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Hi there.

I am currently building a Tyranid army for casual and local tournaments. Now for me the looks of models is important, so no strange gun or swordlike weapons and as much Scything talons as possible. I like to include a swarmlord as they suit the 'in-your-face' nid army it will be. But I have some serious issues with the Swarmlord model. For one it is way too small for its stats. Next its boneswords do look off. I thus intend to build my own Swarmlord from the Tyrannofex kit using the scythed talons for his front limbs. Perhaps even making him a bit more upright on the hindlegs well for an even more imposing stance.

Question is: obviously this will not abe WYSIWYG, but would you have a problem with it? And is the larger base a problem conserning the rules?

You are not the only one with that problem, the swarmlord is a bit "off" the typical tyranid look.
The larger base WILL BE a problem in many cases, because he is a synpatic creature, so you are increasng the area covered by it.
I saw some decent conversions using a tyrant kit and a trygon.

 Singleton Mosby wrote:
Hi there.

I am currently building a Tyranid army for casual and local tournaments. Now for me the looks of models is important, so no strange gun or swordlike weapons and as much Scything talons as possible. I like to include a swarmlord as they suit the 'in-your-face' nid army it will be. But I have some serious issues with the Swarmlord model. For one it is way too small for its stats. Next its boneswords do look off. I thus intend to build my own Swarmlord from the Tyrannofex kit using the scythed talons for his front limbs. Perhaps even making him a bit more upright on the hindlegs well for an even more imposing stance.

Question is: obviously this will not abe WYSIWYG, but would you have a problem with it? And is the larger base a problem conserning the rules?

Best Boneswords I have seen are these.

http://hydracast.blogspot.com/p/boneswords-for-gw-hivetyrant-kit-of-two.html





And I found and used a forgeworld Hive Tyrant for my swarmlord. Mostly you need to search ebay for them.



All that being said, putting the swarmlord into your army list is a mistake. To get the most out a SL you need to invest a lot of point into it and it's one big trick which is to slingshot another unit into the fray early. Which also means it needs to be up front in your deployment. If the opponent goes first they will know what it is capable of and it will get shot off the board very quickly. 400+ points will get flushed down the drain by turn 2. The Swarmlord is a flashy looking tactic that gets a lot of new nid players excited but it's also the shallowest strategy that is the most easily countered. Nids do significantly better if you bring lots of cheap options. Overwhelming amounts of threats so they have no clear target priority and redundancies (bring multiples of each of those threats or have the threats each capable of covering the same kinds of jobs). SOMETHING will get through and the enemy won't know how to stop it. The SL everyone knows how to stop. Just shoot it first.

It would be far too big and as said the base size increases the size of his auras. Not to mention from your own side the physical size the model would make him much easier to draw LoS to.

 Lance845 wrote:

Wow, these are really nice counts-as boneswords. That solves it! No more mucking about with larger models, bases etc. Just bulking up the tyrant model and adding these boneswords and he's looking good again

 Lance845 wrote:



All that being said, putting the swarmlord into your army list is a mistake. To get the most out a SL you need to invest a lot of point into it and it's one big trick which is to slingshot another unit into the fray early. Which also means it needs to be up front in your deployment. If the opponent goes first they will know what it is capable of and it will get shot off the board very quickly. 400+ points will get flushed down the drain by turn 2. The Swarmlord is a flashy looking tactic that gets a lot of new nid players excited but it's also the shallowest strategy that is the most easily countered. Nids do significantly better if you bring lots of cheap options. Overwhelming amounts of threats so they have no clear target priority and redundancies (bring multiples of each of those threats or have the threats each capable of covering the same kinds of jobs). SOMETHING will get through and the enemy won't know how to stop it. The SL everyone knows how to stop. Just shoot it first.

Interesting bit of advice. The Swarmlord is indeed a one-trick-pony. And an expensive one at that. I will consider your words when I decide what model to build next. Thanks!

One of the strongest things about the Swarmlord is his size.

Is not much bigger than a Broodlord, so he can be easily hidden somewhere.

And to be honest playing the Swarmlord as my WL and with 3 T guards, he is never going down before conditioning the game.

Most of the games he is winning them alone without seeing a single close combat...