Chaos in a short league.... am I crazy to try this?

[Skipper]

I'm about to start a new rookie league and it looks to be a short season. This usually isn't a good thing for Chaos, but I'm up for the challenge.

Starting Roster

10 Beastmen 600
1 minotaur 150
4 Rerolls 240
Bank 10
Total 1,000,000

The first purchases will be the apoticary and then start adding in Warriors. I have a bunch of beastmen models from Reaper that I love and have ordered enough to run the team as beastmen. Even the eventual Chaos warriors will be modeled as LArge Beastmen.


Builds:

Minotaur: Claw, Tentacles, (Block) Claws for damage, Tentacles to keep prey close to avoid using Bitz on him all the time. He'll be the saety on defense and hopefully scare the other teams a bit.

Line Beastmen: 1) Guard, Block, Stand Firm 2) Block, Guard 3) Block, Guard The last two will be replaced on the line by Chaos Warriors early hopefully and will then differentiate into the ball handles with Extra arms, Bighand, Surehand combinations.

Safety/Hunter Beastmen: 1) Wrestle, Tackle, Tentacles 2) Block, MB, Claw 3) MB, Claw, Block

Sideline Beastmen: 1) Frenzy, Block, 2) Block, Frenzy, Stand Firm

Fouler: (Sneaky Git), Dirty Player, Wrestle, If a beast skills and rolls doubles out of the gate, he'll get Sneaky Git first followed by Dirty player for the obvious reasons.

Kicker: Kick, Block


First Skills will be Block, Block, Wrestle, Kick, Guard before diversifying.


Chaos Warriors will be built for line duty.....Block/Guard/Stand Firm


EDIT: The 4rerolls should handle my preliminary ball handling skills for a bit till the team develops some.

[Porkus_Maximus]

An all beast start (+/- Mino) is do-able if you have the patience, but no early ball handling skills? I'd get at least 1 or 2 beastmen with sure hands from the get-go. Whenever I coach a chaos team my first 3 beastmen to skill up always take sure hands X2 and kick. Waiting until you have 2 Chaos warriors seems like far too long to wait to get ball handling beastmen.

I think your team is also a little bit light on damage skills, I'd seriously consider mighty blow as a solid 3rd skill choice on warriors rather than stand firm and I'd be tempted to take it as a second skill on maybe 2 of the warriors and push guard back to the 3rd skill. Regardless of how much guard and stand firm you might take, it doesn't change the fact that the majority of the chaos team is AV8 and can get bashed off the pitch. What kind of opponents are you expecting to face?

[Skipper]

Not sure yet, as its just organizing, but probably 2-3 elven teams of different flavors...probably more Dark Elven though, 2 Orc teams, amazon, lizardmen, 1 necromancer team, and a definite human team.

[Grumbledook]

don't think you can really plan skills out like that for a league environment, you should really adjust to the other teams in the league

you can't be certain who will skill up and when

if it is a short league I wouldn't expect many skills at all, how short a season are you looking at?

[Skipper]

3-5 preseason games followed by 8-10 regular season games.

I

don't think you can really plan skills out like that for a league environment, you should really adjust to the other teams in the league

I agree completely, but youo have to have some type of development plan to try something out of the ordinary. i like to think about the position more than the skills. i know I'll need three survivable linemen..(Fend and Wrestle might also be good here), at least two defending hunters, 2 sideline players, and then a stable of assorted support positions.

My last Chaos team did very little in the use of the Chaos Warrior department as I tended to use the beastmen more, so now I'm looking at getting the team to match my play style as well as looking forward to painting more beastmen models.

We have a relatively new player base and the veteran players tend to take heavy hitting teams and beat up on the teams of the new players. I thought if I took a team that could weaken Dwarves and Orcs some, the newer players would have more fun as they wouldn't be constantly abused by these veterans. (I'm also running a goblin team in the preseason to give the new players a chance to learn the game, pick up skills, and maybe even win a few prior to the season openner. The Chaos team will preseason against these veteran coaches and maybe second games against a new coach.)

[mattgslater]

You can totally use CWs in skill positions. They're great ball-carriers, AG3, fast enough to play any role on offense except retrieving back, and add a lot of backbone to your nascent team, leading to better skill memory, which is crucial in this format.

[soranos]

I think you're planning with way, way too many skills for your players in regard to a short league of no more than 15 games. Otherwise it appears like a sound plan, but I think I would rather drop the Mino for some Warrios...

[Grumbledook]

my last league team with that many games was humans

I didn't get three skills on anyone and only managed to skill up a single lineman (not that this was a problem I made the league final)

I really think you are overcooking it in your aims for chaos who usually are going to get less SPP than humans and I was playing in a way that didn't really get many SPP as I already had the highest team value in the league

so given that the other teams quite likely had even less skills than I did

[mattgslater]

I run both team races, and let me tell you without hesitation I have an easier time skilling Chaos players than Humans, at the same level of success. Since anybody can do anything more-or-less equally (except the Mino), it's easy to play for improvements; no rookie player ever finds himself consistently stuck on line-duty or play-side midfielder or some other unglamorous role (except, again, the Mino). That's true of Humans on Week 1, when you don't have your Catcher brigade, but at roster peak (an easy target for Humans) you just have too many specialist players, and some guys start hogging the action. So with a Human team, you have like three or four games to get a skill on as many guys as you can, and then your development curve will shift sharply in favor of the positionals. Aggravating this is the fact that the Human Linemen have only G access, so there's not a huge incentive to get them on their track; their job, mostly, is to be 50k or 70k of "better him than the expensive guy." With Chaos, the players all have GSM access; you can always think of something to do with an improvement, there simply is no peak. Development-wise, they're like strong, slow, clumsy elves, while Humans are more like up-armored Skaven.

[Grumbledook]

I don't disagree, but that doesn't mean you are going to get more skills in a short league format

you are using your first skill ups to catch up to where humans are with block, sure hands etc as well

[Smeborg]

Skipper - a total of 10-15 retained SPPs per game is what you can expect, in my experience. At (say) 12 SPPs per game, that would be 120 SPPs over 15 games. The SPPs will not be spread evenly.

I agree with Matt (up to a point) that you have the opportunity with Chaos to spread the SPPs around a bit because they are all AG3, so have equal chances to pick up or receive the ball. However, once you get one or more dedicated ball handlers going (with S-Hands and/or X-Arms), this equation changes, and you will find the ball handlers hogging a majority of the TDs. This will happen after only a few games.

Any players with damage inflicting skills (e.g. M-Blow) will tend to accumulate SPPs from CAS more quickly than other players.

Finally, one of the neat things about Chaos is that (in the right circumstances) Chaos Warriors make great ball carriers (typically on long slow grinding drives, but also in scrambles near the opponent's end zone). This makes them much easier to skill up than most ST4 lumps, a hidden advantage of the Chaos team.

Have fun!

[Greyhound]

Skipper - a total of 10-15 retained SPPs

Damned! how do you do!!??

5 SPP for MVP: check !
6 MVP for scoring on average: check !
1 casualty on average per game with a team who doesn't have Block not mighty Blow.... check!
1 pass every game completed: check!

Total: 14 MVP.... before being casualties/death.

My lizardmen team after 6 games has:
8 TDs: some games didn't go well at all !
7 Casualties
3 Completions. classic for my team, I'm willing to consider you can do twice more with beastmen
2 interceptions... That's LUCKY!
Total: 47SPP = 7.8333 / game

No death/injuries I had to fire.

I have a 3/1/2 record of V/D/L which is not great but not abyssal either, I'd like to hear from others of their experience in skilling up!

[Aino]

My first skill with Chaos, for a beastman that is would ALWAYS be Sure Hands...

Maybe because I've spent 7 turns trying to pick up the ball (under no pressure at all from the few remaininf human lineman that were left onthe field) in a particular pouring rain game.... but still Sure Hands is the way to go I think.
Aino

[Podfrey]

Just read quickly, so apologies if already suggested. Extra arms beast gives 2+ pick ups and also aids quick SPP generation (2+ catch) to get those with 2 cas to skill up in 2 turns (3+, 2+, 3+ hand off back to player & repeat next turn)

[mattgslater]

What P.o.d.f.r.e.y said. Extra Arms guys don't hog SPP. They go up faster than other guys, but if you're doing it right, XA-boy is just a link in the chain, and the guy who makes the pass or scores the TD is the guy who needs the 1 or 3 SPP. The key is using all that ST4 on offense to establish some gratuitous QPs. The key to that, of course, is building a lead. If what you got is working, you can build on success by building SPP.