I had some optimistic results last night, for those who have been following the trials and tribulations of my nid codex exploration....
Nash came over and audibled out of orks, only to play with THSS land raider marines. fine by me...
The nid list in question
prime with swords
3x zoanthropes in pod
3x zaonthropes in pod
8x ymgarls
9x genestealers with toxin
9x genestealers with toxin
9x genestealers with toxin
24x hormagaunts with toxin
8x ripper swarms with toxin and tunnel swarm
t-fex with rupture
t-fex with rupture
The marine list from memory...
librarian null zone avenger
6x thss termies in a
LRC
ironclad dread with heavy flamer in drop pod
10x marines flamer missile combi-flamer in rhino
10x marines flamer missile combi-flamer in rhino
10x marines flamer missile combi-flamer in rhino
2x attack bikes with
MM
typhoon
typhoon
thunderfire cannon in drop pod
dakka predator
dakka predator
So I'm certainly facing an absolutely legit list...
We roll mission and get a 5 objective seize ground. We roll for deployment and get dawn of war. Good! I say, my prior lists were bent over so badly by dawn of war, and this one actually likes it. Anyway, this deployment type is what made me shelf hive guard. If you scout your tourneys before hand and they release their missions, and there isn't any dawn of war, then I'd totally field them, they are awesome... but if there is at least one dawn of war, you know you are going to hate that you took them over podding thropes.
IMO of course. Nash got to place 3 objectives... He went for dead center, then I went to 12" away from the short side in the middle, then he went for dead center but closer to the right side of table, then I went 12" away from that, as close as I could get to the short side, then he put one close to a long table edge, in the middle of the table. In shorthand. He put 3 as centrally as he could, and I put two as close to my outflankers as I could.
I win the roll and give Nash first turn. He deploys two combat squads in the buildings like this... (Come to think of it, I think this is illegal to split combat squads into on-table/off-table for dawn of war.... it had little to no game impact... but I'll need to figure that out for future games. neither of us call marines our 'main' army...
Top pic is the right side of the table, bottom pic is the left side close to the table edge
I decided to deploy my hormagaunts and prime on table, to get some extra forward movement. This was not a backbreaking mistake, but a mistake nonetheless, the unit ended up moving BACk in its first two movement phases, thanks to the tough to kill land raider, so actually deploying this unit just gave nash more information about where my t-fexes were going to walk on (as they would probably want synapse)
Ok, top of one... Nash moves everything except the drop pods on the long table edge. its obvious where my hormas are so he brings his predators on across from them, the thunderfire cannon tucks in to a little building he had fortified earlier, two of his rhinos hide out of
LOS from the t-fexes, with the speeders hiding around that same
LOS blocking terrain, the third foot combat squad walks on and runs to get into position to score the objective, not seeing the sleeping genestealers hanging in the trees over their heads... the last rhino combat squad moves over to the thunderfire cannon to support him with flames for the inevitable stealer arrival. hes got a pretty good spread. His flamers are in good spots to intercept my stealers, and the
LRC is dead center ready to take over the table center. The attack bikes were hidden behind the land raider crusader ready to pounce on zoanthropes. Nash didn't want to commit the ironclad until he saw where my final t-fex position would be, so he called down the empty drop pod, trying to block the center objective, and flew a bit wide of the mark.
Bottom of one. I just bring on the two t-fexes and say go... thos are my tervigon models standing in.
Top of two, let there be blood. Both speeders flare out 6" to get
LOS to my hormas, the
LRC moves forward to table center and prepares to just dominate it. The attack bikes skulk along behind it. His whole army shoots into the hormas and account for about 13 of them. The thunderfire cannon being particularly evil. the ironclad landed right in front of the hormagaunt unit and chose to flamer... I think I would have popped smoke, but its fair to say that flaming is a decent choice as well.
Bottom of two. My reserrves rolls were fantastic, I'll freely admit this... but from this point on in the game i pretty much took over. I got both zoans, the ymgarls and the rippers. The stealers stayed safely in reserve. Now nash pointed out that had my stealers shown up instead, they still would have been pretty safe as long as they had shown up on the left side of the table, but either way... the way my reserves came down was a real blessing. Zoanthrope pods tried to contest objectives with the pods and one scattered pretty far backwards from where I wanted it, a little too close to the combat squads behind the building. The other hit right on an objective. I love this 18" range and I love not needing cover. Zoans are just straight awesome and i haven't even fired them yet. Now, the Ymgarls were DIRTY! Like DIRTY, DIRTY... Check out their arrival...
The rippers did a really good job of protecting what i perceived as a threat to the zoanthropes (which it turned out, wasn't) I landed them luckily in the space between the zoans and the combat squad rhinos, then ran to spread them out and block charges.
It turns out Nash had no intention of charging the zoanthropes, because he knows it just sets his troops up to be counter-charged by arriving genestealers and by the rippers/ymgarls. I should have ran them to cover. But it was hard to predict my opponents game plan.
So, the ymgarls then moved... and set up this crazy triple charge. it took awhile to set it up so that I could make this work, but it was devastating...
All my zoans were hoodable, but Nash only managed to hood one. Two of them managed to get boxcars and hooded themselves with massive aneurisms, failing the 3++ without even having to reroll it. I managed to kill the ironclad dreadnought with a single zoan shot, and the other two zoans couldnt get past
LRC armor and smoke. Now, I have to tell you how proud I am of my smartness. Nash was trying to push me into shooting my t-fexes at the smoked land raider, but I had
LOS to one of his typhoons. The rupture cannon to me is less about
LRC kill and more about guaranteed pens to shooty vehicles that are very far away. I took my shot at the speeder, blowing it up. The other speeder was destined for ymgarl
CC, so I took a pot shot at the
LRC with the other t-fex and whiffed.
In that ymgarl triple
CC, I crew stunned the speeder, killed one attack bike, wrecked a rhino and killed one
tac marine. The
tac marines held, and I piled into them, the attack bike fell back but stayed on the table.
All in all, a fantastic turn, netting me a speeder, a rhino, an attack bike squadron (in a turn) an ironclad, a combat squad (in a turn). And I had a lot of threats laid out in front of him. The
LRC however, was still a problem.
Top of three, Nash's plan seemed to be, unload every single bullet he had on zoanthropes, and I won't fault the plan. he was looking for a decisive end to them rather than the quicker but riskier charge into them. The only real moving done was the
LRC just pivoting and lining up all of its guns to the zoans. As the dust settled i was left with two zoans, one from each unit, each with only a single wound left, in the carnage i had lost a mycetic spore as well.
It should be noted that in my furious concentration, i forgot to instruct Nash on the use of null zone. He is brand new to vanilla marines and didn't really know how it worked either. I had a zoan unit within 12" this turn, so one could assume that he just failed a shadow in the warp null zone, but in the interest of full disclosure, we did forget to try it. Which turned out to be ok, because I had completley forgotten for the whole game that my stealers had toxin sacs. And many times that came up big against his marines as you would imagine.
Bottom of three... Two of my three stealers showed up, and both decided to show up on the thunderfire side. they nearly crapped the bed, as the first unit manged to not get a single rend on the techmarine (sans poison re-roll of course) and I gulped big time, but fortunately the techmarine failed a 2+. The other unit whiffed on the fast moving rhino, and consigned themselves to the abyss for their failure.
Meanwhile, where all the action is, the ymgarls moved over to start just cleaning up Nash's troops choices.
The ripper swarms moved up to charge the combat squad that fell out of the wrecked rhino, the ymgarls planned to go to the top floor to get the other half... I shot my rupture cannons at the speeder that the ymgarls had walked away from and wrecked it, and i tried for the other rhino but whiffed.
In
CC, the ymgarls managed to kill 4 marines and stay locked in the building, the rippers killed off the combat squad and consolidated into as much cover as they could get. Another good turn for me, except now I'm keeping a keen eye on my troops. The
LRC has my hormagaunts completely pinned to the back edge of the table for fear of getting wiped out, and one of my genestealer units is almost certainly dead meat after failing to shake that rhino.
Top of 4. In predicatble fashion, Nash moves his unscathed rhino into position to bake some genestealers, he moves his other surviving rhino laterally a bit to get fire onto the rippers and or ymgarls, and his predators rotate to likewise dump fire into those units, trying to save this last 5 man scoring unit over on this side. At this point both of those surviving zoanthropes are still alive, and i pointed out that he probably needed to kill them. But he also was feeling pressure to protect his scoring unit, as the game was rapidly concluding but I had a genestealer unit in reserve still. Again I don't fault his choice, he shot what he could into one zoanthroe, killing it, but the rest of his firepower went into the swarms, making them combat ineffective with two bases remaining. The lone attack bike that was ble to regroup after my ymgarls pile in move took a shot at the other zoanthrope, hit, wound, save... the rhino on the left side of the table laid out flamer, combi-flamer from the hatch, and got 12 hits and 9 wounds, bye-bye stealer unit one.
Bottom of 4. I surround the rhino as best as I can with remaining swarms and ymgarls, and my fresh genestealer unit shows up on my choice of side. i choose to go after that combat speed rhino. If things go just right, I can kill off every troop he's got next turn. First shot I take was the lone wounded zoanthrope, passes test, passes hood, pens, and rolls a 4!!! Thus cementing the 6 zoanthropes into any list I write for standard missions. I dump 4 rupture cannon shots into the surrounded rhino, hoping to get a charge on the survivors with ymgarls, I get weapon destroyed, immobilized and crew stunned. CRAP!
So I have to charge it the old fashioned way with ymgarls, they choose strength 5 and hit automatically, easily wrecking it, but miraculously managing not to blow it up.
The fresh stealers weapon destroy and crew stun the rhino, forcing the occupants to get out on their turn if they want to not die. The other stealers climb up to the to of the building cnad charge the combat squad on the roof, beating them, failing to catch them in a sweep, and then escorting them right off table.
So i have a flamer combat squad thats going to eat a big bite out of my stealer unit, I have two predators lined up on my ymgarls, there is a free combat squad roaming around, and the terminators are still comfortably hanging out in table center, preventing my hormagaunts from doing anything but trying to screen my t-fexes, they will not be able to score unless it goes to turn 7, but their existence is managing to anchor the terminators to table center. if they walk away to go after flanking stealers, then my single horma unit could easily scoop up two of those middle objectives. the game is tighter than i'd like it to be, considering how much butt I have been kicking. And it is because I need one more scoring unit in my list.
Top of 5... The predators rotate and the take a dump on my ymgarls, ending an amazing run, the combat squad finishes off the rippers, but in shooting them was out of position to score. The combat squad on the other flank got out, laid one more flamer down and shot its bolters but only managed to kill 4 stealers, they passed their leadership and then made the throat slitting gesture and pointed at the marines.
Bottom of 5... The 5 stealers and the 8 remaining stealers that killed the tfire cannon all converged on the survivors of the rhino wreck and gobbled them up. Consolidating comfortably on the objective. I moved my T-fexes up and reached for my large blast marker in order to cluster spine the other combat squad, and Nash said "just roll to see if the game ends." I should have shot the cluster spines anyway to see if i could have wiped out the squad, but I just rolled. A '2'! the first win my nid test lists have had against a legit mechanized army in a couple weeks! And it didn't feel flukey.
Had the game continued, we would have been playing the hormagaunt tempts the terminators to stay out of the duel between a combat squad and two predators versus two t-fexes. At least one of the t-fexes should easily have been able to at very least contest whichever direction the combat squad would have headed, if not charge them and take them out. As nash pointed out... the game was WAY closer than it should have been. he has this new conservative streak which I find pretty funny, notice him running 30
tac marines here. its because he just got back from the broadside bash, and every mission they had was basically "get as many troops sitting on objectives as early as possible to win" And we DID play a 5 objective seize ground, but I'm willing to change the rippers for another troop.
Ok, I'm happy, the anti-armor was perfectly adequate. I managed to take just what i needed and still had lots of aggressive elements... Lets just do one of those unit by unit write-ups.
tyranid prime - Meh... I chose him because he was virtually unkillable from range, but him and his hormagaunts could have been just about any troop and any synapse and couldn't have done any worse. I didn't hate him, but if I'm going to be playing a lot of games where he isn't going to be able to move up, then I think I want something with a bit more shooting.
zoanthropes in pod - Killed a land raider and an ironclad, and thats it. But come on! Thats actually a tall order, and was insanely vital to my gameplan. Unless land raiders suddenly get banned from tourney play, two of these guys are core...
ymgarls - OMG. Now, I know that not every game they are going to yield like that, but they were instrumental in my taking that middle from Nash. I had plenty of threatening outflankers, but nothing to threaten the middle of his deployment. This was a god-send. Killing two rhinos is clutch, and killing two combat squads was huge as well. Strength 5 is major. And it was nice to just switch over to toughness 5 when i actually wanted to get hung up in
CC so as not to get shot. I'm not calling them core. But i have a huge crush on them right now.
genestealers - although not spectacular, they are a troop choice... what do you want? Troops, even good ones, are never spectacular, they just get the job done. I'm done trying to walk across the table with a troop choice, even tervigons. No respectable gunline will let you live long enough to score. genestealers are in... they are core, at least a couple. And I'll remember toxin sacs next time i promise.
ripper swarms - I didn't hate them, but if I was looking to tweak, they didn't really need to be there. they were nice and survivable, but WAY less flexible than stealers. With no brood telepathy, they were tied to my zoanthropes arriving first, and once my zoans were dead, they were a non-factor. What i replace them with does need to be an aggressive fast
CC element however.
hormagaunts - Double meh... could have done exactly what they did as a 5 point termagant, I would have had more as well, 30 termagants scores THSS more than 24 hormagaunts. neither unit is going to ultimately beat terminators, but one will make it last a lot longer
t-fex - lets see. How do tyranids kill typhoon speeders or any other fast as hell, long range, fragile gun platform? Call it overcosted if you want. but I need 48" consistent vehicle kill. I also need more that three elite slots to get enough tank kill in my list. Robin is making me pay for the cluster spines and shreddershard beetles and the decent counter-
cc, thats fine. They are core. If Nash had to come at me with no terminator marines, or if i could get his terms down to 3 or 2, I could have just finished him up in
CC. They aren't JUST the gun. But i don't think the nid dex can be competitive without the gun though.
I liked Nash's list... if anyone thinks its soft, send me a
PM to discuss it, I wanna save this thread for nid discussion. Thanks to all of the guys that pointed me towards things like genestealers, Ymgarls and rippers. i think I might not be so gloomy now that I've gotten a totally legit, repeatable win off of a NASTY
SM mech list.
Somnicide is going to help me by piloting my
IG army against nids very soon, and I'll then know for sure if I'm feeling comfortable in my own metagame with nids... I have also made some tweaks to the list that I want to discuss briefly...
hive tyrant with armored shell, venom cannon and hive commander
3x zoanthropes in pod
3x zoanthropes in pod
7x ymgarls
20x termagants
9x stealers with toxin sacs
8x stealers with toxin sacs
tervigon with adrenal glands toxin sacs crushing claws and catalyst
t-fex with rupture cannon
t-fex with rupture cannon
Still running with the ymgarls, and my core of two genestealer units and 2 zoans and 2 t-fex. I swapped the hormagaunts, a genestealer unit and the rippers, for a tervigon and 20 termagants. I used the leftover points to turn the prime into a 2+ save tyrant that is letting me outflank the tervigon (who wouldn't have even made the list without the ability to outflank) and to get +1 reserves so I can repeat that fantastic reserves call-down I had this game.
The tyrant, unlike the prime, can be killed. With a 2+ save, and taking a 4+ cover from being behind a T-fex, my thinking is... you have lascannons or bright lances, and you AREN'T shooting my t-fexes? Ok, thanks, i'll take that. If I do lose the tyrant, then I'm testing leadership 8 on my t-fexes to shoot at what I want. I can scoop up the big termagant unit with a dominion on an arriving tervigon if its important to me (like in a cap and control for instance). So thats my justification for bringing the hive tyrant back. I also reserve the right to cut the silly
HVC and switch over to double dakka if it starts to piss me off again.
An outflanking tervigon, providing
FNP to a genestealer unit is outrageously awesome. Cutting gunline firepower by showing up on an extreme edge, and then threatening like 24" from short edges on the next turn with super gant charges is just going to be great. it makes swallowing the bitter pill of that 260 point hive tyrant a little easier, because no one is going to enjoy an outflanking tervigon.
Let me know what you guys thought of the battle, and let me know what you think of the revised list.
and p.s. Mahu, yes, that is a hive tyrant in my list... but until I actually play with it and like it, you can't say "i told you so!"
3000 
1000
