Guide to building a SAD army

Hello everyone! Here's a guide to building a Shooty Army of Doom. Taken from UnderEmpire.net and written by Scrivener.

The SAD army is definitely one of the most controversial Skaven armies. At some point or other you would have heard debates about sportsmanship, gaming, competitiveness, balance, whether ratlings are overpowered, whether ratlings should be abolished, and the debate goes on and on. In the middle of all that, it seems sometimes that skaven firepower has copped most of the bad rep. Players start shunning any skaven projectile for fear of cries of “Cheese!” The negativity of the SAD image lies mostly in the player that wields it, and not in the concept of a shooty skaven army. So today I’m going to try to write up a workable skaven SAD army list.

There are a number of ways one can go about building an SAD army. Many go with the conservative way, fielding as many ratlings as they can to compensate some blowing up, or only rolling 1 or 2 die for each ratling gun to minimize misfires. To me, the Skaven way is that everything is expendable, and unreliability is an inescapable fact of the Skaven army. Don’t perceive those unreliable misfiring tendencies as a liability costing you precious units, rather use them to your advantage. Misfiring can be a weapon unto its own. Take into consideration the possibility of misfiring, and calculate your unit’s actions such that if you were to misfire, they’ll still likely cause some damage to your enemy. And this is the way of the fluffy SAD army: a destructive force of constant explosions, where its unreliability is a glorious weapon, where the army wreaks untold damage wherever it goes regardless of what happens.

With this in mind, I'm going to approach the SAD army as one that can be as effective in as many situations as you will find on the tabletop. I know it may not look like your generic SAD army, I am hoping to fix most of the weaknesses of your usual SAD army and also introduce some sneaky, destructive tactics that will take the SAD to a much more complex level than is commonly seen.


Units

First, a quick run-through the SAD weaponry. The famous ones are your warlock engineer, ratling gun team, warplightning cannon and jezzails. But these are only half of all skryre weaponry available. What self-respecting SAD army would call itself Shooty if it’s only scratching the surface of the Skaven’s true firepower potential. Any army, shooty or not, needs the tools to deal with anything that any army can throw at you. It’s all about back-ups, contingency-planning, and having a weapon for every occasion. Shooting everything before it can reach you is fair enough and used to great effect in history, but skaven shooting isn’t the most reliable, and there are many circumstances where shooting just may not kill as much as you’d like. And there are many things that could get the drop on a shooting army: fast cavalry, flyers, gutter-runners, ambushing Beastmen, scouts, fanatics suddenly flying out of a night goblin horde…. Not to mention the stuff that can weaken a shooting army: UCoD, crowded terrain, stormbanners… an army needs to be effective in every, and any, circumstance. So I’ll try to tackle the SAD army with an all-comers approach.

I know with most SAD players, and even general skaven players, the warpfire thrower and poison-wind globadiers are definitely some of the least-favourite shooting choices. These guys aren’t winning the popularity contests for two simple reasons: they are unreliable and can miss the target or plain misfire, and they need a decent judgment of range and possible scattering estimation. Sure, they are no marksmen, but we’re skaven after all, not wood elves. These factors don’t deny the fact that the WTF and the PWG are “specialists”. They are designed to cater to, and excel at, specific types of tasks. The ratling gun in comparison is a generic mass-killing weapon, so it can perform adequately in all situations, but there are just some things that using the right tool for will be just so much easier.

Let’s have a look at the WTF. Fire weapon, D3 wounds, template, leadership test if the target unit sustains any casualties. This baby can take down multiwound monsters far more efficiently per hit than the ratling gun. And with the leadership test, it’s also priceless against large units with poor leadership. Have a problem controlling the range of the WFT? Simply fire it right into the midst of a horde army or down the enemy flank, and you’re bound to cause a lot of damage. Enemy skavenslave unit trying to bait you into a charge? Toast them with your attached WFT and send them packing. The combination of its forced leadership test, the possibility of firing longer than expected and its template means that this weapon has a lot of effectiveness against your standard horde army with its numerous large units with poor armour and leadership, like skaven, goblins and beasts. And that bit about fire means this weapon is the bane of trolls and tree spirits. With all these little bonuses, there’s a reason the WFT is more expensive in points than the ratling gun, y’know!

Now we look at the globadier. Simply put, it’s an anti-armour weapon with a short range. We already have the jezzails, so why put up with globadiers? Jezzails do have the better range, and better save. Globadiers have a short range, and also have a tendency to get shot to pieces and panic off the board, thanks to their Ld5. So what do we do with these guys? The globadiers function as a back-up unit: Sending them charging forward trying to hit a unit of knights or chaos warriors at 8” is nothing short of suicide. Field them as several units of 3 models each, and have them sneaking behind your main blocks, to slip into those hard to reach areas jezzails can’t always shoot at. Combine with shooting into combat, tackling high armoured troops that get too close to your frontline, or in conjunction with bait & flee tactics to set up the enemy unit just where you want it. Small units mean that it’s harder to destroy all of them at the same time, and they won’t cause panic. They’ll also be at 30 points, cheaper than a slave unit, making them practically able to serve the same baiting and blocking functions for a lower cost.

A good strategy for PWGs is to field them in conjunction with swarms. The swarms tie up a heavy armoured unit, and the PWGs shoot into combat. With 7th edition, swarms will crumble and are unlikely to last more than 2 turns at most, so use it with 2-3 of those PWG units and fire into combat in the same turn the swarms engage. It relies on good timing, estimation of distance and a bit of risk, but when pulled off right it’s a very satisfactory trap.

And there’s still one more use to the globadiers that works before the fighting even starts: deployment. 4 units of PWGs, and your opponent would have deployed half his army. By the time you’re done with your slaves, he’d have finished. Now, with all his army deployed, you can start arranging the bulk of your army to counter his deployment positions.

A good number for jezzails would be 10-13. You can field them as one unit or split them into two units. This avoids putting all eggs in one basket, and you’ll also be able to aim at two targets should you need to, eg. If you’re going for a single model or a small unit where you don’t need 10 jezzails to do the job, you can save half your shots for elsewhere if you had split the unit into two. More than 13 jezzails is not recommended for one reason: a very large line of jezzails takes up too much of your frontline. The best place to put them would be on top of a hill, but you’re likely to need a very large hill for that, and you don’t always get the hill you want. If the hill isn’t there, all those jezzails will have to go with the rest of your troops. While you can, putting them in front of your rank & file isn’t generally a good idea: they’ll block LoS and hamper your movement, and in case the enemy gets an upper hand against them., should your jezzailers flee your unit behind them will be hit by the fleeing through. The alternative to that would be to have a substantial part of your deployment zone occupied by a single line of skirmishers, again not a good idea should the enemy manage to break them.

Relying on your jezzails to shoot everyone before they can reach them is probably putting too much expectation on their Ballistic Skill tongue.gif. Jezzails ultimately are superior only against high-armoured troops, and these always come in low numbers. Using hordes of jezzails to shoot large units of cheap, low-armoured troops is a waste of points and not very effective, since there are better, cheaper weapons at our disposal to deal with these, and jezzails are best suited doing the specialized job they are designed for. The hatchet is for the firewood, the scalpel for the triple heart bypass.

Now, the ubiquitous ratling gun, bane of armies everywhere. A common tactic of the SAD is to field as many ratling guns as possible. It’s a matter of simple maths: the more ratlings you have, the less die you need to roll for each to get a good number of shots off, so the less chances of blowing up. Downside is, you’ve got to buy a unit of clanrats first before you can buy a ratling, so we’re not just looking at those 60 points. Now there’s no point buying a minimum cost unit of 20 naked clanrats just for the ratling gun, because you’re just wasting points and deployment space with a unit that’s utterly useless. And if you’re going to spend points on something, you’d better be using it. Buying a clanrat unit just for the ratling means you now have a 160 point weapon team and a block of seat-warmers that are likely to panic or break at the first chance they get, and panic everyone around them in the process. A simple rule of thumb is to ensure that everything in your army has a purpose and is combat-worthy.

One of the more effective ways of deploying a ratling gun is the “tunnel” method. If you field your blocks of clanrats and slaves in the generic checkerboard method, have a space between each of the front units just enough to stick your ratling gun in. This doesn’t protect them against snipers in 7th edition, but it still offers a measure of protection against charges, since the enemy unit’s ranks will hit the neighbouring units in the process.

The warplightning cannon. Most know the advantages of this weapon, and its unreliability too. This is not a mass-damage weapon by the nature of its straight line “template” and unreliable range and strength. The WLC is strictly a support weapon, for pulling off a few moves like taking down generals or heroes, and terrorizing large single monsters. It also has a good function as a flank protector: it may not be able to be relied on to cause damage to a flank attack, especially against fast cavalry that can force it to flee, but a WLC behind some terrain on the flank might force your opponent to think twice about sending an expensive unit down that flank. The WLC has a good psychological effect from being a much-maligned unit, and might also force your opponent to keep his general as far away from it as possible for fear of being sniped. And every time your opponent has to re-adjust his tactics to respond to your threats is a time your opponent is not applying his tactics freely to his own whims.

A shooting army still needs a reasonable combat support to anchor the line together. Being shooting-oriented works both ways: to be shooting offensive, and shooting defensive. An SAD army has to be able to wreak carnage in the shooting phase, but likewise it needs to be able to take it if an equal amount of shooting comes right back at it, because it sucks to be beaten at your own game. Numbers are essential to keep that 25% casualty risk at bay. A good-sized slave unit anchored with the general or a chieftain is an invaluable screen. Think of it as like a pavise for a jezzail. Shooters are always vulnerable from enemy shooters and mages, so if they’re shooting in one direction it’s always a good idea to cover their blind side. A shooting army will likely not be fielding monks, censer bearers, or ratogres, but swarms, clanrats, slaves and stormvermin are still not to be neglected. These will be there to block off enemy units from charging your vulnerable shooters, offering more targets for your enemy, and counter-charge any enemy that tries to take on your shooting units. Also have some units to target and neutralize your opponent's own shooting units. When up against another shooting army, it's not always a good idea to face off and see whose shooting is superior, since Skaven shooting is easily challenged by a dwarven castle or an edition Empire gunline army. Tunneling Gutter-runners can take care of your opponent's mages and warmachines, and ensure he doesn't do the same to you, as you're about to do to him.

Part two:

Characters

Now, to picking a general. The Grey seer, especially with a screaming bell, is a ranged general and so does match the style of a ranged-killing army, but considering that both a Seer and Skryre weaponry tend to take up a lot of points, the army will have to be smaller than average. Seers also have a risk of self-destructiveness, and if on a Bell can be easily targeted.

Considering that an SAD already has a large number of units, especially heroes, that are capable of and likely to blow themselves and everything around them to smithereens, I think it’ll be a much needed stability to have a general that is not going to do the same. A general who will also have the Ld to hold the army together, just in case it starts to break. wink.gif Since one of the weaknesses of an SAD army the fragility and low Leadership of Jezzails and PWGs, a few extra points of Leadership can make the difference.

The seer, especially with a Bell, is best when you’re using armies of 2,500 points or more, and where you have enough hero slots to field a chieftain or two, and enough points so that the Bell and Seer combo isn't too much of a points drain.

Warlock Engineers will be taking most of those Hero slots, I guess that goes without saying. Since this is an SAD army, try out a full-kit, pistol included. You can't be a fully shooty army without some pistols... 2 engineers, both with condenser and accumulator, 1-2 dispel scrolls and a stormdaemon are staples. Another good trick is to field a third Warlock Engineer, naked except for Death Globes. This guy will join a PWG unit that hold back for the first few turns, and will move forward to engage the enemy later, once the enemy is closer to your lines. Your opponent will likely assume that he will be functioning as a usual warplightning-casting engineer, so you’ll have the element of surprise when he runs in all kamikaze-like and starts flinging those lethal, template-shooting globes into the midst of a large gathering of enemy units. If he gets close enough, it wouldn’t matter if he misfires, he’ll take someone down with him.


Sample Army

Here's a sample 2000 pt army list based on the above ideas. It makes use of as many shooting weapons as I could fit in, plus some unit and character designs as illustrated above.

Warlord: Heavy Armour: Shield; Headsplitter; Warpstone Amulet

Warlock Engineer: Warplock Pistol; Warp-Blades; Warp-Energy Condenser; Warp-power Accumulator; Dispel Scroll(x2)
Warlock Engineer: Warplock Pistol; Warp-Blades; Warp-Energy Condenser; Warp-power Accumulator; Storm Daemon
Warlock Engineer: Dispel Scroll(x1); Death Globes

25 x Clanrats: Musician; Standard Bearer; Ratling Gun
25 x Clanrats: Musician; Standard Bearer; Ratling Gun
25 x Clanrats: Musician; Standard Bearer; Warpfire Thrower
25 x Clanrats: Musician; Standard Bearer

20 x Clanrat Slaves
20 x Clanrat Slaves
20 x Clanrat Slaves

3 x Poisoned Wind Globadiers
3 x Poisoned Wind Globadiers
3 x Poisoned Wind Globadiers
3 x Poisoned Wind Globadiers

5 x Gutter Runners: Poisoned Hand Weapon; Tunnelling

5 x Warplock Jezzails
5 x Warplock Jezzails

1 x Warp-Lightning Cannon
1 x Warp-Lightning Cannon


Ideas, discussions, and suggestions of other tactics for SAD armies are welcome.