Is synapse really that heavy a burden?

[creatureboi]

I think the point is that a nid list should be designed around synapse because that is how the fluff says the army is supposed to work.

Having said that i have to agree that some of the IB results are stupidly bad. They are not necessarily game breaking and there are ways around most of the problems caused but the best way to avoid the problem is to not have to take IB tests in the first place. We do that through synapse.

My case is that this isn't necessarily a difficult thing or something that is bad for our army.

[gigasnail]

Feb 5, 2014 19:30:54 GMT creatureboi said:

I think the point is that a nid list should be designed around synapse because that is how the fluff says the army is supposed to work.

Having said that i have to agree that some of the IB results are stupidly bad. They are not necessarily game breaking and there are ways around most of the problems caused but the best way to avoid the problem is to not have to take IB tests in the first place. We do that through synapse.

My case is that this isn't necessarily a difficult thing or something that is bad for our army.

Lol, ok sparky. See how that works for you turn 5+ when you likely have one or two synapse creatures alive at most. Your objective holders start taking casualties, they start testing at LD6 assuming they passed the IB check at the start of your turn. good luck when your opponents start realizing they just need to kill immediate threats on turn 1 and 2, then synapse, then giggle at you the rest of the game.

[gloomfang]

Feb 5, 2014 15:51:12 GMT DukeMantis said:

If you know of any defence against this Daisy Cutting gloomfang id love to hear it xD

I tried everyhting I could think of, but it boils down to clumping up. When the new IG dex hits I think that won't be an option anymore either.

I can do a post on Daisy Cutting tactics so people can be forewarned and know what units to look out for and how it can impact you but that is it.

My list philosophy has grown into a divergent evolutionary thread if you will. Multiple small units of expensive models, but cheap units. This strategy wasn't even possible a few weeks ago so I am still wrestling with it. Basically it comes down to the fact if you can make the FOC not matter then you can start using a set of strategies based on Overkill, Target Saturation and Squandered Overhead.

The basic theory of each for folks that don't know them.

Overkill states that any force that is excess of the amount of firepower used to wipe out a unit is a detriment to your list. It is why folks don't shoot krack missles at termigaunts, its a waste of points. So if you have a unit of 20 firewarriors shooting at two units (30 Termigaunts or 5 genestealers) the more effective use of firepower would be to shoot at the termigaunts because you can probably wipe out a unit worth 120pts vs a unit worth 70pts.

Target Saturation is pretty basic. More targets then they can shoot. It can cause priority targeting issues and can cause inefficient use of shooting.

Squandered Overhead is the practice of lowing your opponents effective list size by causing him to spend points on something that does not give him a proportional benefit. An army that spends a lot of points on lascannons for example when all you have is low toughness W1 Sv5 units. Or anything they take for AA if you have no flyers. Anything that they pay for that is not worth the points is wasted.

So how does that play back into synapse? Becasue of the forced evolution (thanks to the dataslates) away from synapse and that lets you escape the confines of FOC. My current 1999pt list has 14 infiltrators alone with 10 of them costing 70pts or less. That means that in most cases I have limited my oppenet to doing very little damage before I can slam into him. I also have no MCs so that means that most of thier high strength weaponry is going to go to waste. As I am using high Ld units (many don't even have IB) I don't need to worry about synapse as much. No flyers means that all that AA firepower is either wasted or overpriced. With some lists I can change the points equation to roughly 1999pt vs 1850pts based on the stuff they are taking that will do them very little good.

OK think I went a little off target there....

[mattblowers]

Is synapse that bad? Not until it actually happens to you can you appreciate how badly things can turn. Last night against orks, my ork warboss with PK opponent got to my Tervigon (my last synapse creature standing) and killed it. I had a biovore, Venomthrope, and about 40+/- gaunts left. After backlash and synapse failed beginning of my turn, I had three models left on the board and only one that wasn't on IB. This was beginning of turn 6. Game over. For the record, he only had two damaged killa-kans, a def-dread, and the warboss on the table. So the moral of the story is, we can lose the game on the last turn or two because of our codex special rules. No other codex melts on its own like that.

[gigasnail]

This is the possible saving grace of the assassin brood. It's 6 seperate units that have to be burned down.

That price tag is just brutal though.

[creatureboi]

Feb 5, 2014 19:46:06 GMT gigasnail said:

Feb 5, 2014 19:30:54 GMT creatureboi said:

I think the point is that a nid list should be designed around synapse because that is how the fluff says the army is supposed to work.

Having said that i have to agree that some of the IB results are stupidly bad. They are not necessarily game breaking and there are ways around most of the problems caused but the best way to avoid the problem is to not have to take IB tests in the first place. We do that through synapse.

My case is that this isn't necessarily a difficult thing or something that is bad for our army.

Lol, ok sparky. See how that works for you turn 5+ when you likely have one or two synapse creatures alive at most. Your objective holders start taking casualties, they start testing at LD6 assuming they passed the IB check at the start of your turn. good luck when your opponents start realizing they just need to kill immediate threats on turn 1 and 2, then synapse, then giggle at you the rest of the game.

But since you know that this is going to happen you can plan for it. As i see it there are two ways to respond to your synapse being wiped out:
1) Make a list with so much synapse support that it cant be wiped out before your real threats hit home and take out the stuff killing your synapse (i accept this is difficult to achieve and still be competitive)
2) target saturation- if you have a flyrant and two crones zooming round his army taking stuff out, an exocrant sitting back field blasting away and a wave of gaunts bearing down on his gunline, which threat does he ignore in order to take out your synapse?

[gloomfang]

Feb 5, 2014 20:04:52 GMT gigasnail said:

This is the possible saving grace of the assassin brood. It's 6 seperate units that have to be burned down.

That price tag is just brutal though.

Its not just the 6 separate units if you play it right. Its the 5 lictors and DL giving everyone -1Ld in separate units and then the five 5 man stealer squads and then the other three 9 stealer+BL squads. Making units take The Horror tests at -3Ld works pretty well. And lets face it that is a lot of "What do I shoot at first???" Decisions. Generally the Lictors are closest, then the 5 man stealers and then 2 of my larger broods. I sometimes outflank one or two of my larger broods if I am facing an army with a lot of reserves.

And its not a brutal price tag when you say to yourself that FMCs are worthless and your not going to take any MCs because unless you take a LOT of them they will just get shot down the first few turns.

Those two Vanguard formations probably come in lower then the dual Flyrants that people don't bat an eyelid at anymore.

[mattblowers]

if you have a flyrant and two crones zooming round his army taking stuff out, an exocrant sitting back field blasting away and a wave of gaunts bearing down on his gunline, which threat does he ignore in order to take out your synapse?

That's easy, the flyrant. 100/100 times that is what you do. Take out the flyrant and the rest of that list goes on autopilot 50% of the time. Once people realize this, 'nids will struggle. Right now I'm 6-2 only because people haven't realized yet. In most games you have to play the objectives to win. When you play 'nids you can just play their synapse, if you take it out, you probably win.

[gloomfang]

Feb 5, 2014 20:28:50 GMT creatureboi said:

2) target saturation- if you have a flyrant and two crones zooming round his army taking stuff out, an exocrant sitting back field blasting away and a wave of gaunts bearing down on his gunline, which threat does he ignore in order to take out your synapse?

Honest answers from a hyper-competitive player?

Gun down the flyrant first. Always. Shoot it till it is down then shoot it more or assault it. Always.

Have a unit of elite CC units hit the gaunts once they are out of synapse. Chances are I will score more wounds and get to do a sweeping advance to slaughter the unit even if there are 20 of them left. Either that of shoot them unit they are at 25% of unit strenght and have them probably break. Killing all the troops is usually a priority so the guants (and other scoring units) come right after the synapse is dead.

Move units out of range of the exocrine as it has got a (please do not swear) range and can no longer run. If you need to get a unit to get past the exocrine for some reason (like to kill it in CC) then just keep a really cheap unit close to the exocrine so it is forced to shoot at it.

The crones have just been forced to assault if they can or reduced to 1 vector strike a turn if you keep them moving full out. No more drool, no tenticlids, no worries. If I get points for killing it them I'll ground them and kill them at my leisure once I have secured all the objectives I need too.

[creatureboi]

The above responses are all correct assuming
a) your opponent has the proper targeting priority and
b) the flyrant is your only source of synapse.

Synapse web and target saturation are intended to work together. It is fairly easy to take down one source of synapse in a single turn. It gets harder when there are two, three or four separate sources to take out before the army starts falling apart.

I think the key to making nids work is very tight list building and planning so that by the time your synapse web is starting to break down your main units are already in amongst the enemy and its too late. I'm not saying its easy...

[gigasnail]

Yeah, we know. This is no mystery. The mystery is how to score, hold synapse, retain lethality and not run out of gas on turn 4+. You can generally do any two of these things pretty easily, but only two just isnt going to cut it.

[chuckles]

Feb 5, 2014 21:10:21 GMT creatureboi said:

I think the key to making nids work is very tight list building and planning so that by the time your synapse web is starting to break down your main units are already in amongst the enemy and its too late. I'm not saying its easy...

More to the point, why does it matter? Your units can be in amongst the enemy and still get taken to pieces when the synapse goes down

[elitemaster]

Chuckles I never said my army is slow every time I play every enemy I played against I was on their side of the table getting in CC turn 2 and I go first most of the time. If that is slow then you must think that you must be in his zone turn 1 (really I past 12' every game turn 1). This does not mean I use nothing but fast moving things I have a lot of slow moving things but the way I deploy matters. even the Tua gun line got stuck in CC turn 2 and he gave up turn 5 the walking tyrant with 10W just rolled through his lines with the Gaunts. I'm srry you cant see how fast the army is right now and thinking the army is slow have fun not enjoying your self I have to get ready for a torumy coming up (note that most of players at my store are major players to and go to the big tourmies all the time).

[gloomfang]

Feb 5, 2014 21:10:21 GMT creatureboi said:

The above responses are all correct assuming
a) your opponent has the proper targeting priority and
b) the flyrant is your only source of synapse.

Synapse web and target saturation are intended to work together. It is fairly easy to take down one source of synapse in a single turn. It gets harder when there are two, three or four separate sources to take out before the army starts falling apart.

I think the key to making nids work is very tight list building and planning so that by the time your synapse web is starting to break down your main units are already in amongst the enemy and its too late. I'm not saying its easy...

1) I always assume opponent always has proper targeting priority.

2) Flyrants are generally the only advanced source of synapse turn 1 and 2. Walkrants, Zoans, warriors and tervigons are generally pushing from behind the guant wall. That means if I can kill the flyrant I am forcing your to either send units in advance with no synapse or you are going to be moving your synapse web forward as a wall moving roughly the speed of the run of your fastest synapse creature.

The problem I am seeing (at the competitive level) is that the really good opponets have found ways to get your army to break without removing synapse, but by removing the models from a large unit that are in synapse.

You can remove Fearless from a unit without killing all the synapse. It was a hard lesson to learn.

[coredump]

Feb 5, 2014 19:30:54 GMT creatureboi said:

I think the point is that a nid list should be designed around synapse because that is how the fluff says the army is supposed to work.

Having said that i have to agree that some of the IB results are stupidly bad. They are not necessarily game breaking and there are ways around most of the problems caused but the best way to avoid the problem is to not have to take IB tests in the first place. We do that through synapse.

My case is that this isn't necessarily a difficult thing or something that is bad for our army.

Yes, it should be designed around synapse, and always has been. But when you make the synapse creatures a weak choice, and make IB game breaking.... then it becomes a problem.

Yes, they are game breaking. Those HGaunts charging across... now stop and eat themselves. Those gaunts camping an objective, now run off and you lose the objective. That brood of devilfexes... stop doing anything for a turn. They are game breaking...

Yes we *can* get an overlapping synapse web... but at an exorbitant cost for very little benefit. We are 'blackmailed' into taking sub par units to avoid the IB 'lose' effect. We have a pretty weak codex already, and the strongest lists you can build... will have very little synapse. So you can't build those... I can build a list with a lot of synapse, I just can't build a good list with a lot of synapse.

Feb 5, 2014 20:28:10 GMT creatureboi said:

But since you know that this is going to happen you can plan for it. As i see it there are two ways to respond to your synapse being wiped out:
1) Make a list with so much synapse support that it cant be wiped out before your real threats hit home and take out the stuff killing your synapse (i accept this is difficult to achieve and still be competitive)
2) target saturation- if you have a flyrant and two crones zooming round his army taking stuff out, an exocrant sitting back field blasting away and a wave of gaunts bearing down on his gunline, which threat does he ignore in order to take out your synapse?

This *is* the 'heavy burden' your OP asks about.

1) Yes, we can take a ton of synapse support, but that is a 'heavy burden' because those are not the models you want to take to win games. Those are the units you *have* to take because of IB.

2) Thats just it, IB is so debilitating that it makes target priority *easy*. Shooting at the synapse unit is like shooting at *every* unit; because if you take out synapse, you take out everything. In your example its simple... you take out the flyrant... then everything else falls apart.

Feb 5, 2014 21:10:21 GMT creatureboi said:

The above responses are all correct assuming
a) your opponent has the proper targeting priority and
b) the flyrant is your only source of synapse.

Synapse web and target saturation are intended to work together. It is fairly easy to take down one source of synapse in a single turn. It gets harder when there are two, three or four separate sources to take out before the army starts falling apart.

I think the key to making nids work is very tight list building and planning so that by the time your synapse web is starting to break down your main units are already in amongst the enemy and its too late. I'm not saying its easy...

1) Its a bad situation if your ability to win hinges on your opponents ignorance. Besides, this isn't a 'tricky' thing to know about. Take out Synapse = Win. Kind of straight forward.

2) Well, it was the only source you listed... But you can't just add more synapse, you need to add a lot more. Or spend enough points for it to be very resilient synapse.

Two-Three-Four sources.... depending on what they are, still not that hard. And you don't have to get rid of all of it, clearing just one area will greatly affect the game balance. And it doesn't matter if you are 'in among them', IB will still thrash your army.