I just finished painting my lancers and I am looking for good lists with 5-6 lancers in them. I have some ideas:

199/200

@Elliphino 's list seemed to do well in the battle report he just posted.

I'm rather fond of the 2x1 with Rank Discipline. They can slot into all sorts of armies. I really don't like the single tray - not enough damage for my tastes. I do want to try the 2x2 Combat Ingenuity + Master-Crafted Weapons, but only 2 threat makes it considerably less potent than the 6 tray variety.

First off, your Carrion Lancers look amazing! I like the multiple color schemes. It adds a lot of variety, especially when we have limited poses available to us.

I kind of approach list building from the opposite direction. Instead of saying, "I want five or six carrion lancers" I say what's an effective way for my army to fight, and then build in the units I need around that. For the list that @Parakitor mentioned, I did start with wanting to field this very tough, very maneuverable, and very potent Carrion Lancer unit. The rest of the army is built around covering protecting that one unit and making up for its weaknesses. Hence the big block of reanimates to cover one of their flanks, since a flank charge from even a medium powered unit can tie them up for the whole game, and the six tray unit also allows me to drop Ardus who is too slow to keep up with them. The archers spread blight to minimize impact from units that come with enough dice to penetrate their armor, and the knights give me a good, fast, hunting unit that can go after their backfield units such as archers/crossbowmen and heroes.

That said, I've had good luck running lancers in 3 ways. First way is the six tray unit with MCW and CI, as described above. The second way is as single-tray blockers. I've used these in what I call my "stand-off" list which is basically archers and a Deathcaller in a reanimate block. In this case just 2, or even one will do if you're good about using terrain, they can hold off a surprising amount while your ranged units do their work. But notice that I'm building around the ranged units. The third way is, as @Parakitor suggests, 2x1 with rank discipline. In this army build what I'm trying to do is have 3 medium to medium strong units work together to inflict damage while having more units to spread out the damage coming back at me and give my opponent too many things to deal with. In this army I've done 2 units of Carrion Lancers and a block of six reanimates, although I'm looking forward to replace the reanimates with a four tray unit of Death Knights once I get that second rank painted. Anyway, that's close enough to your second list that I think you should be pretty confident it can do alright.

I haven't tried the Wind Rune plus Simultaneous Orders unit at all yet, although I'm tempted to. Let us know how it goes if you try it out.

The list with 5 or 6 single tray Lancer units is probably not going to be very effective, but if I turn out to be wrong, definitely let me know that too. The problem is that they just aren't doing enough damage on their own and there are so many of them that they will likely end up in each other's way. Unlike the world champ list that did something similar with Scions, Carrion Lancers can't shoot, so if they get bottlenecked they can't contribute much to the game. I would be tempted to run a similar list with the archers and knights, but would probably drop down to just one or two lancers and and instead pick up Maro or a smallish block of reanimates, or even another 2x1 unit of archers.

1 hour ago, Elliphino said:

@Parakitor

The list with 5 or 6 single tray Lancer units is probably not going to be very effective, but if I turn out to be wrong, definitely let me know that too. The problem is that they just aren't doing enough damage on their own and there are so many of them that they will likely end up in each other's way. Unlike the world champ list that did something similar with Scions, Carrion Lancers can't shoot, so if they get bottlenecked they can't contribute much to the game. I would be tempted to run a similar list with the archers and knights, but would probably drop down to just one or two lancers and and instead pick up Maro or a smallish block of reanimates, or even another 2x1 unit of archers.

I found your post very helpful, gives me a lot to think about. I actually run the 5 single lancer list in a 3 round comp before Christmas. It did well in the first 2 rounds because the lancers could move through and around the dense terrain on those setups very well while the archers shot past them. It all fell apart when I came up against this:

Kari Wraithstalker [32]
Fortunas Dice [6]
Wraith Step [1]
Total Unit Cost: 39

Lord Hawthorne [34]
Reaping Blade [4]
Sweeping Strikes [5]
Total Unit Cost: 43

Oathsworn Cavalry x 4 [34]
Moment of Inspiration [5]
Total Unit Cost: 39

Oathsworn Cavalry x 4 [34]
Moment of Inspiration [5]
Total Unit Cost: 39

Oathsworn Cavalry x 4 [34]
Moment of Inspiration [5]
Total Unit Cost: 39

This game had a much more open field. Hawthorne charged into the lancers and dropped them extremely fast with sweeping strikes and reaping blade, leaving room for oathsowrn to attack my archers. The death knights couldn't counter attack because there was an oathsworn unit holding back ready to countercharge the DK's flank after they engaged. Im hoping that the other list I posted has a better time against something like this.

Slurm Team 6 is hands down the best use I found for 6 lancers. If you have only 5, then Slurm Team 4 should be good.

I tend to run a Lancer Block with solo Ardus, 2x 2-tray Archers w/ Combat Ingenuity, and a 2x1 or so of Death Knights. Undead seems to work best in variety.

A battle report featuring the second list posted above can be found in the battle report forum: