefor the easiest way to disrupt the plans of a Skaven. This can be achieved the simplest way by magic missiles/ shooting, but it is wise to aim for the weakest unit in order to create the ‘domino effect’ of units in the surrounding areas having to take panic tests as well… Units outside range of the ‘leadership bubble’ (for example: jezzail teams that are put on the side of the battlefield to not being restricted in their line of sight by friendly units) are very interesting targets usually. If not, going for the units with the characters is always a nice second option.
One final word of advice: Be carefull of the warp-lightning cannon… From experience I can say it’s a (usually) dissapointing weapon, but it has its days and when it does, it goes through everything!
Watch out for that Screaming Bell. Blasted thing toke out an Earthshaker and three Bolt Throwers with one go. Furthermore I’d advise going magic heavy against them. Even a Seer and a Warplock Engineer can be really hard to nullify with just four dispel dice.[/align]
Magic heavy or taurus is a must for skaven to gain the psychological advantage of panic tests .In the case of tunnelling teams a unit of orc arrer boyz are the perfect cheap ,effective option(I KNOW I AM ALWAYS GOING ON ABOUT HOW USEFUL THEY ARE:P):hat
skaven can be a little tricky, but use your own slaves to counter his. shutting down his magic is a must, and a hobgoblin rocket may be just the ticket. a lord on taurus is great for terror and flanking.
bull centaurs need to watch out as they will get eaten alive by magic and ratling guns. leave these at home is my opinion, and level your earthshaker at his gunline.
magic wise, id go with shadow and/or death and/or fire. fire for burning head to kill ratters and panic multiple units. shadow for unseen lurker, steed of shadows, and shades of death. pit of shades isnt as useful as skaven I is high. death has walking death, doom and darkness. anything to force psychology tests and lower their ld is good.
this is what i have found and i run a destroyer in my list and my advice is for keeping the destroyer alive long enough to hide it in combat
against competitve lists your going to going to be up against 2 units of gutter runners and at least 1 warp lightning cannon. to me there the big threats to killing the destroyer due to poison and magic attacks, so with out telling you how to play if you can make them targets with your shooting and magic early you should be able to get the destroyer in to combat to killing things and to hide from magic missiles and shooting
Lore of Death in conjunction with hellcannons/dread quake mortars/death shrieker rocket launchers and dwarf style play.
If all goes well you will get doom and darkness and ensure that you get it off each magic phase on the unit of your choice, then pound that unit with hellcannon and/or death shrieker fire and watch them run the majority of the time. If you get purple sun cast it on high threat units and watch them disintegrate.
Use dread quake mortars and death shreikers to snipe out artillery pieces as quickly as possible; likewise use the dread quake mortar to make those hordes take dangerous terrain tests every time they move.
Either way sit back and get as many shooting phases as possible, focus fire on high threat units first and work your way down the food chain. Beware of slaves that get into close combat as the wise skaven player will use them to pin down a unit for concentrated fire, which will hurt.
there are 3 basic ways to get rid of skaven 1= get nothing but warriors and gunners to break their unit the first turn. 2= get little units and get a lot of deathshiekers, deathquake mortars and magma cannons to wipe most of them out and have your units wipe the rest out 3= get a lot of units with fear to charge and break them(prefer small units of bullcentaurs)
I faced a guy a while back with a 3000 pt skaven army(I was playing WOC)…He had two Hell Pit Abominations…very hard to get rid of without some type of flaming attack…If I play him again, I’ll be sure to us my CD’s and send my Kdaii Destroyer after them.
As treason is part of the skaven race as a former skaven general I feel not reluctant at all to tell my view at this topic:
How described above the skaven can put a great variety of troops to the battlefield. Almost always there will be a abomination, gutter runners and a great block of stormvermin. Very often there will be a warp lightning cannon. warlocks and a great seer are the main choice at casters and sometimes there will be a warlord and assassins. Defensively as again desribed above you definitely need good magic protection. skaven magic is nasty and maybe you want as addition to the scroll a scepter of stability because skaven can boost their pool with warpstone. Be careful to deny the right spells. Most time it is better to let go a warp lightning (bite on your teeth and take it a like a dwarf) than one of the other spells. Especially frenzied stormvermin or the curse of the horned one must be denied. Be sure to give one of the units flamed attacks against the abomination. At the beginning stay as wide as necessary and compact enough to prevent gutter runners near your deployment area which will otherwise attack your war machines with poison. Bows or rifles may be a good idea to kill them or also giant rats.
Offensively you have to be patient. Flying creatures (if you play a taurus) and war machines will possibly be delayed by the storm banner. Keep your troops together and concentrate your big fire on ONE important unit until size is at least halved. The skaven general will smile within if you fire too much at worthless slaves while his main regiment stays untouched. Your “small” range weapons care in the meantime for gutter runners, giant rats and if these are killed, slaves. If you field fast units of hobgoblinriders you can threaten the cannon from the side. In close combat try to keep your main regiment and other mighty units in one close combat and destroy the skaven units one ofter the other. Keep in mind that furnace and bell make their skaven regiment unbreakable. In close combat you have to destroy this devices first, so if you know you cannot do this: Don`t attack this regiment.
There are plenty other things to write. But thats enough for the moment :-). Many but not all roads lead to rome, so thats only my personal view of the things.
to tell my view at this topic: