This battle report is not for the squeamish and includes scenes of swearing, foot-stomping, fist-waving and cruelty to mini's. (However, no actual mini's were harmed in the writing of this report.) If you are looking for a report which shows great narrative, fluffy battles, the finer side of gaming and great comraderie, then LEAVE NOW! If you are looking for no-holds-barred, hardcore, stomp-your-opponent-to-the-mud action, then continue. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
So there's been an influx of material/formations for Tyranids which, in my opinion, have just catapulted them from a middling army all the way up the stratosphere. Tyranids are no longer an afterthought of an army in competitive play. First with the release of the new Forgeworld Tyranid book and accompanying models, then with the release of a plethora of new models (that should have been included with the codex in the very first place!) and now with the release of the Shield of Baal supplement, Tyranids have just shot up the competitive ladder into top-tier territory. Yes, the newest supplement, the Shield of Baal, will be a meta-changing release as it has just injected another top-tier build to the tournament scene.
So why is this book so meta-changing? Because you can run both a normal detachment and the Shield of Baal Hive Fleet Leviathan detachment. What this does is it now allows you to take up to 5 flyrants in tournament play. This is possible for 2 reasons. Firstly, the normal detachment allows you to take 2 HQ's and the Leviathan detachment allows you to take 3 HQ's! Secondly, GW recently released a new troop choice called the Mucolid. This unit satisfies 1 troop slot....for only 15-pts!!! So in a normal + Leviathan detachment, you can fulfill the minimum 5 troop requirements to run this configuration for only a total of 75-pts!!! What the f*ck was GW thinking?!? Only 75-pts to be able to run 5 HQ's (in other words, 5 flyrants)?!?
My hypothesis is that a 5-flyrant list (which I shall call a Pentyrant Tyranid build) is over-powering to most of the armies out there. Tyranids were strong before, but they've always had trouble against the top tournament builds. Well, now the shoe is on the other foot. A pentyrant build is so strong that even other top, tournament armies will have trouble against it. Yes, pentyrant armies will be changing the meta once again. You better bring a lot of skyfire to your Take-All-Comer's tournament list, because if you don't, then you won't be able to handle such an army.
My opponent for this game is my friend and GT-winner, Grant aka "Grant Theft Auto" aka "GTA". He normally runs the seer council, but currently he is testing out a new Eldar army using the Forgeworld super-heavy, the Lynx. He is also trying a new build - he is bringing the Tyrannic War Veterans formation to help shore up a traditional weakness of Eldar, their anti-air. He's only had 2 games so far with his latest army. Both games were against Geoff "InControl" and his triple-flyrant/Swarmlord/Barbed Hierodule tournament Tyranid army. And Grant was able to win both of those games. So I know his list can handle up to 3 flyrants and a gargantuan. However, he's going up against what I feel just may be the quintessential Tyranid build. I hope he's ready for the spanking that I am going to give to his army, because that's what this game is going to be....a rude awakening.
1. Hold Either Objective 1.
2. Hold Either Objective 2.
3. Destroy an enemy unit.
4. Destroy an enemy unit.
5. Have a scoring unit at least partially within the enemy deployment zone.
6. Have at least 3 of your scoring units and no enemy scoring units at least partially within your own deployment zone.
Tertiary Objectives: First Blood, Linebreaker, Slay the Warlord, 1-pt each
I don't even know where to begin with how much problems my pentyrant list will cause for most armies. In my opinion, there's only 2 main armies that can give it problems - Necrons with massed tesla shooting (bargelords, AV13 annihilation barges with 3-4 night scythes) and a more slightly tailored, skyfiring Tau army (too bad most Tau players run ions nowadays in competitive play, but that may soon change). Most other armies really don't have the "tools" to deal with massed flyers and especially, massed FMC's.
While my opponent has respectable anti-air (AA) firepower in his army, he has another problem to deal with - trying to penetrate my void shields. All of his flyers shooting may be able to take down 2 flyrants with normal 3+ save, or 1 flyrant with 2+ shrouded cover, but it'll probably take him at least 2 stormtalons just to get rid of all of my void shields. So that's just 2 talons shooting at a flyrant with 2+ cover....he shouldn't even be able to kill 1! However, that doesn't mean he doesn't have a chance. He's still got his most dangerous weapon - the Lynx.
Fortunately, my opponent was able to get 1st turn. That is what will give him a slight chance. This is what he needs to happen. 2 stormtalons will have to wipe out my void shields. My flyrants will be spread out so that large blasts should only hit one. His Lynx then fires. It'll only hit one unless he gets lucky and the other shot scatters onto another one. He then needs to roll 6's on the destroyer table against my flyrant(s) to remove them. Otherwise, I guarantee you that I will be getting 2+ shrouded cover (either in ruins or by jinking). Finally, his other 2 talons and the 2 wave serpents need to focus on and bring down at least 1 flyrant. Best-case scenario, he is able to kill 3 with his 1st turn alpha-strike and then he should be able to win this game. But he needs a lot of favorable "events" to go his way in this situation and that is something I wouldn't bank on. Worst-case scenario is that he won't even be able to bring down 1 flyrant. However, on an average scenario, he just may be able to bring down 1 flyrant. After that, my flyrants take off into the air and shoot down all his anti-air. After that....game over. 4 flyrants is enough to wreck his army. He needs to be able to kill at least 2 flyrants (so only 3 can retaliate) with his initial alpha-strike in order to have any chance at all of a victory in this game.
2 factors may play a role in this game, and both of them are our Warlord traits. We both actually get very good Warlord traits. My opponent got Stealth and Move Through Cover in ruins. Just this alone will cause me to expend double my firepower (exluding my electroshock grubs) to kill any of his Eldar units obscured by ruins, this making his army much harder to kill. However, my Warlord trait is pretty darn good as well. I got the trait which gives me +1 to steal the initiative and to re-roll my reserves. Combine that with the fact that he is running a Lord of War and it means that I can potentially steal the initiative on a 4+!!! Moreover, a large part of my forces is reserves-based. Being able to re-roll reserves is extremely useful to me, especially for bringing in the units that I want and trying to keep the other units that I don't want to come in yet in reserves.
Tactics-wise, I will be ignoring his Lynx initially. That sucker is going to be darn hard to kill, especially on the skyshield. Just to give you an idea of how hard it is go kill it, assuming I fire all 5 flyrants at it:
60 shots, 53 hits, Eldar Titan Holo-fields ignore half of those hits so it then becomes only 27 hits. Being AV11, 9 hits glance/penetrate and then 4.5 is saved by the 4++ Invulnerable of the skypad. So overall, it'll take about 1.5 turns, or 7-8 flyrants shooting at it to be able to kill it. It's much better to just focus on his other units and in particular, the stormtalons as the actual only threats to my flyrants once they are in the air. Once they (the talons) are out of the way, it is just a matter of time before I table, or near-table by opponent.
By the ways, the MSU element of my army - my ground units - will really make it tough for my opponents. Either shoot at my cheapo ground units and let my flyrants continue doing stupendous damage to his forces, or shoot at my flyrants and let my ground forces continue taking objectives/harassing his units. It's a no-win situation for my opponent. Of course the Lynx will be shooting at the ground targets, but that's ok. I really don't mind that he is wasting 2 Destroyer shots a turn in order to kill a 50-pt unit. If his super-heavy does this for 4 turns straight, he's still only killing about half of what his Lynx costs. That, my friends, is the very definition of inefficiency.
One last note, while he can get more troops via Daemon summoning, I have 10 warp dice to his 3. I am going to stuff his attempts. Moreover, he's going to feel the wrath of my Shadows in the Warp. It is very easy to Perils with Malefic powers, and I am going to show his Warlord firsthand what it will be like doing any Summoning while in range of Shadows. I guarantee you, Shadows will get to him in the end (unless he ends up casting Possession).
Tyranids - +1 to Seize the Initiative and may re-roll reserves.
Psychic Powers:
I get 1 Catalyst, 1 Onslaught, 5 Psychic Screams and a mix of other powers for flyrants.
Grant's farseer gets a shooty power, Incursion, Possession and the Summoning.
Eldar deployment, to the right.
My opponent hides his Lynx and Warlord behind BLOS (blocking LOS) terrain (to me left). The model is actually an older, Armorcast Cobra but for this game, he is using it as his Lynx.
My deployment. I spread out all 5 of my flyrants but make sure each and every one is within 6" of the malanthrope and within 12" of the Void Shield Generator (VSG).
Grant then infiltrate the 4 stormtalons (pardon the proxies using only their bases) more than 42" from my flyrants.
Overview of our deployment.
Because of his Lord of War granting me +1 to Seize the Initiative, I would be seizing on a 4+ (due to his LoW and my Warlord Trait). So just for sh*ts and Giggles, I roll the dice to steal anyways. And the result is a ....
The Lynx moves. It can barely see the nose of my malanthrope. Uh oh....that might be bad, considering I have one of my flyrants right next to him.
Talons move up to within assault cannon range (24").
Serpents move towards the skyshield landing pad.
Finally, his farseer moves and then turbo-boosts to within my deployment zone to satisfy one of his Maelstrom objectives (a unit in my deployment zone).
Farseer tries to summon daemons but I stuff it.
We then go onto Shooting.
First off, he fires 2 stormtalons at my flyrant. As I predicted, it took 2 talons to knock out all 3 of my void shields.
He then fires the Lynx because he could barely see the face of my malanthrope (should have turned my malan to face the other direction). BAM!!! Direct hit on the malanthrope and the flyrant right next to it.....with both blasts!
He doesn't roll a on the Destroyer chart and I would then go on to pass all 4 of my 2+ schrouded cover saves.
As for the rest of his shooting, 2 talons and 2 wave serpents manage only to put 1W on a flyrant on the ground.
Tyranids 1
Spoiler:
All of my flyrants take off.
I don't even bother to cast any psychic powers.
After my shooting is done, all 4 of his flyers disappear.
Because he has lost the ability to deal with my flyrants, my opponent has no recourse but to concede.
That was too quick. We decided to reset the game to see if there was anything else he could have done.
Eldar 1
Spoiler:
So we start over.
This time, my opponent deploys his Lynx on the skypad.
He hides his Warlord.
My deployment is the same, though this time, I turn my malanthrope the other way.
He then infiltrates his 4 talons.
Once again, I fail to steal.
All 4 talons fly up.
Serpents go the other way this time. He is going to try to take out my malan with them.
This time, it only takes 1 talon to bust my void shields.
Lynx fires at my top flyrant but I make my 2 2+ cover saves.
Once again, his wave serpents could just barely see the nose of my malan. Doh!
They fire at it but my malan makes all of its saves against them.
3 of his talons fire at my top flyrant and he only manages to get 2W through my 2+ cover.
Tyranids 1
Spoiler:
Not wanting this game to end on Turn 1 again. I decide just for fun to go after the Lynx. Note - this WON'T be my normal tactic in tournament play, but since this was only an experimental game, time to test out the resiliency of the Lynx.
The only power that I bother to cast is Catalyst.
It takes 3 flyrants just to do 2 Hull Points of damage to it (out of a total of 6 HP's). Wanting to make sure I can get First Blood, I then fire my other 2 flyrants at his talons....
I don't manage to get it (First Blood) due to good saves by my opponent, though I do take off 1HP each from 2 talons and cause them to jink.
Eldar 2
Spoiler:
Talons continue to go after my flyrants, though 2 of them have to overshoot my flyrants in order to stay in flying mode.
Serpents continue their advance.
His Warlord's head explodes while trying to summon some daemons (rolled a on the Perils chart and then failed his LD test by rolling 11).
That gives me both First Blood and Warlord.
All of his shooting only manage to put 2W on one of my flyrants (though keep in mind that 2 of them jinked last turn and the 2 in front could only fire their turreted assault cannons behind them).
Tyranids 2
Spoiler:
Ok, no more fun and games, boys and girls. Some of my reserves come in, but I use my Warlord trait to keep most of them out.
This turn, I am going in for the kill.
My Warlord takes 1W while casting Catalyst.
And in a heartbeat, all of his talons are gone.
I even had enough firepower afterwards to take down 1 of his wave serpents.
Just as I expected, my list is super-powerful. My opponent just had no answer for it, and he actually brought a list with good anti-air firepower. Other than for him to pray for some good dice or for me to roll poorly, he just couldn't do anything to my army. I could see how frustrating this game was for him, just like how frustrating his seer council was to so many armies, and that shouldn't be how the game is. Therefore, you won't see me running this type of army in tournament play. The game should be about having fun. There really is no fun when one army can literally do nothing against another. You are not playing against someone. That is just using your opponent as a punching bag. Thus, you won't see me running this type of list anymore unless by request from my opponent for practice.
Seriously, this is the type of list that will make people wonder why they are even playing the game of 40K anyways. Now you may have a small minority of people who will enjoy the challenge of going up against a Pentyrant list, but the majority of the people will hate it. If your goal is to have fun with your opponent, then I would strongly recommend you don't run these types of lists. But if your goal is just to win and you don't care what other people think of your army (and perhaps you!), then you've got a winner on your hands. The Pentyrant build is a serious contender at any tournament you bring it to. As I've said in my disclaimer at the very beginner of the report, you have been warned.
This looks like a really rough for the Eldar/SM player to face. The Stormtalons are loaded up with AP4 weapons, so the Hive Tyrants don't even have to jink against them to get good saves (rending from the Assault Cannon is the main danger). The Lynx has good protection (AV11 + holofields + presumable he's sitting on a landing pad?), but those brainleech devourers glance on a 5+, and they're going to have a monstrous number of shots ever turn... makes me wonder if it can survive even a single turn of shooting?
I haven't played against the Lynx before, is it even allowed to shoot at flying units? I know it has that weird flying mode, but I'm not sure if it has skyfire.
DanielBeaver wrote: This looks like a really rough for the Eldar/SM player to face. The Stormtalons are loaded up with AP4 weapons, so the Hive Tyrants don't even have to jink against them to get good saves (rending from the Assault Cannon is the main danger). The Lynx has good protection (AV11 + holofields + presumable he's sitting on a landing pad?), but those brainleech devourers glance on a 5+, and they're going to have a monstrous number of shots ever turn... makes me wonder if it can survive even a single turn of shooting?
I haven't played against the Lynx before, is it even allowed to shoot at flying units? I know it has that weird flying mode, but I'm not sure if it has skyfire.
The Lynx on a skyshield is actually pretty darn resilient. Basically, it will ignore 50% of hits if it moves due to Eldar Titan Holo-fields and then it gets its 4++ save on top of that. That's a 75% to ignore the damage effects of any shots. So to put that into perspective, if I fire all 5 flyrants at the Lynx on the skypad:
60 shots, 53 hits, 27 hits get past Holo-fields, 9 hits will glance/pen and only 4.5 gets through the 4++. I'd have to fire all my flyrants at it for almost 2 turns in order to kill it!
No, the Lynx cannot shoot at flying targets, other than with its scatter lasers. Also, when it flies, it cannot shoot.
It's best against ground targets. In other words, my opponent has to knock down my void shields and then he has a chance to fire 2 D-pie plates at my flyrants before they take off into the air. But after that, I don't anticipate the Lynx doing too much.
pinecone77 wrote: In honor of the "schoolin" you gave the Demon Factory with SkyTyrant, I am going to refer to the Formation as "SkyShadow" from now on!
Our gargoyles will block out the sky!
Very excited to see this game, I think that jy2 runs away with this one. I will personally never run 5 Flyrants due to a combination of cheesiness and finances, but I can see it becoming very effective. I will say, however, that I am sold on the SkyTyrant swarm and will be trying it out myself shortly! I think 30 gargs with a ReaperFlyrant can solve a lot of problems for us.
pinecone77 wrote: In honor of the "schoolin" you gave the Demon Factory with SkyTyrant, I am going to refer to the Formation as "SkyShadow" from now on!
Let loose the alien birds of war!
But I wouldn't break out any champagne just yet. Playing against my opponent running Daemons is much, much different than, say, playing against the likes of Slaede or yermom running Daemons. Daemon factory run by a really good general is indeed a nightmare to play against.
pinecone77 wrote: In honor of the "schoolin" you gave the Demon Factory with SkyTyrant, I am going to refer to the Formation as "SkyShadow" from now on!
Our gargoyles will block out the sky!
Very excited to see this game, I think that jy2 runs away with this one. I will personally never run 5 Flyrants due to a combination of cheesiness and finances, but I can see it becoming very effective. I will say, however, that I am sold on the SkyTyrant swarm and will be trying it out myself shortly! I think 30 gargs with a ReaperFlyrant can solve a lot of problems for us.
Personally, I wouldn't run 5 flyrants either. It really won't be any fun to most opponents, like bringing a fire hose to a water gun fight, and that's not what this game is about. I did this report because what I really wanted to show was how much Tyranids have changed and how stupid-good a build like this can be. A lot of people will just hate it, just like they did against the seer council last edition. I'm hoping this battle will serve as a cautionary tale....but I am afraid that at the end of the day, people will abuse it just the same. In any case, this battle report is meant to inform. It's not really to show off my new army because honestly, I won't be running it in competitive play.
I am really liking Skytyrant, even only after 1 game with it. The skytyrant is turning out to be better than I thought. In the future, for tournament play, I may probably go with 3 flyrants + Skytyrant. Either that or 3 flyrants + Skyblight. 4 flyrants is probably the most I would ever run in tournament play.
Dozer Blades wrote: This reminds me of my discussion this morning about unbound lists.
It's going to be a trend that you will see more and more. With the release of each new codex, it's no longer just Primary + allies. Now, we're trending towards Primary + formation or 2+ formations. Pretty soon, dual-CAD would seem tame in comparison.
The 40K landscape has been and will continue to be changing. Better get used to it.
Ratius wrote: I forsee much pain for the Eldar. 3 scoring troops at 1850 just dosent cut it.
Ironically, my bugs only have 2 ObSec troops and even less scoring bodies on the table as flyrants should almost always be flying. Scoring-wise, it really shouldn't be a problem for Eldar. Stormtalons can go into Hover mode and they are low enough to still be able to score objectives on the ground.
And then there is Daemon summoning from the farseer.
Dozer Blades wrote: This reminds me of my discussion this morning about unbound lists.
It's going to be a trend that you will see more and more. With the release of each new codex, it's no longer just Primary + allies. Now, we're trending towards Primary + formation or 2+ formations. Pretty soon, dual-CAD would seem tame in comparison.
The 40K landscape has been and will continue to be changing. Better get used to it.
At some point we will reach a tipping point where some Tourneys fix the FOC in some way, and the vast majority of players adopt it. You can see early signs of that with the Adepticon point limit (Percentage based) for LOW. Something similar expanded to each FOC category and formations is an easy fix.
Alternatively, a strategy based on Highlander could work, or a penalty for Spam like 'Da Boyz, or some other solution could emerge that fixes the increasing crazyness, and returns us to a more rational, fun, and competitive game.
I am all for multi cad and formations but I like to think people respect my armies. Already some tournies in my area are banning Come the Apocalypse and Lance formation - they are not good for the game.
I agree that a percentage limit is coming. 40k will cycle back to what is was at the beginning of 3rd edition when I started playing with percentage limits in all catagories except troops who had a percentage minimum.
I don't think the game will totally go back to 3rd edition which was obviously more simple. Percentages for tournaments sounds like it could be a good idea and is more attractive to me than Highlander. Overall I really seventh edition a lot more than sixth but don't like the really crazy armies.
Dozer Blades wrote: I don't think the game will totally go back to 3rd edition which was obviously more simple. Percentages for tournaments sounds like it could be a good idea and is more attractive to me than Highlander. Overall I really seventh edition a lot more than sixth but don't like the really crazy armies.
I think you sentiment is share by most players. I agree that Highlander is mainly a novelty, but let me offer a way to expand Highlander that you might be ok with that we've been kicking around our gaming group. The key is the highlander mechanic that allows you to unlock multiple troops, only applying that to FOC slots. The numbers are all preliminary, and we haven't yet included Legion of the Damned, Imperial Knights, Assassins or Formations that are essentially an entire detachment by themselves, for instance the Storm Trooper Formations.
Detachment Level 1
1-1 HQ 0-1 Elite
2-3 Troops
0-1 Fast
0-1 Heavy
0-1 Dedicated Transports
0-0 Formation
0-0 Fortification
0-0 Lord of War
Detachment Level 2
1-1 HQ 1-2 Elite
3-4 Troops
1-2 Fast
1-2 Heavy
0-2 Dedicated Transports
0-1 Formation (Max 350 Points)
0-0 Fortification
0-0 Lord of War
Detachment Level 3
1-2 HQ 2-3 Elite
4-6 Troops
2-3 Fast
2-3 Heavy
0-3 Dedicated Transports
0-1 Formation (Max 650 Points)
0-1 Fortification (Max 250 Points)
0-1 Lord of War (Max 650 Points)
Detachment Level 4
2-3 HQ 3-4 Elite
6-8 Troops
3-4 Fast
3-4 Heavy
0-5 Dedicated Transports
0-2 Formation (Max 1000 Points total)
0-1 Fortification (Max 500 Points)
0-1 Lord of War (Max 1000 Points)
Take as many Detachments as you want, but you must pick from this list, and you are limited to one detachment per Faction.
DarthDiggler wrote: I agree that a percentage limit is coming. 40k will cycle back to what is was at the beginning of 3rd edition when I started playing with percentage limits in all catagories except troops who had a percentage minimum.
It's going to be harder and harder to do that as the game is going more and more towards formation-based armies. I mean, how do limit an army that is running formations like Skyblight, where almost all the units there are Fast Attacks, or the Corpsethief Claw, where you are running 5 Heavy Support units? I'm sure there are many more formations like that and also more coming out in the future as well.
If there are any limits, it will be those imposed by local tournaments. GW on the whole is going more towards an open-structured system where you can almost bring whatever the heck you like.
Dozer Blades wrote: This reminds me of my discussion this morning about unbound lists.
It's going to be a trend that you will see more and more. With the release of each new codex, it's no longer just Primary + allies. Now, we're trending towards Primary + formation or 2+ formations. Pretty soon, dual-CAD would seem tame in comparison.
The 40K landscape has been and will continue to be changing. Better get used to it.
At some point we will reach a tipping point where some Tourneys fix the FOC in some way, and the vast majority of players adopt it. You can see early signs of that with the Adepticon point limit (Percentage based) for LOW. Something similar expanded to each FOC category and formations is an easy fix.
Alternatively, a strategy based on Highlander could work, or a penalty for Spam like 'Da Boyz, or some other solution could emerge that fixes the increasing crazyness, and returns us to a more rational, fun, and competitive game.
I'd be curious to see how they will "fix" it. Personally, I really don't care how they do it as long as everyone is following the same restrictions. Unfortunately, people will always find ways around it as they build the most powerful army they can under any type of self-imposed comp.
BTW, I really like the Highlander format, but it won't be the tournament for everyone. I am liking how the larger GT's are handling it. Most larger GT's allow 2 or even 3 formats - a "Championship" type main event, a narrative or No-holds-barred type event and/or a more casual/friendly comped even (like the Highlander). I think that is the way to go. You force players to do just 1 type of event and you lose potential players. You allow for multiple events and now you not only satisfy a wider range of audience, but you have the potential to generate more revenue as well by offering more "products" (from a TO perspective).
Dozer Blades wrote: I am all for multi cad and formations but I like to think people respect my armies. Already some tournies in my area are banning Come the Apocalypse and Lance formation - they are not good for the game.
"Respect" is really subjective. Some will respect your army as a challenge or even a fun army to play against. Other people may think it is too much even for them to handle and therefore, "cheesy".
BTW, the West Coast tournaments running the BAO format have banned Come the Apocalypse allies ever since 7th came out.
herpguy wrote: All I can muster is a very sad chuckle when looking at what "legal" lists are nowadays.
It's scary how the game is progressing in an environment that is getting less and less structured than before. And the saddest part is that this is actually being encouraged by the very people who made the game.
Dozer Blades wrote: I don't think the game will totally go back to 3rd edition which was obviously more simple. Percentages for tournaments sounds like it could be a good idea and is more attractive to me than Highlander. Overall I really seventh edition a lot more than sixth but don't like the really crazy armies.
The signs were there from the very beginning. I mean, come on, allowing Super-heavies, unlimited CAD and the taking of any allies into regular games of 40K? How can things NOT get crazy? It is only due to the hard work of TO's across the world that we still maintain some semblance of sanity in competitive gaming...and yet people are still griping about not playing the game as GW intended. To that, I say, f*ck how the game was intended.
The game is getting comped....and that, to me, is actually a good thing.
So while talons may not be the ideal platform from which to challenge flyrants.. it still seems like they would have been better served in reserve.
Clearly attempting to shoot into 2+ cover is futile unless you ignore it so I just dont understand why you'd ever try. Instead you simply start in reserve in 2x2 pairs and hope you can hold out against their shooting until then (which, admittedly in this instance may be dicey, but just keeping only the lynx/skyshield on the board and reserving everything else wouldnt have been a terrible option).
just my 02cents.
Also JY2 are you gonna be in LA for games testing at all soon? I really need a good test vs this type of list for LVO practice, as I suspect (along with you clearly) that nids will be in the meta in a big way, so I need to see how i do against them. In theory I have a list that can at least handle 4 flyrants, but I do need practice against it.
I completely agree that your Pentyrant list is super tough. From your opponent's perspective however, why not reserve the Stormtalons and have them come in once your Flyrants are no longer shrouded and under Void Shield protection? Your list is set up to stay safe from an Alpha Strike, but once airborne other flyers can come on and have a better chance of outmaneuvering the Flyrants. There's no way your 5 Flyrants were going to do TOO much damage right away, particularly if he kept everything on/near the Skyshield. Just my two cents.
Homeskillet wrote: I completely agree that your Pentyrant list is super tough. From your opponent's perspective however, why not reserve the Stormtalons and have them come in once your Flyrants are no longer shrouded and under Void Shield protection? Your list is set up to stay safe from an Alpha Strike, but once airborne other flyers can come on and have a better chance of outmaneuvering the Flyrants. There's no way your 5 Flyrants were going to do TOO much damage right away, particularly if he kept everything on/near the Skyshield. Just my two cents.
First off, that is an awesome username.
The problem with reserving the talons is that you run two risks:
1) the (presumably two) squadrons will come in piecemeal. This risk is even greater when you split them up into four individual units, and if they don't all come in at once it's a sad, sad day
2) either of the (presumably two) squadrons would come in on turn three or four (even if they both did this, it would be really really bad). Basically, you need as many chances to kill the Flyrants as possible
That being said, they basically are flying rhinos. It would be interesting to see fire raptors or storm ravens kitted out against the Flyrants. I've found that they are much tougher to kill (av 12 4 hp) and of course their guns are natively ap 3 or better (or at least can be). This is a much bigger issue that will force a Flyrant to jink. Rending ap 4? I might just take my chances with my 3+
Also, it goes without saying that a super heavy tank with a blast weapon is going to be a huge handicap against a list like this. There are definitely bigger challenges to Flyrant spam (or Flyrant Council as Gigasnail has apparently coined it). I'm ok with Pentyrant too FWIW.
I agree that this will probably be the new top tier Tyranid build (or some variant of this) and its a little bit sad. No Tyranid player really wanted our own version of wave serpent spam, but here we have it. I would also definitely be interested to see how Leviathan + Skyblight does
pretre wrote: Yeah, not to harsh the eldar guy, but I'd love to see skytyrant against a harder player.
I don't think it's the player at all. There is no scenario barring a dice miracle that lets Eldar win this game. None at all. I want to see this list against a ground force personally, like a bikestar. If you try to outshoot a pentyrant list you will lose, no questions asked. But, a fast list that can zoom past and hit the enemy backfield... that may have a chance. Drop Pod lists, SW ThunderCalv, WS Bike lists, Daemon screamerstars, etc. A Tau list bristling with skyfire and ignores cover could also be nasty here. I think this list is a super hard counter to Eldar, and gunlines in general, but everything has weaknesses. THe lack of ground presence here stands out, but it will be hard to exploit since Flyrants are so versatile.
So how does pentyrant deal with a landraider or 2? How does it deal with triple burst tides? how does it deal with add lance with AM for anti air? Basically, how do you handle any army that is capable of surviving your shooting (which in theory should be a few) and only has to murder your squishy troops on turn 4 and five and win the game?.
pretre wrote: Yeah, not to harsh the eldar guy, but I'd love to see skytyrant against a harder player.
Grant's a GT winner and a regular at top tables, so it isn't as though Jim was clubbing a baby seal here. I'm sure the thought was to lay it all out trying to gib the malanthrope, and down a few tyrants. I agree that Eldar's normal strategy of dealing with enemies they can't hurt is to cat and mouse all game until you either A) have no other targets or B) you force your opponent to make a mistake, is probably the better call here. However, at the end of the day it's just delaying the inevitable in this scenario.
I'd have put the Lynx in max range of the ground targets on the sky shield in my back corner, Farseer w/in guide range behind some BLOS. Everything else in reserve, roll hard for the reserve manipulation WL trait. Take first turn just to make sure that you're talons come on after he's out of the bubble when they arrive. Once the flyrants are out, bring in the talons and play man to man D. One talon per flyrant, forcing them to spend the rest of the game jinking. Depending on how you play Psychic Shriek the Farseer could help out here or there. Once a Flyrant is down a few wounds put a couple talons on them to get the kill.
So that's my best case arm chair quarterbacking in this scenario. Problem is, Jy2 can just sit in his bubble all day playing musical chairs flying the tyrants in circles around the Mal. While he'd give up maelstrom, you are too because you're hiding in the corner. Best case scenario is that you start nabbing objectives with your warlord and tyranids send 2-3 tyrants to kill him. Then you can bring in talons and pick those off. But a smart opponent knows that primary is his as long as he hits second, so they'd just give you secondary and grab Primary/First Blood/Line Breaker for the easy win.
Jy2's point stands, Grant was hosed before they decided which table to play on. 5 Flyrants is easily a GT winning list, just like necron air used to be, just like seer council used to be. It's a list that takes 0 skill to play (which is one of the main points of this batrep), and forces you to either tailor to it (and get destroyed by every other army in a tournament) or try to minimize how badly you lose. In a strategy game (as 40k purports to be), being able to put a list on autopilot and come back to collect your win is very poor design. The worst part is, this isn't LoW or Forge World or anything of that nature. This list is acceptable at just about any tournament around the country, no questions asked. Between this, IK's forcing LoW's to be accepted, and ignorance like Deamon factories it seems like GW is really pushing the community to accept unbound as a thing. By releasing so many broken items/units in so many different forms (codex/data slates/formations) it's becoming nigh to impossible to police what is clearly lazy/bad rules writing.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Pony_law wrote: So how does pentyrant deal with a landraider or 2? How does it deal with triple burst tides? how does it deal with add lance with AM for anti air? Basically, how do you handle any army that is capable of surviving your shooting (which in theory should be a few) and only has to murder your squishy troops on turn 4 and five and win the game?.
Electro Shock Grubs for anything with armor, Catalyst to survive Riptides. 5 tyrants should only take 1-2 turns per IK, 1 turn per Riptide. Only issue with riptides is not getting killed before you're in range, but 3+ and FnP should make that easy enough.
Guided hornets work well but in order to be effective you'd need 9-12 of them against a list like this.
The problem with burst tides is it's 750+ points since you need either stim injectors or ECPA to get off the nova safely and aside from this and a few other list, it's pretty useless as a TAC. 3 Sky rays on the other hand could take this list to town.
Pony_law wrote: So how does pentyrant deal with a landraider or 2?
Easily kills 1 landraider a turn (all of the flyrants have a haywire flamer). Most likely just ignore them for a turn or two and kill everything else. 2 Land Raiders are a good way to lose most missions.
If the Burst tides have skyfire, then it would be rough. As long as the burst tides don't have marker light support you are ok. As mentioned, Skyrays are a much, much more threatening unit. A single skyray can essentially kill a flyrant a turn. Best bet is to get first turn, and then force them to jink. Tau certainly have excellent options to list tailor against 5 Flyrants.
Pony_law wrote: how does it deal with add lance with AM for anti air?
Well, the anti-air is generally going to die on turn 1. From that point on, it will be 1 Knight dead per turn. Flyrants are very effective at killing Knights. I would generally expect a complete tabling.
If you are looking for a counter, Centstar can kill a flyrant a turn while taking basically no damage in return. The flyrants will kill whatever came with the Centstar, but might take enough damage and get tabled. The only real answer the list has to Centstar is the Mawloc which is a great answer, but it still has to hit.
Pony_law wrote: Basically, how do you handle any army that is capable of surviving your shooting (which in theory should be a few) and only has to murder your squishy troops on turn 4 and five and win the game?.
The Flyrants all land and score on turn 5. So the bigger fear is when you land them on 5, that you opponent will have enough left to kill them if the game goes on to 6.
Also this list is usually going to lose in maelstrom games. Very few people play Maelstrom competitively, but
The list can be beat but you've got to know what you're doing and there has to be a fair amount of LoS blocking terrain. Forget about the psychic phase versus five Flyrants. I think Necrons could give it a run for the money.
GT Winner with a list like that and tactics like that? I beg to differ! 5 flyrant list is solid, already preping my list to deal with such a threat :p -inserts 3 skyrays into tau list -
Hey Jy2, I had a question about list building. How would you field this same style of list in an event that limits detachments to two (so no room for a fortification detachment) and outlaws the Void Shield Generator? Would it still be able to work or should I start working on a different list?
Happyjew wrote: It can be beat. But the problem is, how well would the counter list fair against other tournament-level lists?
This. 5 Tyrants is a good TAC list. Most things that can reliably deal with 5 tyrants isn't.
Greentide, Venom spam, Centurion star, Marine flood, and Flier-Crons are the only real TAC lists I can think of that have a chance to hang with 5 flyrants. On the upside Serpent spam will get demolished by it, so maybe we'll see a decline there.
*Edit*
DE airforce with Venom spam actually would probably work this list hard as well. I don't play it (reaverstar all the way), but on paper it's a rock solid build. Could easily put 7 flyers on the table with Eldar allies (autarch for reserve manipulation), and a boat load of venoms spamming poison/blasters.
With regards to talons in reserves, Grant started them on the table for several reasons:
1. He needed to burst though my Void Shields and he couldn't have done it without the firepower of his talons. His best shot at killing my flyrants was to take out all my void shields and then to shoot at my flyrants with the Lynx. If he hadn't of done that, his Lynx would basically be near useless the entire game as my flyrants take to the air. It was a calculated gamble and IMO, it was also his best chance for a victory. When you are in a bad matchup, oftentimes, it's better to take the gamble.
2. Had he started off his talons in reserves, I would have just gone after his 2 wave serpents. By doing so, I would have taken away his ability to score the Maelstrom secondary objectives and most likely, to score any objectives at the end of the game.
3. Or I could have flown my flyrants off the table, wait until his talons come in, and then beta-struck the heck out of them.
4. As Dash mentioned, I could have just moved my flyrants within VS and malanthrope range. Now I most likely wouldn't have done this, but it was an option I could have considered.
5. Without a way to manipulate reserves, there's always the chance that some of his talons didn't come in. Playing against pentyrants with a piecemeal army is very bad, especially since I have the potential to table you (and I was going 2nd) before your next reserves come in.
Honestly, no matter what he did, he would be in a rough spot.
I am not sure how marines would deal with this but I'm thinking off the top of my Head--
Master of the Forge -- Conversion Beamer (need him for the relics, might get lucky and pop the Malanthrope with St. 10 and AP 1. I don't think the beamer ignores cover, can't remember)
2 Storm Talons, Typhoon Launchers
1x4 Hyperios Anti-Air Missile batteries
2x Fire Raptors with quad heavy bolters
It's optimized against this list, but is also mean against Knights and Wave Serpent Eldar. I'd consider a standard smashy chapter master, couple of bike squads, and grav command squad. Might be able to do something before it dies.
The cent star relies on 2 things, invisibility and gate. If it doesnt have both, it's either going to get picked off or out of range. 24 inches isn't far and rolling 6's to hit is not an easy thing to do. You also need to factor in the 10 warp charge nids get.
Red hunters and allied sky rays are probably one of the best bets at the moment.
Nice battle rep Jy, but if you could I think a follow up against a demon flying circus, crons, and a solid tau list would be the three I'd consider part of the tournament regular lists you'll be running into that can end up T1/2 running this off the table with a minimal amount of good luck on their part.
I've seen a few people mention that a Tau list would have to tailor with 3x skyrays to bring this down - and thus become non-competitive. I wouldn't think it needs that much, and many tau lists (especially tau-tau) have plenty of anti-air that you'd run into.
Anyway, very cool list and glad to see Nids back on the scene. Between this and the Lictor list(s) hopefully will see more nids in the top brackets.
CentStar can be built to reliably get the psychic powers it needs to do the dirty - tyrants will have to move in assault range for SotW to be effective. It's so many shots some are going to hit... Would be a lot more interesting game than Talon spam . CentStar has enough warp charge it could get off some powers fairly reliably too.
Pony_law wrote: So how does pentyrant deal with a landraider or 2? How does it deal with triple burst tides? how does it deal with add lance with AM for anti air? Basically, how do you handle any army that is capable of surviving your shooting (which in theory should be a few) and only has to murder your squishy troops on turn 4 and five and win the game?.
I played against a list in the final 16 at the Renegate Open a couple weeks ago which oddly was nearly a combination of the two lists presented here--it was a traditional Tyranid FMC list (Flyrants, Crones, Malanthrope, 2 Mawlocs) with a SM Stormwing formation tacked on (2 Talons, Stormraven, all arrive from reserve together) to widen his air coverage to handle a broader selection of targets.
The highlighted part was all that was relevant. I was playing a Lite Screamerstar (2 Heralds, 3 FMCs) which presented him with no targets he was actually capable of killing from the air, aside from a token unit of Horrors and anything I happened to summon. By the end, the only flyers I had killed was two of the Crones, and I basically only killed them because I had nothing bettter to do.
I just sat down on the ground and controlled the whole board uncontested. The move toward Maelstrom is going to hurt an army like this, because it doesn't control the board--outside of Lictor shenanigans. Renegade used BAO's format, which is what jy2 uses in his batreps, which I am not a fan of--the whole point of Maelstrom is to incentivize board control, mobility, and staying power (as opposed to last-turn objective grabs with meaningless troops, as is traditional in normal 7th and all of 6th) and the BAO Maelstrom really falls short of that in my opinion. Only having two objectives, which are able (and likely) to be repeated over the course of the game, does not incentivize mobility at all--in fact, the only Maelstrom objective that incentivizes mobility in any real way is the "hold the other guy's objective" one, (which is often to be ignored as it will frequently be essentially impossible to achieve) as "have a unit in their deployment zone" is not really a hard feat to achieve. The other four objectives are simply two "kill a unit" choices, "get them out of your deployment zone," and "sit on the objective that you obviously placed where you'll hold it easily all game."
They fall far short of what Maelstrom should be accomplishing, particularly when you get into the absurdity of repeated mission objectives on a table of 6--at Renegade, it felt like the vast majority of Maelstrom secondaries were decided solely by who rolled more favorable objectives on the table, as opposed to serving as any reflection of in-game play. We saw games where people practically got tabled, but if you roll enough "hold your own objective" and "kill the thing the other guy actually has" or "be in his deployment zone" while he was rolling "kill the thing you don't have" and "hold the opponent's objective," you'd cruise to a win on secondary regardless of how you performed in the game. There's also a rather deep strategic opportunity completely left by the wayside due to the fact that the missions are automatically forfeited and re-generated every turn. There's no capability to react, plan, or protect an area to deny an opponent an objective (or force them to use a limited-opportunity discard on it, at minimum) because there's literally zero permanence to any of it.
But again, outside of my complaining about that particular variation of handling the missions--even in the stripped-down BAO Maelstrom format--it was evident the whole game that he just had no capability to control or contest meaningful portions of the board.
Adepticon's set of missions should be closer to that stated goal; keeping 6 objectives in play is practically a requirement for actually enforcing the type of gameplay Maelstrom is supposed to be pushing us toward. I feel as though a FMC-focused list relying on the ability to keep 80% of their army cost in the sky all game just will not be able to compete in such a siutation. With 6 objectives, a handful of effecttively single-use Lictors and Ripper Swarms don't strike me as having the staying power required to handle those missions. You'll be forced to drop to Glide to hold objectives, and every time you do so you're actively playing against the strengths of your army.
As a Daemon player, I'm not even planning on taking 3 FMCs to Adepticon for that very reason, and will likely drop to 2. 1000 points is too much to have explicitly dedicated to not controlling the board, and I'm already testing what to fill those points with to better handle board control.
Largo39 wrote: So while talons may not be the ideal platform from which to challenge flyrants.. it still seems like they would have been better served in reserve.
Clearly attempting to shoot into 2+ cover is futile unless you ignore it so I just dont understand why you'd ever try. Instead you simply start in reserve in 2x2 pairs and hope you can hold out against their shooting until then (which, admittedly in this instance may be dicey, but just keeping only the lynx/skyshield on the board and reserving everything else wouldnt have been a terrible option).
just my 02cents.
Also JY2 are you gonna be in LA for games testing at all soon? I really need a good test vs this type of list for LVO practice, as I suspect (along with you clearly) that nids will be in the meta in a big way, so I need to see how i do against them. In theory I have a list that can at least handle 4 flyrants, but I do need practice against it.
I will be down in LA, but that won't be until after the LVO. I'm sure there's a lot of good players down in LA though. The gaming community there is huge. One of the best players that I have played against from SoCal - and he's also a GT winner as well - is mortetvie. He runs primarily Eldar but I believe he also has a Tyranid army as well (though not quite like mine). You can probably PM him to see if he wants to get a game on.
1) the (presumably two) squadrons will come in piecemeal. This risk is even greater when you split them up into four individual units, and if they don't all come in at once it's a sad, sad day
2) either of the (presumably two) squadrons would come in on turn three or four (even if they both did this, it would be really really bad). Basically, you need as many chances to kill the Flyrants as possible
That being said, they basically are flying rhinos. It would be interesting to see fire raptors or storm ravens kitted out against the Flyrants. I've found that they are much tougher to kill (av 12 4 hp) and of course their guns are natively ap 3 or better (or at least can be). This is a much bigger issue that will force a Flyrant to jink. Rending ap 4? I might just take my chances with my 3+
Also, it goes without saying that a super heavy tank with a blast weapon is going to be a huge handicap against a list like this. There are definitely bigger challenges to Flyrant spam (or Flyrant Council as Gigasnail has apparently coined it). I'm ok with Pentyrant too FWIW.
I agree that this will probably be the new top tier Tyranid build (or some variant of this) and its a little bit sad. No Tyranid player really wanted our own version of wave serpent spam, but here we have it. I would also definitely be interested to see how Leviathan + Skyblight does
Actually, they're not squadroned. Each flyer is independent.
Stormravens I'm actually not too concerned about. I have strategies to deal with them and I think I can survive their firepower. Fire raptors could be a problem though. Their firepower is really good and 1 raptor can potentially down a flyrant all by itself.
MSU is the best weapon against super-heavies/gargantuans. Anyone bringing a super-heavy/gargant against a pentyrant army like mine will be playing with a handicap.
I don't know about Flyrant Council. Sounds like it's trying to hard to copy the seer council.
Finally, a word of warning to gamers out there. 5-flyrant lists aren't the only top-tier Tyranid list out there. There are and will be more. You can create so many good builds with the Leviathan formation, even if it is not all pure Tyranids.
pretre wrote: Yeah, not to harsh the eldar guy, but I'd love to see skytyrant against a harder player.
I don't think it's the player at all. There is no scenario barring a dice miracle that lets Eldar win this game. None at all. I want to see this list against a ground force personally, like a bikestar. If you try to outshoot a pentyrant list you will lose, no questions asked. But, a fast list that can zoom past and hit the enemy backfield... that may have a chance. Drop Pod lists, SW ThunderCalv, WS Bike lists, Daemon screamerstars, etc. A Tau list bristling with skyfire and ignores cover could also be nasty here. I think this list is a super hard counter to Eldar, and gunlines in general, but everything has weaknesses. THe lack of ground presence here stands out, but it will be hard to exploit since Flyrants are so versatile.
Ok, let me tell you what I think about some of those matchups:
Bikestar - Tyranids have the advantage. 2+ cover protects us from their most dangerous weapon - grav weaponry. Once the flyrants take off into the air, bikers can't really do much against them. BTW, my list plays a denial game. Other than the malanthrope, there is nothing in my backfield for the bikes to go after. Everything else in my army should be in reserves.
Drop pod lists - they can be good, but bugs should have the resiliency to survive their alpha-strike, after which they are sitting ducks. They will beat bugs in secondary missions like Maelstrom, but bugs should be able to take the Primary against these types of armies. Just don't deploy your Warlord for your opponent to try to get both Warlord and First Blood.
SW Thundercav list - Tyranids take it. Like I said, I play a denial list. There is no board to control or no targets on the ground initially for them to take out. Also 5 rounds of shooting by 5 flyrants = dead deathstar, especially since most of the models there have only 3+ saves. Another easy win for Tyranids IMO.
Daemon screamerstar - any ground-based army with anti-air support will have problems against pentyrants. As long as bugs can keep the unit in Shadows range, bad things will start to happen to it, especially when the unit is using 6 dice on average to cast summoning powers. Daemon summoning will work better than most against Tyranids, but still, bugs have the firepower and then some to take out newly generated units as well as units already on the table.
Tau - this (and Necrons) may be the toughest challenge for a pentyrant list. It won't be like before, where Tau used to dominate bugs, but it is a more even matchup between the 2, that is, if the Tau list has ample skyfire in it. Fortunately for Tau (and Necrons), they really don't need to tailor their list (much) to take on bugs. They can build anti-flyer lists which are also great TAC lists as well. I'm going to try to set up a game against Spam Adam's Tau, an army that I have never beat yet with my Tyranids (he's also the guy who got 4th at the BAO this year).
Pony_law wrote: So how does pentyrant deal with a landraider or 2? How does it deal with triple burst tides? how does it deal with add lance with AM for anti air? Basically, how do you handle any army that is capable of surviving your shooting (which in theory should be a few) and only has to murder your squishy troops on turn 4 and five and win the game?.
Against land raiders? Easily. Egrubs (electroshock grubs) are haywire. Bugs can kill 1 LR a turn.
Burstides - much tougher. However, in the current meta, most Tau players take ion over the heavy burst cannon. That will, of course, change with Tyranids. Without markerlight support, how would burstides do against Tyranids (assuming normal 3+/4+ save for flyrants):
24 shots (nova'd), 12 hits, 2 rends and 4 wounds + 8 shots, 4 hits, 2 wounds = 3 wounds on a flyrant. This does not factor in fusion shooting or markerlights.
Tyranids shoot:
60 shots, 53 hits, 27 wounds = 4.5 wounds on a riptide. This does not factor any effects caused by psychic powers, including damage from warp blast or psychic scream or powers such as Horror and Paroxysm.
Adlance - destroy any anti-air. Then work on the Imperial Knights, who can do nothing against flyrants. 5 flyrants can easily take out 1 knight a turn.
Against super-resilient armies (i.e. deathstars, blobs, Imperial Knights, super-heavies) - focus on killing off the weak troops/scoring units. Deal with the tough units later.
pretre wrote: Yeah, not to harsh the eldar guy, but I'd love to see skytyrant against a harder player.
I don't think it's the player at all. There is no scenario barring a dice miracle that lets Eldar win this game. None at all. I want to see this list against a ground force personally, like a bikestar. If you try to outshoot a pentyrant list you will lose, no questions asked. But, a fast list that can zoom past and hit the enemy backfield... that may have a chance. Drop Pod lists, SW ThunderCalv, WS Bike lists, Daemon screamerstars, etc. A Tau list bristling with skyfire and ignores cover could also be nasty here. I think this list is a super hard counter to Eldar, and gunlines in general, but everything has weaknesses. THe lack of ground presence here stands out, but it will be hard to exploit since Flyrants are so versatile.
That list still doesn't do much to adamantine lance with super friend support.
I think my favorite part of this report is how it demonstrates how silly it is for people to dump on unbound while this crap is possible in battle forged
When 7th hit people were afraid of unbound, now bound lists are doing the exact things people feared unbound would do.
The ironic part is how the BAO format actually helps these lists. With normal maelstrom scoring (at the end of player turns rather then game turns) and swooping FMC being SOL for grabbing them a TAC list could easily beat either of these lists.
pretre wrote: Yeah, not to harsh the eldar guy, but I'd love to see skytyrant against a harder player.
Grant's a GT winner and a regular at top tables, so it isn't as though Jim was clubbing a baby seal here. I'm sure the thought was to lay it all out trying to gib the malanthrope, and down a few tyrants. I agree that Eldar's normal strategy of dealing with enemies they can't hurt is to cat and mouse all game until you either A) have no other targets or B) you force your opponent to make a mistake, is probably the better call here. However, at the end of the day it's just delaying the inevitable in this scenario.
I'd have put the Lynx in max range of the ground targets on the sky shield in my back corner, Farseer w/in guide range behind some BLOS. Everything else in reserve, roll hard for the reserve manipulation WL trait. Take first turn just to make sure that you're talons come on after he's out of the bubble when they arrive. Once the flyrants are out, bring in the talons and play man to man D. One talon per flyrant, forcing them to spend the rest of the game jinking. Depending on how you play Psychic Shriek the Farseer could help out here or there. Once a Flyrant is down a few wounds put a couple talons on them to get the kill.
So that's my best case arm chair quarterbacking in this scenario. Problem is, Jy2 can just sit in his bubble all day playing musical chairs flying the tyrants in circles around the Mal. While he'd give up maelstrom, you are too because you're hiding in the corner. Best case scenario is that you start nabbing objectives with your warlord and tyranids send 2-3 tyrants to kill him. Then you can bring in talons and pick those off. But a smart opponent knows that primary is his as long as he hits second, so they'd just give you secondary and grab Primary/First Blood/Line Breaker for the easy win.
Jy2's point stands, Grant was hosed before they decided which table to play on. 5 Flyrants is easily a GT winning list, just like necron air used to be, just like seer council used to be. It's a list that takes 0 skill to play (which is one of the main points of this batrep), and forces you to either tailor to it (and get destroyed by every other army in a tournament) or try to minimize how badly you lose. In a strategy game (as 40k purports to be), being able to put a list on autopilot and come back to collect your win is very poor design. The worst part is, this isn't LoW or Forge World or anything of that nature. This list is acceptable at just about any tournament around the country, no questions asked. Between this, IK's forcing LoW's to be accepted, and ignorance like Deamon factories it seems like GW is really pushing the community to accept unbound as a thing. By releasing so many broken items/units in so many different forms (codex/data slates/formations) it's becoming nigh to impossible to police what is clearly lazy/bad rules writing.
Well said. Agreed on everything thing you said except for the 0 skill part.
This type of army is much easier to play because it is a much more forgiving army than other Tyranid builds. Even a beginner can play it and do well. However, if you think that he is going to beat a better and more experienced player (with a good list) with it, you may be banking too much on the list. It's 33% list, 33% player skill and tactics and 33% dice. In the case of a pentyrant build, it's probably 45% list, 22% skill and 33% dice so that is why a lesser player can still do well with it. But don't make the mistake of thinking that it takes 0 skill to try to win a tournament with it.
iddy00711 wrote: Guided hornets work well but in order to be effective you'd need 9-12 of them against a list like this.
The problem with burst tides is it's 750+ points since you need either stim injectors or ECPA to get off the nova safely and aside from this and a few other list, it's pretty useless as a TAC. 3 Sky rays on the other hand could take this list to town.
Hornets are good, but I don't think they can take out flyrants as quickly as flyrants can take them out.
Triple burstides are good, but they just aren't as common in tournament play as the iontides (although that may soon change).
I think an effective Tau TAC list will run 2 burstides, 1 iontide and 3 skyrays.
tag8833 wrote: If you are looking for a counter, Centstar can kill a flyrant a turn while taking basically no damage in return. The flyrants will kill whatever came with the Centstar, but might take enough damage and get tabled. The only real answer the list has to Centstar is the Mawloc which is a great answer, but it still has to hit.
Not really. Pentyrants is a bad matchup for the centstar as well....unless they can get the Perfect Timing power (or skyfire objective). Basically, any deathstar build will have problems against Pentyrants. All the flyrants need to do is to kill off the rest of the army and the centstar can't do jack. I generally just ignore the deathstar. Then, I don't even care if he shoots at my flyrants then, because that means he won't be shooting at my cheapo MSU units on objectives. I'm telling you now, unless they get very favorable conditions (i.e. first turn alpha-strike, the right psychic powers, perhaps skyfire objectives), the centstar will struggle against this type of list.
Also this list is usually going to lose in maelstrom games. Very few people play Maelstrom competitively, but
I'd have to disagree with this. My list was designed with pure Maelstrom in mind as well. About half (1/3?) of the time, the Maelstrom objectives are all about killing enemy units. My flyrants have that covered. The other half is about getting objectives, which is why I designed it to be MSU in nature. Not just MSU, but MSU units who can drop in on objectives anywhere the turn they come in.
Dozer Blades wrote: The list can be beat but you've got to know what you're doing and there has to be a fair amount of LoS blocking terrain. Forget about the psychic phase versus five Flyrants. I think Necrons could give it a run for the money.
You're right. It can be beaten by an army with the right tools. The problem is, not a lot of armies have the right tools (or the right amount of tools). That is why this army will be a meta-changing build. It will force many people to change up the "tools" in their toolbox.
I agree. Necrons are one of the few armies that is still strong against pentyrants. However, that may all change once their codex gets updated in January.
KillswitchUK wrote: GT Winner with a list like that and tactics like that? I beg to differ! 5 flyrant list is solid, already preping my list to deal with such a threat :p -inserts 3 skyrays into tau list -
Grant is actually #2 on the ITC leadership board. The ITC keeps track of the top players in tournaments that follow the BAO format and includes such tournaments as the BAO and the LVO and many other GT's as well. He's done very well with his seer council list, winning numerous tournaments, and he consistently does well in the other tournaments.
However, he had 2 things going against him. First of all, he was playing with a new army. Secondly, he was playing without Fortune and Invisibility. HAHAHAHA.... j.k.! Secondly, his list just didn't have enough juice to deal with mine, especially against a general of my caliber (not to toot my own horn or anything). You can't really fault him as he was playing with a major handicap.
Happyjew wrote: It can be beat. But the problem is, how well would the counter list fair against other tournament-level lists?
Ironically, it's going to force all the other tournament-level lists to change as well. So almost everyone will be in the same boat, with the exception of Tau and Necron, who have great TAC lists with anti-air support already. They will probably be the armies reaping the most benefits as they have to make the least amount of changes to their armies.
Tarnag wrote: Hey Jy2, I had a question about list building. How would you field this same style of list in an event that limits detachments to two (so no room for a fortification detachment) and outlaws the Void Shield Generator? Would it still be able to work or should I start working on a different list?
You can take a fortification with your Primary CAD (a fortification isn't a separate detachment), but if your tournament doesn't allow for the VSG, then I would get a bastion with Comms relay. What you really need is protection for your malanthrope against the likes of serpent-spam and Tau. Flyrants can still jink for 2+ shrouded cover even out in the open so they don't really need to worry about cover.
But if your tournament totally bans fortifications (which would be really strange IMO), then just go with more MSU. Bring in more lictors and more deepstriking rippers. Either that or drop a lictor and get a 2nd mawloc. Personally, I'd keep the fortification if it was allowed.
Well said. Agreed on everything thing you said except for the 0 skill part.
This type of army is much easier to play because it is a much more forgiving army than other Tyranid builds. Even a beginner can play it and do well. However, if you think that he is going to beat a better and more experienced player (with a good list) with it, you may be banking too much on the list. It's 33% list, 33% player skill and tactics and 33% dice. In the case of a pentyrant build, it's probably 45% list, 22% skill and 33% dice so that is why a lesser player can still do well with it. But don't make the mistake of thinking that it takes 0 skill to try to win a tournament with it.
"It's not the weapon, it's the wielder." Fair enough, not 0 skill. 5%? . 0 skill was a bit of hyperbole, but the point remains the same. A player can punch way above their weight class wielding a list like this. A new player won't beat a GT winner, sure. But a decent player can easily destroy a good player. Same as back when I played Seer Council in 6th. After the first few tournaments I quit running it, because as I explained to my opponents (I try and go over the battle right after with my opponents, to help them with their game as well as myself): Seer Council with a moderately skilled general (~where I sit) vs. anything but a top tier army fielded by an experienced general is clubbing a baby seal with a baby seal, on top of their dead seal mother. 5 Flyrants is pretty well the same. It's just plain lazy rules writing to take the best unit in the codex, and allow you to field 5 of them. I could do some really nasty things with 5 farseers, and the one and only unbound tournament I went to made me glad that you can't have 5 chaptermasters on bikes with invis. in normal play.
Experience is > list for sure. But this particular list is almost as autoplay as it gets. A mediocre player can do much better than would otherwise be possible, and that just makes for bad game play. I don't care to be outplayed (I masochistically enjoy it), but being beaten because GW let an oppoenent field a ridiculous list without any drawbacks isn't my idea of a good time. I don't fault anyone who builds such a list: you pay money to go to a tournament, you kinda want to win. I blame GW for putting out a sub-standard codex, and trying to gloss over it's many weaknesses with poorly thought out band-aids
Stormravens I'm actually not too concerned about. I have strategies to deal with them and I think I can survive their firepower. Fire raptors could be a problem though. Their firepower is really good and 1 raptor can potentially down a flyrant all by itself.
MSU is the best weapon against super-heavies/gargantuans. Anyone bringing a super-heavy/gargant against a pentyrant army like mine will be playing with a handicap.
I don't know about Flyrant Council. Sounds like it's trying to hard to copy the seer council.
Finally, a word of warning to gamers out there. 5-flyrant lists aren't the only top-tier Tyranid list out there. There are and will be more. You can create so many good builds with the Leviathan formation, even if it is not all pure Tyranids.
That is definitely true - leviathan gives Nids access to better than true double CAD under the standard two source format. We may give a new definition to MSU. Just for example, we could bring 6 units of spores (Fast Attack), 15 units of troops, 6 elites units (say, lictors) and that could easily totally up to less than 800 points, with only 12 of the 27 units giving up a kill point. In that example, you've got 9 Mucolids and 6 deep striking ripper squads, putting you at 795 points. That leaves over 1000 points for the rest of the list. Insane
Tarnag wrote: Hey Jy2, I had a question about list building. How would you field this same style of list in an event that limits detachments to two (so no room for a fortification detachment) and outlaws the Void Shield Generator? Would it still be able to work or should I start working on a different list?
You can take a fortification with your Primary CAD (a fortification isn't a separate detachment), but if your tournament doesn't allow for the VSG, then I would get a bastion with Comms relay. What you really need is protection for your malanthrope against the likes of serpent-spam and Tau. Flyrants can still jink for 2+ shrouded cover even out in the open so they don't really need to worry about cover.
But if your tournament totally bans fortifications (which would be really strange IMO), then just go with more MSU. Bring in more lictors and more deepstriking rippers. Either that or drop a lictor and get a 2nd mawloc. Personally, I'd keep the fortification if it was allowed.
My problem, is that the local free tournament I play in forbids Forgeworld units (so no Malanthrope), and forbids all Fortiifications except the ADL.
You can take a fortification with your Primary CAD (a fortification isn't a separate detachment), but if your tournament doesn't allow for the VSG, then I would get a bastion with Comms relay. What you really need is protection for your malanthrope against the likes of serpent-spam and Tau. Flyrants can still jink for 2+ shrouded cover even out in the open so they don't really need to worry about cover.
But if your tournament totally bans fortifications (which would be really strange IMO), then just go with more MSU. Bring in more lictors and more deepstriking rippers. Either that or drop a lictor and get a 2nd mawloc. Personally, I'd keep the fortification if it was allowed.
Thanks so much for the response! Yeah I realized that after I posted that I could take a fortification, no VSG, but fortifications are all good. Would you take the bastion withe a Comms Relay or go for the one Void Shield it can take?
Thanks for this report but it is really strange. What do you want to know with this game ? Of course 5 flying tyrants with devo and a 2+ cover save are extremely awful.
You can go to tournament with this and crush every list. Maybe you will have problem with maelstrom missions but who cares, you will table your opponents
Well said. Agreed on everything thing you said except for the 0 skill part.
This type of army is much easier to play because it is a much more forgiving army than other Tyranid builds. Even a beginner can play it and do well. However, if you think that he is going to beat a better and more experienced player (with a good list) with it, you may be banking too much on the list. It's 33% list, 33% player skill and tactics and 33% dice. In the case of a pentyrant build, it's probably 45% list, 22% skill and 33% dice so that is why a lesser player can still do well with it. But don't make the mistake of thinking that it takes 0 skill to try to win a tournament with it.
"It's not the weapon, it's the wielder." Fair enough, not 0 skill. 5%? . 0 skill was a bit of hyperbole, but the point remains the same. A player can punch way above their weight class wielding a list like this. A new player won't beat a GT winner, sure. But a decent player can easily destroy a good player. Same as back when I played Seer Council in 6th. After the first few tournaments I quit running it, because as I explained to my opponents (I try and go over the battle right after with my opponents, to help them with their game as well as myself): Seer Council with a moderately skilled general (~where I sit) vs. anything but a top tier army fielded by an experienced general is clubbing a baby seal with a baby seal, on top of their dead seal mother. 5 Flyrants is pretty well the same. It's just plain lazy rules writing to take the best unit in the codex, and allow you to field 5 of them. I could do some really nasty things with 5 farseers, and the one and only unbound tournament I went to made me glad that you can't have 5 chaptermasters on bikes with invis. in normal play.
Experience is > list for sure. But this particular list is almost as autoplay as it gets. A mediocre player can do much better than would otherwise be possible, and that just makes for bad game play. I don't care to be outplayed (I masochistically enjoy it), but being beaten because GW let an oppoenent field a ridiculous list without any drawbacks isn't my idea of a good time. I don't fault anyone who builds such a list: you pay money to go to a tournament, you kinda want to win. I blame GW for putting out a sub-standard codex, and trying to gloss over it's many weaknesses with poorly thought out band-aids
Very well put - point and click.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Happyjew wrote: It can be beat. But the problem is, how well would the counter list fair against other tournament-level lists?
Ironically, it's going to force all the other tournament-level lists to change as well. So almost everyone will be in the same boat, with the exception of Tau and Necron, who have great TAC lists with anti-air support already. They will probably be the armies reaping the most benefits as they have to make the least amount of changes to their armies.
Haha, so instead of Wave Serpent spam, we get this? Replace one terrible thing with another.
There seems to be a way to prevent this particular combination (5 flying Hive Tyrants) and excise the AdLance as well: Both are 'Campaign' formations, yes? That's the route I would go, maintaining self-allying (3 flying Hive Tyrants is a thing) and laying the foundation for differentiating between formations by virtue of their source (codex, supplement, dataslate, campaign, etc.).
Wow. That was pretty incredible. I mean, i'm aware of how good flying hive tyrants are, but wow.
I don't believe I'll be running a 5-tyrant build mostly because I don't have the models. However, I did just get a 3rd tyrant in a trade, and a Hive Fleet Detachment would let me run 3 without any FOC extras.
Jy2 - What fighter ace trait did you roll for your warlord? It doesn't appear that it made a difference in either of these games, but i'm just curious.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
DCannon4Life wrote: There seems to be a way to prevent this particular combination (5 flying Hive Tyrants) and excise the AdLance as well: Both are 'Campaign' formations, yes? That's the route I would go, maintaining self-allying (3 flying Hive Tyrants is a thing) and laying the foundation for differentiating between formations by virtue of their source (codex, supplement, dataslate, campaign, etc.).
Adamantium lance is a 40K approved dataslate formation.
Hive Fleet Detachment is a 40k approved Detachment from a tyranid supplement (Leviathan). Both are just as legal as the formations and detachments in any other codex or supplement. What it comes down to these days is what TO's allow and ban in their events -- GW has taken a stance in 7th that everything is prettymuch "legal play".
You can take a fortification with your Primary CAD (a fortification isn't a separate detachment), but if your tournament doesn't allow for the VSG, then I would get a bastion with Comms relay. What you really need is protection for your malanthrope against the likes of serpent-spam and Tau. Flyrants can still jink for 2+ shrouded cover even out in the open so they don't really need to worry about cover.
But if your tournament totally bans fortifications (which would be really strange IMO), then just go with more MSU. Bring in more lictors and more deepstriking rippers. Either that or drop a lictor and get a 2nd mawloc. Personally, I'd keep the fortification if it was allowed.
Thanks so much for the response! Yeah I realized that after I posted that I could take a fortification, no VSG, but fortifications are all good. Would you take the bastion withe a Comms Relay or go for the one Void Shield it can take?
The void shield on the bastion only protects the bastion. It's helpful, but not for 25 points is it efficient. The only projected void shields that protect your army are from the VSG. I find it odd that your area bans the VSG - it's a purely defensive upgrade, it kills nothing and can be outwitted by fast armies, drop pods, etc.
Happyjew wrote: It can be beat. But the problem is, how well would the counter list fair against other tournament-level lists?
This. 5 Tyrants is a good TAC list. Most things that can reliably deal with 5 tyrants isn't.
Greentide, Venom spam, Centurion star, Marine flood, and Flier-Crons are the only real TAC lists I can think of that have a chance to hang with 5 flyrants. On the upside Serpent spam will get demolished by it, so maybe we'll see a decline there.
*Edit*
DE airforce with Venom spam actually would probably work this list hard as well. I don't play it (reaverstar all the way), but on paper it's a rock solid build. Could easily put 7 flyers on the table with Eldar allies (autarch for reserve manipulation), and a boat load of venoms spamming poison/blasters.
Here is my take:
Greentide - could be a counter. Boots on the ground is what you need against flyer builds and the greentide has it. HOWEVER, they would have to withstand 300+ TL S6 shots over the course of a 5-turn game so I guess it could go either ways (Tyranids).
Venom-spam - not a chance. Razorwing-spam, maybe, but venom-spam, no. This is where electroshock grubs from flyrants will shine, killing both the transport and the guys inside in 1 fell swoop potentially.
Centstar - nope. Unless they get very favorable conditions (like 1st turn, Perfect Timing psychic power or skyfire objectives), pentyrants will be a bad matchup for the centstar as well. My army excels against deathstar builds because it is very good in killing the rest of the army. The bigger the deathstar, the easier it becomes for the flyrants to wipe out everyone else.
Marine-spam - more boots on the ground = better resiliency against flyrant-spam. I like marine-spam, though it becomes more of a question of "can I outlast their firepower to still claim objectives at the end" rather than "can I kill those flyrants"?
Necron Airforce - highly dependent on who goes 1st. I don't like a pure Necron Airforce build against pentyrant, but a hybrid Necron Airforce with some AV13 vehicles in there as well - bargelords and AB's - can be very effective against Air Tyranids.
Silverthorne wrote: I am not sure how marines would deal with this but I'm thinking off the top of my Head--
Master of the Forge -- Conversion Beamer (need him for the relics, might get lucky and pop the Malanthrope with St. 10 and AP 1. I don't think the beamer ignores cover, can't remember)
2 Storm Talons, Typhoon Launchers
1x4 Hyperios Anti-Air Missile batteries
2x Fire Raptors with quad heavy bolters
It's optimized against this list, but is also mean against Knights and Wave Serpent Eldar. I'd consider a standard smashy chapter master, couple of bike squads, and grav command squad. Might be able to do something before it dies.
A decent foundation with very good anti-air. It's got potential to give pentyrant a run for its money. I would also recommend you include something in there to help with reserves manipulation.
iddy00711 wrote: The cent star relies on 2 things, invisibility and gate. If it doesnt have both, it's either going to get picked off or out of range. 24 inches isn't far and rolling 6's to hit is not an easy thing to do. You also need to factor in the 10 warp charge nids get.
Red hunters and allied sky rays are probably one of the best bets at the moment.
Just keep in mind that Red Hunters can only use their special Chapter Tactics rules once per game. As for allied skyrays, well, you can only ally in 1. However, you can take a burstide as well. Now the only question is how well your list would function as a TAC list in a tournament setting against the other tournament armies as well.
GreyDragoon wrote: Nice battle rep Jy, but if you could I think a follow up against a demon flying circus, crons, and a solid tau list would be the three I'd consider part of the tournament regular lists you'll be running into that can end up T1/2 running this off the table with a minimal amount of good luck on their part.
I've seen a few people mention that a Tau list would have to tailor with 3x skyrays to bring this down - and thus become non-competitive. I wouldn't think it needs that much, and many tau lists (especially tau-tau) have plenty of anti-air that you'd run into.
Anyway, very cool list and glad to see Nids back on the scene. Between this and the Lictor list(s) hopefully will see more nids in the top brackets.
I'm going to try to get a test game in against Taus and probably Necrons.
I disagree that those lists will be able to run my list off the table on T1/2 and with minimal luck. I think you are really under-estimating this Tyranid build.
Yeah, Tau can build an anti-flyer army which is also a great TAC list. The changes they would have to make would be small compared to most other armies.
Nevermind wrote: Haha, why even play this? Up the challenge or dump the spam. Hopefully tournaments crack down on this.
This was more of a battle to give info to the readers. I won't be running such an army in tournament play, but I wanted to inform the public about how much Tyranids have changed. Consider it a public service announcement.
I played against a list in the final 16 at the Renegate Open a couple weeks ago which oddly was nearly a combination of the two lists presented here--it was a traditional Tyranid FMC list (Flyrants, Crones, Malanthrope, 2 Mawlocs) with a SM Stormwing formation tacked on (2 Talons, Stormraven, all arrive from reserve together) to widen his air coverage to handle a broader selection of targets.
The highlighted part was all that was relevant. I was playing a Lite Screamerstar (2 Heralds, 3 FMCs) which presented him with no targets he was actually capable of killing from the air, aside from a token unit of Horrors and anything I happened to summon. By the end, the only flyers I had killed was two of the Crones, and I basically only killed them because I had nothing bettter to do.
I just sat down on the ground and controlled the whole board uncontested. The move toward Maelstrom is going to hurt an army like this, because it doesn't control the board--outside of Lictor shenanigans. Renegade used BAO's format, which is what jy2 uses in his batreps, which I am not a fan of--the whole point of Maelstrom is to incentivize board control, mobility, and staying power (as opposed to last-turn objective grabs with meaningless troops, as is traditional in normal 7th and all of 6th) and the BAO Maelstrom really falls short of that in my opinion. Only having two objectives, which are able (and likely) to be repeated over the course of the game, does not incentivize mobility at all--in fact, the only Maelstrom objective that incentivizes mobility in any real way is the "hold the other guy's objective" one, (which is often to be ignored as it will frequently be essentially impossible to achieve) as "have a unit in their deployment zone" is not really a hard feat to achieve. The other four objectives are simply two "kill a unit" choices, "get them out of your deployment zone," and "sit on the objective that you obviously placed where you'll hold it easily all game."
They fall far short of what Maelstrom should be accomplishing, particularly when you get into the absurdity of repeated mission objectives on a table of 6--at Renegade, it felt like the vast majority of Maelstrom secondaries were decided solely by who rolled more favorable objectives on the table, as opposed to serving as any reflection of in-game play. We saw games where people practically got tabled, but if you roll enough "hold your own objective" and "kill the thing the other guy actually has" or "be in his deployment zone" while he was rolling "kill the thing you don't have" and "hold the opponent's objective," you'd cruise to a win on secondary regardless of how you performed in the game. There's also a rather deep strategic opportunity completely left by the wayside due to the fact that the missions are automatically forfeited and re-generated every turn. There's no capability to react, plan, or protect an area to deny an opponent an objective (or force them to use a limited-opportunity discard on it, at minimum) because there's literally zero permanence to any of it.
But again, outside of my complaining about that particular variation of handling the missions--even in the stripped-down BAO Maelstrom format--it was evident the whole game that he just had no capability to control or contest meaningful portions of the board.
Adepticon's set of missions should be closer to that stated goal; keeping 6 objectives in play is practically a requirement for actually enforcing the type of gameplay Maelstrom is supposed to be pushing us toward. I feel as though a FMC-focused list relying on the ability to keep 80% of their army cost in the sky all game just will not be able to compete in such a siutation. With 6 objectives, a handful of effecttively single-use Lictors and Ripper Swarms don't strike me as having the staying power required to handle those missions. You'll be forced to drop to Glide to hold objectives, and every time you do so you're actively playing against the strengths of your army.
As a Daemon player, I'm not even planning on taking 3 FMCs to Adepticon for that very reason, and will likely drop to 2. 1000 points is too much to have explicitly dedicated to not controlling the board, and I'm already testing what to fill those points with to better handle board control.
I can tell you this much. A pentyrant build is better equipped then the older Tyranid Airforce armies to handle your type of lists. It has improved significantly. Even the best Tyranid FMC army back then was at most, an upper-middle tiered army. A pentyrant list like the one I am running is top-tier and the difference between how they play is like night-&-day. The new pentyrant builds are much, much more efficient in dealing with ground units, which is probably one of their greatest strengths compared to yesterday's FMC bugs. And of course, they are much better at dealing against air targets as well. The only problems that they will have are against massed 2+ units, re-rollable 2+ units, invisible units or massed AV13-spam.
As for Maelstrom missions, do not under-estimate this list in Maelstrom missions. It can handle both pure and modified Maelstroms. In pure maelstroms, flyrants attack with surgical precision. They remove enemy units on objectives or contesting my objectives. Tyranid reserves then take those objectives with uncanny precision when they come in from reserves. Also, about half (or maybe 1/3) of pure Maelstrom missions involve killing units or non-objectives-based tasks. Flyrants can easily kill enemy units. And in a pinch, flyrants can land on objectives as well as long as I think that they will be relatively safe in doing so.
This list works because it is such a flexible list. It's not affected as much by enemy board control as some of the other more traditional ground armies because it has the flexibility to adjust to whatever your opponent does. It's basically the Tyranid's water warrior style of play (water warrior is a reactive and tactically flexible style of play).
pretre wrote: Yeah, not to harsh the eldar guy, but I'd love to see skytyrant against a harder player.
I don't think it's the player at all. There is no scenario barring a dice miracle that lets Eldar win this game. None at all. I want to see this list against a ground force personally, like a bikestar. If you try to outshoot a pentyrant list you will lose, no questions asked. But, a fast list that can zoom past and hit the enemy backfield... that may have a chance. Drop Pod lists, SW ThunderCalv, WS Bike lists, Daemon screamerstars, etc. A Tau list bristling with skyfire and ignores cover could also be nasty here. I think this list is a super hard counter to Eldar, and gunlines in general, but everything has weaknesses. THe lack of ground presence here stands out, but it will be hard to exploit since Flyrants are so versatile.
That list still doesn't do much to adamantine lance with super friend support.
I think my favorite part of this report is how it demonstrates how silly it is for people to dump on unbound while this crap is possible in battle forged
When 7th hit people were afraid of unbound, now bound lists are doing the exact things people feared unbound would do.
The ironic part is how the BAO format actually helps these lists. With normal maelstrom scoring (at the end of player turns rather then game turns) and swooping FMC being SOL for grabbing them a TAC list could easily beat either of these lists.
It's the trend that we are moving towards. DE can take 6 razorwings, 6 ravagers or up to 8 talos. Tyranids can take up to 5 flyrants. I'm not even sure what some of the other formations can run, but I'm betting they're letting you run similarly spammy units like this. When all is said and done, dual-CAD will probably be a non-issue with the way the formations are going.
What do you mean by super-friend support for the Adlance? Are you tallking about another deathstar build + Adlance?
Well said. Agreed on everything thing you said except for the 0 skill part.
This type of army is much easier to play because it is a much more forgiving army than other Tyranid builds. Even a beginner can play it and do well. However, if you think that he is going to beat a better and more experienced player (with a good list) with it, you may be banking too much on the list. It's 33% list, 33% player skill and tactics and 33% dice. In the case of a pentyrant build, it's probably 45% list, 22% skill and 33% dice so that is why a lesser player can still do well with it. But don't make the mistake of thinking that it takes 0 skill to try to win a tournament with it.
"It's not the weapon, it's the wielder." Fair enough, not 0 skill. 5%? . 0 skill was a bit of hyperbole, but the point remains the same. A player can punch way above their weight class wielding a list like this. A new player won't beat a GT winner, sure. But a decent player can easily destroy a good player. Same as back when I played Seer Council in 6th. After the first few tournaments I quit running it, because as I explained to my opponents (I try and go over the battle right after with my opponents, to help them with their game as well as myself): Seer Council with a moderately skilled general (~where I sit) vs. anything but a top tier army fielded by an experienced general is clubbing a baby seal with a baby seal, on top of their dead seal mother. 5 Flyrants is pretty well the same. It's just plain lazy rules writing to take the best unit in the codex, and allow you to field 5 of them. I could do some really nasty things with 5 farseers, and the one and only unbound tournament I went to made me glad that you can't have 5 chaptermasters on bikes with invis. in normal play.
Experience is > list for sure. But this particular list is almost as autoplay as it gets. A mediocre player can do much better than would otherwise be possible, and that just makes for bad game play. I don't care to be outplayed (I masochistically enjoy it), but being beaten because GW let an oppoenent field a ridiculous list without any drawbacks isn't my idea of a good time. I don't fault anyone who builds such a list: you pay money to go to a tournament, you kinda want to win. I blame GW for putting out a sub-standard codex, and trying to gloss over it's many weaknesses with poorly thought out band-aids
I apologize. I know its hyperbole, but I just have a pet peeve when someone says that a list takes 0 skill to play. All lists take some amount of skill to play, even if that skill is low. In any case, everything else you said, I fully agree.
That is definitely true - leviathan gives Nids access to better than true double CAD under the standard two source format. We may give a new definition to MSU. Just for example, we could bring 6 units of spores (Fast Attack), 15 units of troops, 6 elites units (say, lictors) and that could easily totally up to less than 800 points, with only 12 of the 27 units giving up a kill point. In that example, you've got 9 Mucolids and 6 deep striking ripper squads, putting you at 795 points. That leaves over 1000 points for the rest of the list. Insane
Yeah, that's what makes Tyranids so scary. The secret to my pentyrant list is not that it can run 5 flyrants. The secret is that it can run 5 flyrants and then still have a very strong MSU presence. The durability of any deathstar list (that is essentially what a pentyrant build is - 1200-pts of flyrants) is not really the deathstar itself, but of its support units. You win not by beating the deathstar itself, but by beating the rest of the army. That's why I use a combination of denial strategy, MSU support units and positional flexibility. My goal is to have my support units survive until the end of the game. At the very least, I want to be able to kill off all of your support units before you can kill off mine. In this case, MSU is the way to go as a complement to pentyrant.
BTW, I'd go with more rippers over the mucolids if you can afford them. Though mucolids are cheap, a scoring/denial unit is always better.
My problem, is that the local free tournament I play in forbids Forgeworld units (so no Malanthrope), and forbids all Fortiifications except the ADL.
It's not a big deal without fortifications as long as there is adequate terrain on the table (i.e. BLOS terrain and ruins). You can substitute the malan for a venomthrope (or 2) if you have to (I believe my list is at 1845 so I could run 2 venoms instead of 1 malan if I needed).
Also this list is usually going to lose in maelstrom games. Very few people play Maelstrom competitively, but
I'd have to disagree with this. My list was designed with pure Maelstrom in mind as well. About half (1/3?) of the time, the Maelstrom objectives are all about killing enemy units. My flyrants have that covered. The other half is about getting objectives, which is why I designed it to be MSU in nature. Not just MSU, but MSU units who can drop in on objectives anywhere the turn they come in.
You are confusing BAO with Maelstrom again. In the base Maelstrom cards, there is only 1 for killing something with shooting(#51). There are a few more you can probably do while in the air.
#53: Kill a unit however you want
#55: Make the enemy fail a moral or pinning test
#56: Manifest a psychic power
#61: Kill the enemy warlord
#62: Kill a psycher
#63: Kill a flier or FMC #64: Kill a character
#65: Kill a gun emplacement or building
#66: Kill a vehicle or MC So that is 10 out of 66 or roughly 15% of maelstrom objectives, and it just so happen to be all of them that can be impossible, and thus get discarded. You aren't going to run into many armies that have a vehicle or MC, a gun emplacement, a psycher, and a Flier, that aren't also fearless.
My guess is that you get 1 point from your rippers, and 2 from your Lictors, and probably 1 or 2 from you Mawloc, Most likely 2 or so for the cards above, so you are looking at a score of about 7 going into turn 4-5 when you feel comfortable enough to start landing flyrants. A good Maelstrom list can do 10-14 during that time, but you have a good chance of tabling them, and you might be able to deny them enough to win the game, or just get lucky with your draws. So it isn't auto lose. I was definitely overstating the case by saying "usually going to lose", but it is definitely less optimized than a list with 3 flyrants and 2 Dakkafexes in pods.
Thanks so much for the response! Yeah I realized that after I posted that I could take a fortification, no VSG, but fortifications are all good. Would you take the bastion withe a Comms Relay or go for the one Void Shield it can take?
Comms relay. The void shield isn't necessary....unless your meta is full of drop podding marines.
tetsuo666 wrote: Thanks for this report but it is really strange. What do you want to know with this game ? Of course 5 flying tyrants with devo and a 2+ cover save are extremely awful.
You can go to tournament with this and crush every list. Maybe you will have problem with maelstrom missions but who cares, you will table your opponents
The game was more to inform the public than anything else.
Haha, so instead of Wave Serpent spam, we get this? Replace one terrible thing with another.
Essentially, yes.
DCannon4Life wrote: There seems to be a way to prevent this particular combination (5 flying Hive Tyrants) and excise the AdLance as well: Both are 'Campaign' formations, yes? That's the route I would go, maintaining self-allying (3 flying Hive Tyrants is a thing) and laying the foundation for differentiating between formations by virtue of their source (codex, supplement, dataslate, campaign, etc.).
The only way to "limit" these types of builds is either through selective banning or by putting a hard cap/limit on how many of each units you can take. Either ways, you will have to comp it hard and this is only the beginning. There will be (and there has been) other formations coming out similar to this.
tetrisphreak wrote: Wow. That was pretty incredible. I mean, i'm aware of how good flying hive tyrants are, but wow.
I don't believe I'll be running a 5-tyrant build mostly because I don't have the models. However, I did just get a 3rd tyrant in a trade, and a Hive Fleet Detachment would let me run 3 without any FOC extras.
Jy2 - What fighter ace trait did you roll for your warlord? It doesn't appear that it made a difference in either of these games, but i'm just curious.
Also this list is usually going to lose in maelstrom games. Very few people play Maelstrom competitively, but
I'd have to disagree with this. My list was designed with pure Maelstrom in mind as well. About half (1/3?) of the time, the Maelstrom objectives are all about killing enemy units. My flyrants have that covered. The other half is about getting objectives, which is why I designed it to be MSU in nature. Not just MSU, but MSU units who can drop in on objectives anywhere the turn they come in.
You are confusing BAO with Maelstrom again. In the base Maelstrom cards, there is only 1 for killing something with shooting(#51). There are a few more you can probably do while in the air.
#53: Kill a unit however you want
#55: Make the enemy fail a moral or pinning test
#56: Manifest a psychic power
#61: Kill the enemy warlord
#62: Kill a psycher
#63: Kill a flier or FMC #64: Kill a character
#65: Kill a gun emplacement or building
#66: Kill a vehicle or MC So that is 10 out of 66 or roughly 15% of maelstrom objectives, and it just so happen to be all of them that can be impossible, and thus get discarded. You aren't going to run into many armies that have a vehicle or MC, a gun emplacement, a psycher, and a Flier, that aren't also fearless.
My guess is that you get 1 point from your rippers, and 2 from your Lictors, and probably 1 or 2 from you Mawloc, Most likely 2 or so for the cards above, so you are looking at a score of about 7 going into turn 4-5 when you feel comfortable enough to start landing flyrants. A good Maelstrom list can do 10-14 during that time, but you have a good chance of tabling them, and you might be able to deny them enough to win the game, or just get lucky with your draws. So it isn't auto lose. I was definitely overstating the case by saying "usually going to lose", but it is definitely less optimized than a list with 3 flyrants and 2 Dakkafexes in pods.
One thing you are forgetting is that the 5 flyrants should be clearing enemy scoring units. Each flyrant has the firepower and mobility to potentially take out 1 MSU unit a turn by itself. Sure, the opponent might score a couple of Maelstrom objectives more initially, but they are also losing scoring units at a much faster rate than Tyranids will be. Also, not only will Tyranids be killing off enemy units, but they can do so with surgical precision. Need an objective contested by an enemy unit? Take it out. So now, you've cleared a path for your scoring unit as well as take out an enemy scoring unit. As the game goes on, Tyranids will get better and better at the Maelstrom objectives while the opponent gets worse and worse. Moreover, it's very, very hard to stop the flyrants from doing whatever they want to your troops.
Now I am not saying that a pentyrant build is super-effective at Maelstrom missions, but I wouldn't under-estimate their ability to play the Maelstrom game. They can definitely compete in the Maelstrom department.
ok so does the Egrub fire multiple times a turn or is it just a single template haywire? What am I missing as to why 5 haywire shots is so deadly (especially if it's torrent which is a max range of 21"). It does not seem like that shoul be enough to reliably kill an AV 13 vehicle with 6 HP and a rerollable 4+ invulnerable?
Pony_law wrote: ok so does the Egrub fire multiple times a turn or is it just a single template haywire? What am I missing as to why 5 haywire shots is so deadly (especially if it's torrent which is a max range of 21"). It does not seem like that shoul be enough to reliably kill an AV 13 vehicle with 6 HP and a rerollable 4+ invulnerable?
You're also not factoring in vector strikes, or the possibility of rolling pens on the haywire. If you have any idea what you're doing with the Tyrants, you'll have a maximum of 2 tyrants per side. So 2 4+ saves, and 3 that just go through. Also, if your opponent is running Ad. Lance you are getting at least 2 HP from two different IK's a turn if they don't break formation.
Also, the tyrants guns are S6. So on top of the haywire you have 30 more shots to try and glance side/rear armor. Between all of that, downing an IK a turn with Tyrants isn't really a stretch
Pony_law wrote: ok so does the Egrub fire multiple times a turn or is it just a single template haywire? What am I missing as to why 5 haywire shots is so deadly (especially if it's torrent which is a max range of 21"). It does not seem like that shoul be enough to reliably kill an AV 13 vehicle with 6 HP and a rerollable 4+ invulnerable?
You're also not factoring in vector strikes, or the possibility of rolling pens on the haywire. If you have any idea what you're doing with the Tyrants, you'll have a maximum of 2 tyrants per side. So 2 4+ saves, and 3 that just go through. Also, if your opponent is running Ad. Lance you are getting at least 2 HP from two different IK's a turn if they don't break formation.
Also, the tyrants guns are S6. So on top of the haywire you have 30 more shots to try and glance side/rear armor. Between all of that, downing an IK a turn with Tyrants isn't really a stretch
This exactly. It's very easy for Flyrants to get on multiple sides of a Knight, and in range of multiple knights, in order to make you pick a side to put a shield up and then ignore it by shooting a different unit while the three other Flyrants strip of Hull Points.
tetrisphreak wrote: I find it odd that your area bans the VSG - it's a purely defensive upgrade, it kills nothing and can be outwitted by fast armies, drop pods, etc.
Lots of areas ban the VSG due to the goofiness of its' rules wording. The VSG shield is triggered by firing at a "unit" that is within range of the VSG; that means a single model, in the very back, is enough for a unit to be protected by the VSG shields even if 99% of the unit is far outside of it.
You could, hypothetically, take 100 Guardsmen and spread them all out where only a couple guys from each unit are in range of the VSG, covering wide swaths of the board nowhere near the VSG itself, yet still being protected by it.
Or you could realistically look at the Renegade Open, where a list doing exactly this won.
Also this list is usually going to lose in maelstrom games. Very few people play Maelstrom competitively, but
[...]
My guess is that you get 1 point from your rippers, and 2 from your Lictors, and probably 1 or 2 from you Mawloc, Most likely 2 or so for the cards above, so you are looking at a score of about 7 going into turn 4-5 when you feel comfortable enough to start landing flyrants. A good Maelstrom list can do 10-14 during that time, but you have a good chance of tabling them, and you might be able to deny them enough to win the game, or just get lucky with your draws. So it isn't auto lose. I was definitely overstating the case by saying "usually going to lose", but it is definitely less optimized than a list with 3 flyrants and 2 Dakkafexes in pods.
Don't forget as well--anyone who has tested straight-Maelstrom (or Adepticon-Maelstrom) will tell you how important card generation itself is.
You essentially have a "hand size" in Maelstrom; a cap on the number of cards you can hold. Scoring missions early is incredibly important, as it empties your hand and allows you to draw more cards, and literally opens you up to having a higher scoring possibility than your opponent.
Saying you have 5 cards, and your opponent has 5 cards, and you'll just score all 5 on Turn 4 once the game has turned in your favor is meaningless if your opponent scored 2 on turn 1, and then 3 on turn 2, and then 2 on turn 4 while you just held onto yours. You don't really have 5 cards to his 5 cards; you have 5 cards to his 12 cards.
Then there's the real wrench-in-the-gears mission (from both the main rulebook and Adepticon's primers), wherein you only generate cards based on holding objectives at the start of the turn. That is the true nightmare mission for a list like this, as well as any other list with no staying power (on the ground) that expects to be able to leap in and grab objectives with paper-thin units who are then expected to die. If you can't hold ground and maintain positioning for a turn, you will not receive mission cards at all.
I honestly believe that BAO's "Maelstrom" format is throwing people off of what real Maelstrom actually looks like.
Pony_law wrote: ok so does the Egrub fire multiple times a turn or is it just a single template haywire? What am I missing as to why 5 haywire shots is so deadly (especially if it's torrent which is a max range of 21"). It does not seem like that shoul be enough to reliably kill an AV 13 vehicle with 6 HP and a rerollable 4+ invulnerable?
You're also not factoring in vector strikes, or the possibility of rolling pens on the haywire. If you have any idea what you're doing with the Tyrants, you'll have a maximum of 2 tyrants per side. So 2 4+ saves, and 3 that just go through. Also, if your opponent is running Ad. Lance you are getting at least 2 HP from two different IK's a turn if they don't break formation.
Also, the tyrants guns are S6. So on top of the haywire you have 30 more shots to try and glance side/rear armor. Between all of that, downing an IK a turn with Tyrants isn't really a stretch
A few notes. A Tyrant is never going to vector strike a knight. You need a 6 to glance it, and you give up shooting a weapon. Vector striking knights is reserved to crones.
Also, Haywire pens do not affect a knight, because now you have to roll a 7 on a D6 for a pen result, and haywire give you no bonus.
However, Tyrants do have method to deal with Knights. #1 is to shoot 12 TL BS4 shots at side or rear. 1.83 hull points per turn.
#2 is a random psychic power. Warp Lance is S10 AP:2 Lance. Each tyrant has a 37% chance of rolling it. Because it happens in the psychic phase, it can be directed against an unshielded side without the knight player having any recourse.
Coupled with the Tyrants ability to move 24" a turn, you should be expecting each tyrant to do about 2 Hull points a turn to an imperial Knight.
The haywire flamer is mainly for scenarios where you can get multiple knights at a time with it, and to threaten a knight who might attempt to charge a downed tyrant.
tetrisphreak wrote: I find it odd that your area bans the VSG - it's a purely defensive upgrade, it kills nothing and can be outwitted by fast armies, drop pods, etc.
Lots of areas ban the VSG due to the goofiness of its' rules wording. The VSG shield is triggered by firing at a "unit" that is within range of the VSG; that means a single model, in the very back, is enough for a unit to be protected by the VSG shields even if 99% of the unit is far outside of it.
You could, hypothetically, take 100 Guardsmen and spread them all out where only a couple guys from each unit are in range of the VSG, covering wide swaths of the board nowhere near the VSG itself, yet still being protected by it.
Or you could realistically look at the Renegade Open, where a list doing exactly this won.
[quote=tag8833 625933 7415634
My point is it's counter intuitive to allow lords of war, but ban a defensive upgrade like a VSG. it's rules allowing you to spread units back and claim protection helps melee focused armies like tyranids in a shooty edition. What's more, in a typical competitive setting where players expect to see knights and LOW units, busting 3 av12 walls should be cake. It's just an extra layer of armor, it's not jetseer, or cent star, or riptide spam, or serpent spam (which nobody organizing tournaments seems to have had problems allowing).
So if the purpose of this bat rep is a public service then can you please expand on ways to defeat the list?
Tactics/Strategies?
Any armies besides crons and tau that can take it on? Personally I think Daemon FMC would be good. Nurgle gets 2+ cover and Tzeentch doesn't care about your shadows and can potentially get 2+ rerollable cover with shrouding.
While the pentyrant list is absolutely bonkers, I don't think I'll be using it. I still only own 2 flyrants and I'll keep it that way. I don't play in tournaments and my friends play casually for the most part.
tetrisphreak wrote: I find it odd that your area bans the VSG - it's a purely defensive upgrade, it kills nothing and can be outwitted by fast armies, drop pods, etc.
Lots of areas ban the VSG due to the goofiness of its' rules wording. The VSG shield is triggered by firing at a "unit" that is within range of the VSG; that means a single model, in the very back, is enough for a unit to be protected by the VSG shields even if 99% of the unit is far outside of it.
You could, hypothetically, take 100 Guardsmen and spread them all out where only a couple guys from each unit are in range of the VSG, covering wide swaths of the board nowhere near the VSG itself, yet still being protected by it.
Or you could realistically look at the Renegade Open, where a list doing exactly this won.
[quote=tag8833 625933 7415634
My point is it's counter intuitive to allow lords of war, but ban a defensive upgrade like a VSG. it's rules allowing you to spread units back and claim protection helps melee focused armies like tyranids in a shooty edition. What's more, in a typical competitive setting where players expect to see knights and LOW units, busting 3 av12 walls should be cake. It's just an extra layer of armor, it's not jetseer, or cent star, or riptide spam, or serpent spam (which nobody organizing tournaments seems to have had problems allowing).
My area doesn't typically ban the VSG, this specific event does. It also doesn't allow Lords of War.
Anyone who buys 5 flyrants should expect to have 3 wasted models when the rules update again. Extreme lists are generally just gimicks.
I still don't see how that list is so great. MSU is the best strategy to win in 7th, that list wastes too many points on models that can't score when if they want to be useful.
Calgar plus 60 marines in transports laughs at this pretty hard actually. Especially when playing the normal maelstrom missions. Those frontline missions are terrible (edit: they weren't bad when they first implemented them as a stop gap but are now poor), the fact that you get to go second and prevent objectives scoring buy killing units coupled with WAY too many kill a unit results is the only reason why it looks so good.
While I appreciate the fact they tried to streamline the maelstrom cards, there are much better ways to do it then their way IMHO. All they had to do was allow discarding cards that are impossible to get. They stripped it down too much which makes it too easy to exploit. The biggest foul they made was scoring the objects at the bottom of the game turn, it basically continued the trend where tournament 40k is all about going second (and also getting last turn do to time).
I had to chuckle about this being a public service announcement.
"This just in: blocking bullets with face is bad for health!"
I will say that it is rather stupid to even bother limiting detachments at this point, the artificial cap is just making certain armies way too good, I'd rather see more variety come from more sources.
corpsethief claw
dark artisan
razorwings
autarch
da /w WS
as a core. 5 flyrants shooting at Claw are only putting 1.5 wounds on it per turn. Need 10 rounds of shooting to kill it. Razorwings come on turn 2 and either kill one flyrant or force it to jink. Nid player forced to either deal with Razorwings or pick away at corpsethief.
Dark Artisan unit, Wave serpent and whatever other DE units are on the field merc all ground opposition and capture objectives with impunity while corpsethief and razorwings soak up all Flyrant attention.
BlaxicanX wrote: corpsethief claw
dark artisan
razorwings
autarch
da /w WS
as a core. 5 flyrants shooting at Claw are only putting 1.5 wounds on it per turn. Need 10 rounds of shooting to kill it. Razorwings come on turn 2 and either kill one flyrant or force it to jink. Nid player forced to either deal with Razorwings or pick away at corpsethief.
Dark Artisan unit, Wave serpent and whatever other DE units are on the field merc all ground opposition and capture objectives with impunity while corpsethief and razorwings soak up all Flyrant attention.
Which would be legal according to the rules but illegal due to bullgak tourny comp. The 2 detachment restriction just lets a select few codices exploit to rules rather then giving everyone an equal opportunity to.
The strength of this nid list is in dominating air.
Most air units have AV 10, Str6 lotsa twin linked - shots equals dead AV 10 things.
Stormtalons were a bad matchup against this list, they are at best okay anti air, but not that great against FMC.
Placing a void shield generator very far up with the stormtalons in it might have been more useful, but even still 4 storm talons is what 500pts? versus how many points of tyrants? 1k+? did anyone expect the storm talons to win?
its a fairly uneven matchup just on the points.
essentially the list is an air deathstar, and needs things that can eliminate air units, or ignore its firepower to counter it.
8 stormtalons with a VSG deployed far up would be more of an even fight.
or 4 stormtalons and 3crimson hunters.
the other option is MSU.
HT put out a lot of shots with twin linked dev with brain leach, but its AP -. So yeah you score 10-11 hits per HT which is about 9 wounds versus toughness 4, but thats only going to remove 3 guys with a 3+ or 4-5 guys with a 4+. per set of devourers w/brain leech.
The Tyrants are great because most metas play with expensive models with low model counts, so lots of S6 AP- shooting is great, its also great at trashing AV 12 or less due to lots of glances/pens(11 / 10 AV). But other things, not so much.
this battle does highlight how powerful 5 tyrants can be, but it really highlights how RPS40k can be, and ultimately how bad it is to actually bring a LoW. The points on the LoW could have been spent elsewhere and been more useful to the objectives the player needed to compete for.
Things that ignore flying would be useful of course, like purifiers nova ability.
an army that had fortifications/vehicles with AV 13+ would be useful, as it could ignore all of the nid shooting for a few turns.
Horde armies with any decent armor save/cover save and FnP with toughness 4+ so they could actually roll FnP versus twin dev w/ brain leech would be tough.
It's only 0-6 storm talons in this formation. As for vehicles with 13/14 armour values, electro shock grubs would eventually take them out of the equation.
In my opinion the best way of taking out 5 tyrants is by allying Necrons and taking a unit of sentry pylons with the focused death ray + Obyron. Youre hitting them automatically and denying them Jink.
This was a fun report, I would like to have seen GTA go second and play a more patient game. It sure seemed like he ran his entire army up in order to try to push through a VSG and a 2+ cover save, that seems like a waste of effort and put him in a position where JY2 was able to take off the tyrant swarm without fear of reprisal. Stormtalons can not endure that kind of fire power.
But i also know this was a playtest game as well, strategies are tested in playtest games, you don't expect a flawless game at this point. I would expect in the rematch, GTA would be less likely to fly those talons into the teeth of the beast.
As a tyranid player i have found that the way my opponents can best deal with them is to split fire across the front of tyrants, trying to force as many as possible to take grounding tests. if your force of 3-4 tyrants all the sudden all have 2 wounds each on them you are forced to make a decision, do you continue to press your attack or do you start worrying more about preserving your tyrants.
I am of course fairly new to the tourney thing (only 2 GTs under my belt so far) so i have alot to learn myself!
I know its only 0-6 in that formation however the nid player took 4 of the 6, or only 66% of allowed., but the eldar portion of the army could have contained anti air as well, and did not.
The eldar/sm list just didn't seen very tuned, and the the nid list is very tuned but only in 1 direction.
ultimately one player has 1200pts of air units, the other has 500.
Its just an uneven matchup.
the nid list is very powerful, because the HTs can threaten a lot of things, and most lists have to either have an air or anti air focus to counter it, or be builds that you do not normally see at the top tables in the medium rounds or higher in a tournament.
yeah the egrubs can eat armor eventually, but the HTs would have to close in on a target en masse to really take something out in 1 turn, which would be outside of their VSG network most likely.
usually you can count on snapshooting Wave Serpents for your normal anti-air needs. So for the Eldar player trying to make a TAC list and not catering it to face 5 tyrants, it actually has quite a bit of anti-air.
I agree it has a bit of anti air, but the other list is mostly air.
however in this case one army is 1235 pts of air units- the nids.
the 2 wave serpents and 4 talons is about 800pts of units that can pull anti air, none of them ignore armor.
so you have anti air thats geared towards AV10 non FMC units, since FMC tend to have armor saves, and almost none of the air units can ignore armor better than 4, and at that one has 50% more points in air than the other....
If any army brought 2/3rds of their army as air units that start on the table, you would have a hard time dealing with them unless you had a large investment in anti air things.
so yes as a TAC all comers list it does, but it came up against a list thats not really a TAC list, its tailored to be fighting small elite armies that have little to medium anti air or air units themselves.
This is a rock paper scissors list, the really nice thing about it is the counters to it, are pretty rare or builds that are not considered highly competitive themselves usually.
valid points, although I think the tyrant spam has a place as a counter to the knight based meta. At least the one that I saw at the Renegade Open.
There was a guy at Renegade who ran 10 flyers but i think he had the misfortune of going up against a skyfire heavy tau list which put him out of the running early.
The list is definitely a PRS attempt at the meta while also highlighting the fact that the hive tyrant stands above all other tyranid units.
I think knights still have some advantages over the pentyrant list.
They can hold still on objectives, the nids need to keep flying, unless they want to be targets for assault by going into jump mode.
The best way the nids have to kill the knights, egrubs, puts them in danger of D explosions.
Would be interesting to see how it played against a all knight list, since the knights usually have little AA, other than the one knight that gets IIRC 8 shots at S7 ap 2?
Even still a pure knight list, or mostly knight list would struggle and rely on luck to ground a tyrant to try and put wounds onto it most of the time.
The nids on the other hand would have to try and strip off armor from vector strikes/shooting. twin linked brain devs from 5 tyrants will get about 50 hits a round, or about 8 glances, half of which will be saved from ion shields. On average, you are looking at killing a knight and a half of turn if you can bring all the tyrants to bear on them from non egrub shooting.
If the player takes two adamantine lances, it would be hard to put any damage on the knights with just the massed S6 shots.
I really dislike knights. Wish they cost 100 more each, even then they would still be good.
iddy00711 wrote: Hmmm I suppose the question should now be how do you make this list more resilient/ TAC.
I figure if you can't beat them you may as well join them.
Are you talking about making the Eldar list or the Tyranids list more resilient/TAC?
The Tyranid list is already a TAC list and it is resilient enough. My combination of MSU, denial strategy and all-reserves for my support units is what helps to make them "resilient".
As for the Eldar army, it is TAC and it is fairly resilient to many armies. But what it will have problems against is volume-of-fire from units with skyfire like my pentyrants. That's its one kryptonite.
tetrisphreak wrote: I find it odd that your area bans the VSG - it's a purely defensive upgrade, it kills nothing and can be outwitted by fast armies, drop pods, etc.
Lots of areas ban the VSG due to the goofiness of its' rules wording. The VSG shield is triggered by firing at a "unit" that is within range of the VSG; that means a single model, in the very back, is enough for a unit to be protected by the VSG shields even if 99% of the unit is far outside of it.
You could, hypothetically, take 100 Guardsmen and spread them all out where only a couple guys from each unit are in range of the VSG, covering wide swaths of the board nowhere near the VSG itself, yet still being protected by it.
Or you could realistically look at the Renegade Open, where a list doing exactly this won.
The VSG could definitely use some FAQ'ing (haha....like that will ever happen).
Don't forget as well--anyone who has tested straight-Maelstrom (or Adepticon-Maelstrom) will tell you how important card generation itself is.
You essentially have a "hand size" in Maelstrom; a cap on the number of cards you can hold. Scoring missions early is incredibly important, as it empties your hand and allows you to draw more cards, and literally opens you up to having a higher scoring possibility than your opponent.
Saying you have 5 cards, and your opponent has 5 cards, and you'll just score all 5 on Turn 4 once the game has turned in your favor is meaningless if your opponent scored 2 on turn 1, and then 3 on turn 2, and then 2 on turn 4 while you just held onto yours. You don't really have 5 cards to his 5 cards; you have 5 cards to his 12 cards.
Then there's the real wrench-in-the-gears mission (from both the main rulebook and Adepticon's primers), wherein you only generate cards based on holding objectives at the start of the turn. That is the true nightmare mission for a list like this, as well as any other list with no staying power (on the ground) that expects to be able to leap in and grab objectives with paper-thin units who are then expected to die. If you can't hold ground and maintain positioning for a turn, you will not receive mission cards at all.
I honestly believe that BAO's "Maelstrom" format is throwing people off of what real Maelstrom actually looks like.
To be fair, pure Maelstrom is not conducive to tournament play. Then you have situations where one can win just because of the cards he gets as opposed to actually outplaying the opponent. That is why very few tournaments actually use pure Maelstrom missions. Most use a hybrid or modified version of it. This also reduces the amount of bookkeeping you need to make in a environment which is also time-sensitive (i.e. tournament games).
Budzerker wrote: So if the purpose of this bat rep is a public service then can you please expand on ways to defeat the list?
Tactics/Strategies?
Any armies besides crons and tau that can take it on? Personally I think Daemon FMC would be good. Nurgle gets 2+ cover and Tzeentch doesn't care about your shadows and can potentially get 2+ rerollable cover with shrouding.
There's a difference between a public service announcement (hey, the new Tyranids are really nasty!) and an actual tactica, of which this is not.
But I will give a brief overview on what you need to deal against this type of list.
1. Strong anti-air. Anti-air is no longer just an afterthought. Your tournament list needs to have very strong anti-air in order to deal with this type of list.
2. A very strong ground presence. To survive its firepower, you need to have resiliency on the ground. MSU is one way to go. Another is just to have lots of bodies in the ground, with decent saves (i.e. 3+ MEQ, 4+ in cover, FNP, AV13-spam, etc.).
3. Go after the non-flying units of the Tyrand army. They will go after yours. You need to go after theirs. If you can't deal with the flyrants, then kill everything else on the ground.
Daemons will give Tyranids a fight because they can satisfy #2 with Daemon Summoning. However, tyranids will give daemons a tough fight because they have a huge advantage with their shooting.
jy2 wrote: To be fair, pure Maelstrom is not conducive to tournament play. Then you have situations where one can win just because of the cards he gets as opposed to actually outplaying the opponent. That is why very few tournaments actually use pure Maelstrom missions. Most use a hybrid or modified version of it. This also reduces the amount of bookkeeping you need to make in a environment which is also time-sensitive (i.e. tournament games).
I think it would be interesting for you to try out a tourney running Maelstrom. RTTs running Maelstrom are sprouting up all over the place in the midwest (and probably other places as well). They have a much lower bookkeeping requirement than most other tourney missions (Ever played a NOVA mission?), and the randomness where a lucky draw overcomes superior play is a silly myth born of bad attempted adaptions of Maelstrom to competitive play (BAO #3), naivety, or fear of the unknown. I've had Maelstrom games where a dice roll or a Card Draw determine the final outcome, but far fewer than Eternal war games. By adding more opportunities to score you reduce the effect of randomness rather than increase it.
shamroll wrote: While the pentyrant list is absolutely bonkers, I don't think I'll be using it. I still only own 2 flyrants and I'll keep it that way. I don't play in tournaments and my friends play casually for the most part.
Yeah, if you and your group aren't into competitive gaming, then don't even worry about it. In casual play, 2 flyrants is all you'll ever need.
Red Corsair wrote: Anyone who buys 5 flyrants should expect to have 3 wasted models when the rules update again. Extreme lists are generally just gimicks.
I still don't see how that list is so great. MSU is the best strategy to win in 7th, that list wastes too many points on models that can't score when if they want to be useful.
Calgar plus 60 marines in transports laughs at this pretty hard actually. Especially when playing the normal maelstrom missions. Those frontline missions are terrible (edit: they weren't bad when they first implemented them as a stop gap but are now poor), the fact that you get to go second and prevent objectives scoring buy killing units coupled with WAY too many kill a unit results is the only reason why it looks so good.
While I appreciate the fact they tried to streamline the maelstrom cards, there are much better ways to do it then their way IMHO. All they had to do was allow discarding cards that are impossible to get. They stripped it down too much which makes it too easy to exploit. The biggest foul they made was scoring the objects at the bottom of the game turn, it basically continued the trend where tournament 40k is all about going second (and also getting last turn do to time).
I had to chuckle about this being a public service announcement.
"This just in: blocking bullets with face is bad for health!"
I will say that it is rather stupid to even bother limiting detachments at this point, the artificial cap is just making certain armies way too good, I'd rather see more variety come from more sources.
Honestly, not many lists are going to beat a 60 drop pod marine list in Maelstrom scenarios. That type of list is also another "extreme" list. While pentyrants may be king-of-the-air, 60 marines in pods are king-of-the-ObSec. However, I'd like to see the marine list beat the flyrant one in a pure Eternal War mission.
One of the things I like about a 2-tier mission format (like the BAO) is that you have other ways to win, especially if you come up against a mission that is bad for you. Good luck trying to get a deathstar army off of the Relic, or have fun playing against 60 drop pod marines in pure Maelstrom missions. The 2-tier system tries to balance out these inequities and will give armies in what is normally a bad matchup for them at least a fighting chance to still do something with the game (such as MSU in pure VP missions or Skyblight in Scouring missions, where they are already playing with a huge handicap). And while systems like the BAO isn't perfect, to me, it is still better than a straight-up pure Eternal Warrior or pure Maelstrom mission, at least for competitive play.
Say what you will about BAO Maelstrom objectives, in terms of managing in tournament play, simple = better. You really don't want people to roll and then re-roll for mission objectives. Few objectives where everyone can achieve on about an equal footing is much, much better than many objectives where some of the objectives are hard to achieve for some armies (for example, having to kill an enemy close combat for an army with no close-combat units, or having to kill a flyer for an army with hardly any anti-air). Then you go into the realm where winning isn't determined by the player but rather, by the objectives he draws.
BlaxicanX wrote: corpsethief claw
dark artisan
razorwings
autarch
da /w WS
as a core. 5 flyrants shooting at Claw are only putting 1.5 wounds on it per turn. Need 10 rounds of shooting to kill it. Razorwings come on turn 2 and either kill one flyrant or force it to jink. Nid player forced to either deal with Razorwings or pick away at corpsethief.
Dark Artisan unit, Wave serpent and whatever other DE units are on the field merc all ground opposition and capture objectives with impunity while corpsethief and razorwings soak up all Flyrant attention.
More allowable sources/detachments open up to more combos for exploitation. At least that is one of the lessons we can learn from the past (Adepticon last year, where about 1/2 of the final 16 players brought in Inquisition allies in addition to their regular allies). But who knows, the tournament meta may be trending in this direction anyways.
Which would be legal according to the rules but illegal due to bullgak tourny comp. The 2 detachment restriction just lets a select few codices exploit to rules rather then giving everyone an equal opportunity to.
Allowing for more than 2 sources also allows for more avenues for abuse, as it creates for even more combos. You're going to throw balance more out-of-whack than it already is when you allow for multiple/unlimited sources/detachments. Less detachments = more balancing. I actually long for the days of 5th edition when there wasn't even any allies at all! You want game balance without any comp necessary? Throw out allies, throw out formations and go back to the 40K stone ages.
It's only 0-6 storm talons in this formation. As for vehicles with 13/14 armour values, electro shock grubs would eventually take them out of the equation.
In my opinion the best way of taking out 5 tyrants is by allying Necrons and taking a unit of sentry pylons with the focused death ray + Obyron. Youre hitting them automatically and denying them Jink.
Sentry pylons can't hit flyers when they're in the air. Don't even try to argue that in competitive play.
BeeCee wrote: This was a fun report, I would like to have seen GTA go second and play a more patient game. It sure seemed like he ran his entire army up in order to try to push through a VSG and a 2+ cover save, that seems like a waste of effort and put him in a position where JY2 was able to take off the tyrant swarm without fear of reprisal. Stormtalons can not endure that kind of fire power.
But i also know this was a playtest game as well, strategies are tested in playtest games, you don't expect a flawless game at this point. I would expect in the rematch, GTA would be less likely to fly those talons into the teeth of the beast.
As a tyranid player i have found that the way my opponents can best deal with them is to split fire across the front of tyrants, trying to force as many as possible to take grounding tests. if your force of 3-4 tyrants all the sudden all have 2 wounds each on them you are forced to make a decision, do you continue to press your attack or do you start worrying more about preserving your tyrants.
I am of course fairly new to the tourney thing (only 2 GTs under my belt so far) so i have alot to learn myself!
Agreed. This game was purely experimental, not just with lists but with tactics as well. I mean, how will you know if you don't try it? In any case, better to test it out here than to find out in a tournament. It is also usually in these practice games where I do things I won't normally do. Because if I fail, there are no repercussions. It's only practice.
blaktoof wrote: I know its only 0-6 in that formation however the nid player took 4 of the 6, or only 66% of allowed., but the eldar portion of the army could have contained anti air as well, and did not.
The eldar/sm list just didn't seen very tuned, and the the nid list is very tuned but only in 1 direction.
ultimately one player has 1200pts of air units, the other has 500.
Its just an uneven matchup.
the nid list is very powerful, because the HTs can threaten a lot of things, and most lists have to either have an air or anti air focus to counter it, or be builds that you do not normally see at the top tables in the medium rounds or higher in a tournament.
yeah the egrubs can eat armor eventually, but the HTs would have to close in on a target en masse to really take something out in 1 turn, which would be outside of their VSG network most likely.
Don't mistake not being "tuned" to tailoring. Pentyrant is just a army-mismatch for most armies. Grant actually beat a very capable Tyranid player running 3 flyrants and a barbed hierodule (and he did it twice) before playing against me. His new list is actually a good TAC list.
My pentyrant list, on the other hand, is what I call a anti-meta list. It breaks the mold in that it can ignore a lot of the elements of a typical TAC list. You take a lot of good, tournament-successful TAC lists and I guarantee you that I can steamroll over many of them. That's why this type of list is a meta-changing list. It's a good TAC list which goes against the current meta, and it is so good that it will force the meta to change in order to deal with it. You are right in that it is an uneven matchup, but that is just how it's going to be with a Pentyrant build against most armies.
BeeCee wrote: usually you can count on snapshooting Wave Serpents for your normal anti-air needs. So for the Eldar player trying to make a TAC list and not catering it to face 5 tyrants, it actually has quite a bit of anti-air.
This list has probably the most anti-air of any Eldar list that I have faced before. Eldar is not traditionally known for their AA, but this one is actually really good against air targets. But still, it had problems against my list. Now that should tell you something about how resilient my list actually is and why it would be a nightmare for most armies to go up against.
This is a rock paper scissors list, the really nice thing about it is the counters to it, are pretty rare or builds that are not considered highly competitive themselves usually.
I think you give it too little credit. It isn't a RPS list. It's an anti-meta list which happens to also be a very, very good TAC list. I guarantee you, there are no true hard-counters to it. Tau will fare better against it than most other armies, but Tau is not an absolute counter to it. As a matter of fact, I almost consider the 2 matchups as equals instead of a Tau-dominating-Tyranids type of matchup.
jy2 wrote: To be fair, pure Maelstrom is not conducive to tournament play. Then you have situations where one can win just because of the cards he gets as opposed to actually outplaying the opponent. That is why very few tournaments actually use pure Maelstrom missions. Most use a hybrid or modified version of it. This also reduces the amount of bookkeeping you need to make in a environment which is also time-sensitive (i.e. tournament games).
I think it would be interesting for you to try out a tourney running Maelstrom. RTTs running Maelstrom are sprouting up all over the place in the midwest (and probably other places as well). They have a much lower bookkeeping requirement than most other tourney missions (Ever played a NOVA mission?), and the randomness where a lucky draw overcomes superior play is a silly myth born of bad attempted adaptions of Maelstrom to competitive play (BAO #3), naivety, or fear of the unknown. I've had Maelstrom games where a dice roll or a Card Draw determine the final outcome, but far fewer than Eternal war games. By adding more opportunities to score you reduce the effect of randomness rather than increase it.
Sorry, but I don't know of any tourneys in my area that runs pure Maelstrom. But the info does not have to come from a tournament. Just play a regular game of Maelstrom to get the info that you want.
And you don't need ME to test it out. I am not the one who needs persuading. I think YOU should try out my list yourself in a Maelstrom game. Play it against the best Maelstrom player/army in your meta and see how it fares.
jy2 wrote: To be fair, pure Maelstrom is not conducive to tournament play. Then you have situations where one can win just because of the cards he gets as opposed to actually outplaying the opponent. That is why very few tournaments actually use pure Maelstrom missions. Most use a hybrid or modified version of it. This also reduces the amount of bookkeeping you need to make in a environment which is also time-sensitive (i.e. tournament games).
I think it would be interesting for you to try out a tourney running Maelstrom. RTTs running Maelstrom are sprouting up all over the place in the midwest (and probably other places as well). They have a much lower bookkeeping requirement than most other tourney missions (Ever played a NOVA mission?), and the randomness where a lucky draw overcomes superior play is a silly myth born of bad attempted adaptions of Maelstrom to competitive play (BAO #3), naivety, or fear of the unknown. I've had Maelstrom games where a dice roll or a Card Draw determine the final outcome, but far fewer than Eternal war games. By adding more opportunities to score you reduce the effect of randomness rather than increase it.
Yea I always have to raise an eye brow when someone uses terminology like "most tournaments."
Sorry jy2 but you can't know what most tournaments as a whole are running, and in your defense nor would anyone expect you to. In the North east most RTT's I have attended also run maelstrom from the cards and have simpler changes then frontlines. For example allowing players to discard and redraw cards that are impossible to achieve.
Guess what? The games are incredibly tactical and fair and there doesn't need to be anymore book keeping then rolling for random generations each player turn.
The actual maelstrom format also reduces the loopholes tournies get where you always want bottom of turn and can slow play the last few turns to win. Sorry but when your opponent can score 3-5 points turn one you really have it in your best interest to score early as well as late rather then the same crappy trend that has been grand tournament 40k for the last two cycles (5th and 6th).
I have to reiterate how absolutely stupid the BAO format is for making maelstrom scoring happen at the bottom of the turn only and for making so many results KP's. It literally allows lists like this one to function way better then they normally would.
TLDR: You'd be surprised what most tournaments are actually running. Please don't assume your neck of the woods is the only way or the right way. You would actually be quite surprised.
One of the things I like about a 2-tier mission format (like the BAO) is that you have other ways to win, especially if you come up against a mission that is bad for you. Good luck trying to get a deathstar army off of the Relic, or have fun playing against 60 drop pod marines in pure Maelstrom missions. The 2-tier system tries to balance out these inequities and will give armies in what is normally a bad matchup for them at least a fighting chance to still do something with the game (such as MSU in pure VP missions or Skyblight in Scouring missions, where they are already playing with a huge handicap). And while systems like the BAO isn't perfect, to me, it is still better than a straight-up pure Eternal Warrior or pure Maelstrom mission, at least for competitive play.
Say what you will about BAO Maelstrom objectives, in terms of managing in tournament play, simple = better. You really don't want people to roll and then re-roll for mission objectives. Few objectives where everyone can achieve on about an equal footing is much, much better than many objectives where some of the objectives are hard to achieve for some armies (for example, having to kill an enemy close combat for an army with no close-combat units, or having to kill a flyer for an army with hardly any anti-air). Then you go into the realm where winning isn't determined by the player but rather, by the objectives he draws.
See this is when I question whether you have played many RTT's using the actual maelstrom missions, because when you allow a player to toss impossible cards and have a battle forged list rolling with its re-roll on the tactical warlord traits table, the scenarios you just listed are not nearly the issue you trying to make it out to be.
The BAO maelstrom format is not without its issues though, and the frontline guys actually don't remedy there missions often enough. You can't seriously tell me that after the BAO they had a perfect system in place and nothing could be improved, yet the appear to be content with leabving the missions be. I do really like that they have two ways to win though, this is the best part of their format, though I think they should alternate between primary and secondary. By that I mean its lazy that they always have the maelstrom side secondary and thus worth less points, alternating would be such an easy fix. As for their take on maelstrom? I appreciate simple things but this is way to simple. Actually it's modified to the point where I question that they even have the right to call it maelstrom. Asymmetrical mission format? Sure. Maelstrom? Not anymore.
As for the book keeping and making the cards more simple (reducing some of the more fringe ones like killing gun emplacements) I have seen vista print/word used to make cheap and clear to read decks of mission cards, no need for players to be rolling at all, just charge them for a cheapy deck or put it in their swag bag.
Allowing for more than 2 sources also allows for more avenues for abuse, as it creates for even more combos. You're going to throw balance more out-of-whack than it already is when you allow for multiple/unlimited sources/detachments. Less detachments = more balancing. I actually long for the days of 5th edition when there wasn't even any allies at all! You want game balance without any comp necessary? Throw out allies, throw out formations and go back to the 40K stone ages.
I never even mentions sources. I am aware that 40k requires at least SOME form of comp to play competitively, which is exactly why I was referring to detachments not sources. While I think unlimited sources is much, I also think 2 is way too restrictive and places little no faith or trust in the community in attendance at all.
I will definitely agree with you in referrence to wanting simpler 40k back. But I think you either say one source no self allying or you trust the player base and let them use the system with as few restrictions as possible. 2 sources is not that route.
Automatically Appended Next Post: BTW you ARE on the inside with Reece now as a team 0 comp member, maybe you can help make a tighter format
Fair enough. I don't know what most of the smaller tournaments, the RTT's, are running. But I do know that most of the larger tournaments in the West Coast, the GT's, follow the BAO format.
Pure Maelstrom, while I admit is pretty fun, has its own fair share of problems as well.
1. Winning the game can oftentimes be a result of drawing the right objectives as opposed to actually beating your opponent tactically.
2. It becomes a game not of beating your opponent, but of mainly grabbing objectives.
3. Results can be really skewered as people build their lists with mainly mobility in mind. It then becomes a game of not who is the best army, but who is the fastest army on the ground.
Now there's nothing wrong with Maelstrom missions. I actually quite enjoy them myself. However, I don't feel it is representative of how the game should be played competitively. It's like playing basketball, but each turn, you randomize what each team needs to do. Maybe one turn, I need to make a basket into your hoop. Then another turn, I need to make a basket into my own hoop. Then another turn, I need to steal the ball in order to get a point. Then another turn, I need to block a shot in order to get a point. IMO, it is not conducive to competitive play because you aren't playing on a level playing field (as you are with set objectives such as Eternal War missions).
But I nobody ever suggested PURE maelstrom. The BAO, I'd argue, isn't using maelstrom. Heck NOVA has as much right to claim their playing modified maelstrom is BAO is going to.
Also eternal war missions are not ever level. 40k makes this impossible since you have one player getting the final chance to secure set objectives over another, which by the way is even more lopsided in a timed format. It's simply inaccurate to suggest that it is more balance since the games mechanics aren't balanced.
As to the random nature.... come on man, cop out. While there are random powers like invisibility around that can tilt a game to almost set odds you can't blame maelstroms short comings on its random nature. In fact it is one of the few random elements that proves to level the field not make it worse. Random objectives make the game more tactical, I will say the random die roll amounts for some of them are stupid since that is a situation where you have no influence other then seeing what the card is worth that time around.
Honestly I think maelstrom are the only things keeping 40k playable at all in 7th. They need some subtle adjusting but it is not nearly as chaotic as some internet heads preach.
The BAO maelstrom format is not without its issues though, and the frontline guys actually don't remedy there missions often enough. You can't seriously tell me that after the BAO they had a perfect system in place and nothing could be improved, yet the appear to be content with leabving the missions be. I do really like that they have two ways to win though, this is the best part of their format, though I think they should alternate between primary and secondary. By that I mean its lazy that they always have the maelstrom side secondary and thus worth less points, alternating would be such an easy fix. As for their take on maelstrom? I appreciate simple things but this is way to simple. Actually it's modified to the point where I question that they even have the right to call it maelstrom. Asymmetrical mission format? Sure. Maelstrom? Not anymore.
I never even mentions sources. I am aware that 40k requires at least SOME form of comp to play competitively, which is exactly why I was referring to detachments not sources. While I think unlimited sources is much, I also think 2 is way too restrictive and places little no faith or trust in the community in attendance at all.
I will definitely agree with you in referrence to wanting simpler 40k back. But I think you either say one source no self allying or you trust the player base and let them use the system with as few restrictions as possible. 2 sources is not that route.
BTW you ARE on the inside with Reece now as a team 0 comp member, maybe you can help make a tighter format
If there is enough complaints about the BAO format, I am sure the Frontline guys would do something about it (like have a poll for people to vote on). They've been very democratic about it. But since not a lot of people are griping about their format (at least not to my knowledge), then why fix a system that isn't broken? Personally, I like the BAO format for its straight-forwards and very simple design. The only change that I would recommend would probably be that their Maelstrom objectives be rolled for and scored at the each player's turn instead of each game turn. This way, it minimizes the importance of going 2nd in the game for a double-contest (contesting both the Primary and the Secondary).
If you have a certain format in mind, PM me and I will consider bringing it to their attention if I think it is better than their current system. Just keep in mind that I am against formats that are too complicated or that takes a PHD to comprehend. Simple and balanced are what I am most concerned about.
Honestly the biggest fault I have with their format is scoring and tallying points at the bottom of the turn which we are in agreement on it seems.
My other main complaint is that the primary and secondary never alternate. Unless I am wrong here, but it seems that maelstrom is never the primary, its not good enough to tell players they have an alternative to killing invisideathstars and spammed FMC's when you MUST achieve the tertiary along with the secondary to overcome primary, and because first blood is so hard to get from the aforementioned lists I think you can see where I am going here. Those two changes would be incredibly simple and IMHO would fix many of the problems that they already have issue with (invis and rerolls).
I was ranting a bit before mainly because I hate when people knock maelstrom when it is not nearly as busted as they make it out to be. So apologies for the tangent and long windedness, I am a bit tired ATM
Aside from that I think they should Allow for more detachments. Not more sources, just more detachments since some armies like DE and Orks are kneecapped hard with only two detachments being allowed.
I agree that missions at the tournament level have room for improvement. An interesting idea would be looking at the mission formats from the tournament that Seam Nayden won.
It had the ability to give the player a great deal of control over whether he utilized progressive or end-game scoring, as well as what most (IIRC) of the primaries/secondaries were. I think it let you pick one from a set of five or something.
I'm not sure that that level of complete control is good, but there's something to be said for setting win conditions after you have seen your opponents list within a certain framework. Sort of like surveying the field and developing a strategy based on that. For example, you're never going to go up against an elite army and say, "ok if we can kill enough squads, we'll take the victory men! Never mind that 5 of their squads amount to 80 percent of their army whereas it would be 30 percent of ours! Victory is ours if we can do this!"
Red Corsair wrote: Honestly the biggest fault I have with their format is scoring and tallying points at the bottom of the turn which we are in agreement on it seems.
My other main complaint is that the primary and secondary never alternate. Unless I am wrong here, but it seems that maelstrom is never the primary, its not good enough to tell players they have an alternative to killing invisideathstars and spammed FMC's when you MUST achieve the tertiary along with the secondary to overcome primary, and because first blood is so hard to get from the aforementioned lists I think you can see where I am going here. Those two changes would be incredibly simple and IMHO would fix many of the problems that they already have issue with (invis and rerolls).
I was ranting a bit before mainly because I hate when people knock maelstrom when it is not nearly as busted as they make it out to be. So apologies for the tangent and long windedness, I am a bit tired ATM
Aside from that I think they should Allow for more detachments. Not more sources, just more detachments since some armies like DE and Orks are kneecapped hard with only two detachments being allowed.
I actually like your idea of alternating between Eternal and Modified Maelstrom missions as primary/secondary. However, it'll take more than just me to convince Frontline of making this type of change to their format. This is more of a wishlist request than an actual balance-fixing request, so it'll take quite a few people more to petition them to consider this request. I will mention this to Reece the next time I go up to Frontline, but unless enough people make waves, my voice will just be a small splash in the ocean.
Personally, I love the Maelstrom missions. I just don't think it is balanced enough for true competitive play. My idea of competitive play is that everyone plays to the same goal and not to ever-shifting goals. This way, the champion is the one who outplayed everyone else and not the one who got all the right objectives. I want the champion to be determined by the same standard, not one that is determined by different standards every time they play. The less randomness you introduce into the system, the truer your champion is. Just my opinion.
jy2 wrote: Sorry, but I don't know of any tourneys in my area that runs pure Maelstrom. But the info does not have to come from a tournament. Just play a regular game of Maelstrom to get the info that you want.
And you don't need ME to test it out. I am not the one who needs persuading. I think YOU should try out my list yourself in a Maelstrom game. Play it against the best Maelstrom player/army in your meta and see how it fares.
1st, my suggestion about trying a Maelstrom RTT was more about giving you a chance to see Maelstrom in action rather than test out this particular list.
As far as how this list would perform in a Maelstrom meta. I'm a pretty savvy Tyranid player. I can tell you exactly how it would perform in my common meta. Grey Knights stomp the tar out of it. One Tau player probably torches you by killing 4-5 of the flyrants (2 Skyray, 2 skyfire burstides, buffmander + suites or misilesides). There are several space marine mech msu, you should have no trouble tabling them. Salamander drop pods give you trouble. Killing 1 Flyrant with the alpha strike, and then putting drop pods on most or all of the objectives. The 2 CSM lists get tabled. The 3 Space wolves probably get tabled. The farsight bomb player gets tabled. AD Lance gets tabled. 3 Ork players probably get tabled, or beat on points if they bring a stompa. Eldar Wraith spam gives you trouble. 3 Wraith Knights that can score objectives and kill any flyrant that lands is a problem. 3 IG mech get table or just beat on points if they brings a baneblade. IG blob gets tabled. Necron Flying Circus could go either way, depends on how many 6's the Annihilation barges roll. Summoning Daemons could go either way. Bestpack Demons win easily. Dark eldar Venom Spam probably gets tabled. Wave Serpent spam could go either way. Probably wins on points. Eldar Jetbike spam wins on points (unless you kill the Wraith Knights).
Its an unbalanced list that would perform toward the high/middle of the pack in my Maelstrom meta. It has little board control, and thus little ability to score early, and it suffers from a distinct lack of ability to kill MC's like Wraith Knights, Dread Knights, or Riptides. It will kill them eventually, but they come in 2 and 3's, so killing them all is a big problem.
I wonder how you would plan to play against a list like this in your BAO missions:
Spoiler:
Autarch
5 Fire Dragons, Wave Serpent TL Scatter Laser, Holo‐fields 5 Fire Dragons, Wave Serpent TL Scatter Laser, Holo‐fields
I agree that missions at the tournament level have room for improvement. An interesting idea would be looking at the mission formats from the tournament that Seam Nayden won.
It had the ability to give the player a great deal of control over whether he utilized progressive or end-game scoring, as well as what most (IIRC) of the primaries/secondaries were. I think it let you pick one from a set of five or something.
I'm not sure that that level of complete control is good, but there's something to be said for setting win conditions after you have seen your opponents list within a certain framework. Sort of like surveying the field and developing a strategy based on that. For example, you're never going to go up against an elite army and say, "ok if we can kill enough squads, we'll take the victory men! Never mind that 5 of their squads amount to 80 percent of their army whereas it would be 30 percent of ours! Victory is ours if we can do this!"
I actually like that idea. Never tried out the 11th Company missions, but I think I'll give it a look-see. Sounds interesting.
Its a list I haven't beaten yet, and even though I haven't ever faced it with one of my top lists, I don't have much hope.
Challenged excepted! Right after I kick the crap out of Tau.
BTW, I don't think that Eldar list is as good as mine and so I may modify it somewhat (plus, I don't have all of those models).
So would you like to see me play against it in Maelstrom or BAO missions? Maelstrom would be tougher for my pentyrant army due to all the Eldar super-scorers. Maelstrom would actually favor Mechdar in this case. However, BAO should favor my bugs,
jy2 wrote: Then you go into the realm where winning isn't determined by the player but rather, by the objectives he draws.
This is the most glaring downside of BAO's Maelstrom format in the first place. The Maelstrom table is basically:
1. Hold your objective (Easily achieved under virtually any circumstances)
2. Hold their objective (Very unlikely to be achieved)
3. Kill a unit (Easily achieved, unless against Deathstars)
4. Kill a unit (Easily achieved, unless against Deathstars)
5. 1 unit in their deployment zone (Easily achieved)
6. 3 of your units in your deployment zone/none of theirs (Highly dependent on matchup/other Maelstrom rolls)
Every game basically came down to who rolled the least 2's (or 1's, depending on which player was which) and 6's. Meanwhile, the huge preponderance of "kill a unit" was an enormous boon to deathstar armies, which is one of the things a Maelstrom format is supposed to mitigate--again, my personal opinion is that the missions completely missed the boat on what Maelstrom is supposed to accomplish competitively, and instead just became LOL RANDOM MISSIONS with no real strategic bearing on the outcome.
jy2 wrote: The only change that I would recommend would probably be that their Maelstrom objectives be rolled for and scored at the each player's turn instead of each game turn. This way, it minimizes the importance of going 2nd in the game for a double-contest (contesting both the Primary and the Secondary).
Renegade actually did do it this way--each player generated missions at the start of their player turn, and scored at the end of their player turn--to completely remove the enormous "going second" advantage. They also defined the two "kill a unit" missions to select targets; one was basically "kill a vehicle or MC" while the other was "kill [anything else]" so that they weren't quite so broad.
And again, it was a pretty wide consensus at the event that the winner of the secondaries seemed completely random and had little resemblence to what actually went on during the game. There was no ability to account for or plan for any of it, and the end result was that the winner was the one who generated more favorable objectives. At this point I feel I've made my opinion on the BAO Maelstrom format pretty clear; I only really bring it back up because I found it odd that you'd say other Maelstrom formats are reduced to who draws the best cards, where I feel that experience has already played out that that is the case with the BAO format.
Now, it's safe to say "straight Maelstrom" isn't an option competitively; even things like "D3 point" cards are enough to make that clear. But there's also such a thing as paring down the system so much that you defeat the point, which is what I think has happened here.
Maelstrom, in my opinion, is intended to act as a counterbalance to the predominant playstyle of 6th and 7th Edition, which is/was having your one (or two) big unkillable units parade around the board bashing the hell out of everything else that exists, completely ignoring any semblence of board control or tactics beyond "kill as many things as physically possible before Turn 5," and then have your weak meaningless Troops jump out at the last moment to stand on the shiny objectives amongst the smoking ruins.
That was Necron Warriors in Night Scythes, that was Eldar Jetbikes behind the ruins, that was Plaguebearers GTG in the forest, that was Cultists in the Bastion, that was Kroot praying they don't pass a reserve roll until Turn 4.
Maelstrom is inherently unbalanced, but the point of that imbalance is to serve as a counter to the imbalance of Eternal War, which results in gameplay as noted above.
And as a quick history lesson, this is not a new concept--you only have to look back as far as (pre-GK) 5th Edition to see that. Remember how unpopular Kill Points were in 5th Ed? Remember how every ten minutes, there'd be a new thread about them out in the tournament forum, complaining about how unfair they were to certain armies? Remember how the "certain armies" they were unfair to were the ones that were winning all the tournaments anyway?
Nobody removed Kill Points from their tournaments because Kill Points was the only thing that made the IG and SW players of the time even consider changing their army types or altering their builds. MSU ruled the day, and MSU hated Kill Points. Balance in a vacuum was not the goal, as Kill Points were inherently imbalanced--the goal was using the smaller imbalance of a single gametype (Kill Points) to attempt to rectify the wider imbalance of the meta at the time.
Well, how do you rectify the "wider imbalance" of hidden Troops leaping out at the last second to hold objectives? You spread six objectives out all over the board and you tell them that sometimes they'll have to hold those objectives on Turns 1, 2, 3 and 4, when the fighting is heavy--instead of just 5, 6 and 7, once everything is long dead. And even if this is not your primary mission, you construct your format in such a way that someone who refuses to adapt to it can lose games as a result.
While it may not get us all the way there (in the same way that Kill Points never got us "all the way there" in 5th), from the testing done so far I have rather high hopes for Adepticon's Maelstrom system. Forcing the top army builds to make hard decisions and play a game they might not be perfectly suited for goes a long way toward that; getting it to all work out and result in some semblence of balance is a much harder goal, but it's certainly worth a shot, so I'm glad people are still trying to come up with a workable competitive Maelstrom system.
Its a list I haven't beaten yet, and even though I haven't ever faced it with one of my top lists, I don't have much hope.
Challenged excepted! Right after I kick the crap out of Tau.
BTW, I don't think that Eldar list is as good as mine and so I may modify it somewhat (plus, I don't have all of those models).
So would you like to see me play against it in Maelstrom or BAO missions? Maelstrom would be tougher for my pentyrant army due to all the Eldar super-scorers. Maelstrom would actually favor Mechdar in this case. However, BAO should favor my bugs,
Modify it as you see fit. The key challenge is that everything is either in a AV 12/12/10 transport with a 3+ jink or Toughness 8. So there are no soft targets like jet bikes or Warp Spiders. Also, everything is twin linked.
Play it BAO. I don't think it favors you as much as you think. You've got only 2 OS units in your list, and no reasonable way to kill all of the toughness 8, and so it seems like in BAO, you best hope is to get first blood, and then contest objectives on turn 5, praying with all of your might that it doesn't go on until turn 6.
One thing I like about the BAO modified Maelstrom missions is that they are more generic and thus, more fair. For example, kill-a-unit is achievable by any army. However, kill an enemy tank is not quite as fair if you are going up against an Imperial Knight army, an army whose only vehicle is a super-heavy or an army with no vehicles at all. Likewise, kill an MC can be inherently unfair if the opponent is running a wraithknight, riptides or an FMC, especially if you are running an army with little to no shooting (daemons, orks, etc.) or skyfire. The more specific the Maelstrom objective becomes, while it may be more "fun", it also becomes more unbalancing. The BAO Maelstrom objectives are simple objectives that any army has a chance to accomplish. Not only that, but any TAC army should have almost an equal chance of scoring. That's what I like about them. I think that if you KISS (keep-it-simple-son), it is easier to do and more fair. However, once you start adding more and more stuff/options, it gets more and more complicated and things start to become more and more unbalanced. That's just the nature of the beast.
And again, it was a pretty wide consensus at the event that the winner of the secondaries seemed completely random and had little resemblence to what actually went on during the game. There was no ability to account for or plan for any of it, and the end result was that the winner was the one who generated more favorable objectives. At this point I feel I've made my opinion on the BAO Maelstrom format pretty clear; I only really bring it back up because I found it odd that you'd say other Maelstrom formats are reduced to who draws the best cards, where I feel that experience has already played out that that is the case with the BAO format.
I feel that the Maelstrom objectives were included in their missions for 2 reasons mainly.
1. To keep it more in-line with the 7th Ed. missions, or at least with the concept of the 7th Ed. missions.
2. To make the missions more fun. While Maelstrom missions are somewhat random, they do tend to be more dynamic due to the fact that they are different each and every turn. This helps to make the game more interesting. But to limit the impact of the randomness of Maelstrom, the designers made the Maelstrom a Secondary mission objective as opposed to the Primary. This way, you have a clear goal as to how to win the mission, with a bunch of side goals to help you towards another path to victory should the primary goal be too hard. At least that is the concept IMO.
Maybe people have outgrown the BAO format. I don't know. I, for one, still enjoy the balance and simplicity of its design. Honestly, I don't feel that it need any major changes, but if enough people do and voice their opinions, I am pretty sure the TO's would listen.
I agree that missions at the tournament level have room for improvement. An interesting idea would be looking at the mission formats from the tournament that Seam Nayden won.
It had the ability to give the player a great deal of control over whether he utilized progressive or end-game scoring, as well as what most (IIRC) of the primaries/secondaries were. I think it let you pick one from a set of five or something.
I'm not sure that that level of complete control is good, but there's something to be said for setting win conditions after you have seen your opponents list within a certain framework. Sort of like surveying the field and developing a strategy based on that. For example, you're never going to go up against an elite army and say, "ok if we can kill enough squads, we'll take the victory men! Never mind that 5 of their squads amount to 80 percent of their army whereas it would be 30 percent of ours! Victory is ours if we can do this!"
I actually like that idea. Never tried out the 11th Company missions, but I think I'll give it a look-see. Sounds interesting.
I'm not a big fan of the 11th company missions. The problem is the same army will have an advantage in both the progressive and the end-game scoring in most of their missions. If you are going to have a choice of primary the options have to reward different armies or playstyles, not just 2 different ways to reward the same army.
Also, way, way too little emphasis on kill points. It made MSU too dominant, and was unfair to non-msu builds and armies. I'm not saying that MSU shouldn't be a viable way to play. I'm just saying that there should be other competitive builds as well.
The secondaries selection was better, but the options could have been improved as well, because most people gravitate to the same secondaries.
There was a really good idea (choosing the primary), it just needed a bit of a punch up in the execution. It was definitely and improvement from NOVA, and if they keep working at it, they will get there eventually.
Modify it as you see fit. The key challenge is that everything is either in a AV 12/12/10 transport with a 3+ jink or Toughness 8. So there are no soft targets like jet bikes or Warp Spiders. Also, everything is twin linked.
Play it BAO. I don't think it favors you as much as you think. You've got only 2 OS units in your list, and no reasonable way to kill all of the toughness 8, and so it seems like in BAO, you best hope is to get first blood, and then contest objectives on turn 5, praying with all of your might that it doesn't go on until turn 6.
Yeah, I know, mechdar is an anti-meta list, just as my pentyrant build is an anti-meta list as well. For them, its AV12 with 3+ cover or T8. For tyranids, everything is either flying or they are cheap, expendable units.
Normally, in such a matchup, I just ignore the WK's and focus on killing everything else. It's similar in concept to ignoring deathstar units and going after the rest of the army. The difference is that, at the end of the game, after we've all killed each other's support units, the Eldar player will have 2 (or 3) knights that can take 2 or 3 objectives, whereas my Tyranid list will have 4-5 flyrants which can take/contest 4-5 objectives.
BTW, just fyi, but 5 flyrants vs a wraithknight:
60 shots, 53 hits, 9 wounds, 3 unsaved wounds a turn. While it is inefficient, 5 flyrants can kill 1 knight in 2 turns, and that doesn't include the use of psychic powers like Warp Blast or Psychic Scream.
PS - BTW, I myself run mechdar with 2 WK's. I am well aware of their strengths and their weaknesses.
jy2 wrote: Then you go into the realm where winning isn't determined by the player but rather, by the objectives he draws.
1. Hold your objective (Easily achieved under virtually any circumstances)
2. Hold their objective (Very unlikely to be achieved)
3. Kill a unit (Easily achieved, unless against Deathstars)
4. Kill a unit (Easily achieved, unless against Deathstars)
5. 1 unit in their deployment zone (Easily achieved)
6. 3 of your units in your deployment zone/none of theirs (Highly dependent on matchup/other Maelstrom rolls)
Every game basically came down to who rolled the least 2's (or 1's, depending on which player was which) and 6's. Meanwhile, the huge preponderance of "kill a unit" was an enormous boon to deathstar armies, which is one of the things a Maelstrom format is supposed to mitigate--again, my personal opinion is that the missions completely missed the boat on what Maelstrom is supposed to accomplish competitively, and instead just became LOL RANDOM MISSIONS with no real strategic bearing on the outcome.
I think the BAO Maelstrom was designed by saying "How do we incooperate Maelstrom in a way that doesn't force gunline armies to change much?" Just like 11th Company built missions favoring MSU, and Sean's MSU Tyranid build won, BAO has built missions favoring gunline, and BigPig is out there with a very successful tyranid gunline that he calls the "Trapdoor spider".
Personally, I don't favor gunline because it discourages army engagement, and thus makes the game less fun. So, if I were to redesign BAO, I would make 4 changes.
1) Make Maelstrom Primary, and Eternal War Secondary.
2) Roll for and score objectives on the player turn not game turn.
3) Change the objective placement rules so that objectives are placed in No-Man's-Land (And most objectives have 2 copies)
4) Create a 11th companyesk list of tertiary objectives that players can pick from. (First Blood, Line Breaker, Moment of Carnage, Warlord, Last Laugh)
My modified BAO would favor armies able to compete in all phases of the game. A more run-and-gun style with much more army engagement, because those are the games I find more fun. That doesn't make me right, though.
First of all, thanks for your BatReps.
It's a great pleassure to follow those.
I cannot find much BatReps against Astra Militarum.
Is this because that no people play AM locally where you play, or don't you (and others locally) think that AM is that competative?
z3bb3 wrote: First of all, thanks for your BatReps.
It's a great pleassure to follow those.
I cannot find much BatReps against Astra Militarum.
Is this because that no people play AM locally where you play, or don't you (and others locally) think that AM is that competative?
Seconded, great batreps. Always a pleasure to read. Would like to ask the same question in regards to Orks
jy2 wrote: Normally, in such a matchup, I just ignore the WK's and focus on killing everything else. It's similar in concept to ignoring deathstar units and going after the rest of the army. The difference is that, at the end of the game, after we've all killed each other's support units, the Eldar player will have 2 (or 3) knights that can take 2 or 3 objectives, whereas my Tyranid list will have 4-5 flyrants which can take/contest 4-5 objectives.
That wins you missions 4-6, and only if the game ends on 5. If it goes on to 6, the Wraith Knights can kill your landed flyrants.
jy2 wrote: BTW, just fyi, but 5 flyrants vs a wraithknight:
60 shots, 53 hits, 9 wounds, 3 unsaved wounds a turn. While it is inefficient, 5 flyrants can kill 1 knight in 2 turns, and that doesn't include the use of psychic powers like Warp Blast or Psychic Scream.
Yep, I've gunned down Wraith Knights with Flyrants + Dakkafexes, but as you say, it isn't efficient, plus you've got other fish to fry in the form of serpents.
jy2 wrote: PS - BTW, I myself run mechdar with 2 WK's. I am well aware of their strengths and their weaknesses.
I have no doubt that you know more about Eldar than me, and likely more than my buddy who runs the list I posted.
z3bb3 wrote: First of all, thanks for your BatReps.
It's a great pleassure to follow those.
I cannot find much BatReps against Astra Militarum.
Is this because that no people play AM locally where you play, or don't you (and others locally) think that AM is that competative?
Seconded, great batreps. Always a pleasure to read. Would like to ask the same question in regards to Orks
Thanks, guys.
Unfortunately, and I don't know why, but there is a shortage of AM and Ork players in our area. There are even fewer competitive Ork/AM players in my locale. Probably the best ork/AM player in my vicinity is Reece the man himself, but he is always so busy that he doesn't really play all that much anymore.
jy2 wrote: BTW, just fyi, but 5 flyrants vs a wraithknight:
60 shots, 53 hits, 9 wounds, 3 unsaved wounds a turn. While it is inefficient, 5 flyrants can kill 1 knight in 2 turns, and that doesn't include the use of psychic powers like Warp Blast or Psychic Scream.
Yep, I've gunned down Wraith Knights with Flyrants + Dakkafexes, but as you say, it isn't efficient, plus you've got other fish to fry in the form of serpents.
Yeah, that should be a last-resort tactic, as the WK's are no threat to flyrants in the air. Kill everything else before you turn on the knights.
Unfortunately, and I don't know why, but there is a shortage of AM and Ork players in our area. There are even fewer competitive Ork/AM players in my locale. Probably the best ork/AM player in my vicinity is Reece the man himself, but he is always so busy that he doesn't really play all that much anymore.
Dozer Blades wrote: The list can be beat but you've got to know what you're doing and there has to be a fair amount of LoS blocking terrain. Forget about the psychic phase versus five Flyrants. I think Necrons could give it a run for the money.
How does LoS blocking terrain help against Flyrants? They have an 18" gun and a flamer and they're a FMC. If anything it helps them so you can hide them more on turn 1 when they're on the ground.
I think Jim nailed it in the first post. List tailoring Tau and av13 tesla spam Necrons are the only things they wouldn't stand a good chance.
I'd like to see this list perform in an ETC format mission where you have 1 book eternal war mission + 1 book maelstrom mission + KP differential. It's a little more balanced because you add up the total VPs scored by each player in every mission and then do a comparison, so an army like Pentyrant can't let his opponent run away with Maelstorm because he won't necessarily be able to make up the ground with primary points unlike BAO's fixed values.
jy2 wrote: One thing I like about the BAO modified Maelstrom missions is that they are more generic and thus, more fair.
While they are more generic, it does not follow that they are more fair. What does follow is this: It is easier to ignore them, both in list-building and in play. Build a list that denies First Blood, makes Slay the Warlord difficult (Chapter Master on a Bike with the Shield Eternal and Artificer Armor, for example), and focus entirely on the Primary (or on tabling your opponents). Profit.
AdeptiCon Maelstrom (current iteration can be found at: http://adepticon.org/wpfiles/2015/201540Ktocards.pdf), and the missions being designed around their implementation, shift the focus of list-building away from preparing for the known to preparing for the unknown. If you refuse to build a list that is tactically flexible, you will likely conclude that you lost because you didn't get the 'right' cards. If you build a tactically flexible list, you will having scoring opportunities, and decisions to make, on every turn. This introduces a dynamic tension to the game from Turn 1.
When playing Eternal War missions (with or without a quasi-maelstrom Secondary), a player only needs to consider the mission on turns 4 and 5 (assuming enough mobility to get units to where they are needed, otherwise they have to start planning earlier). The first three turns are dedicated almost solely to attempting to remove opposing units with high threat levels and/or preserving your own units from Deathstars. When playing AdeptiCon Maelstrom (which I have, both in tournament and casual play), a player has to BOTH attempt to remove opposing units/preserve their own AND decide how to achieve tactical objectives while exposing their own units to the least amount of risk. Example: In a tournament game, I drew a card that would reward 2 points. However, in order to get it, I had to sacrifice shooting a Wave Serpent and instead send it flat-out to secure that objective. I did, earned the two points, and lost the serpent (over-extended and without nearby support). However, because I was willing to risk (and aren't tournament players risk-averse?) losing a valuable asset in exchange for achieving a tactical objective, I won that game...by 2 points.
PanzerLeader wrote: I'd like to see this list perform in an ETC format mission where you have 1 book eternal war mission + 1 book maelstrom mission + KP differential. It's a little more balanced because you add up the total VPs scored by each player in every mission and then do a comparison, so an army like Pentyrant can't let his opponent run away with Maelstorm because he won't necessarily be able to make up the ground with primary points unlike BAO's fixed values.
I like that concept. Is each mission its own separate category or do you combine the VP's from all 3 missions? For example, the ATC ran all 3 missions simultaneously but each mission was separate (and each mission was worth 8-pts). So if you win in KP's, you get 8-pts. The other method I am talking about is to just total up all the VP's accumulated, so if you get 10-KP's, 3 objectives (worth 3VP's each) and 7 Maelstrom VP's, it would total out to 26 VP's.
In terms of its performance, I have no doubt that it can dominate in such a format just as it could dominate in the BAO format. It is a solid enough TAC to be able to do well in ANY format.
jy2 wrote: One thing I like about the BAO modified Maelstrom missions is that they are more generic and thus, more fair.
While they are more generic, it does not follow that they are more fair. What does follow is this: It is easier to ignore them, both in list-building and in play. Build a list that denies First Blood, makes Slay the Warlord difficult (Chapter Master on a Bike with the Shield Eternal and Artificer Armor, for example), and focus entirely on the Primary (or on tabling your opponents). Profit.
AdeptiCon Maelstrom (current iteration can be found at: http://adepticon.org/wpfiles/2015/201540Ktocards.pdf), and the missions being designed around their implementation, shift the focus of list-building away from preparing for the known to preparing for the unknown. If you refuse to build a list that is tactically flexible, you will likely conclude that you lost because you didn't get the 'right' cards. If you build a tactically flexible list, you will having scoring opportunities, and decisions to make, on every turn. This introduces a dynamic tension to the game from Turn 1.
When playing Eternal War missions (with or without a quasi-maelstrom Secondary), a player only needs to consider the mission on turns 4 and 5 (assuming enough mobility to get units to where they are needed, otherwise they have to start planning earlier). The first three turns are dedicated almost solely to attempting to remove opposing units with high threat levels and/or preserving your own units from Deathstars. When playing AdeptiCon Maelstrom (which I have, both in tournament and casual play), a player has to BOTH attempt to remove opposing units/preserve their own AND decide how to achieve tactical objectives while exposing their own units to the least amount of risk. Example: In a tournament game, I drew a card that would reward 2 points. However, in order to get it, I had to sacrifice shooting a Wave Serpent and instead send it flat-out to secure that objective. I did, earned the two points, and lost the serpent (over-extended and without nearby support). However, because I was willing to risk (and aren't tournament players risk-averse?) losing a valuable asset in exchange for achieving a tactical objective, I won that game...by 2 points.
A beatstick, uber HQ (especially one you can hide in a unit) is hard to achieve Warlord from no matter the format. With a more generic Maelstrom format (i.e. kill a unit), you can just ignore him and try to kill another unit instead. However, in a more specific Maelstrom format (i.e. kill the enemy Warlord or kill a character in a challenge), then it becomes much harder and more unfair, especially to armies with no cc-capability at all. See the difference there? More generic missions = easier to achieve by everyone. More specific missions = harder to achieve for some armies and against some builds. Thus, the more general the missions are, the fairer they are as well.
BTW, I don't follow why you think it is easier to ignore more generic Maelstrom objectives. They are easier to achieve than more specific ones. Why would you want to ignore them?
You may like the format of Adepticon, but that doesn't necessarily make it better. It just makes it....different. However, both formats do require tactical flexibility. Adepticon may require that flexibility because you don't know what your objective is. BAO requires flexibility because with each round, the mission changes and so does your opponent. Moreover, just the presence of Maelstrom-type missions means that it is always better to build a more tactically flexible list than just a brute-force, 1-dimensional list.
I think the BAO Maelstrom was designed by saying "How do we incooperate Maelstrom in a way that doesn't force gunline armies to change much?" Just like 11th Company built missions favoring MSU, and Sean's MSU Tyranid build won, BAO has built missions favoring gunline, and BigPig is out there with a very successful tyranid gunline that he calls the "Trapdoor spider".
Personally, I don't favor gunline because it discourages army engagement, and thus makes the game less fun. So, if I were to redesign BAO, I would make 4 changes.
1) Make Maelstrom Primary, and Eternal War Secondary.
2) Roll for and score objectives on the player turn not game turn.
3) Change the objective placement rules so that objectives are placed in No-Man's-Land (And most objectives have 2 copies)
4) Create a 11th companyesk list of tertiary objectives that players can pick from. (First Blood, Line Breaker, Moment of Carnage, Warlord, Last Laugh)
My modified BAO would favor armies able to compete in all phases of the game. A more run-and-gun style with much more army engagement, because those are the games I find more fun. That doesn't make me right, though.
You couldn't be more wrong to think that the BAO format favors the gunline. You NEED mobility to play the BAO format. None of the top armies were gunlines and none of the pure gunlines armies did well. Even the Tau army that came out 4th was a mobile one, with riptides and firewarriors in devilfish.
Dozer Blades wrote: I played a couple games this week while up north with my BikeStar versus this build - won both games. Not easy but not super hard either.
I would be interested to hear more about it. You should do a batrep or a summary of the game, either here or in your own thread. I'm sure people would be interested to hear how you dealt with such a list.
@jy2: It's cumulative for all three. So you score your eternal war and maelstorm missions as normal and then you do the KP difference up to a maximum of 8, I.e. If you scored 11 KP and I scored 5 KP, you'd get a bonus 6 VP. Once each player has their total score, you compare them to see how many total BPs you score. It's very balanced and the open values for scoring make it much harder for massacres between equally skilled opponents.
Great report as always, buddy. Gah, that list is dirty!
@tag83
No, we did not design the missions with gunline armies in mind. If anything, they are bad for gunlines as they force you to move to get points.
The "Trapdoor Spider" list that BigPig and iNcontoL play are not Gunlines (perhaps we define them differently). They are actually really mobile armies that move all over the table. A Gunline tends to be very static. Also, neither of those players has won a GT in our format, although they have both done very well.
Long and short of it, we did not design the missions to favor static armies at all, although your perspective on it may alter your experience.
@DJ3
Don't forget, each Maelstrom Mission table in the BAO format is different. They are not all the same.
The reason we built them that way is so that they complimented the primary missions, but didn't overlap with them. Some of the missions are actually really hard to write a maelstrom mission table for that is fair for all armies (don't include unattainable missions), and even for both players with the given deployment.
It's actually really difficult to come up with a variety of maelstrom missions that fit all the parameters. However, we have overwhelmingly positive feedback on the missions after our events, so I know we are on the right track.
As for having maelstroms as primary to mix it up, that is something we have considered. But, we have not implemented it yet as maelstrom missions were not very popular for tournament play when they first came out. Players have warmed up to them now, so they are more open minded to having them as the primary win condition if they are fair (IE, not the versions in the book).
No, we did not design the missions with gunline armies in mind. If anything, they are bad for gunlines as they force you to move to get points.
The "Trapdoor Spider" list that BigPig and iNcontoL play are not Gunlines (perhaps we define them differently). They are actually really mobile armies that move all over the table. A Gunline tends to be very static. Also, neither of those players has won a GT in our format, although they have both done very well.
Long and short of it, we did not design the missions to favor static armies at all, although your perspective on it may alter your experience.
I shouldn't have used the term gunline, as I've sparked a semantic argument. I am hesitant to put a name to it lest we get mired into another debate on what does or doesn't qualify. Suffice to say the changes I would make (Maelstrom primary, Objectives placed in no-mans-land, scoring on player turn instead of game turn, Pick 3 of 6 tertiary goals), would draw armies to have a more significant mid-board presence, and not be so stand-offish, and engage more fully like they do in Maelstrom based missions. So a fleet of nothing but Tyrants might be a less balanced list than an army with a greater diversity of units.
No, we did not design the missions with gunline armies in mind. If anything, they are bad for gunlines as they force you to move to get points.
The "Trapdoor Spider" list that BigPig and iNcontoL play are not Gunlines (perhaps we define them differently). They are actually really mobile armies that move all over the table. A Gunline tends to be very static. Also, neither of those players has won a GT in our format, although they have both done very well.
Long and short of it, we did not design the missions to favor static armies at all, although your perspective on it may alter your experience.
I shouldn't have used the term gunline, as I've sparked a semantic argument. I am hesitant to put a name to it lest we get mired into another debate on what does or doesn't qualify. Suffice to say the changes I would make (Maelstrom primary, Objectives placed in no-mans-land, scoring on player turn instead of game turn, Pick 3 of 6 tertiary goals), would draw armies to have a more significant mid-board presence, and not be so stand-offish, and engage more fully like they do in Maelstrom based missions. So a fleet of nothing but Tyrants might be a less balanced list than an army with a greater diversity of units.
I like these ideas a lot. I think it's about time all formats make alternate tertiaries. It's actually crazy to me that people still run just First Blood, LB and WL since they are SO hard for some lists to get, against deathstars you can expect to never get FB or WL and probably tie on linebreaker at best.... Just not acceptable IMHO.
Those subtle tweaks make these extreme list much less powerful. It's actually a very enlightening exercise just to see how missions can be used to bring a smidgeon of sanity back to army composition.
Mission design is hugely important, I agree. That is why we play-test ours to death.
It's funny, the number 1 complaint about the way we score our Maelstrom missions is scoring at the bottom of the turn and the stated reason is the perception that the player going second has the advantage when in reality, our data shows that the player going first wins 4% more of the time.
That said, an only 4% varience is pretty awesome. It means you have a roughly equal chance of victory with our missions going first or second.
Having Maelstrom as primary is not a bad idea, but, again in our format Primary is 4pts, secondary is 3pts. They are really close in value (intentionally) so swapping them in all likelihood won't dramatically change the lists we see. For example, the Flyrant list would probably still obliterate most folks regardless.
@Red Corsair
What would you suggest as changes? Coming up with fair options is actually quite a challenge. You point out the inequities of the book tertiary missions, and I agree with a lot of them, but try and write some that are universally fair. You can't. In a game where all the armies are intentionally different, a static win condition will impact them all differently and therefore be more or less fair depending on the army played. It's the price we pay for variety in the game.
Plus, we try to stay as close to the book as possible for a few reasons.
Folks don't have to think about it. Overly complex missions that alternate from the book confuse players. While they are trying to focus on playing the game, they forget new or wonky alternate objectives as they are used to FB, StW and LB. Those sort of fade into the background of the mind as you have done it so many times. Are they perfectly balanced? No, but they are second nature.
IMO, the best thing we could do to make the game more fair would be to drop the IGO/UGO format and implement alternate unit activation. It is inherently more fair. However, in a game as complex as 40k, with as many units as we use, that would be tough to do.
Great report as always, buddy. Gah, that list is dirty!
Yeah, it sure is.
It is to this edition what the seer council was to previous edition (before the changes to the Psychic phase with warp dice). A lot of people are going to hate it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it gets nerfed in the future, along with re-rollable 2+ and Invisibility.
I shouldn't have used the term gunline, as I've sparked a semantic argument. I am hesitant to put a name to it lest we get mired into another debate on what does or doesn't qualify. Suffice to say the changes I would make (Maelstrom primary, Objectives placed in no-mans-land, scoring on player turn instead of game turn, Pick 3 of 6 tertiary goals), would draw armies to have a more significant mid-board presence, and not be so stand-offish, and engage more fully like they do in Maelstrom based missions. So a fleet of nothing but Tyrants might be a less balanced list than an army with a greater diversity of units.
With regards to placing objectives in the center, that is a very unbalanced scenario. First of all, how will you play missions such as the Scouring (with 6 objectives) or Emperor's Will? Secondly, objectives in NML's will create a huge imbalance as it will greatly benefit the more aggressive armies (such as MTO armies). As if deathstars, daemon summoning armies, TWC space wolves or MTO tyranids need such an advantage. Board control armies will have an inherent advantage in such a case.
I know you want to discourage people playing a static gunline type of armies, but that is not the way to do it.
Personally I dont think Maelstrom will ever be perfect. This is how I think it should be done:
4 Objectives random placement.
Turn 1. No pts possible
Turn 2. 1pt possible for ea of the following: killing a unit. Controlling more obj than your opponent. Acheiving lb while not allowing lb.
And continue with that till game end.
Secondaries are
First Turn blood. Kill a unit first turn, both armies are able to achieve.
Linebreaker.
Marked for death. Pick a unit or char n kill it.
Then the secondary is who controls more obj at games end.
One good thing is that you can use the BAO only as a foundation and then build upon that. TO's can just use the BAO as a basis and modify it from there. Just make sure you do a lot of playtesting for balance reasons and to fine-tune the scenarios.
jy2 wrote: With regards to placing objectives in the center, that is a very unbalanced scenario. First of all, how will you play missions such as the Scouring (with 6 objectives) or Emperor's Will? Secondly, objectives in NML's will create a huge imbalance as it will greatly benefit the more aggressive armies (such as MTO armies). As if deathstars, daemon summoning armies, TWC space wolves or MTO tyranids need such an advantage. Board control armies will have an inherent advantage in such a case.
I know you want to discourage people playing a static gunline type of armies, but that is not the way to do it.
Important to note, I'm only suggesting this for Maelstrom objectives. Not Eternal War Objectives. Most of the BAO missions only have 2 of them (or 4, but 2 are duplicates, which I like very much). Board control armies should have an advantage in Maelstrom to make up for their disadvantage in Eternal War.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Reecius wrote: Mission design is hugely important, I agree. That is why we play-test ours to death.
It's funny, the number 1 complaint about the way we score our Maelstrom missions is scoring at the bottom of the turn and the stated reason is the perception that the player going second has the advantage when in reality, our data shows that the player going first wins 4% more of the time.
That said, an only 4% varience is pretty awesome. It means you have a roughly equal chance of victory with our missions going first or second.
Having Maelstrom as primary is not a bad idea, but, again in our format Primary is 4pts, secondary is 3pts. They are really close in value (intentionally) so swapping them in all likelihood won't dramatically change the lists we see. For example, the Flyrant list would probably still obliterate most folks regardless.
I like Data too. Database analysis is my job. What does your data show about the percentage of wins where the player won the secondary, but not the primary? Because my data shows that 92.5% of winners won the primary in my little RTT. Its a much smaller sample size. 18 players for a total of 27 games, but only 2 of them were decided based on secondary, and those 2 were both a draw on primary.
How about first blood. 85.2% of players who got first blood won their games in my little RTT. Just 4 games went to the player who lost 1st blood. Lists built for Eternal War and 1st Blood utterly dominated.
I'm not comfortable with those numbers. Not comfortable at all. Advantages of going 1st like 1st blood might offset, the advantages of going second and being able to score or deny objectives, but offsetting isn't fun, and fun is far more important.
Reecius wrote: Mission design is hugely important, I agree. That is why we play-test ours to death.
It's funny, the number 1 complaint about the way we score our Maelstrom missions is scoring at the bottom of the turn and the stated reason is the perception that the player going second has the advantage when in reality, our data shows that the player going first wins 4% more of the time.
That said, an only 4% varience is pretty awesome. It means you have a roughly equal chance of victory with our missions going first or second.
Having Maelstrom as primary is not a bad idea, but, again in our format Primary is 4pts, secondary is 3pts. They are really close in value (intentionally) so swapping them in all likelihood won't dramatically change the lists we see. For example, the Flyrant list would probably still obliterate most folks regardless.
@Red Corsair
What would you suggest as changes? Coming up with fair options is actually quite a challenge. You point out the inequities of the book tertiary missions, and I agree with a lot of them, but try and write some that are universally fair. You can't. In a game where all the armies are intentionally different, a static win condition will impact them all differently and therefore be more or less fair depending on the army played. It's the price we pay for variety in the game.
Plus, we try to stay as close to the book as possible for a few reasons.
Folks don't have to think about it. Overly complex missions that alternate from the book confuse players. While they are trying to focus on playing the game, they forget new or wonky alternate objectives as they are used to FB, StW and LB. Those sort of fade into the background of the mind as you have done it so many times. Are they perfectly balanced? No, but they are second nature.
IMO, the best thing we could do to make the game more fair would be to drop the IGO/UGO format and implement alternate unit activation. It is inherently more fair. However, in a game as complex as 40k, with as many units as we use, that would be tough to do.
Table quarters as a tertiary would be fair and not that difficult to figure out. It's really not that hard, especially when other tournaments have created several. Though I don't think they are all great, many like last laugh are no more imbalanced then first blood. They don't all need to be perfect as long as there is a list to choose from so its harder for players to tailor to. The current three are all beneficial to deathstars, thats kind of lame as a tertiary. Adding even 2 to 3 more that benefit table control evens things out.
I also disagree that players will be confused by added tertiaries, I mean you guys have had to do videos explaining your mission format and told people to practice them so they are familiar with the way its scored. Adding a few more tertiary options isn't going to confuse anyone, and if they don't like them the normal three options are there.
In regards to the way 40k plays, I agree with you 100% which is also why I am not expecting or blaming you for the inequities of 40k. Your a smart guy and you do a stand up job! I love problem solving and because you guys format is a great package, it's honestly the best starting point. I don't think there will ever be a perfect mission package but the moment we stop striving to improve is the moment we should give up. Your missions are the same since the BAO, surely there are improvements that can be made is all I am suggesting.
In regard to the 4% variation, I don't know how you determined that so it's kind of a pointless statistic honestly. I mean, how do you account for the difference in codex creep or even generalship? 40k has way to many variables to suggest your method for scoring maelstrom is accounting for it. That doesn't mean scouring maelstrom by player turn would be worse. It would be interesting to poll your attendees on the missions and list some possible changes. Do it as an exit poll at the very least.
Again I don't want to sound like a backseat driver, it is just a damned shame the missions haven't evolved since last.
Can I inquire as to why you guys decided to score the maelstrom missions at the bottom of the turn?
It would be interesting to poll your attendees on the missions and list some possible changes. Do it as an exit poll at the very least.
Again I don't want to sound like a backseat driver, it is just a damned shame the missions haven't evolved since last.
Can I inquire as to why you guys decided to score the maelstrom missions at the bottom of the turn?
Corsair, I've got to ask you....why? What is your justification for them to change their mission format? Why is it a "damned shame" that the missions haven't evolved? Now why should they change a highly successful format so that it fits more idealistically into how you feel the tournament should be?
Their attendance is off the charts. Completely sold out and with a waiting list.
Their BAO format is borrowed and duplicated by a lot of tournaments.
Their customers aren't complaining. As a matter of fact, most of them like their format.
These guys are super-busy, both with retail work as well as spending time on all the different forums, social media and their own blog/website online. Why add extra work to their already busy workload when it isn't really necessary?
You can't please everyone. The moment you make changes, people will complain about something else. Simple = better. The more you add to your format, the more people will gripe about it. Why do you want to create all that extra work? Playtesting, defending your changes to naysayers, then making those changes, more playtesting and then defending your changes again?
I can see that changes may be necessary if attendance is down and sales are sagging. That is when you really need to look into your format and consider making changes. But for now, I really don't see the justification to do so.
Instead of asking them to make changes, I think it would be more productive - if you are really serious about wanting them to change - to do either of these 2 things:
1. Write up how you think their formats should change and why it would be better for them to do so. Be as detailed with it as possible, including all the changes you think they should incorporate into their format (and in detail!) and then submit it to them.
2. Open up an open forum on this or another gaming forum site. You can title it something like "How to improve on the BAO format" or something like that. Then direct their attention to it. That is almost like an open petition. If they see that a lot of people wanting changes in their format, then they are more likely to do something about it. However, if not a lot of people are posting there, then sorry my friend, you are one of the true minorities who feel that there should be any changes to the BAO format.
Red Corsair wrote: In regard to the 4% variation, I don't know how you determined that so it's kind of a pointless statistic honestly. I mean, how do you account for the difference in codex creep or even generalship? 40k has way to many variables to suggest your method for scoring maelstrom is accounting for it. That doesn't mean scouring maelstrom by player turn would be worse. It would be interesting to poll your attendees on the missions and list some possible changes. Do it as an exit poll at the very least.
Again I don't want to sound like a backseat driver, it is just a damned shame the missions haven't evolved since last.
Can I inquire as to why you guys decided to score the maelstrom missions at the bottom of the turn?
He is saying that if players scored on the player turn instead of the game turn, then the advantage of going 1st would be too significant. The fact that there is a 4% variance means that there are roughly as many advantages to going first as there are to going second. It has nothing to do with generalship or codex creep, because the same armies went both 1st and 2nd, and thus had a chance to alter the statistics on both sides. The only skew to the data would be the small percentage of armies that had a bonus to seize the initiative.
They accomplished this by giving advantages to going first (First Blood, Alpha Striking), and advantages to going 2nd (Objective scoring).
There is an argument to be made that the statistics have questionable value because of the self-selecting generals and armies that attend. For instance, my local meta runs mainly Maelstrom missions. We have many players who have crafted a very powerful list that is excellent at Maelstrom missions. But, the vast majority of those players changed up their lists for our BAO format tournament. They switched from a board control, tactically flexible list to either gunline, deathstar, or the type of list that I was previously grouping in with gunline, but doesn't fit that definition because it is highly mobile. Lists that were more based on pregame strategy, and tended to be less tactically flexible. Overall, I think this is mainly an asterisk on the variance, and does basically nothing to discredit it.
I prefer a tactically fluid game where superior gameplay overcomes bad matchups and pregame strategy. Maelstrom lends itself to this. Eternal War, First Blood, Objectives in deployment zones, and end of game turn scoring, and even warlord all trend toward a game where a greater emphasis is placed on pregame strategy, and a lesser emphasis on Tactical gameplay. I don't like this because if I travel 1,000 miles to attend an event, I want my player skill to matter more than my matchups. Missions alone cannot fix this, but they can definitely improve it.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
jy2 wrote: Corsair, I've got to ask you....why? What is your justification for them to change their mission format? Why is it a "damned shame" that the missions haven't evolved? Now why should they change a highly successful format so that it fits more idealistically into how you feel the tournament should be?
...
Interesting point. One that I often take for granted. From a business perspective, the reasoning is pretty weak. Basically, they are the market leader (40k Tournaments), and so they need to continue innovating to maintain their competitive edge. But as you say, they are well loved, and not in danger of losing ground any time soon.
However, from a wider 40k perspective, there are great reasons to change it up. BAO has awesome missions. Some of the best out there. But they fall into the category of Rock-Paper-40k too much. Matchups are destiny, and not because of the players, but because of the lists. It is my opinion that the easiest way to improve this is with a fix to the FOC. Some subtle changes like the 2+ reroll or the potential invis nerf help as well, but missions can help too. It is our desire for a game that is meaningfully competitive based on player skill and not pre-game list building, and lucky match-ups. You simply can't do that with so much emphasis on one time non-selective preset scoring opportunities. Furthermore, missions based on non-selective preset scoring opportunities become less fun the more you play them. More dynamic missions have more longevity, and a better fun factor. I can play one list vs an opponents list 3 times without altering either lists in a specific BAO mission, and after that there is generally no more fun to be had unless you change the mission, or the lists. I can play a Maelstrom mission with the same 2 lists many, many times and still have fun. Because FLG represents innovators, the best hope of players like me for the future of 40k is that we find a way to introduce more dynamism into their missions, and by doing so start to heal the gap between competitive players, and non-competitive players. So suffice to say, I believe that the missions can be made both more competitive and more fun. As Awesome as they are, there is still room for improvement. Maybe that improvement will start at my little RTTs or at some other GT, but if I had to place a bet, it would be that improvement comes out of the FLG group.
Hive Fleet Detachment is a 40k approved Detachment from a tyranid supplement (Leviathan). Both are just as legal as the formations and detachments in any other codex or supplement. What it comes down to these days is what TO's allow and ban in their events -- GW has taken a stance in 7th that everything is prettymuch "legal play".
The Adamantine Lance is a formation from the Sanctus Reach campaign supplement ('The Red Waaagh'). The Hive Fleet detachment is from the Shield of Baal campaign supplement, which, while containing formations for Tyranid, is not a codex supplement. So while, yes, they are approved, they are not sourced from codex supplements, codex formations, or codex detachments. They are sourced from campaign supplements.
This provides a clear distinction that can be used (whether or not it should is another discussion) to differentiate between what is, and is not allowed in tournament play.
It would be interesting to poll your attendees on the missions and list some possible changes. Do it as an exit poll at the very least.
Again I don't want to sound like a backseat driver, it is just a damned shame the missions haven't evolved since last.
Can I inquire as to why you guys decided to score the maelstrom missions at the bottom of the turn?
Corsair, I've got to ask you....why? What is your justification for them to change their mission format? Why is it a "damned shame" that the missions haven't evolved? Now why should they change a highly successful format so that it fits more idealistically into how you feel the tournament should be?
Their attendance is off the charts. Completely sold out and with a waiting list.
Their BAO format is borrowed and duplicated by a lot of tournaments.
Their customers aren't complaining. As a matter of fact, most of them like their format.
These guys are super-busy, both with retail work as well as spending time on all the different forums, social media and their own blog/website online. Why add extra work to their already busy workload when it isn't really necessary?
You can't please everyone. The moment you make changes, people will complain about something else. Simple = better. The more you add to your format, the more people will gripe about it. Why do you want to create all that extra work? Playtesting, defending your changes to naysayers, then making those changes, more playtesting and then defending your changes again?
I can see that changes may be necessary if attendance is down and sales are sagging. That is when you really need to look into your format and consider making changes. But for now, I really don't see the justification to do so.
Instead of asking them to make changes, I think it would be more productive - if you are really serious about wanting them to change - to do either of these 2 things:
1. Write up how you think their formats should change and why it would be better for them to do so. Be as detailed with it as possible, including all the changes you think they should incorporate into their format (and in detail!) and then submit it to them.
2. Open up an open forum on this or another gaming forum site. You can title it something like "How to improve on the BAO format" or something like that. Then direct their attention to it. That is almost like an open petition. If they see that a lot of people wanting changes in their format, then they are more likely to do something about it. However, if not a lot of people are posting there, then sorry my friend, you are one of the true minorities who feel that there should be any changes to the BAO format.
I think your taking it the wrong way. I tried to spell out that I think they have the better format of the Bigger tournaments. That said, it doesn't mean it can't be improved. You had suggestions yourself, so yea I feel it is a damned shame when something is close to the best it can be but stops.
Saying damned shame is a bit dramatic of me I admit, it happens when you accidentally drank that 2nd late and are up way past your bed time
The only main suggestions I had were alternating the primary and secondary and scoring maelstrom the way it is intended. Note, they changed the scoring to both players at the bottom and I am not sure why since tournaments are notorious for having time issues and giving an edge to the player going second. I still don't understand that one and when I ask for their reasoning it's not being mean I am genuinely baffled and want to understand.
Beyond that and even without those changes its a solid format.
However with that said, the only reason why I brought up the missions to begin with is because of the list you played in this thread. You sold it as nearly unbeatable and while I agree it is an annoying list it very much games the BAO format to reach that level. If your going to run a disclaimer and boast about a lists strengths you need to be prepared to have an open discussion as to why it is so strong. That means missions fall under the scrutiny first and foremost.
Their attendance is awesome and clearly they don't have to change a thing, your right on that note. That said, if you make a list that is almost unbeatable using their format then congratulations, you found the holes in the format and just proved it isn't tight anymore. There will always be strong armies but missions should serve to level the field as much as possible.
Hey, maybe we are both wrong though and you lose your first match
Sorry, I can joke because we both know it isn't likely I hope I didn't jinx you though or I will feel bad
PS: As for starting a thread, I actually have been tempted to in the past but I didn't want to step on Reece toes and open up a troll farm Any debate here should pertain to the why your list is as strong as it is, which again is why I even mentioned the BAO (your playing their missions)
Red Corsair wrote: In regard to the 4% variation, I don't know how you determined that so it's kind of a pointless statistic honestly. I mean, how do you account for the difference in codex creep or even generalship? 40k has way to many variables to suggest your method for scoring maelstrom is accounting for it. That doesn't mean scouring maelstrom by player turn would be worse. It would be interesting to poll your attendees on the missions and list some possible changes. Do it as an exit poll at the very least.
Again I don't want to sound like a backseat driver, it is just a damned shame the missions haven't evolved since last.
Can I inquire as to why you guys decided to score the maelstrom missions at the bottom of the turn?
He is saying that if players scored on the player turn instead of the game turn, then the advantage of going 1st would be too significant. The fact that there is a 4% variance means that there are roughly as many advantages to going first as there are to going second. It has nothing to do with generalship or codex creep, because the same armies went both 1st and 2nd, and thus had a chance to alter the statistics on both sides. The only skew to the data would be the small percentage of armies that had a bonus to seize the initiative.
They accomplished this by giving advantages to going first (First Blood, Alpha Striking), and advantages to going 2nd (Objective scoring).
There is an argument to be made that the statistics have questionable value because of the self-selecting generals and armies that attend. For instance, my local meta runs mainly Maelstrom missions. We have many players who have crafted a very powerful list that is excellent at Maelstrom missions. But, the vast majority of those players changed up their lists for our BAO format tournament. They switched from a board control, tactically flexible list to either gunline, deathstar, or the type of list that I was previously grouping in with gunline, but doesn't fit that definition because it is highly mobile. Lists that were more based on pregame strategy, and tended to be less tactically flexible. Overall, I think this is mainly an asterisk on the variance, and does basically nothing to discredit it.
I prefer a tactically fluid game where superior gameplay overcomes bad matchups and pregame strategy. Maelstrom lends itself to this. Eternal War, First Blood, Objectives in deployment zones, and end of game turn scoring, and even warlord all trend toward a game where a greater emphasis is placed on pregame strategy, and a lesser emphasis on Tactical gameplay. I don't like this because if I travel 1,000 miles to attend an event, I want my player skill to matter more than my matchups. Missions alone cannot fix this, but they can definitely improve it.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
jy2 wrote: Corsair, I've got to ask you....why? What is your justification for them to change their mission format? Why is it a "damned shame" that the missions haven't evolved? Now why should they change a highly successful format so that it fits more idealistically into how you feel the tournament should be?
...
Interesting point. One that I often take for granted. From a business perspective, the reasoning is pretty weak. Basically, they are the market leader (40k Tournaments), and so they need to continue innovating to maintain their competitive edge. But as you say, they are well loved, and not in danger of losing ground any time soon.
However, from a wider 40k perspective, there are great reasons to change it up. BAO has awesome missions. Some of the best out there. But they fall into the category of Rock-Paper-40k too much. Matchups are destiny, and not because of the players, but because of the lists. It is my opinion that the easiest way to improve this is with a fix to the FOC. Some subtle changes like the 2+ reroll or the potential invis nerf help as well, but missions can help too. It is our desire for a game that is meaningfully competitive based on player skill and not pre-game list building, and lucky match-ups. You simply can't do that with so much emphasis on one time non-selective preset scoring opportunities. Furthermore, missions based on non-selective preset scoring opportunities become less fun the more you play them. More dynamic missions have more longevity, and a better fun factor. I can play one list vs an opponents list 3 times without altering either lists in a specific BAO mission, and after that there is generally no more fun to be had unless you change the mission, or the lists. I can play a Maelstrom mission with the same 2 lists many, many times and still have fun. Because FLG represents innovators, the best hope of players like me for the future of 40k is that we find a way to introduce more dynamism into their missions, and by doing so start to heal the gap between competitive players, and non-competitive players. So suffice to say, I believe that the missions can be made both more competitive and more fun. As Awesome as they are, there is still room for improvement. Maybe that improvement will start at my little RTTs or at some other GT, but if I had to place a bet, it would be that improvement comes out of the FLG group.
And this is what happens when you don't scroll the page before posting.
+1
You managed everything I wanted to present and more! Well said on all accounts.
No offense taken, i appreciate the feedback. Just to illustrate the point I was making earlier, you mentioned Table Quarters as a good Tertiary win condition. The issue is that that overlaps with any other board control objective such as Linebreaker or taking an objective. If you have an objective in a table quarter, which they all are, you are already "taking table quarters" so to speak. They overlap and provide no new tactical choices to make.
I point this out not to put you down, but to show you how hard it is to actually write win conditions that don't overlap with what is already being done. And, why make a change just to make a change? It confuses players and often, as in this case, actually make the game LESS tactically flexible.
It is quite the challenge to write good missions. We're always seeking to improve though and do appreciate the feedback.
And our missions have been the way they are since the BAO, which was in July, it hasn't been that long =) That said, we are open to new ideas.
@Tag8833
Yeah, it sounds like your sample set was skewed perhaps? And it is really hard to make missions that are fun and fair for the two extremes of MSU and Deathstar 40k. I agree with you 100% that the game should be predominantly player skill and luck, but, the game quite simply isn't written with balance in mind. We're constantly trying to make the game as fun, fair and open as possible but the core product isn't meant for that, so we're fighting the tide a bit. It simply will not ever be balanced, we just try to get as close as we can to the mark.
DCannon4Life wrote: The Adamantine Lance is a formation from the Sanctus Reach campaign supplement ('The Red Waaagh'). The Hive Fleet detachment is from the Shield of Baal campaign supplement, which, while containing formations for Tyranid, is not a codex supplement. So while, yes, they are approved, they are not sourced from codex supplements, codex formations, or codex detachments. They are sourced from campaign supplements.
This provides a clear distinction that can be used (whether or not it should is another discussion) to differentiate between what is, and is not allowed in tournament play.
This was true originally; however Adamantine Lance was re-released as a standalone Dataslate as well, so there's really no way to restrict it at this point outside of just singling it out specifically.
Yeah, it sounds like your sample set was skewed perhaps? And it is really hard to make missions that are fun and fair for the two extremes of MSU and Deathstar 40k. I agree with you 100% that the game should be predominantly player skill and luck, but, the game quite simply isn't written with balance in mind. We're constantly trying to make the game as fun, fair and open as possible but the core product isn't meant for that, so we're fighting the tide a bit. It simply will not ever be balanced, we just try to get as close as we can to the mark.
Fair enough. I'm very gladdened to see that my data isn't representative. As I said the sample was crazy small, and 8 of our 18 players were in their first tourney, so I accept fully that a higher level of competition might have games decided more based on the secondary missions, and not so dependent on 1st Blood.
As for me. In my preparation for LVO, I'm working hard to construct a list that denies 1st blood, and wins the primary, even if the secondary is often going to be out of reach.
Your list will do very well. Well, I suppose any list built to the missions is giving you an advantage in any system, but if you can deny Warlord, don't give FB easily and can reliably get LB, you obviously have a strong advantage. It's one of the reasons Eldar do so well in most mission formats that use the book as a foundation.
Red Corsair wrote: I think your taking it the wrong way. I tried to spell out that I think they have the better format of the Bigger tournaments. That said, it doesn't mean it can't be improved. You had suggestions yourself, so yea I feel it is a damned shame when something is close to the best it can be but stops.
Saying damned shame is a bit dramatic of me I admit, it happens when you accidentally drank that 2nd late and are up way past your bed time
The only main suggestions I had were alternating the primary and secondary and scoring maelstrom the way it is intended. Note, they changed the scoring to both players at the bottom and I am not sure why since tournaments are notorious for having time issues and giving an edge to the player going second. I still don't understand that one and when I ask for their reasoning it's not being mean I am genuinely baffled and want to understand.
Beyond that and even without those changes its a solid format.
However with that said, the only reason why I brought up the missions to begin with is because of the list you played in this thread. You sold it as nearly unbeatable and while I agree it is an annoying list it very much games the BAO format to reach that level. If your going to run a disclaimer and boast about a lists strengths you need to be prepared to have an open discussion as to why it is so strong. That means missions fall under the scrutiny first and foremost.
Their attendance is awesome and clearly they don't have to change a thing, your right on that note. That said, if you make a list that is almost unbeatable using their format then congratulations, you found the holes in the format and just proved it isn't tight anymore. There will always be strong armies but missions should serve to level the field as much as possible.
Hey, maybe we are both wrong though and you lose your first match
Sorry, I can joke because we both know it isn't likely I hope I didn't jinx you though or I will feel bad
PS: As for starting a thread, I actually have been tempted to in the past but I didn't want to step on Reece toes and open up a troll farm Any debate here should pertain to the why your list is as strong as it is, which again is why I even mentioned the BAO (your playing their missions)
I keep wondering why people think that this type of list is strong just because of the BAO format....that this type of list is so powerful because it games the BAO format?
WAKE UP PEOPLE! This list is good against any tournament format. It is designed as a Take-All-Comer's to handle most armies and in more mission scenarios.
You think flyrants can take objectives at the end of the game only in the BAO format? Guess what? Other than pure Maelstrom missions, all tournament formats have objectives that armies going 2nd can always do a last-turn objective-grab/contest with.
Concerned about KP's? This semi-MSU list has only got 13 KP's total that the opponent can grab, and 5 of them are hard to get. The rest of them are mainly reserve-based to deny you the chance to try to get them, at least initially.
You think this type of list cannot compete in Maelstrom objectives? To that, I say baloney. It can take Maelstrom objectives, and the flyrants will protect the MSU elements of the list by taking out the opponent's ability to grab Maelstrom objectives as well.
If you think that the BAO format can by improved upon, that's fine. But don't think that it is only the BAO that this type of list can do well against. It has all the tools to do well under almost any tournament format.
BTW, I never claimed that this list is unbeatable. What I claimed is that this type of list is meta-changing. If you don't bring the tools to be able to deal with it, then most likely you won't be able to beat it.
As for me. In my preparation for LVO, I'm working hard to construct a list that denies 1st blood, and wins the primary, even if the secondary is often going to be out of reach.
Sounds like you are going towards more of a denial list, you know, kind of like my Pentyrant army here.
There's a reason why my Tyranid armies have shifted away from tervigons+termagants, dakkafexes and other such units and into ripper swarms, lictors and mawlocs. That's also a reason why OrdoSean's list is also based off of reserves units (lictors, mawlocs, genestealers). We are running more of a denial and highly mobile list with the ideas of First Blood denial, positional flexibility and also Maelstrom objectives.
Reecius wrote: Your list will do very well. Well, I suppose any list built to the missions is giving you an advantage in any system, but if you can deny Warlord, don't give FB easily and can reliably get LB, you obviously have a strong advantage. It's one of the reasons Eldar do so well in most mission formats that use the book as a foundation.
As for me. In my preparation for LVO, I'm working hard to construct a list that denies 1st blood, and wins the primary, even if the secondary is often going to be out of reach.
Sounds like you are going towards more of a denial list, you know, kind of like my Pentyrant army here.
There's a reason why my Tyranid armies have shifted away from tervigons+termagants, dakkafexes and other such units and into ripper swarms, lictors and mawlocs. That's also a reason why OrdoSean's list is also based off of reserves units (lictors, mawlocs, genestealers). We are running more of a denial and highly mobile list with the ideas of First Blood denial, positional flexibility and also Maelstrom objectives.
11th Company missions favored MSU. Last years Adepticon missions favored Kill point denial. It is my experience that BAO missions favor First Blood, and last turn objective stealing. That may not be born out by more complete data, but that is what I'm focusing on.
Change of topic.
I recently took quite a beating from a couple of blobby armies when I was bringing my A game (Barbed heirodule + 3 flyrants). I'm more eager to see 5 Flyrant vs Mechdar + Wraithknights, but I'm curious what you instincts tell you if you ran 5 flyrants against one of these lists, because their durability surprised me. If it weren't for the heirodule in assault, I would have fared much worse.
The conscripts sat on the skyshield for a 4++. Azreal joined the small blob for a 4++, and the psychers were split between the blobs, but mainly focussed on giving the big blob with Yarrik a 4++ via Forewarning.
The game started off bad with them seizing on me and first blooding my warlord thanks to orders (twin linking, Monster Hunter, and Ignore cover) on the big blob. Then the Wyvrens took 3 wounds off the Malanthrope. But eventually the Heirodule stomped Azreal to death, and then shot the other blob off of a 3 point objective for a possible turn 5 win.
2 Tractor Kannons (2 Ammo Runts)
2 Tractor Kannons (2 Ammo Runts)
2 Tractor Kannons (2 Ammo Runts)
I got very lucky with terrain, and was able to pin one squad of Tractor Kannons, Kill 1 and hide from the others, but the pinned one still clipped a flyrant, and took him to the ground on terrain 10" away from the green tide on the turn it charged the Heirodule. Later the Deff Koptas grounded a flyrant, and the green tide ate it. On turn 5 I landed the flyrants in charge range, but scoring enough objectives to win, but game went on. Heirodule ended up killing about 45 orks in assault thanks to paroxysm.
It was only the heirodules Toughness 8 and stomps in assault that kept me in the running in those two games. With 5 Flyrants would you have enough fire power to perform better?
I recently took quite a beating from a couple of blobby armies when I was bringing my A game (Barbed heirodule + 3 flyrants). I'm more eager to see 5 Flyrant vs Mechdar + Wraithknights, but I'm curious what you instincts tell you if you ran 5 flyrants against one of these lists, because their durability surprised me. If it weren't for the heirodule in assault, I would have fared much worse.
The conscripts sat on the skyshield for a 4++. Azreal joined the small blob for a 4++, and the psychers were split between the blobs, but mainly focussed on giving the big blob with Yarrik a 4++ via Forewarning.
The game started off bad with them seizing on me and first blooding my warlord thanks to orders (twin linking, Monster Hunter, and Ignore cover) on the big blob. Then the Wyvrens took 3 wounds off the Malanthrope. But eventually the Heirodule stomped Azreal to death, and then shot the other blob off of a 3 point objective for a possible turn 5 win.
This is in essence a deathstar army. Kill off all support units - wyverns, platoon command squads and any lone straggling units. Then focus on 1 blob at a time. I wouldn't worry too much about the conscripts. They are a static unit that just sits on an objective, just as your much cheaper rippers will sit on an objective. 3 flyrants might not have the firepower to do serious damage to the blob, but 5 will. 60 shots, 53 hits, 44 wounds, 22 dead guardsmen a turn even with 4++. The key is to kill off all the support units first, starting with the PCS and wyverns.
2 Tractor Kannons (2 Ammo Runts)
2 Tractor Kannons (2 Ammo Runts)
2 Tractor Kannons (2 Ammo Runts)
I got very lucky with terrain, and was able to pin one squad of Tractor Kannons, Kill 1 and hide from the others, but the pinned one still clipped a flyrant, and took him to the ground on terrain 10" away from the green tide on the turn it charged the Heirodule. Later the Deff Koptas grounded a flyrant, and the green tide ate it. On turn 5 I landed the flyrants in charge range, but scoring enough objectives to win, but game went on. Heirodule ended up killing about 45 orks in assault thanks to paroxysm.
It was only the heirodules Toughness 8 and stomps in assault that kept me in the running in those two games. With 5 Flyrants would you have enough fire power to perform better?
Kill off the tractor kannons first. Don't worry about the tide....it's a deathstar and a Pentyrant list can easily deal with deathstars. Psychic powers here will be your friend and you will have a lot of it. Low LD is how you take advantage of them. Tractor Kannons are especially low (LD5). Psychic Scream, the Horror and Paroxysm here are your friends. After you deal with the kannons, it is almost cruise control there thereon.
BTW, 5 flyrants firing at boyz (assuming only 6+ armor because flyrants can usually get to the boys in the open and if they bunch up in cover, then it's egrubs time):
60 shots, 53 hits, 44 wounds, 37 Wounds or 37 dead boys a turn out in the open.
I don't see problems against either of these lists with a Pentyrant build.
I recently took quite a beating from a couple of blobby armies when I was bringing my A game (Barbed heirodule + 3 flyrants). I'm more eager to see 5 Flyrant vs Mechdar + Wraithknights, but I'm curious what you instincts tell you if you ran 5 flyrants against one of these lists, because their durability surprised me. If it weren't for the heirodule in assault, I would have fared much worse.
The conscripts sat on the skyshield for a 4++. Azreal joined the small blob for a 4++, and the psychers were split between the blobs, but mainly focussed on giving the big blob with Yarrik a 4++ via Forewarning.
The game started off bad with them seizing on me and first blooding my warlord thanks to orders (twin linking, Monster Hunter, and Ignore cover) on the big blob. Then the Wyvrens took 3 wounds off the Malanthrope. But eventually the Heirodule stomped Azreal to death, and then shot the other blob off of a 3 point objective for a possible turn 5 win.
This is in essence a deathstar army. Kill off all support units - wyverns, platoon command squads and any lone straggling units. Then focus on 1 blob at a time. I wouldn't worry too much about the conscripts. They are a static unit that just sits on an objective, just as your much cheaper rippers will sit on an objective. 3 flyrants might not have the firepower to do serious damage to the blob, but 5 will. 60 shots, 53 hits, 44 wounds, 22 dead guardsmen a turn even with 4++. The key is to kill off all the support units first, starting with the PCS and wyverns.
The PCS were joined to the blobs. 3 Blobs, 3 Wyvrens, and 1 unit of scouts (in reserves). You've got to kill 2 blobs to have a shot at a win, because all 3 are OS, and the blobs have a chance to shoot back with TL Las Cannons, but your point is taken.
Then you got cheated. Platoon Command Squads can't blob up. Only the Infantry Squads have the ability to combine units.
A weirdly common mistake, but mostly among newer Guard players.
Edit: and while we're on the subject, I really hope you weren't letting him stack Orders. The way you phrased his usage of the big blob makes me worry that he was, but I assumed we were also dealing with Divination powers when you say TL, Ignores Cover, AND Monster Hunter. He is obviously limited to one order per unit.
Assuming we are talking about Perfect Timing and Prescience, those must have been some great Psychic phases for him. With Forewarning on the blob, that's 4 Warp Charge of powers in a list with only 4 natural WC against a list with 6 WC (or more).
DJ3 wrote: Then you got cheated. Platoon Command Squads can't blob up. Only the Infantry Squads have the ability to combine units.
A weirdly common mistake, but mostly among newer Guard players.
Edit: and while we're on the subject, I really hope you weren't letting him stack Orders. The way you phrased his usage of the big blob makes me worry that he was, but I assumed we were also dealing with Divination powers when you say TL, Ignores Cover, AND Monster Hunter. He is obviously limited to one order per unit.
Assuming we are talking about Perfect Timing and Prescience, those must have been some great Psychic phases for him. With Forewarning on the blob, that's 4 Warp Charge of powers in a list with only 4 natural WC against a list with 6 WC (or more).
Nope. Order stacking. My fault. He was a non-guard player that I asked to play that list so that I could get a look. No order stacking + PCS not being allowed in the blob makes it a ton less threatening. Thank goodness, because it was F*ing scary how fast I lost my warlord. 1st Shooting attack of the game.
Then yeah, you made things quite a bit harder on yourself. You'd have been looking at exposed PCS units (mostly for FB, they don't have any of the good orders anyhow) and probably just Ignores Cover orders and TL from Prescience.
But even just getting off Prescience and Forewarning reliably on 4 WC would be hard.
DJ3 wrote: Then yeah, you made things quite a bit harder on yourself. You'd have been looking at exposed PCS units (mostly for FB, they don't have any of the good orders anyhow) and probably just Ignores Cover orders and TL from Prescience.
But even just getting off Prescience and Forewarning reliably on 4 WC would be hard.
We tested a mechanicus list at the club against a four Flyrant list and it got wasted - could not handle four flyrants. I was able to destroy a WS/IK list a DE list and even an Eldar list. But Quad Flyrants - no.
Like many lists today - there is just not enough skyfire. The mechanicus lists will decimate anything that glides or is on the ground. It is good at getting ObSec onto objectives. It is very elite and durable. It has no chance against PentyRant though. It cannot handle psychic buffs and powers or flyers/FMCs well.
felixcat wrote: We tested a mechanicus list at the club against a four Flyrant list and it got wasted - could not handle four flyrants. I was able to destroy a WS/IK list a DE list and even an Eldar list. But Quad Flyrants - no.
TR: Tech-thrall Adsecularis Covenant (10) - 50 Las-lock, Rite of Pure Thought
TR: Tech-thrall Adsecularis Covenant (10) - 50 Las-lock, Rite of Pure Thought
TR: Mechanicum Thallax Cohort (9) - 490 -6x Lightning guns, 3x Photon Thruster, Destructor
HS: Imperial Avenger Strike Fighter (1) - 150 -Avenger Bolt Cannon, 2 Lascannon wing-mounted, Defensive Heavy Stubber
HS: Thanatar Class Siege-Automata Maniple - 275 -TL Mauler Bolt Cannon, Hellex Plasma Mortar, Paragon of Meta
l - 1850 --
Do you have much trouble in finding opponents willing to play against Ad Mech in 40k games?
There are a few problems with your list. You cannot take Rotor Cannons on Castellax. It would be nice, and especially as a free replacement for their bolters! Enhanced Targeting Arrays are a waste of points on stock Castellax. Especially so on your Castellax with dual flamers as it only benefits the Mauler bolt cannon.
Consider splitting up the two Darkfire Castellax if you free up a troop slot. They work great as a pair and just as well solo.
The Avenger Strike Fighter is a fast attack choice not a heavy. Consider swapping it for a Lightning. Both are paper planes and won't last 5 minutes on the board. The avenger has the better starting load out for base points but the Lightning can pack a more effective punch quickly with 2-4 Kraken Penetrator missiles. If you're switching between 30k and 40k games the Lightning has more bang for it's buck.
Ad Mech are crap for flyers/anti air but they make up for that with amazing ground presence. Ignore what flies and focus on annihilating the boots on the ground.
Don't bother with Thallaxi. I've never found them to be that good. You sink a lot of points into a unit that gets ripped apart by heavy bolters, predator cannons, thudd guns, scorpii, sicarans and medusae. Three quad heavy bolters comes in at 120pts and will chew through those Thallaxi nicely over a couple of turns. They suffer badly in 30k matches and will suffer badly against most top tier armies in 40k. Too many points for a 4+/6+ with an 18" range Lightning gun. When you have 20 man fearless squads and S6 T7 3+/5+ MC troops you really don't need Thallaxi.
Ad Mech should be able to do quite well against Pentyrant. Ignore the fliers and decimate the rest of his army. Your opponent can have 5 flyrants shooting at your Castellax all game long and still not kill them all. Imagine the sweat they'd break trying to down two Thanatars.
This makes me really want to try them out. I've actually got a small army of Mechanicus (unbuilt yet), but don't have the rules for them. That just might become my next project after the LVO.
Do you have much trouble in finding opponents willing to play against Ad Mech in 40k games?
Quite the opposite. people really want see what mechanicus is about.
There are a few problems with your list. You cannot take Rotor Cannons on Castellax.
Indeed not. They should be regular boltguns.
Ad Mech should be able to do quite well against Pentyrant. Ignore the fliers and decimate the rest of his army.
We know they have great ground presence but you[code] cannot ignore four or five tyrants. They will hurt you. And na slew od gaks hittingb on 6s really still is not enough.
Don't bother with Thallaxi. I
WEll, I personally have good luck with thallax. I will say my list is constantly evolving though. Thyey might end up just a unit of three. Thing is the two most efficient nits for Mechanicus lists are castallax with mauler/flamer and krios venator. Sp thallax might become a casualty as I acquire more models.
on the Destroyer chart and I would then go on to pass all 4 of my 2+ schrouded cover saves.
on the Perils chart and then failed his 
