Hmm... Empire gearing up for yet another tilt against the cursed rat man. <sniff> aaaahhhh.... It's good to be home!
I've fought these guys so many times I lost count somewhere past the 100th battle. Hence the name, and I do truly hate them with a passion. I hate their magic. I hate their shooting. I hate their Stormvermin. I just hate them!
Since I don't feel like typing for the next 20 minutes, I am going to paste a long post I wrote re: the tactics against these rotten creatures that I wrote a Players-Society awhile back. There is no theory here, it's all tried and true many times over... <it's a bit dated now, there have been many many more victories using this technique since. I was .500 against the skaven before I employed these, I'm more closer to .750 now.>
I am a devout Empire player, and I play against the skaven about 5 times more than against any other army. The following write-up took my skaven opponent about 10 games to finally beat. It didn't help my cause when I rolled like drek for that entire game either. The victories were by and large very one-sided.
Templar Grandmaster
Laurels of Victory- All wounds count double in re: to CR.
White Cloak- 5+ ward
Captain
GW, Barded Horse
Helm of the Skaven Slayer- +1 AS Fear vs. Skaven
Wizard lvl 2 Life
2x dispell scrolls
Wizard lvl 2 Heavens
2x dispell scroll
(Note- you can always switch out one wizard for an engineer w/hochland. Great for popping off weapon teams.)
Core:
13 IC Knights
Standard of Arcane Warding- Magic Resistence 2
Immune to Psych due to presence of GM
25 Swordsmen w/full command
Detach: 10 swordsmen
25 Swordsmen w/full command
11 Archers
Special
Mortar
Mortar
Cannon
Rare
Hellblaster
The reason I go with swordsmen and not free company is because of their superior WS and identical I they share with clanrats. Not to mention their great survivability in HTH. I take a cannon because your oppenent may field stormvermin with the umbranner (5+ ward v. st 4 shooting.)
Your knights w/GM AND w/Captain are the all-crushing force of the universe in an Empire-Skaven tilt. You try to take their biggest meanest unit and you ride them down. The only things you have to worry about are jezzails, and the Warp-Lightning cannon, but the best part is even if skaven shooting kills 25% of your knights, you won't have to take a panic check. If he is scared of your knights and wants to hang back, you will bludgeon him to death with your artillery. If he moves forward he is still going to be bludgeoned, and charged. What makes it to your line of swordsmen is likely to be somewhat damaged, it's then time for your superior foot troops to shine. If he puts his ratling guns in front of his units to stand and shoot your knights in a charge, you send a cannon ball down their gullet, or if you have the master of stone or the wood spell(s) you can kill the team that way too.
With the Laurels of Victory, you only go for rank and file with your GM. You kill as many as possible to make the CR too one-sided for his troops to stay put. You have a captain and a champion to accept challenges. He's only going to try to warp-lightning your knights once, and after he realizes they have a MR of 2, he'll stop there.
The archers are there to protect the artillery from other skirmishers (even though tunneling teams are still a big problem) and to maybe get lucky and throw shots at lone WE's or Weapon teams. I've also used them to shoot at rat ogres too. They are also good for whittling down giant rat units.
If he tries the slave-feint method. (You'll know if he is if his blocks of slaves are in front of his other units.) The spend that turn hammering the slaves with your shooting and magic. It's not very point efficient, but the last thing you can have is your knights failing a charge because his slaves fled. If his shooting his not dwindling your knights, such as if you have them out of LOS from his jezzails, then it pays to be patient and let his army come to you. It will get to the point where if his slaves fled, you will be able redirect into that ratling gun he has krept up there. Don't let it's stand and shoot stop your from charging it. Your 3+ armor save should take most of the brunt, and it's much better to do that than sit there and get blasted at more than once. Meanwhile, you'll kill his weapon team, and overrun into his big juicy unit.
If he brings the Bell. Your knights have a MR of 2, and their new sole purpose in life is to charge the Bell unit and send it into the four winds.
Your knights should have only one thing in mind the whole game. "kill clanrats, win combat by a ton, break them, run them down."
Your biggest strategic weakness is not having 3 or more blocks of infantry. That is why it is so critical to get your knights into combat and disrupt his plans the moment you can. (it's also important so you can break his unit and overrun into his jezzails asap! Don't freak out if your knights fall short just in front of the jezzails. He can't panic you, and his shooting is not about to harvest the amount of points you're going to get when you charge the jezzails next turn.) If your knights charge successfully by turn four at the latest, my money is on you to win the game convincingly.
P.S. Oh yeah, make sure your artiller pieces and swordsmen and spaced out far enough in the case he has a Greyseer w/ Vermintide.Okay, that's what I said then. I would like to make some ammendments. Lose the Captain in unit of Knights. Total overkill.
Using detachments for countercharging is a fool's errand against the skaven. They have too many blocks of troops and your detach won't have the room to make the charge. Lose the unit of 10 swords and make 2 detach's of 5 Free company. They are disposable units that don't cause panic that can create awkward angles for the skaven troops in hth engagements, and can be used as missile screens. If he shoots them, then that's something else that's not getting shot.
Huntsmen are always nice to have along, or put that Captain I said to lose on a pegasus. It'll keep any Warlock Engineers from wandering too far from their units. Also great as a suicide attacker to kill off Warlock Engineers inside units...
Peggie Charges unit of Clanrats w/WE
Kill warlock engineer
Probably take no wounds but lose combat miserably
Get away by not rolling like complete garbage on 3d6"
Result: Dead WE, staggered skaven battle line, unit of clanrats are possibly in charge range of Knights if they were foolish enough to pursue peggie.
Captain rallies next turn. All is well.
