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Hello,

I am wanting to start a second army in the coming months. I am stuck between orks and nids. I am wonderring if the swarm box is any good? Are those models decent? Competetive? Useless?

It seems like a decent deal, and if the models arent horrible ill start there and abandon orks for now.

Thanks for reading,
Juicy

Unless you are doing 3-5 Flyrant then Nids are useless in a competitive environment. If you want to start Nids for fun and modelling then YES it's a great start.

For gaming and winning, not so much. You can still win, or I should say it's still POSSIBLE to win but will be a very up hill battle.

What is competative? I heard Eldar are everywhere in tournaments.

Yeah, to be competitive, Tyranids are pretty close to the bottom of the barrel, with only max-Flyrants (max it out by using Mycolids for your Troops) being the foundations of a viable competitive Tyranid list. Swarms in competitions suffer from both being easily killed, horribly ineffective against anything that is walking, requiring Synapse (the more gribblies you have, the less Synapse you have), and taking so long to play out that you're frequently hitting time limits.

HOWEVER, casually, Swarm Nids are a lot of fun! From that angle, it's a good box to start with.


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The competitive stuff out there is practically invulnerable to everything, can pretty much kill anything, is Fearless, and can move wherever it needs to all the time. Flyrants don't do a bad shake at this list, but a lot does it even better. Competitive lists are not fluffy at all, and are also not evocative of the actual themes of the factions involved. They're like someone stitched together and Pidgeon and a Rat to make a Pidgeon-Rat.

A word of caution: unless you plan on buying/selling armies, don't let competitiveness be the leading factor in armor selection. Eldar, Tau, SM, Necrons, and Daemons may be the top five armies right now (in no particular order), but balance does change. If Eldar units receive a major points increase in the future, you could find yourself stuck with a suddenly underpowered army.
Then again, if 'Nids suddenly got a 7.5 update, they could get some major changes like maybe Hormagaunts getting reclassified as Beasts (so 12" move and ignore terrain). Now suddenly they're a little more viable on the tabletop and more competitive. If competition is your main concern, then by all means do your research (start by finding out if your area uses the core rules or ITC, ETC, NOVA, etc.) and buy the most competitive army, but don't be surprised when the meta shifts.

I dont want to be competative. I just dont want to get crushed every game. I have Dark Angels, and am expanding them pretty quickly. I will hold off on my next army for now.


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Thanks everyone.

Ah, well in that case, so long as you're against like-minded opponents, you'll find that most of the factions are just fine when matched against each other. The only things that tend to "crush everything, every game" are those pesky competitive-level lists. In general, Tyranids are still on the weaker end, and you will notice this compared to your Dark Angels, but they allow for a lot of other styles of play that you may find most enjoyable. Just remember that having a couple of Flying Nids is pretty important for a Tyranid list to hold its own.

JuicyPVP wrote:
I dont want to be competative. I just dont want to get crushed every game. I have Dark Angels, and am expanding them pretty quickly. I will hold off on my next army for now.


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Thanks everyone.

I just played a few games just with the Get Started set for Nids, and I am loosing and last game I was crushed on turn 3. Mind you I suck at 40K so it's not the Tyranids fault. I would loose with other armies as well. That being said, while they are fun to play, just think of it as in the end of the books when the opposition win all the time. and you are just making the story on how to get to the ending.

At least for me, last game I had my flyrant charge into a squad of Skitarri (spelling?) on his last wound, they missed all their shots on him before he assaulted, but when he got overwatched on his charge, all the shots missed except for his plasma shot and bang shot him dead just as he was about to pounce. Great stories that way. Just don't expect to win many games.

Remember a lot of stuff like Skitarri and Tau have lots of ignore cover so basically makes the Venomthropes useless that way. There is a counter for everything we can do but hard for us to counter.

Tyranids can be lots of fun. Great to model and paint except for the gaunts. You will pull out your hair there. As long as everyone is having friendly games you should be fine with Nids. Question is, your play group or opponents you play against, how do they play? Are they competitive, play to win, tweak armies when they know what you have and play? It all depends on your play group.

I have orks, nids and dark eldar.

I make it pretty clear that I'm not looking to play against killer lists, and have a great time of it!