Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Two games with the gobs against the new lizardmen, how did they go?

Last weekend I played two games against the new Lizards army. The lists were far from tuned as my opponent was rather wanting to test all the new rules and abilities of the army so had pretty much one of every unit type. The first game he had something along the lines of -

Scar vet on cold one
skink chief on steg
Skink priest on ancient / engine of gods
8 x skinks
1 x cohort, 1 krox
20 x ranked skinks (steg ancient joined unit)
20 x saurus with spears
10 x saurus with spears
4 x terradons
2 x salamanders
1 x razerdon

Second game he had much the same but made the following changes -

1 Steg
Slann
2 razerdons
1 salamander

The biggest weakness I noticed with the stegadons was that the skinks on top were so fragile. Even with the 2+ save from the ancient, his weapon skill and toughness is so low it's easy to throw engouh wounds agains him that he's bound to fail some armour saves. This pretty much removes the ability for the stegs to join skink or saurus infantry to make them stubborn as once they are without the character obviously they are forced out. My standard battle plan was to double charge my wyvern and one hit wonda hero on wolf into a steg infantry block and have my hero knock the skink off the top while my black orc and wyvern wailed on the unit.

Razerdons weren't as nasty as I expected purely for the fact that when they do the double artillery shots for their stand and shoot, if either of the two dice rolls up a misfire all shots are cancelled for that particular razerdon. It means on average a unit of 3 razerdons will do 4 artillery shots worth of spikes (15 approx). Another thing to take notice of when charging Razerdons is that while they don't receive many 'to hit' penalties for moving and shooting, long range or stand and shoot they do receive penalties trying to hit models in cover, or skirmishers. If you need to charge these guys, charge them with squig hoppers (preferably charging out of a forest!)

Anyway, I ended up with two wins agains the new lizards, one by about 500, one by about 350. I think they have the potential to be a tough army, but the direction GW has given the new lizards is quite different to the old one, so i'm guessing many players will struggling until they find the new playstyle associated with them.

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