Whoopee! I beat Draigo!

[commandersasha]

Sorry, I had to share! My best gaming buddy plays Nurgle mech, Webway portal DEldar, Loganwing and Draigowing; against all the other armies, he is better than me, but not by much, and I guess we have fairly even wins against each other, slightly in his favour.

When C:GK came out, he got himself a pure Draigowing: 10 Pallies, 5 Pallies, 2 Dreadknights and a Terminator Inquisitor.
Playing 1500-1750, with full wound allocation shenanigans, my run against him in 5th was 18/1/1, and the win was when I chose the mission, deployment, made him deploy first, and stole the initiative, and he "chose" to roll low on Grand Strategy (ie the game was legal, but the 1:162 odds that it all stacked in my favour!)

I must add at this point that he is not a Draigo-power-gamer; he is a competitive but very fair and reasonable player; what's more he chose the Draigowing before any of us realised just how powerful it was. On Bolter And Chainsword he is "Nurgez", author of the 40page thread on Draigo that has become a refernce material source on the build!

Anyway, yesterday I beat him, in a fair battle! In order to boost the enthusiasm of other 'Nid players, or anyone else who regularly faces Draigo, Ork Nob Bikers or the like, I thought I'd try and highlight the changes that made this possible, and would welcome further contribution!

To The Mods, I couldn't decide if this would be a Battle Report, a Tyranid Tactica, or a Vs Thread, so I put it in general, please move it if you can figure out where to put it! Thanks!

[commandersasha]

Many Bothans died...The Weaknesses of a Deathstar
The Draigo/Thunderwolf/Nob Biker Deathstar was a nightmare for us 'Nids in 5th: with over half the enenmy's points in one unit, high armour, and multi-wound allocation tricks, we just crashed against it, unit after unit, and everything we threw at it got smashed back.
If we were lucky, we'd get a few Rends or Boneswords through, maybe even the odd ID, but rarely did enough damage to stop it being a one-round suicide run.

Tactica were discussed about using our AP1,2 guns and powers, but if the enemy player was anything less than incompetent, he would prevent us from getting more than one attempt at these.

Mass assaults were the only option, but if we committed our MCs for hard hits and aura buffs, the Enemy would target our little guys, win combat on wounds, then No Retreat would burn our MCs in one turn.

Their only weakness was their large size and vulnerability to tarpitting, but if the enemy was sensible he brought some Fast Attack or Jump solutions, and kept them safe until we were decimated.

A large unit of large bases such as these could also afford to spread out and hold multiple objectives, and I lost several games in the final moments as Draigo wiped the last of my blood off his sword, and consoildated D6" back onto objectives that I had dragged him off!

It has all changed!
Thankfully in 6th, the Wound Allocation monster has been slain!
Although 'Look Out,Sir' can mitigate things a little, it now depends on the success of a 4+ roll, and can only be done if a Character is involved, and has to be swapped with the closest model. The days of passing a wound to any unwounded model have gone!

On round 1 my Flyrant took a Paladin off the board with shooting! Unheard off! I actually danced!

Now, a bunch of attacks on a Deathstar flank will ACTUALLY REMOVE MODELS, depleting their counter attack.


Killpoint missions will still be a nightmare for us, but now that is only 1 of 6 missions, not 1 of 3, and with the greater vulnerability of the main Deathstar, he can't just hold his other support units back safely, he has to commit them.

No No No No No No Retreat!
This is the biggest part for me though. The removal of No Retreat wounds means that now I CAN commit multiple assaults against the Deathstar, using MCs with swarms of little things. The Gaunts can perform the first charge, soaking up the pesky Overwatch (which on a Draigostar is phenomenal: 20 S7 Psycannon and 12 S5 Psybolters, often re-rolling), then our real hitters wade in, safe in the knowledge that they won't be dying in the No Retreat phase.

Even if you have an assault with just Gaunts, whilst in Synapse, it is now a fair fight, and you don't end up removing models AFTER the fight (which always offended me!)

The upshot of this is that after 18 losses, and only a cheated win against a similarly matched player with an army that I considered unbeatable in 5th, I beat him, and was not that far from tabling him! Only Draigo and 4 injured Pallies remained!

I hope this ramble inspires some of you that may have despaired against certain armies, and that you have as much success as I did yesterday!

For The UnderEmpire! Squeee!

[commandersasha]

Oh, and I forgot to mention, a squad can no longer hold 2 objectives, so he can't spread out between multiple ones! He has to commit to one, so you can tie him up on it and safeguard the others!

[cibissum]

While you are correct that a Look Out, Sir! is on a 4+ for a character, don't forget that it's a 2+ for an independent character. But that still isn't so bad since it just means the nearest guy will be taking that many more wounds.

[vivi22]

This is actually good to hear since I know that I will be facing Draigo in a team game tomorrow night (it's continuing from last week. By the time we got the game started and finished the first turn we had to leave it to finish this week so I know Draigo is there, I just hadn't had to face him yet).

I still remember the first and only time I faced Draigo until now bck in 5th: brought an all comers style list not realizing that GK's could actually do that. Got tabled and ended the game having caused one wound and destroyed a dreadnought because nothing I had that could cause instant death or crack their armour save managed to do anything. I think the worst part was thinking about what I could have done for days after and realizing that even the best strategies I could think of would probably still get tabled, even if I did a bit more damage.

[halos]

Yeah the latest FAQ hit Paladins really hard.

Not that I'm complaining of course, that list was kinda dumb.

But losing Character (apart from the apothecary) and the change to Lo,S makes them somewhat more manageable for Nids, and a whole lot more manageable for other armies.

[grarik]

I'd agree with this. Like commandersasha's friend, I made a Draigo army before it was realized how powerful they were (I just wanted a realitively cheap army for larger games), 5th edition, barely lost a game, 6th edition, much, much harder to play with.

[fleetofclaw]

Enfeeble further devastates paladins, taking away their FNP and doubling them out with our strength 6 spam is awesome. Paladins are a lot less scary now.


Sent from my Nexus S 4G using proboards

[Geneva]

Sept 26, 2012 16:05:42 GMT fleetofclaw said:

Enfeeble further devastates paladins, taking away their FNP and doubling them out with our strength 6 spam is awesome. Paladins are a lot less scary now.

Enfeeble followed by an assaulting Flyrant with Iron Arm is a death sentence for Paladins. It's not an opportunity that always comes up but when it does it's unbelievably satisfying. Hitting on 3s, re-rolling 1s, Wounding on 2s with Instant Death, re-rolling 1s, no armour saves. And your opponent's weapons can't even touch you.

Moments like that are downright magical.

[Davor]

The question I have to ask is, Sasha, did you play with Skaven counts as Tyranids? I believed that was an awsome looking army you had there.

[commandersasha]

I did, the Skavenids are doing well in 6th! I am playing a lot of Malifaux now, so don't want to invest heavily in 40K; the only new model is my WiP Flyrant: another Doomwheel, but this time with a timber frame hang-glider construction, based on Bleriot's early monoplane!

I've shelved the Genestealers, so my 1,850 list (for a coming tournament) is
DakkaFlyrant, Personal Warlord, Biomancy
3xHiveguard
3xZoe in a spore
8xYmgarls
Tervigon with AG,TS,CC,2nd Psy, Biomancy
~15 Devilgaunts in a spore
~15 Ubergaunts
3 Shrikes
15 Ãœbergoyles
5 Raveners
Trygon
I am jiggling gaunt numbers at the moment to experiment with buffs on the MCs; in a mixed all-comers list I find the value of biomorphs is too unpredictable, whereas more Gaunts always help!