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I know the fluff in the text talks about unbreakable being about magical bonds and stuff, but there's no reason it couldn't also represent guys sneaking off from the back ranks when the battle is going really bad. And when you think about slaves who are there and fighting because someone is making them, well then if the battle is going really badly that sounds like a great opportunity to sneak off.

Also, I don't have either of the Undead books on hand, but reading through the BRB it reads like you can be Unstable without being Unbreakable. That is to say, you could lose combat by a lot, make your steadfast check and still have a bunch of guys sneak off the back saying 'screw this I'm out of here'.

So slaves would suffer a double whammy, a chance to break and when combat is going badly the unit would start to disappear a lot quicker. It means elite troops would be able to smash through these guys about twice as fast as they do now, and maybe they'd start to look as fragile as they ought to.

Any thoughts?

This sounds pretty brilliant. The friend I usually play with runs Skaven and I can't tell you how many times groups of Treekin or Dryads have been pinned for an entire game because of a few hundred points of slaves.

I don't have a problem with rules like Unstable being used in other contexts, it's a version of "counts as." I remember someone getting really bent out of shape when I tried to say Regen could be something other than actual biological regeneration. And then TK gave their new animated constructs a way to regen...

But I just don't know how much good it will do. The owners will have to counter by keeping them near their general. Also, it has a side effect of not allowing heroes to join.

The high leadership of the general and the Hold Your Ground rule will put the slaves about where they were before, but only around those two characters. Being able to wear away a flank and circle behind the frontline would become an option, if not an easy one.

Makes sense to me. And what self respecting character(even if he is a dirty rat) would hang out with slaves?

It seems like a good way to get yourself killed, more then usual in skaven society. I'm sick of seeing Engineers hiding in slave blocks when that would probably be a dangerous place to be.

I have no problem with slaves as they currently are, they are slow and unwiedly in such big blocks and dont have the leadership to operate outside of the 12" bubble.

Putting a engineer in the unit solves the LD issues to a degree but it then denies you the chance to shoot into your own unit.

Slaves are fine as they are if someone takes the time to paint up 200 rats they deserve to enjoy the rewards.

DukeRustfield wrote:I don't have a problem with rules like Unstable being used in other contexts, it's a version of "counts as." I remember someone getting really bent out of shape when I tried to say Regen could be something other than actual biological regeneration. And then TK gave their new animated constructs a way to regen...

The flowery text they give for some rules effects becomes dogma for some people. As much as GW shouldn't have to, they probably need to write next to every rule they've got 'although this is the most common form of this rule it isn't the only way it can happen'.

But I just don't know how much good it will do.

This is my question, really. I think there's always a potential to add too many special rules to too many units, so it should be important to ensure every special rule really plays an important part in how that unit works. As such, a rule like this should only be used if it makes a really big difference to how Skaven Slaves work in the game. So would this rule really make that much of a difference to Skaven Slaves?

Would it just result in people shifting from 50 to odd strong units?

Also, it has a side effect of not allowing heroes to join.

I didn't think of that, but count it as another positive.

Jubear wrote: Slaves are fine as they are if someone takes the time to paint up 200 rats they deserve to enjoy the rewards

Here here, im in the midst of making and painting my slaves and with 80 painted to a respectable quality i must say i would be a sad panda to watch them scurry off the board.... well more then they normally do.

As for the fluff of why they don't scurry away if combat is going poorly its pretty well explained in the book. Most have spent their entire lives being beaten and oppressed by their taskmasters and are often more scared of them then they are of the enemy since their essentially psychologically broken. They would rather fight as a huge pack (and hope that someone else dies) for the chance of being a clanrat, then face their task masters after all as the book says, any slaves that runs, is eaten. So its fight and probably die, or run and assuredly die because wolf rats always lurk around the Skaven armies and would get any slave that the other Skaven don't catch first. AND even even if you don't buy that, where would they go? Towns wouldn't exactly accept a running Skaven, if they were even to make it far enough away from the battlefield they are all beaten and undernourished so they wouldn't exactly be able to make it to far away and if say a dwarf did live, did run, and did make it to a town he would most likely still die to all those Skaven diseases, because once again as the army book says the non Skaven slaves, the ones who a town might actually help, never last long. So in the end it kind of works out like on of those high profile kidnapping cases, eventually the victim becomes so scared/dependent upon the kidnapper (overlord in this case) that even when presented with freedom they still don't run they're simply too psychologically broken to run.

The lords heroes and such putz around in the slave blocks for a few reasons
A. Because they are Their slaves and have a lot of psychological control over the slaves
B. Some Skaven players fluff it as they're servants or untrained Skaven, like a posse for the engineer
C. It could be that the leaders have been back-stabbed or betrayed to the point that they wind up stuck with a bunch of slaves, though dangerous they don't want to be there either.
well I think thats about all i have in , me or else a moderator might ask me to stop lol.

As a long time skaven player i have to say i like this idea-it realy makes sense but how about calling it something like "better alive than dead" or something more apropiate.... Also i hate seeing characters in slave blocks unless nessassary. And i once had a colum of slaves bog down a unit of "Da Immortrals" for 4 game turns as well as killing half of them. And yes they were well outside of the 12" bubble and had no characters with them.

master of ordinance wrote:As a long time skaven player i have to say i like this idea-it realy makes sense but how about calling it something like "better alive than dead" or something more apropiate.... Also i hate seeing characters in slave blocks unless nessassary. And i once had a colum of slaves bog down a unit of "Da Immortrals" for 4 game turns as well as killing half of them. And yes they were well outside of the 12" bubble and had no characters with them.

wow that alot of Ld 5 break test to pass

sandant wrote:As for the fluff of why they don't scurry away if combat is going poorly its pretty well explained in the book. Most have spent their entire lives being beaten and oppressed by their taskmasters and are often more scared of them then they are of the enemy since their essentially psychologically broken. They would rather fight as a huge pack (and hope that someone else dies) for the chance of being a clanrat, then face their task masters after all as the book says, any slaves that runs, is eaten. So its fight and probably die, or run and assuredly die because wolf rats always lurk around the Skaven armies and would get any slave that the other Skaven don't catch first.

Sure, which works for explaining how they work now. The fluff could just as easily be changed to say that many slaves will take any chance to disappear into the chaos of battle, without really changing how people see them work.

I was looking to address the probem with how they work in the game - between steadfast, a general's leadership and a rank bonus you have a unit that for a low price can potentially stay in combat for a really, really long time.

That could be fixed with a points hike, and maybe that'd be enough to price 50 slaves appropriately for how long they can hold up superior enemy units. But my idea was to make them feel like a unit of slaves, that would disappear more quickly when taking a severe beating than other skaven units would.

Flank charges will dislodge a slave block faster then you could imagine lol, no rank bonus, and you have Ld 2.

Jubear wrote:

master of ordinance wrote:As a long time skaven player i have to say i like this idea-it realy makes sense but how about calling it something like "better alive than dead" or something more apropiate.... Also i hate seeing characters in slave blocks unless nessassary. And i once had a colum of slaves bog down a unit of "Da Immortrals" for 4 game turns as well as killing half of them. And yes they were well outside of the 12" bubble and had no characters with them.

wow that alot of Ld 5 break test to pass

Yeah well it was a slavebomb column of 70 slaves 5 models per rank. Mind you when it went off it only took 1-2 down. They were stubborn however for being in a fungal forest.

sandant wrote:Flank charges will dislodge a slave block faster then you could imagine lol, no rank bonus, and you have Ld 2.

Yeah, I know. I've faced slaves plenty of times and I know how to beat them. But getting that flank charge against skaven isn't always practical (given beating skaven relies on sweeping a flank as often as not, most skaven players have more than few tricks to ensure their flanks are protected).

But vulnerable flank or not, slaves remain exceptionally good value, because even if they flee you've lost no more than 100 odd points, and when they do work they can hold up much more valuable, much higher quality units for a whole game. I mean, they're just excellent value for their points, and there's no pretending otherwise. They were designed and priced when there was no steadfast, and so 10 ranks couldn't be relied upon to hold an enemy up for multiple turns.

They could be set closer to their in-game value with a price hike, and that's probably what's going to happen with the new Skaven book. But I thought it might be interesting to think of them as wilting away in the face of heavy combat, even when they hold.

sebster wrote:

sandant wrote:Flank charges will dislodge a slave block faster then you could imagine lol, no rank bonus, and you have Ld 2.

Yeah, I know. I've faced slaves plenty of times and I know how to beat them. But getting that flank charge against skaven isn't always practical (given beating skaven relies on sweeping a flank as often as not, most skaven players have more than few tricks to ensure their flanks are protected).

But vulnerable flank or not, slaves remain exceptionally good value, because even if they flee you've lost no more than 100 odd points, and when they do work they can hold up much more valuable, much higher quality units for a whole game. I mean, they're just excellent value for their points, and there's no pretending otherwise. They were designed and priced when there was no steadfast, and so 10 ranks couldn't be relied upon to hold an enemy up for multiple turns.

They could be set closer to their in-game value with a price hike, and that's probably what's going to happen with the new Skaven book. But I thought it might be interesting to think of them as wilting away in the face of heavy combat, even when they hold.

Templates, magic, redirectors and of course hitting them with a really strong unit (30 SMs in horde will kill 21.74 a turn even against a slave frontage of 5) or a similar sized unit of cheap core. There are a ton of options. And without them the skaven book would not work. If your meta is full of medium sized blocks of troops of around 50 then you need to bring a few yourself every army has access to something that can be fielded in large numbers.

Only if they will be only one point they may be unstable

Jubear wrote:Templates, magic, redirectors and of course hitting them with a really strong unit (30 SMs in horde will kill 21.74 a turn even against a slave frontage of 5) or a similar sized unit of cheap core. There are a ton of options. And without them the skaven book would not work. If your meta is full of medium sized blocks of troops of around 50 then you need to bring a few yourself every army has access to something that can be fielded in large numbers.

So you're not even going to bother reading my posts, then? Because I said I there are plenty of ways to beat slaves. But that doesn't change the fact that slaves are extremely good value for what you get. The fact that they have weaknesses does not mean they are therefore automatically worth whatever they cost. That's not an argument.

So if you don't like my suggestion that's fine, no harm done, I think there are a couple of problems with it myself (how many special rules do we need for a cheapo unit being the big one). But arguing against a debuff against a unit in your army because 'there are ways to kill it' is just wasting people's time.

sebster wrote:

Jubear wrote:Templates, magic, redirectors and of course hitting them with a really strong unit (30 SMs in horde will kill 21.74 a turn even against a slave frontage of 5) or a similar sized unit of cheap core. There are a ton of options. And without them the skaven book would not work. If your meta is full of medium sized blocks of troops of around 50 then you need to bring a few yourself every army has access to something that can be fielded in large numbers.

So you're not even going to bother reading my posts, then? Because I said I there are plenty of ways to beat slaves. But that doesn't change the fact that slaves are extremely good value for what you get. The fact that they have weaknesses does not mean they are therefore automatically worth whatever they cost. That's not an argument.

So if you don't like my suggestion that's fine, no harm done, I think there are a couple of problems with it myself (how many special rules do we need for a cheapo unit being the big one). But arguing against a debuff against a unit in your army because 'there are ways to kill it' is just wasting people's time.

No I did read your post I was just suggesting they slaves are pointed fairly well for what they bring to the table because they have numerous weak points. Unstable is not something that is needed for slaves they are pointed fairly considering they simply cant leave the 12" Ld bubble. Sorry you took offense that was not my intent.

master of ordinance wrote:

Jubear wrote:

master of ordinance wrote:As a long time skaven player i have to say i like this idea-it realy makes sense but how about calling it something like "better alive than dead" or something more apropiate.... Also i hate seeing characters in slave blocks unless nessassary. And i once had a colum of slaves bog down a unit of "Da Immortrals" for 4 game turns as well as killing half of them. And yes they were well outside of the 12" bubble and had no characters with them.

wow that alot of Ld 5 break test to pass

Yeah well it was a slavebomb column of 70 slaves 5 models per rank. Mind you when it went off it only took 1-2 down. They were stubborn however for being in a fungal forest.

Also, 14 ranks deep gives them +13 ld IIRC.

Its caps at +3

Jubear wrote:Its caps at +3

That isnt in my book?

Check the FAQ.

Slaves are a point cheaper than Zombies, which are a worse unit (and Unstable). They are a point cheaper than Goblins who have 6LD and LA.

I could see them going to 2.5 pts or WS1.

Jubear wrote:No I did read your post I was just suggesting they slaves are pointed fairly well for what they bring to the table because they have numerous weak points. Unstable is not something that is needed for slaves they are pointed fairly considering they simply cant leave the 12" Ld bubble. Sorry you took offense that was not my intent.

Okay, I misread what you were saying, my mistake. Sorry for reacting as I did.

Fair enough if you think slaves are properly costed considering their abilities and weaknesses. I'm just going to have to say I think you're wrong, and I think most people will probably agree with me on this - slaves are very good for their points cost. I could see them being increased in cost, or having another ability like unstable added to them with a rewrite.

Grey Templar wrote:Check the FAQ.

Thats mean.
They didnt place that in the book.
If slaves go to 3 points though, it would be more reasonable to just ignore 'em and field clanrats without anything extra.

DukeRustfield wrote:
Slaves are a point cheaper than Zombies, which are a worse unit (and Unstable). They are a point cheaper than Goblins who have 6LD and LA.

I could see them going to 2.5 pts or WS1.

Zombies cause fear and though unstable they're also unbreakable. Not to mention zombies can be raised back faster than any other undead units.

I will admit i haven't read the original post yet but this is what i think on the matter. I'm unsure if i want slaves to be unstable. Slaves are at Ld 2 and it only stacks to 3 ranks beyond the first. Unless you throw a base warlock in the unit to give them a leadership 5 that can get to 8 or if you have a leader very close to them that can give them a higher leadership that can be boosted. That said 'strength in numbers' doesn't work when ranks are broken like from being flanked. So you guys are mostly having problems with an army of slaves possibly that has to stay stuck within 12"-18" (grey seer or plague priest on bell/furnace) and honestly you could do toughness tests from magic to them. Though their stat-line is decent for the points they cost they can still die pretty hard. Also if skavenslaves lose combat in melee even once they just attack anything in a certain range a few times and all auto-die taking all characters in their unit with them. Skavenslaves can be shot into by the owning player's ranged units but only if there are no characters in them. That means you have to rely on a BSB and general with 'strength in numbers' to do everything.

Am i comfortable with how things are? Somewhat. Could some new rules be introduced to change things? Probably.

I do think that as they are skavenslaves could go up to 2 and a half points up from 2 and be worth it. At 3 pts considering clanrats have a better stat-line easily esp. in Ld and better armor at 4 pts it'd be a waste to even take slaves in most cases. The one reason to even take slaves at that point would be that you can shoot into slaves. Slaves are a fodder unit that only causes panic in other slave units. Other armies have enough killy melee, good shooting or fantastic magic to handle these numbers. I haven't totally seen slaves in action but they have to be worth it for a skaven player to take. Considering some of the restrictions i don't see them as terribly useful beyond 2 and a half points.

My suggestion to people that can't handle a slave mass is to get slaves out of position with magic or something, use magic like toughness tests on the whole unit or similar, flank and kill off characters with death magic, shooting with the sniper rule, etc. Warlocks shouldn't be hard to kill in a unit of slaves but you can't challenge them as they'll just use verminous valor and jump to the back of the unit and use leadership from said character anyway. You have to focus them down with a few rank and file guys and considering warlocks are basically a 2 wound clanrat model with no armor they shouldn't be hard to take down. Skaven already have poor leadership esp. when flanked. The only way to have decent leadership with skaven is 'strength in numbers', leaders and a BSB. Flank any skaven really and their unit's morale should be no higher than a 7 tops if they're lucky and luckier if they have a BSB nearby.

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Whoops seems i necro'd a thread. My apologies it was on page one to my knowledge.

Let's lock this one down and maybe start up a new one?