Tyranids and city fight tatics?

[wolfkin03]

Greetings,
   For tomorrow a fellow gaming club member has issued up a challenge for a game.It will be 1500 pts and city fight. MY first city fight game and only my second 40k game. what kind of tactics can you guys offer. what are some better units to take? my first game i played was against orcs and i loved the dakka flyrant and dakka fexs. So hoping i can take them. my first list looked like this 

tyrant-wings, dev with blw,eletroshock grubs

30 termagaunts-10 dev
30 termagaunts-10 dev
3 warriors-2 death spitters,barbed strangler
3 warriors-2 deathspitters, barbed strangler
4 rippers
harpy
3 carnifex- 2 twld with blw each 
biovore
venomthrope 

would a list like this work well for city fight considering the abundance of terrain? 

[Yautja]

With lots of ruins I'd be want to bring more shrouded for awesome saves. I'd also like Hive Guard to negate cover saves to the light armour Orc transports.

[Freeman]

Acid spray tyrannofex should be pretty baller as well. Also due to the maelstrom missions you need lots f scoring units. Probably ones that can fight a bit of combat. Shrikes gargoyles and ravenors are all probably a decent shout. Some genestealer might also be nice.

[hiveminded]

I like the suggestion of having more CC options. Depending on how dense the terrain is, you may find your shooting options limited.

I also like the genestealer option in an area map where you can hide behind corners and get the assault on people. Lictors might be a good idea. Being fleet with move through cover, they won't be slowed down much by all the terrain. Also, they can hold their own in CC. Stealth, infiltrate, and hit and run may all also come in handy. They're also L10, so not ruined if they get separated from the synapse creatures.

[Yautja]

Problem with Genestealers against Orcs is that with their useless armour they rely on cover as much as us. Assault them and they'll hit you first with 20 dice. Need flesh hooks!

[creatureboi]

City fight generally should be awesome for nids. What is our no.1 complaint? Being shot off the board at long range thanks to slow moving, short threat ranged creatures with generally poor saves and no invuln.

What does city fight offer? A compulsory minimum of 6 buildings/ruins, combined with being maelstrom style missions. The objectives must be placed in buildings or ruins.

The effect of this is that there should be plenty of LOS blocking/cover save providing terrain on the table for you to take advantage of. On a properly set up city fight board it should be impossible for an entire tau gun line to be able to draw line of sight to everything on your side of the board. Added to this is the fact that they are forced to play the objective game. They can't simply sit back and wait for you to lumber forwards so they can shoot you up like fish in a barrel. They have to move to score objectives or you will simply out point them while scuttling round with move through cover on just about everything in the army.

Having said that, in your specific case facing orks these advantages will be minimised. The biggest effect on the game you will probably see is the impact of mass amounts of cover - usually 4+ saves from ruins or being partially obscured by buildings. To get the best out of a city fight board you will need to account for cover. Take lots of things to take maximum advantage of your own cover while denying the orks any advantages of their own.

That means you want as many venomthropes/malanthropes as you can squeeze into your list for 2+ cover saves. At the same time you need to max out on units that ignore cover. Template weapons (crones, tfex w/acid spray, any of the thorax weapons, biovores using barrage to fire over buildings) are your friends. Stars of the show will be hive guard since they ignore both cover saves and don't require LOS (but they will compete with your thropes for slots).

Vanguard organisms (lictors and genestealers) should also have a slightly easier time in city fight as there's less chance of them getting shot up. Just remember to only charge the stealers into combat with something not in cover or that is already engaged to avoid striking at I1. Anything with flesh hooks will enjoy city fight.

[wolfkin03]

Thanks to everyone for thier input. The list i ended up taking was

tyrant,wings,2x twld with blw, electroshock grubs

3 rippers
10 genestealers
5 genestealers

2 carnifex 2x twld with blw
3 biovores
tfex

3 hiveguard
2 venomthrope

hivecrone

he threw me a curve ball and brought grey knights instead. We played a new mission out of the new Baal campaign book at the end of the game. with lucky rolls on my end and bad on his. i managed to kill his librarian in term Armour (his warlord)with the tfexs shots from its stinger salvo. he failed both saves on double 1s and both feel no pain rolls on double 3s. the tyranids pulled out 9-4 point win i got firstblood,linebreaker and slay the warlord I tabled him and all he killed of mine was the 10 man unit of genestealers. Learned a few things really need to bring more synapse creatures. not a fan of genestealers. and need to invest in another hive tyrant. Thanks again for everyones help it was greatly appreciated