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Hello, together with a friend I'm getting back into the game after a break. We play since 2nd edition, but are only now starting with our first 10E games.

In those I played Necron and he has only a Tyranid army. In every game I was winning so clearly that I fear he might lose his motivation if it stays in this way. I'd love to get some thoughts on where the problem might be and how me might fix this. We're playing 1000 pts at the moment.

In one game I was using Hypercrypt Legion with a 20 Necron Warriors blob with an Overlord giving them Deep Strike, along with a hexmark destroyer. This did a lot of damage and the damage he did was regenerated by Reanimation Protocols (if necessary even in reserves with the Stratagem and with a Resurrection Orb). He never was able to bind them in melee, cause of the cheap Overwatch I could get with My Will Be Done and the Hexmark's ability. I told him to keep his units more concentrated so I could not deep strike and pick off one or two units and so he could bind them in melee, but he argumented that this way he'll lose in terms of objectives cause he'll not cover as many as I do. And if he does he leaves himself open to deep striking and picking his units off in small groups. A Doomsday Ark deleted one big monster after another, beginning with a Screamer Killer in round 1.

In another game I chose Awakened Dynasty, added Royal Wardens to 5 model Immortal units and put 10 Warriors in a Ghost Ark. The big unit was 6 wraiths with a Technomancer. In addition again a Doomsday Ark. He struggled to do anything. His Genestealers with Broodlord killed a minor model, then consolidated to the Doomsday Ark. But Overwatch with its Gauss Flayer arrays, then just staying stationary and firing into the unit killed so many that it was not a threat anymore. The Wraiths and Technomancer proved so durable that any damage he did was again regenerated/healed/reanimated. His Exocrine was not able to do enough damage to the Arks, even two would not be enough to kill one in one round. Same if he switched to a Tyrannofex with Rupture Cannon.

I got some suggestions from people which included playing more than 1k points since Tyranids might be at a disadvantage at smaller sizes. Others said we need to put enough ruins at the table so the big bugs can't be shot at freely from the Doomsday Ark. But all that does not change that you'd need 1 Exocrine and 2 Tfexes with Rupture Cannon to reliably remove one Ark in one round while it takes only one Ark to reliably remove one big bug per round.

I'd be very happy about any input and hints on how to improve the situation for this Tyranid player so we have a fair setup that makes sure he has a fair chance at winning.

A Doomsday ark shouldn't be reliably deleting a big bug per round. It does an average of 10 wounds assuming no cover, no defensive strats and that it remained stationary, which is a lot but not enough to reliably kill a 14 wound monster.

As for anti-tank, giving the Exocrines lethal hits with either Invasion Fleet or Hive Tyrant aura works quite well, and a HT extra CP for a stratagem re-roll also helps the Rupture Cannon.
Throw in a Maleceptor for frontline tanking and close range S10 attack also helps.

And remember to use the updated dataslate profiles (S9 on Exocrines and D6+6 on Rupture cannons).

That aside Tyranids work best on "themed" list. Either all monsters or all vanguard units or all assimilation units, etc. Mixing different themes doesn't really work very well.

While it's hard to say for certain without a lot more information, one possible issue could be that (from what you've said) it seems like you're playing a very active playstyle and your friend is playing very reactive. That you've got your set gameplan and your army does it's thing while your friend is focused on trying to figure out how to stop your army from doing its thing.

While this is obviously a factor, I worry that perhaps, they are so focused on your game plan, that they are forgetting their own. Does your friend have a cohesive army idea, or playstyle yet that they like to use? If not some armies, especially "theme" heavy ones like Tyranids can be pretty underpowered when you just try to play general cool stuff lists.

Since your finding that the Doomsday Ark is too strong against him, why not just leave it on the shelf?

First of all thanks to you all for your answers so far.

Tyran wrote:A Doomsday ark shouldn't be reliably deleting a big bug per round. It does an average of 10 wounds assuming no cover, no defensive strats and that it remained stationary, which is a lot but not enough to reliably kill a 14 wound monster.

As for anti-tank, giving the Exocrines lethal hits with either Invasion Fleet or Hive Tyrant aura works quite well, and a HT extra CP for a stratagem re-roll also helps the Rupture Cannon.
Throw in a Maleceptor for frontline tanking and close range S10 attack also helps.

That aside Tyranids work best on "themed" list. Either all monsters or all vanguard units or all assimilation units, etc. Mixing different themes doesn't really work very well.

Is is possible that you didn't factor in the devastating wounds the Doomsday Ark gets when it remains stationary? With that it's over 10. But I think the problem was that we haven't defined "big bugs" and for my as a non-Tyranid player everything not in a mass unit is a big bug. If you assume 14W you are of course right, but I was killing a Screamer Killer in one Round and a Carnifex in the next.

I'll forward your tips when I next discuss the upcoming game with him. I'm eager to see how it works for him.

Tawnis wrote:While it's hard to say for certain without a lot more information, one possible issue could be that (from what you've said) it seems like you're playing a very active playstyle and your friend is playing very reactive. That you've got your set gameplan and your army does it's thing while your friend is focused on trying to figure out how to stop your army from doing its thing.

While this is obviously a factor, I worry that perhaps, they are so focused on your game plan, that they are forgetting their own. Does your friend have a cohesive army idea, or playstyle yet that they like to use? If not some armies, especially "theme" heavy ones like Tyranids can be pretty underpowered when you just try to play general cool stuff lists.

I think this might be a very good point, he was mainly trying to keep me from scoring which did not work out well for him. Of course he had some plan like "pressure him with the Screamer Killer, keep the Zoanthropes in reserve to be able to react to the situation and try to score objectives with the gaunts", but that might indeed not have been as specific as mine was.

ccs wrote:Since your finding that the Doomsday Ark is too strong against him, why not just leave it on the shelf?

I'll do even more and even leave the whole army on the shelf and just pick another at some point. But there are other Necron players in our local group and with me he has a friendly practice environment to try what might work against the others who might not be that interested in his continued motivation.

It's a lot harder to do this in a game of 40k with models being as expensive as they are, but I'd recommend trying to find a way to have your friend try out a dedicated list of each of the Tyranid detachments to see what suits their playstyle the best. Even better would be for you to run the same list against all of them so that the pros and cons of each style are more apparent.

Maybe flooding the objectives with bodies in Unending Swarm is more their style, or running around making precision tactical strikes with Vanguard Onslaught, or having enough big monsters to overwhelm opponents anti-tank capabilities, ect...

Sometimes it's just a matter of experimentation until they find what they are comfortable with.

For example, when I first got into the hobby, I was young a big fan of heroic last stand stories, like Helms Deep ect, so I enjoyed playing armies that would just go to a spot and try to protect it. However, that rarely won me many games as while it was something that I enjoyed thematically, it wasn't what I was actually good at playing.

As I tried more armies and playstyles, I found that I excel with fast paced tactical armies. Ones that can control the board and put pressure on key locations even if the army is unit for unit weaker than my opponents. (This is why I've had so much success as a Kroot player.)

 Murenius wrote:
First
Is is possible that you didn't factor in the devastating wounds the Doomsday Ark gets when it remains stationary? With that it's over 10. But I think the problem was that we haven't defined "big bugs" and for my as a non-Tyranid player everything not in a mass unit is a big bug. If you assume 14W you are of course right, but I was killing a Screamer Killer in one Round and a Carnifex in the next.

I don't consider Carnifexes or Scream Killers to be big bugs, as they are on the lower end of Tyranid monsters in terms of size and defensive profile.

When I think of big bug I think Exocrine or bigger.

To be honest Screamer Killers are kinda awful. Carnifexes are better if led by Old One Eye but even then I would try to keep them out of a Doomsday Ark's firing los very damn hard, but that is dependent on the table having enough terrain to hide.

Sadly list building or more points won't fix anything in th match up. Necron are build for pariax nexus and 10th ed. they are very efficient , even after multiple nerfs/points up etc. Their stratagems are good, their synargies are easy to see and to use. And they have the whole RP thing. Now tyranids on the other hand have nothing like that. To function they need a good to very good player, ton of really hard work to make the army function. The army has practicaly no re-rolls, the stratagems are no where near as efficient as the necron one and lets better not talk about the army rules. Like many other armies in 10th, tyranids to function at all, even at a casual level, need to run something resembling a tournament list. And then the tyranid player has to put time and effort to learn all match ups, and to play thinking what to do when unit X fails to scratch a tank or unit and suddenly your primaries and secondaris fold on themselfs, if you don't know what to do.

Now you could play a very bad necron army, or play bad on purpose. maybe it would help a bit. But how much I am not sure. Nids are the opposit of easy army to play in 10th, at least if the goal is to have a functioning army and fun from playing it, and not just removing models while doing nothing.

Thanks for the additional comments. We took some time and started to build/print a terrain set that allows us to use a layout from one of the tournament terrain sets. Maybe we'll start with one of the GW layouts or WTC. I played against someone else in the meantime and I'm fairly sure that the table had too few terrain and too many killing zones that allowed me to shoot him arbitrarily. If we combine that with our tips he should have a more pleasant experience.

One quick question: are you doing Overwatch correctly? You mention it a few times in the OP and for most units it's not really that dangerous. In particular, you mention the Ghost Ark Overwatching into a unit that consolidated into it, which you can't do.

Slipspace wrote:
One quick question: are you doing Overwatch correctly? You mention it a few times in the OP and for most units it's not really that dangerous. In particular, you mention the Ghost Ark Overwatching into a unit that consolidated into it, which you can't do.

It is dangerous with a Hexmark Destroyer, which will hit on 2+. And about the Ghost Ark, I described this not well enough. It shot Overwatch when the Genestealers charged the Lokhust Destroyer next to it. Then they destroyed the Lokhust and consolidated to the Ghost Ark. In my turn the Ghost Ark just fired regularly because of Big Guns Never Tire.

There's something I used to do back in the distant past when playing friendly games with my friends, is that we would switch armies for a game or two.

I noticed it helped us get the feel for how our opponents armies worked, and it showed us new ways to play our own armies.

Just a thoughr.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
There's something I used to do back in the distant past when playing friendly games with my friends, is that we would switch armies for a game or two.
.

We might consider this at some point, but there are two big points against it: we think a lot of these problems stem from still learning our armies in 10E - and we both put a hugh amount of time painting our armies, so we want to finally command them on the table

 Murenius wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
There's something I used to do back in the distant past when playing friendly games with my friends, is that we would switch armies for a game or two.
.

We might consider this at some point, but there are two big points against it: we think a lot of these problems stem from still learning our armies in 10E - and we both put a hugh amount of time painting our armies, so we want to finally command them on the table

Having to defeat your army with your opponent's army helps give you a fresh perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of both. I did that with a friend too back in the day, to see if/how his tau could defeat my nids. It's fun even if you don't learn anything new, but it's just a suggestion.

shortymcnostrill wrote:

Having to defeat your army with your opponent's army helps give you a fresh perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of both. I did that with a friend too back in the day, to see if/how his tau could defeat my nids. It's fun even if you don't learn anything new, but it's just a suggestion.

How did that go? Did it work out? I wonder how an opponent might react if you manage to consistently beat your own army but he does not.

I remember that my friend did not use my IG the way I uses them. He was hyper aggressive, while I in contrast was essentially playing IG like a WW 1 simulation.

It was a wake up call as he bulldozed through the Chaos daemons that I would typically run away from.

I learned so much from someone else using my army, that it changed my playstyle for the better.

 Murenius wrote:

shortymcnostrill wrote:

Having to defeat your army with your opponent's army helps give you a fresh perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of both. I did that with a friend too back in the day, to see if/how his tau could defeat my nids. It's fun even if you don't learn anything new, but it's just a suggestion.

How did that go? Did it work out? I wonder how an opponent might react if you manage to consistently beat your own army but he does not.

Hah, iirc it ended awkwardly as I beat him soundly with his tau too, and I didn't have the awareness to do a "lessons learned" type evaluation afterwards (we're still friends). If I'd do something like this again then I'd play to win, but I'd treat the outcome as a learning experience and have a solid post-game discussion about what worked and what didn't, and why it did/didn't.