Skaven Battleline Frustration! >:S

[Toemass]

So I bought the pestilens starter box with the intention of mixing it up with a bit from all the other clans. It seems that I cant do this because of the battleline rules according to the warscroll builder. Which is strange because the fluff says that the armies more often than not mix in battle. So according to what i've been doing on warscroll I'd have to take 3 units of clan rats as battleline in order to mix the clans. Is this right??

Tom

[Overread]

Correct. 

Basically the way GW has done it the clans each have their own battle-line option, but only if the whole army is from that specific clan; meanwhile if you're running a generalist clan army you'll have to contend with taking the 3 battleline minimum of clanrats. It's a bit of shame they didn't tweak it to that there were other battleline options for the general clan of rats, but at the same time I think it was GW trying to give ecah clan its own space within the book and their own identity without them being just overruled by going with a generalist clan. 

[Laststand]

1 hour ago, Overread said:

Correct. 

Basically the way GW has done it the clans each have their own battle-line option, but only if the whole army is from that specific clan; meanwhile if you're running a generalist clan army you'll have to contend with taking the 3 battleline minimum of clanrats. It's a bit of shame they didn't tweak it to that there were other battleline options for the general clan of rats, but at the same time I think it was GW trying to give ecah clan its own space within the book and their own identity without them being just overruled by going with a generalist clan. 

Stormvermin are also battleline for a mixed list.

[Toemass]

2 hours ago, Overread said:

Correct. 

Basically the way GW has done it the clans each have their own battle-line option, but only if the whole army is from that specific clan; meanwhile if you're running a generalist clan army you'll have to contend with taking the 3 battleline minimum of clanrats. It's a bit of shame they didn't tweak it to that there were other battleline options for the general clan of rats, but at the same time I think it was GW trying to give ecah clan its own space within the book and their own identity without them being just overruled by going with a generalist clan. 

Thanks for your reply. The problem I have with GW for this is that some of the clans (eshin, moulder and verminus in particular) have barely enough units to make an interesting larger army size. 

[Overread]

Just now, Toemass said:

Thanks for your reply. The problem I have with GW for this is that some of the clans (eshin, moulder and verminus in particular) have barely enough units to make an interesting larger army size. 

Aye it clearly favours some over others. 

That said it might well be GW setting the ground for new models for those clans in the future. It would certainly let them expand the range and keep to the clan system. That said Skaven still have a lot of old/legacy models even some still in metal so there's a wealth of stuff to update for them before GW focus on adding any bulk of new models.

 

That said forces like Pestilens, Moulder and Skyre have a huge wealth of choices for models (at least if you bring in wolf rats from forgeworld for moulder). Eshin is the real suffering side, but then again they are the assassins wing; they are basically designed to be ideal support units rather than a whole army unto themselves. Even in the lore they are typically shown doing smaller scale stuff unless supporting a huge army.