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I always hear a lot of grumbling about skew lists, but what do you think about all horde/tank armies?

Outside of Imperial/Chaos Knights, What are some examples of skew lists you've faced or played?

Not faced or played personally, but recently there was a tournament winning (LVO?) Guard list that had over 200 bodies in it (and a sentinel!). I've gotten close to that with my 30k Milita list but it just takes too long to play (even with movement trays).

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I always hear a lot of grumbling about skew lists, but what do you think about all horde/tank armies?

They're just kind of non-interactive and feel like a frustrating waste of time. It feels like they violate an unspoken agreement that you're there to let your armies take chunks out of eachother and show off their cool traits. Against a vehicle skew list, it feels like any anti-infantry units I brought are basically wasted/forced to just be action monkeys. Even if I win the game doing that, it doesn't feel good. I didn't bring dire avengers or wyches to the table because I wanted them to stand on objectives waiting to get shot to death; I wanted them to have firefights with the enemy and trade blows in melee. Being essentially barred from meaningfully hurting anything in the enemy army denies them the ability to do that.

Horde skew is usually less frustrating because at least you're making your opponent pick up models (which is satisfying), and my anti-tank units usually aren't completely worthless against hordes even fi they aren't *efficient* either. My thousand sons predator suddenly values its bolt weapons and havoc launchers more than its lascannons, and my fire dragons might have to consider actually charging into melee for a change, but they're usually still able to contribute.

Outside of Imperial/Chaos Knights, What are some examples of skew lists you've faced or played?

In 5th edition, the vast majority of my games were against parking lots. Skew lists that were just loaded to the gills with vehicles. Sometimes infantry would get out of the vehicles, but there were always tons of vehicles to chew through. 8th featured some flyer-spam lists that basically had the frustration of vehicle skew, but also they were hard to hit.

I've seen less skew in 10th, largely because it tends to encourage you to take a variety of units for scoring purposes and also so that you can take advantage of multiple good stratagems each turn. The main skew lists I've faced are:
1. Marine tank lists that revolve around a handful of big tanks being supported by tech marines. These are just kind of annoying to face because they're basically gunlines. The tanks have a million shots with various special rules on top to make overwatch pretty scary. These lists aren't actually competitive mind you, but you're basically faced with some units that only a fraction of your army can trade against efficiently, and then you either kill them or you don't.
2. Dreadnaught spam featuring legend-dreads. This list is fun to face actually. The smaller dreads have midling toughness which means your small arms fire isn't actually *that* inefficient into them. And the split between midling toughness dreads and big dreads with high toughness makes this feel like you're more or less facing a non-skew list.
3. Custodes without vehicles. This is *kind of* a skew list in that it's sort of just stat-checking your ability to get through as many 2+/4++ mid-toughness bodies as possible. Where the dread list feels fine because you have a variety of toughness values to deal with, all-custodes infantry are a little more sketchy because there's less statline variety. But also this isn't *that* bad becaue both small arms and anti-tank weapons are still moderately efficient into them instead of being totally useless.
4. Chaos knights. Mostly war dogs, which is less bad than it could be, but still makes me feel compelled to ignore most units in my collection if they're equipped primarily with S4 or lower weapons.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I always hear a lot of grumbling about skew lists, but what do you think about all horde/tank armies?

As an Imperial Guard player, they're fine.
Seriously though, wether I'm running one or playing against one, both are fine with me.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Outside of Imperial/Chaos Knights, What are some examples of skew lists you've faced or played?

Well, Wednesday evening I had a SM vs Necron game.
Me:
SM (Blood Angels) - Landraider x2, Drop Pod x1, Captain Ferran Areious, Captain on Bike x2, Terminator Captain x3, Gravis Captain x3, SM Captain x3, Blood Angel Captain x3, Death Co. Captain x3

My Necron foe:
The Silent King, The Dragon, Nightbringer, The Deceiver, Transcendent CTan x2

It was a glorious game of Hero Hammer. In the end I won by barely outscoring him. It was quiet humorous to see the Silent King being used to accomplish the Sabotage action.

ccs wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I always hear a lot of grumbling about skew lists, but what do you think about all horde/tank armies?

As an Imperial Guard player, they're fine.
Seriously though, wether I'm running one or playing against one, both are fine with me.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Outside of Imperial/Chaos Knights, What are some examples of skew lists you've faced or played?

Well, Wednesday evening I had a SM vs Necron game.
Me:
SM (Blood Angels) - Landraider x2, Drop Pod x1, Captain Ferran Areious, Captain on Bike x2, Terminator Captain x3, Gravis Captain x3, SM Captain x3, Blood Angel Captain x3, Death Co. Captain x3

My Necron foe:
The Silent King, The Dragon, Nightbringer, The Deceiver, Transcendent CTan x2

It was a glorious game of Hero Hammer. In the end I won by barely outscoring him. It was quiet humorous to see the Silent King being used to accomplish the Sabotage action.

At least their turn was quick.

-STS

Taking on a skew list can be fun - once in a while. After all, facing a seriously uphill battle can be thematic and highly cinematic.

But like any extreme sport? Has to be consensual. I mean, if you’re a Sunday League team, you don’t want to be staggering on to the pitch only to face the 2022 World Cup Winning Team, do you?

Otherwise it can feel like a Pool Hustle, a way solely for your opponent to maintain their W/L/D ratio like it makes the blindest bit of difference to life.

And hey, there will still be bad match ups which can feel skewed. That’s just part of the fun of the game. Unless your local gamers are tied closely to the tournament Meta? You can never be sure what you might face.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I always hear a lot of grumbling about skew lists, but what do you think about all horde/tank armies?

They're just kind of non-interactive and feel like a frustrating waste of time. It feels like they violate an unspoken agreement that you're there to let your armies take chunks out of eachother and show off their cool traits. Against a vehicle skew list, it feels like any anti-infantry units I brought are basically wasted/forced to just be action monkeys. Even if I win the game doing that, it doesn't feel good. I didn't bring dire avengers or wyches to the table because I wanted them to stand on objectives waiting to get shot to death; I wanted them to have firefights with the enemy and trade blows in melee. Being essentially barred from meaningfully hurting anything in the enemy army denies them the ability to do that.

Horde skew is usually less frustrating because at least you're making your opponent pick up models (which is satisfying), and my anti-tank units usually aren't completely worthless against hordes even fi they aren't *efficient* either. My thousand sons predator suddenly values its bolt weapons and havoc launchers more than its lascannons, and my fire dragons might have to consider actually charging into melee for a change, but they're usually still able to contribute.

Outside of Imperial/Chaos Knights, What are some examples of skew lists you've faced or played?

In 5th edition, the vast majority of my games were against parking lots. Skew lists that were just loaded to the gills with vehicles. Sometimes infantry would get out of the vehicles, but there were always tons of vehicles to chew through. 8th featured some flyer-spam lists that basically had the frustration of vehicle skew, but also they were hard to hit.

I've seen less skew in 10th, largely because it tends to encourage you to take a variety of units for scoring purposes and also so that you can take advantage of multiple good stratagems each turn. The main skew lists I've faced are:
1. Marine tank lists that revolve around a handful of big tanks being supported by tech marines. These are just kind of annoying to face because they're basically gunlines. The tanks have a million shots with various special rules on top to make overwatch pretty scary. These lists aren't actually competitive mind you, but you're basically faced with some units that only a fraction of your army can trade against efficiently, and then you either kill them or you don't.
2. Dreadnaught spam featuring legend-dreads. This list is fun to face actually. The smaller dreads have midling toughness which means your small arms fire isn't actually *that* inefficient into them. And the split between midling toughness dreads and big dreads with high toughness makes this feel like you're more or less facing a non-skew list.
3. Custodes without vehicles. This is *kind of* a skew list in that it's sort of just stat-checking your ability to get through as many 2+/4++ mid-toughness bodies as possible. Where the dread list feels fine because you have a variety of toughness values to deal with, all-custodes infantry are a little more sketchy because there's less statline variety. But also this isn't *that* bad becaue both small arms and anti-tank weapons are still moderately efficient into them instead of being totally useless.
4. Chaos knights. Mostly war dogs, which is less bad than it could be, but still makes me feel compelled to ignore most units in my collection if they're equipped primarily with S4 or lower weapons.

And there can be a difference between a skew list and a theme list. Knights are generally both skew and theme because their skew is their theme. A few editions ago Ultramarines had a "Tank commander" character Sergeant Chronus - and there was a book for Damnos that even gave out his army. You could field the Rhinos and Razorbacks without fielding the transported troops unit so you could make some version of that book list. I never played with it, but I always tinkered with the theme. That would have probably would have fit more with the Dread Spam list mentioned above. A couple landraiders and a bunch of Predators and Razorbacks.

Are skew lists worse to play against in smaller point games?

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Are skew lists worse to play against in smaller point games?

Usually, yes. In higher points games, a vanilla list probably has enough anti-tank that it can at least concentrate a bunch of that anti-tank into one area of the battlefield and deal with the threats there even if it doesn't have enough AT to *also* meaningfully engage other areas of the battlefield. And a 2k vanilla list almost certainly has enough attacks that it can carve slices out of a horde style list and gum up their movement with move blocking.

At 1k, a vanilla list could reasonably only have a couple of units with any real anti-tank capability. And those units are probably the first to be targeted by the enemy's vehicle-skew list. And at 1k, you need a larger percentage of your army to reliably clear an entire unit of whatever a horde list is spamming, plus each speed bump unit you sacrifice represents that much larger a slice of your army.

EDIT: Caveat - it's possible for a skew list to spend so many points on so few units that it gets in their own way at lower points. If you only have three units on the table and I can kill one of them top of 1, then you only have 2 activations per turn to kill my 8+ units meaning I'm probably winning the game even if the game itself is kind of lame.

Also, edge cases like my harlies exist. I'm a weirdo who actually uses a lot of the harlequins' "can't shoot me outside of 18 inches" units. So when I've faced tau pseudo-skew lists in the past with lots of big suits and not much else, I can actually keep my clowns safe from a big percentage of the enemy forces because he doesn't want to get close to the stab-clowns, and he has to spread out across the table to score points. So weirdly, my clowns probably do better against a 1k skew list than they would against a 2k vanilla list.

I have a soft spot for infantry-spam lists because I think they're generally fun to play against. The endless-horde of enemies is a classic trope and it can be fun to mow down huge volumes of orcs, nids or such. Even if you lose, at least you feel like your accomplishing something.

The same can rarely be said for vehicle spam. While not quite as bad as it was in some prior editions, I just don't find it fun when a lot of your weapons are basically useless and all you can do is fire at a car-park until something breaks.

And Knights are even worse because some genius in GW decided that 500-pt models needed to be even more abstracted. So rather than having any interesting mechanics (for either player), they're just walking bricks that can take even more fire than normal vehicles before finally collapsing in a cloud of disappointment.

Like fliers, they're one of the factors throttling the game's rules but which GW will never ever simply move to their own game (where they should have been all along).

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Are skew lists worse to play against in smaller point games?

Yes, by their very nature skew is an all-or-nothing gamble. The fewer points you have that aren't part of the skew the bigger the gamble. And it goes both ways. One 500 point knight cannot shoot enough 4 point gretchin to be able to win the game. 500 points of Gretchin can literally ignore the knight can win on objective control

Breton wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Are skew lists worse to play against in smaller point games?

Yes, by their very nature skew is an all-or-nothing gamble. The fewer points you have that aren't part of the skew the bigger the gamble. And it goes both ways. One 500 point knight cannot shoot enough 4 point gretchin to be able to win the game. 500 points of Gretchin can literally ignore the knight can win on objective control

Bad example as you'll never get that match up if you play by the rules.

But yes, 1 500 pt knight cannot shoot down enough cheap infantry squads.

There’s also asymmetrical pricing.

An all infantry army costs a lot more than a Knight army. They also taken longer to build, paint and base.

So you’re, broadly speaking, less likely to come across infantry centric hordes.

There’s also the natural skew of tournament games having a necessary time limit. Chess clock stuff entirely aside? An all infantry army just takes longer to play a turn with than one with a general mix of stuff. Simply put? A 250 point tank’s turn will be quicker than 250 points of Grots or Guard Squads. Apply that across an entire army? And infantry horde armies aren’t practical in a timed environment.

Please note this is an observation, not a criticism, of tournaments.