I had a game yesterday against my good mate with his Beastmen. Amongst other units, he had a unit of 7 minotaurs with a BSB and a Doombull. His Doombull unit absolutely carved through my chaos warriors. It ate two chariots, 25 warriors with MoT and a warshrine. It really got me thinking on how am I going to deal with this unit when I get my daemons up and running. Would a unit of 30 'letters grind it out or would 20 Daemonettes with a herald work better? He has an item on the unit making spells cast at the unit have a -2 penalty, which thwarted several attempts to soften the unit up with magic. I'm thinking if I can get enough wounds on the unit, to have the -2 Ld banner handy to make it tough for his break test.

In other news, my daemons turned up in the post today so I am now officially a Daemon player. :rock:

none of our core units can handle a minobus. what is he using to support it? you need to deal with the support units that keep it pointed in the right direction and if you do engage it, it needs to be from all sides with your heaviest hitters.

the answer to most things with multiple wounds, GUO, draw the unit with siren song and counter charge with GUO, preferably flank, but it will grind through the front all the same

alternatively tarpit the unit with chaff and spells all game. hes got a fair few points tied up in that unit

do not try to go through the front of a minobus with anything including a balesword GUO. and even if you get him into the flank, chances are very good that he's not going to come out alive.

he'll get maybe 2 hits on the DB, maybe one wound will get through the DB's gear depending on the build. if you don't roll up the 5 wounds needed to kill him, you're going to lose your greater daemon.

treat minobuses like chosenstars. don't engage them with anything you don't feel comfortable losing.

sorry i kinda skim read what you was having trouble with... minos on themselves can easily be claimed by a guo... but if there was a doombull, i would be throwing everything but decent units at them... shooting, magic, chaff to buy time etc

sorry about that

Thanks guys.

This unit was way tougher than what I thought it would be. I'll just have to see what works, but I think general redirecting would do the trick. One thing my WoC list doesn't have is cheap redirectors. I should have taken it out of the game rather than trying to hold it with the Warriors and hit it in the flanks in subsequent turns.

Live and learn, eh?

dp

the only thing to remember about the minobus is that every time you feed it a redirector, the unit gains attacks so once you start doing that, make sure you have enough chaff to keep it pointed in the wrong direction all game.

if you're going to try to kill it, do it early before the minos get all pissed off.

If possible you want to avoid deathstars and such until you can throw enough pain at them to kill them. With so many points tied up in one unit, the rest of the army should be pretty weak; take that out first if possible. The deathstar's weakness is maneuverability. Surround it, flank and rear charge it with your whole army and it should go down.

just out of curiosity deathphoenix, what does he use to support his minobus? for mine, i'm partial to 2 40's of gor and a world harpies and razorgors. just curious as to what other BM players like to use.

He runs it along side a unit of 30 gors with great weapons. He also dropped down a ghorgon, 2 units of 35 gors with 2 hand weapons, a lvl 4 and lvl 2 shamen and 4 units of the little shooty blokes. This game he also got a Mountain Chimera off, which I couldn't get rid of until after it had smoked my unit of marauders. <_<

Good point on feeding the unit. I'll have to give it some more thought.

dp

Could we not just shoot it to death with a large bunch of flamers?

he said that something in the unit is rocking the pelt of the shadowgave which is -1 to hit when shooting at the unit and -2 to cast spells at it. not that big a deal but it does cut down significantly on the damage flamers will do. and even if you shoot at them all day, you're not getting pts out of the unit. the problem with a minobus is not actually the minotaur rank and file, its the doombull and gorebull in the unit.

Yeah that sounds a bit nasty. Was just thinking that the flamers could do their stuff and the BL unit (with tooled up Herald) could go in a sweep up.

Would that still not work?

6 flamers should kill about a mino a round, so if you use redirectors, you're looking at a good 3-4 rounds of shooting. problem is, every time they win a round of combat, they gain additional attacks. so 2-3 rounds of redirecting in order to shoot and you have some VERY pissed off minos, the doombull and gorebull will be throwing out 8-10 attacks a piece.

i think you should either redirect and shoot/magic, or go for the gold and try to kill the unit early with heavy hitters. minobuses are interesting in that mixing the two actually makes the unit insanely hard to deal with.

best bet is just to not fight it though. use the bloodgreed and handle the other stuff.

Call me crazy but could one not hit them in the face with a BT? By face I mean flank, pone said Doombull in a challenge (alright beat him marginally...) if he decides to walk your way. As long as you can tie him up and then get a flank charge off you should be able to take it, use your redirectors to fornicate w/ his support units... Before this gains validity what did the mino's have for weapons?

If its great weapons it would be dodgy for the 'Thirster. Even just hand weapons could make things a bit risky for him. If you're going to rely on any single unit to do it, a BT with Immortal Fury, Firestorm Blade and Obsidian Armour would be one of the few that stood a chance. Doombull builds can vary of course but the most popular has asf and a 1+ save (with re-roll), plus often the Other Tricksters Shard which can make challenging him dangerous.

I still think Balesword/Vapours GUO would be my choice, but you would HAVE to get Miasma off to guarantee your survival. Failing that, 50+ Bloodletters (or maybe Plagurbearers even) with at least 2 Heralds. May sound like overkill, but there's no such thing in this situation.

there's is no "pwning" a doombull, not even with a thirster. the standard ramhorn build will actually do more damage to a thirster than he recieves and he will also have ranks, standard, and bsb on his side. and if he's had a few redirector snacks before the fight, things will be even worse.

His items included the Sword of Swift Slaying, Dark Pelt, Uncanny Senses and Potion of Speed. I think he took the potion because he either thought that if two characters have ASF, that the one the highest initiative gets the rerolls or that he was going up against Init 7 troops.

Mindrazor etc?

Minotaur's weakness is being T4 and mostly naked.. we just don't have a lot of ways to take advantage of that outside of combat.

If he doesn't have flaming attacks a plaguebearer unit with herald might do ok. He would need miasma to stay alive, or noxious vapors and stream of bile. I rocked a bunch of ogres last night with a unit like this.

Now I have never played against a minobus and so I might be underestimating them. But honestly I can't see how this unit is so unbeatable. I think a horde unit (40) of letters can and will shred them to pieces.

You don't have to kill the doombull or the bsb (although killing the bsb would be good). Just kill the rank and file, get loads of CR and then the heroes break. If this plan fails, have a tzeentch herald or lord of change with the lore of tzeentch near by. To quote Wu Tang Clan indirectly "Bolt of change ain't nothing to f*ck with". :D

The whole point of a mino bus is that you have to attack the characters and you're not going to do anything to them. my favorite setup goes through 40 letters in 2 rounds

He runs them three wide by three deep with Doombull, the BSB and a unit champ in the front rank. It pumps out an obscene number of attacks, impact hits and stomp. It is one very tough unit, and lowering it's stats with magic is hard as I am at a -2 to cast spells at the unit.

ok so i did that last reply on my phone so i couldn't really go into detail here, but there seems to be some confusion as to what the minobus actually is.

contrary to popular belief, it is not a big unit of minotaurs. it is a big unit of minotaurs that includes 2-3 minotaur characters. i like to use a doombull and a gorebull, others use 2 gorebulls (hence the nickname "the double diesel"), and others eschew magic support altogether and use 2 gorebulls and a doombull.

the unit will have a champion that carries a magic item to accomplish a specific function. some of these are the I10 sword, so the champ can strike at I10, then get killed, and then another mino steps up to attack (it essentially gives the unit 5 more attacks than it would normally get). another one is the blackened plate which gives the entire unit a 4+ vs flaming. my favorite is the glittering scales, because he tanks really well, keeps enemy combat res to a minimum, and stands a good chance of getting underdog challenge pts by killing enemy characters. potion of toughness is also a good one because if you pop it before the critical combat, it basically makes the champ unwoundable.

the doombull and gorebull will be kitted for destruction so the unit works like this: full command means all the characters are in the second rank. after charging in and doing impact hits, the beast player can use "make way" to put his 2 characters in positions that are most advantageous to him, i.e. doombull in b2b w/ herald or what have you. the minotaur characters then trash the enemy unit. when its time to attack back, the enemy unit must allocate attacks to the doombull, gorebull, or unit champ. in the case of bloodletters, they will do nothing to the DB, maybe 1 or 2 to the gorebull depending on his gear, and they'll mince the unit champ (for 3 wounds). this means that when the dust settles, the minos will be up in combat res by around 12-15 depending on impact hits and stomps and whether or not the DB has the other trickster's shard. if the BL's don't pop, the minos will just finish them in the next round and get a reform instead of having to overrun, and will have +2 more attacks per model than when it charged in, for the low, low price of a couple wounds on the gorebull and a dead unit champ.

just leave it alone. when somebody builds a minobus, they build it to be able to run headlong into the nastiest thing on the table and smash it to a pulp. there's no point in risking a combat with the thing, its greatest weakness is bloodgreed use that to keep it out of meaningful combats. and the beastmen player likely gave up LD 9 in the army to include it, so use that too.

Well, that's just nasty. I'll have to retitle my topic to mino van then. ;) I'll forward this to my Beastman mate and see if he can pick up a few tips on how to run his unit better.

Make way happens before resolving impact hits. Page 100. Not sure if that makes a difference to what dice you roll.

NO DON'T DO THAT lol

i thought so but didn't want to spread false info. i could't remember if that was explicitly stated or not. it does make a difference in this case, as a mino character does D3 impact hits (S6 for the DB), while a regular mino does only 1 at S5 :P good catch DP

The harder the unit is, the less he'll have in the rest of his list, so hopefully if I can avoid it I'll fare better. If not then I'm probably screwed anyway. :lol:

Hmm okay .. I'd then recommend final transmutation( or some similar spell), tzeentch magic and flamers. Even at -2 for casting spells are still very viable. Irresistible force still works, and you still have the option of using a level 4 caster, even a caster with +6 to cast.

Suddenly I thought of a "wild" idea. Keeper with soulhunger and etherblade. He should get the charge on average , and hitting rather hard. Now I don't know the stats of the doombull but the set up above has 1+ rerollable save which the Keeper ignores. He has 6 attacks each hitting with (8/9) chance and wounding with (8/9) chance (assuming the doombull is T5) for a total of 4,74 wound with no armor saves. You will ofcourse challenge with the Keeper, and should the doombull hide you just butcher someone else. If the doombull takes the bate (and he doesn't kill you) you should have a CR of 5-6 and quiet possibly win combat(he has 2 ranks(if you don't manage to kill a single mino with magic or shooting), banner , bsb = 4 + wounds).

And as Tor said use mindrazor , just throw it on horde formation nettes with a herald. Should get around 28 attacks (7 in btb if minos are 3 wide) with asf and s7.