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I am a mew 40k player and long time enthusiast, I am almost ready to feild m6 first skitarrii/ ad mech force fulky painted to play somewhere other than in my basement against myself or m6 son. I have a gew questions to shoot out there for the wiser heads to help me decide how to play my cyborgs of doom.
1. Is it worth going for the battle maniple or one of the other formations in regards to being able to win.

2. Which of the ad mech formations is the best and why?

3. Opinions on the kataphron breacher, I love them, and I want the holy requositioner fromation so bad I canttaste it. Buuuutttt even in our basment games they die to easiky in melee.

4. Can dragoons be effective in the cavalier formation with aklied ad mech force? What is the best way to play the dragoon ( my other favourite)


Thanks for any imput. I will be posting pics of my badass skitarri/ad mech force,

1. The skitarii maniple and the battle maniple are essentially the same minus the battle maniple requires on of everything. If you have one of everything and keep your dunecrawlers close by, then the battle maniple for sure.

2. My personal experience, FWIW, has shown the dominus maniple to be the best skitarii formation. Use the priest with the 4++ conversion field to tank for the vanguard. Not as experienced with cult mech. I've only used them as support utilizing their grav guns in an allied detachment.

3.Go destroyers with grav or plasmas. Unless you're using the holy req formation, skitarii do it better. I've been there though trust me. That holy req deepstrike sounds soooo good. Never tried it though.

4. Cavalier formation is bad. Each model outflanks separately. The dragoons with jezzails can be good since you have two of them. The balistariis are just bad. Expensive and the epitome of glass, emphasis on the glass!, cannons. They just get smoked. I personally love the dragoons with jezzails for hunting sergeants, but if you want the lances, go 3 or more, min of two. Three really works best.

I've been doing ad mech since they launched and they're great. Skitarii are the stronger of the two IMO, but vanguard, sicarians, and tech priests run the show in an admech force. These are the units that are cheap and if left unchecked, will wreck armies. Not counting knights of course.

I'd disagree with you on the ironstrider cavaliers. This little lot comes for 435pts, and 1/3 of them turn up in the enemy deployment zone turn 1! I'd run them as MSU overload.

3x Ironstrider Cavaliers:

Balistarii with autocannon 55pts
Dragoon with lance 45pts
Dragoon with lance 45pts
Balistarii with autocannon 55pts
Dragoon with lance 45pts
Dragoon with lance 45pts
Balistarii with autocannon 55pts
Dragoon with lance 45pts
Dragoon with lance 45pts

They're never going to kill this many individual AV11 walkers (particularly with 5+ innate cover on most of them) and should provide a decent distraction while the rest of your force hammers away at the enemy. I agree that the balistarii are less strong, but when they arrive they should be hitting on re-rollable 2+ (hopefully against some rear AV if possible)

I don't like to think what this would cost money-wise though haha

I have often wondered how effective the jezzials are on the dragoons.... there seems like some interesting options if you have them but are they better than the lance?

And I am thinking about trying a vangard heavy skitarii list with the holy req. Formation aliied in just to see what happens.

And I would love to try 3 cavalier squads but damn that's a lot of cash on chicken walkers....


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Let me throw this one out there....

10 vangard plain
10 vangard 3 calivers
10 vangard 3 arc rifles
5 rangers plain
5 rangers 2 arquebus
2 Dragoons lances and serpentas
Onager neutron laser
Or
Onager icarus

Allied killclade ( or Cavaliers)

Allied holy requisitioner or destroyer/kastellan formation

Maybe a knight later on.

Just a rough outline for how I want to mix my forces up. I may go straight for the
dominus
2 units of grav destroyers,
1 unit torsion breachers,
1 unit arc brachers ( mixing in a few hyd claws), 1 unit kastellans.

For my ad mech allies but yhis is all hypothetical. I have almost no play exp. Outside my friends and family and haven't figured up the points on all of this. I am slowly coming to love the vanguard, they are the lynchpin of every win I get. I think I can make a large vangard list work well but what would compli, ent them the best? Just a crap load of Ironheads with rangers and onagers? Or ironheads with allied killclade and holy requiositioner ( I did this the other night and won every time aginst necrons, chaos, eldar, and orks...... by a lot. I use an oblique strategy. But we all suck and probably play missing rules or screwing them up)

Lets get outside the box here.... the war convo is badass but everyone I see use almost the same set up. Throw some ideas for a list that can use some of the synergy of skitarii and ad mech to bring the pain without the war convo ,but most of all let me piss off the people I can't beat.......


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P.S.

The more I think about it the more I would love to try to run 3 ironstrider formations..... for no other reason than to see the look on everyone's fac3 as my chicken walkers gank thier stuff

Dragoon spam can work, similarly to Guard sentinel spam except more effective, it's just the cash investment that holds it back. IMO the kastelan robot formation is the most effective of the Admech stuff, properly kitted out it's practically unkillable and can take on multiple things, with its only weakness (no ranged antitank) mitigated by the gobs of haywire available to you. It's just similarly a significant points/cash investment that you build the rest of the army around.
As far as the Skitarii, min squads of vanguards all the way. 4+/6+++ is juuust survivable enough that it takes more than one unit of firepower to wipe them out, and even one guy left (who will be a special weapon guy in the very back) will still have the potential to ruin someone's day.

*edit* Also, lists spamming expensive Admech units will lead you invariably to the dark recesses of the Internet in search of... 3rd party models. Dust tactics has chicken walkers you can get pretty cheap, but their big stuff is too big for the 4-legged bots.

Hmmmmm....

So maybe something like

X4-6 vangard 5 man units with a spec. Weapon
X2 rangers plain and arquebus
X1 onager neutron or icarus

Allied

X1? ironstrider cavalier dragoons maxed and balistarii min ( or as close as $$$ allows)
Or would it be better to spam yhe crap out of dragoons as part of the skitarrii formation andno cavalier?

Kastellan/destroyer/dominus fromation

Or..... slide in the holy req formation somewhere just because I want to use it so bad.

Theroy #2

This new formation with the dominus , onager, and skitarri.... how flexible is it? How many vanguard could you pump into it and if anyone has played with it, how does it hold up?

I am going to try to run all 30 of my vanguard with min ranger squads tonite, here is what I'm going to try

x1 10 man vangard w full haywire and omni spex. warlord in this one with taser goad and phosphoenix (maybe)

X4 5 man vanguard plain ....maybe omnispex or a special weapon here or there

X2 5 man ranger plain and w 2 arquebus

X2 dragoons taser and serpenta (all I habe assembled)

X1 onager w icarus, lil crab claw (IWND), mindscanner, stubber

Allied

Holy req. W eradication beamer/ serpenta on dominus ,and torsion/arc claw x3, arcrifle/hyd claw x3.... still trying to figure out how many hyd claws is enough and weather to make all torsion cannons or arc rifles or what the balance should be.

Maybe a killclade just to be a dick

Ill figure out points by what's allowed and how I finalky line things up, 1 guy runs chaos ahd deamons, 1 guy is either tau or eldar. Both are better than me so I will probably get stomped. I just want to go down swinging and collect hard data.....0101010001111001.... glory to the machine!

I will post what I use and how its kitted out and result tomorrow. Will try dragoon spam too if the let me use some proxy models...... but I'd say not

Quick addition here, I ran vangard heavy w icarus onager, dragoon spam, and holy req. Allied in..... and completly werecked the eldar player.... he was pissed. Ill post more details later. He was not expecting the vanguard to survive long enough for my cavaliers and ad mech to make the board. He had many jet bikes, hemlocks and aspect warriors in trasport auturach and some other nasty stuff. with no respect for my ironheads whatsoever he moved everything up to destroy them but the onager and skitarii just would not go down. With lucky dice, and canticles I made it to my turn 3 where both formations came on..... in the best possible places... dragoons proceed to wreck every vehicle I charge them at and I make so many 5+ cover saves the next few turns eldar guy throws his dice at one point. Dominus and breachers sit on skyfire nexus objective and shoot haywire everywhere. Deamon guy was wise to my tricks and beat me soumdly though.

Ok been a bit and forgot to post details of my sucessful game againt eldar.... sadly I was shown how wrong some of my assumptions were this week as I lost both games I played by a long shot.

Note: dragoon spam can be cool as long as you het some hot dice. If not then you better not be in anyones crosshairs. Lesson learned

My vangard have preformed well and I started running my dominus with a gauntlet in my kataphrons to heal them and it can be handy offence in a pinch. Rangers w arquebus are so/so, I'm gonna move away from that and put arc rifles in and let them take more advantage of thier movment skills. Going to run 4 dragoons in my skitarii maniple not as cavaliers. 2 duncrawlers 1 nuetron 1 icarus, Probably still killclade when points allow and just the standard ad mech formation w dominus 2 breachers 1 grav destroyer and 1 kastellan/datasmith.

Has anyone out there had any good results with the electro priest? I love the models but is there anything that they can do thatsworth the cost? Has anyone even tried the nominus formation? I'm looking for some feedback here also before I spend any money on them

For most competitive skitarii build, it's probably the war convocation (I think it's called, it's a bunch of formations and an IK). Free upgrades, get to use canticles of the omnissiah and all weapons with gets hot! Lose that rule. Not a very flexible build, but very nasty.

Dragoons are decent in objective games because of their speed. I don't really know much about them other than that. From what I can tell, not a very good melee unit because of easy tarpit-ability so it's probably best used as a skirmisher.