Hi everyone, and thanks for visiting my blog. I have spent the last week exploring the Immortal Empires campaign with Belakor of the Warriors of Chaos and decided to give a hand at trying to learn the Skaven who I have learned are difficult to play but boy was I in for a challenge even on Normal difficult.

I must have restarted the campaign for Clan Rictus like 10 times before I started to get an understanding of how the Skaven work and it’s satisfying when you figure out how to make them work but they are not straightforward like the other factions are to play and you need to make use of every trick in the book to make them work.

Luckily if you are having trouble getting started with the Skaven, this guide is for you. Be aware I have only played Clan Rictus but they have no faction-specific things like Clan Eshin or Skyre do so it should apply mostly overall to the Skaven faction as a whole(except for Clan Eshin as they mainly use Eshin troops) and is mainly focused on getting started with the Skaven which is the hardest part of playing them.

If you are a beginner to the Total War Warhammer series, you should check out our series of beginner guides here: Total Warhammer 3 Guide for Beginners.

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Please note this guide is also applicable for the most part to Total War Warhammer 2

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Your front-line troops suck

Now the above heading is a bit suggestive, but I will explain why I wrote it. What I mean by that is, is that you can’t rely on your front-line troops of skavenslaves and clan rats to do the damage to the enemy as even when I had an even number of troops with clan rats, a basic orc army with a mix of orcs and gobbos was going to beat me on the auto-resolve quite handily (maybe a problem of the auto-resolve but it’s never been this pronounced) which was a new experience for me.

So then, if your front line doesn’t do the damage, then what does? Well, it seems your artillery and ranged units as well as your monstrous units are the damage dealers of the faction (haven’t used the Eshin units much but I may cover those in a later update of this article).

I noticed when I recruited two units of ratlings guns into my army that they completely changed my opinion on the Skaven as they chewed through infantry units and have a pretty decent range which means you can keep them behind your lines and have your front-line infantry engage while the Ratling guns chew through the enemy units but Skaven has a very large selection of ranged units so they all seem pretty good but once you get Ratling guns it’s on.

What do I do until I get rat ogres and Ratling guns?

Well, that was quite the conundrum I had to solve. What do you do until then? Well, I found that I had the main force with my main leader Tretch Craventail which consisted of mostly clan rats and then I created another force of just skavenslaves with a Grey Seer who had Plague spells which sort of helped.

One advantage of the skavenslaves units is that they are remarkably cheap and they have 3 variants of skavenslaves, skavenslaves with spears that cost a little more and skavenslave slingers which are your first range unit.

This is the first time I have played Total War Warhammer 3 and had enough income to create two armies from like the very first turn (though it took a while to recruit) I even had enough money to use global recruitment with Skavenslaves which was awesome.

Now with these two armies, I attacked the very first settlement and the game said if I auto-resolved I would get a pyrrhic victory but I decided to encircle the enemy because I wanted to get them to come out of the settlement and thought I would have a few turns of attrition to wear them out but they decided to come out and attack me as soon as I ended my turn and so we met on the field of battle.

Now while I had advanced deployment for my entire main army I decided to employ near where my reinforcements would appear of the skavenslaves army which was on the bottom right of the map.

So, I waited the two minutes or so for my reinforcements to arrive and then decided to have my main force deploy in a long line to charge straight into the enemy force while the skavenslaves force would deploy to the left of the main force in a long line with the idea of enveloping the enemy which is a tactic you use when you outnumber the enemy.

And so my army moved forward slowly until the front line charged into the enemy and the left side of my force was able to envelop the enemy with the help of the Grey Seer casting Bless with Filth (a Plague spell that gives all friendly units in the hex area poison on their attacks).

Thus, the skavenslaves were able to roll up the enemy line and then I was able to charge the rest of the skavenslaves into the rest of the enemy line and they routed.

It also helped that I had my Assassin character and Death Runners unit that I started the campaign with a charge into the back of the enemy line which helped make them break.

So to reiterate, outnumber your enemy and make sure you envelop them if you’re attacking the open field of battle. Remember, when playing with the Skaven, use every dirty tactic in the book, which we will start talking about now.

Dirty Ratsy Tactics and Food

Now that you have figured out how to beat your earliest enemy, we need to talk about some of the mechanics that you will have already encountered that make Skaven unique and that is food.

Now you must keep your food in at least yellow in the middle of the bar as otherwise, you will get negative buffs to your faction now your main source of food is defeating armies and occupying or razing settlements.

Now food is interesting in that it has a few uses beyond being something that you need to keep in the green (and get no lower than yellow) in that when attacking settlements or armies you can pay 3 food to get more uses (or some uses) of “The Menace Below“.

Now, this is a very important ability to the Skaven and fits into their dirty tactics mentality. Now what it does is that for each use, it summons a unit of clan rats onto the map.

Now, this ability has a cooldown but the important thing about this ability is that this unit can be summoned so you can summon it behind the enemy once the front lines are engaged and then use it to charge into the rear of an enemy unit that is engaged to give them a significant leadership debuff to break them quicker.

Now if you combined that with another unit (or 4) of slingers shooting into the same enemy unit that is being attacked on the front and rear hopefully that unit will break and then you can charge those now-free units into the back and side of the next enemy unit up the line and hopefully roll over their entire force.

This becomes significantly better when you get those Ratling guns (or other artillery, ranged or monstrous units etc) and especially when you combine it with spells support such as Bless with Filth and Wither (which is an armour debuff) and when you cast those two spells together it’s debilitating.

Now one last thing about this is that apart from those previous two things it also has another use in that when occupying a settlement, you can spend an ever-increasing amount of food to start a settlement at a certain level which allows the Skaven to expand aggressively as long as they have excess food.

I recommend that you start the regular settlements at level 2 if you have the food to spare so that you can build the accompanying defensive building that allows you to garrison more units and that you get capital settlements that go up from level 3 to level 5 if you can afford it as at that level you can build more garrison units and defend that settlement capital.

If spending the food would take you lower than green then don’t do it as the negative debuffs from having low food are bad. Remember to protect your first capital as that is where you will get access to your most powerful troops so if you lose it you will suffer.

Ambush is your friend.

One of the very powerful things that are universally unique to the Skaven faction (and maybe a few others like Beastmen and Wood Elves though I haven’t played Wood Elves yet) is that the default stance that Skaven use is called stalk and it has a chance of ambushing an enemy when used.

The real powerhouse of the Skaven that I found is that all lords can buff their ambush chance very early into the yellow tree and certain legendary lords as well as the Warlord and Master Assassin can buff it further

Now, this is powerful because if you successfully get into an ambush stance (which is quite easy to do for the Skaven) then the AI will not be able to see where your armies are which is very useful when you’re trying to outnumber him.

This came in handy when I was dealing with Imrik’s faction as Imrik turned out to be powerful and he was just south of my position and started a war with me quite early and even with my main army of Clan Rats and an entire army of skavenslaves it was auto resolving into a valiant defeat, but ambush came to the rescue.

See what happened is that Imrik was sieging my most southern settlement of the first province I took which thankfully had walls and so I was moving my two armies discussed previously to intercept. In one turn, I tried to march both armies to get as close to sieged settlement as possible, but then Imrik decided to attack my two armies, and I was looking at a valiant defeat.

So, what I did was I loaded the save to a turn earlier and put both armies into ambush stance and moved as close to Imrik as possible and ended my turn. The next turn, Imrik was still sieging the province, so I moved my skavenslaves army into reinforcement range and got out of ambush stance and then moved my main army to attack Imrik from a normal stance. The two armies combined with the garrison units resulted in a decisive victory via auto-resolve.

As a result of this, I learned you should always be in an ambush stance with the Skaven as there seems to be no downside apart from moving a bit slower so this plays into the guerrilla tactics and tricksy nature of the Skaven where you can keep the computer guessing about where you going to attack.

Conclusion

The Skaven are very different and are initially a hard faction to get the grasp of but it just requires an adjustment in mentality to play them well.

The link to Part 2 of the Beginners Guide to Skaven for Total War Warhammer 3 can be found here: Beginners Guide to Skaven for Total War Warhammer 3