Tyranids go to a RTT. 3 Written Battle Reports (Text/Image)

[stormcoil]

Hello internet. I have something slightly new for you this week. This last weekend I found out on Friday night that there was going to be a small RTT held at a game store that is only about a 30 minute drive away on Saturday. I play almost all of my games in people's homes, and there has not been much in the way of a tournament scene this year. I happened to have my Saturday free as a major responsibility had been postponed for a week and so I decided to go.


The great thing about going to tournaments is that it is an opportunity to meet new people and face armies and playstyles that are different from what I am used to. I really appreciate the group of guys I play with all the time, but when you are only playing against the same dozen guys or so you get into specific trends and metas. I am eager to see how my army does in the wild.


Now going to tournaments is different than playing casually at a buddy's house. As mentioned, you will be playing against people you probably don't know and so you are not going to be familiar with how they play or what tricks they normally have up their sleeve. Also at an event you will be on a strict clock for the round. This means you can't play at a more leisurely pace where you really think about every move. The combination of unfamiliar environment and time pressure means that you are much more likely to make "stupid" mistakes that you would never make in a home game. This is why it can be helpful to get a good amount of practice in with an army before you try and play it in this sort of artificial environment. Both players are under the same pressures, and in my experience both players are more likely to make mistakes while playing in a tournament.


Every TO will run their event a little bit differently, so it is good to find out if there are any specifics to the event that you are not used to. Also, in my experience, tournaments will have very different terrain to what you normally will use in a home game (less terrain at a tournament, typically). Also at a tournament you might get tables which are large set pieces that look great but my provide very strange rules interactions or lopsided battlefields.


Now that I am older my life has changed and now I have responsibilities that make it difficult to take off entire weekends and travel just for a hobby. It is easy to head over to a buddy's house for four hours after work and play a game and hang out. It is a different thing altogether to plan travel and take time off to go to a large event, even if the world was normal. I don't often go to events, and when I do I typically only make it to small RTTs within an hour's drive or less of where I live.


The event this weekend was the smallest one I have attended yet, which in some ways was quite nice. There were only six people at the event total. Three of the others I did not know at all. Two of the people there are some very good, locally well known ITC players I have played a couple times at other events, but neither of them are in my particular play group. One of the ITC players I've been told was in the top 10 custodes players in the last ITC season and always brings well painted armies. The other player I believe did very well last season with mixed imperium faction, which I am told was the most competitive category. Both gentlemen have won multiple GT or larger events each in the past, they both regularly attend tournaments so they have a lot more tournament experience than I do, and they are both known locally as strong players. I believe I have been told that both were in the top 300 for overall ITC last year.


Last year, at small events like the one today I would not normally run into players of this caliber, as they would be off traveling playing at the larger events being held. It speaks a little bit to how few tournaments are being held that you get players like this at such a tiny event. Still, three of the players here I've never played before, and of the two more locally famous ITC guys one I have only played twice in the last two years and the other I have played against four times in the last two years. So I will indeed get to have three games outside of my play group, which was my only real goal for this RTT.


My list: For those that have read my previous work, I am again taking a slightly different version of the list today. I am in the middle of preparing for a major move and so many of my models are already packed up in boxes and unavailable. I also only learned that this RTT was being held for sure the night before. As such I made some emergency adjustments which, sadly, make this version of the list worse than normal. The biggest change is that without a broodlord I instead took 3 neurothropes and needed to add 30 points to my army. So I "upgraded" one of my mawlocs to a trygon with murderous size. Now this change is bad for several reasons. Dropping the broodlord and taking a trygon means that now I basically can't take WWSWF as a secondary (it would then be exocrine, exocrine, trygon... and I can't really protect any of them). Also dropping the broodlord means I lose the extra cast ability of the resonance barb relic I take. Also, I think a trygon is worse than a mawloc because a trygon needs to get good rolls on dice to work, where as a mawloc always works every time. But, these were the models I had available on short notice so this is what I took.


Potato Cam: There are several beautiful armies in the room, and people have been asking me for pictures of the games, so I asked every opponent if they were OK with me taking some pictures while we played. All of my opponent's were very generous and let me take pictures. I will say that the majority of the pictures came out quite poorly. I was trying to play fast and take pictures fast and the combination means that most of the pictures ended up being blurry and unusable. I am still including pictures in each battle report, and I apologize ahead of time for the poor quality. I don't know if I will do this again, but for this set of reports it will at least give people some blurry images of the games.


Looking around the room the strong ITC custodes player is probably the favorite to win this, although I have no idea how strong some of the three strangers are and crazy things can happen at small events. The initial pairings went up and my heart sank a little bit. I got matched against the custodes player round 1! I was hoping to avoid this matchup until later in the day, if I even had to play him at all. We have played twice before, and we each have won one game in the past. Well, I just have to try and do my best. Off to round 1....


RTT Round 1 Battle Report:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/jnqcma/rtt_round_1_battle_report_tyranids_vs_custodes/


RTT Round 2 Battle Report:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/jnqkhs/rtt_round_2_battle_report_tyranids_vs_creations/

RTT Round 3 Battle Report:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/jnqt4h/rtt_round_3_battle_report_tyranids_vs_black/


So there we go, a tiny but very fun RTT. At the end I got exactly what I wanted out of the event. I was hoping to play three games against new players and new armies. I got two games against new people and a game against someone I've only played against three times in the last two years. I went from having never played against codex Chaos Space Marines in 9th, to now I have two games under my belt against two very different builds. I really want to thank all three of my opponents for the great games and also for them allowing me to take pictures while we played. I also want to thank the venue and tournament organizer, it is tough to run events of any size in the current environment and the effort it takes to put these on is not lost on me.


I continue to really enjoy Tyranids and I find them to be a very capable army, especially at scoring points. Still, the list I took had some weaknesses that really annoyed me. I'm glad that the fates had me taking a Trygon to a tournament, if only so that it could utterly fail me in 3 games straight and remind me exactly why I don't consider them a competitive choice. Trygons hit a lot harder than a Mawloc, but Trygon's rely on dice. Mawlocs kill next to nothing but they always work. The other problem with the Trygon is it ruins the WWSWF math of my list, a secondary I would have liked to have taken in the second game. Stormcoil and Madcoil, my Mawlocs, shall rise again!


Finally I have some thoughts on terrain. I make comments in several of the reports about terrain. Look, the terrain at the tournament was just different than what I play with in my home games, many fewer pieces and only ruins so no variety. However, I think the terrain was probably pretty typical of what to expect at a tournament. I think the lack of dense terrain made the games much more shallow and easy. But it isn't as simple as saying the terrain was "bad", you have to be able to adjust to whatever terrain you find yourself playing with. In the first two games I seriously outranged and outgunned my opponents, and the lack of meaningful terrain meant that I could sit back fat and happy and just shoot away. Then in the third game I was the one outranged and outgunned, and I had to find a way to play around what little terrain there was. My hope is that more tournament organizers find a way to work dense terrain into their tables, as they make the games a lot more interesting and less shallow and point and click.


Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this. Let me know what you think!


Appendix:

Links to my previous battle reports and article, if so inclined.

Initial 9th Edition and Tyranids Analysis:

www.reddit.com/r/WarhammerCompetitive/comments/ike5jx/9th_edition_and_tyranids_analysis/

Tyranids vs Custodes:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/isi6as/tyranids_vs_custodes_9th_edition_battle_report/

Tyranids vs Iron Hands:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/ixfhri/tyranids_vs_iron_hands_9th_edition_battle_report/

Tyranids vs Knights and Admech:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/iztbu8/tyranids_vs_knights_and_admech_9th_edition_battle/

Tyranids vs Daemons and Death Guard:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/j2qjxp/tyranids_vs_daemons_and_death_guard_9th_edition/

Tyranids vs White Scars:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/jbdgkx/tyranids_vs_new_codex_white_scars_9th_edition/

[xetemara]

Very, very happy to read we got some teeth!!!

[ferros]

Just, wow.

Your writing ist great and I had a blast Reading it!

Keep up the great work and batreps!

I learned a lot and will try the double lictor, trippel ripper, double mawloc in my next game.

[brianb9999]

I'm not sure why the community seems so down on the nids vs custodes matchup. The combination of mortal wounds, hive guard, and exocrine make a mess of custodes units. Hive guard are great at shooting the inevitable outside LOS shield guard, taking them down to their 3++ in cover even with the new storm shield rules, and they're great against bikes. Exocrines bypass the ignore ap 1/2 on the terminators and you don't have to buff damage against terminators or bikes.

Great writeup, I always look forward to reading them.

[xj85]

Great write up and thanks a lot for sharing.

What is your view on Warriors? I am struggling to find a durable unit which is also obsec. Ofcourse zoanthropes are durable but not troops. Or don’t you see it as important for them being not troops?

[stormcoil]

Nov 4, 2020 14:52:22 GMT xj85 said:

Great write up and thanks a lot for sharing.

What is your view on Warriors? I am struggling to find a durable unit which is also obsec. Ofcourse zoanthropes are durable but not troops. Or don’t you see it as important for them being not troops?

I used to run warriors and they were a solid unit. I ultimately dropped them so I could fit in more cheap screens and a second Mawloc. I think you need to play around and find what works for you on the table with your own playstyle.

My list has a lot more obsec than most of my opponents.  In this RTT I brought 6 units of obsec.

[beetlejuice]

Congrats and well played! I’m really impressed how well you make a plan to play the missions, read your opponents, and make game winning decisions at the table. Those explosions though, made me lol the second time

[kazetanade]

Echoing beetlejuice, I am very impressed at the level of thought you have put into reading your opponent and their playstyle. Identifying the Cultists as the "secret sauce" might have been wrong (those lists were designed much simpler than that), identifying them as the key component to hit was definitely the right call, as they were the weakest link in their chains. HG excel at scenarios like this, where they can just over 3 turns destroy the enemy's ObSec and render them innert. I also like how you accurately ascertained in games 2 and 3 that going 2nd was the better play, as both players very very very evidently wanted to go 2nd and just tear up people who are left out in the open (I personally prefer this approach as well for my lists, and would usually happily give 1st turn away since I dont survive coming out of hiding anyway).

If I'm not mistaken, Game 2 you avoided a Rhino full of Possessed in your face on T1, while on Game 3 you avoided a LoS in your face which would have ended your game right there I think. I have played against a single LoS before that was completely unsupported other than Daemonforge strategem, and that thing was tearing through my army at such an alarming rate - I only managed to stave it off by sacrificing 80% of my Obsec to it over 4 turns and focusing on killing the rest of his army. 3 LOS' would have been a nightmare list for my Nids list to handle, as I have very little mobility to get around them to the rest of his army. Either of those units being fully in your face on T1 would have been close to the end of your game, I think, as both units would likely slaughter the HG screen and engaged with the HG, either killing them or bringing them down low enough that their shooting doesnt really hurt.

Also as you start to play more competitively competent players, you see more "toolbox" approaches that also rely on reacting to enemy play and "set-up" manuveurs designed to make enemies make choices, most of the time all of them being not good choices (the only variance is how bad), similar to how you have been doing to these matchups with much harder firepower thrown at you. The Oblitz one in particular made me laugh when he decided they're a combat unit (they are) and didnt kill anything with them. A better player would have weighed what the Oblitz could do that turn on average numbers and if it wasnt anything that would turn the score, he'd move them to try and secure his VP and contest objectives (from reading memory, the Oblitz were not in a place where they would affect the score by much if at all by shooting anything).

Recalling the 3 batreps, I am trying to think of something to nitpick or criticize, and I cannot really think of anything in particular. It's written very well, very clearly, and the exploration of your thoughts at each point of the game (the important ones) makes me feel as if I am experiencing it at that moment. Honestly, so far these are the best batreps I read and I prefer these batreps over the recorded batreps from Art of War podcast, and that's saying a lot as that's done by the best players in the ITC circuit. Of course. I also prefer reading over watching, so that may skew things a bit...

[stormcoil]

Thank you for the feedback. I agree I lucked out a bit that in games 2 and 3 the opening warptime failed. It probably would have made a big difference.

In my opinion my normal play group is more competitive than the players I faced at this RTT.  But I always welcome the opportunity to play against new people.  Also I suspect it is more common to hold a little more back turn 1 at a tournament against strangers.  Both people are trying to learn about the other player, where as when you play against your friends you both already know the other's play style.

[No One]

Minor thing: perils is before the power goes off, so you would've regenned some wounds on the neuros on some of your super smites.

Ref cover: I think you're being a tad biased here. Hive guard are probably the most effected by dense in the entire game. For everything else, obscuring (that is actually >5") is almost always far more impactful. -1 is a pretty minor survivability bump for most things (hardly matters at all for rerolls, doesn't matter at all if they'd be copping a -1 anyway, doesn't do much to 2+ etc), while obscuring is complete damage mitigation that's ignored by very little. If they really didn't want midfield obscuring (why?), dense would've been at least a more reasonable compromise.

Finally, going 2nd.

Second, he deployed very defensively (my first clue to his playstyle) and even if I took the first turn I would not really be able to shoot or smite. Third, there is very little terrain and my army generally has longer range than his army. That means he is going to have to advance through my range before I am in danger from his range. My moving towards him is just going to make his army more efficient.

kazetanade said:

I also like how you accurately ascertained in games 2 and 3 that going 2nd was the better play, as both players very very very evidently wanted to go 2nd and just tear up people who are left out in the open (I personally prefer this approach as well for my lists, and would usually happily give 1st turn away since I dont survive coming out of hiding anyway).

Lots of thoughts on this (it literally kept me up last night: I wanted sleep damn it!) Going to be a bit of a ramble, but I'll try and put down the salient points reasonably coherently.

Going 1st and doing nothing is a play. Whether it's viable is going to be variable. But it's always an option that you should consider if you're thinking about going 2nd. Essentially, if you go 2nd, your last turn doesn't matter for primary, and for barely matters for secondary either, especially with most of your choices. So at worst, you trade your last turn scoring (which you did get 10 2nd game, but were lucky to even get 5 in the 3rd game) for a guaranteed 5 pts T1. And you also get an extra turn of shooting with the hive guard if nothing else. i.e. Going 2nd, you get 4 relevant shooting phases. Going 1st and doing minimal, you get 4+hive guard shooting phases.

Also, going 1st and doing little puts the pressure on your opponent: if you choose second, they can just do what happened in the 2nd game. Buff up, shuffle around and get some long range poke in. Which forced you to do something first on your T1: in the event of a standoff where the person who moves first loses on board, the person going 1st has the advantage in scoring. Essentially, the person going 1st has the first 'opportunity' to move once there's too little time remaining to do anything about it, and then either score or deny scoring.

Similarly, the fact that your T1 going 2nd was to move, even though he didn't really move, and he didn't really punish means that going 1st would've been fine there (though potentially awkward either way if he actually succeeded with warptime).

Regarding reserves: going to counter reserves is fine. But you had 2 units that you wanted to drop sequentially, and he had 1 that he was happy to just drop before your reserves because he had targets (hive guard/zoans). So the only way going 2nd is an advantage there is if he doesn't drop on his turn 2 and you hold both exos till T3 to gimp the output of one of them. Or I guess if he holds to take them both out on his T3 if he went 2nd, but that feels pretty whatever.

[kazetanade]

Point of consideration - in games 2 and games 3, going first and moving onto objectives would have given both chaos players something easy to make wartime charges into. Going first and not being able to sit or grab objectives put you at the disadvantage, not advantage.

Case in point, him shuffling around the creations of bile left him at 0 primary. He needed Warp Time to go off to create any form of pressure against a defensive enemy. This let's Stormcoil plan the placement of his Exocrenes to reduce threat to them (which were realistically only the Oblitz or Terminator melee anyway) Assuming Stormcoil could have taken WWSWF, going 2nd would have secured likely full pts for WWSWF and Deploy Scramblers, with middling scores for EOAF, vs next to nothing on Creations of Bile. Both sides would be on low Primaries, and Bile would be forced to make a play or auto lose the game, just because he went first.

Remember that T5 counts for no Primaries for both parties, meaning T4 is the last turn where movement onto objectives matter - going first always means you'll be the first to stop scoring, and any move you make on objectives T4 is the turn the enemy has to dedicate everything to stopping you score, while you cannot reciprocate in kind on T5.

On the flip side, he could have chosen to go first vs Bile, and shuffle Zoanthropes onto objectives and let them be bait for the Possessed. This would create early pressure on Bile to do something and Zoeys are notoriously hard to kill. But baits are always risky and they always backfire for me, so I rather take the safer play of going 2nd and reacting.

[No One]

kazetanade said:

Remember that T5 counts for no Primaries for both parties, meaning T4 is the last turn where movement onto objectives matter - going first always means you'll be the first to stop scoring, and any move you make on objectives T4 is the turn the enemy has to dedicate everything to stopping you score, while you cannot reciprocate in kind on T5.

What? You score primary on T5. So the last turn of movement to score for yourself is T4, yes. But going 1st, your T5 matters to kill your opponent off objectives. Your opponent's T5...does nothing vis a vis primaries except in a 'was I standing their yes/no'.

Case in point, him shuffling around the creations of bile left him at 0 primary. He needed Warp Time to go off to create any form of pressure against a defensive enemy. This let's Stormcoil plan the placement of his Exocrenes to reduce threat to them (which were realistically only the Oblitz or Terminator melee anyway) Assuming Stormcoil could have taken WWSWF, going 2nd would have secured likely full pts for WWSWF and Deploy Scramblers, with middling scores for EOAF, vs next to nothing on Creations of Bile. Both sides would be on low Primaries, and Bile would be forced to make a play or auto lose the game, just because he went first.

So, that's 100% a secondary thing: doesn't matter if he went first or second, the player with 100% passive secondaries forces the player with mostly active secondaries to do stuff.

I think whether it's better to go first in this case depends a lot on how you're scoring/doing damage, and how your opponent's doing the same. Going 1st, you move onto objective T4: your opponent now has 1 turn to both clear you off and move onto objectives, otherwise it's back to parity or worse. With 1st still getting 1 turn to counter that, either ob sec or killing to bring it back to parity if the T4 grab didn't work.

So against e.g. Scars/Custodes, that strat's bad because they want to kill close and are good at it, and have ob sec and durability (and even likely HI) to prevent steals/killing them off. But both of those lists? Likely struggle to get through zoans in 1 turn: with zoans screening a unit of gaunts, the gaunts likely live, the zoans probably live, and even if they all die just metabollic a random ripper on there to steal. Where as trying the same thing going 2nd...potentially runs into issues of being bodyblocked off the objectives (NB: I think it's still fine, but that's more because I think the match up is favoured for Stormcoil in any sort of cagey game. Metabollic ob sec/zoans are strong for these sorts of plays).

Anyway, lost my train of thought now, so...Imma just post this.

On the flip side, he could have chosen to go first vs Bile, and shuffle Zoanthropes onto objectives and let them be bait for the Possessed. This would create early pressure on Bile to do something and Zoeys are notoriously hard to kill. But baits are always risky and they always backfire for me, so I rather take the safer play of going 2nd and reacting.

He could've chosen to go first, and just done what he did anyway. He'd be probably just as week to warptime/knight shooting as his T1/T2 board (it's a bit hard to tell distances, but the fact that Stormcoil would be hard on one flank, while his opponent started far back in the other corner seems out of range of even advance and charge warptime: which, unless there's another advance and charge strat, is declared at start of movement i.e. you need to commit to it before knowing if warptime goes off). And if it's not...term squad to force an termi/possessed warptime engage isn't exactly bad.

[kazetanade]

So here's what I don't get. No One

If you go first and both players decide to play cagey (and somehow can't hurt or kill one another), you get to turn 4 where player 1 has to make a move onto the objective because it is his last turn to score Objectives.

Player 2 now has full information on what needs to be done to stop him scoring, and what needs to die to stop Player 1 from denying him scoring.

I cannot see how this can lead to a situation where Player 1 will be in control to take the game back from Player 2, unless player 2 has an army incapable of hurting or stopping Player 1 at all.

Even assuming that there has been a lot of fighting going on in turns 1,2, and 3, unless there were some really key fights that can turn the game, Player 2 should always have this upper hand, unless Player 1 has an army that is hyper aggressive (being able to prevent Player 2 from scoring altogether) or is very defensible (cannot be stopped from scoring by Player 2 due to too tanky/ObSec/whatever).

At best, player 1 going first has the ability to disrupt player 2s ability to score primaries on T5 through his turn (which is cancelled out by player 2 getting to disrupt player 1s Primaries through his T4), but only after Player 2 has had the opportunity to enact his plan. So I don't understand where is the inherent advantage you're talking about.

[hannibal]

Great reports Stormcoil, very detailed and great work on explaining your thinking and decisions too.
I also went on to Reddit and read all your other reports, very insightful, keep up the great work.