Spears OR hand weapons and shields?

[ATozz]

There seems to be A LOT of conflict about the usefulness of spears, and I understand that their usefulness is very situational.

I can't remember ever facing a player who chose to pay extra for spears... :S
When are spears actually beneficial? (when not considering their point cost AT ALL!)

For example I can clearly see that spears are good for fighting things that ignore my armour save and that has a lower Initiative value.
But besides these rather rare situations, when should I pick up my spear instead of my hand weapon?

Could someone point me towards or post some math-hammer calculated conclusions on which situations that spears (and shields)
perform better in compared to hand weapons and shields. I'm sure someone has crunched these numbers somewhere.

Please refer from posting about how you would rather use your units or what you think unless you can back it up
with some calculations or similar that validate your beliefs. Your mere notion is not convincing enough! :P

Maybe once I know more about spears I can make up my mind about how to model my units. ;)

(perhaps this post should be moved to another part of the forum?)

[Rork]

Moved to Warhammer discussions.

[lewbot1]

You have obviously never played Lizardmen, nearly all saurus blocks now take spears for a 1pt extra cost.

Also, if you want advice on whether to take them or not, it may be a good idea to post what army you have, and what armies you have never seen take them.

[Ancalagon]

Spears can definitely be beneficial, after all in most cases they will double the number of attacks that a unit puts out, or in the case of High Elves, triple the number of attacks. That's not bad, and the only thing you lose by taking spear and shield rather than hand weapon and shield is one point of armour save.

Now, it's true that you won't always get the second rank of attacks (charging for example) but it is really useful to have the second rank join in if the combat goes to another round. Plus, if you think the armour save needs to be beefed up, you can always opt to have the troops use their hand weapon and shield instead.

Like lewbot1 said, these days nearly every Lizardmen player will pay extra points for their Saurus to have spears, though the spears are more beneficial to Saurus than they are to other troops - since Saurus have a decent base strength and the fact that they get two attacks each means that taking spears on a 5 wide unit gives ten extra attacks.

[BretLord]

I often use spears on my Men at arms units as well. This is becasue I use them as a unit of 10, and often have them as a throw away unit that is meant to lose combat and often they get run down. The extra attacks just gives me more chance of doing some damage back before they are broken.

And saurus with spears is truely evil! Having so many extra attacks in combat is really not nice, and makes them virtually unbeatable from the front!

[rysal]

I think it totally depends on the unit. Like you do want to take spears and shields for your basic Night Goblins. As mentioned, Saurus with spear rock hard too. however, for instances like with my basic Empire troops, I elect to take sword and board over spear and shield. Swordsmen can be better resilient at that level, and since I tend to use them in an anvilly type of way I'll take any points of survivability I can get. I've also seen people say that for TK you should skip out of Spear skellies completely and just go all archers. Overall, again...depends on the unit. And, of course, your play style.