Dealing with a Storm Eagle / Spartan combo

[roughjnick]

Hi guys,

I've done some searches and read up as much as I could find on dealing with flyers but I'm still wanting some ideas of how to deal with the above.

My friend who I've been playing against regularly for a while has recently purchased both a Storm Eagle and a Spartan assault tank from FW for his vanilla marines. He's also got a Storm talon that he attaches to the Storm Eagle for deployment. I'd been on a 8-10 game winning streak before these turned up but the last game we had (the first he's used both of these vehicles in) was a Purge the Alien game and I really struggled. It ended 5 -7 in his favour but to be honest the closeness of the match was more to do with him making poor decisions with his troops rather than me being able to beat him with tactics. It could easily have been 3-7 in his favour.

I did manage to take out the Spartan and Storm Talon but I couldn't scratch the Storm Eagle. He just kept it well out of my range and having taken out my Fly-rant (by knocking it out of the sky with a pistol shot ) I had nothing that could catch it while he rained templates and lascannon fire down on me.

I'm aware that I could just use massed hive guard but it's still fairly easy for him to just stay out of range. Also if I concentrate fire on the Storm Eagle then the Spartan gets to annihilate my MC's with it's lascannons. The best I can come up with is to just try and ignore it and hope for an objective game (fortunately that's fairly likely in 6th).

What's the rest of the hives opinion? Is there anything else I can try? Anyone any experience with carnifex devourer spam against an armor 12 flyer / landraider variant? I'm open to any advice.

[Deleted]

Unfortunately, Tyranids don't really have any options past Dakka Flyrants for AA. Keep in mind he has less on the board and hammer the (please do not swear) out of his scoring units. KP missions are just gonna be rough Perhaps, given Tyranid's unique no-AA position, your friend would allow you to purchase a quad-gun. There's that recent thread showing a guys quad-gun he built from an Acid Spray that looks really sweet. Or maybe houserule an gun option for Harpies or Tyrants that can be useful AA.

[roughjnick]

Hmmm yeah thats pretty much what I thought. I'll have a chat with him about house rules but maybe I'll just have to cross my fingers and hope we dont roll a kill points game again anytime soon.

To be honest he was lucky we didn't have objectives as I had killed all his scoring units by turn four.

Thanks for the reply anyway.

[gigasnail]

you have the right of it: play to the mission. you just got the one mission that doesn't include objectives.

also, don't sweat not being able to handle those units well. nids don't handle flyers well at all to begin with (try podding dakka fexes + double flyrant but it gets expensive, and podded fexes don't do much for you if you get them from reserves and the flyers aren't on the board yet), and those are FW units that throw intra army balance out the window (not that it's particularly balanced between codexes to begin with, but you get the idea). the spartan is just a big (and expensive) land raider; a brood of zoanthropes will do for it nicely. if you're running tervigons and face flyers, you can try to control the board with spawned gants to limit where a flyer can come on the board or where a zooming flyer can manuever/fire.

[coredump]

And ForgeWorld stuff is not known for being well balanced... (40K approved seems pretty good) and Nids have a hard enough time with the codex flyers...

[roughjnick]

Cool thanks guys.

Nice tip about board control there gigasnail. When I think about it with having to come on at least 18 inches I can probably limit his placement options quite a bit.

I must admit his forgeworld stuff seems a little OP but I'd prefer to beat him at his own game than moan about it too much. I will say though for the advantages over a normal landraider the Spartan has quite a bit. Off the top of my head it's something like an extra 40-50 points and it gets an extra hullpoint and extra 2 twinlinked lascannon shots over the normal pattern as well as more options. Still you're right about it being no tougher and podded zoanthropes may well be the way to go if I can't catch it with a MC.

[infornography]

It sounds to me like a pair of dakka flyrants is your best bet at dealing with both of those problems.

They are our only reasonable skyfire option to deal with the storm eagle and they can cross the battlefield quickly to deal with the spartan in melee.

Zoeys in a pod are also a good solution to the spartan problem.

As for balance, I have a storm eagle and have found that generally, I'd rather have a GK storm raven with psibolt ammo and hurricaine bolters. The Storm Eagle is a very good unit, but it's vengeance launcher isn't particularly useful against it's usual targets and if you are skyfiring with it, you can't even shoot the vengeance launcher at all. I really don't think it is significantly better than a storm raven, just a little bit more durable.

[hellhammer]

I never ever had a case where I absolutely HAD to kill a flyer, especially with nids they are not that big of a deal but on the other hand I would also never allow any FW (please do not swear) in a game I'm taking halfway serious...
wasn't there a tyranid FW flyer? I'm pretty sure the harridan is as broken as the other stuff ^^

[infornography]

Well, the Harridan is a gargantuan creature and is apocalypse only, and from what I've heard, is not actually worth it's points generally. I find FW stuff to be kind of cool, just stick with the stuff that is cleared for 40k and you should be good. They are not generally overpowered for the points cost. Usually they are overcosted in fact. There are exceptions, but that is true of codex units as well.