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Here you go~

http://synaps3.blogspot.com/2011/01/2k-batrep-vs-sisters.html

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for writing this one up, it was a really interesting match for me. Most Tyranids I have played have been much more assault oriented. I'll reserve my comments for after some others provide feedback.

(as usual a great battle report too)

Don't have my rulebook but I think if you stun a vehicle on a death or glory you live because stun means it can't move.

Great battle report though.

The doom should have been in assault. 4 attacks at str 6+ and a 3++. He'd have been safe from melta and still able to suck souls.

Good point. I'll do that for sure next time. Still learning how to use him best.

Good game, and a good read as usual. It looked completely sealed up for you early on, but then his shooting starting kicking in.

As for moving forward, it seems that you generally deploy bunched up. While this gives you good synapse and psychic reach, it could end up biting you against certain opponents. So my only warning is to be aware of this. I've definitely developed deployment habits, and it's kicked my ass a few times.

And Eric, we should have a game some time. I've seen you around a few times, but we've never faced off (I'm Tim with the Dark Eldar).

I do deploy bunched up often. It's part personal preference, but mostly my approach to Nids.

Other armies don't have the handicap of synapse. Any MEQ army can divide forces and still function. Also, our synergistic units and abilities are short range. Brood progenitor is 6", catalyst and synapse are 12". Since we don't have the protective armor of vehicles, we need to layer our cover saves and bubble wrap our vital units from more mobile forces.

I will space more carefully when facing off against pie plates, but sisters have only flamers. Every time I've tried to play spread out, I've lost.

Board control is important to bugs so I believe a solid mass is a strong stance. Hive guard are out best anti-mech and have short range. Deploying them centrally will help with table control and provide the best firing position as they never need LoS.

A strong central presence gives me best striking opportunities for objectives also. Once the tervigons reach mid board, they can spawn 6" out and that unit can move 6" and assault 6" also if needed.

If my opponent wants to commit to an assault on my wrapping units, I may crumple but then you face the entire bulk of my force in rebuttal.

If you've seen Jay Woodcock play, his movement and maneuvering is similar. Fast units tie down or intercept flankers, but a majority of the swarm moves together. I'd love to see Nids function in other formations, but I don't see it happening. I've even lost 20 man genestealer units due to being out of synapse and losing a multi-assault.

I haven't had a chance to play the new Dark Eldar, I would love to get a game. I start a new job in Rome, NY this Monday but I will be back on weekends (the wife is teaching locally).

Stunned results would usually be a successful DoG, but in this case the Tank in question had Extra Armor on it which downgraded the Stunned to Shaken.

Some additional thoughts on the game. I basically used my 1850 list from Da Boyz GT and swapped in Seraphim while removing Inferno Pistols from the Canoness and an Eviscerator from the Celestian Retinue. In this game I definitely missed the extra Eviscerator which would have let me carve up the Tyrannofex much more quickly than it did.

I made some key mistakes in this game. The first was my deployment of the Exorcists, I normally place them centrally but was trying to figure out a good way to give the cover. In the end, they could have moved up behind the main body of my troops since the only real dangerous shooting to them was the Tyrannofex's themselves. Then split off the the left and hid behind the pillars of the landing pad. With a 48" range I still would have been able to shoot.

Next I should have concentrated fire on the Tervignons. I thought the Exorcists were going to mow through the Hive Guard more quickly than they did. From the numbers an Exorcist averages 3.5 shots, 2.16 hits and 2 wounds on Hive Guard. With cover this is 1 wound a turn and at the end of the day a 2 man unit of Hive Guard is just about as effective as a 3 man unit is wrecking vehicles. Shooting at the Tervignons would have meant (without cover) I could have potentially dropped one by the second turn which weakens the Gaunts, prevents spawning more screening units, eliminates FNP to make my Bolters better and leads to synapse issues.

Next I screwed up using my Seraphim, I intended for them to act as a shield to take the charge from the Genestealers and then through some luck and tricky wound allocation survive a turn so they could hit and run away (hide the rest of the game) and leave a nicely clumped up genestealer unit. My first mistake in this was I positioned them badly so they did not get cover saves from the Doom. I also completely forgot to attempt to Nullify Cataclysm with Shield of Faith on them as well. A better use for them probably would have been to tie up the Ravenor that was nearby and then hit and run into a Tervignon/Tyrannofex to take some Eviscerator swipes.

Next mistake was not using Hand of the Emperor more often with my Canoness. I was worried about running out of Faith (which I eventually did) due to a protracted combat. However, to deal 6 wounds to either the Tervignon orTyrannofex the math with and without Hand is...

HotE - 3 swings, 2 hits, 10/6 wound - 3.5 rounds of combat - 7 Fatih

w/o HotE - 3 swings, 2 hits, 1 wound - 6 rounds of combat - 6 Faith

From a faith perspective it would have been slightly cheaper, but the standard deviation of using HotE is smaller and it frees up the Canoness a turn earlier. I also should have let the Tyrannofex take free swings until the retinue was gone from my Canoness since she cannot be picked out before I Started burning faith on her. With its WS 3, and 3 attacks it would have needed about 3 combat phases to make it through all the bodies.

Finally, in the last turn I tried to torrent down with lucky 6's the Tervignon using Divine Guidance. I should have taken my shots at the HiveGuard since I would have had 9 flamer hits on them rather than the 3 on the Tervignon. Killing them might also have saved me a KP for my transport that turn.

Regardless it was a great game and I appreciate hyv3mynd for posting it up and for making such a unique Tyranid list to play against. Next time I will probably bring 3 Exorcists, I have been leaning towards it in the past and I think SoB really need the extra ranged shooting to prepare the field for the flamer and melta strikes that usually come on turn 3.

Yeah an extra eviscerator or exorcist would have had major consequences. I agree on needing more than the 2 exorcists for shooting past 12". Maybe dominions. Jay was tearing me up with 4 heavy bolters with rending options. 4 multi-meltas could stay out of sight in the parking lot and move up safely to firing position.

I actually have 4 Retributors (Heavy Bolters) but I just stripped them to repaint them a few weeks ago.

Eric appears to be a very solid player... but his over all strategy was done as if he was playing vs guard. A bit of better deployment, and he could have used the long range of the exorcists to take down the hive guard while shielding his exorcists from tyranofex shots with rhinos.

This would have forced the Nid player to move forward more, possibly giving Eric better positioning for an easy-bake oven drive up attack on genestealers or even hive guard. In addition, it would take the targets away from the hive guard first turn which had perfect shots to kill the transports early because they were close.

But yea, I'd say Eric did a fantastic job picking targets, but he needed to play less aggressive to win this game : )

Nice game, and nice job overall.

Your opponent was definitely going to have a tough time on KP games being a mech list, but that seems to have been at least partially countered by the fact that you were spawning easy KP with the tervigons.

It looks like in the end it came down to your infantry being better than their infantry, and your MCs being better than their vehicles.

Yeah, I wasn't too concerned with spawning KP's as he had so many more than me with the transports and IC's. It's a slow grind wearing down sisters in combat, but resilient large gant squads that keep the sisters from shooting is worth it. All those meltas and flamers would have done a lot more damage if I didn't tie them down.

My dice were pretty solid with hive guard wrecking a vehicle with each volley. Tyrannofexes were stunning the exorcists enough to halve their effectiveness until they exploded.

I'm really dying for an objective game, I've rolled annihilation games for 2 weeks straight now.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

frgsinwntr wrote:Eric appears to be a very solid player... but his over all strategy was done as if he was playing vs guard. A bit of better deployment, and he could have used the long range of the exorcists to take down the hive guard while shielding his exorcists from tyranofex shots with rhinos.

This would have forced the Nid player to move forward more, possibly giving Eric better positioning for an easy-bake oven drive up attack on genestealers or even hive guard. In addition, it would take the targets away from the hive guard first turn which had perfect shots to kill the transports early because they were close.

But yea, I'd say Eric did a fantastic job picking targets, but he needed to play less aggressive to win this game : )

Yeah man, he's good. His team went undefeated at the last team tournament. Our locale is dominated by "comp" players and proponents, but I have a much more enjoyable game when I face off against someone who isn't afraid to bring 9+ vehicles, loads of melta, and makes me work for a win. He hadn't played against nids for nearly a year, and it was only my second game against sisters ever. I'm sure we both learned a lot and our next match will be even more interesting!

One of the disadvantages of the terrain (which I ironically setup) is it was dominated by two landing pads which did not block LoS/provide cover for vehicles. This made it easier to hide infantry behind it and move out than to hide vehicles and pop in to shoot.

That said, my worry about moving forward is that SoB are really most effective at about 8" range for flamers, bolters and melta. I also only had the two Exorcists as long range shooting and I did not want to be in a situation where he grabbed 2 or 3 Kill Points from blown vehicles and I had to make a late game charge while he ran away.

From a 'statistics' perspective the Hive Guard have 6 wounds with 4+ cover is 12 before saves with 5/6 wounding is ~14 hits, hitting on 3's is 21 missile shots. Exorcists average 3.5 shots a turn, which correlates to 3 turns of uninterrupted shooting to take down 1 unit of Hive Guard (it actually just about worked out this way as well). In that time I am pretty confident in a T'fex's ability to smash open 2 or 3 tanks and put me behind on KP and footslogging half my army.

Regardless, those Hive Guard are nasty and I probably should have been more conservative with smoke.

The last tournament locally was actually pretty interesting - it was 2 man teams with adepticon force org and I played a pure Slaanesh while my partner played a pure Tzeeetch Daemon army. I also played an 1850 last night against Tyranids and I have to say, Slaanesh Daemons do a number on them with their rends!

Nice win and nice battle report. Also nice paint jobs on those nids

Good battle report. It's always fun reading one that includes Sisters of Battle.

Tyrannofex are really good near the front lines rather than hanging back in a corner. They are tough to kill and perform decently in assault.

calypso2ts:

Annihilation games is brutal on Sisters. You put up a good fight against a really shooty Nid list.

Prior to the release of all the new armies up to IG, it was considered overkill to field 3 Exorcists. But now, it's almost a necessity.

3 Exorcists helps a lot in Annihilation games.

Yeah, 3 exorcists would definately be painful for me. I've never looked through the codex, but I think I saw multi-melta immolators on another blog, are they viable?

Seems like MM immolators would provide some much needed midrange firepower. More str8 ap1 is good for anti-mech and denying me FnP.

I tend to find the closer units are to the action, the shorter their life expectancy due to increased exposure to small arms fire and assault ranges. Taking MM's would keep the immos back and their contents safer longer, until you need to jump out and drop several flame templates.

if you have lots of them they are viable... but otherwise they are cost prohibitive in games. a rhino hull with a weapon that can't fire if you move over 6.

85pts before upgrades when you give it a TL MM

Love the pepto bismol pink rhino... I wonder if it's jealous of the primer black rhinos.

MisterMoon wrote:Love the pepto bismol pink rhino... I wonder if it's jealous of the primer black rhinos.

That Rhino is actually the Emperor's Children rhino, if you look closely each squad is painted as a different heresy era Legion, so far I have Blood Angels, Ultramarines, Dark Angels, Emperor's Children, Space Wolves, and Death Guard. I'll be changing one Imperial Fit Exorcist to be Iron Warriors and start working more diligently on the vehicles soon. The end goal is a display board with various mutilated astartes surrounded by SoB of the same scheme. I figured SM fit the category of witch and mutant when I started playing and it was time they were replaced by more Faithful servants!

MM Immolators lose the greatest part of Immolators which is the ability to move 12" and still shoot. I will probably begin fielding three Exorcists soon, there is a rumor that my little sister has one for me as a combined my birthday from 2 years ago and graduation last year present...

Lol nice.

I actually like the fact that each trasport is a different color as the unit carried within. It makes keeping track of diverse units and wargear easier.