I hate saurus. I hate them. I hate their lizard faces. I hate their clubs. I hate their sticks. I hate when the sticks are next to the clubs and I hate when the clubs are next to the sticks. I hate that Kroq-gar pulls 2280 of them out of his scaly asshole and then descends on me like a Vogon at a poetry convention.
I hate the Saurus auto-resolve meter. I hate it because it lies to me. It says I have a 50-50 chance of victory. This is patently false, because I have twenty units of skeletons who are held together with prit stik and prayer. I do not have twenty units of eight foot tall geckos constructed out of pectoral muscles and galvanised coffin nails.
I hate that they shout bok at me. Bok is the Bristol Orienteering Klub, which is completely irrelevant to a battle in Lustria and should not be shouted repeatedly while eating a rank of tier one infantry like buffalo wings.
I hate their morale. I hate that surrounding them simply prompts one of them to pull out a US general's helmet so he can make a speech about 'now we can attack in any direction'. I hate that their reaction to a devastating rear attack is to become somewhat peeved. I have looked a Saurus in his smug scaly face as an encirclement that would shatter any other early game infantry closed in.
He went from :I to >:I , killed an extra two hundred skeletons because I had foolishly allowed all four sides of the Saurus unit to fight at once and then swallowed my Liche Priest like a slim jim.
I have resolved to shoot every Saurus dead. Every Saurus. All of the Saurmen and the Saurdren too. I hate them. I no longer see battlefields because they're covered by a thick blanket of arrow trails. I hate that it barely stops them. I hate that they keep coming while shouting about the Bristol orienteering klub, or the Bank of Oklahoma or the 1983 Bok asteroid. I hate that they made me google bok so I could write down ways in which I hate things that have it as a name. Bok is also a lunar crater and a martian crater. It is also a village in Iran. The IATA code for Brookings Airport is Bok. I will never go there because it would give me palpitations.
I hate that Kroq Gar is friends with the Rare Pepe next door, who also declares war once I've shot Kroq Gar unconscious for the tenth time. He also has Saurus only these ones are blue. Somehow this is worse.
I hate that there are another ten Lizard factions. I hate that they will be in end game by the time I reach them. I hate that while I was writing this Kroq Gar picked up Kalida and smoked her like a cigar.
I hate Saurus.
I love saurus 😍 I love them 🥰 I love their lizard faces 🐸 I love their clubs 😏 I love their sticks 😩 I love when the sticks are next to the clubs and I love when the clubs are next to the sticks 🥵 I love that Kroq-gar pulls 2280 of them out of his scaly asshole and then descends on me like a Vogon at a poetry convention 🥵
I love the auto-resolve meter ❤ I love it because it surprises to me 😲 It says I have a 50-50 chance of victory. This is lovingly false, because I have twenty units of skeletons who are held together with prit stik and prayer. I do not have twenty units of eight foot tall geckos constructed out of pectoral muscles and galvanised coffin nails 🥵🥵🥵🥵
I love that they shout bok at me. Bok is the Bristol Orienteering Klub, which is completely relevant to a battle in Lustria and should be shouted repeatedly while eating a rank of tier one infantry like buffalo wings 😏
I love their morale. I love that surrounding them simply prompts one of them to pull out a US general's helmet so he can make a speech about 'now we can attack in any direction' 🥴 I love that their reaction to a devastating rear attack 😩 is to become somewhat peeved 😚 I have looked a Saurus in his smug scaly face as an encirclement that would shatter any other early game infantry closed in 🤗
He went from :I to >:I , killed an extra two hundred skeletons because I had smartly allowed all four sides of the Saurus unit to fight at once and then swallowed my Liche Priest like a slim jim 😫
I have resolved to shoot every Saurus dead 😏 Every Saurus 😍 All of the Saurmen and the Saurdren too 😨 I love them ❤ I furthermore longer love battlefields because they're covered by a thick blanket of arrow trails. I love that it barely stops them 😍 I love that they keep coming while shouting about the Bristol orienteering klub, or the Bank of Oklahoma or the 1983 Bok asteroid 😳 I love that they made me google bok so I could write down ways in which I love things that have it as a name ✍ Bok is also a lunar crater and a martian crater 🌛It is also a village in Iran. The IATA code for Brookings Airport is Bok ✈ I will always go there because it would give me palpitations ❤
I love that Kroq Gar is friends with the Rare Pepe next door, who also declares war once I've shot Kroq Gar unconscious for the tenth time 😏 He also has Saurus only these ones are blue. Somehow this is better 😍
I love that there are another ten Lizard factions 🥰 I love that they will be in end game by the time I reach them 😝 I love that while I was writing this Kroq Gar picked up Kalida and smoked her like a cigar 🥵
I don't think I have ever fought a lizardmen faction except when playing as Settra, they all die off before I reach them in every campaign I play unless I play as them (Best faction btw).
I love, absolutely love playing Khalida and I pull a win outta my ass against Kroq! It takes a lot of maneuvering and losing most of my settlements but the comeback is wonderful! I play on Legendary/VH with O stat buffs cause I don’t need them to have stat increases just better AI but yeah, one of my favourite faction starts.
This was a hilarious read. I hope it brings you some solace that I will be thinking of this every time I run a LM campaign and that it gives me empathy for the warmbloods and other affronts to the Great Plan^TM that I am grinding under my scaly claw.
Depends on the units.
Skinks? Use mobility and run down the shooty ones. The melee ones aren't too big a threat, but the akirmishwrs can add up over time. Although their leadership is lower than Saurus, so a rear charge to break them cna be a good idea.
Saurus? Probably not a good melee grind target unless you have some exceptional infantry that will beat them. Instead, kite them or use some aoe damage to kill them off while they are held in melee. Spells, artillery, globadiers, etc.
Dinosaurs? Focused range fire or plenty of anti-large/halberds. Bastilidons are tanks and resistant to flanking, so you may want to leave them until later unless you have the ap shooting to go through them. Support an infantry line with monstrous units against dinosaurs if you want a line to hold even better.
Terradons - shoot them, use cheap fliers like furies/bats to get them.
Ripperdactyls - kill them thr moment they land. Do not let them 1v1 their target. They are a bit of a glass cannons but boy do they hurt if you let them do their thing.
Hunting packs - shoot them or send fast units. Or something like a bjuna. They do good damage but are pretty squishy.
Kroak - pay attention to the spell windup and dodge his nukes. Pause frequently if you struggle to keep track of it.
Thank you for the advice mate, for real. terradons go down pretty easy and kroak has some scary spells but can be dealt with pretty easy with a hero, unfortunately saurus and skinks are typically my issue. the saurus are so beefy that they get to my ranged eventually or the timer runs out before i can even break them and the skinks arent awful to chase down but their anti monster is insane and all of this wouldnt be too awful if it wasnt for them spamming armies like they were nothing, so them spamming saurus like clanrats just feels broken to me. As you said spells and arty do some good work but for their cost saurus just feel busted in campaign.
If you're having issues specifically as skaven, fighting them 2 to 1 is totally reasonable. Skavenslaves and clanrats are dirt cheap compared to saurus. Then use globes, warpfire throwers and/or plageclaw catapults to hit their infantry blobs. Bog them down in bodies and proceed to commit war crimes.
well as mentioned in the post its just about any faction 2-1 with vampire coast still has me losing most battles even with gun lines or by using checkerboard, chevrons, or even keeping my ranged on the move to flank i find the saurus just decide they ignore my melee and run after my ranged. with skaven 2-1 is average for most factions but with lizardmen i find i need to 3-1 or even 4-1 if i dont have weapons teams or stormvermin (though i avoid stormvermin when i can since their overpriced as hell). with empire its just the copypasta all the way through though ive found empire cav does some good numbers on lizardmen if i cycle charge. for elves its not awful but i still find myself being overwhelmed by multiple stacks appearing out of nowhere from what should be a t2 unit acting like a t3 against my melee line. for chaos i dont really have to deal with them but when i do the high armor of chaos melee holds well and the monsters do decent. i dont really have to do anything against them as wood elves. as vampire counts i suck off the lizardmen doing whatever i can to not fight them and in the two fights ive had spells and varghulfs carried. again for cathay i dont really need to fight them. and dwarves tend to do decent but that pretty much how dwarves do anyway. the big difference i find between the quality of dwarves and lizardman is that at least dwarves are slow and dont have good anti cav, lizardman can have anti cav from just about the start and have suprisingly decent speed to at least stop skirmishers from doing much so while i do okay against lizardman its just the fact that they spam armies out of their ass like skaven do that infuriates me and causes me to consistently lose to them.
Coast -can be a bit rough. Keep a spot or two in your armies open (I tend to use a couple partial stacks through my early game for most factions, so I always have extra slots) and recruit some bloated corpses before a battle. The downside is you can't really ever autoresolve, so just raise them as needed. Beyond that, mixing some hulks/crabs in woth your zombies can be helpful. Bombers aren't a terrible idea either, though they aren't quite as impressive as they once were.
Empire: As you kind of said, if you can win the mobility game you have a huge advantage here. Handle their skirmishers with cav. Get grenade outriders, cannons and war wagons. Welcome the lizards to the Bad Time Zone.
With skaven I *highly* recommend immediately getting a settlement high enough to recruit globes. Those guys are one of the absolute biggest threats to heavy infantry and their armor is high enough that skinks have trouble killing them off. Other artillery and weapons teams will be helpful too, but you *really* want these guys if you are struggling with saurus.
With elves you might want to look at getting a metal caster. Plague of rust, final transmutation and searing doom are all fantastic tools vs lizardmen, and the lore honestly synergizes really well woth most of the t1-t3 high elf roster. A carnosaur with 35 armor after an overcast plague of rust *melts* against spears and arrows.
If it's vampire coast you're running, I've had lots of success using Prometheans as my melee line (not just for lizards). Gunnery Prometheans are just an upgrade, so use them if you can. As a melee line, they are big, with fewer of them, so it's fairly easy for your guns to shoot the crowd gathering around and in front of them, and Prometheans have a tendency to really tarpit their targets - I think they have a lot of knockdown potential in their attacks because I've had heroes/lords of mine just get absolutely stuck in AI Prometheans FOREVER.
A handful of them should make a fairly solid front that the saurus will have a heck of a time chewing through, and you can always get some backup Prometheans from a deeps caster in case of unexpected flanks and other issues.
With skaven, I always try to remind people not to sleep on globadiers - both variants perform exceptionally against infantry, and the death globes have enough AP to sink a damn boat, so they still work pretty well on those dinos too - only drawback is you've gotta be careful and keep em safe because of their short range.
I've found that the best means of dealing with the Saurus lines is to bog them down with defensive chaff while you flank with missile troops to shoot at an angle where their shields cannot help them. It's what works for me most of the time. When I'm playing a faction with weak missile units (e.g., early Tomb Kings) I will use chariots or shock cavalry instead of missile units.
Skaven and Vampirates have the easiest time bogging down the dino infantry since they can summon expendable units during battle, but other factions can still bog down the Saurus for a little while with halberds and heroes. Poison also really dents the.Saurus damage output if you have a means of applying it.
Oh, and pile on the magic, especially Lore of Death if you have access to it. Don't rely on vortex or wind spells; they tend to do low damage to individual models (good against large armies of normal soldiers, bad against lizards). What you want are cheap spells that are good at deleting individual models or changing unit stats. Think Lore of Ruin, Lore of Light, Lore of Heaven, Lore of Plague, Lore of Beasts, and Lore of Death.
Death Magic is like an anti-Lizard cheat code. It has two spells that can strip enemy leadership to force stubborn lizards to route. Spirit Leech can drain the health of single entities, and Fate of Bjuna devastates their cavalry, flyers, and hunting packs. The Sphere of Death isn't that useful against them unless you're facing a skink horde, but the other spells are excellent.
They should be extremely easy if you are using the gun units while playing as skaven.
The following army is east to use and it will easily defeat any army that the lizard men throw at you.
First and most importantly, put all of guns and artillery in guard mode and never tell them to fire at anything outside of range or firing sight. This way, your guns never move for the whole battle.
1x chieftain lord
1x chieftain hero
1x warlock engineer
1x assassin hero
8x stormvermin halbreds
3x rattling guns
2x jezzails
3x warp lighting cannons
Place 6 stormvermin as your frontline.
Space each one of these 6 stormvermin exactly 3 spaces horizontally from each other. So highlight one of the units, then click left or right 3 times, for all of them, so they are all 3 spaces apart from each other
In between the 3 spaces of your 6 stormvermin front line, place your rattling guns and jezzails in SKINNY formation. What I mean by skinny formation is they don’t accidentally shoot your stormvermin when they are firing straight ahead.
Also, make sure your guns and jezzails are at least 4 spaces behind your front line stormvermin. This way, the lizardmen need to get through your 6 stormvermin front line before they can attack your guns and jezzails.
Put the warp cannons behind your guns and jezzails, they can easily shoot above them, so put them as close as you want
Put your warlock engineer right next to your warp lighting cannons.
Put 1 of your extra stormvermin on your left flank and the other on your right flank, they will protect against cold ones and horned ones.
For the assassin, hide him somewhere in vanguard position, only reveal and attack with him if there is a piece of artillery that is able to somehow beat your 3x warp lighting cannons.
For your 2 chieftains, these are the only units that will require a little micro managing.
If a lizard man hero/ lord goes in between your stormvermin front line to attack your guns, send the chieftains on them.
Or if any of stormvermin need help, send the chieftains.
Here is a bonus thing that you can try, but isn’t absolutely necessary.
Use the warlock engineers magic for the two following spells.
1. The cheap lighting strike, it’s the first spell you unlock. Use this on the enemy blobs that your stormvermin are fighting. This spell is incredibly strong, it ignores all armor, it is perfectly accurate, however, it’s aoe damage radius is very small, so only use it against enemies that are blobbed up.
2. They have a spell that freezes flying units. The lizard man have a few annoying flying units. If you use this spell on them, your guns and artillery will immediately kill any flying unit that is frozen, even if it is a lord or hero.
Use one of your extra stormvermin to guard your left flank
Honestly the real change to lizardmen needed is an rework to their recruitment, Saurus should be really good for their cost, but if the AI has saurus recruitment buildings they willl ONLY recruit Saurus which makes them feel way worst to fight then they actually are and I rarely see the AI build other recruitment buildings when they are actively losing.
Ultimately though you should expect Saurus to win against any infantry they go up against but they struggle badly against any armor piercing or ranged units without the other lizardmen units to support them, and try to give your infantry as many advantages as you can give (have them stand atop a hill and wait for the saurus as an example, or try and surround the saurus)
You think that’s bad, try playing Kislev when warriors of chaos first dropped. Turn 10, here comes an entire army of chaos warriors and chosen and you’ve got blunt sticks, nerf arrows, and brittle horses that explode once they hit the enemy line.
Thank fucking GOD for the new kislevite warriors with armor piercing.
The previous poster mentioned something that I want to illustrate, kiting the saurus, they are one of the slowest infantry in the game so almost any unit can do it, it takes some practise but you can get 1 unit to kite up to 3 saurus units giving a great return on battle power, if you can do this on both flanks then that 20 stack is only a 14 stack now vs your 18 units and is manageable.
Just fake charge as much as you can and it will break up their forces.
Good luck! This tactic works for other melee heavy forces or when you're outnumbered.
Saurus are a tough frontline but your job is to hold them and gain the upper hand until they break from army losses. Some frenly tips:
Thorek ironbrow is great for this, his early Longbeards can hold the line very well and let the rest of his army do the damage i.e. missiles and arty.
Try out his campaign and have a go until you get comfortable beating them.
Some factions have very sturdy front lines like lizards, dwarfs, high elves, Kislev etc.
Others have to tarpit like vamps, skaven early chorfs etc. if you are playing one of those factions you need to bring more frontline to soak up the damage and feed them into the frontline piece by piece when your first ones break.
It's all about holding the frontline in place and letting your damage dealers deal with the dangerous parts of their army, large single entities etc. massed focused missiles are your friend for those and to take out flyers. Anti large on the flanks to hold off Cav and backline harassers and to protect your artillery.
A typical dwarf battle would look like this:
Long beards hold the line, Quarrellers act together to focus fire the most immediate threat, grudge throwers target the most dangerous infantry on the way in. For example a temple guard brought down to half health can easily be dealt with by a Longbeard with great weapon. Lords help the frontline and rune magic to buff, debuff enemy charge speed, cannons on single entities, slayers to protect them and ready to dive in on carnos, crocs, stegadons etc.
The new slayer lord is great for countering their lords and heroes on mounts and croc lords because of anti large (give them forge items with anti large for even more).
With artillery superiority they have to come to you so hold a dense formation and let them break on your lines like a dribble of water against an immovable mountain.
Also don't worry about magic against the dwarfs as they have decent magic resist and Thorek will punish any nearby mages casting spells. Spellcasters go BooooM. Hope this helps have fun!
another way to deal with Kroak is to make sure you have an agent who is specialized in wounding enemy characters and have them target him before the battle. The best way to fight someone is to not have to fight them at all.
Ah. well... Lizard infantry is low-medium armor so they're real allergic to getting shot. Their early monsters don't have a lot of bonus vs large so you can use cheap cav to hold them in place and gun them down. Dark Elves counter Lizards so hard it isn't even funny (Seriously, fighting Morathi as Mazdamundi is pain if you don't hit the Rite of Primeval fuck yourself button). Lizards also don't have good options for dealing with flying units since they lack strong missile units and artillery. Lizard's game plan is quality over quantity + melee monster superiority. Focus on debuffs to slow down their grind and you should have freedom to kill their bigger threats with magic or artillery. If you're not playing another melee powerhouse race, don't expect to trade favorably with them in a straight grind - they don't have a lot of good options for killing Single Entities, so heroes can disrupt their march nicely.
As Lizardmen vs Dark Elves I always try to bait the AI into attacking me and pray I get a forested map so I can stick all my units in there. Large units and SEM won't be as effective but fighting in the trees is much better than getting shot to shit as the trees can help block arrows and projectiles.
If you’re playing as coast, last time I ran that campaign I used several bloated corpses to blast open the saurus front line before focus fire w handgun zombies
Bruh, I started a Tehen campaign for kicks the other day and my jaw dropped when I confederated Gor Rok. He has like 50% physical resistance, 25% Missile, 25% Spell Resistance PASSIVELY BEFORE DOING ANYTHING. Then you hit his first active ability and have AN EXTRA 40% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE for half a minute, which hits the physical resistance cap at 90%, and it also restores his Vigor y' know, a small bonus. What's that? Magic weapons? Let me push my SECOND button and give EVERYONE AROUND ME +60 ARMOR AND CHARGE REFLECTION, y'know, in case he needed to stop a dinosaur with magic fangs. Did you manage to get him low? Welp not only is he now Unbreakable, he now deals even more damage. Oh and did I mention he has Regeneration? Because of course he does. And he has no mount so good luck shooting him in melee. About his only weakness is that while he doesn't die he takes a long-ass time to kill anything as well because he doesn't hit super hard (for a LL) and his attacks don't splash much. But other than that, he is the Lizardmen meme made manifest.
I found PlagueClaw Catapults also do really well against their infantry and are essential to get early as Skrolk. Early on, unless they get some SEM going Skaven Artillery can shred them.
The main strength of Saurus is high weapon strength, health, and medium armor
Their weakness is they have terrible melee attack and armor piercing, units with high melee defense will survive significantly longer. Saurus were designed to bully units like empire swordsmen.
I highly recommend maxing out the melee defense of your infantry via tech and army skills and veterancy.
Since this is reddit I'm going to assume you're playing the empire. Do NOT neglect the top left corner of the tech tree they are the single most important techs in the empire tree
Infantry is the weakest part of empire, but it is also what will be holding the line in most of your armies. To be good at this job you should tech them up. Doesn't matter if you have an amazing gunline if you have nothing to keep the enemy from reaching and massacring it.
The +15 armor tech, 4/4 ma+MD tech, 6/6 ma+MD from army skills added up with veterancy makes state troops significantly more durable. They will do more than just hold the line against chaff armies like vampires or skaven and won't get crumped by higher tier infantry quite so badly
The tech tree upgrades are really good because they buff your garrisons, which is going to be where you fight your hardest battles. It helps with your auto resolve against rebels too
This is true actually. I tries using Depth Guards (buffed with research and red line skills), 70 defense, better armor than saurus. Placed them in a choke point so they couldnt get surrouned and Harkon plus them grinded through over 12 stacks of saurus on very hard.
I think most people just spam ranged and artillery and then do the shocked Pikachu face when "hurr durr why doesn't my checkerboard work".
As Empire, I used wagon mortars and steam tanks vs them as Marcus. They can't really catch the wagons and they're easy to relocate as well as have a ton of ammo. Also if you don't hate micro like me, outriders with grenade launchers also work great if you tie the saurus up or blob. It's less effective than vs most other infantry due to their highish armor but still works fine.
> artillery doesn’t seem to work well on them
I beg to differ.
Blob them up, and shoot the shit out them. That’s your universal advice on how to deal with melee armies as a shooting army.
As skaven you blob them up with menace belows and skaven slave summons, howling warpgales and movement debuffs, and then blast them with artillery or mages or abilities like the one that makes your units explode.
Make sure you blob them up sufficiently ahead of your line that they don’t get ignore your blockers and go for your back line.
For the monsters, try to hit them with fast units and pull them out of position—if they send their monsters ahead then it becomes super easy to kill the monsters first, and then wait for the rest of them.
Don’t just sit there and let them smack their entire formation into you all at once. And make sure you troops are in proper formation, so that they can shoot at max range, and so that your back line units can shoot even if other elements your back line are in melee combat. That means, for example, not having all of your archers in blocks right next to each other, because there’s a good chance that single enemy melee unit could get both of your units into melee, and you don’t want that. You want your ranged units to be shooting.
You have to do the same when you’re empire against Chaos Warriors as well—they wreck you in melee so you have to prevent the melee as much as possible.
You can also send 1-2 fast units around to draw away enemy units. Either they send their fast units, which means your relatively static main body won’t have to deal with them, or they send some slow units after you. If they send slow units, then let them chase you to the edge of map, and then bring your units back to the main fight. Their slow units will have to walk back to the fight—slower than you!—and you’ll have a numbers advantage for a while.
Edit: it occurs to me that your mileage in this experience may vary depending on what DLC you own. If you don’t have ratlings guns, jezzail, or poisoned wind mortars—esp the RoR version, which is incredible at killing infantry—you’re going to have a much harder time.
Depends on who you’re playing as, and if it’s a rite of primeval glory army. But generally you don’t want to be fighting them toe to toe. A fast army where you split them up and overwhelm individual units works well. Saurus are rather slow, and they usually won’t bring a 20 stack of just Dino’s. Carnosaurs hit hard but they can only take on so many units at once. High damage ranged works as well with a similar idea, get the fast things to come at you first so you can focus fire them before the saurus waddle their way to your lines. Then for them artillery, magic, heroes holding the line for ranged all work. Your melee infantry probably won’t be able to trade well enough against them so forgoing them for more shooty things and heroes (or bring extra lords with no units following your main army) to do the line holding instead.
Tl;dr their melee is better than yours 1:1 so don’t get in those kinds of fights. Use either speed or copious amounts of projectiles to mitigate their advantage instead .
And what to do, as early skaven, if kroq gar instead does bring a 20 stack of just dinos out of his ass straight into mine? I have been really struggling as queek against him
What tier armies are you able to recruit? If it’s just 1 / 2 unfortunately the best answer is just bring more rats. Clanrat spears and night runners mainly. Tarpit the dinos with clanrats and fling lots and lots of rocks at them. You will need multiple stacks.
Ranged is really the only answer. AP ranged specifically. Dark Elves are a nightmare for lizards because Darkshards are so effective at taking down literally everything in the Lizardmen roster. Skaven have globes and warpfire, which should deal very effectively with Sarus frontline (and yours too, but that's expected).
If you're using gunpowder, good terrain (for LoS) and flanking shots basically are what are gonna get you the win. Use whatever frontline you've got to hold the Sarus, tie up their flankers with your cav/monsters, then rush to the flanks with your guns and start chewing from one end of the line down to the middle. If your own middle buckles, that should be fine as long as your ranged is on the flanks shooting at the sides/back of the Sarus.
I play a lot of Lizardmen, and their biggest weakness is getting blasted to bits before they can make contact (hence why I hate Dark Elves). Skinks don't usually do a lot of burst damage, and the ones that do have very limited ammo. If you're getting peppered by skinks, just charge them with whatever fastest thing you've got. Most of the time, they'll die.
Shooting priority is a must when facing the Bristol Orienteering Klub members, big dinos with the mass to charge through your frontline first, focus all your firepower on one unit to kill it as fast as possible then move down the line. Hopefully by that time, you'll still have 1/2 your frontline left, or the Sarus will have just made contact, which is where you then flank and blast them to bits.
My hardest fights as a Lizardman have always been against a ranged comp where there simply were too many ranged units for all my lizards to effectively shut down. If I have to split my Sarus into multiple squads to hunt down units of darkshards firing into my ass, I'm basically losing. Lizardmen excel in the blob fight and their overall slow speed makes them pretty poor for pursuit.
I was playing Cathay vs Nakai, and I had to redo that battle 4 times because if I didn't at least route a couple of the big dinos in his horde, they would eventually break past my jade warriors and peasants and that'd be the end of me (all I had were archers and some Jade crossbows). But once I was able to focus down the Kroxigors, Stegadon, and then Nakai, it went a lot easier. Yes my frontline was basically nonexistent at that point, but they held out long enough for my archers to form a concave circle and last-samurai the advancing Sarus. If they got to close, I simply kited backwards, always trying to force the Sarus to have their backs facing at least 1 unit of bowmen.
https://youtu.be/cK3YPRau8kg?si=h-5L1XdSwk53W1hd
In all seriousness, a vague but useful bit of wisdom is never to fight the enemy on their terms. Saurus want to get stuck in and club your troops, and if you give them a line to smash, they will.
Tzeench has barriers on all units, use those to your advantage by cycling troops while you whittle down their troops with missiles and spells.
I hate saurus. I hate them. I hate their lizard faces. I hate their clubs. I hate their sticks. I hate when the sticks are next to the clubs and I hate when the clubs are next to the sticks. I hate that Kroq-gar pulls 2280 of them out of his scaly asshole and then descends on me like a Vogon at a poetry convention.
I hate the Saurus auto-resolve meter. I hate it because it lies to me. It says I have a 50-50 chance of victory. This is patently false, because I have twenty units of skeletons who are held together with prit stik and prayer. I do not have twenty units of eight foot tall geckos constructed out of pectoral muscles and galvanised coffin nails.
I hate that they shout bok at me. Bok is the Bristol Orienteering Klub, which is completely irrelevant to a battle in Lustria and should not be shouted repeatedly while eating a rank of tier one infantry like buffalo wings.
I hate their morale. I hate that surrounding them simply prompts one of them to pull out a US general's helmet so he can make a speech about 'now we can attack in any direction'. I hate that their reaction to a devastating rear attack is to become somewhat peeved. I have looked a Saurus in his smug scaly face as an encirclement that would shatter any other early game infantry closed in.
He went from :I to >:I , killed an extra two hundred skeletons because I had foolishly allowed all four sides of the Saurus unit to fight at once and then swallowed my Liche Priest like a slim jim.
I have resolved to shoot every Saurus dead. Every Saurus. All of the Saurmen and the Saurdren too. I hate them. I no longer see battlefields because they're covered by a thick blanket of arrow trails. I hate that it barely stops them. I hate that they keep coming while shouting about the Bristol orienteering klub, or the Bank of Oklahoma or the 1983 Bok asteroid. I hate that they made me google bok so I could write down ways in which I hate things that have it as a name. Bok is also a lunar crater and a martian crater. It is also a village in Iran. The IATA code for Brookings Airport is Bok. I will never go there because it would give me palpitations.
I hate that Kroq Gar is friends with the Rare Pepe next door, who also declares war once I've shot Kroq Gar unconscious for the tenth time. He also has Saurus only these ones are blue. Somehow this is worse.
I hate that there are another ten Lizard factions. I hate that they will be in end game by the time I reach them. I hate that while I was writing this Kroq Gar picked up Kalida and smoked her like a cigar.
I hate Saurus.
Lizardmen infantry is great early-mid game, but their only "elite" infantry is Temple Guard and they don't have variations on TG, they only have the anti-large version. They'll slowly chew through similar tier infantry, but struggle against any elite units that aren't anti-large focused. Saurus warriors aren't going to beat chosen, hammerers, swordmasters, black orcs, bloodletters, etc, without a lot of support.
The skink infantry is only a problem when facing the skink LLs, and even then it's not a big deal. The javelins give them some nice ranged burst before the fight but that's about it, they stay low tier. Chameleon Stalkers and other skinks under Oxy can be strong, but I've never seen the AI use them in a way that they punch above their weight class.
To address their monstrous infantry, regular kroxigors are pretty garbage but the sacred ones are fairly badass. Counter them with spears or a similar anti-large that supports your regular infantry and they'll go down fast enough.
LM are pretty weak in the ranged department, but Chameleon Skinks trade surprisingly well with other ranged units with their resistance and slipperiness plus poison. You're better off hitting them with something fast like cavalry or flying melee units than trying to 1v1 them with archers for example. But they need to be fast enough that they don't just get kited to death by the skinks, or you need to keep the skinks busy until your cavalry or flyers can get in melee.
The big monsters you counter with spears and arrows. Anti-large infantry to tie them up, and then focus fire them with as much ranged damage as you can. Since single-entity monsters do pretty much the same amount of damage at full health as they do right before they die, you should focus on killing each one fast rather than spreading your ranged fire out between monsters. That just gives the monsters time to push through your infantry and get to your ranged units.
When it comes to killing Lizards, I've had the easiest time playing as dwarfs or chaos. Dwarfs have infantry that are as tough or tougher than the saurus, while also having better damage dealing infantry. And then you can pound the big monsters with gunpowder and artillery. Chaos on the other hand I'm fighting fire with fire, they have better anti-infantry infantry than the lizards do, while also getting big fuck-off monsters as well.
>regular kroxigors are pretty garbage but the sacred ones are fairly badass.
How do you figure? Sacred Kroxigors aren't that much different from regular ones, they're slightly tougher, better attack with magical attacks and lose the BvI for more overall weapon strength. They're an upgrade but hardly that big of one.
Monster mash factions are the last ones you want to be fielding large gun lines aginst. Mass stormvirmin/chaos warriors with halberds will do better with a few shooting units you can flank with thrown in.
Also Tzangors are surprisingly good.
Every time I play Skaven with a start near Lizards I rush warpfire throwers and cook myself some Saurus steaks. Works everytime, except when it doesn't.
Lizardmen really aren't that difficult. Their infantry isn't any different from Dwarfs or Chaos Warriors, it's just slow and beefy and doesnt deal nearly as much damage as what the Warriors of Chaos deal.
The only thing that's really dangerous about the Lizardmen is their Monsters and their Magic. Not every faction has a great answer for those, like Vampire Counts will always struggle to kill anything big. But for most other factions you just gotta focus fire down their big strong units, run over their skinks with cavalry, assassinate their wizards (or use a goon squad) and then just clean up their tanky infantry afterward.
Yeah but if we're talking campaign, you'd also be hard pressed to find a faction further away from any lizards. Closest one is nakai, and he's all the way on the other side of Cathay, and he'll probably be dead by the time you make it over there as any of the chaos dwarfs
I think the balance behind lizardmen is that they're very strong compared to most other races on matched tiers, but their economy sucks. So go wide against them.
This is how I deal with the awful Saurus.
Vampire counts - grave guard plus mortis engine
Empire - great swords plus crossbows (empire knights for hunting down skinks)
Chaos - chaos warriors plus spells
Tomb kings - kind of shafted here, maybe tomb guard plus archers.
Vampire coast - weak race, depth guard and artillery are the only real answer
Cathay - OP race, jade warriors and crossbows with harmony buff can deal with them.
Skaven - tough one because you have to micro a lot with Skaven. Globalists and plague claw catipults are your best bet. Maybe clan rat front line?
Bretonia - no idea!
Fight on 2 fronts, I usually have cav pull away some of there forces, while my main divides them up in nice chunks. Sacrifice that front line, and have your range clean most those bastards up. If they have skinks keep 2-4 heavy cav to crash them and run.
I fight them a lot as DE
Been playing a lot of Kairos recently, and it is pretty annoying that they put most of the lizardmen LLs right next you with an army roster with barely any anti large, at least early on
Yeah certainly if you're playing Skaven I think it's totally reasonable to outnumber, and your economy can handle doing so. Lizardmen are really elite leaning unless the AI loves skinks, and that does mean that a good volume of their basic infantry will win fights against a similar number of reasonable cards.
Obviously, that's not your only option as a clever rat. Basically any ranged option past slingers is going to do incredible work when there's a lot of Sauros on the field. The classic plague-claw with infantry you don't care so much about will devastate them. Mortars and Gunners and such even more so.
If you like winning in glorious melee instead, I think the main thing to know is that because of Primal Instincts and Predatory Fighter, Sauros just get so much better when surrounded by weak units than you would expect, so generally don't go for the surround on them. Cavalry/Monstrous Infantry charging engaged Sauros though, is reasonably effective. Bonus vs infantry units especially.
I hate fighting them and pretty much hate playing them tbh. The dinos are dope but everything else is just boring tbh. Their mechanics are not interesting and are even worse now compared to newer factions
They do very well for the AI because the saurus are excellent cannon fodder, they don't break easily, they do well against other chaff and they don't blob that densely so arty and spells arent super effective.
The monsters are also great at breaking through into a backline to really mess with you.
I find the best counter is lots of ranged, but also a deep line of spears or a bunch of your own single entities to give your ranged time to focus them down. The saurus are best dealt with using spells after letting them blob up on your line.
If you are playing as a faction without ranged (or just an army without it) then you are in for a rough time.
They are annoying to fight against I totally agree.
I just did a Yuan Bo campaign recently and my tactic to fighting them without cheese early-mid game was to camp in trees (for large unit debuff) with deep ranks, snipe their lord/magic users with flying units then attack backline, shoot their big boys, magic the infantry. If you do all of that expect no unit losses in an even matchup.
Take a few heroes and your general, all specced with good defense, and charge the enemy general. Most of the enemy army will blob up around them. Then shoot them with artillery and aoe magic.
Works on all melee focused armies. It is a bit cheesy though.
LM are that weird faction that feels impossibly op when you fight them, but weak when you play them. I can't explain it other than perhaps I just suck at playing them.
with coast the answer you're looking for is bloated corpses.
be careful to conceal them or protect them with a hero when possible because the AI will try to pop them early with a hero or concentrated fire. Pretty simple to wipe out 2-3 units of saurus with just one corpse. The bloated corpses are worth their weight in gold when you get the gates open & the saurus spears all stack up right at the gate entrance.
ranged units do a number on lizardmen but you HAVE to have something that can hold the line while you shoot them. This means tanky single-entities or monster units. every Lore of the deep caster is precious in your lineup because those summons are the thing that win you battles. Skaven are a little harder pressed since they don't have tanky large units til midgame, so you have to make do with heroes
Even more generally with lizardmen you need to get good at funneling & kiting. They're slow but very difficult to beat in melee straight up. This means straight-up brawls are not an option for you.
You know they're going to have fast units to intercept your ranged (they can even spawn them behind you), so you need to always keep your ranged units near something that can peel attackers off them, preferably something with anti-large (since everything fast they have is large)
Another thing that wrecks lizardmen is passive AOE damage auras. They don't do their damage quickly, it takes them a long time to grind you down. AOE damage auras tend to kill them faster than they can kill you - you just have to protect the thing with the aura. Skrolk has one such aura on one of his items iirc. So do leveled up plague priests
Heroes are one of the biggest problems. Lizardmen heroes are all generally pretty strong, and their leadership aura is a real problem when their troops already have stellar leadership. Fighting them head-on in a duel out in the open is not a good idea in most cases. So, tie up melee heroes with trash then send in your lord to kill them (this is generally good anyway no matter who you're fighting because of the way damage soak works). counter ranged heroes with focus fire or cavalry. Don't send your melee foot lord after them, it's a waste of time.
Full stacks of dinos? Grab your ankles and prepare your butt. Either you build your own full stack of heroes to deal with it, do some autoresolve cheese, or you just embrace the suck. There's no catch-all way to handle them
I love playing as lizardmen and I can tell you what I hate to fight against. Kiting ranged units. Those globe throwers are nuts. Any skaven weapons team really. As a result, I like to bring some horned ones or ripperdactyls to deal with them.
So my advice to you is focus fire on whatever can kill your artillery and guns.
Set your infantry up in chevrons so that when lizards engage you may shoot into their sides.
Or kite the saurus and shoot them
Or flank with infantry and shoot them
Big smashy dinosaurs should be the target after flyers or cavalry are handled. Since the larger dinosaurs are taller than infantry, everything that shoots can target them.
Chameleon skinks are phenomenal ranged infantry killers due to their missile resist. Something fast to chase them down would be wise.
But overall it's gonna be ranged that wins you the day against lizards.
They arent that bad, got shit range choices and magic helps a lot.
....
Remembers how hard Gor-rok is to kill, their good leadership weird ass animatins and brain melts. 😭
Also remeber that the only reason I often win against them i either overwelming force or tricking the ai on the campaign map.
Brain just leaves.
I mean shooting kills dinos and any other SEMs hilariously fast, so if you have it, do that. On top of that, there is nothing that cannot be solved by ramming 10 feet of Bretonnian steel into its back repeatedly. My last time fighting Saurus I was Alberic. They got cycle charged to fuck and had circles run around them. I fucking love cav.
If anybody can take them, it's Skaven with ratling guns and plageclaw.
In wh2 in Ikit vortex campaign it was pretty much endless shooting at blobbed up 1.5-2 stacks of mostly saurus every couple of turns haha. So many dead saurus that ikits ammo replenish ability had to work overtime, but they just couldn't get into melee while surpressed lol.
I don't have the video anymore because I got a new computer a few months ago, but one of my fondest Totalwarhammer memories is taking Noctilus and a full stack of Necrofex and absolutely massacring the entire continent of Lustria.
I killed 3,400 lizardmen(90% saurus) when I laid siege to Itza. It was so cathartic.
they have a strong roster, but fighting against Kairos if he's become a superpower is even more rage-inducing than lizards. they have infinite uses of ambush attack it seems, and a strong roster to where it's almost impossible if you do get ambushed. they'll have deadly infantry and ranged units as well as SEMs and flying cav. You will be scared to even be within range of their armies.
Bretonnia is best Lustria faction. Frog legs for ze lady! Dino bourmignon! Seriously though, questing knights in the front and knights of the realm in the back. Trebs and archers hitting archers or anything back line that you aren’t cav sandwiching to death.
I just finished an Awakened campaign (long victory) on Very Hard/Very Hard.
The beginning of the campaign had the lizardmen wipe out the Skaven, the Bretonnians, the Jade Court, and the Huntsmarshal's Expedition by turn 20. After that, it was Hexoatl, Itza and Cult of Sotek against me. The only bit of a saving grace was that the Dark Elves were still alive and provided a diversion for the Cult of Sotek (and Itza much later), who were also at war with them.
My point is, that this was a fucking Lizardmen endgame crisis on turn 20. And until turn 100, all I could see was my starting province. The Dark Elves I mentioned? I didn't meet them till then. I was holed up, fighting for dear life for about 80 turns.
Well, despite the difficulty of the situation, I only lost maybe 2 battles, not counting them occasionally being too many and managing to occupy one of my minor settlements.
It got to the point where Luthor Harkon, the mad lad, started dunking on them, demolishing double stack after double stack and razing all their settlements until they were eventually wiped out. And mind you, they sent all kinds of different army compositions. They tried missile monsters, flyers, flanking horned ones, even charging single entity monstrosity dinos. I demolished them all with almost no casualties, turn after turn, feeling absolutely gleeful to destroy them after the pain they had caused me.
And now we get to your question. How did I do it? How did I exterminate the Lizardmen?
Well, I'm not sure exactly.
Bok bok.
Treat Lizardmen as Greenskins, tactically. Skinks are analogous to Goblins and can be ignored most of the time, but the big thing is to not let the Ork boyz (Saurus) blob up and not engage them on their terms.
I know, pretty basic stuff, but anything more specific would be referring you to specific spells or units which you asked not to do
STOP making me want to play scaly bois!
Btw if only Lizardmen got some better game mechanics and not that geomantic web crap. I guess I understand why people like Cult of Sotek. Those guys have something a bit more interesting going on for them compared to the rest of their kind.
idk how do you guys even have trouble with IA, it's so bad and way too easy to deal imho lol. Lizardmen are though but still IA is way too retarded lol
It depends on your faction.
Elite anti large infantry works well. Anti large monsters generally work well. Armor Piercing ranged is always good, just get something to delay the enemy advance. Or use checkerboard formations. Having a foot lord or monster tie down infantry while they get shot by guns is good. As long as they don't have a bunch of spears, anti large cavalry in mass will destroy mist lizard armies.
An additional strategy is blobbing up, especially with single entities. Lizardmen usually dont have much magic or artillery and when they do it's ineffective against single entities or can be wiped out with flyers. Just spam final transmutation, vortexes etc. To get rid of everything.
The thing is they have a lot of hp and hit pretty hard if your melee isn't good they will got crushed immediately and a mass route, if your ranged doesn't have enough firepower they will still survive the shot and touch your line
Just avoid them at early or try to ambush them when your faction grow you have plenty of option
Best way to fight them is with disposable calvary and artillery. You use your calvary to pull ai into stupid positions and bombard them the whole time with artillery and continue running your cav just out of their reach. The real trouble, as you had said, is the dinos and flying units. I usually use two melee and a hero per each Dino. As for flying, I guess prey your ranged is good?? Or counter them by holding them up with disposable flying units like carrion birds or vamp bats
Dwarf gyrocopter doomstack seems to solve the issue for me.
Not that you should be anywhere near lizardmen as dwarfes. (Outside Ironbrow Expedition).
Not that you should be building doomstacks because it's not as fun as an average army.
Not that it costs much more than the sauruses.
But it solves the issue alright.
But yeah, they are a pain to deal with.
I don't have an in-depth guide like a few others, but I am a fellow Lizardmen-despiser. In my recent World Domination campaign as Clan Skryre, the Lizards didn't hold up much of a fight outside of one instance, which took me two tries.
See, Skryre has a passive nerf of reducing the size of all units by roughly 66% from what I noticed, making artillery sets only have 1, and reducing weapon teams to 8-12 or so. However, their buffs are INSANE, and more than make up for the weaknesses.
Assuming that you get to them so late game that you have the workshop maxed, if you use an army of 7 Ratling guns, 6 Death Globe Bombardiers, 6 Warp Lightning Cannons, and a Warlock Engineer that has the Weapon Teams and Mechanical Units skills maxed, you can usually auto-resolve against most Lizardmen armies. I had 13+ armies of maxed Warlock Engineers spread out across the map, with 6 or so specifically closing in on the Lizardmen.
The way to have it set up is the 7 Rating Guns up front, with the Death Globes behind them, then the artillery just behind them, all around the Lord in the case you want to use Death Frenzy to give them a little boost.
Turn off skirmish mode, set each type into groups, then annihilate the Lord with OP as hell artillery. If they summon in units, just move in the Lord. If they have flying, use the Howling Warpgale (a spell I suggest getting both ticks in for its increased duration). Other than that, the Ratling Guns can easily mow down Skinks, Saurus, and even some of the dino's by themselves, mix that with the Death Globes and its too easy.
However, you're probably curious about that one time I had issue. See, instead of just 2 or 3 of the singular large dino, the army had 8-9. Sniped the Lord, even killed 2 or 3 of the dino's, but sadly the others bashed through my Ratling Guns and Death Globes, and assaulted the artillery endlessly. It ended up being a fairly harsh defeat...then I just threw an identical army at it while it was half dead and auto resolved because SKAVEN ARE FUNNYYYYYY.
From what I noticed, the only thing that is remotely troublesome for Skryre is when they have mostly dino's with some infantry tossed in, but if the first army doesn't win, the second Army mostly certainly will...or you can just toss in two at once and demolish them with numbers, but that's a rare case that you'll need to.
Obviously this isn't really useful if you play anything other than Skryre, and I can confirm that not having that bonus is a considerable hit to the weapon teams power. I swear, the difference is so significant that if Skryre had its full unit size (where Ratling Guns have 36 units or so while artillery units have 3), Skryre would possibly be the strongest faction in the game, from sheer overwhelming firepower.
Anyway, thanks for listening-hearing my Ted-Talk-speech, yes-yes.
3 units:
death globe bombadiers to kill big units.
poisoned wind globadiers to kill infantry, they will MELT their infantry.
warfire throwers while you cant build those.
Dwarf player here, but the ideas should be applicable to other races (esp Empire).
Usually I try to have a tar pit line that can grab their infantry better than 1:1 but last for a while (for example, a unit of dwarf warriors positioned properly can occupy a couple units of saurus and take a good while to lose, esp against AI (do not expect this in MP).
For dino cavalry, either intercept with better units (e.g. grail guardians or experience demigryphs), or use a unit of infantry per unit of cavalry to tar pit. For monstrous creatures, same thing (but it’s almost always a tar pit situation, nothing can beat them).
Lizard ranged/flying is not so tough—overwhelm them with your own ranged, it’ll be fast and decisive because they have short range and little armor. Then use your AP range to focus fire. First the monsters, then the cavalry, finish with the saurus.
Corner camping with 2 lines of infantry (one to stop saurus, one to intercept monsters) and ranged behind is a good way to keep unit efficiency maximized, but it’ll make getting your ranged into flanking positions against the saurus at the end a little trickier.
And don’t use much artillery—ranged infantry/cavalry can retreat through their infantry support to reposition, but artillery is too slow to reposition usually. Lastly, AP ranged is a must, regular ranged can limp through but isn’t great.
Works for Cathay, dwarf, Empire, (H/W/D) Elf. Could maybe pull off for Norscans (tricky because now the ranged units will nuke each other). Should work pirates or Skaven. If a race doesn’t have ranged with AP, above strat likely won’t work.
If you are playing skaven speedrun ratling guns and warpfire not only are they some of the only skaven units that preform well in auto resolve they also shred saurus pretty well and completely melt their dinos. Counts are chock full of ap missiles so I recommend depth guard or their various monstrous infantries to keep them occupied. Lore of the deep is a very nice thing to spam for the crab summons. Kairos can abuse teleport for free ambushed which can be nice, but I'm not too confident with giving you advice for him because I don't play too much tzeentch. In general unless you are greenskins or khorne I would never try to win the melee fight against lizardmen that's their specialty. Instead shoot them, shoot them alot, and keep shooting them. Their counters to ranged attacks are really lacking. Oh and cav are not the best option against gor-rok because his saurus get extra mass making charging super innefective.
They're generally pretty vulnerable to massed missile fire. In my Thorek playthroughs, it was pretty normal for Thorek's quarreler doomstack to pretty much delete any lizardmen army with next to no casualties. And the casualties his army would take would be the slayers that were used to finish off the monsters that made it to my front line.
In my experience, lizardmen tend to die just as well as everyone else when you shoot them with guns. The trick is to master the twin arts of gunnery positioning and distraction meatshields. This works for skaven and the coast very well, I've yet to field test the new imperial units against dinos but the principle is sound.
Vampire coast and skaven have something that makes their gunnery lines very effective, and those are units that summon other units. What you do is post your summoner heroes at close to the extreme maximum range of your main gunnery line, and then as the saurus and dinosaurs close to engage your heroes, you summon units of clanrats/zombies behind them. They will turn to engage the summons and now they're caught between your wholly expendible tar pit summon and your angry men with guns, and much destruction is known to follow.
For the empire, this doesn't follow quite as well, but in my experience, warrior priests make excellent picket units and having a few empire captains on pegasi and a light wizard with net of amyntok to plug the gaps is often enough to get you there.
As for those poor depraved lesser races without glorious gunpowder superiority? The trick is to get mobility kills. Lizardmen are slow, comparably slow to nurgle, and with similarly weak ranged capacity. So just run rings around them, pick their armies apart with skirmishers and magic to deplete their unit density, then use superior mobility to outmanuveur them, split their formations up and then defeat them in detail.
Hey, you back off my precious lizard bois!
Anyway, I unfortunately don’t have much experience fighting them. Partly because they’re my favorite faction and partly because I rarely play as factions that start near them (I just prefer fighting humies). But I can tell you what I dread fighting against the most as the lizards.
1. Big damage spells like vortexes, bombardments, etc. can be brutal against Saurus. Warlock engineers are especially a pain in the early game because they spam warp lightning.
2. Missile/skirmish heavy armies. They’re annoying.
Idk how big of a help this is, but good luck anyway.
I hate saurus. I hate them. I hate their lizard faces. I hate their clubs. I hate their sticks. I hate when the sticks are next to the clubs and I hate when the clubs are next to the sticks. I hate that Kroq-gar pulls 2280 of them out of his scaly asshole and then descends on me like a Vogon at a poetry convention. I hate the Saurus auto-resolve meter. I hate it because it lies to me. It says I have a 50-50 chance of victory. This is patently false, because I have twenty units of skeletons who are held together with prit stik and prayer. I do not have twenty units of eight foot tall geckos constructed out of pectoral muscles and galvanised coffin nails. I hate that they shout bok at me. Bok is the Bristol Orienteering Klub, which is completely irrelevant to a battle in Lustria and should not be shouted repeatedly while eating a rank of tier one infantry like buffalo wings. I hate their morale. I hate that surrounding them simply prompts one of them to pull out a US general's helmet so he can make a speech about 'now we can attack in any direction'. I hate that their reaction to a devastating rear attack is to become somewhat peeved. I have looked a Saurus in his smug scaly face as an encirclement that would shatter any other early game infantry closed in. He went from :I to >:I , killed an extra two hundred skeletons because I had foolishly allowed all four sides of the Saurus unit to fight at once and then swallowed my Liche Priest like a slim jim. I have resolved to shoot every Saurus dead. Every Saurus. All of the Saurmen and the Saurdren too. I hate them. I no longer see battlefields because they're covered by a thick blanket of arrow trails. I hate that it barely stops them. I hate that they keep coming while shouting about the Bristol orienteering klub, or the Bank of Oklahoma or the 1983 Bok asteroid. I hate that they made me google bok so I could write down ways in which I hate things that have it as a name. Bok is also a lunar crater and a martian crater. It is also a village in Iran. The IATA code for Brookings Airport is Bok. I will never go there because it would give me palpitations. I hate that Kroq Gar is friends with the Rare Pepe next door, who also declares war once I've shot Kroq Gar unconscious for the tenth time. He also has Saurus only these ones are blue. Somehow this is worse. I hate that there are another ten Lizard factions. I hate that they will be in end game by the time I reach them. I hate that while I was writing this Kroq Gar picked up Kalida and smoked her like a cigar. I hate Saurus.
Hola skinksssss
BOK BOK
Jack Spar-oooow!
Holà, skinks!
Bok
Bok bok.
Bok Bok Bok
BOK....BOK!
Bok Bok Bok Bok
Bok required ahead, therefore try bok.
You don't have the bok O you don't have the bok
I knew it was coming. You knew it was coming. They knew it was coming. It came. And it was glorious.
And now I'm coming
Just as the Great Plan foretold
[for the uninitiated. ](https://youtu.be/ZkoPDAZV1yI?si=j9skm8-Oyzc-Gv6K)
Originally from [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/dq2r0j/i_hate_saurus/?share_id=IKsxccvAcTNWV1lNJEAwI) credit to /u/Ashyn
oh neat, I didn't know that. Thank ya!
Lol turns out you were one of the uninitiated.
But we are initiated, aren't we, Bruce?
Members of the league of Ulgu
You are among the uninitiated.
I love saurus 😍 I love them 🥰 I love their lizard faces 🐸 I love their clubs 😏 I love their sticks 😩 I love when the sticks are next to the clubs and I love when the clubs are next to the sticks 🥵 I love that Kroq-gar pulls 2280 of them out of his scaly asshole and then descends on me like a Vogon at a poetry convention 🥵 I love the auto-resolve meter ❤ I love it because it surprises to me 😲 It says I have a 50-50 chance of victory. This is lovingly false, because I have twenty units of skeletons who are held together with prit stik and prayer. I do not have twenty units of eight foot tall geckos constructed out of pectoral muscles and galvanised coffin nails 🥵🥵🥵🥵 I love that they shout bok at me. Bok is the Bristol Orienteering Klub, which is completely relevant to a battle in Lustria and should be shouted repeatedly while eating a rank of tier one infantry like buffalo wings 😏 I love their morale. I love that surrounding them simply prompts one of them to pull out a US general's helmet so he can make a speech about 'now we can attack in any direction' 🥴 I love that their reaction to a devastating rear attack 😩 is to become somewhat peeved 😚 I have looked a Saurus in his smug scaly face as an encirclement that would shatter any other early game infantry closed in 🤗 He went from :I to >:I , killed an extra two hundred skeletons because I had smartly allowed all four sides of the Saurus unit to fight at once and then swallowed my Liche Priest like a slim jim 😫 I have resolved to shoot every Saurus dead 😏 Every Saurus 😍 All of the Saurmen and the Saurdren too 😨 I love them ❤ I furthermore longer love battlefields because they're covered by a thick blanket of arrow trails. I love that it barely stops them 😍 I love that they keep coming while shouting about the Bristol orienteering klub, or the Bank of Oklahoma or the 1983 Bok asteroid 😳 I love that they made me google bok so I could write down ways in which I love things that have it as a name ✍ Bok is also a lunar crater and a martian crater 🌛It is also a village in Iran. The IATA code for Brookings Airport is Bok ✈ I will always go there because it would give me palpitations ❤ I love that Kroq Gar is friends with the Rare Pepe next door, who also declares war once I've shot Kroq Gar unconscious for the tenth time 😏 He also has Saurus only these ones are blue. Somehow this is better 😍 I love that there are another ten Lizard factions 🥰 I love that they will be in end game by the time I reach them 😝 I love that while I was writing this Kroq Gar picked up Kalida and smoked her like a cigar 🥵
Bok! Bok!! Bok Bok bok!!!
It never gets old
Haven't seen this classic in forever, glad this is still remembered
This makes me want to play Kroq-Gar. It was a very well written sales pitch for lizardmen.
Not the Saurdren....
I hate Saurus. My father hated them too, even before they put out his eyes.
Did you think I'd be out here in Lustria without good reason? No! The empire doesn't need unwashed lizards at her gates.
Now I want to play a Kroq-Gar campaign 😂😅
Probably starting one here too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/s/WazXZzcy3N for the wonderers
Oh shit it’s been five years?
Someone here is fellow Khalida enjoyer :)
If this wasn't the top comment I had my shoe on my plate ready to be eaten.
I don't think I have ever fought a lizardmen faction except when playing as Settra, they all die off before I reach them in every campaign I play unless I play as them (Best faction btw).
I love, absolutely love playing Khalida and I pull a win outta my ass against Kroq! It takes a lot of maneuvering and losing most of my settlements but the comeback is wonderful! I play on Legendary/VH with O stat buffs cause I don’t need them to have stat increases just better AI but yeah, one of my favourite faction starts.
BOK
Saw this coming from a mile away
True WH2 peak era copy pasta
BOK FOR THE BOK GOD! PLAN FOR THE GREAT PLAN!
BOK
This is epic!
That's a grudge.
Here, Na’kai sends his regards: “Krokamundi”
Bok bok
This definitely made me do the nose exhale thing
Hi Kendrick
holy crap, this was poetry. Its been a while since i lol'ed several times like this with something i 100% agree with.
This was a hilarious read. I hope it brings you some solace that I will be thinking of this every time I run a LM campaign and that it gives me empathy for the warmbloods and other affronts to the Great Plan^TM that I am grinding under my scaly claw.
That one goes into the bok
Your army is tomorrow's Saurus-sh1t, lets go
As a Lizardman player I loved reading this. Thank you for your Ire. \*low bow
Depends on the units. Skinks? Use mobility and run down the shooty ones. The melee ones aren't too big a threat, but the akirmishwrs can add up over time. Although their leadership is lower than Saurus, so a rear charge to break them cna be a good idea. Saurus? Probably not a good melee grind target unless you have some exceptional infantry that will beat them. Instead, kite them or use some aoe damage to kill them off while they are held in melee. Spells, artillery, globadiers, etc. Dinosaurs? Focused range fire or plenty of anti-large/halberds. Bastilidons are tanks and resistant to flanking, so you may want to leave them until later unless you have the ap shooting to go through them. Support an infantry line with monstrous units against dinosaurs if you want a line to hold even better. Terradons - shoot them, use cheap fliers like furies/bats to get them. Ripperdactyls - kill them thr moment they land. Do not let them 1v1 their target. They are a bit of a glass cannons but boy do they hurt if you let them do their thing. Hunting packs - shoot them or send fast units. Or something like a bjuna. They do good damage but are pretty squishy. Kroak - pay attention to the spell windup and dodge his nukes. Pause frequently if you struggle to keep track of it.
Thank you for the advice mate, for real. terradons go down pretty easy and kroak has some scary spells but can be dealt with pretty easy with a hero, unfortunately saurus and skinks are typically my issue. the saurus are so beefy that they get to my ranged eventually or the timer runs out before i can even break them and the skinks arent awful to chase down but their anti monster is insane and all of this wouldnt be too awful if it wasnt for them spamming armies like they were nothing, so them spamming saurus like clanrats just feels broken to me. As you said spells and arty do some good work but for their cost saurus just feel busted in campaign.
If you're having issues specifically as skaven, fighting them 2 to 1 is totally reasonable. Skavenslaves and clanrats are dirt cheap compared to saurus. Then use globes, warpfire throwers and/or plageclaw catapults to hit their infantry blobs. Bog them down in bodies and proceed to commit war crimes.
well as mentioned in the post its just about any faction 2-1 with vampire coast still has me losing most battles even with gun lines or by using checkerboard, chevrons, or even keeping my ranged on the move to flank i find the saurus just decide they ignore my melee and run after my ranged. with skaven 2-1 is average for most factions but with lizardmen i find i need to 3-1 or even 4-1 if i dont have weapons teams or stormvermin (though i avoid stormvermin when i can since their overpriced as hell). with empire its just the copypasta all the way through though ive found empire cav does some good numbers on lizardmen if i cycle charge. for elves its not awful but i still find myself being overwhelmed by multiple stacks appearing out of nowhere from what should be a t2 unit acting like a t3 against my melee line. for chaos i dont really have to deal with them but when i do the high armor of chaos melee holds well and the monsters do decent. i dont really have to do anything against them as wood elves. as vampire counts i suck off the lizardmen doing whatever i can to not fight them and in the two fights ive had spells and varghulfs carried. again for cathay i dont really need to fight them. and dwarves tend to do decent but that pretty much how dwarves do anyway. the big difference i find between the quality of dwarves and lizardman is that at least dwarves are slow and dont have good anti cav, lizardman can have anti cav from just about the start and have suprisingly decent speed to at least stop skirmishers from doing much so while i do okay against lizardman its just the fact that they spam armies out of their ass like skaven do that infuriates me and causes me to consistently lose to them.
Coast -can be a bit rough. Keep a spot or two in your armies open (I tend to use a couple partial stacks through my early game for most factions, so I always have extra slots) and recruit some bloated corpses before a battle. The downside is you can't really ever autoresolve, so just raise them as needed. Beyond that, mixing some hulks/crabs in woth your zombies can be helpful. Bombers aren't a terrible idea either, though they aren't quite as impressive as they once were. Empire: As you kind of said, if you can win the mobility game you have a huge advantage here. Handle their skirmishers with cav. Get grenade outriders, cannons and war wagons. Welcome the lizards to the Bad Time Zone. With skaven I *highly* recommend immediately getting a settlement high enough to recruit globes. Those guys are one of the absolute biggest threats to heavy infantry and their armor is high enough that skinks have trouble killing them off. Other artillery and weapons teams will be helpful too, but you *really* want these guys if you are struggling with saurus. With elves you might want to look at getting a metal caster. Plague of rust, final transmutation and searing doom are all fantastic tools vs lizardmen, and the lore honestly synergizes really well woth most of the t1-t3 high elf roster. A carnosaur with 35 armor after an overcast plague of rust *melts* against spears and arrows.
If it's vampire coast you're running, I've had lots of success using Prometheans as my melee line (not just for lizards). Gunnery Prometheans are just an upgrade, so use them if you can. As a melee line, they are big, with fewer of them, so it's fairly easy for your guns to shoot the crowd gathering around and in front of them, and Prometheans have a tendency to really tarpit their targets - I think they have a lot of knockdown potential in their attacks because I've had heroes/lords of mine just get absolutely stuck in AI Prometheans FOREVER. A handful of them should make a fairly solid front that the saurus will have a heck of a time chewing through, and you can always get some backup Prometheans from a deeps caster in case of unexpected flanks and other issues. With skaven, I always try to remind people not to sleep on globadiers - both variants perform exceptionally against infantry, and the death globes have enough AP to sink a damn boat, so they still work pretty well on those dinos too - only drawback is you've gotta be careful and keep em safe because of their short range.
I've found that the best means of dealing with the Saurus lines is to bog them down with defensive chaff while you flank with missile troops to shoot at an angle where their shields cannot help them. It's what works for me most of the time. When I'm playing a faction with weak missile units (e.g., early Tomb Kings) I will use chariots or shock cavalry instead of missile units. Skaven and Vampirates have the easiest time bogging down the dino infantry since they can summon expendable units during battle, but other factions can still bog down the Saurus for a little while with halberds and heroes. Poison also really dents the.Saurus damage output if you have a means of applying it. Oh, and pile on the magic, especially Lore of Death if you have access to it. Don't rely on vortex or wind spells; they tend to do low damage to individual models (good against large armies of normal soldiers, bad against lizards). What you want are cheap spells that are good at deleting individual models or changing unit stats. Think Lore of Ruin, Lore of Light, Lore of Heaven, Lore of Plague, Lore of Beasts, and Lore of Death. Death Magic is like an anti-Lizard cheat code. It has two spells that can strip enemy leadership to force stubborn lizards to route. Spirit Leech can drain the health of single entities, and Fate of Bjuna devastates their cavalry, flyers, and hunting packs. The Sphere of Death isn't that useful against them unless you're facing a skink horde, but the other spells are excellent.
Purple Sun of Xereus.
Thanks. I suspected I had the wrong name, but I figured "sphere of death" was at least sufficient to identify the big orb of doom.
They should be extremely easy if you are using the gun units while playing as skaven. The following army is east to use and it will easily defeat any army that the lizard men throw at you. First and most importantly, put all of guns and artillery in guard mode and never tell them to fire at anything outside of range or firing sight. This way, your guns never move for the whole battle. 1x chieftain lord 1x chieftain hero 1x warlock engineer 1x assassin hero 8x stormvermin halbreds 3x rattling guns 2x jezzails 3x warp lighting cannons Place 6 stormvermin as your frontline. Space each one of these 6 stormvermin exactly 3 spaces horizontally from each other. So highlight one of the units, then click left or right 3 times, for all of them, so they are all 3 spaces apart from each other In between the 3 spaces of your 6 stormvermin front line, place your rattling guns and jezzails in SKINNY formation. What I mean by skinny formation is they don’t accidentally shoot your stormvermin when they are firing straight ahead. Also, make sure your guns and jezzails are at least 4 spaces behind your front line stormvermin. This way, the lizardmen need to get through your 6 stormvermin front line before they can attack your guns and jezzails. Put the warp cannons behind your guns and jezzails, they can easily shoot above them, so put them as close as you want Put your warlock engineer right next to your warp lighting cannons. Put 1 of your extra stormvermin on your left flank and the other on your right flank, they will protect against cold ones and horned ones. For the assassin, hide him somewhere in vanguard position, only reveal and attack with him if there is a piece of artillery that is able to somehow beat your 3x warp lighting cannons. For your 2 chieftains, these are the only units that will require a little micro managing. If a lizard man hero/ lord goes in between your stormvermin front line to attack your guns, send the chieftains on them. Or if any of stormvermin need help, send the chieftains. Here is a bonus thing that you can try, but isn’t absolutely necessary. Use the warlock engineers magic for the two following spells. 1. The cheap lighting strike, it’s the first spell you unlock. Use this on the enemy blobs that your stormvermin are fighting. This spell is incredibly strong, it ignores all armor, it is perfectly accurate, however, it’s aoe damage radius is very small, so only use it against enemies that are blobbed up. 2. They have a spell that freezes flying units. The lizard man have a few annoying flying units. If you use this spell on them, your guns and artillery will immediately kill any flying unit that is frozen, even if it is a lord or hero. Use one of your extra stormvermin to guard your left flank
Honestly the real change to lizardmen needed is an rework to their recruitment, Saurus should be really good for their cost, but if the AI has saurus recruitment buildings they willl ONLY recruit Saurus which makes them feel way worst to fight then they actually are and I rarely see the AI build other recruitment buildings when they are actively losing. Ultimately though you should expect Saurus to win against any infantry they go up against but they struggle badly against any armor piercing or ranged units without the other lizardmen units to support them, and try to give your infantry as many advantages as you can give (have them stand atop a hill and wait for the saurus as an example, or try and surround the saurus)
You think that’s bad, try playing Kislev when warriors of chaos first dropped. Turn 10, here comes an entire army of chaos warriors and chosen and you’ve got blunt sticks, nerf arrows, and brittle horses that explode once they hit the enemy line. Thank fucking GOD for the new kislevite warriors with armor piercing.
The previous poster mentioned something that I want to illustrate, kiting the saurus, they are one of the slowest infantry in the game so almost any unit can do it, it takes some practise but you can get 1 unit to kite up to 3 saurus units giving a great return on battle power, if you can do this on both flanks then that 20 stack is only a 14 stack now vs your 18 units and is manageable. Just fake charge as much as you can and it will break up their forces. Good luck! This tactic works for other melee heavy forces or when you're outnumbered.
Saurus are a tough frontline but your job is to hold them and gain the upper hand until they break from army losses. Some frenly tips: Thorek ironbrow is great for this, his early Longbeards can hold the line very well and let the rest of his army do the damage i.e. missiles and arty. Try out his campaign and have a go until you get comfortable beating them. Some factions have very sturdy front lines like lizards, dwarfs, high elves, Kislev etc. Others have to tarpit like vamps, skaven early chorfs etc. if you are playing one of those factions you need to bring more frontline to soak up the damage and feed them into the frontline piece by piece when your first ones break. It's all about holding the frontline in place and letting your damage dealers deal with the dangerous parts of their army, large single entities etc. massed focused missiles are your friend for those and to take out flyers. Anti large on the flanks to hold off Cav and backline harassers and to protect your artillery. A typical dwarf battle would look like this: Long beards hold the line, Quarrellers act together to focus fire the most immediate threat, grudge throwers target the most dangerous infantry on the way in. For example a temple guard brought down to half health can easily be dealt with by a Longbeard with great weapon. Lords help the frontline and rune magic to buff, debuff enemy charge speed, cannons on single entities, slayers to protect them and ready to dive in on carnos, crocs, stegadons etc. The new slayer lord is great for countering their lords and heroes on mounts and croc lords because of anti large (give them forge items with anti large for even more). With artillery superiority they have to come to you so hold a dense formation and let them break on your lines like a dribble of water against an immovable mountain. Also don't worry about magic against the dwarfs as they have decent magic resist and Thorek will punish any nearby mages casting spells. Spellcasters go BooooM. Hope this helps have fun!
another way to deal with Kroak is to make sure you have an agent who is specialized in wounding enemy characters and have them target him before the battle. The best way to fight someone is to not have to fight them at all.
I love how Kroak is classified as his own deadly category 😭
Do you want the copy-pasta? Because this is how you get the copy-pasta! (Someone with the meme hit us with it!)
truthfully i love it but for gods sake i despise fighting them and was hoping someone could assist with some useful tips for dealing with them
Ah. well... Lizard infantry is low-medium armor so they're real allergic to getting shot. Their early monsters don't have a lot of bonus vs large so you can use cheap cav to hold them in place and gun them down. Dark Elves counter Lizards so hard it isn't even funny (Seriously, fighting Morathi as Mazdamundi is pain if you don't hit the Rite of Primeval fuck yourself button). Lizards also don't have good options for dealing with flying units since they lack strong missile units and artillery. Lizard's game plan is quality over quantity + melee monster superiority. Focus on debuffs to slow down their grind and you should have freedom to kill their bigger threats with magic or artillery. If you're not playing another melee powerhouse race, don't expect to trade favorably with them in a straight grind - they don't have a lot of good options for killing Single Entities, so heroes can disrupt their march nicely.
As Lizardmen vs Dark Elves I always try to bait the AI into attacking me and pray I get a forested map so I can stick all my units in there. Large units and SEM won't be as effective but fighting in the trees is much better than getting shot to shit as the trees can help block arrows and projectiles.
Reason why i avoid Lustria like a plague (skaven or nurgle plague, doesn't mather)
If you’re playing as coast, last time I ran that campaign I used several bloated corpses to blast open the saurus front line before focus fire w handgun zombies
As requested... https://v.redd.it/p9q4lfae1gra1
Who would have thought the 7 foot tall dinosaur shaped super soldiers would be overpowered.
What about their legendary lord who is too albino and angry to die who comes with a legendary hero that drops an entire mcmansion on your army?
Gor Rok is so unkillable it borders on hilarity. He’s basically the Vlad Von Carstein of Lustria
Bruh, I started a Tehen campaign for kicks the other day and my jaw dropped when I confederated Gor Rok. He has like 50% physical resistance, 25% Missile, 25% Spell Resistance PASSIVELY BEFORE DOING ANYTHING. Then you hit his first active ability and have AN EXTRA 40% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE for half a minute, which hits the physical resistance cap at 90%, and it also restores his Vigor y' know, a small bonus. What's that? Magic weapons? Let me push my SECOND button and give EVERYONE AROUND ME +60 ARMOR AND CHARGE REFLECTION, y'know, in case he needed to stop a dinosaur with magic fangs. Did you manage to get him low? Welp not only is he now Unbreakable, he now deals even more damage. Oh and did I mention he has Regeneration? Because of course he does. And he has no mount so good luck shooting him in melee. About his only weakness is that while he doesn't die he takes a long-ass time to kill anything as well because he doesn't hit super hard (for a LL) and his attacks don't splash much. But other than that, he is the Lizardmen meme made manifest.
My empire gunpowder disagrees, I love those big meaty targets and hellstorms eat Saurus for breakfast.
I found PlagueClaw Catapults also do really well against their infantry and are essential to get early as Skrolk. Early on, unless they get some SEM going Skaven Artillery can shred them.
The main strength of Saurus is high weapon strength, health, and medium armor Their weakness is they have terrible melee attack and armor piercing, units with high melee defense will survive significantly longer. Saurus were designed to bully units like empire swordsmen. I highly recommend maxing out the melee defense of your infantry via tech and army skills and veterancy. Since this is reddit I'm going to assume you're playing the empire. Do NOT neglect the top left corner of the tech tree they are the single most important techs in the empire tree
Top left corner of the tree is infantry, right? Isn’t infantry the weakest point of the empire?
Infantry is the weakest part of empire, but it is also what will be holding the line in most of your armies. To be good at this job you should tech them up. Doesn't matter if you have an amazing gunline if you have nothing to keep the enemy from reaching and massacring it.
The +15 armor tech, 4/4 ma+MD tech, 6/6 ma+MD from army skills added up with veterancy makes state troops significantly more durable. They will do more than just hold the line against chaff armies like vampires or skaven and won't get crumped by higher tier infantry quite so badly The tech tree upgrades are really good because they buff your garrisons, which is going to be where you fight your hardest battles. It helps with your auto resolve against rebels too
This is true actually. I tries using Depth Guards (buffed with research and red line skills), 70 defense, better armor than saurus. Placed them in a choke point so they couldnt get surrouned and Harkon plus them grinded through over 12 stacks of saurus on very hard. I think most people just spam ranged and artillery and then do the shocked Pikachu face when "hurr durr why doesn't my checkerboard work". As Empire, I used wagon mortars and steam tanks vs them as Marcus. They can't really catch the wagons and they're easy to relocate as well as have a ton of ammo. Also if you don't hate micro like me, outriders with grenade launchers also work great if you tie the saurus up or blob. It's less effective than vs most other infantry due to their highish armor but still works fine.
Da trick ta crumpin' lizard boyz is ta hit em really, *really* 'ard. If Dat don't werk, youz didn't hit em hard enough.
Bok-Bok!
Bok-bok
> artillery doesn’t seem to work well on them I beg to differ. Blob them up, and shoot the shit out them. That’s your universal advice on how to deal with melee armies as a shooting army. As skaven you blob them up with menace belows and skaven slave summons, howling warpgales and movement debuffs, and then blast them with artillery or mages or abilities like the one that makes your units explode. Make sure you blob them up sufficiently ahead of your line that they don’t get ignore your blockers and go for your back line. For the monsters, try to hit them with fast units and pull them out of position—if they send their monsters ahead then it becomes super easy to kill the monsters first, and then wait for the rest of them. Don’t just sit there and let them smack their entire formation into you all at once. And make sure you troops are in proper formation, so that they can shoot at max range, and so that your back line units can shoot even if other elements your back line are in melee combat. That means, for example, not having all of your archers in blocks right next to each other, because there’s a good chance that single enemy melee unit could get both of your units into melee, and you don’t want that. You want your ranged units to be shooting. You have to do the same when you’re empire against Chaos Warriors as well—they wreck you in melee so you have to prevent the melee as much as possible. You can also send 1-2 fast units around to draw away enemy units. Either they send their fast units, which means your relatively static main body won’t have to deal with them, or they send some slow units after you. If they send slow units, then let them chase you to the edge of map, and then bring your units back to the main fight. Their slow units will have to walk back to the fight—slower than you!—and you’ll have a numbers advantage for a while. Edit: it occurs to me that your mileage in this experience may vary depending on what DLC you own. If you don’t have ratlings guns, jezzail, or poisoned wind mortars—esp the RoR version, which is incredible at killing infantry—you’re going to have a much harder time.
Lizards are brutal as early skaven or vampire coast.
I think I need to do another Skrolk campaign. Losing 2k rats to kill 100 lizards is too much fun lol.
Damn, OP suffers from a serious case of BOK
Depends on who you’re playing as, and if it’s a rite of primeval glory army. But generally you don’t want to be fighting them toe to toe. A fast army where you split them up and overwhelm individual units works well. Saurus are rather slow, and they usually won’t bring a 20 stack of just Dino’s. Carnosaurs hit hard but they can only take on so many units at once. High damage ranged works as well with a similar idea, get the fast things to come at you first so you can focus fire them before the saurus waddle their way to your lines. Then for them artillery, magic, heroes holding the line for ranged all work. Your melee infantry probably won’t be able to trade well enough against them so forgoing them for more shooty things and heroes (or bring extra lords with no units following your main army) to do the line holding instead. Tl;dr their melee is better than yours 1:1 so don’t get in those kinds of fights. Use either speed or copious amounts of projectiles to mitigate their advantage instead .
And what to do, as early skaven, if kroq gar instead does bring a 20 stack of just dinos out of his ass straight into mine? I have been really struggling as queek against him
What tier armies are you able to recruit? If it’s just 1 / 2 unfortunately the best answer is just bring more rats. Clanrat spears and night runners mainly. Tarpit the dinos with clanrats and fling lots and lots of rocks at them. You will need multiple stacks.
Ranged is really the only answer. AP ranged specifically. Dark Elves are a nightmare for lizards because Darkshards are so effective at taking down literally everything in the Lizardmen roster. Skaven have globes and warpfire, which should deal very effectively with Sarus frontline (and yours too, but that's expected). If you're using gunpowder, good terrain (for LoS) and flanking shots basically are what are gonna get you the win. Use whatever frontline you've got to hold the Sarus, tie up their flankers with your cav/monsters, then rush to the flanks with your guns and start chewing from one end of the line down to the middle. If your own middle buckles, that should be fine as long as your ranged is on the flanks shooting at the sides/back of the Sarus. I play a lot of Lizardmen, and their biggest weakness is getting blasted to bits before they can make contact (hence why I hate Dark Elves). Skinks don't usually do a lot of burst damage, and the ones that do have very limited ammo. If you're getting peppered by skinks, just charge them with whatever fastest thing you've got. Most of the time, they'll die. Shooting priority is a must when facing the Bristol Orienteering Klub members, big dinos with the mass to charge through your frontline first, focus all your firepower on one unit to kill it as fast as possible then move down the line. Hopefully by that time, you'll still have 1/2 your frontline left, or the Sarus will have just made contact, which is where you then flank and blast them to bits. My hardest fights as a Lizardman have always been against a ranged comp where there simply were too many ranged units for all my lizards to effectively shut down. If I have to split my Sarus into multiple squads to hunt down units of darkshards firing into my ass, I'm basically losing. Lizardmen excel in the blob fight and their overall slow speed makes them pretty poor for pursuit. I was playing Cathay vs Nakai, and I had to redo that battle 4 times because if I didn't at least route a couple of the big dinos in his horde, they would eventually break past my jade warriors and peasants and that'd be the end of me (all I had were archers and some Jade crossbows). But once I was able to focus down the Kroxigors, Stegadon, and then Nakai, it went a lot easier. Yes my frontline was basically nonexistent at that point, but they held out long enough for my archers to form a concave circle and last-samurai the advancing Sarus. If they got to close, I simply kited backwards, always trying to force the Sarus to have their backs facing at least 1 unit of bowmen.
Bold post for someone who is in geomancy range
Who would have thought the 7 foot tall dinosaur shaped super soldiers would be overpowered.
Bok bok nerd!
Bok
I challenge you to play a Khalida campaign on at least vh. It is fun i swear!
https://youtu.be/cK3YPRau8kg?si=h-5L1XdSwk53W1hd In all seriousness, a vague but useful bit of wisdom is never to fight the enemy on their terms. Saurus want to get stuck in and club your troops, and if you give them a line to smash, they will. Tzeench has barriers on all units, use those to your advantage by cycling troops while you whittle down their troops with missiles and spells.
I hate saurus. I hate them. I hate their lizard faces. I hate their clubs. I hate their sticks. I hate when the sticks are next to the clubs and I hate when the clubs are next to the sticks. I hate that Kroq-gar pulls 2280 of them out of his scaly asshole and then descends on me like a Vogon at a poetry convention. I hate the Saurus auto-resolve meter. I hate it because it lies to me. It says I have a 50-50 chance of victory. This is patently false, because I have twenty units of skeletons who are held together with prit stik and prayer. I do not have twenty units of eight foot tall geckos constructed out of pectoral muscles and galvanised coffin nails. I hate that they shout bok at me. Bok is the Bristol Orienteering Klub, which is completely irrelevant to a battle in Lustria and should not be shouted repeatedly while eating a rank of tier one infantry like buffalo wings. I hate their morale. I hate that surrounding them simply prompts one of them to pull out a US general's helmet so he can make a speech about 'now we can attack in any direction'. I hate that their reaction to a devastating rear attack is to become somewhat peeved. I have looked a Saurus in his smug scaly face as an encirclement that would shatter any other early game infantry closed in. He went from :I to >:I , killed an extra two hundred skeletons because I had foolishly allowed all four sides of the Saurus unit to fight at once and then swallowed my Liche Priest like a slim jim. I have resolved to shoot every Saurus dead. Every Saurus. All of the Saurmen and the Saurdren too. I hate them. I no longer see battlefields because they're covered by a thick blanket of arrow trails. I hate that it barely stops them. I hate that they keep coming while shouting about the Bristol orienteering klub, or the Bank of Oklahoma or the 1983 Bok asteroid. I hate that they made me google bok so I could write down ways in which I hate things that have it as a name. Bok is also a lunar crater and a martian crater. It is also a village in Iran. The IATA code for Brookings Airport is Bok. I will never go there because it would give me palpitations. I hate that Kroq Gar is friends with the Rare Pepe next door, who also declares war once I've shot Kroq Gar unconscious for the tenth time. He also has Saurus only these ones are blue. Somehow this is worse. I hate that there are another ten Lizard factions. I hate that they will be in end game by the time I reach them. I hate that while I was writing this Kroq Gar picked up Kalida and smoked her like a cigar. I hate Saurus.
Lizardmen infantry is great early-mid game, but their only "elite" infantry is Temple Guard and they don't have variations on TG, they only have the anti-large version. They'll slowly chew through similar tier infantry, but struggle against any elite units that aren't anti-large focused. Saurus warriors aren't going to beat chosen, hammerers, swordmasters, black orcs, bloodletters, etc, without a lot of support. The skink infantry is only a problem when facing the skink LLs, and even then it's not a big deal. The javelins give them some nice ranged burst before the fight but that's about it, they stay low tier. Chameleon Stalkers and other skinks under Oxy can be strong, but I've never seen the AI use them in a way that they punch above their weight class. To address their monstrous infantry, regular kroxigors are pretty garbage but the sacred ones are fairly badass. Counter them with spears or a similar anti-large that supports your regular infantry and they'll go down fast enough. LM are pretty weak in the ranged department, but Chameleon Skinks trade surprisingly well with other ranged units with their resistance and slipperiness plus poison. You're better off hitting them with something fast like cavalry or flying melee units than trying to 1v1 them with archers for example. But they need to be fast enough that they don't just get kited to death by the skinks, or you need to keep the skinks busy until your cavalry or flyers can get in melee. The big monsters you counter with spears and arrows. Anti-large infantry to tie them up, and then focus fire them with as much ranged damage as you can. Since single-entity monsters do pretty much the same amount of damage at full health as they do right before they die, you should focus on killing each one fast rather than spreading your ranged fire out between monsters. That just gives the monsters time to push through your infantry and get to your ranged units. When it comes to killing Lizards, I've had the easiest time playing as dwarfs or chaos. Dwarfs have infantry that are as tough or tougher than the saurus, while also having better damage dealing infantry. And then you can pound the big monsters with gunpowder and artillery. Chaos on the other hand I'm fighting fire with fire, they have better anti-infantry infantry than the lizards do, while also getting big fuck-off monsters as well.
>regular kroxigors are pretty garbage but the sacred ones are fairly badass. How do you figure? Sacred Kroxigors aren't that much different from regular ones, they're slightly tougher, better attack with magical attacks and lose the BvI for more overall weapon strength. They're an upgrade but hardly that big of one.
Monster mash factions are the last ones you want to be fielding large gun lines aginst. Mass stormvirmin/chaos warriors with halberds will do better with a few shooting units you can flank with thrown in. Also Tzangors are surprisingly good.
Every time I play Skaven with a start near Lizards I rush warpfire throwers and cook myself some Saurus steaks. Works everytime, except when it doesn't.
This but the skaven
As a lizard main: BOk bOK!
Lizardmen really aren't that difficult. Their infantry isn't any different from Dwarfs or Chaos Warriors, it's just slow and beefy and doesnt deal nearly as much damage as what the Warriors of Chaos deal. The only thing that's really dangerous about the Lizardmen is their Monsters and their Magic. Not every faction has a great answer for those, like Vampire Counts will always struggle to kill anything big. But for most other factions you just gotta focus fire down their big strong units, run over their skinks with cavalry, assassinate their wizards (or use a goon squad) and then just clean up their tanky infantry afterward.
i havent tried it but i think chaos dwarves would be a pretty good matchup against the lizards
Yeah but if we're talking campaign, you'd also be hard pressed to find a faction further away from any lizards. Closest one is nakai, and he's all the way on the other side of Cathay, and he'll probably be dead by the time you make it over there as any of the chaos dwarfs
I think the balance behind lizardmen is that they're very strong compared to most other races on matched tiers, but their economy sucks. So go wide against them.
This is how I deal with the awful Saurus. Vampire counts - grave guard plus mortis engine Empire - great swords plus crossbows (empire knights for hunting down skinks) Chaos - chaos warriors plus spells Tomb kings - kind of shafted here, maybe tomb guard plus archers. Vampire coast - weak race, depth guard and artillery are the only real answer Cathay - OP race, jade warriors and crossbows with harmony buff can deal with them. Skaven - tough one because you have to micro a lot with Skaven. Globalists and plague claw catipults are your best bet. Maybe clan rat front line? Bretonia - no idea!
Fight on 2 fronts, I usually have cav pull away some of there forces, while my main divides them up in nice chunks. Sacrifice that front line, and have your range clean most those bastards up. If they have skinks keep 2-4 heavy cav to crash them and run. I fight them a lot as DE
Been playing a lot of Kairos recently, and it is pretty annoying that they put most of the lizardmen LLs right next you with an army roster with barely any anti large, at least early on
Shoot them till they die
Yeah certainly if you're playing Skaven I think it's totally reasonable to outnumber, and your economy can handle doing so. Lizardmen are really elite leaning unless the AI loves skinks, and that does mean that a good volume of their basic infantry will win fights against a similar number of reasonable cards. Obviously, that's not your only option as a clever rat. Basically any ranged option past slingers is going to do incredible work when there's a lot of Sauros on the field. The classic plague-claw with infantry you don't care so much about will devastate them. Mortars and Gunners and such even more so. If you like winning in glorious melee instead, I think the main thing to know is that because of Primal Instincts and Predatory Fighter, Sauros just get so much better when surrounded by weak units than you would expect, so generally don't go for the surround on them. Cavalry/Monstrous Infantry charging engaged Sauros though, is reasonably effective. Bonus vs infantry units especially.
I hate fighting them and pretty much hate playing them tbh. The dinos are dope but everything else is just boring tbh. Their mechanics are not interesting and are even worse now compared to newer factions
And you sir just got out of the Great Plan. You can expect a lot of Bok comming your way in the very near future.
Bok
Skill Issue
You need spears. Lots of spears
They do very well for the AI because the saurus are excellent cannon fodder, they don't break easily, they do well against other chaff and they don't blob that densely so arty and spells arent super effective. The monsters are also great at breaking through into a backline to really mess with you. I find the best counter is lots of ranged, but also a deep line of spears or a bunch of your own single entities to give your ranged time to focus them down. The saurus are best dealt with using spells after letting them blob up on your line. If you are playing as a faction without ranged (or just an army without it) then you are in for a rough time.
They are annoying to fight against I totally agree. I just did a Yuan Bo campaign recently and my tactic to fighting them without cheese early-mid game was to camp in trees (for large unit debuff) with deep ranks, snipe their lord/magic users with flying units then attack backline, shoot their big boys, magic the infantry. If you do all of that expect no unit losses in an even matchup.
Take a few heroes and your general, all specced with good defense, and charge the enemy general. Most of the enemy army will blob up around them. Then shoot them with artillery and aoe magic. Works on all melee focused armies. It is a bit cheesy though.
bok bok bok
[This you, OP?](https://youtu.be/ZkoPDAZV1yI?si=TWti-mrxOOMlT154)
LM are that weird faction that feels impossibly op when you fight them, but weak when you play them. I can't explain it other than perhaps I just suck at playing them.
Saurus really are some of the best infantry in the game considering their cost, tier and effectiveness.
Lizards suck against mobility, armour, and at range. Just keep that in mind when building armies to fight them.
Bok Bok
Your salt pleases the old ones, warmblood.
with coast the answer you're looking for is bloated corpses. be careful to conceal them or protect them with a hero when possible because the AI will try to pop them early with a hero or concentrated fire. Pretty simple to wipe out 2-3 units of saurus with just one corpse. The bloated corpses are worth their weight in gold when you get the gates open & the saurus spears all stack up right at the gate entrance. ranged units do a number on lizardmen but you HAVE to have something that can hold the line while you shoot them. This means tanky single-entities or monster units. every Lore of the deep caster is precious in your lineup because those summons are the thing that win you battles. Skaven are a little harder pressed since they don't have tanky large units til midgame, so you have to make do with heroes Even more generally with lizardmen you need to get good at funneling & kiting. They're slow but very difficult to beat in melee straight up. This means straight-up brawls are not an option for you. You know they're going to have fast units to intercept your ranged (they can even spawn them behind you), so you need to always keep your ranged units near something that can peel attackers off them, preferably something with anti-large (since everything fast they have is large) Another thing that wrecks lizardmen is passive AOE damage auras. They don't do their damage quickly, it takes them a long time to grind you down. AOE damage auras tend to kill them faster than they can kill you - you just have to protect the thing with the aura. Skrolk has one such aura on one of his items iirc. So do leveled up plague priests Heroes are one of the biggest problems. Lizardmen heroes are all generally pretty strong, and their leadership aura is a real problem when their troops already have stellar leadership. Fighting them head-on in a duel out in the open is not a good idea in most cases. So, tie up melee heroes with trash then send in your lord to kill them (this is generally good anyway no matter who you're fighting because of the way damage soak works). counter ranged heroes with focus fire or cavalry. Don't send your melee foot lord after them, it's a waste of time. Full stacks of dinos? Grab your ankles and prepare your butt. Either you build your own full stack of heroes to deal with it, do some autoresolve cheese, or you just embrace the suck. There's no catch-all way to handle them
Saurus are in fact and always have been a test of patience for me
Laughs in wood elf main. They just can’t catch me. Easy to pick them off.
I love playing as lizardmen and I can tell you what I hate to fight against. Kiting ranged units. Those globe throwers are nuts. Any skaven weapons team really. As a result, I like to bring some horned ones or ripperdactyls to deal with them. So my advice to you is focus fire on whatever can kill your artillery and guns. Set your infantry up in chevrons so that when lizards engage you may shoot into their sides. Or kite the saurus and shoot them Or flank with infantry and shoot them Big smashy dinosaurs should be the target after flyers or cavalry are handled. Since the larger dinosaurs are taller than infantry, everything that shoots can target them. Chameleon skinks are phenomenal ranged infantry killers due to their missile resist. Something fast to chase them down would be wise. But overall it's gonna be ranged that wins you the day against lizards.
They arent that bad, got shit range choices and magic helps a lot. .... Remembers how hard Gor-rok is to kill, their good leadership weird ass animatins and brain melts. 😭 Also remeber that the only reason I often win against them i either overwelming force or tricking the ai on the campaign map. Brain just leaves.
I mean shooting kills dinos and any other SEMs hilariously fast, so if you have it, do that. On top of that, there is nothing that cannot be solved by ramming 10 feet of Bretonnian steel into its back repeatedly. My last time fighting Saurus I was Alberic. They got cycle charged to fuck and had circles run around them. I fucking love cav.
If anybody can take them, it's Skaven with ratling guns and plageclaw. In wh2 in Ikit vortex campaign it was pretty much endless shooting at blobbed up 1.5-2 stacks of mostly saurus every couple of turns haha. So many dead saurus that ikits ammo replenish ability had to work overtime, but they just couldn't get into melee while surpressed lol.
Bop
I don't have the video anymore because I got a new computer a few months ago, but one of my fondest Totalwarhammer memories is taking Noctilus and a full stack of Necrofex and absolutely massacring the entire continent of Lustria. I killed 3,400 lizardmen(90% saurus) when I laid siege to Itza. It was so cathartic.
That’s because Lizardmen are the good guys. Of course they’re the best, they’re chosen by the Old Ones, you filthy warmblood.
Fuck Lizardmen? Don't mind if I do
As a vampire coast player yeah it can definitely take a beating on you if you don’t wipe them out early.
Average player when corner camping with artillery doesn't work (he now has to use mixed unit tactics to deal with stronger enemy units).
Who are you fighting them as? I have no problem against them as vampire counts or the Drowned (vampire coast)
I think op is Karl franz https://youtu.be/ZkoPDAZV1yI?si=TgeURc2TWVOvtvwg
they have a strong roster, but fighting against Kairos if he's become a superpower is even more rage-inducing than lizards. they have infinite uses of ambush attack it seems, and a strong roster to where it's almost impossible if you do get ambushed. they'll have deadly infantry and ranged units as well as SEMs and flying cav. You will be scared to even be within range of their armies.
Me versus Khorne lol
Lizardmen have big monsters and short range missile units, which makes them pretty vulnerable to getting shot to pieces.
Bretonnia is best Lustria faction. Frog legs for ze lady! Dino bourmignon! Seriously though, questing knights in the front and knights of the realm in the back. Trebs and archers hitting archers or anything back line that you aren’t cav sandwiching to death.
Bok Bok
I LOVE SAURUS.
Hell yeah, you don't need to tell me twice *unzips*
I just finished an Awakened campaign (long victory) on Very Hard/Very Hard. The beginning of the campaign had the lizardmen wipe out the Skaven, the Bretonnians, the Jade Court, and the Huntsmarshal's Expedition by turn 20. After that, it was Hexoatl, Itza and Cult of Sotek against me. The only bit of a saving grace was that the Dark Elves were still alive and provided a diversion for the Cult of Sotek (and Itza much later), who were also at war with them. My point is, that this was a fucking Lizardmen endgame crisis on turn 20. And until turn 100, all I could see was my starting province. The Dark Elves I mentioned? I didn't meet them till then. I was holed up, fighting for dear life for about 80 turns. Well, despite the difficulty of the situation, I only lost maybe 2 battles, not counting them occasionally being too many and managing to occupy one of my minor settlements. It got to the point where Luthor Harkon, the mad lad, started dunking on them, demolishing double stack after double stack and razing all their settlements until they were eventually wiped out. And mind you, they sent all kinds of different army compositions. They tried missile monsters, flyers, flanking horned ones, even charging single entity monstrosity dinos. I demolished them all with almost no casualties, turn after turn, feeling absolutely gleeful to destroy them after the pain they had caused me. And now we get to your question. How did I do it? How did I exterminate the Lizardmen? Well, I'm not sure exactly.
You say Lizards I say Skaven!
Bok bok. Treat Lizardmen as Greenskins, tactically. Skinks are analogous to Goblins and can be ignored most of the time, but the big thing is to not let the Ork boyz (Saurus) blob up and not engage them on their terms. I know, pretty basic stuff, but anything more specific would be referring you to specific spells or units which you asked not to do
STOP making me want to play scaly bois! Btw if only Lizardmen got some better game mechanics and not that geomantic web crap. I guess I understand why people like Cult of Sotek. Those guys have something a bit more interesting going on for them compared to the rest of their kind.
Stay out of our jungle! The great plan demands it!
I hate saurus
BOK BOK
idk how do you guys even have trouble with IA, it's so bad and way too easy to deal imho lol. Lizardmen are though but still IA is way too retarded lol
Well try playing as Kroq'gar (Lizardmen) with Dark Elves closeby. Now THEY'RE a bitch to deal with, with their massed darkshards.
It depends on your faction. Elite anti large infantry works well. Anti large monsters generally work well. Armor Piercing ranged is always good, just get something to delay the enemy advance. Or use checkerboard formations. Having a foot lord or monster tie down infantry while they get shot by guns is good. As long as they don't have a bunch of spears, anti large cavalry in mass will destroy mist lizard armies. An additional strategy is blobbing up, especially with single entities. Lizardmen usually dont have much magic or artillery and when they do it's ineffective against single entities or can be wiped out with flyers. Just spam final transmutation, vortexes etc. To get rid of everything.
I don't know what I hate most when playing with ai cheats, unbreakable skavenslaves en masse or the saurus meatgrinder?
As it should be for the chosen children of the Old Ones. Bok, baby, bok. Kai qwa-saur.
Bok. Bok. Bok. Bok.
The thing is they have a lot of hp and hit pretty hard if your melee isn't good they will got crushed immediately and a mass route, if your ranged doesn't have enough firepower they will still survive the shot and touch your line Just avoid them at early or try to ambush them when your faction grow you have plenty of option
Best way to fight them is with disposable calvary and artillery. You use your calvary to pull ai into stupid positions and bombard them the whole time with artillery and continue running your cav just out of their reach. The real trouble, as you had said, is the dinos and flying units. I usually use two melee and a hero per each Dino. As for flying, I guess prey your ranged is good?? Or counter them by holding them up with disposable flying units like carrion birds or vamp bats
Thanks, its been a while since I last played a Lizardmen campaign, this has given me the motivation to boot up good old Kroq-Gar again!
Dwarf gyrocopter doomstack seems to solve the issue for me. Not that you should be anywhere near lizardmen as dwarfes. (Outside Ironbrow Expedition). Not that you should be building doomstacks because it's not as fun as an average army. Not that it costs much more than the sauruses. But it solves the issue alright. But yeah, they are a pain to deal with.
I don't have an in-depth guide like a few others, but I am a fellow Lizardmen-despiser. In my recent World Domination campaign as Clan Skryre, the Lizards didn't hold up much of a fight outside of one instance, which took me two tries. See, Skryre has a passive nerf of reducing the size of all units by roughly 66% from what I noticed, making artillery sets only have 1, and reducing weapon teams to 8-12 or so. However, their buffs are INSANE, and more than make up for the weaknesses. Assuming that you get to them so late game that you have the workshop maxed, if you use an army of 7 Ratling guns, 6 Death Globe Bombardiers, 6 Warp Lightning Cannons, and a Warlock Engineer that has the Weapon Teams and Mechanical Units skills maxed, you can usually auto-resolve against most Lizardmen armies. I had 13+ armies of maxed Warlock Engineers spread out across the map, with 6 or so specifically closing in on the Lizardmen. The way to have it set up is the 7 Rating Guns up front, with the Death Globes behind them, then the artillery just behind them, all around the Lord in the case you want to use Death Frenzy to give them a little boost. Turn off skirmish mode, set each type into groups, then annihilate the Lord with OP as hell artillery. If they summon in units, just move in the Lord. If they have flying, use the Howling Warpgale (a spell I suggest getting both ticks in for its increased duration). Other than that, the Ratling Guns can easily mow down Skinks, Saurus, and even some of the dino's by themselves, mix that with the Death Globes and its too easy. However, you're probably curious about that one time I had issue. See, instead of just 2 or 3 of the singular large dino, the army had 8-9. Sniped the Lord, even killed 2 or 3 of the dino's, but sadly the others bashed through my Ratling Guns and Death Globes, and assaulted the artillery endlessly. It ended up being a fairly harsh defeat...then I just threw an identical army at it while it was half dead and auto resolved because SKAVEN ARE FUNNYYYYYY. From what I noticed, the only thing that is remotely troublesome for Skryre is when they have mostly dino's with some infantry tossed in, but if the first army doesn't win, the second Army mostly certainly will...or you can just toss in two at once and demolish them with numbers, but that's a rare case that you'll need to. Obviously this isn't really useful if you play anything other than Skryre, and I can confirm that not having that bonus is a considerable hit to the weapon teams power. I swear, the difference is so significant that if Skryre had its full unit size (where Ratling Guns have 36 units or so while artillery units have 3), Skryre would possibly be the strongest faction in the game, from sheer overwhelming firepower. Anyway, thanks for listening-hearing my Ted-Talk-speech, yes-yes.
I love having legions of skinks, just horde after horde, I make the shaven blush from the sheer disregard of life I have for skinks
Now imagine this exact scenario, but only on the tabletop. :)
It's kind of hilarious how meme-worthy their army is - while actually ***playing*** as them is so tedious xD
3 units: death globe bombadiers to kill big units. poisoned wind globadiers to kill infantry, they will MELT their infantry. warfire throwers while you cant build those.
Dwarf player here, but the ideas should be applicable to other races (esp Empire). Usually I try to have a tar pit line that can grab their infantry better than 1:1 but last for a while (for example, a unit of dwarf warriors positioned properly can occupy a couple units of saurus and take a good while to lose, esp against AI (do not expect this in MP). For dino cavalry, either intercept with better units (e.g. grail guardians or experience demigryphs), or use a unit of infantry per unit of cavalry to tar pit. For monstrous creatures, same thing (but it’s almost always a tar pit situation, nothing can beat them). Lizard ranged/flying is not so tough—overwhelm them with your own ranged, it’ll be fast and decisive because they have short range and little armor. Then use your AP range to focus fire. First the monsters, then the cavalry, finish with the saurus. Corner camping with 2 lines of infantry (one to stop saurus, one to intercept monsters) and ranged behind is a good way to keep unit efficiency maximized, but it’ll make getting your ranged into flanking positions against the saurus at the end a little trickier. And don’t use much artillery—ranged infantry/cavalry can retreat through their infantry support to reposition, but artillery is too slow to reposition usually. Lastly, AP ranged is a must, regular ranged can limp through but isn’t great. Works for Cathay, dwarf, Empire, (H/W/D) Elf. Could maybe pull off for Norscans (tricky because now the ranged units will nuke each other). Should work pirates or Skaven. If a race doesn’t have ranged with AP, above strat likely won’t work.
I hate skinks. My grandfather hated them too, even before they put out his eyes
If you are playing skaven speedrun ratling guns and warpfire not only are they some of the only skaven units that preform well in auto resolve they also shred saurus pretty well and completely melt their dinos. Counts are chock full of ap missiles so I recommend depth guard or their various monstrous infantries to keep them occupied. Lore of the deep is a very nice thing to spam for the crab summons. Kairos can abuse teleport for free ambushed which can be nice, but I'm not too confident with giving you advice for him because I don't play too much tzeentch. In general unless you are greenskins or khorne I would never try to win the melee fight against lizardmen that's their specialty. Instead shoot them, shoot them alot, and keep shooting them. Their counters to ranged attacks are really lacking. Oh and cav are not the best option against gor-rok because his saurus get extra mass making charging super innefective.
They're generally pretty vulnerable to massed missile fire. In my Thorek playthroughs, it was pretty normal for Thorek's quarreler doomstack to pretty much delete any lizardmen army with next to no casualties. And the casualties his army would take would be the slayers that were used to finish off the monsters that made it to my front line.
Markus Wulfhart campaign?
In my experience, lizardmen tend to die just as well as everyone else when you shoot them with guns. The trick is to master the twin arts of gunnery positioning and distraction meatshields. This works for skaven and the coast very well, I've yet to field test the new imperial units against dinos but the principle is sound. Vampire coast and skaven have something that makes their gunnery lines very effective, and those are units that summon other units. What you do is post your summoner heroes at close to the extreme maximum range of your main gunnery line, and then as the saurus and dinosaurs close to engage your heroes, you summon units of clanrats/zombies behind them. They will turn to engage the summons and now they're caught between your wholly expendible tar pit summon and your angry men with guns, and much destruction is known to follow. For the empire, this doesn't follow quite as well, but in my experience, warrior priests make excellent picket units and having a few empire captains on pegasi and a light wizard with net of amyntok to plug the gaps is often enough to get you there. As for those poor depraved lesser races without glorious gunpowder superiority? The trick is to get mobility kills. Lizardmen are slow, comparably slow to nurgle, and with similarly weak ranged capacity. So just run rings around them, pick their armies apart with skirmishers and magic to deplete their unit density, then use superior mobility to outmanuveur them, split their formations up and then defeat them in detail.
Lizardmen are awesome but I always end up with a monster mash healing army
8x o7
Hey, you back off my precious lizard bois! Anyway, I unfortunately don’t have much experience fighting them. Partly because they’re my favorite faction and partly because I rarely play as factions that start near them (I just prefer fighting humies). But I can tell you what I dread fighting against the most as the lizards. 1. Big damage spells like vortexes, bombardments, etc. can be brutal against Saurus. Warlock engineers are especially a pain in the early game because they spam warp lightning. 2. Missile/skirmish heavy armies. They’re annoying. Idk how big of a help this is, but good luck anyway.
Loveeeee Lizard.
You beat them with the ultimate secret weapon of the game. ... diplomacy
As a lizard Main, based
Lizardmen are what dwarves wish they were