Lizardmen First Game Lessons

[ElectricPaladin]

This wasn't really my first game, but it was the first I've played in a while, and the first I've played against someone of comparable skill. I won't got into a blow-by-blow - it looks like my opponent, jberrysf, will be doing that presently - so here is a summary of the lessons I I think I've learned. I'd love to read how they interact with your more experienced opinions, as well as the "common wisdom" of Lizardmen.

Tactics
• In the future, I need to be careful not to let my cold one riders get out ahead of the rest of my army. They slammed through one of my opponents units and got tar-pitted in the other. They then got bogged down for the rest of the freaking game. If I'd held them down and used them as more of a counter-punch unit to finish something off. Let the saurus blocks advance in front of them, with a gap between them wide enough for the cold one riders to fit through - something like that.
• In small games, having a lone Slann protected by the Higher State of Consciousness power really paid off. He was immune to most attacks - until my opponent got a giant tree on him, but by then the game was basically over anyway - and I didn't have to buy an entire unit of temple guard. In a larger game, I would definitely go temple guard - because they are incredibly badass and make a great hammer - but I don't need them the way I thought I did.
• Lore of Heavens... not so great, actually. I kind of think that I would have been better served by Lore of Beasts with all its nasty boost spells. The flyer was scary, but not that scary. It died to massed skink shooting.

List
• I'm thinking of swapping out one of my two saurus spear blocks for a largish skink cohort, dropping one of the slamanaders, and replacing it with a stegadon. I kind of think that the massive hitting power - not to mention shooting power! - of a stegadon would be neat. Additionally, having a more versatile unit - shooting as well as fighting if need be - would be good.

Rules
• EVERYONE MAKES BREAK TESTS! Even those ******* Immune to Psychology tree dudes. EV-ER-Y-ONE.
• Saves are modified by strength in all attacks, not just ranged attacks (I have no idea why we thought that).

[jberrysf]

I was looking... Lore of Heavens is Epic. You took all your spells from High Magic.

Sidebar, can stegodons shoot?

Further sidebar, we also played bolt throwers wrong.

[magickbk]

If you hold your Cold Ones back, you lose the speed advantage of being mounted. The trick is to determine where they will end up after the first combat, and where they will be able to rejoin the fight afterwards. It is often good to keep your cavalry closer to a flank, that way after they break through there won't be as many enemy units nearby to bog them down, and maybe only one other supporting unit can be used to draw anything between the Cold Ones and the flank away. You can also bring something monstrous along with them, like the Stegadon, that can potentially hit a turn after they do if they get bogged down, to break them loose.

[Chronowraith]

Stegadons do have some shooting. Depends on the kind of Stegadon.

Lore of Heavens on skinks is fine (Although beasts is probably better, Heavens is good for lightning spells and iceshard blizzard and that's really it). Lore of Heavens on Slann... not so much. For Lizards you want either High Magic (if you take the discipline that gives you Loremaster for High Magic), Life if you have Slann + Temple Guard, or Shadow.

[ElectricPaladin]

In no particular order...
• Lore of Beasts does a better job of supporting Lizardmen in melee, which is already their strong suit. Lore of Heavens is more ranged focused. It reminds me of the first advice I ever got about making good D&D characters: "play to your strengths, don't try to minimize your weaknesses." Lizardmen will always prefer melee, I think.
• The thing about Slann is that with so many options - including the Lore of High Magic, which is great - it wouldn't be optimal to focus on an ordinary Lore. There are a couple of extraordinary Lores that only Slann can take.
• All stegadon have shooting, whether it's a giant bow, two giant blowpipes, a giant magical engine that can deal auto-hits to every enemy in range, or just the skinks on board.

If you hold your Cold Ones back, you lose the speed advantage of being mounted. The trick is to determine where they will end up after the first combat, and where they will be able to rejoin the fight afterwards. It is often good to keep your cavalry closer to a flank, that way after they break through there won't be as many enemy units nearby to bog them down, and maybe only one other supporting unit can be used to draw anything between the Cold Ones and the flank away. You can also bring something monstrous along with them, like the Stegadon, that can potentially hit a turn after they do if they get bogged down, to break them loose.

Can you say more about how to do this?

In this game, that's more or less exactly what I did - or at least what I tried to do. The cold one riders were on my extreme left flank. They moved around the outside and charged into tasty target (it was a relatively flimsy unit that included my opponent's general). They won that combat and overran into a combat they could not win against nasty treedudes (actually, they might have been able to win it - we thought that being Immune to Psychology let his models never test to break, which caused the combat to bog down - had the dice favored me, I might have swept all the way through all his units and even run down his warlord, but we will never know).

The trouble is that at that point, they were so far away that nothing could reach them: the Saurus were too slow, and trapped behind the salamander who had lost his handlers and was standing there spouting flames at everything. They took so long to maneuver around the damn thing that by the time they were clear, the fight was over.

[magickbk]

Can you say more about how to do this?

It's very subjective to the arrangement of units on the board, and why keeping your own units angled properly is so important. Before charging, determine how your unit will align for the combat, and where any overrun will take you. Sometimes it is better to hold off a charge if it will result in a subsequent unfavorable combat. Deployment also becomes very important for this reason, in terms of making sure you have something that can hit relatively hard like a chariot or monster nearby to break cavalry loose from an infantry block. In previous editions, that hard hitter was Cavalry, but the rules currently favor infantry and monstrous infantry.