Looking For Synergy

[chillingworth]

Forgive me if I'm rehashing old ground.

I'm struggling to find a good level of workable synergy within my Tyranid army when compared to Necron's (the army I play against most). Quantum shielding, reanimation protocol and all the buffs that allow units to hit in 2's rerolling 1's because of their proximity to a HQ's or Tesla, bloody Tesla rolling a 6 on a hit roll gives you another 3 hits!. Tyranids have very little like that that I can find. It's got better since Blood Of Baal. We do have the Tyron deep strike with 30 devigaunts, the 9 warrior units with deathspitters/boneswords/wips and enhanced resistance. I would be interested if anyone could suggest any other good combined unit, stratagem combinations.

[tylertt]

I haven't played against Necrons in 9th myself, but I've really been enjoying the Leviathan x2 AcidFex & Malanthrope. Great for controlling the middle of the table.

[afewveiws]

Its limited in our army. Swarmlord slinging OOE is pritty good if you can clear a path.

We have alot of deepstrikeing options...

Yeah... synergy is not that obvious in nid armies but you can build army lists that synergies well toward a particular goal,... mostly scoring while being annoying with a couple hard hitters reserved for things that must be removed from play.

[infornography]

Sadly, the days of the 5th edition codex are long behind us and synergy is in short supply. Most of what I can think of amounts to just making it harder to kill our guys with different bonuses and abilities so we can survive long enough to outscore our opponents.

I'm hoping our next codex is better than this lazy one we got. If any army should have lots of built in synergies it should be the faction with a friggin hive mind!

[kazetanade]

Tyranids have very few buff bubbles* that can be easily exploited. Our obvious ones aren't obviously usable anymore.

If we're talking "synergy" as a way to create an effective tool or strategy though I think we have a handful.

A few good pairings as follows:

- Exocrine with Adaptive Physio for mortal wounds/Dermic Symbiosis, tagged with Symbiostorm.

- Termagant/Hormagant blobs buffed by Maleceptor Encaphalic Diffusion (same to said Exocrine and Zoanthropes).

- Swarmlord hive commandeering blobs (gargoyle blobs in particular) to body block with a Catalyst 5+++ to slow down damage.

- 9 man warriors with Enhanced Resistance, Cover, their new reduce damage strategem, Prime, and Guns forms a reasonable if not top tier competitive objective sitting option that does some damage and is fairly hard to shift against anything not mass melts/lascannon.

- Trygon/Rav taxi with 30 devilgants is somewhere in there, assuming the damage profile of devilgants works for you.

- Using of above Gargs and Biovores missing their shots to completely move block people.

- double during hiveguard at 3+ rr1s is not bad and chews through stuff like necron warriors fairly consistentltly.

[ferros]

To add to this list:
Tervigon with mass termagants for rr1

[iniquity]

In the grand scheme of things I’m pretty new to nids but the more I play them the more I think that we aren’t a particularly synergetic army. We don’t have units that we can really stack buffs on and then combo into specific stratagems or relics.

We have lots of units that interact well together but none that really do it with the end goal of knocking out your opponent. We have lots of small synergies that are good as achieving specific goals however. (Examples listed in a post above)

One of my biggest hurdles with tyranids when it comes to making a list that isn’t just a net list with 1 unit changed is how to make a tyranid army that has lots of these individually synergetic units that function as a whole in order to achieve an over arching army wide function.

[able]

Sept 9, 2020 10:34:28 GMT ferros said:

To add to this list:
Tervigon with mass termagants for rr1

That's a crowbarred mechanic, not synergy. The tervigon is written to literally do nothing unless it is run beside gants, rather than synergise with them.

Despite being in an ok place, there is no way of getting around the fact that our codex was extremely lazily written. Rather than getting HQs that work well with the units they are supposed to be beside fluff wise (but are open to creative usage with other units) we get keyword specific special rules that leave no room for creative use. There is no room for 'I wonder how well a tervigon would work with warriors?' because it is hard coded against creative use.

Movement shenanigans are the only place I've found any synergy, especially with kraken. I've had decent success with a metabolic overdriven acidfex with a 5++ and catalyst. Get it right into the enemy's face T1, and force them to deal with it, while flyrants come in (one kraken double advancing onslaught for T1 charge). If the Tyrannofex survives it should be able to double fire at a choice target as well as charge. You are committing to getting beaten up, and probably tabled at some point, but you should be able to get 15 or 20pts in primary objectives at least one turn.

[kazetanade]

Sept 9, 2020 10:34:28 GMT ferros said:

To add to this list:
Tervigon with mass termagants for rr1

I'm sorry, that's just not Synergy - it's in the "obvious that obviously doesn't work" pile.

What would fit into the list but I neglected earlier due to changes in Coherency (ie worked better in 8th Ed) is making 3 x 30 string back to 3 Tervigons. If they don't wipe the unit, you get WHOLE unit back, while sending another unit up to replace the nearly dead unit.

The reason why it didn't work was that Tervigons cost more than what they could regenerate in a game, so it was almost aways more cost efficient to just bring more Gaunts.

[mattblowers]

Sept 8, 2020 22:59:17 GMT infornography said:

Sadly, the days of the 5th edition codex are long behind us and synergy is in short supply.

What synergies do you remember from 5th ed codex? I remember a steaming hot pile of garbage. 3 tervigons were good for a while. Flyrants were always good. The codex endured midway through 7th but I never really thought of it as synergistic. It was mediocre at best. What we have now actually has more legs. Genestealers had a 5+ save, no invul, and always went last if they charged through cover. They had high initiative and a decent number of attacks but rarely got to use them. I have no fondness for the 'good ol' days' because they never were.

[hivemind03]

I think our codex came before the +1 hit/wound and reroll dice aura craze. Thats really not the kind of "synergy" I would want for tyranids anyways. In my opinion, those are lazy rules.

[dranzyl]

Hmmm what was the tyrant aura of rr1's called back in 5th? Old adversary? Before it was removed in 6th.

Psychic powers was where the most synergistic feeling used to be. It came to an end with the 'you can cast a given power only once' rule in 8th.

[infornography]

Tyrants had a reroll misses buff in an aura, we had great psyker abilities that helped a lot. Hive Commander letting you outflank a Tervigon, the ability to outflank or deep strike just about everything! Ymgarls popping up in some piece of terrain in the middle. Mycetic Spores were cheap and would allow us to deep strike a devilgaunt bomb or The Doom of Malantai! We were able to seriously synergize our deployment so that we were literally coming at them from all sides in serious numbers! Also we could have a Swarmlord with worthwhile Tyrant Guard AND a Tyranid Prime rolling around the map as a scary as hell deathstar!

While large portions of that codex were a steaming garbage pile, what it did well, it did REALLY WELL! We had multiple buff auras and could really ruin someone's day with the way it played. As much as I remember complaining about that codex, I also remember how playing felt RIGHT! How we felt like a swarm coming from all angles at once with unstoppable numbers! The good units in that codex synergized VERY well. The poor ones were complained about but never fielded because we were not actually lacking for effective units. The result was much the same as every Tyranid codex since though, We had a small variety of really good lists and if you deviated much from them you started losing games. I still miss the feel of playing that way though. We had a little of it at the beginning with this codex but they swiftly nerfed it into unusability.

[trashcan01]

Sept 9, 2020 19:42:50 GMT infornography said:

While large portions of that codex were a steaming garbage pile, what it did well, it did REALLY WELL! We had multiple buff auras and could really ruin someone's day with the way it played. As much as I remember complaining about that codex, I also remember how playing felt RIGHT! How we felt like a swarm coming from all angles at once with unstoppable numbers! 

Heh, I wish I played back then. Sounds fun.

[stormcoil]

Sept 8, 2020 18:44:27 GMT chillingworth said:

Forgive me if I'm rehashing old ground.

I'm struggling to find a good level of workable synergy within my Tyranid army when compared to Necron's (the army I play against most). Quantum shielding, reanimation protocol and all the buffs that allow units to hit in 2's rerolling 1's because of their proximity to a HQ's or Tesla, bloody Tesla rolling a 6 on a hit roll gives you another 3 hits!. Tyranids have very little like that that I can find. It's got better since Blood Of Baal. We do have the Tyron deep strike with 30 devigaunts, the 9 warrior units with deathspitters/boneswords/wips and enhanced resistance. I would be interested if anyone could suggest any other good combined unit, stratagem combinations.

Well, we have obvious ones like a tyranid prime buffing warriors or a broodlord buffing genestealers.  A big blob of warriors (with enhanced resistance) and all of the guns boosted by a prime and then using SMA to shoot twice would be a similar "buff + strat" combo.

There are also synergies to mark a target and give everything bonuses to charge, many of those are from the blood of baal.

The good news is that blobbing up to try and get HQ buffs is often a poor strategy in 9th as you really want to be spread out across the board contesting objectives.  Due to this our lack of need to cluster around our HQs actually makes Tyranids a stronger army because we are able to have better board control without losing anything.

Look at GT winning armies lately.  Marines LOVE their HQ bubbles, and yet the winning marine lists have very few of these "synergy" options because shooting castles don't work.  Same thing for like Riptides and shield drones.  Having a couple of doomblobs is not as effective at scoring as being able to be independent and mobile.