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This is one of those absurd situations where I like to think that as the mawloc bursts out from the ground, his giant, distendable jaw actually distends to somewhere near the size of the blast template and swallows up everything it can catch while spewing acid and electrical discharge all over the place in an explosion of dirt, concrete, blood and tyranid ichor.

I like to think that the guys in the tank next to the victim tank exchange uneasy looks at the Chimera next to them starts to shake and blood curdling screams are heard from within, and a few moments later the Mawloc does his Alien impression, with the Chimera as the poor dude's chest.

I know the biggest strength of Termagants is their low cost, but I saw a guy at my LGS have a Spore Pod crap out 20 w/ Devourers and pour 60 S4 shots into a guys marines. It was bad. Can't imagine if he shot something w/ less than a 3+ save.

The most interesting about htis thread, is the experience with the tyrannofex.
Dakkadakka is the only forum in which some people think that the TFex is a viable option. Whats the reason?

Do all the others only parroting what others say and are the dakkdakka users the only ones who actually tested the TFexes? Or are the dakkadakka user no competitive players who dont know whats really effective?

What i would like to say, could you please tell me/us more about the specific performance of the TFex? And if you have to field at least 2 of them etc.

I really want to field one, but they are costly and dont have that many shots (4+).

Hive2003 wrote:The most interesting about htis thread, is the experience with the tyrannofex.
Dakkadakka is the only forum in which some people think that the TFex is a viable option. Whats the reason?

I really want to field one, but they are costly and dont have that many shots (4+).

I initially dismissed them as too expensive but have been looking again since others suggested them. If you think of them as an upgraded Carnifex they are not too bad. We all know the Carnifex is overcosted, but the T'fex seems slightly less overcosted since the Rupture Cannon is better than the HVC.

If we take -
265 Points T'Fex with Rupture Cannon, Cluster Spines, Thorax Swarm & Armoured Shell
200 Points Carnifex with Hvy Venom Cannon & TL Deathspitter

From the Hive Tyrant entry the cost to add a Thorax Swarm & Armoured Shell is 65 Points which makes them the same cost. We then spend Zero Points to swap three points of Strength and an Attack for two Wounds and a point of Leadership. Loosing the attack is a shame but for 50% more wounds I would happily trade the Strength. The Cluster Spines are equivalent to TL Deathspitter and the Rupture Cannon is just better than the HVC.

you can only chose a thorax swarm /or/ extra armor, not both (on a HT)

Hive2003 wrote:The most interesting about htis thread, is the experience with the tyrannofex.
Dakkadakka is the only forum in which some people think that the TFex is a viable option. Whats the reason?

Do all the others only parroting what others say and are the dakkdakka users the only ones who actually tested the TFexes? Or are the dakkadakka user no competitive players who dont know whats really effective?

What i would like to say, could you please tell me/us more about the specific performance of the TFex? And if you have to field at least 2 of them etc.

I really want to field one, but they are costly and dont have that many shots (4+).

I played 2 this weekend in a 1500 point game against tau. Before my hive guard could get in range the tyrannofexes popped two devilfish and in the process one FW squad fell back off table. They then kept the hammerhead shaken the rest of the game. Had the game gone beyond turn 5 -- one of my tfexes was in position to contest or clear an objective of scoring FWs. I don't expect that kind of performance every game but the ability to hit targets from 48" out make them very useful in a tyranid army.

I think people are looking at them as 2 S10 shots at 265, and missing their ability to pound infantry at short range or their high resilincy in the current meta where most everyone is taking melta or autocannons.

Hive2003 wrote:The most interesting about htis thread, is the experience with the tyrannofex.
Dakkadakka is the only forum in which some people think that the TFex is a viable option. Whats the reason?

Have lists appeared on another forum that have cracked the issue of AV14?

Zoeys eat up Elite slots and after Spodding in will either be mown down by lasguns after getting one round of fire, or slaughtered by a Daemonhunter as they poke their heads out.

Carnifexes will pop a LR if they get close enough, only to be smacked down by Thunder Hammers.

I only play "friendly" games locally, no real tournament-level stuff. So far I've played 1250 and 1500 point games and it's been a mix of wins and losses. Both losses were due to me screwing up trying to get to an objective and the game ended at turn 5.

MVPs have been Zoanthropes (killed a LRR and a Defiler, one game they didnt do much due to my own crappy deployment), Tyranid Warriors with Deathspitters and Tyranid Prime (awesome unit, it has never been wiped out even vs some nasty stuff) and the Trygon (killed a whole unit of berzerkers that charged it - eventually!, almost a full unit of assault termis with TH's - got those down to 1 guy before it died).

I have a question: I'm looking at the Venomthrope. What unit(s) do you think benefits most from that 5+ save? Most of the guys I place high value on protecting already have superior saves. Is that mostly good vs range attacks that ignore armor?

The T-Fex has been discussedh ere because some very competitive players are trying to build very competitive lists for large tournaments. The current trends in those tournaments tend towards Mechanized armies and AV14/Land Raiders. Because the contents of a Land Raider can smash their way through your big bugs if they're allowed to base them (which the LR enables by tankshocking the Gaunt screen) then you're going to be very hard pressed to win a game. If a Land Raider is not included, there will pretty much certainly be some tanks with very potent long range weapons on them hiding in the opposing backfield. The T-Fex pressures them from turn 1 and gives you a chance to stop their scary guns early on, without having to close a lot of distance and take some serious shelling first. For these reasons (and others, but those are the main ones) the T-Fex is a worthwhile consideration for a very competitive Tyranid army.

Just because a few of us on here are running them doesn't mean we like them though. I think at this point no one woul be happy about paying 265pts for the guy. He just fills what some of us see as a very crucial role and thus far, we haven't found his high points cost to be not worth it because of that.

This is a TACTICS forum, not rules. I'm going to go back and clear out all rules-related posts. There's already a thread on this in YMDC, so take the discussion there.

Any further discussion of rules debates in this thread will result in disciplinary action.

You should probably clarify rules debates in that first statement then. It's a bit difficult to discuss tactics involving the use of a model if you can't bring up it's rules and their interactions.

Content- The Tyrannofex seems to be the replacement to the ubiquitous gun-fex from last edition. He arguably does what the old gun-fex did better, especially because he can actually destroy vehicles if you roll well enough. The issue is that he isn't absolutely necessary when you also have warp-lancing Zoanthropes and Hive Guard, as well as his very high cost. I think his real advantage comes in the range of his cannon, and how that allows him to do his job without getting gunned down by the nasty, nasty nasty short ranged fire that many armies have these days. Of course this just makes him a high priority target for lascannons and whatever else can reach out and touch him, and his secondary weapons will probably never see use if you keep him at maximum range. The other guys don't pay points for extra abilities they probably won't use but then are vulnerable with the shorter ranged attacks.

Railguns wrote:You should probably clarify rules debates in that first statement then. It's a bit difficult to discuss tactics involving the use of a model if you can't bring up it's rules and their interactions.

Sorry, yes, rules debates is what I meant.

I think the Tyrannofex is a lot more than just long-ranged antitank. It's a versatile unit -- in fact, it's about as versatile as marine tactical squad, or more versatile, in some respects. You have long-ranged antitank that's better than the sit-in-the-backfield solo lascannon a tac squad might take, and that can move, too. You have short-ranged anti-infantry shooting, and even a flamer-like template weapon. You're not the most powerful close combat unit around, but you can certainly do close combat perfectly well. You're almost certainly more durable than a tac squad -- sure, you have fewer wounds, but you do have much higher toughness and more armour. In some games, sure, you may just sit him at the back & shoot tanks for most of the game -- but in others, you're going to be walking him up and doing other stuff once the tanks are cracked open.

Not to mention the fact that his abilities at close range make him an extremely daunting prospect for deep striking units. It'll take a lot to take him out quickly.

Im not a big fan of the tyrannofex.

havent used one, but im going to stick with a carnifex in pod for a while.

I see the obvious about the T FEx, but i dont know...

There are 3 options:

1. the few dakkadakka users who actually tested him are wrong, or not really competitive

2. dakkadakka users are the only one who really tested him.

3. other metas...


That thing ist about 265 points, its slow and dont have a lot of output. Land Raider hunting? I dont think so, 4+/5+ isnt very reliable if you ask me...
Are they only "good" in pairs?
And anti infantry isnt an argument, Nids dont need the T Fex for anti Infantry...


But perhaps i should give it a try and play him the next few Games...

What are these other sites? Are there nid focused sites?

Most of the German sites.

40k online, Warseer etc.

40konline gets almost no traffic compared to here. I post on there more but they have so few non eldar or ork players its crazy. Warseer is poop, and i dont read german well enough to use a german site.

Mh nontheless there are a lot of competitive players and no one is even considering the big Fexes.
So lets be fair and dont hate on other sites.


If there are no more arguments than the posted ones, i think a have to test him for myself. But the theory tells me, that they are not worth their points...

Thats what I feel.

They are crap for blowing up enemy tanks.
However as a suppression unit they seem to be very good. Considering your only way to stop it from shooting is to kill it, and with its toughness thats not likely.

Death leaper. rending 5 omgomgomg

Meh, im not impressed with deathleaper at all. For around his points I can get 2 thropes in a pod or 3 hive guard, both of which will be better all around. I can also buy a squad of 28 gargoyles, to make my opponent have horrible morrowind flashbacks and win through psychological warfare.

I think deathleaper really depends on what you face in general. Against SM that like to run their librarian/rune preists and eldar with Eldrad/farseer it's pretty much a no-brainer.

However if you don't run into those armies very often or don't attend hardcore tournaments then I think it's safe to say Deathleaper will be kept in the box rather than on the table. The slot he takes up is valuable...far too valuable to be wasted.

Hive2003 wrote:That thing ist about 265 points, its slow and dont have a lot of output. Land Raider hunting? I dont think so, 4+/5+ isnt very reliable if you ask me...
Are they only "good" in pairs?

I've explained before why its important to run two t-fexes, but I'll go again. Following some simple math, we see that every turn my 4 rupture shots will account for one roll on the damage chart. It is twice as likely to be a pen as it is a glance, and even a glance can immobilize. It is pretty likely that over 2 rounds of shooting, I will get two rolls on the pen table. Which means its pretty likely that your raider will be immobilized or dead. Not assured, not "for sure gonna happen" but indeed a healthy likelihood. I use the term "the clock" to describe the psychology of that kind of math. What it means is, the space marine player has a certain amount of confidence in how long he is going to have his land raider, and it is likely the first two turns of the game. Every turn after that, he is less and less likely to have access to it.

Now that we have established that... lets follow it up with another important fact. The outcome of a gant-farm versus thss termie marine list will be decided by one unit alone. The terminator will either make good charges and win the game for the marines, or they will get hung up and ground out by supergants. Since we both know this, the nid player attempts to use gant screens to block the doors of tank shocking land raiders, thereby denying a charge on either the tervigon or the t-fex, and the marine player attempts to thin out the gant units enough so that a tank shock followed by round of shooting by supporting elements will open a charge lane up.

Space marine firepower is certainly adequate to do the job, given enough time. It is vitally important that they be pressured enough so that they don't have that time. They can't allow their terminators to not declare a charge, so they will have to either declare a charge on gants with terminators, or unload full spreads of LRC firepower into the gant screen and hope to the emperor that the t-fex doesn't blow up the unsmoked land raider.

I have already lost games to thunderhammer terminators, and I have already won multiple games against them. Whenever they got past the gant screen they won, and whenever they didn't, well, they didn't.... However, in the first game I faced against them, my opponent had absolutely no incentive to commit his land raider until my gants were thinned out Because my only land raider kill was a pair of carnifexes, waiting behind a gant screen to counter-charge the land raider. He kept moving 12" staying away from any monstrous creature assaults, and thinned my gants with everything else he had, soon enough, only a thin screen of 11 gants were blocking the tervigon charge, he then casually moved up, debarked the terminators, shot with the LRC and nearby support units until those 11 gants had removed enough casualties to open a charge lane, then the tervigon got exploded, which accounted for another two full units of newly born termagants. Instant GG. If LRCs can't get handled, then forget it.

Can zoanthropes do the job? Maybe... they might show up on time, they might pass the hood/rune weapon, they might pass the smoke... You are giving up your hive guard to do it, but I think it is valid to say that they can also kill land raiders. But in my neighborhood, if you see a land raider, there is either a runepriest or a librarian inside, and it is going to pop smoke after its first movement phase, of course this affects both the t-fex and the zoanthropes equally, but after the zoans arrive, they are going to be scooped right back into your army case, whereas marines don't have a good answer for t-fexes from range. I just prefer a less counter-able, more consistent approach. I'm conservative that way. Now if I could find another way to have any kind of game against IG without running mass catalysted hive guard, I could run 9 zoanthropes, but knowing that I have to have an answer for both 12+ armor 12 vehicles AND 1-2 land raiders full of nid kryptonite in a single metagame, leaves me no option but to flll up on hive guard and get my land raider "clock" from a differrent slot. I even ran some numbers on how many HVC shots I'd need to get that pressure on land raiders, it was way too cost prohibitive. Point for point, rupture cannons are the cheapest penetrating hit on a land raider, even when compared to the harpy.

Hive2003 wrote:But perhaps i should give it a try and play him the next few Games...

This should always be your first step. Play experience, both with and without the t-fex is what convinced me of its efficacy, not theory-hammer.

I think it's misleading to look at the T-fex on its own merits and judge if it's worth the points; it has to be borne in mind what it brings to the list as a whole.

In an army with one other ranged antitank competing for force org slots with other powerful units, it's an expense that can be justified. Spodding in a unit of Zoeys can probably get a LR kill, in return getting your highly visible models shot to pieces and forfeiting 2KP (and if there's a Daemonhunter around, you won't even get a shot off). Oh, and I suppose you could try and have a Carnifex run the Plasmagun gauntlet to try to reach the tanks, if you don't mind the Terminators inside pwning what's left of you senseless should you score a touchdown.

Most other armies have a lot of options for dealing with AV14. The Tyranids have a suicidal Zoey unit, suicidal Carnifexes, or the T-fex. In an army with deepstriking Melta guns, charging deepstrikers with Meltabombs, lances or lascannons galore, or mega artillery, the T-fex would be difficult to justify for its points. In a Tyranid army, it serves as both your ONLY long-ranged AT unit, your ONLY AT unit that doesn't expose itself to great danger in its role, and also as a bullet sponge tempting Lascannons away from OHKO'ing Warriors.

As someone who enjoys playing horde more than Nidzilla, if anyone can come up with a build that doesn't sink points into T-fexes and can give a LR/mech Guard list a decent fight I want to see it.

I will now replace my podding carnifex with a T-fex for the next few games. Though I like the podding fex a lot.

Can I ask how many points you have been playing shep...I want to get practise with my list, but I can't really compare it if points values aren't the same. I'm not only going to try massed trygons, but ymgarl stealers as well.

I know they aren't really anti tank but I see some potential bonuses in glancing vehicles to death (well 1, but it can be quite big)...embarked units will be destroyed if their transport is wrecked. This, I believe, is where the swarm wins. I think if nids ever face nids the swarm has the advantage.

Lukus83 wrote:Can I ask how many points you have been playing shep...I want to get practise with my list, but I can't really compare it if points values aren't the same. I'm not only going to try massed trygons, but ymgarl stealers as well.

I know they aren't really anti tank but I see some potential bonuses in glancing vehicles to death (well 1, but it can be quite big)...embarked units will be destroyed if their transport is wrecked. This, I believe, is where the swarm wins. I think if nids ever face nids the swarm has the advantage.

1750....

I was searching for something along those same lines. I gave double scytal raveners a shot, in order to see if i could get enough crew stunned results on vehicles to either force the occupants out to shoot, or to keep them in place so that trygons could come in and smash them up. No, rending claws isn't better anti-vehicle for them, because I have noticed that since you can't charge off of a deep strike under any circumstances, players will get to react to your arrival, nearby vehicles will move cruising speed to get away from you, and further away vehicles will shoot at you. if they have any nearby flamer response units, they'll just kill you off anyway. It seems that raveners should be deployed traditionally, a turn 2 charge is much better than a possible turn 2 arrival.

I also tried spamming strength 5 shooting in pods, and even experimented with dakkafexes. The return fire you take from tourney armies when you are danger close and not killing their tanks consistently is far more than nids can handle. Just running 25mm based models is not tourney viable, having 180+ models on table will not see you finishing any games in the time-limit... and hormagaunts will not get enough models on tanks to kill them off, what follows is a bunch of flamer templates on the bunched up hormagaunts. Just remember this simple math. For strength 4 models attacking cruising vehicles, 1 in 36 attacks will glance... if you want to immobilize that vehicle, you'll need around 216 attacks.

In one of my test games against IG, my first arrival was two trygons and a full 5 man unit of raveners. The raveners ran into area terrain, but the two trygons both got extremely lucky and one wrecked a manticore and the other wrecked a chimera. I was thinking that there was maybe a chance. Three vendettas combined to completely kill off one of my trygons, 5 multi-lasers and 7 meltaguns converged on the other and killed him, and then a piddly platoon command squad moved up and covered my ravener unit with 4 regular flamer templates. By the end of that turn, I had nothing. And all we were waiting for was two more ravener units one more trygon and two big warrior units. Whatever combination of that came down, it was guaranteed to get removed before the next turn began, and i was just feeding him my units piece by piece.

As much as I like the concept of podding in screamer killers for tank hunting, I don't understand how 4 wounds is going to be better than 6 wounds. And i don't think i'd expect one bio-plasma shot to do any better than the shots the trygons took in that test game.

Ultimately i don't know why the smaller venom cannon couldn't have been strength 7, and why both had to retain their -1 to damage table. Mech has officially started to limit the amount of viable units that can be fielded in my metagame, and I don't think its out of the question for every army to have vehicle answers in every FO slot... Its unfortunate that close combatting vehicles can't be the answer (since those vehicles cost between 35-55 points, and you are trading a 200 point unit for it) and that many of the tyranid "anti-tank" suggestions are venom cannon related... single shot, strength 6 or 9 and a -1 to the table don't really help the situation.

That's why i don't 'love' my shooting core suggestion of 6 hive guard and 2 t-fexes, but I feel its neccessary for the typical opponents like eldar, IG, and marines...