How to deal with Skink Spam?

[Thiagoma]

My local meta plays 1250 pts, considering the game is quite new in the country.  I usually play non BT Elven armies, so i am quite aware of my handicap on those matchs, but i usually have good results (win about 50-60% of my games), and we have all sorts of armies, from Brettonia/TK to Idoneth/DoK.

 

Last tournament i played Mixed Order:

- 1 Frost Phoenix (ignax scale/ Master of Defense)

- 1 Archmage on Horse

- 2  Reavers x 5 (battleline)

- Phoenix Guard x 30

- Sisters of the Thorn x 5

 

Plan: Reavers cap objectives, pile all the saves on the big Bird and PG and hope for the best.

My battles were against Skaven (major victory), LoN (minor victory) and Seraphon, where for the first time ever, i conceded a game. I am not a sore loser, usually i will take a loss and laught about it, but this was absolutly frustrating.

The Battleplan was absolutly against me. 6 objectives, 3 on each side. Burn one for the enemy for 1d3 VP and hold one of yours for 1 VP/turn. Odds were not in my favor, but i was confidence of having a chance.

Oh boy, i was soo wrong.

My enemy army had Skinks for Battlelines, Slaan, Engine of the Gods, Astrolith bearer, 3 pterodactil and a Bastiladon.

Enemy Deploy on a corner, behind a terrain piece the Slaan, bearer, bastilodon closing 1 side, a unit of skinks and engine closing the other one.

 

I  send Reavers for two of the objectives,  kill his birds on some really lucky rolls, Phoenix charge ahead with mages suporting and PG right behind. Things are looking good, and so it begins...

 

Disclaimer, i dont know exactly how Seraphon summoning works, but in a couple turns i was under a bazilion skinks. He just summoned and teleported units all around me, killing the reavers, mage and sisters with a barrage of shots. The Phoenix was forced to engage the bastilodon since it couldnt land on the Slaan, Engine or the Bearer due to the terrain and the swarm, and felt on the second turn.

By this time all i had was the PG that had no chance of going for objectives by itself, and that was it.

TO confirmed and assisted on the match, told and showed me the rules granting me that the other player rules were being used correctly and that he had great rolls on his dice.

 

I am used to fight LoN and usually handle it pretty well, but i found the Skink spam nearly impossible to deal with, even if i had ignored it and went for objectives, since they could just teleport on top of it.

 

How to counter this violent summoning?

 

 

[boombyeyeah]

I don't have a solution for this, but summoning is balanced for 2000+ games I think. At those low points games the summoned units are just too strong 

[Mark Williams]

I played against a similar list in a 2k tournament game last year. Turn 1 lasted about an hour. The only thing that stopped it from being a 5+ hour match was that the seraphon player ran out of models to put on the board eventually. The main reason I lost was just simply being unable to hold objectives due to the sheer number of bodies. I don’t see how it’s meant to work that way, but I will say that an army with good ranged attacks can shut it down very easily. Anvils SCE with longstrike raptors almost make it look easy, so there’s definitely a few counters out there.

[XReN]

I can feel the pain, Seraphon are so annoying when they run cheesy max. summoning lists.
You want to take a lot of high quality long ranged shooting to shut down both the Slaan and the Engine really fast.
Or at least only the Slaan, without him his  summoning from Celestial Points gets a lot worse and Engine starts to be more random
 

Edited March 25, 2019 by XReN

[Thiagoma]

19 hours ago, boombyeyeah said:

I don't have a solution for this, but summoning is balanced for 2000+ games I think. At those low points games the summoned units are just too strong 

That makes a lot of sense!

[Evil Bob]

On 3/24/2019 at 4:48 PM, Thiagoma said:

Snip

The Battleplan was absolutly against me. 6 objectives, 3 on each side. Burn one for the enemy for 1d3 VP and hold one of yours for 1 VP/turn. Odds were not in my favor, but i was confidence of having a chance.

Oh boy, i was soo wrong.

My enemy army had Skinks for Battlelines, Slaan, Engine of the Gods, Astrolith bearer, 3 pterodactil and a Bastiladon.

Snip

I am used to fight LoN and usually handle it pretty well, but i found the Skink spam nearly impossible to deal with, even if i had ignored it and went for objectives, since they could just teleport on top of it.

How to counter this violent summoning?

So last year during the local escalation league our Serephon player nearly won every game.  She was running with the option of teleporting two units every turn, a few maxed skink squads with optimal dice output.  She also knew how to play-for-objectives ruthlessly which is important in match play.

My match against her was four objectives (4vp/2vp/1vp).  Order of battle was hold my home objective and sweep map clockwise to her home objective while minding appearing skink blowpipe ambushes.  40 skinks are cheap and can outnumber on an objective but my castled block of spread out Skeletons on home spread out pretty much negated that.  In most of her games she was used to teleporting around and exploiting other people’s weaknesses.  I left no openings by playing on the minimum space I needed to maintain control.

In your case it looks like objectives needed to be burned by you down to a manageable 2 (or 3 in some super ideal situation).  His hot dice rolls didn’t help.

The strength of skink blobs is that they are so cheap and can go almost anywhere.  Hit them with just an elite unit or semi-powerful characters and they win by still outnumbering on an objective or tying up greater points.  So the sophie’s choice is whether to commit or ignore them.  Mobile hammers that can hit them while still maneuvering towards the next objective can work.  Ideally you want piles of wounds so that battleskock takes care of the rest.  Which is difficult on a unit with forty wounds and a leadership of 10.  Thankfully they are no longer have the discounted at 40 (GHB2017 was brutal).

With the current easy ten skink summons it really puts the onus on us.  It is unlikely we can wack-a-mole them all so a solid battleline becomes even more important.  The question is how effective is our character-hammers and elites going to be?  Every turn their current position/job is really important.  Consider whether those points are better spent on more core forces?  Specialized models have to be well thought out when your opponent has more flexible tactical options.

 

TLDR - More core/baseline.  Play-for-objectives like your life depends on it.  Minimize use of elites unless you are confident they will be doing something meaningful every flipping turn.  Any fat in your army helps the lizards.