Dealing with Skinks, Q from the army list forum Options

[Lockjaw]

A question from the Army list forum that I thought deserved a thread of it's own:

So... leaving comp scoring aside, what is the answer to the problem of facing lots of skinks? What does theoryhammer suggest as the in-game solution? Adaptation of playstyle, or alterations to army build to cope? Specifics?

Having had a bit of experiance playing with (and against) skinks, I can give a few pointers. The perfect skink killers are Spirt Hosts. Can't be hurt, move through terrain, etc. Of course not everyone has access to spirt hosts, so in more general terms the best way to deal with skinks is to 'sweep' them away with something resiliant enough to take a fistful of poison shots whilst being fast enough to make sure the job gets done. Cheap units of heavy cav such as Empire knights or Dogs of War Heavy cav (which everyone has access to) are excellent at this. They will mince the skinks and they're cheap enough that you don't care if they get bogged down in a forest or are forced to flee from a resulting counter-charge. Cheap melee skirmishing units like Dryads, Beast herds, etc are also very good for clearing away skinks. Chariots are good in open terrain, but if the skinks have terrain they can use then the chariots are useless.

Some things are definately NOT suited to chasing skinks around... Giants, chaos spawn, ogres, etc. Basically anything lightly armoured that is expensive enough for you to care about losing should avoid skinks.

If you march block skinks you cut their manuverbility in half. With some careful positioning you can trap a unit of skinks and ensure that it can't move out of charge arc or out of range of your sweeping unit. But if you get it wrong and allow the skinks to get to your flank or rear then you've got a real problem unless your a skirmish unit yourself. Take that extra moment to get your positioning spot on and also ensure your lizardmen opponent doesnt pull out his stretchy tape measure when trying to get those skinks around your flank.

Skink LD is relatively poor when away from the general. If you can force a panic test on LD5 you've got almost a 50% chance of the skinks failing. Default d6 s4 magic missles are good to throw at skinks. You generally will need to kill 3 models to force a panic and on average that's what a fireball will do. Remember that with the exception of a stegadon, tzacoatl marked units or a jungle swarm (which i haven't seen in an army since 6th ed) everything else in the lizard army is suceptible to panic from skinks. Use this to your advantage, try and make your opponents fleeing skinks go through as many units as possible. Even on LD 8 or 9 lizard players are going to fail a test eventually. I've lost games before from having a skink screen flee through my 1000 point slann+temple guard unit, panic it and have it run off the board. It can and does happen, so maximise your chances.

Hope that helps some of you dealing with Lizards. I'm playing Chaos in my next tourney or two (dubbo this weekend) so you'll hafta wait awhile before using my tactics against me

Cheers,
Locky

[Dave Grant]

Bastard!


I can't believe you gave all those secrets away. Excellent breakdown of how to get the little sods.

The other options of course include archers (TK archers LOVE skinks) as the -1 to hit is often offset by the T2, and cheap blocks (slaves, goblins, gnoblars...)

I also find lone heroes, with a 2+ save or better to be good skink killers - just not near the Slann (cos then they won't break) or if you're prone to rolling snake-eyes.

Re panic, you're most correct. High Ld is good, but if your army takes 10 tests you'll fail at least 1.

[Mutator]

So... skinks are really just VP on the hoof then: no need for adverse comp scores if you field lots of them?

[Bobo the Vampire Monkey]

Good breakdown.

I always found cheap heavy cavalry units to give my Skinks the most trouble.
Also, one thing for people to remember is that you don't actually have to KILL the Skinks. Sometimes all you have to do is control them, by limiting the amount that they can annoy you by restricting their movement and making them take risks if they want to come out and get into the game. Dragons are generally quite resistant to all that poison thanks to the 3+ armour save, but you may want to be wary if the beastie has already suffered a wound or two from Stegadon bow shots or magic. Terror is your friend...


Locky - are you bringing Chaos to BIG March? I thought the Slann would be making the journey after his success at DogCon?

[Zippy Wonderdog]

All that the Ogre Kingdoms has is Leadbelchers and even then you have to hope for high rolls.
I guess you could use gnoblars to screen your ogres but thats such an annoying way to play, on the otherhand so is taking lots of skinks....

[Lockjaw]

Locky - are you bringing Chaos to BIG March? I thought the Slann would be making the journey after his success at DogCon?

No idea what I'm taking to BIG March. I'm still enjoying the lizards and my results with them have always been strong, but I do tend to change things up fairly regularly. I might look at borrowing an army for big march and playing something other than chaos or lizards.

Locky

[rampagingpenguins]

The biggest weakness skinks have is their range... means that if you protect your juicy targets and flanks, the skinks are going to HAVE to come withint charge range of your blocks to shoot at anything good... once they start fleeing, they tend to keep going, or at least by the time they rally you are getting stuck into other things.

The annoying thing is the ammount of effort that has to be put in to get rid of the skinks (or at least get them out of the game) compared to their points cost...

[warpaintoz]

I tend to think that if you don't have the tools to go after them, then its simply best to ignore them and go after the rest of the army. If they get in your way it means they are usually in the way oif the combat parts of the lizardmen anyway.