Beastmen Tactics: An Introduction
So after my moderate success with my Beastman army lately, I've decided to sit down and share my thoughts of the book. I re-started my Beastmen when the new book was released, but 8th was soon to follow and everything I learned in that brief time had been lost, and I switched back to my Ogre Kingdoms. But fate soon turned me back to the hairier of the two and I was quickly trying to figure out how to make these stinking beasts work in an edition that seemed to hate them... Beastmen are an army of extreme visual character, when they're on the field, everybody knows what they're looking at, though fewer understand what each unit is capable of. Due to the general lack of Beastmen players, we are able to prey on our opponents ignorance, though typically they just assume every unit is a super close combat unit, and rarely think they are weaker than they are.
The Beastmen get access to some of the most esoteric monsters in the game, with bizarre special rules and a total lack of miniatures; unfortunately however, those monsters aren't really very good, but we'll get to that when I talk about the Rare section of the army. As a whole the army has very little shooting, next to no armor and a surprising lack of hard-hitting core choices. What the army does have though are some fantastic characters, magic items and magic support. Most armies use magic to cause a bit of damage or disruption, but few use it in such a way that the beasts do. A canny beast player will use magic to only slightly debuff the enemy, or enhance their own troops, making it appear that they're saving for something much more scary. Only after casting these "weaker" spells, the beast will take full advantage of the enemy being lowered from WS4 to 3, allowing you hit them on 3's, which dramatically changes the outcome of a combat. So much for letting that 5+ miasma go off.
I think that much like Skaven, a Beastman player must always have an ace up his sleeve. Catching your opponent off guard then shoving a block of Bestigors down their throat is the path to victory.
Come back next week when I talk about the Lords and Heroes of the Beastmen.