Had my first game agaisnt the new skaven.

[shinankoku]

I just played my first game with Skaven versus Empire, 1500 points. It was a fun, back and forth afair. I think Skaven are the new kings of the MSU: I used 4 units of small giant rat units to control enemy charges and even kill the crew of his mortar. Other than that, it was a lot of stuff you'd expect: slaves getting killed, clan rats and swordsmen gooing to toe-to-toe, etc. A couple of my take-aways were:

1) Again, the MSU strategy works well with 6 model units of giant rats. They weigh in at 23 points, move 6". Eat all you want, we'll make more

2) Those weapon teams are costly given how fragile they are. Of course, I could just be bitter 'cause I didn't make *one* ward save I still managed to use the warp-fire flamer to kill a scad of swordsmen. Significantly, the doom-flayer came in real handy when it supported a stormvermin charge on his greatswords. Before it died to cannon shot from a steam tank, that is. Despite their seeming frailty, I think they are dead-important to making a rat army work.

3) I likes me the Shroud of Dripping Death. A lot.

Less significantly to the new army book, but no less fun,

4) I shot snake-eyes for my Warplock Engineer on a casting attempt, followed up by snake-eyes on the miscast table. It was a first for me He killed his wizard on an ill-advised charge on one of my MSUs, discribled above (the Flaming Sword of Rhuin didn't help him one bit. I won combat being a larger unit, he broke, I ran him down.)

5) Clan rats managed to put 5 wounds on his steam tank! Yay clan rats!!

[sprue]

I played half a game against the skaven yesterday with my wood elves. My opponent didn't take a cheesy list so it was fairly evenly matched. I'd say I would probably have won it at the rate I was able to thin skaven ranks and stay out of combat. The worst thing was having deployed with the idea of avoiding the doomwheel. I had nothing to kill it with but it seemed to be doing more damage to him than me with shooting. In the future I'll have a way to kill it and will deploy differently so I can take it out early.