Post by gigasnail on Nov 23, 2015 3:52:10 GMT
this is a copy/pasta from my thread in the list building section, starting on page 7 or so ( thetyranidhive.proboards.com/thread/46826/spitballing-lists-7th?page=8 ). had a 26ish player 2 day/5 game event here in fresno by mark, the guy that used to do brawl in the fall (too big, too expensive to continue). was a great event, and was my first 2 day tournament. i ended up 2/2/1, with the draw coming from me forgetting i had two mucolids in range instead of one (one would not have survived overwatch from 15 gargoyles, it had 1 wound) to clear a maelstrom objecive. 1850, ITC rules and missions.
my opponents were:
RG detachment from the new tau/RG supplement. loss. bad maelstrom for me, great opponent. got to eat precision dropped assault VV from reserves to loose primary last turn.
tyranids, tie, due to my derp (see above). great opponent, cagey old vet. dude had metal gargoyles, ffs. he's new to 7th though. ran skyblight/CAD, 3 flyrants + extra crone and rippers + two mawlocks.
3rd game, space wolves + skyhammer. won big, but it was bloody. TWC, the flying coffin of doom, melta skyhammer. got first turn but got seized on, but was smart enough to cluster in ruins w/ 2+ cover.
4th game, bad loss to SM battle company + librarius. slow game, only got 2.5 turns in, but only lost a mucolid, a lictor, and some spawned gants while mauling the opposition. was still outscored 9-2ish.
5th game, big win vs. old school IH SM CAD w/ 2 LR and a relic sicarius. very young player, but great opponent and good looking army.
my flexeril fueled ramblings are mostly copy/pasta below. reiterating again had a great time.
lessons learned so far:
-i am *really* rusty. made a lot of little mistakes that cost me for sure my 2nd game, and possibly my first though really, there's not much i could have done to stop that mess i could have had the rippers live longer if i'd actually bothered to bring all 3 and not just one. yes, i forgot 2 rippers and didn't realize it till the end of the first game. borrowed 2 from a friend for 3rd game. /rageface
-swapping the bastion out was probably a good idea. every marine list i saw had melta, and every skyhammer i saw had MM. regular melta i can block off with spores, MM, ehhh it's a bit harder to do.
-maelstrom is a real mixed bag. i had a difficult time doing anything with it the first 2 games because of rolls (yeah, sure i'll have 3 scoring units in my opponent's deployment area, and next turn, i'll have 3 in mine. while keeping drop marines out of mine. sure. that sounds like it'll be ok.). last game was a lot smoother, because i didn't roll stupid conditions. i still don't care for it. ironically, my regular pods/flyrants/tfex/crones/malanthrope/gargs list would have done much better here because it has a much stronger ground presence. this would have probably put me at the top of the middle tables, where, ironically, it would have got shot off the board. it makes my head hurt. i like that list.
-be prepared to deal with assault from reserve. it's alive and real and you will see it.
-lictors are fragile snowflakes. deploy with care.
-rippers and mucolids are either ignored, or draw inordinate amounts of hate.
-random psychic powers continue to be 100% high quality poo. i had catalyst on one flyrant only, and only in two games at all.
-psychic scream is solid gold, but fickle. so fickle. i nailed 3 units with it and did 2 wounds total. /dice.
two more games tomorrow, i think i am solidly at the bottom of the middle of the pack.
so, finished 2-2-1.
first game was a bad loss against a guy i know, playing SM battle company + bike librarius conclave; 2 pods, 3(?) rhinos and 2 LC razorbacks. one unit of grav devs w/ termy chaplain to tank wounds, one unit of ML devs, two single landspeeders. just a lot of marines and scouts, everywhere. game was slow b/c he had so many damn units, we only did 2.5 turns. i only lost a lictor, a unit of 12 spawned gants (that tanked 27 wounds on the last guy with a 2+ cover save...died by double heavy flamers from a speeder, and i think a single mucolid. i killed most of his army, with only 2 RB, 2 speeders, 2 scouts (total), 1 rhino, 3 grav devs + chaplain and the bits and pieces of two tac squads left on the table. opponent put objectives generally up off the ground and had conqueror of cities WL trait, letting bikes go all over the place and keep them from getting eaten by mawlocks.
was still outscored 9-2. maddening. would have been a different game if it went on to turn 4 because i'd have killed probably everything, but, it was what it was. we were both kind of slow and jittery with coffee and early sunday morning syndrome. the player is a good guy though, hats off to him. this is the one game i had catalyst on two flyrants.
i still (please do not swear) hate battle company.
2nd game today was against the little brother of my first opponent. kid was about 10-12, not sure, but he brought an old school but hard as nails list. SM CAD, iron hands. two land raiders, relic sicaran, stalker (annoying), unit of podded cents, scouts, 2 land speeders, CM + command squad, and a unit of hammernators. great opponent, great game. blood everywhere. he got first turn and had podded cents coming in, however he had elected to have his HQ as a CM instead of a libby and had it in the LR, so with no ignores cover i had everything cluster up in ruins around the venomthrope and reserved my WL flyrant. combined fires from two land raiders, the cents, the stalker, and the sicaran put 3 wounds on one flyrant turn 1 while they were all on the ground. after that i screamed the cents down and started chopping up the scouts, sicaran and stalker w/ flyrants and preparing to road block the incoming terminators with mucolids and spawned gants. details unimportant really, but mawlocks got some good scoring/clearing scouts off objectives. IH heavy tanks are a pain to kill, took me two rounds of pelting the sicaran to put it down and i just ignored the LR and put out layers of fearless, shrouded gants to block any incoming assaults with a ripper unit and a lictor as backup on my 2nd objective. in the end i mauled him pretty good, with just an immoblized LR, a LRC, and one lone terminator left on the board. i had gotten pretty shot up looking one flyrant, the rippers, 13 gants, a lictor and two mawlocks but cleared of his objectives (nearly both, last termy tanked 11 2+ saves). won primary (big guns, with 3 objectives and killing 3 of his heavies, with him having 1 objective and killing 2 of my heavies), got warlord and linebreaker, he got king of the hill. won maelstrom by a couple of points this time.
conclusions:
be prepared to deal with the many faces of the SM battle company.
i did not see as much grav as i thought i was going to. the one guy i know plays UM battle company + skyhammer had it in spades, and shot a 5 IK list off the table with it, so, it's there for sure. but the field is extremely varied. i saw DA battle company (lion's SF?), the new RG battle company thing, several more standard drop pod/rhino rush SM battle companies (with UM, IH, WH, and salamanders represented that i saw). everyone seemed to want to have melta for knights vs. trying to grav them down (or, 5 out of the six people i talked to did). dropping my bastion was probably a good thing, in this event. broader, i can't speak for.
i also did not see one invisible unit this weekend. the one librarius i ran into didn't get great powers.
psychic powers continue to be random and sporadic. scream is awesome, when it works. catalyst is great, when you get it. dominion can be clutch, if you need it and want to risk perils. etc.
be prepared for precision dropping assault from reserves, and not just from skyhammer. my first game we had emporer's will primary, with a RG army where he can choose to fail reserves iirc. he waited until turn 4 to walk his scouts on from his table edge, where my mawlock had his objective, then DS two units of VV with no scatter that got to assault from reserves. still nearly held it down, as the mawlock is pretty tough at T6 and six wounds, the power swords of the vets had difficulty wounding him even hitting on 3's with an absolute boatload of attacks on the charge. failed his last armor save on the last attack after he threw something else into the combat T5. so, that's 4 units coming in w/e you need them on your backfield, the scouts walking in 6", the VV dropping in w/ no scatter up to 6" away, then assaulting 2d6" with rerolls (RG can use packs in movement + assault), so something like a 23" from the backline threat radius.
there was a 5 IK army, it took 2nd. had the shooty FW tall one, and was gorgeously painted. be prepared for it.
there were 2 tau armies, and a tau/eldar army (took 3rd). the two straight tau units had the mobile wall formation. you'll see more of them with farsight enclaves hitting soon, which makes crisis suits troops still (rules leaks are around if you care to search).
only one eldar player, who brought eldar/tau with a CC WK. took 3rd. our other local eldar player couldn't make it. no IG either.
i saw 5 separate armies with IK in it, including the 5 knight army. have an answer for them, even if it's just feeding them units.
you *must* be able to progressively score while playing 2 missions + tertiaries at once.
first place was salamanders battle company drop pod list. not sure what was in it but he railed a white scars battle company with it pretty hard during the final game. i talked to his opponent and he was pretty shell shocked. couldn't score, everything dying. iknowthatfeelbro.
i had a bunch of other stuff written but my computer ate it.
from a tyranid standpoint:
the terv did really well for me and for panda (the young nid player i face off with locally). no one shoots at it when you hide it behind LoS blocking ruins with a venomthrope up its butt, not when there are 4 flyrants around. i think mine took one wound all weekend. that being said, it either did clutch, or did absolutely nothing. this is due to the nature of maelstrom and progressive scoring. did you roll stuff you can score? great! did you roll a bunch of "have 3 scoring units in the other guy's deployment zone"? not so helpful. CC were great, you eat pods alive. egrubs did real well also on her, and stinger salvo will be helpful with all the damn scouts around. bubble wrap with gants and mucolids to keep stupid things away. you will have to deal with backline drop pods at some time or another.
flyrants continue to be clutch. the only other air threats i saw were the other two nid players. be prepared for sicarans. volume of fire from battle company was my main problem; roll enough dice and you will see sixes.
i give my lictors a B+. twice they failed IB and even with rerolls from leviathan, ran right off the damn board. they did threaten some back armor and grab a couple of objetives and they're just threatening enough to force them to be dealt with, which takes volume of fire off the flyrants. i think you need more than i took to make them effective.
mucolids drew an inordinate amount of fire, it was really wierd. eeveryone shot the hell out of them, trying to double them out with heavy weapons. they're annoying, make them as annoying as possible so people continue to make bad decisions and shoot at them. do NOT forget about them being able to blow up. charge multiples of them at the same unit; one will not survive overwatch most of the time but the 2nd one will do some work if you get it in there.
mawlocks i give a B+. random is random. never once was able to lictor/mawlock anything, the lictors are just too fragile to live and no one was dumb enough to get something fragile close. not being able to hit upper ruins hampers them. i would have loved to have had the points for 4. not having the coms relay was offset by getting the WL trait with the reroll reserves a couple of times. i'd still rather have the stealth/mtc ruins though.
i'll repost this mess in tactics since not everyone gets to this section. had a great time, was a great event.
my opponents were:
RG detachment from the new tau/RG supplement. loss. bad maelstrom for me, great opponent. got to eat precision dropped assault VV from reserves to loose primary last turn.
tyranids, tie, due to my derp (see above). great opponent, cagey old vet. dude had metal gargoyles, ffs. he's new to 7th though. ran skyblight/CAD, 3 flyrants + extra crone and rippers + two mawlocks.
3rd game, space wolves + skyhammer. won big, but it was bloody. TWC, the flying coffin of doom, melta skyhammer. got first turn but got seized on, but was smart enough to cluster in ruins w/ 2+ cover.
4th game, bad loss to SM battle company + librarius. slow game, only got 2.5 turns in, but only lost a mucolid, a lictor, and some spawned gants while mauling the opposition. was still outscored 9-2ish.
5th game, big win vs. old school IH SM CAD w/ 2 LR and a relic sicarius. very young player, but great opponent and good looking army.
my flexeril fueled ramblings are mostly copy/pasta below. reiterating again had a great time.
lessons learned so far:
-i am *really* rusty. made a lot of little mistakes that cost me for sure my 2nd game, and possibly my first though really, there's not much i could have done to stop that mess i could have had the rippers live longer if i'd actually bothered to bring all 3 and not just one. yes, i forgot 2 rippers and didn't realize it till the end of the first game. borrowed 2 from a friend for 3rd game. /rageface
-swapping the bastion out was probably a good idea. every marine list i saw had melta, and every skyhammer i saw had MM. regular melta i can block off with spores, MM, ehhh it's a bit harder to do.
-maelstrom is a real mixed bag. i had a difficult time doing anything with it the first 2 games because of rolls (yeah, sure i'll have 3 scoring units in my opponent's deployment area, and next turn, i'll have 3 in mine. while keeping drop marines out of mine. sure. that sounds like it'll be ok.). last game was a lot smoother, because i didn't roll stupid conditions. i still don't care for it. ironically, my regular pods/flyrants/tfex/crones/malanthrope/gargs list would have done much better here because it has a much stronger ground presence. this would have probably put me at the top of the middle tables, where, ironically, it would have got shot off the board. it makes my head hurt. i like that list.
-be prepared to deal with assault from reserve. it's alive and real and you will see it.
-lictors are fragile snowflakes. deploy with care.
-rippers and mucolids are either ignored, or draw inordinate amounts of hate.
-random psychic powers continue to be 100% high quality poo. i had catalyst on one flyrant only, and only in two games at all.
-psychic scream is solid gold, but fickle. so fickle. i nailed 3 units with it and did 2 wounds total. /dice.
two more games tomorrow, i think i am solidly at the bottom of the middle of the pack.
so, finished 2-2-1.
first game was a bad loss against a guy i know, playing SM battle company + bike librarius conclave; 2 pods, 3(?) rhinos and 2 LC razorbacks. one unit of grav devs w/ termy chaplain to tank wounds, one unit of ML devs, two single landspeeders. just a lot of marines and scouts, everywhere. game was slow b/c he had so many damn units, we only did 2.5 turns. i only lost a lictor, a unit of 12 spawned gants (that tanked 27 wounds on the last guy with a 2+ cover save...died by double heavy flamers from a speeder, and i think a single mucolid. i killed most of his army, with only 2 RB, 2 speeders, 2 scouts (total), 1 rhino, 3 grav devs + chaplain and the bits and pieces of two tac squads left on the table. opponent put objectives generally up off the ground and had conqueror of cities WL trait, letting bikes go all over the place and keep them from getting eaten by mawlocks.
was still outscored 9-2. maddening. would have been a different game if it went on to turn 4 because i'd have killed probably everything, but, it was what it was. we were both kind of slow and jittery with coffee and early sunday morning syndrome. the player is a good guy though, hats off to him. this is the one game i had catalyst on two flyrants.
i still (please do not swear) hate battle company.
2nd game today was against the little brother of my first opponent. kid was about 10-12, not sure, but he brought an old school but hard as nails list. SM CAD, iron hands. two land raiders, relic sicaran, stalker (annoying), unit of podded cents, scouts, 2 land speeders, CM + command squad, and a unit of hammernators. great opponent, great game. blood everywhere. he got first turn and had podded cents coming in, however he had elected to have his HQ as a CM instead of a libby and had it in the LR, so with no ignores cover i had everything cluster up in ruins around the venomthrope and reserved my WL flyrant. combined fires from two land raiders, the cents, the stalker, and the sicaran put 3 wounds on one flyrant turn 1 while they were all on the ground. after that i screamed the cents down and started chopping up the scouts, sicaran and stalker w/ flyrants and preparing to road block the incoming terminators with mucolids and spawned gants. details unimportant really, but mawlocks got some good scoring/clearing scouts off objectives. IH heavy tanks are a pain to kill, took me two rounds of pelting the sicaran to put it down and i just ignored the LR and put out layers of fearless, shrouded gants to block any incoming assaults with a ripper unit and a lictor as backup on my 2nd objective. in the end i mauled him pretty good, with just an immoblized LR, a LRC, and one lone terminator left on the board. i had gotten pretty shot up looking one flyrant, the rippers, 13 gants, a lictor and two mawlocks but cleared of his objectives (nearly both, last termy tanked 11 2+ saves). won primary (big guns, with 3 objectives and killing 3 of his heavies, with him having 1 objective and killing 2 of my heavies), got warlord and linebreaker, he got king of the hill. won maelstrom by a couple of points this time.
conclusions:
be prepared to deal with the many faces of the SM battle company.
i did not see as much grav as i thought i was going to. the one guy i know plays UM battle company + skyhammer had it in spades, and shot a 5 IK list off the table with it, so, it's there for sure. but the field is extremely varied. i saw DA battle company (lion's SF?), the new RG battle company thing, several more standard drop pod/rhino rush SM battle companies (with UM, IH, WH, and salamanders represented that i saw). everyone seemed to want to have melta for knights vs. trying to grav them down (or, 5 out of the six people i talked to did). dropping my bastion was probably a good thing, in this event. broader, i can't speak for.
i also did not see one invisible unit this weekend. the one librarius i ran into didn't get great powers.
psychic powers continue to be random and sporadic. scream is awesome, when it works. catalyst is great, when you get it. dominion can be clutch, if you need it and want to risk perils. etc.
be prepared for precision dropping assault from reserves, and not just from skyhammer. my first game we had emporer's will primary, with a RG army where he can choose to fail reserves iirc. he waited until turn 4 to walk his scouts on from his table edge, where my mawlock had his objective, then DS two units of VV with no scatter that got to assault from reserves. still nearly held it down, as the mawlock is pretty tough at T6 and six wounds, the power swords of the vets had difficulty wounding him even hitting on 3's with an absolute boatload of attacks on the charge. failed his last armor save on the last attack after he threw something else into the combat T5. so, that's 4 units coming in w/e you need them on your backfield, the scouts walking in 6", the VV dropping in w/ no scatter up to 6" away, then assaulting 2d6" with rerolls (RG can use packs in movement + assault), so something like a 23" from the backline threat radius.
there was a 5 IK army, it took 2nd. had the shooty FW tall one, and was gorgeously painted. be prepared for it.
there were 2 tau armies, and a tau/eldar army (took 3rd). the two straight tau units had the mobile wall formation. you'll see more of them with farsight enclaves hitting soon, which makes crisis suits troops still (rules leaks are around if you care to search).
only one eldar player, who brought eldar/tau with a CC WK. took 3rd. our other local eldar player couldn't make it. no IG either.
i saw 5 separate armies with IK in it, including the 5 knight army. have an answer for them, even if it's just feeding them units.
you *must* be able to progressively score while playing 2 missions + tertiaries at once.
first place was salamanders battle company drop pod list. not sure what was in it but he railed a white scars battle company with it pretty hard during the final game. i talked to his opponent and he was pretty shell shocked. couldn't score, everything dying. iknowthatfeelbro.
i had a bunch of other stuff written but my computer ate it.
from a tyranid standpoint:
the terv did really well for me and for panda (the young nid player i face off with locally). no one shoots at it when you hide it behind LoS blocking ruins with a venomthrope up its butt, not when there are 4 flyrants around. i think mine took one wound all weekend. that being said, it either did clutch, or did absolutely nothing. this is due to the nature of maelstrom and progressive scoring. did you roll stuff you can score? great! did you roll a bunch of "have 3 scoring units in the other guy's deployment zone"? not so helpful. CC were great, you eat pods alive. egrubs did real well also on her, and stinger salvo will be helpful with all the damn scouts around. bubble wrap with gants and mucolids to keep stupid things away. you will have to deal with backline drop pods at some time or another.
flyrants continue to be clutch. the only other air threats i saw were the other two nid players. be prepared for sicarans. volume of fire from battle company was my main problem; roll enough dice and you will see sixes.
i give my lictors a B+. twice they failed IB and even with rerolls from leviathan, ran right off the damn board. they did threaten some back armor and grab a couple of objetives and they're just threatening enough to force them to be dealt with, which takes volume of fire off the flyrants. i think you need more than i took to make them effective.
mucolids drew an inordinate amount of fire, it was really wierd. eeveryone shot the hell out of them, trying to double them out with heavy weapons. they're annoying, make them as annoying as possible so people continue to make bad decisions and shoot at them. do NOT forget about them being able to blow up. charge multiples of them at the same unit; one will not survive overwatch most of the time but the 2nd one will do some work if you get it in there.
mawlocks i give a B+. random is random. never once was able to lictor/mawlock anything, the lictors are just too fragile to live and no one was dumb enough to get something fragile close. not being able to hit upper ruins hampers them. i would have loved to have had the points for 4. not having the coms relay was offset by getting the WL trait with the reroll reserves a couple of times. i'd still rather have the stealth/mtc ruins though.
i'll repost this mess in tactics since not everyone gets to this section. had a great time, was a great event.
. Your first game was against my oldest (Gage). We threw his list together when the new supplement came since it plays so much like he used to play his blood angles.... lots of drop troops. Its a fun army to play with the ability to control reserves, jockey for first turn, etc. 
