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I have an upcoming game against tyranids as the space wolves. I have only played against them twice as IG. I'm figuring drop all the melta for flamethrowers, maybe squeeze in an LR. What are some of the tyranids weakness'?

Their small guys are squishy and a lot of them will die to bolter fire with no saves(without cover).

I feel like long fangs have the potential to be really scarry with decent firing lanes, frag missles and hvy bolters will wreck anything that isnt an MC and still do some damage to MCs.

Bring skyfire of some kind even a storm fang/wolf or some flakk, unless you know he doesnt like FMCs.

Be careful with your LRs MCs dont have to try too hard to pop av14

if you slay the monstrous creatures and larger things the size of warriors and venomthropes the army tends to just fall apart. their primal traits when out of synpase basically shut the whole army down

^

Their fearless bubbles are both an amazing perk and a ridiculous curse. Once you remove that bubble, and quite honestly Nid big bugs are one of the easiest MCs to kill right now which is completely bogus if you ask me.

I killed a hive tyrant from full to dead with a single volley from broadsides. Didnt pen armor, but because i caused so many wounds and 3+ armor is lame on such an important solo model, he just failed enough of them. Which promptly had about half of the warriors under its bubble start going berserk because only one of the units had a backup synapse at the time.

Some dont need it, but the large majority of those are rarely used. I havent seen any genestealers in god knows how long and ive never seen warriors.

Focus fire the synapses ones, sacrificing a squad to remove synapse from a large chunk of the army is usually a good trade.

With tyranid ld and how fething brutal the charts are for being out of synapses, you can reliably ignore gribblies and beasties who aren't in the bubbles. Unless they're already locked in CC, the odds of them doing anything useful are pretty nill.

 morganfreeman wrote:
Focus fire the synapses ones, sacrificing a squad to remove synapse from a large chunk of the army is usually a good trade.

With tyranid ld and how fething brutal the charts are for being out of synapses, you can reliably ignore gribblies and beasties who aren't in the bubbles. Unless they're already locked in CC, the odds of them doing anything useful are pretty nill.

On that note, do be aware of each unit's ld. Some of the non-synapse MCs, especially the fliers, are fairly high (Harpies and Crones are both ld10, for example) so you can't necessarily expect the entire army to collapse once synapse is removed. Infantry are generally ld6 or so, so if you're gunning for synapse, but off the little guys first.

Arent their non synapse MCs free-minded so they dont NEED synapse?

Could be wrong, specifics like that im a bit hazy on. Tyranid players are sparse.

As someone who routinely plays against a tyranid player (who knows his army), with both IG and BA, I can safely say that synapse is important. However, the second most important, perhaps even more than synapse, are venomthropes.

I swear, these things are the bane of my existence, and as SM you lack any real cover-denying weapons to kill them - and god forbid if you get night fighting - you won't kill anything t1.

I tend to focus fire scary stuff first and then let any template weapons I have take care of the gribblies. Also, if he's using a flyrant, punch him in the face and break the model, that thing is stupid.

 Vineheart01 wrote:
Arent their non synapse MCs free-minded so they dont NEED synapse?

Could be wrong, specifics like that im a bit hazy on. Tyranid players are sparse.

Most (if not all?) non-Synapse MCs are Fearless, but they do have Instinctive Behavior and have to roll on that chart if outside of Synapse range. However, because they are Fearless, they can't get the super-bad result on the Instinctive Behavior chart. The middling result usually isnt too terribly bad for the type of unit, and of course rolling a 6 gives you a bonus.

Very few non synapse MCs have fearless, it's I St the results for single models are not an issue as they can't eat themselves ...

Against lots of armour 13-14 nids do nothing in cc outside of caring exes. Smash is pretty useless now and the best way to kill armour is haywire shooting on flyrants and warp lance.

What nids hate is ap2-3 and ignore cover. Makes them cry. Flyrants heavy is the only competitive list so bring your own AA and maybe a wolf star and he will struggle. They can't hold objectives well as troops are pants.

I'm expecting him to bring atleast 1-2 flyrants. Would drop pods be useless against nids? Should I keep my grey hunters on foot or pod them in?

Droppods could be a great idea or a bad one.

If hes actually going melee heavy on his MCs, which is getting less and less likely to see, then its bad because you will not be able to kill them all before they charge and murder your faces off.
If hes going shooty flyrant, which is the norm, then its great because i guarantee his guns will hit you before you can hit him. Not to mention the possibility of landing in turn 1 and sniping him before he starts flying around.

Odds are its a good bet to bring pods. Just be mindful it can backfire if you end up near a melee MC and fail to kill it.

Tyranids main weakness is their codex. Literally. Take his codex and smash his models with it.

 Frankenberry wrote:
As someone who routinely plays against a tyranid player (who knows his army), with both IG and BA, I can safely say that synapse is important. However, the second most important, perhaps even more than synapse, are venomthropes.

I swear, these things are the bane of my existence, and as SM you lack any real cover-denying weapons to kill them - and god forbid if you get night fighting - you won't kill anything t1.

I tend to focus fire scary stuff first and then let any template weapons I have take care of the gribblies. Also, if he's using a flyrant, punch him in the face and break the model, that thing is stupid.

Use TFC or Wyveen, droppod dual Heavy flamer Ironclad dreadnought or sternguard would make Venomthrope cry. If you are playing BA, droppod the Frag Cannon and HF Furioso Dradnought and triple template Tactical Squads. Just watch out for really bad dice rolling, nothing would be worse than you hit the venomthrope twice, then rolled double ones to wound......
Flyrant could be a headache if the Nids player taken in mass, i.e. three/four of them or more. If there is only one or two, it is actually not very threatening if you could have capable anti air and/or could get the alpha strike. If you play Ultramarines, you may also just take a bunch of Grav Centurion supported by Tigirius, get Preciense, perfect timing then just snap shoot into the sky. Statistically you may cause three wounds on a Flyrant per turn, and thus the grounding test might have 1/3 chances to kill one.

 Vineheart01 wrote:
Arent their non synapse MCs free-minded so they dont NEED synapse?

Could be wrong, specifics like that im a bit hazy on. Tyranid players are sparse.

Non-synaptic Monstrous Creatures still come with Instinctive Behavior, just the 1-3 result on the applicable tables do not work on most monstrous creatures so they generally skip to the more mild 4-5 results instead*. The only Tyranid monstrous creature that is especially vulnerable to Instinctive Behavior is the Carnifex, as it can actually be affected by the 1-3 result on the Feed instinctive behavior table when taken in broods and Feed shuts down any ranged weapons they carry.

* For reference:

Feed 1-3: Each model in the unit suffers 1 hit with the same strength as the unit (no AP) and cannot do any other actions this turn. Single model units skip this result and use the 4-5 result instead.
Feed 4-5: The model must attempt to assault the nearest enemy unit that turn and cannot shoot or run.

Hunt: 1-3: The unit is pinned. As monstrous creatures and Fearless models cannot be pinned, they treat this result as a 4-5 instead.
Hunt: 4-5: The unit must shoot at the nearest enemy unit and cannot run or assault this turn.

 ruminator wrote:
Very few non synapse MCs have fearless

Actually it is quite the opposite, the only Tyranid Monstrous Creature that doesn't have fearless innately is the forge world Dimachaeron.

 ruminator wrote:

Against lots of armour 13-14 nids do nothing in cc outside of caring exes. Smash is pretty useless now and the best way to kill armour is haywire shooting on flyrants and warp lance.

They also have Crushing Claws on Tervigons, Tyrant Guard, and the Haruspex for high armor as well, though none of those are particularly popular choices at the moment (Tervigons aren't as powerful as they used to be and don't play well with MSU tactics, Tyrant Guard are expensive and the Haruspex suffers from being in a highly contested slot and being somewhat redundant with Carnifexes).


Regardless, the main problem Tyranids have is high volume of high strength shooting. They don't really have any way to mitigate volumes of S6+ outside of their flying monsters since they (obviously) have no AV13 and their toughness caps out at T6. Most competitive lists try to get around this weakness by focusing exclusively on flying platforms for offense and a handful of single-model units for scoring functions. If you can kill their token scoring units (generally Lictors or Rippers) and withstand masses of S6 firepower with the odd haywire template or missile you're more or less good to go. Against swarm lists focus on neutralizing synapse as suggested (especially Tervigons, since the backlash from their deaths deals 3D6 S3 hits to nearby Termagants as well) as both troop gaunts are highly vulnerable to the Instinctive Behavior table (Gargoyles not so much, since the penalty of IB: Hunt can be corrected instantly by bringing them back into synapse - Feed and Lurk are much more dangerous and debilitating).

Tyranids can't deal with armor. Your tanks (12" move) are faster than the MC that can kill the tanks (6" move). Enjoy your victory and bring enough AA (or planes) to deal with the flying hive tyrants

How are Tyranids weak? Let me count the ways. Nah, I can't be arsed. I'll just pick out one.

Instinctive Behaviour feels like Necrons old crippling 'Phase Out' rule. You don't need to fight the army. Just take out the pillars, and watch the rest come tumbling down.
That's the major reason why you only see 10% of the codex on the tables, the few good choices that don't need babysitting.

Tyranids can be a strong mid-tier faction against new players with bad target priority and no access to ignore cover.

Once the hive tyrants go down the rest will follow

Depends on what you mean by weaknesses. A lot of the bad units got help via getting their drop pod back, but as a whole it's a weak codex. Flyrants, Mawlocs, and Zoans are the basic winners of the codex.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Depends on what you mean by weaknesses. A lot of the bad units got help via getting their drop pod back, but as a whole it's a weak codex. Flyrants, Mawlocs, and Zoans are the basic winners of the codex.

Zoans are winners of the codex now? How do you mean?

And Tyrannocytes merely made some of our bad units mediocre. Starting at 75 points, they're overpriced. I'd rather have them at 40 points (like our old pods), and toning down their shooting instead which is too situational anyway.

- target venomthropes if you can
- bring AP3 weapons
- Target synapse creatures only if they didn't really bring enough to overlap, otherwise you may be wasting your shooting
- Dealing with high armour isn't a strength of nids, however how you arm your armour can make the difference. If you're nid army is a lot of big bugs then your armour should have high strength weapons or a lot of multi-shot AP3. If the nid army is mostly swarms of smaller nids, you want a lot of AoE or multi-shot weapons to deal with them.
- Nid weapons are mostly non-existant outside 18", if you can, keep you army outside range