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Tornado Landspeeders (AC, HB) excel at firepower, flexibilty, speed and are nearly immune to assaults. Or to say it shorter: Tornados are damn good.

This naturally inspires one to include as many Tornados as reasonably possible. In a normal Marine list 2 Tornados seem to be ideal, because you find enough terrain on most tables to hide 2 Tornados if you dont get first turn.

Lets discuss if 6 might be a magic number for all Drop Pod armys.

- The first turn problem: Static Tornados without cover die like flies and on most tables you wont find enough terrain to hide 6 Speeders. Lets assume 1/3 of the missions are alpha (where you cant hide Tornados first turn in reserves) and you go second 1/2 of the time. This means only one in 6 games you have to expose some of your 6 Tornados in the first round. Add in, that some enemy armys will lack first turn long range shooting, and the Speeders odds to survive get even better.

- 3 x 2 Tornados: A unit of two (for the even number) can take heavy losses and still stays scoring. When one of two gets stunned, the other one can move and revert the first incoming shot to glancing. With two Tornados the problem of overkill (you cant split fire) is largely neglectable in my experience.

Whats your experience? What else has to be considered? Do you think Tornados fit well with Drop Pods?

 

 

GT rules say no alpha, so you can always DS them (in most tourney environments. even in RTTs there're rarely scenarios without deep strike, maybe 1 in 4 or 1 in 6)

The problem is there is currently no rule that says that speeders count as moving >6" when deepstriking, so they are made of tarpaper the turn they arrive.

Aside from that, paper thin vehicles are a poor counterpoint to an army that is made up of a lot of very hard to kill guys - it ruins your target saturation completely and gives them an easy way to make vps off of heavy bolters that they didn't have before.

If you think Tornados are immune to assaults you're on some kind of dope. A squad of bp/ccw marines rates to get a glancing hit per charge, 2 glancing hits with furious charge.

I ran tornados in my pod army for a while and I concluded that it's always better to get more guys - terminators, normal marines, et cetera. They hold up longer and score.

If you MUST run tornados, 3 x 1 is the only (and I mean only) way they belong in a pod army.

If one is stunned then if the other chooses to move the stunned one is left behind and assumed destroyed!

It's either both stunned or 1 destroyed and 1 moving, those are your choices.

Fast choices are deployed last so even with weak terrain it is still possible to keep them safe some times.

That's not completely accurate. Moving out of coherency means it's destroyed. You can stick around and still move.

When I saw "immune to assault" for some reason the word "tornado" turned into the word "typhoon" in my head - there's a speeder that could use some discussion. Pretty clearly, the Tornado (assuming assault cannon/heavy bolter) beats the multimelta for tank hunting, and is the best overall for kicking out firepower. Typhoons sacrifice the killiness but get some extra range - ever since Augustus posted his tourney army, I've been musing over them. My speeders are still going to be 2x1 Tornado, but if you've got tons of anti-tank, the S5 small blast at 48" looks (a little) interesting. Could be useful to throw (some) opponents for a loop, if nothing else.

Just to clarify something...when I ran the numbers a while back, the multimelta was the only weapon that was superior at anti-tank work to the assault cannon. However, that multimelta MUST be within 12" to get that result.

True...but that 12" is one turn.

Yeah, but stay at range with the Typhoon and they can essentially ignore it because it simply doesn't damage anyone enough.
All that will get assigned to it is targets of opportunity that don't have anything better to shoot at.

Really, it just doesn't hurt.