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A friend and I were at a doubles tournament yesterday playing a combination of DE and SM, one opponent absolutely thrashed us, they were running Blood Angels and Tyranids, and ended up taking first place overall.
Each team got 2 1000 point armies, no FW, Escalation, Stronghold Assault, Allies, or Dataslates, just the codex you pick.

Their lists were something like this

Tyranids:

Flyrant
Flyrant
Hive Crone
Hive Crone
Harpy

10x termagants
10x termagants

Blood angels (full drop pod)
Libby, dude with chalice, marines, drop pod
Melta-pistols squad of 5, drop pod
Melta-pisolts squad of 5, drop pod, sanguinary priest
Flamer squad of 5, drop pod
marines x 5, melta, drop pod.


We castled up the DE boats behind some troops and my artillery department. My scouts infiltrated into ruins. we had a Stormraven and Stormtalon for AA.

Scouts got vector strike'd to death for first blood, everything flew up into our end, pods landed all around and popped venoms. we lots so much in that alpha strike that we were basically doomed.
even if we had gone first, the blood angels were off the board, and the tyrannids were all airborne and far away. the gants being in reserve.

we have no idea how we could have dealt with that. Ideas?

Well..

Don't deploy your scouts where they will get vector striked 1st turn would be a good start

If your comboing DE and SM then you need to cover each others weakness.


DE specialize in killing high toughness and armored enemies, but dont have anything for flyers or hoard.

SM can handle anything but have alot of weakness's as well.


You should always build your SM army to do somthing in a doubles tourny. Let your DE ally build his best army, and then you cover what he cant.

In your case you should have taken some anti-air and anti-hoard.

You won't beat this list with what you got. Sorry, FMC spam is just too over the top and you need lots of dakka to deal with it. You need to tailor your list.

The DEldar have their own fliers which can be super brutal against FMCs, I'd get those ASAP.

Dark eldar are the premier grounding check army. Load up on venoms and you should be set to knock some flyers out of the sky.

Yeah until the hive crone came along spammed night shield venoms was widely considered a "pack up and go home" matchup for the Tyranids.

what does the hive crone do, and what range do the venoms have? assuming the guns on the venoms are 24" range or more and the crone is a flier with vector strike attacks, vector strikes can't touch them if you're clever. first turn sit just in range & shoot. they'll move up to try and get you next turn, you move under them and get behind where they can't vector strike, then shoot.

vector strikes are one of those things that are powerful, but clever tactics & manoeuvrability can let you dodge them every time.

The drop pod alpha strike is quite a difficult one, my recommendation would be to try and hide from it as best you can - try to position yourself with cover such that he can only get line of sight from one place, and that he can't get within 6" due to the size of the drop pod. try and get him to position himself badly for subsequent turns, most people who use drop pod armies forget to plan ahead when they're looking for juicy alpha-strike targets.

 some bloke wrote:
what does the hive crone do, and what range do the venoms have? assuming the guns on the venoms are 24" range or more and the crone is a flier with vector strike attacks, vector strikes can't touch them if you're clever. first turn sit just in range & shoot. they'll move up to try and get you next turn, you move under them and get behind where they can't vector strike, then shoot.

vector strikes are one of those things that are powerful, but clever tactics & manoeuvrability can let you dodge them every time.

The drop pod alpha strike is quite a difficult one, my recommendation would be to try and hide from it as best you can - try to position yourself with cover such that he can only get line of sight from one place, and that he can't get within 6" due to the size of the drop pod. try and get him to position himself badly for subsequent turns, most people who use drop pod armies forget to plan ahead when they're looking for juicy alpha-strike targets.

The Crone has haywire missiles and a rather nonsensically placed S6 AP4 flamer (nonsensical as it's S8 vector strikes and haywire missiles make it a vehicle killer/air superiority flier, whereas the harpy is kitted out for blob breaking).

Otherwise a combination of free covers, murderous anti toughness shooting, taking six inches of range away from an already very short ranged army, and the option for a 5++ save conspires with incredible maneuverability, weight of fire, and superior range to make sure the Tyranids aren't having fun.

You have to be able to get some sort of bubble wrap to prevent the first turn drop pods from landing next to your expensive stuff and jumping out and killing it.

What kind of terrain were you playing with?

Take out the troops so the enemy cant score. Also ground the flyers with normal bolter or venom fire then fire your heavy weapons on the MC's. Also orbital bombard the libby to double him out.