Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I keep running into a reoccurring problem with my Lizardmen army. Slaan are awesome magic users, but since they cost so much points wise they pretty much take up all my Lord points. Then I don't really have any other Lord Heroes or creatures that can take on bad ass units.

The last two games I fought against Chaos in one and Wood Elves in the other. I barely won both games and it was because I had lots of great rank and file troops would took out almost all the basic troops of both armies I fought against. However, the Daemon Prince on the Juggernaught, the treeman, the other tree dudes, the chaos heavy knights and champion/heroes.

So, now I am faced with a conundrum. Do, I scratch the Slaan and build an Old one riding a Carnosaur? I can pimp out an Old blood, with like the blade of realities and frenzy with a ward save, which means extra attacks and every attack that hits you must take a leadership test or die, which is outright nasty. Or, I can keep going the Slaan route and dominate the Magic. Things like denying wizards 6's on casting die, and 2+ save against miscast and then giving the miscast to an enemy mage is pretty epic. However, it seems that the big bad stuff in the other players army is almost impossible to kill.

I used life magic and gave my Saurus unit +4 T one round against a Treeman, and while that 8 Toughness really helped prolong that unit's life I could not for the life of me kill or even wound the Treeman. That Unit eventually got wiped by the treeman and the wardancers that flanked them. I guess I could go the hero route since Slaan take up so many Lord points, but I cannot mount a Hero on a Carnosaur, and their items and stats are a bit more limiting.

So, what do you guys think?

I think do whatever you want. I personally like switching between both lord choices.

It is always good to have options. I personaly find that the carnosaur is a bit fragile, but can cause lots of damage.

My problem is the Slaan is weak and Life Magic while super awesome doesn't kill powerful models. Treekin and Treemen are like Toughness 7 and my basic rank and file troops can survive but they cannot dish it out against those models. The carnosaur does D3 wounds per a wound and is a decent monster.

In my last game I made a small mistake and the wood elf player roll box cars on his charge roll and charged my stegadon and owned him. Then thunderstomped the skink shaman.

I would love to find a way to squeeze in a Slaan and have another lord and maybe a few heroes.

If you want more killing power from your Slann then just take Light instead of Life. Aside from losing the mega spell in Dwellers Light is really a much better option for Lizards as it can push them from being decent in combat to outright nasty and still has some great defensive spells. It also doesn't require Loremaster (at least to the same extent that Life does) as you only really need 5 spells to ensure you get either Time Warp or Speed of Light (you really don't need both).

Why the insistence on taking a hero on a Carnosaur? An Oldblood is pretty nasty even without any magic items (and for their points Scar Vets are great without magic items as well) and putting him on a Carnosaur actually makes him more fragile. All he really needs is a bit of defensive gear (probably a ward of some kind) and he can run around chopping things to bits. Assuming you are playing 2400-2500pts you should easily be able to fit in a Slann (figure around 400pts, thats pretty tooled up, BSB, 2 Disciplines) and an Oldblood (200pts or so) in to the 600 or so points you have to work with.

I agree with Powerguy, you should be able to fit a Slann and an Oldblood in a list. Even at 2000pts, you may just have to back off a bit on the Slann. Sometimes going all out on a single character isn't the best choice, you don't have to sink 500 points into your Lord choice. You really can't spend more than about 260 points on an Oldblood without a mount, so they're not too bad as far as Lords go. I like to run one with the Armour of Destiny and the Obsidian Blade. 2+ armour, 4+ ward and 5 attacks that ignore armour saves. Also for the amount of points your opponent is spending on a couple treemen or a Chaos Lord with a Juggernaut, you could easily have two Oldbloods or an Oldblood and a few Scar-veterans.

You can try taking a cheaper slaan to fit in an oldblood, or just stick a few GW scar vets in your blocks, one for each block with GW, LA (or a mgic one) and maybe a ward. Remember you get 25% Lords and 25% Heroes, the 2 or 3 scar vets needed for your saurus blocks will gost around 100 pts a pop but the S7 is a nice way to slay big baddies and you can dodge nasty challenges via the unit champ, and the TG don't need this kind of bolstering having regen 5+/4+ and/or T6/8 should make them hard enough to kill and S5 can kill the bigger baddies over time.

If you want to see direct killing power from lore of life I dont think you're really thinking deeply enough about the lore. With rumination you're getting +4 power dice a turn so you're gonna be running 11 vs their 4 on average

Unfortunately there is no comparison between an old blood killing potential and the utterly destructive force of a Slaan.. Even if the old blood was in combat at the start of turn 1 he wouldnt do more damage than the slaan can do in a single phase

Throne of vines allows you to make sure your slann virtually never dies to miscasts and buffs your spells. WFB is VP based, so that basically means you'll never give up 500+ VPs unless the entire unit dies

Giving your guys +2T or +4 means in general they'll be only wounded on 6s, making S4 models wound about 2.5x less than usual. For every 24 hits you'll suffer 12 wounds normally, but with a life slann that unit suffers *4*.. Thats 3x less damage. In turn those 9 extra saurus warriors will deal about 5 wounds in return to T4 models.

Regeneration provides much the same bonuses of the above spell, making your guys even more insane. Couple that with the standard setup for temple guard you're looking at standard combat res of +5.. And since they wont do any wounds, you win easily

Shield of thorns with throne of vines up is pretty damn amazing also since it makes you almost IMMUNE to small units. They each take 2d6 S4 hits, and promptly die.

You can also raise models back to life.. This spell can win you the game because you can 7 models back (IE 7 temple guard or bring back a salamander unit that almost died)

FInally you got dwellers below which against a unit of 20 models will kill more models in a single turn than an old blood will prob kill all game

In short life slann is amazing

Take my 2500 pt tournament army and play it against your friends.. they'll probably agree that a life slann is unfair (and so is the army as a whole

Life slann - 465 pt version
Cube o darkness priest

21 temple guard
3x 10 camo skinks

30 saurus
30 saurus

3 salamanders + 11 handlers
3 salamanders + 11 hanlders

This same list can be scaled to 2000 or 3000 by adding normal skinks to 3000 + salamanders.. or reducing saurus units and some camo skinks for 2000 pts. ALl rares and lords fit neatly in 250 or 500pt blocks

Ubersllan is for tourneys, im still new and play friendly games, if a tourney style game is being planned i will definately bring the uberslaan, and less stegs
But untill then – POWER TO THE STAMPEDE

last game we played was 3000 points, here was my list roughly

Slaan
- 4 disciplines
-cupped hands of the old ones
life magic

Old blood
-blade of realities

25 x sauruses with spears

25 x saurus with spears

20 saurus with spears

25 temple guard with veteran

20 skinks with 2x Krox

20 skinks with 2x krox

stegadon with engine of the gods as a mount for my skink priest
-skink priest had cube of darkness

1 x salamander with extra skink crew


I was able to fit an old blood in, but barely. I liked the idea of 5 attacks and every hit = leadership test or die. The old blood took out a lot, but then suffered instant death by the hands of the war dancer in a challenge. Once he died, the whole right flank of my army was weak, and they were in combat with a treeman for 3 turns, as I kept giving them +4 toughness but they could not wound the treeman with their Strength of 4.

Kirasu wrote:

3 salamanders + 11 handlers

This confuses me. Are you saying you have 3 Salamanders and a TOTAL of 11 handlers, or that you have a total of 20 handlers for three Salamanders?

Because I always read it that you could only have 4 handlers per Salamander max.

5$ say Kirasu didn't take an illegal army to a tournament

If comp gets scored, you might want to skip the slann.
Heavens magic isn't horrible, and skinks can get the job done.
You can still win without the uber-slann, and you're opponent will be happy that you aren't "That Guy".
Lizardmen units all tend to be pretty good, and the points saved on slann give you a lot of options.

-Matt

Well I just bought a guy's Lizardmen army he had purchased and done nothing with, so I think I got around 7,000 to 8,000 points of lizards now. His new stuff combined with my 4th edition stuff is a lot of lizards

I have roughly the following (haven't done inventory yet)

100+ skinks
10 krox
100+ saurus
30+ Temple Guard
16 cold ones
2 slaan (4th edition ones)
3 x carnosaurs w/ riders
several blister packs of champions (both skink and saurus)
3x stegadons
3 x horned ones
3 x salamanders

I have more than I need but the guy selling his old stuff just lumped it all into one lot of miniatures and the price was about half of what it would cost retail to buy it. A lot of it is still on sprue. So, now I am completely done buying lizards, and I just need to paint all this stuff. Next I am thinking about building an Ogre army.

I have found there are no such thing as friendly games of WFB. Every time I've tried to take a toned down list, even against other toned down lists, I get tabled by turn three.

Your answer to high toughness models are stegadons, temple guard, or Kroxigors. Having a slaan and two stegadons is pretty standard in a lot of Lizardmen lists.

Lore of Life is going to be your best bet almost always because against high toughness (and usually high strength) units, you just use flesh to stone and make the unit T8. A T8 unit of skinks with kroxes or Saurus Warriors can kill any unit in the game eventually.

skinks can only get up to T6 (with just flesh to stone that is), but that's hard enough to wound.

Playing a game thursday 2,000 points against Orcs I think.

I will be probably building an army like this

1 x Slaan or 1 x Old blood on carnosaur

several blocks of 20 Saurus units

2 salamanders

2 stegadons

I haven't worked out the points yet, but I think I am going to ditch the skinks and just do rank and file saurus units.

Carno bloods are too expensive for 2k IMO, i just can't seem to fit the gear i want on 'em.

HoverBoy wrote:Carno bloods are too expensive for 2k IMO, i just can't seem to fit the gear i want on 'em.

Yeah my problem with my lizards is, if I field a Slaan I got nothing to take out other lords and heroes on the other side since the Slaan eat up so many points. If I take an Old Blood on a carno with some gear (blade of realities) then I can cause some serious damage to his big stuff.

I definitely need to keep my stegadons in the back this game. Last game I charged them up and they got torn to shreds by treemen.

In 2500+ you can include an economy slaan and an oldblood on foot, stick them in the same TG unit and go nuts

HoverBoy wrote:In 2500+ you can include an economy slaan and an oldblood on foot, stick them in the same TG unit and go nuts

Yes but don't Old Bloods in the same unit as a Slaan always have to challenge? I like having the option of not issuing challenges.

I've never heard of such a rule.

I'm just gonna second what pretty much everyone has said- Slann is more competitive, Oldblood isn't bad but can be kinda fragile.

HoverBoy wrote:I've never heard of such a rule.

Yeah I read that rule on a special character and thought it was all old bloods. It is just that ultimate bodyguard dude.

I think I may field the skink special character that takes beast lore and hope I can morph him into something awesome. I think I will stick with the Slaan and life magic next game as well. I just wish skinks could take other lores outside of heavens.

Well played again last night. 2250 WE vs Lizards

My list was roughly (don't have it in front of me)
Slaan
-4 disciplines
-cupped hands of the old ones
-Life Magic

20 x saurus unit
-standard
-musician

25 x saurus unit
-standard
-musician
-champion

20 temple guard
-champion
-magic banner that causes all attacks to be flaming attacks

5 cold ones
-champion
-musician
-standard
-magic banner that gives strider ability

2 x stegadons
- 1 engine of the gods with a skink priest lvl 1
- 1 giant bow

I lost initiative so he went first. Lots of shooting, hail of doom arrow. Some saurus and cold ones die. I charge the scouts with cold ones and they have strider so they go right into the woods no problemo. everything else marches
- cold ones wipe scouts and are left on my far right flank of the table

turn 2
- more shooting on his part, magic was tame

my turn 2
marching, blocked treeman's path to stegadon with 20x saurus block. Passed leadership test to march right up next to him. My stegadon on the left flank gets slaughtered by the WE Lord General.

Turn 3 was pretty much game over. At this point I had my cold ones charging from the flank, my saurus charing the treekin, my temple guard charging the giant archer unit with the mage/heroes in it. By the time his treeman even got close to being back in the game I had wiped most units in hand to hand. His treekin ended up wiping out my cold ones and saurus unit but my other stegadon charged in for a flank attack and it was death for the treekin with impact hits and thunder stomp.

Turn 4

Treeman finally charges into Temple Guard for the last ditch effort to score victory points. Flaming attacks cause double wounds, and I ended up getting a ton of wounds on him and he failed his saves. I killed his general with a good roll on a magic spell, and my stegadon did some damage to all the forest spririts.
a
Overall, this game was a lot easier to win this time because I was very careful with my movement and maneuvered my units around to avoid being charged by the treeman and the treekin. In fact, I did almost all the charging that game. Made a HUGE difference.

Crom wrote:His treekin ended up wiping out my cold ones and saurus unit but my other stegadon charged in for a flank attack and it was death for the treekin with impact hits and thunder stomp.

You can't stomp on monstrous infantry! Looks like you did a good job manuevering overall, but definitely no thunderstomp allowed in this case...

I've made the same mistake plenty of times, it's hard to keep track of what you can do it against. But pretty much anything else that can stomp, can't be stomped, as well as cavalry.

RiTides wrote:

Crom wrote:His treekin ended up wiping out my cold ones and saurus unit but my other stegadon charged in for a flank attack and it was death for the treekin with impact hits and thunder stomp.

You can't stomp on monstrous infantry! Looks like you did a good job manuevering overall, but definitely no thunderstomp allowed in this case...

I've made the same mistake plenty of times, it's hard to keep track of what you can do it against. But pretty much anything else that can stomp, can't be stomped, as well as cavalry.

That's right you can only stomp infantry, swarms, and cavalry right? Can a larger creature like a stegadon stomp 40mm base units? We always get that rule messed up.

No you can't stomp cavalry either.
Only infantry, warbeasts and swarms are stompable.

HoverBoy wrote:No you can't stomp cavalry either.
Only infantry, warbeasts and swarms are stompable.

OK we should hopefully get this rule right someday. Our gaming group (just 3 of us at the moment) haven't played GW games since 4th edition fantasy and 2nd Edition 40K. So, we are learning a lot of new rules. Back when we played the magic system used cards....

There's nothing wrong with not gettin all the rules right from the start, in fact i doudbt anyone can pull it off.