DGG Battle Report Tyranids V Space Wolves

Time for another club battle report and with the new Tyranid army inbound I was looking forward to taking them out for a spin!

My list 

2 Tervigons  Iron Arm /leech   & Endurance / Hemhorage

Swarmlord  Leech / Iron arm / 

Flyrant

2* Zoanthropes (puppetmaster/ Endurance and 2 crap powers)

20 Gargoyles

Trygon

7 Ymgarls

10 gaunts

10 gaunts in pod

Space Wolf force was

2 Rune Priests one with Divination Prescience/foreboding and Jaws/ lightning

Drop pod with combi melta squad

2 10 man tac squads one in rhino

2 land speeder with multi - melta / flamer

Drop pod and 10 man tac

2 squads of long fangs

Dreadnought

3 thunderwolves

Mission was in the style of the BAO 2 missions played concurrently - with  Emperors Will and The Relic and setup of vanguard strikes .  I have played these variants a few times and I find it brings a little more balance to the game... you are never quite out of it!  Both of us place our emperors Will objectives in buildings (just left and right in the below photo.

Fig 1 - Tyranid setup

The Tyranids setup aggressively in the center using the spore forest for cover... they look hungry!

Fig 2 Wolves setup

The wolves counter putting their tac squads in the center (one in Rhino) the long fangs hold the right flank from cover (building / forest)

Turn 1 central advance

The Tyranid pour forward... psychic powers are a bit of a fail with 3 of my creatures wounding themselves!
On the plus side Puppetmaster does go off and manages to cause a landspeeder to meltagun the Dreadnought for first blood. The hive mind can cause you to do strange things.
On the right flank the wounded Flyrant  jumps forward and takes out  some long fangs. The Devourer worms cause the 2 remaining fangs to run back. ATSKNF will get them straight back into it.

Turn 1 Drop pod strike

The grey hunters and the rune priest drop deep and aggressively taking the iron arm tervigon out in one shot and the feedback kills half a dozen gaunts. A few of the Gargoyles get plinked by the tac squads - FNP and cover help them stay in the game.

SW turn 1 - bolters at the ready

Tyranid  counter charge

The Swarmlord does not take kindly to tinmen causing the ground to open under his buddies and charges in with help from the flock of Gargoyles. The swarmlord challenges and splatters the offending rune priest.

Tyranid turn 2 - Ymgarl strike

The Ymgarls appear in the right hand forest and jump both squads of the Long fangs - taking some casualties on the way in. The Thunderwolves lose one of their number from the Flyrant but prepare to counter charge.
In the center the Trygon assaults the troop unit holding the emperors will objective - slicing and dicing them without a wound.  The thunderwolves flub some of their attacks and the ymgarls are fortunate to survive.. help is on the way as in the wolves turn the central tac unit are wiped out and the Tyrgon moves close to the ongoing combat.

SW turn 3 Grab the Relic

Also in turn 3 the other drop pod arrives and the marines get out and grab the relic

In addition this turn a spawned gaunt squad are killed (and the remaining tervigon menopauses) by the disembarking second troop unit.

On the left flank it takes the swarmlord a while to take his boneswords out of the remains of the rune priest but he continues to work through the marines (who in turn kill some gargoyles)

Nid turn 4 - my what shiny teeth you have

In nid turn 4 the tervigon heads straight for the relic peering around the droppod which he then charges and wrecks.

Nid turn 4 - Ymgarls Trygon and flyrant kill them

The last ymgarl takes some marines out and the trygon comes in and mangles some more. The flyrant chooses to hit the remaining runepriest.... just surviving a force sword but eventually killing him.
The swarmlord and his buddies finish off the drop tac squad and turn back towards the objective the left and right flanks closing in like jaws onto the relic.
But the marines are not done yet and krak grenades  at the ready they charge the tervigon and over 2 turns they kill her with the wolfen going rend crazy too- she explodes and kills most of the gaunts nearby... for a moment things look better for the marines.

Cruuunch

The Zoanthropes just act to stop the marines on the objective running away - pinning them in combat while the other monsters close in. In a flurry of blood and claws the marine numbers are dramatically reduced. The future looks to contain gene soup...

SW turn 5 Final stand!

The final marine wolfen squares up to the Trygon...it ends predictably.... another annal written in the heroic history of the space wolves.

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