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I was watching Alien vs Predator and had an idea for a game -

Zone Mortalis set up, kill team

Tyranid Tervigon, deployed in a real hard to reach place. Not much else to begin with. (I bet you can see where this is going already)

The opponents only objective is to kill the Tervigon, I was hoping to get an idea of how this would be best played out. Some thoughts I had were -

- Nid player starts with nothing but the Tervigon on the board, but gets to roll a number of bonus dice to spawn extra termagants to begin with, before defaulting back to its regular rolls
- Nid player gains VP's for killing individual opponents models
- Perhaps no equipment limits on rapid fire or assault based weaponry for the assaulting force. I'd limit heavy weapons as I can imagine these doing too much damage. Or even add a rule for splash damage that makes corridors impassable should they hit a wall, or provide the option of a special breaching grenade to enable the assaulting force to blow holes in the walls to bypass something, akin to a melta bomb
- Time limits? I don't think I'd have any, to ensure the assaulting force has enough chances to get around obstacles or avoid overwhelming numbers

Hell, thinking about it this could even be expanded to the other races

- Orcs could have some kind of gestation pit
- DE could have cloning vats / haemonculus' lair
- Eldar could have "spirit warriors" (essentially dead versions of whatever you want from the codex, to fit the idea of the game without restricting them to just wraithguard)
- Guard, I dunno... maybe a boot camp that churns out newly trained guardsmen, or an armoury to represent a bunch of guys going in one door, grabbing a weapon and running out the other side
- SM & CSM could be difficult... maybe a teleport homer or something would be the best bet
- Daemons, a warp gate
- Necrons, easy, tomb world entrance.
- Tau.. I dunno... fishing pond?
- SoB, again, not sure... I guess a teleport homer as per the Marines

So what do you think would be the best way of making this playable? I'd want it to be a pretty tense thing, a set number of attackers with no reinforcements, they'd be in a strong position to begin with until they started getting swamped by an endless of tide of whatever they're against
-

Any thoughts or feedback at all?

I have been working in a game of my own and you seem to just be trying to do too much at once. The game I made was a tervigon on the opposites of the board. Table is 4'by2' long ways. Points are capped to 250. Objective kill the tervigon. Tervigon always goes first and always spawns each turn. (Ignores doubles rule). keep it simple at first then work any bugs

To keep with the "Alien" theme you should have any models killed by the termagaunts get captured and brought back to the hive, where in the next turn a ripper swarm shows up.

You could even have a "docking bay" with a dreadnought (like the weapon loader) and have the epic fight like they did in the movie.

You could also place survivers in different areas that the marines have to escort out of there.

The tervigon is hard to kill, especially with lightweight weaponry. (Heck, I've shot one for three turns in a row with ten ork lootas and merely weakened it) So it's a massive danger in a kill team setting, careful about that. Beastie has the advantage of numbers on its foe shortly, so it'll have no trouble blocking any approach paths, so any kill team that -does- reach it will be severely weakened, and face a beast that can withstand heavy weaponry without the benefit of having softened it up from afar first? and has to be light on heavy weapons? If them's the rules, I'm betting on the nid.

Balance-wise, I've always had a pet peeve with how the number of gaunts the terv spawns is -random-. Which can make the terv vastly more effective than his point value with a few lucky rolls. (Or a oops on a bad roll) I feel that thing would be easier to balance if the number of gaunts it 'contains' is set. The normal variable balance can be a gamebreaker in a kill team setting with the low point armies.

In short, my point: Unit's powerful for kill team, and its power as is is -variable-. Meaning you'll have a ton of trouble playtesting your rules and establishing a fair game balance. I recommend you stabilize it somehow, maybe scrap its psychic powers.

Little rule proposal: how about making it so nids must move their gaunts in a few packed groups, keeping in coherency. While opponents would have the flexibility of moving all models independently - that'd give outnumbered marines a chance to make sacrifice-plays, and outflanking the big blobs. (Also, make flamers nasty, which they should be)

Have you played Space Hulk (3rd Ed)?

The rules are PERFECT. It is much faster and deadly and thus helps convey the deadly feeling of the closed corridors in Space CC. There are a million fan missions, some very close to what you have described.

If thats not what your looking for...Have you tried the Forge World Zone Mortalis Rules? They are great! You can find them in Horus Heresy Book 1: Betrayal.