Im about to assemble 40 saurus and am curious as to which is the most used weapon for saurus? Do most of you equip them with spears or hand weapons when playing them? I like the idea of getting another rank of attacks for 1pt more each but am too inexperienced with them to know for sure.

I know spears means they will no longer get the 6+ parry save in CC.

I prefer the hand weapons over the spears. Being initiative 1, i tend to play more defensively. That extra save has changed games.

I would go with 2 units of 20 saurus with hand weapons and shileds.

In this edition, hand weapons tend to work out slightly more points effective than spears and are a better overall option. However, the difference is fairly small so if you choose to go with spears its not going to cost you any games really. And next edition GW will probably make spears the better choice again.

One option is to assemble half with spears, half with hand weapons. Rules say you just need the majority of the unit equipped properly, and pretty much everyone will be fine with it if the first two ranks are equipped with what you are using, and the next two ranks not. As long as it is clear what the unit has.

what stewart said

i prefer HW+Shield, but spears work too. i would bring spears in a horde of 50 though. if you have 40, you will lose fighting models right off the bat. (i prefer smaller units of 20-25 with HW though)

Since you can have a minority of models in a unit differently armed than WYSiWYG, why not do 12 as spears? That gives you the option to field everything as HW&S lus the ability field one unit of up to 24 spears.

I spent too much time changing weapon arms to suggest that spears will never be better than HW&S!

Just my $0.02

thanks for the input guys. I think i'll do 20 of each and just put spears of HW+S on the front depending on what im using. I do think i will be using HW+S more often but dont like the idea of having no spears models on the table if i do decide to roll with some.

I do like the idea of a 50 model horde! is there a way we can get frenzy on a unit?

You'll need a skink character for frenzy. Skavenpelt banner. I'd rather use it on a Skrox unit though.

dont do that though. its not worth it

The reasons why people tend to go for HW over spear is because you only get one supporting attack per saurus but you are paying the points for a model with 2 attacks.

Normal spear troops go from 2 to 3 attacks per front rank model, saurus spears only go from 3 to 4.

In most cases with the loss of shield ward your expected CR actually goes down despite paying an extra point, especially against tougher troops.

But as other people have said, build the units with a mix of spear and hw. The mix looks better and the balance may change with the next book/edition.