The biobomb mutates

Recent games have proven to be very interesting, I got my first proper tournament (well half a tournament as I couldn't play day 2)
I found myself doing something unexpected, at the start of each game I found myself rolling on tables other than Biomancy, or at the very least rolling on tables as well  as Biomancy. so why did I make these decisions?
I realised as soon as I started to play competitively that one of the greatest advantages the powers tables have is that you gain huge flexibility. This only works of course if you have lots of powers - which the tyranids excel at - as you take a lot of the randomness out of the selections.

So what did I learn from each of these games?

First up Biomancy is still the core of your resilience and will usually be the place you need to start , a few Iron Arms or Endurances make a huge difference to the survivability of the list so if you roll either of those 2 early on your multi power monsters, Tervigons or Tyrants.  Once you have a power like that in place you can start to consider the other 2 tables - and your enemy. Let me explain by elaborating on my opponents and the choices I made accordingly.

Game 1 - Greydar
I played against a greydar list, a wraithguard blob led by eldrad, fuegan and the baron. The force was light on troops (2 min bikes and a squad of 7 hellions) so killing them was going to be the key to victory, as killing the 1000 point wraithguard unit wasn't going to happen. The other big problem I had hear was that of course Eldrad would put a severe dent in my powers. Now that is a pretty big challenge to deal with.
Knowing this I had to double down on Biomancy in most cases to give my tervigons a chance to cause a problem.
So what I did was give all of the 5 Zoanthropes ( 1 in  pods 1 not) the Primaris power Psychic Shriek as it denies cover and armour. I made a mistake of not giving it to the Doom.This was to make it almost impossible for the hellions or bikes to survive while the Tervigons & Flyrants distracted and damaged the blob and pumped out scoring units.
The 3 man zoans dropped in during the game, killing the hellions, with no cover save they were a soft target, it was even the first shot that saw them off, The dooms power killed a squad of bikes on the 3rd attempt - psychic shriek would have been much easier!

If I had been more ballsy in this game I could have loaded the Tyrants with shriek as well and just gone hunting.... even the wraithguard wouldn't have liked that much.
I won the game on the back of the powers I had chosen but it would have been much easier if I had chosen correctly

Game 2 - Necron
A Necron list - 3 night scythes, 1 doom scythe , 2 *6 wraith units with a lord, tomb blades, triarch stalker and 2 annihilation barges. The mission is the relic.
Clearly in this match up I am heavily outgunned.  Learning from the first mission I thought hard about
what powers I needed. So on with the rolling. I did roll pretty well on my first or second roll on my tervigons (1 endurance and 2 Iron arms) - and yes I rolled each psyker fully before moving on. This allowed me to take a close look at Telekinesis and Telepathy.
Telepathy was ideal as 2 of the powers are warp charge 2, meaning the first 4 are quite likely to be rolled.
Dominate -  good for slowing down wraiths
Mental fortitude - useless
Puppet master - ideal... more on why later!
terrify - scare the wraiths

I ended up with 2 puppet masters which is what I wanted.
The zoanthropes and tyrants went for biomancy or kept their existing powers : I got 2 Enfeebles

The powers in this game were used in the following way.
Turn 1 and 2 enfeeble was used to drop the toughness of the wraiths to T3 or T2, the T3 guys were picked on by the flyrants- S6 instant killing them really puts the pain on wraiths. Most of them died early. The T2 guys were pummeled by fire from spawned guants with fleshborers.
Turn 2 my tervigon cast puppetmaster on the Triarch stalker - who turned around and killed an annihilation barge (how fun is that!). Later on I even managed to roll a hit on a doomscythe, which promptly shot down another nightscythe (even more awesome).

Game 3 - Space wolves 
The final game was against space wolves. No shakey stick libraro-wolves and lots and lots of long fangs and grey hunters.
Again in this game Psychic shriek was key, as well as the Doom of Malantai. Dropping in and stripping models from units, Marine units with ld 8 and 9 do not like psychic shriek at all. It gets very easy for the zoans to A get their points back and B cause hastle in the backfield.


In Summary
The flexibility of psychic powers in targeting opponents weaknesses or covering your own is somewhat unprecedented in the game, imagine what you could do if you could change wargear by opponent?
I still see psychic powers as one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal... right up their with flyers, but while folks are tailoring to kill flyers they don't seem to be paying the same attention to psykers.

Good for the Biobomb!

Picking Warlord traits for Tyranids

My current list has a Flyrant that usually takes the warlord spot.

The Flyrant is kitted out with Devourers and
So what is the best set of traits to give him - my estimations are as follows
Ratings for each are out of 5, 5 = awesome, 0 is completely useless

Command  
Inspiring Presence                          Fearless everywhere  0
Intimidating Presence                     Nice but only a few units it makes a big difference with  3
The Dust of a thousand worlds       Meh  most nids have it anyway   1
Master of the vanguard                  Can be handy especially for big bugs   3
Target Priority                               Old advisary is better but better range here   2
Coordinated assault                       Speeds up assaults a little    3


Personal Traits
Master of Defence                   Flyrants rarely stay in own deployment zone.     - 1
Master of Offence                   Flyants do occasionally charge things    -2
Master of Manoeuvre              Don't really need this but keep em guessing   - 2
Legendary Fighter                   Awesome.. challenge the weakling get a VP, can win games    -5
Tenacity                                  Useful  but requires careful movement   -4
Immovable object                   Awesome .. who doesn't like a scoring boss!   -5

Strategic Traits
Conqueror of cities                 A little table dependant but very good if right table - 3 or 5
Night Attacker                       Nids love to close in while it is dark   - 5
Master of Ambush                 Outflank for assault units is pretty poor now   -  2
Strategic Genius                     Re-rolling reserves is good for holding gaunts back or bringing on flyers- 4
Divide to conquer                  Very good for Nids if opponent is dependant on reserved firepower  - 3
Princeps of Deceipt               Meh  deployment zone limitation makes this weak   - 1

Overall 
Command   12
Strategic traits  19
Personal traits 18 or 20

So that helps a little command is not worth taking...In most situations  I would pick personal as it has a better upside but if the table was heavy ruins then I would be tempted to roll strategic as that slightly weights things in your favour!

Roll well Folks

DGG Battle report: The Biobomb takes on Celestine

Heh all,

The biobomb had its first proper test against a few tanks today.
Darragh was back from Germany and brought his Sisters with Guard allies out to play! A list he has been doing well at german Gt's (3 top 5 places from last 3 tourneys)

I put 3 powers on all the tervigons and rolled powers as follows (just listing those I used )
Hive Tyrant 1 Iron Arm  Haemorage
Hive Tyrant 2 Endurance Haemorage
Tervigon 1  Endurance, Warp Charge
Tervigon 2  Iron Arm
Tervigon 3  Iron Arm
Zoans 1 Iron Arm, 2* Enfeeble, 2* Leech
Zoans 2 2* enfeeble, 2* leech
Doom  Iron arm

This is what things looked like at the start

The dominions scouted forward shortly after to see if they could jump some of the big dogs before the psychic wall went up. The guards first turn was uneventful killing a handful of gaunts in my center and on my left flank.
An Interesting observation for me here was that in the lengthways mission that firelines are alot easier to manage as the angles are just so tight.

In response to the Devilgaunts opened up on the left flank blob, killing 7 (even with good saving and going to ground). Everyone is always surprised by them, especially when backed up by an enfeeble  and the preferred enemy aura from the tyrants.
The flyrants had both swooped forward from behind cover and one of them got first blood by destroying an immolator with his brainleeches. the dominions inside.
One of my Tervigons craps out on a 4 Boo! And they then fail a 6 " charge. the others only manage a 6 and a 7 respectively... not exactly the endless horde you would hope for

Turn 2
The Nids are already closing fast so darragh backs off and blasts the right flank tyrant (he with Iron arm up) with everything he can and takes a wound from him. Celestine kills a few more gaunts and continues to make a nuisance of herself.
Another tervigon  craps out this time on a mighty 6
The left flank flyrant tear chunks out of the left flank  guard squad helped ably by the devilgaunts leaving a lone lascannon team. The right flank flyrant explodes a rhino. But suffering from occasional stupidity as I do I forgot to move her.

Turn 3
The guard back off again, except for celestine who parks beside  my home objective and kills a few more gaunts but does take a wound this time for that pleasure.  The chittering hordes start to close in around her though... not sure if she can kill them all. She is up to about 18 kills so far though so not doing badly!!


Turn 4
I actually did a half decent job of talking through this turn... practice makes perfect... so

At this point I was well positioned with turn 5 coming up and firmly holding both of the left flank objectives with unwounded tervigons sitting on both, the big momma tervigon sitting on a 3rd with sisters who could only attach grenades to her optimistically (T8 at this point).

Turn 5

The guard blob kills the black tyrant and takes pasting in return from the grey tyrant. The 3rd trimester tervigon on the right flank is joined closely by the doom who kills another few sisters (I think she is up to about 14 sister kills + a few guardsmen.) The brown tyrant joins in the fun and the last few sisters make a break for it only to be smashed in 2 by the chasing tyrant.  I now hold 2 of 3 objectives.

Turn 6
Celestine the wagon that she is gets up but my home objective is swarming with gaunts so she decides to contest the second mid flank by shooting and charging the tervigon sitting on it. She fluffs her wound roles though and takes a smash from the tervigon which hits once but fails to wound. D'oh.  In my turn she does 5 wounds but the tervigon has endurance up so saves 2 .
The tervigon smashes her again in the nid turn  but her invuln keeps her alive

On the right flank the guard blob charge the tryant and the doom. The tyrant rolls well on his precision striking and  kills some gun crew for extra wounds, probably should have focused on the Comissar though as killing him would be alot more useful. The doom kills off some of

Turn 7
The 3rd trimester Tervigon fails to kill the tank sitting on the objective, The tyrant kills the  Comissar in combat and the Doom sucks in some more souls ( mainly the power axe guys which was nice). The guard platoon command is heading for the table edge in what looks suspiciously like fear but is likely simply some tactical brilliance luring the tyrant into a killzone.  The Tyranids hold back and consolidate their positions


Result win for the Biobomb against tough opposition.
Other observations include:

• With 26 powers  to roll there are alot of useful ones floating around. Also worth observing that against T3 opposition some of the more uninteresting powers  (e.g. Haemorage) become a bit more useful. 
• The aoe of preferred enemy on the tyrants is just awesome I love it.
• enjoying trying to do video bat reps... will get better I promise :)

A very busy painting/converting weekend!

First up we have a Tervigon, beautiful model to assemble but it takes alot of painting! Little discoveries here are that brown ink is still awesome, dip does a passable impression of it and the discovery of a new colour... Carroburg Crimson, lovely colour over both browns (on the nests) and pinks (the Tervigons belly)

New Zoanthropes

I love these models. Great detail, light and drilled for a base mount and little cleaning

The Blade face models

The Tendril feeder versions

The lotus seed pod based conversions came out great below you can see a warrior based one, 2 genestealer ones and a gaunt one. You can also see the whole lot of them in a batch. All still need basing to be fully finished.

Lastly 2 spore pods painted - still need to add some Tendril arms... open to ideas how to make new ones! and still need to base them all of course.

Mycetic spore Pods & Brood Nests WIP.

Only thought about putting a post up on this after I was most of the way through. I picked up 20 Lotus seed pods from a flower wholesaler (about 10 euro). I have been playing around with them and my Bitz box for the last few days.

As per the advice from http://ifitwasntforone.blogspot.ie/. I coated these with watered down PVA glue which has helped stiften them up and help paint to stick (took ages to dry). I have gone with a yellower base colour than my brown tyranids as I went the bugs crawling out of them to stand out.

Spores

Brood Nests

New breed of Zoanthropes for the hive

I picked up 6 floating aliens from Troll Forged that I am going to be using as Zoanthropes.

I think they are pretty nice resin models. They only had a small amount of clean up and the two types of posable heads make it easy to have different squads too.

The basing material is just the insides of Lotus seed pods which are proving to be tremendously versatile!

Flying Hive tyrants

The flying hive tyrant was another lost creature in 5th ed. I have played a few games with 1 in 6th ed as part of the Bio bomb nid list. They provide some high mobility, scary assault capability and good shooting.

The one I have been running so far is set up as follows
Hive Tyrant, Wings, Toxic Miasma, Old Adversory, Brainleech Devourer, Bonesword and Lash Whip
Starting powers are Life Leech and Paroxysm.

Weapon Load out
The hardest call is double Devourer or Lash Whip bone sword Devourer. The extra shooting is awesome but one of the great things about the mobility of a Winged tyrant is that they can dive out of the air and jump into a combat to keep them out of sight of opposing heavy shooting opponents. The downside of the new rules is that your hugely killy monster will often get challenged by some punk. You win combat but not by much - having your opponent stick around is not necessarily a bad thing though. So in combats like that the bonesword is an advantage as with rerolls from the supporting crowd invulns can be a pain accordingly the chance of instant death from the sword is beneficial. The lash whip also means that you at least get to attack simultaneously when diving into cover. If running Tyrants in pairs I would be inclined to give one of them the double devourer and one the whip bone sword. I will be playing around with this somewhat as with smash you can do something similar.

Toxic Miasma
In biobomb lists Toxic Miasma can be very nasty. When the Tyrant charges a unit and gets challenged by a wound soak character he won't get to kill much but at the end of combat he will likely be surrounded by many models. Toxic Miasma forces a toughness test with no cover or armour saves. With Enfeeble on the table you have the ability to make units lower Toughness -which is a very nasty combo. This forces the opponent to either challenge and take wounds per model in base afterwards or get hit by a smashy beast across the squad and lose combat and take fewer wounds afterwards.

Old Adversary - This is not cheap and was an option that I never would have taken in 5th aspreferred enemy really wasn't beneficial enough. Now with the transfer to shooting and wounds it can be devastating. Take for example a 10 man Devil Gaunt squad benefitting  from the preferred enemy aura in shooting. Their efficiency is boosted a significant 33% in terms of wound output (10 wounds instead of 7.5 v MEQ). This gets even better if Enfeeble is in the equation as you get to reroll a higher % of your misses which in turn are more likely to hit. The fact that this can benefit things like shooting Zoanthropes and Hiveguard should not be overlooked either.

As far as the Tyrant himself is concerned being able to reroll 1's in combat gives  a massive 55% boost to wound output hitting on 3's killing on 2's  (1.5 additional wounds a round of combat) and his shooting is twinlinked and wounding on 2's so again gets a boost of about 17% from the rerolls

Psychic powers.
The two existing powers are solid, he only gets to use one a turn but paroxysm can turn gaunts into killers and Nid life leech is ok at getting wounds back (Biomancy life leech is much better at S6). But that said I think though in the context of the Biobomb it is likely you will chance your arm for one of the 2 big powers - Iron Arm - which turns a flyrant into an absolute demon or Endurance which makes survivability out on his own much easier. Worst case you get a 4 shot shooting attack with AP 2 which can be used in conjunction with your brainleech devourer to shoot at a target and makes the Flyrant a little better at killing 2+ save models.

Flyrant - Survivability in the Biobomb world
A basic assumption here is that you will nearly always have endurance on your flyrant as if they stay alive they have the potential to savage your opponents army (In my last game one killed 4 tanks by himself).
So at a minimum you are only hit on 6's while swooping, have  a 5+ Jink and a 5+ FNP - not bad. This is followed up by a further 5+ to get a wound back in your own turn if you keep endurance up. Unlike a flyer you can't be 1 shotted.
Unfortunately you can crash into the ground with a bang and your survivability goes way down so if you are unlucky you can see a vast increase in shooting. Unless you have Iron arm. a Toughness 8 or 9 monstrous creature with FNP and maybe cover is going to take alot of firepower. If nothing else that lets the rest of your gribblies close the gap.and once tyranids start tying up your  units with fearless gaunts and killing vehicles then the game starts to spin their way. In terms of positioning whenever possible you should try to have your tyrant fly over terrain so when he crashes he still gets his 4+ or 5+ from cover saves.


Overall this is a very solid multi functional unit. It is not cheap though so having powers and capabilities that buff survivability and buff some units around you are a huge benefit.
I can see one or two of these guys being in most of my new nid lists.

Bio bomb nids

To kick off 6th ed I want to do what I normally do.... learn to master cc and psychic powers. With all the bluster about flyers and how to counter them players are forgetting just how common great psychic powers are becoming too and what a Nerf the ubiquitous psychic hood got. Nids are the natural choice for me to explore this and have a lot of fun too. After all Nids always welcome you back with open jaws. :)

So I want to introduce  the tyranid biomancy bomb, or bio bomb.

The purpose of this list is to have a ton of stacking bio buffs.
GIven this is the first post on this new blog let me start by talking about the heart of the list. the humble and forgotten zoanthrope.


zoes were known for their ineffective psychic shooting in 5th, cast,  get past psychic hoods and then roll to hit,  pen or wound and get past prevalent cover saves. It was simply too much to be effective.  Hive guard became all the rage due to their efficiency in comparison
 In 6th ed though, zoes have the tactical flexibility of changing their powers . To me biomancy is the right choice. with 2 powers to trade the zoe squad has a great chance to pick up the necessary powers to turn them Into serious force multipliers

How many other 180 point units can put out 3psychic powers a turn! especially when each has 2 to choose from.

So what powers do you need?
First negative here is that the powers are random.  But with 6 powers you are likely to get some of the ones you need. Depending on what you get the unit can behave very differently. There are 3 core powers, Enfeeble , Endurance and Iron Arm

ENFEEBLE
Very offensive and very tactical power that reduces enemy strength and toughness by 1, which dramatically increases the effectiveness of your small units. Gaunts can be instant killing stuff or just laying down far more wounds. Units like devilgaunts or gargoyles get a big boost in effectiveness and survivablility in combat (17% more wounds caused and 17% fewer wounds taken).  This is further enhanced by preferred enemy if you have the ability to double stack that.
Other uses that I have found for enfeeble include,
Dropping an enemy strength so that they can no longer instant kill you with powerfists (great for Zoes and warriors)
Dropping toughness on units that are going to receive Haemorrhage or strangleweb  shots (toughness /strength tests)
Dramatically increasing effectiveness of biovores
Making the parasite of mortrex a real terror for spawning rippers (toughness tests)
Allowing s6 flying mcs to deny fnp to models from swoop attacks or brainleech devourers (very useful v blood angel marines) by causing instant death.

In short enfeeble is always worth taking if rolled and multiple rolls really power up your army.


ENDURANCE
This is a mainstay power . Endurance gives relentless (very low use for Nids), It Will Not Die (recover wound at end of turn on 5+) and Feel No Pain.
Endurance is great on Zoes and little bugs but really shines on  the big mcs .

Combined with the ease of now getting cover on tyranid mcs the new "always on" fnp means that nid mcs are effectively twice as survivable as they were with  5+5+ saves.  It will not die just stacks to this (as does Life Leech).

every nid unit can benefit from this power and given that it has a 24 inch casting range you can pretty much hide the Zoes and buff away to your hearts content! Again always worth taking when rolled.  If you are lucky enough to roll 2or 3 if these in a unit you are off to a great start!


IRON ARM
Iron arm only affects the caster but it does provide a toughness and strength boost of d3.
This is incredibly good for mcs who move into wraithlord toughness territory but they do need some luck to pick up the power.  In a recent game a toughness 9 tyrant terrorised a blood angel back line shrugging off plasma and melta. This also stacks brilliantly with the previous two powers.
All that said what about iron arm on Zoes? At first glance this might not seem like the most useful of powers but if you roll it twice you now have a zoey unit who can stand out front. A toughness 6 unit with 3++ and 2 wounds is a bit of a beast to shift. And becomes a fantastic tarpits unit. To hold up the nasty stuff while your own nasty stuff wanders over to the combat.

Even with just one of these available in the 3 man units you can get some benefit , particularly when you lose one model the unit gets much harder to shift. The more high toughness that is dispersed around the board the harder it is for your opponent to focus fire , which improves the survivability of all your mcs.

Don't forget the strength side of this power too.  Especially if there happens to be an immobilised vehicle nearby !
One point in Iron Arm is that it is definitely 3rd in preference order.  If you roll one of the  other 2 powers first and iron arm then it may be more useful to swap it for Smite in some cases ( eg lots of termies).  In most cases though I think it is too much of a toolkit power to ignore.


Overall if you see bio Zoes across the table be very careful!  And if you are a nid general try them out  I don't think you will be disappointed!