How bad are tyranids?

[Chris Copeland]

Ignore the interwebz echo chamber. If you like bugs then buy the bugs. I have 4K points of fully painted bugs and I'm having a great time with my army... Cope

[daboarder]

if this is true why do I win so many games with nids? plus you are basically repeating what I just said but in more detail. obviously you might be one of those people

......O.O


not quite, see I was taking your idea that only bad players loose with nids and changing it to only bad players loose against nids, with an equal lack of any empirical evidence. Its known as taking the piss.


as to chris's comments I agree with hsi statement that if you like the army don't let anything stop you collecting it

[jonsgot]

Nids offers an unparalleled ability to build an awful army try a Tyranid prime and lots of termagunts. Once the prime gas been killed you are stuffed. If you build a balanced list with more synapse creatures they are ok. There are some things they will always struggle with. They don't have great range on many of the weapons. Deploy forward on one flank then withdraw across your deployment zone, keeping the nids at 18-24 inches as long as you can. It's like shooting nids in a barrel Of course there are ways to counter this but they involve sacrifice by the nid player.
Just like Eldar nids can be brilliant, but in the wrong hands or against the right ones they can be awful.

[jonsgot]

Can I play too?

The only people that think tyranids are good are those that don't understand target priority and aren't very good

was that right? YAY INTERNET COUNTER CULTURE

+1

[SaveModifier]

If you use threat saturation and play smart, Nids are looking pretty decent, they have access to a lot of big scary things but the little scary things are great once you get the doing what they're supposed to do, hormagaunts will not really likely be outside synapse before they fit combat and then they tie up the thing you want until your genestealers come in and tear them apart, you have you use units together and make it so that your opponent has too many things to concentrate on to stop everything, you've got to get up in their faces with some things while other sneaky things go round the side, outflanking Genestealers with a Broodlord are really good, you just have to be smart, its not a "point and click, I win" army, thats why daboarder doesn't like the new codex, that and he's read online that its bad.

[daboarder]

the thing is you can't saturate when a smart opponent knows he has to kill only a fraction of the army

[Mr Mystery]

And knowing that you protect them. Issue therefore is?

[SaveModifier]

If he kills all your synapse before your gaunts get into combat then thats your fault for being bad at the game.

And while he's attacking your synapse, he's having to ignore the other gribblies moving towards him.

Its not the same as the old tyranids, it needs more work and more thought to use them, but they're as good as they ever were (except in 2nd ed, **** 2nd ed tyranids), 6th edition has moved all codexes to a more fluffy list approach, with varients in supplements and dataslates allowing you to build the army to tell the story you want.

They're not written for you to win tournaments with. If you want to play daemons so badly, go play daemons.

[Sly]

the thing is you can't saturate when a smart opponent knows he has to kill only a fraction of the army

This gets thrown around a lot as if it's a truism. I think you really need to go more into depth about how killing only a fraction of the army will win the game for the opponent.

From the lists I've made and seen, what I see is the following:
1: Synapse creatures are usually a significant part of the army, including some that are hard to remove... Warriors behind an ADL, Zoeys hiding behind LOS-blocking terrain, Tervigons, Primes in large blobs. It's easy to sit here and swat them like flies, but the Synapse Creatures will be harder to catch.

2: Creatures that don't care too much about Synapse (Mawloc, Crones, Harpies, Stealers) make up a significant portion of the lists.

3: Biovores are usually kept back with either Warriors or Tervigons in cover, and it's pretty hard to remove that backfield Synapse.

4: What that leaves you with, is that you have some portion of your army that DOES depend on Synapse, and DOES advance so that the Synapse babysitters are exposed to harm. The portion of the list that is "at risk" does depend on the list, but it's not all that often a really large part of the army. You could run a large army of Gaunts/Gants backed up by foot MCs, at which point you do have Synapse issues. Probably that's why they raised the points of the Primes, since it's really hard to remove Synapse when, in this army, you run 1-2 Primes in large Gaunt squads, and use Crones as your AA.

So what does that leave me with? I like Flyrants. So does everyone else. But they're not easy to hide or protect, and if you use them, you're probably better off building a list that doesn't depend as much on Synapse coverage. Support them with a backfield Synapse or two and Biovores, then add Crones/Mawlocs/Stealers, rather than Gaunts/Gants and Carnifexes. At that point you don't have to worry as much that you'll lose the game if you lose the Flyrants. That's one example of how building a list for Nids CAN be done, but you can't just put units together in the list even if they are good units.

You're right, you do have to worry about Synapse. But I think you're also wrong, the idea that you can't solve the Synapse problem is mistaken. You can solve it by limiting the need for Synapse, by adding more Synapse creatures, and/or by bringing more durable Synapse (foot Synapse with bodyguards rather than Flyrants).

[ElectricPaladin]

Re: Synapse.

Isn't that just a part of the way the Tyranids work? Hasn't the "my army is a bunch of wild animals who might go stupid if my mind control critter dies" always been part of the Tyranid lore and tabletop presence? I understand that there may be issues with the new Tyranid codex, but complaining about this issue seems a bit out of touch. It's like saying "damn... all my Eldar are Toughness 3. It's really irritating" or "I just don't understand why my Imperial Guard army is made of tons of guys with low quality weapons and poor Ballistic Skill who rely on numbers to bring down their opponents! Who thought that was a good idea?"

Tyranids = monster bugs who need brain control bugs to keep them coherent on the battlefield. That's how it's always been, right?