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lindsay40k wrote:RE NFWs instant killing all the Carnifexes. Best way I got my head around this was to reflect that I wouldn't expect a Guard player to remove one Ogryn for every three wounds my Swarmlord inflicts on the unit because 'those three wounds are allocated onto three identical models and then combined onto one individual model', so it'd be churlish of me to complain when my own multi wound unit, despite being far more robust against lasguns than Ogryns, happens to share this weakness.

I think thats the point, is you do the wounds, then you decide if the wounds cause instant death.
If the wounds were straight up instant death, you'd be removing models for each one, but you go through the whole wound process and /then/ get instant deathed, the two processes interfere with eachother and if you fail the test you cant exactly go back from the beginning and redo it. I think the "wounded first then ID' makes them much weaker against carnifexes and other squads of same-equipped multiwound models.

Post-game Anaylsis:
Actually, I wasn't really surprised by the result. Without shooting from the tyranid army, he really didn't have much to put the pressure on me. I could've easily won by just backing up and shooting, especially my interceptors, though I probably wouldn't have tabled my opponent that way. After taking out his biovores, I was free to do whatever I want without the fear of pie plates and getting pinned.

The next thing I knew I had to do was to take out his tervigons. Though they aren't really scary in assault, they just make the tyranid army so much tougher to kill, providing FNP, poisoned termagant screens, synapse and Shadows. But when his tervie started casting FNP on itself, I knew it was just too tough to kill so I concentrated on easier kill points. It turned out that killing 1 tervigon on turn 1 was probably enough to cripple his army.

The thing that went in my favor was my assault. I was red-hot in assault against his carnifexes, killing all of them via force weapons. Of course, this was without the protection of Shadows, but then again, my plan was to break up his army. A united tyranid army is a fearsome enemy indeed, as they buff each other up. Once separated, however, they are much easier to take down. So I used my interceptors on the flanks to try to lure his carnifexes away from the main army. Split up (without tervigons) and I can take his carnifexes in assault with master-crafted Nemesis force daemonhammers and no Shadows. And if he doesn't go after my interceptors, then my interceptors will be free to molest the rest of his army all game. That truly was a dilemma for him.

The thing that didn't go my way were my psychic powers getting shut down by Shadows in the Warp. I was failing them left and right, passing only once all game (and at the expense of losing my sergeant!) whenever I was in range of SitW. Imagine if I made even an average amount of psychic tests in the face of Shadows....this battle might have even been a shut-out.

In terms of my mistakes tactics-wise, the main one I made was to get into range of his tervigon-termagant-spawned threat range with my dreadknight. Although they provided me with 3 kill points, they also prevented my dreadknight from doing too much. Also, the first time his 14 gants multi-charged my dreadknight and Grandmaster unit, I forgot about my blind and rad grenades. That might have saved me from losing 2 knights or taking a wound on my dreadknight. More importantly, I might have caused enough wounds on his gants so that No Retreat would've killed the rest and freed me to do other things on my turn.

My opponent made several mistakes tactically. Considering this is his first time playing tyranids, I can't really fault him too much. He did great for someone whose only experience with nids was to play against them.

1) He was too cautious with the Swarmlord. He was too concerned about my rending psycannons. On turn 1, he just moved him slightly and did not run him. Every turn, he should have moved him flat-out.

2) He split off his right carnifexes to go after my assault marines. Honestly, I can't really blame him as they were in his charge range, but without the protection of Shadows from a trailing tervigon, he had to hope I get real unlucky and either not wound him or fail my psychic test. I did neither.

3) He made a big mistake in shooting at my HQ unit when his Swarmlord was barely in range to assault them. I just removed the models closest to his Swarmlord and then he couldn't charge.

4) Lastly, on turn 5, even though he badly wanted to kill my dreadknight, his Swarmlord should have assaulted my strike squad instead. He would've gotten more kills and had a better chance to break my knights in combat (or force them into more No Retreat saves).


Overall, my opponent suffered from a lack of experience as well as a list mismatch against me. His list wasn't bad. It is a decent all-comer's list. However, my opinion on Tyranid assault lists is that they are not balanced enough to truly take on all comers. My grey knights list was just one of those lists that would give his a lot of problems. Now, if the knights were commandeered by a less experienced general, my opponent would have definitely done better. But against me and my list (and in spite of all my little mistakes), he needed to play an almost flawless game to make it through the battle.



Now the evaluation of the Grey Knight units.....


Grandmaster: B. IMO he is the most flexible and arguably the best HQ in the codex. He is a scary opponent in combat, buffs up the entire army with his Grand Strategy, is quite resilient with just a stock Nemesis force sword (3++ Invuln in assault) and has enough toys to make his unit fearsome in combat. While he didn't kill a whole lot in this game, you can't really expect any HQ without Eternal Warrior to survive against the Swarmlord. However, the buffs that he provide to the army makes him an above-average choice at worst.

Venerable Dreadnought: C+. Without any vehicles to shoot down (or T4 tyranids units to insta-gib), they were mediocre this game. They did, however, help to finish off 1 tervigon and some hive guards.

Strike Squad: A-. Very impressive this game. S5-shooting is solid. They combined to take down a tervigon with shooting (along with the vendreads), put 2W on a brood of carnifexes, kill a tyrant guard and some hive guards. Then in assault, they took out a brood of 2 carnifexes, 2-3 units of termagants, 1 tyrant guard and helped to topple the Swarmlord. Just a solid performance from the main workhorse of a purist army.

Interceptor Squad: A. They were just downright awesome this game. I just love the mobility of a jump infantry unit with S5 stormbolters. Let me tell you, the only way you should play them is as a mobile, shooty unit (unless you're going up against an army who doesn't fear S5 assault weapons). Do so and they are worth their weight in gold. While they did finish off a brood of carnifexes in assault as well as help take down the Swarmlord, their effectiveness as a shooty, harassment unit is second-to-none. Their shooting put wounds on many different units, including taking down the biovores and 1-2 units of termagants. And they're such a fun unit to play with (though I'm sure not very fun to play against). Too bad I didn't get to use their Shunt special ability.

Dreadknight: B. He had a chance to shine this game but blew it due to clever tactics by my opponent. His shooting (only 1 turn's worth) did take down 1 hive guard and he did kill a couple of termagants here and there in assault. And he did kill the tervigon who charged him. However, he showed his major weakness here as well, getting tied up by cheap 50-ish point units and then getting insta-gibbed by the much superior Swarmlord. Too bad you cannot use Shunt to get you out of assault. Oh well....the jury is still out on the dreadknight. I will give him another chance though, when I go up against Daemons.


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MVP's:
Grey Knights:
Grey Knight Interceptor Squad: Just a really fun and annoying unit to play with (annoying for my opponent, that is). Highly recommended for a foot-GK list.


Tyranids:
Swarmlord: He gets it because of all the tyranid units, he was the most effective. He killed my Grandmaster, 1 strike squad and the dreadknight. That's about 700pts worth of Grey Knights killed in only 2 turns! He also made the termagants really dangerous with preferred enemy and shut down almost all of my psychic powers. Just a truly nasty, nasty unit.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Lord_Osma wrote:I feel like the nid army build was a poor pick against GK.
I would have ran more of a horde than a bunch of monstrous creatures that can be insta killed.

A horde army will actually do better against my army here, as I did not take any purifiers. But just know that a lot of foot-lists will probably run purifiers and they are death to hordes.

tetrisphreak wrote:As a quick review of 'Nid tactics - I feel your friend's biggest mistake was sending the termagants wave after wave vs the dreadknight. His focus could better have been spent trying to hit your "squishier" units (though GK are NOT very squishy). Swarmlord vs Dreadknight seems like a better matchup in my opinion, especially if the T.Guard have lash whips.

Good game overall, every time a new book comes out it seems to trounce 'nids but I have a great time noodling out new tactics in the meantime.

Actually, I feel that his tactic of sending out gants after my dreadknight was a good tactic. One mistake people make is that they try NOT to spawn gants in KP games. My philosophy is, no matter what type of mission you are playing, NEVER HESITATE TO SPAWN if it would give your army the advantage, even if the risk is great. But I guess you have to have experience with MSU armies to realize that. My friend and I both play MSU armies with 20+ KP's sometimes at 2K. Yes, we have a high amount of KP, but more often than not, we are victorious, even in annihilation games, because we are willing to sacrifice our units in order to gain an advantage for our army.

I felt it was a very veteran move on his part. Though he was giving up KP's every time he sent them out, he also:

1) Locked up my unit and prevented it from doing more damage. Better to lose his gant squad then let me dreadknight fly around and insta-gib his more valuable monstrous creatures with my nemesis doomfists.

2) Forced me to send in reinforcements (my HQ unit) to help free my dreadknight rather than to shoot at the rest of his army. I lost 2 turns of shooting with 2 units trying to free up my dreadknight. Meanwhile, his other units are getting closer relatively healthy because I was not able to focus-fire on them.

3) Held me in place and prevented me from running away. Otherwise, his assault units would probably never see combat.


Swarmlord versus the Dreadknight isn't even fair. It's like taking candy away from a baby (my dreadknight). I don't want my dreadknight anywhere near his Swarmlord.

The Night Stalker wrote:Very good read, it seemed like the tervigons were just feeding you KP's. I am really interested to see the game vs demons.

It's going to be highly competitive and let's just say, will probably involve Fateweaver and some daemons with 2++ invulns against my force weapons (ugh....imagine 2++ re-rollable invulns due to Fateweaver).

I actually feel that I may be the underdog against a competitive (though not an all-comer's) daemon army.

SabrX wrote:
I think the Nid army was build towards take-all comers rather than tailored for GK. Perhaps Doom of Malan'tai, more Biovores, and fat squad of 30 Termagants rather than 10 would have been better?

I like more biovores but the Doom isn't going to do much. He won't be able to deepstrike anywhere near me due to Warp Quake and if the tyranid player footslogs him, the Doom will die to massed stormbolter fire.

A 30-gant list would require a re-do of the entire army list. You need to design it for the gants, otherwise, it won't work properly. That means you probably need to get rid of the fexstars to accomodate the termagants. But I could see it being a very effective list. Imagine:


Swarmlord
2x Tyrant Guards w/Lash Whips

3x Hive Guards
2x Hive Guards

Tervigon - AG, Catalyst, TS
29x Termagants
Tervigon - AG, Catalyst, TS
29x Termagants

20x gargoyles - AG + TS

Trygon Prime - AG
Trygon Prime - AG


With 5 sources for Shadows and fast units such as gargoyles and trygons, I may feel like the underdog in this battle. Just realize that while this list may do better against my knights, it is not really a balanced all-comers list either.

lindsay40k wrote:
Which is indeed a YMDC issue, which I've posted here.

Thanks for asking on YMDC!

A couple of GK related questions regarding 'nids, not necessarily YMDC caliber but rather just small inquiries:

1.) Does a weapon with the Daemonbane special rule have 2 chances to ID our synapse creatures (via typical FW rules, as well as causing a LD test should the psychic test fail)? It looks as though it does. Ouch.

2.) Would a trygon/mycetic spore's ability to reduce scatter to avoid mishaps take the warp quake into account when deep striking?

If these ARE YMDC worthy let me know and I'll post a thread there.

tetrisphreak wrote:A couple of GK related questions regarding 'nids, not necessarily YMDC caliber but rather just small inquiries:

1.) Does a weapon with the Daemonbane special rule have 2 chances to ID our synapse creatures (via typical FW rules, as well as causing a LD test should the psychic test fail)? It looks as though it does. Ouch.

Yes it does....and I totally forgot about that (or rather, I wasn't aware of it).

tetrisphreak wrote:
2.) Would a trygon/mycetic spore's ability to reduce scatter to avoid mishaps take the warp quake into account when deep striking?

If these ARE YMDC worthy let me know and I'll post a thread there.

Warp Quake won't prevent the reduced scatter from deepstriking units such as pods and trygons, but it will cause them auto-mishap if within 12". WQ only stops "homers and other items of wargear" that prevent deep-strike scatter. Subterranean Assault and spores/pods are neither wargear nor do they prevent scatter.

jy2 wrote:

Warp Quake won't prevent the reduced scatter from deepstriking units such as pods and trygons, but it will cause them auto-mishap if within 12". WQ only stops "homers and other items of wargear" that prevent deep-strike scatter. Subterranean Assault and spores/pods are neither wargear nor do they prevent scatter.

So to sum up - If placed outside of the 12" threat range (easy to mis-judge, BTW, deepstrikers beware!) the spores and 'gons are safe from WQ. As usual, if you place either of those within mishap territory and roll a 'hit', too bad so sad. I gotcha.

tetrisphreak wrote:

jy2 wrote:

Warp Quake won't prevent the reduced scatter from deepstriking units such as pods and trygons, but it will cause them auto-mishap if within 12". WQ only stops "homers and other items of wargear" that prevent deep-strike scatter. Subterranean Assault and spores/pods are neither wargear nor do they prevent scatter.

So to sum up - If placed outside of the 12" threat range (easy to mis-judge, BTW, deepstrikers beware!) the spores and 'gons are safe from WQ. As usual, if you place either of those within mishap territory and roll a 'hit', too bad so sad. I gotcha.

Correct. One other thing to note though is that if they scatter within the 12" radius, then they also mishap. It is the final placement, not the initial, that Warp Quake cares about.

This is related to a question I was going to ask - the Mawloc says in its rules that it doesn't mishap if it lands on top of enemy models. What happens if Warp Quake has been used?

Clearly if the Mawloc scatters off the Strike Squad it does mishap, but it's nebulous if it should mishap if it lands on them.

A note on the 'defense of needing 6's to wound':

As a Warhammer Fantasy Beastman player, I have extensive experience with this. Beastmen as an army have no armor and high toughness models. Our Rare's are made entirely of three large monsters. In WFB 7th, they changed it so that any strength attack can wound any toughness on a six. This has made the common consensus that all of the Beastmen rare's are mostly useless, because they just die too fast to Str 3 archers. With a *much* lower volume of attacks than 40k has, it has just been proven over and over that enough 6's will turn up to kill those monsters sooner rather than later

The GK with an army full of force weapons brings somewhat of the same situation to 40k. Imagine if those had been purifier squads with the banners that make the force weapon check autopass? All it takes is one six, and then SiTW isn't going to save you.

JessW wrote:This is related to a question I was going to ask - the Mawloc says in its rules that it doesn't mishap if it lands on top of enemy models. What happens if Warp Quake has been used?

Clearly if the Mawloc scatters off the Strike Squad it does mishap, but it's nebulous if it should mishap if it lands on them.

RAW: "If the Mawloc DS's onto a point occupied by another model, do not roll on the DS Mishap table but instead do the following: (blast, kill, move, place)"

It'd be a weak argument indeed to say that DS'ing on top of a model activates a blanket 'no mishaps' special rule that protects the Mawloc from mishaps caused by, say, its final location also being on top of impassable terrain. I'd say the exact same slight 'RAW vs common sense' issue is at hand here, the only consistent resolution IMO being to take the mishap test.

lindsay40k wrote:

JessW wrote:This is related to a question I was going to ask - the Mawloc says in its rules that it doesn't mishap if it lands on top of enemy models. What happens if Warp Quake has been used?

Clearly if the Mawloc scatters off the Strike Squad it does mishap, but it's nebulous if it should mishap if it lands on them.

RAW: "If the Mawloc DS's onto a point occupied by another model, do not roll on the DS Mishap table but instead do the following: (blast, kill, move, place)"

It'd be a weak argument indeed to say that DS'ing on top of a model activates a blanket 'no mishaps' special rule that protects the Mawloc from mishaps caused by, say, its final location also being on top of impassable terrain. I'd say the exact same slight 'RAW vs common sense' issue is at hand here, the only consistent resolution IMO being to take the mishap test.

Yeah, pretty much. The Mawloc would mishap, not because it landed on top of models (Which the FAQ clarified to end the previous ridiculous argument that it's clearly intended use would cause it to mishap), but because it deep struck into a Warp Quake zone.

On a related note, I wish GW would actually add subdivisions or even separate USRs for different kinds of deep striking. It makes sense for warp based teleporting to be affected by so sort of warp instability, but very little for burrowing bugs

Whilst I definitely agree with the idea of specifying 'Deep Strike - Teleport/Airlift/Burrow/Ambush/etc', and will support it with the observation that the WFB rule equivalent to 'Move Through Cover' follows this exact template without confusion or over-complication, I actually think it's fair in this particular instance to let GK affect most DS-ers. I envisage this power also causing turbulence and seismic activity in the physical plane.

lindsay40k wrote:Whilst I definitely agree with the idea of specifying 'Deep Strike - Teleport/Airlift/Burrow/Ambush/etc', and will support it with the observation that the WFB rule equivalent to 'Move Through Cover' follows this exact template without confusion or over-complication, I actually think it's fair in this particular instance to let GK affect most DS-ers. I envisage this power also causing turbulence and seismic activity in the physical plane.

Maybe I would be more sympathetic if it was an ability of an army that actually needed Deep Strike defense like Tau or Necrons

Yeah, the Mawloc isn't mishapping because it is landing on top of another model. It is mishapping because it landed in Warp Quake. That would be the most logical intepretation, though it'll probably be argued in YDMC by tyranid advocates and end up getting FAQ'd maybe.


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As for needing 6's to wound, one thing regular strike squads (and interceptors) lack is volume of attacks, especially if they get charged. Just a quick theory hammer - 10 SS gets charged by a carnifex.

Strike Squad attacks first (no hammerhand or cannot use force weaponry): 10 attacks x 2/3 hit x 1/6 wound = 10/9 wounds or 1W inflicted on TMC only. Then they pass their test and kills 1 TMC.

That's why the tyranid need to protect its TMC's with Shadows. It's their best and only defense against GK force weapons.


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You can probably say that Warp Quake was to make up for the Daemonhunters losing the anti-deepstriking protection of the older Inquisitorial mystics. I would've been happy with Warp Quake giving only a 6" radius of protection....enough to just keep drop podding meltas away from double-melta range. Giving them 12" of protection, however, have made them quite unbalanced against all-deepstriking armies, especially with the mobility of interceptors.