My first attempt at tactica: Lizardmen

[Mazrim taim]

The Slann Mage-Priests of Lustria have many tools at their disposal, including Saurus, Skinks, Chameleon Skinks, Stegadons, Carnosaur, Kroxigor, Salamanders, Razordon, Pteradons, and hordes of small reptiles. As can be expected of such an army, the Lizardmen are extremely versatile.

Skinks:
The Lizardmen suffer from a severe lack of long-ranged firepower. Other than the Stegadon-mounted bolt thrower, Lizardmen shooting is limited to a range of 12". Skinks are depressingly fragile (T2) and have no armor to speak of. However, Skinks are cheap and plentiful, and they can dish out a lot of shots. Ranged attacks are poisoned. This isn’t always a big deal: because of their poor ballistic skill, short range, and multiple shots, Skinks will often be struggling to hit enemies on a 7+ or greater, which means that your opponent won’t be able to roll the 6s necessary for poison to take effect. M6 combined with Skirmish means that nothing is truly safe from their attention, which usually involves march blocking and harassment shooting.

[Phierlihy]

Is that your openning paragraphs or is that it?!

Moderator's EDIT:
If it was the opening paragraph indeed, it would be polite to let the author post his next paragraphs before issuing a comment.
You could send a PM, instead of risking to spoil a full article.

Calisson.

[Mazrim taim]

Son, I am disappoint.
Blechh....
I'm sorry, that really was a pathetic attempt: Every time i re-read it it seems to get worse. I'll keep going with the article, but i doubt i'll ever try to make a tactica again. (':(')

[Calisson]

Don't get discouraged.
Doing something for the first time is difficult.
The second time, it gets easier.
The next times, it becomes easier and easier (but still requires work, of course).
That is why the articles written by the experts seem sometimes very difficult to achieve by a beginner.
But it is worth doing!
Not only you'll feel satisfied with your achievement, but also you'll become more proficient with your topic, and more proficient with writing articles!


1. First of all, before reading anything, write on a Word document what advice you would give to a friend playing his DE against some LM, for the first time. What advice would you give to the same friend going to a tournament?
This will be the most personal part in your article.


2. Next, you need to get some help.
This help is the advice already given on D.net.
Read all the threads below.
Copy/paste in your Word document everything of interest. It does not matter if the same advice comes several times: you'll select the best written, later.

D.R.A.I.C.H. - knowing your enemy
Long Time Absent: 1500 DE Vs Lizzies, New Book
Tips on how to beat 2nd Gen Slann
morathi the frog killer(or telcis) using the darksword
lizardmen help
Against the New Lizardmen
New Terradons
Lizardmen - the new book (cheese)
Pivotal DE GT discussion a thread just for dealing with the new lizardmen
Plunder Lustria! 1250 v Lizardman advice?


3. Read LM army book. There will be new ideas.


4. It is time to organize your article.
Read again everything you've collected. Give it a title.
Copy/paste the titles in another document.
Sort the titles in order to group together several titles into a chapter.
Sort the chapters in a logical order.
Now you've got the general plan of your article.


5. Beef up the plan.
For each chapter, you cut/paste all the relevant quotes you've collected.
Then you rearrange all of them in order to synthetize them in a couple of paragraphs and write them in proper English. Add some humourous or fluffy description if you can imagine some, it helps making a great article.


6. When your initial document is empty, it means that all the ideas have been transferred to the organized document.
Your article is nearly ready.
Read everything with the LM army book and the rulebook, double check all the rules.
Read the whole article again. Spell check. Grammar check. Add a couple of new ideas which will come spontaneously.
Make all the changes so that it becomes something you're rightly proud of.


7. Last touch: find a title.
The title must tell about what it is, and should also intrigue the reader so that he would want to read.


8. When you've read it a last time, you can post.
Post one or two pages at a time, no more, because it draws "servor 500 errors". Later on, you'll find it easier to edit small post rather than large ones.
When you post your article, leave empty lines, underline or colour the titles, so that it becomes easy to read.


9. Often, an article draws some comments.
Sometimes, it is just "wow", or "thanks". Take pride of it.
Sometimes, it is more constructive, and provides more advice.
Take the useful part of the comments, thank for the contribution, and edit the relevant part of your thread.


10. You receive no pay. But you get the reward to join the team of D.netters who have dedicated a lot of their time for the whole community to improve their skills.
Your article will joint the D.R.A.I.C.H. hall of fame, on page 2, and will replace all the previous threads hyperlinked above, which is so far the best advice that D.net has to offer, pitiful as it is.

This will be and remain your outstanding contribution to this great site.

[Layne]

O aye, if you've got lots of experience with Lizardmen, then we certainly need your help. But Cal is quite correct, lay it all down somewhere else, get it all straight, then post it.

[Thanatoz]

Calisson is spot on, it's how I do my articles too.

Gather the info, sort it into logical groups, watch out for duplicates, rewrite each paragraph with your own thoughts, and if you do copy paste something literally (like mathhammer or army lists), give credit to the original author. Looking forward to your tactica.

Let it rest for a week. Then re-read it. You'll rewrite lots of stuff and find lots of errors. Let it rest for another week. Re-read it again. Letting it rest is the best way to find errors, but don't do it too long or you'll forget.

If you'll post too soon, you'll end up editing multiple times (been there done that).

Skinks will often be struggling to hit enemies on a 7+ or greater, which means that your opponent won’t be able to roll the 6s necessary for poison to take effect

Does this override the poisoned rule? Where can I find this info? BRB? FAQ? I'll wait for the tactica, but I already learnt something.

[Calisson]

Calisson is spot on, it's how I do my articles too

Thanks to Thanatoz and you, I had enough material to rewrite the dedicated post, near the bottom of the D.R.A.I.C.H. p.1, about:
D.R.A.I.C.H. – Writing your own D.R.A.I.C.H. article:

With Thanatoz testimony added to mine, I confirm that the more you write, the easier it becomes.
And speaking for myself, not only I have to write in a foreign language, but in addition I have a rather modest experience in the game (only 30 games or so in 1 1/2 year with 7th ed DE, all of them at home, never attended a tourney not even in a local club); despite this, I received many very nice comments about my articles.

As I mentioned once:
You don't have to be a tactical genius to write a good article for the D.R.A.I.C.H. ...
... but doing it will help you to become one.

[Mazrim taim]

Thanks for all the advice guys. I definitely rushed the article. Expect another post in a few weeks.

[Thanatoz]

Thanks for all the advice guys. I definitely rushed the article. Expect another post in a few weeks.

The first post is of good quality, if you can keep it up for the whole article, it'll be pretty solid. Don't rush, and if you're getting tired, save and restart later.

And speaking for myself, not only I have to write in a foreign language, but in addition I have a rather modest experience in the game (only 30 games or so in 1 1/2 year with 7th ed DE, all of them at home, never attended a tourney not even in a local club); despite this, I received many very nice comments about my articles.

I'm also not a native english speaker, and it shows. You can never hide such a thing, as a native English speaker will always be able to do a better job than you. That's why the re-reading is very important, as well as an english spell checker. That being said, I presume there are lots of non native english speakers here, all of whom do a good job as keeping the quality of their posts to a very high level.

[Blaznak]

Yes, here's another "Please do a Lizardman" tactica vote. They be tricksy beasties...

[Druzil]

poison works provided the to hit roll = 6. it still works at 6's to hit. @7's it is no longer benifits from poison.

so a skink with bs3 starts at 4's.
with moving and range = 6's. not worth firing multi shot as it would remove the auto wounds. if the modifier's would be less than 6 to hit then multiple shots is worth taking. giving you double the shots with all hits auto wounding.

add to this the 360 arc for being a skirmisher and the skinks become well worth their points cost. great vs large targets with high toughness.

[Timz]

poison works provided the to hit roll = 6. it still works at 6's to hit. @7's it is no longer benifits from poison.

so a skink with bs3 starts at 4's.
with moving and range = 6's. not worth firing multi shot as it would remove the auto wounds. if the modifier's would be less than 6 to hit then multiple shots is worth taking. giving you double the shots with all hits auto wounding

I understand why they let poison be the way it is just to save time, but it isn't very logical or realistic.

If an enemy is so skilled that you need 5+ to hit him, half your hits will do super-poison-damage but if you need 3+ to hit him, only a fourth of your hits will do poison damage? No logic there at all.

Particularly significant with skinks.
If you're running and at long range with bad accuracy, then 100% of your shots that land auto-wound, but if you're not moving and the enemy is right in your face, only 33% of your hits auto-wound?

They really should make poison a separate roll or something.

Skinks should be penalized for manuevering so badly that they need a 6 to hit with each arrow, not rewarded.

[Bounce]

They aren't really rewarded as they have less hits overall.
i.e Say we have 24 shots.
If the enemy is not hiding at all and you hit on 3's you should get 18 hits and 6 are poisoned.
If the enemy is hiding extremely well and you hit on 6's you just get 6 poison. this isn't much of a reward, as you have missed out on 12 hits!

However I see your point the percentage of hits which are poisoned should always be the same. Perhaps if all hits were taken and rolled. 1-5 Normal hit. 6 is poison.
For 3+ to hit you get 18 hits of which 6 are poison.
For 6+ to hit you get 6 hits of which 1 is poison.

This means at point blank range you still get the same number of poisons and hits and with a difficult shot you have the same proportion of poison but fewer shots overall.

[Mazrim taim]

So i would like to make it known that when I volunteered to write a Lizardmen Tactica, I, i said i would "give it a shot," or something along those lines. Anyone who know Lizardmen is more than welcome to write their own article, as i don't know when i'll be finished, and my post won't be very high quality anyway :'(

[Calisson]

Go ahead and shoot!

We'll see the result on the target afterwards.
And you'll probably receive some comments once you've posted.
Anyway, your contribution is sure to be already better than what the D.R.A.I.C.H. has to offer so far.