Friday, February 19, 2010

DEVOURING HUMANITY

So, this week we will be looking at how the Guar- wait, what's that noise?

Sergeant?

*SKREEEEEE!!!*
 

Hi there!  I'm Russell, and as you may know if you are a faithful reader, I'm the Tyranid player at Max's local store.  I'll be taking over Max's blog for the day to tell you a little bit about playing the new 'Nids in our escalation league.
The first thing that you should know about me and my 'Nids is that I play shooty Nidzilla.  If you're looking for strategies for playing assault-heavy Tyranids or Tervigon spam/Gaunt swarm lists, I can't help you.  If you're looking for a five hundred point list with only nine models in it, though... well, I know a thing or two about that.

Speaking of that five hundred point list, here it is:



That's two squads of warriors with paired boneswords, deathspitters and barbed stranglers, one Tyranid Prime with deathspitter and paired boneswords, and two hiveguard.  This list is a solid anti-mech force, with the hiveguard able to bring down most transports that you are likely to find in 500 points, and the warriors taking care of any infantry.  It can have trouble with missions with lots of objectives due to its lack of troop choices, but it does very well at Annihilation and 2 or 3 objective missions.

The glaring weakness of this list for all of you non-Tyranid players to exploit is weapons of strength 8 or more, which cause instant death to warriors.  The cheapest model on this list is 45 points, and losing about 10% of your list to a single shot is heartbreaking.  Krak Missiles, Darklances, Lascannons and the like all made my life very difficult.  This is yet another way that the Tyranid Prime helps this list, as his toughness 5 allows him to take a hit or two that should instant-death a warrior.






Much like Max, I was expecting a more mech-heavy first round of the tournament, so I thought that the Hive Guard would be my stars, but as it turned out my warriors, with their blast templates, assault 3 weapons and high close combat capability, were what won me games.  I went 2-2 in games that counted, wiping both Necrons and Daemons off the board, but losing handily to Dark Eldar and a hard-luck game to a different set of Necrons.

That's as much as I have time for in this one post.  If you liked hearing from me, or you have questions about playing with or against the new 'Nids, post a comment.  I'll answer what I can, and if you enjoy this post, Max may let me do another one in the next round of the league.  Until then!

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Devouring Humanity should come back every so often from now on to give you his thoughts on the gribblies and try to convince you to love his middle-sized beasties. Post your comments now so we know what you want to hear about and I'm sure that we can oblige. Next time, your regularly scheduled Imperial programming.

2 comments:

HuronBH said...

Question for Devouring Humanity.

How do you plan to counter the threat of things like Missile Launchers in larger point games? I play Marines and for example at 1850pts I have a Landraider with 2 Twin-Linked Lascannons and Multimelta, 2 Tactical Squads with Missile Launchers, 1 Tactical Squad with a Meltagun and a Multimelta, and 2 Typhoons that can pump out 4 Krak Missiles a turn. On top of that I have all sorts of Powerfist and Thunderhammer nastiness for Hand to Hand combats.

What is you plan for dealing with that type of threat?

Russell (Devouring Humanity) said...

To HuronBH:
That's a lot of heavy ordinance! At point values that high, though, Tyranids start taking a large number of monsters, whether Carnifexes, Hive Tyrants, or the Tyrannofex, which is a model I'd love to say a few things about in a future article. Those larger models either draw fire away from the warriors or they rampage through enemy lines and cause a lot of damage while they're ignored.

Also, as my list grows, you'll start to see some concessions to the swarmy nature of Tyranids. In higher-point games I'll start picking up a few squads of Genestealers and Gargoyles to serve as distractions, cover, or sacrificial assaulters to take care of some of those heavy weapons.

Hope that answers your question. Thanks for commenting!