by Peter Atkinson

They’re good at everything: good magic, good combat, good chaff, good shooting.  So why haven’t they been winning loads of events?  Because they’ve got legendarily shit Battle Tactic options in their book, that’s why.

Today we’ll take a look through the book options, plus how well Skaven can work with the current GHB tactics as well as their Grand Strategy choices, as we try and plot a reliable path to 28 VPs. 

And I’ll say this once, at the start: the Skaven book tactics are less than the sum of their parts.  There’s basically one for each of the Clans plus the latest Pity Points that were dished out to patch them. And because the book tactics are all locked to specific keywords (and in some cases units), they squeeze each other out.  You can’t possibly fit enough units into a competitive 2000 point list to have a proper crack at all the book ones, so keep that in mind as you’re reading: individually they may look OK, but as a group they clash with each other.  So we’ll think about the competitiveness of the unit choices required for each of the book tactics as we go, to have some idea of whether we actually want to take the units needed.

So what do we reckon?  Are the Pity Points enough to get Skaven competing properly on secondaries, or is it still table-them-or-bust?  Let’s go.

The Criteria

As a reminder these are the standard criteria we are using for assessing the strength of each book’s battle tactics:

• Turn 1 EZ Mode.  Is there a gimme that you can bank turn 1?  Always important because it gives you an easy flow into the game, lifting the mental load on you and putting scoreboard pressure on your opponent.  It’s the first thing people look for in the GHB tactics and even when you can reliably score one of those early on, having a guaranteed one-two punch for the first two rounds is a huge quality of life boost.
• Grand Strategy.  The GHB Grand Strats are often “win more” and are variations on have stuff left at the end of the game / stop your opponent having stuff left.  In this context, having an absolute gimme in the book can swing tight games without any skill or good fortune required – Tzeentch and Fyreslayers are the benchmark here, offering you a 3-0 headstart in most games for no real reason.
• Zingers.  Are there 2-3 tactics you can reliably hit in almost every game, to complement 2-3 from the GHB and give you 4-5 every game?  In the race to five there’s usually more value in a couple of zingers to get you over the line, even if the book is padded out with some dross and filllers, as opposed to having a whole bunch that are all kind of feasible but also dicey. In practice, you’d generally prefer a couple of superstars over strength in depth.
• Synchronicity.  How does this army work in with the GHB tactics – are they achievable for common builds?  An example here would be Sons of Behemat – their own BTs aren’t amazing, but they had a really nice run with the first GHB in 3^rd Edition that rewarded Monsters.  With Gally Champs – not so much.  So today we’ll be looking at battle tactics in the context of the 2023 GHB.
• Flavour. Getting hit with the “thematic” stick in Battle Tactics is usually a sign that you’ve been stiffed with something random and dumb, like the one in Sons of Behemat where you have to hit a series of dice rolls to fling a model around and achieve Man-skittles.  While it won’t always help you to hit those consistent 10+3 VPs, good design that makes tactics actually interesting deserves some kind of recognition.

Skaven Battle Tactics

Credit: Games Workshop via Wahapedia

Restore the Beast: Basically the Moulder one, because Rat Ogors are Moulder.  See?  Thematic!  Rat Ogors themselves are a solid and (imo) somewhat underused unit.  Their main crime is that they are outshone by Skaven’s more exciting glass-hammer options, but also because the models themselves are fugly pieces of crap.  I wouldn’t let that stop me though – I’m a Moulder guy, and I’d be happy to convert some up.  All a true Master Moulder needs is a bits box, a hobby saw and a can-do attitude.

The unit costs 140 points and it heals via the Master Moulder, who costs another 90 points and heals them up D3.  You need to heal a full 3 wounds though, so you’ll need at least two Master Moulders within 3” to reliably get there.  So we’re already up to 320 points for the combo.

Then you need to start with 3+ wounds assigned to a 6 wound model, which is relying on your opponent being kind enough to damage them but not mean enough to kill them.  I guess you could hit lucky by taking wounds yourself on Damned Terrain – but that won’t reliably do enough damage to get you there in its own, meaning you’ll probably need to dump an Endless Spell or two into them too, pushing the points cost up further.

So this is what it’s come to.  Spend around 400 points on units and spells that we don’t really want, use that endless spell to mutilate our own unit and then hope we roll right on both the damage and the healing to meet the criteria.  And this is just the first one – let’s hope it gets better. 

Early game: unlikely, certainly not top of 1 unless you do the whole self-mutilation thing.

Overall quality: average to poor, because of the forced unit selection, tight healing requirement and having to thread the needle on the amount of damage that your Rat Ogors takeb first.

Deathmark: Kill something big from full to zero, crucially at least finishing them off with Eshin units.  They’re ostensibly suited to the task, with their mortal wounds on 6s to bypass the popular 3+ save characteristic that Big Things have, and infiltration rules to pop up where you need them.  Some Gutter Runners are a decent little harassment unit in most armies and Skittershank is a fairly popular competitive choice. 

The trouble is you’ll usually get little output other than their mortals – Eshin’s core stats are generally crap (as they should be).  You can of course soften them up first with something heavy duty in order to finish them off with Eshin, but then you run the risk of either accidentally killing the target first or still not hitting enough 6s when you target them with Eshin.

Early game: you could potentially hit a relevant target at any point in the game thanks to your pop and bang infiltration…

Overall quality: …but you’re relying on the opponent bringing a relevant target (which in fairness most armies will), and then spiking 6s when you need them.  You can engineer a high probability but it’s not copper-bottomed.

Fire-fire! More-more!: Skryre loves shooting you off, so why not get paid for doing what you love?  It needs to be a Monster, so we have all the familiar caveats: yes it’s achievable, but with the asterisk that you and your opponent both need to bring the “right” units to enable it. 

All the same, my experience is that most people do still have at least one Monster in their list and you rarely feel bad about bringing some Skryre dakka – it’s a competitive staple.

Early game: teleport and bang, it’s the Skryre motto

Overall quality: yeah even in an extended whinge-fest, I have to say this one is pretty solid.  It suffers only from being the least situational choice, when in a good portfolio of options it would be the most situational.  But that’s a complaint about the suite of BTs in general more than this one specifically.

Crescendo of the Diseased Choir: Successfully chant 3+ Prayers with your Pestilens Priests.  This is steering you to taking multiples, which is convenient, because you also get chanting bonuses for having a bunch of them huddled together.  Your Priest options are the 100 point Plague Priest and the newly-mobile 270 point Furnace, so committing to 3 of these things is quite the undertaking; but you will at least be hitting your Prayers on a 2+, and as soon as you hit one decent roll, that’s a 2+ rerollable.

Early game: Yeah boi.  To make it extra-safe you might wait until you know you’ve got the Great Plague online, but in practice you will trigger that as soon as you hit a single 4+.

Overall quality: Very high…IF you’re willing to commit that many points to Priests, which is a bit of an ask.

And that’s it – that’s all you get.  Four book tactics, which are in practice mutually exclusive because you can’t sink that many points into all those different Clans and units. 

But wait…there’s also Pity Points*, fresh from the latest Battlescroll update:

Flee-flee!: Just retreat a couple of units, that’s all you have to do.  A strictly better version of Bait and Trap from the GHB, because it doesn’t rely on the charging thing.  Well OK not strictly better because one of them does have to be a Hero, but we’ve got Scurry Away to sweeten the deal.  We’ve even got units that can retreat and charge.  Piece of piss.

Early game: Well not if we go first; and if our opponent does, we’re relying on them tagging something but not killing it.  I mean, it’s possible, but it’s not the Top-Of-One banker we’re looking for.

Overall quality: Bangin’.  Two free VPs to make Skaven’s life easier.  Fair play to the devs, they’ve understood the assignment here: it leans into Skaven’s existing retreat bullshit, and most importantly, it’s not Clans-dependent.  Good job.

*Trademark Rob

Grand Strats

Let’s do them all in one go, shall we?  They are all a variation on “Keep your heroes alive”.  See this is the kind of bullshit that made Skaven players feel their book was a half-arsed rush job:

I mean, they’re OK.  Some of the key competitive heroes (like Thanquol and the Grey Seer) are Masterclan so that gets you halfway there, but keeping that many of them alive – when they’re all either frontline fighters or hyperfragile – is a different matter. 

You might be better off going with one of these, rather than going with Slaughter of Sorcery and trying to get your own wizards killed too, but fundamentally it’s a bit “win more” rather than getting you over the line in a tight one.  If you finish the game with your hero package intact you’ve probably already won; if they’ve crumbled, you’re probably rubber ducked.  Not awful, but not a difference-maker for the army.

GHB Tactics

We’ll circle back and update this part after the current handbook cycles out. Or forget. Time will tell.

We’re probably looking at about one-and-a-half bankers from the Book (and Battlescroll) tactics, so these will need to do some heavy lifting.  Are they up to it?

Old faithful Magical Dominance is the one for early game.  Cast your most important buff spells from back out of unbind range, with a portfolio of casting bonuses available, and you’re golden.  You might also consider Surround and Destroy as an early game option; deep-striking Eshin can’t score it on the turn they pop up, but they can get into position for the next turn, plus you’ve got various teleports and even the Night Runners’ pregame moves to have a good chance of getting this on turn one.

It might be tough to score Intimidate the Invaders early game with the sheer volume of heroes that Skaven typically pack, but it’s certainly one to look out for from mid-game onwards. 

Led into the Maelstrom wants you to charge something with Clanrats and fail to kill it, and Clanrats are really good at not killing stuff; meanwhile your Thanquols or Warbringers are more than happy to charge in and merck something.  Very achievable.

Bait and Trap is another charge ‘n’ retreat thing which this army doesn’t mind at all, although the flow of a typical game might make it tricky to score that and our own Flee-flee and Led into the Maelstrom.  We won’t be stepping in and out of combat for the whole game – at some point, some units are going to start dying.

Then we’re into the arse-scratchers: the situational ones where your General has to die first (Reprisal), where they need to have an Endless Spell or Incarnate on the table (Endless Expropriation), where you need something in range to get killed by your magic (Magical Mayhem).  These are the ones that come into play somewhere around turn 4 where you’ve cracked out your General’s Handbook and started scratching around for something you can do, while your opponent starts scrolling through their phone and everyone wonders why games of 3^rd Edition take so fucking long.

The Verdict

• Turn 1 EZ Mode.  With plenty of casting bonuses to crack off Magical Dominance from out of unbind range, you’re in better shape than most. And if you do face Seraphon unbinding boardwide, you have the movement to grab a Surround and Destroy instead. Pretty good.
• Grand Strategy.  This is the real gap for Skaven nowadays – your book options are probably your best bet, but they are all really “win more” rather than a difference-maker. Slaughter of Sorcery is a popular go-to for lots of factions currently, but a plan that revolves around your own Verminlord, Thanquol and support casters all biting it has obvious drawbacks. The rats are below the curve here.
• Zingers.  None of the book tactics are copper-bottomed, even assuming you have the right units.  There are a lot of high-probability plays (zapping some poor bastard with Skryre springs to mind), but there’s still a degree of situationality. The real Zinger is the Battlescroll BT which you really should be scoring every game – that’s the freebie you needed.
• Synchronicity.  Yup, this is where Skaven shine and to a large extent, it rescues them competitively in the current GHB. The units you want to take in the builds you want to run dovetail so damn well with the GHB tactics, and along with the Zinger plus maybe one book tactic, hitting three of these is your path to five overall.
• Flavour.  For all the shit I’ve heaped on the book tactics, one thing I do have to admit is that they are narrative as all hell.

Overall Score: Three and a Half out of Five

Skaven’s book Battle Tactics have deservedly had a bad rep, because competitive lists just can’t and don’t contain the spread of keywords needed to achieve them.  What rescues the army is that the Pity Points are gratefully received, and the various pieces of flotsam and jetsam in a Skaven list (coupled with strong magic and various teleports) lend themselves quite well to the current batch of book tactics. Their below-the-curve Grand Strategy prospects are the only real knock on them these days.

What’s printed in the book is still crap, but there’s now plenty to work with to chart a path to 4+ BTs in most games.  Plus you’re just going to zap everything with Stormfiends and then who cares?  Your opponent isn’t scoring any either.

Credit for cover image to Games Workshop

Thanks to Clarkzium for the article suggestion – we threw it over to the Patrons in our Discord to ask which Battle Tactics they wanted us to review next, and Clarkzium rang the bell for his beloved rats. If you want to get involved next time, you know what to do.

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