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When I played my first 1500 point game against my buddies skaven he smashed me, mainly due to pin point accuracy with his catapult, but he also had a massive 10x6 unit of clanrats. I won our second game in which he used 3 5x4 units and a 5x4 unit of stormvermin as well, I ended up either destroying his unit or sent them fleeing for the hills. He said he thought his problem was the smaller units so he said he won't make the same mistake again. So I want to know what is my best option vs a massive unit like that because obviously I can't field a horde of Sword Masters, and I also need to have enough other units to take care of his storm vermin, catapult, jezzails, rat ogres, warp-fire thrower, poisoned wind mortar, etc etc. God his army seems endless compared to my 3-4 units.

Catapult is death for HE, left my book up stairs but I believe it's a Toughness test and your HE are a lot of points. Add in that it's a large template and you're hurting. The 2nd game he made the mistake of not taking larger units. 5 wide and 8 deep are good, skaven benefit from extra ranks for their leadership tests. Skaven book is very well written but they will blow themselves up, I'm afraid I don't know too much about HE to offer advice on what you should do.

I am fairly new to WFB but one of the two armies i am constructing is high elves, something worht looking into might be phoenix gaurd?? +4 ward makes for a pretty decent life span and fear causing is like icing on the cake, and its not liek they wont hit hard, granted not as hard hitting as the SM but a better life expectancy

The Plague Claw Catapult is a large template, S2 no armour, one wound equals a panic test.

I doubt your friend needed a single unit of 60 rats, but units of 20 are indeed too small. I run four 50-rat blocks at 2000 and up. 30 is generally considered the minimum.

Against big units, I'd consider Spearmen, since they're your cheapest unit and have a lot of attacks.

Typically, though, those huge blocks are just going to stick around for a while, rather than kill stuff. After the first round of combat, charge them with a small-ish unit of decent troops in their flank. Effectively +6 CR, assuming both your units have standards.

Pheonix Guard are indeed great. Amazing, in fact.

Clanrats do almost no damage. Put a unit with a decent amount of attacks against them (Spearmen are a good choice).

In combat, you're going to be hard-pressed to do a lot against a horde of skaven. They'll take the losses, to be sure, and you'll have the advantage of striking first, but they can lose a LOT more than you and still have enough numbers to stay locked in combat.

Keep your swordmasters and other high point units out of that tarpit - they're too valuable to get bogged down on a unit like that. Hit him with a big block of spearmen (remember, with the "fights in extra ranks" rule of HE spearmen, you'll be hitting him with four ranks worth of pointy sticks) instead.

Magic - especially template based stuff - will help. Also anything that forces a leadership test. Big blocks of rats aren't so scary when they're scampering to their own table edge. But as High Elves, you have access to just about every nook and cranny of the magic library - make good use of it. Even lowly bound items are worth their weight in gold against big mobs of squishy rats.

Potential sneaky tactic here... put a wizard hero in the robe that makes him immune to anything but magical attacks and have him charge the rats. Assuming they don't have a champion with magic weapons, they shouldn't be able to touch the guy, and you've essentially negated the entire unit.

Other than that, I would say Phoenix Guard (causing fear gives them a good chance of making the rats attack with WS1) and chariots (impact hits) might have a positive effect for you.

One big thing to remember is that you don't have to kill every single rat to get rid of the unit. Sure, with steadfast, the general's leadership and the BSB's reroll it's pretty hard to break a unit. And with the number of troops a skaven player can put in the field you can almost give up on removing steadfast, but skaven characters are very squishy, so if you plan to do it you can be fairly confident of killing the general and his BSB.

All of a sudden those big units will be testing against their own LD every combat they lose, and testing at 8s at best, with slaves testing on 5s.

Very true. Straight-up Leadership and break tests aren't a problem for Skaven, who'll be Ld10 with a re-roll where it counts. But snipe those characters (Grey Seers are S3, so Dwellers is...good), and that's about it.

If you're tooling out a list to deal specifically with Skaven, I'd either throw the Sword Masters in there; they're ideal for taking on large blocks of T3 models, or not take Sword Masters at all. The bonus vs. shooting that the Lions and Guard have, in addition to the Lion's Stubborn and S6, make them better suited to tackling the other threats of a Skaven force, and less equipped to deal with 50 slaves.

Strelka wrote:Potential sneaky tactic here... put a wizard hero in the robe that makes him immune to anything but magical attacks and have him charge the rats. Assuming they don't have a champion with magic weapons, they shouldn't be able to touch the guy, and you've essentially negated the entire unit.

This won't work. The Mage won't kill any Clanrats / Slaves in combat and will therefore lose the combat by 4 on Static Combat Resolution. Since the Mage isn't Stubborn or Steadfast, that will mean a Break Test on Leadership 5 every round. Good luck with that.

...Crown of Stubbornness?
The other issue I have with this sort of thing is that, by the time you've kitted out your character so he can do this stuff, he's already dangerously close to the same point cost as the unit he's tying up.

On huge uberunits and Deathstars, it's nice. But against tar pits? I'd just have a few small-ish units of good troops that can get stuck in and win for a while, so the real meat of the force can go elsewhere.
...though that's hard to do with High Elf point costs. Really, I'd just invest in one or two decent blocks of infantry for the job. 18 Khornate Warriors with halberds can shred 50 slaves in three combat phases.

@ Warpsolution

You can't actually take the Crown of Command, Folariath's Robe and Talisman of Saphery, as this is over 100 points on Magic Items.

Lore of Death to hit the BSB and general (they don't get ranks for leadership on these tests, as per the FAQ).

Once those are out of the way, any flanking unit with a rank will crush skaven.

-Matt

True dat.

Why do you need the Talisman to perform this "trick", Airmaniac? I thought it was Robe for Ethereal and Crown for Stubborn. But at any rate, it's not worth doing.

8th has a counter to everything. The counter to hordes are templates or magic.

As a HE player who plays against Skaven a lot, I recommend taking a lvl 4 mage with life or shadow magic. Use dwellers below on his horde unit a couple of times and see how he likes it. It might change his mind on hordes.

Also, don't let anyone tell you that you shouldn't use that spell. HE's are a magicky army. It's fluffy and it fits their play style. It's also how we can effectively deal with certain things in the game while mitigating our weaknesses (i.e. high pts cost, small amounts of units, low T). So, light up him up with magic. I also like shadow magic. The pit of shades by itself won't do much to skaven because of their high Int, however, if you lower it with the signature spell then toss a pit on them, that will hurt. Also, a unit of spearmen with Akam's Mindrazor goes from being okay, to broken. You will end up with 3 ranks fight on the charge 4 if charged in a non-horde unit that ASF and probably will re-roll to hit and will strike at St8. It's wicked. And with a lvl 4 archmage with the book of hoeth it's pretty easy to do.

Take some archers or Seaguard as well to shoot his weapons teams.

Another option to take out his war machines is to send a great eagle or 2 at them or some reavers. I prefer shadow warriors in units of 5. That can really mess them up.

Also, keep your BSB and general close to the body of your army then they will have re-rolls and high Ld for panic tests. I never go to battle without a BSB. It's so useful.

Also, Phoenix Guard. They are the bomb. By themselves, they are kind of scary, but add some augmentation spells to them and they are murders. I'm looking at you Akam's Mindrazor.

Warpsolution wrote:Why do you need the Talisman to perform this "trick", Airmaniac? I thought it was Robe for Ethereal and Crown for Stubborn. But at any rate, it's not worth doing.

I agree that you don't need the Talisman of Saphery to specifically hold up a unit of Slaves or Clanrats without a Character in them. However, when there are no Characters in the unit, it isn't really worth it to tarpit the tarpit with an Archmage that costs twice as much as the unit does. If there is a Character in the unit, chances are he'll have some sort of Magic Weapon, which will cut your Archmage down. Also, you will probably want the Talisman of Saphery to make sure that Characters won't suicide themselves into your Archmage's unit early in the game to take out your level 4 Wizard.

Elves need laser guns like skaven and more pointy ears.