LurkSec: 50 Shades of Territorial Instincts

[DukeMantis]

My fellow sexocrines,

I've come to the conclusion I should be playtesting a fleet that makes use of scoring monsters, aka using the Territorial Instincts Biomorphology. I'm hoping you can help me improve/expand on some basic ideas and share your thoughts and experiences.

For the purposes of this thread, I'll refer to scoring monsters as LurkSec.

There seem to be three distinct flavors of LurkSec.

Behemoth: The Assaulty One
Seems like you just want to throw everything forward and try to table your enemy, while scoring everywhere. Creating as much target saturation as possible feels like a wise move, rather than creating big point sinks?

Kronos: The Shooty/Defensive Bugs
Presumably, castle up in your table-half or squat in midfield, then just blast away. After years of defensive play with big blocks of hive guard, this is defo my least favorite idea, but I'm sure it has legs. Has anyone tried it?

Jormungandr: Spooky Bugs aka Somewhere In-between?
Jorm LurkSec could perhaps be the most versatile version. It has some durability/evasion and has the most dynamic pre-game strategic move (Buried in Wait). I'm wondering how well Jorm fares in the mirror though, maybe it just gets beat up by Kraken and Behemoth?

I also wonder which of these three shades of LurkSec best supports our very powerful psychic phase contingent; the popular 400-ish point blob of Mally + Neuro + Zoans?


I realize I left Gorgon out, I figured those generally weren't monster-heavy lists.

Thanks for reading <3

[Raven]

You could also go custom fleet to have Territorial Instincts as your primary adaptation while still having some flexibility with the second.

[kazetanade]

Male Zoey Neu work in any fleet, but assuming you're castling, Jorm gets stacking defensive benefits.

Kronos is an offensive list - get in range, blast with extremely high ap guns, and turn off psychic. If a 1ksons or a GK tries casting in that mess.... hoo boy.

Don't you find this playstyle a little... boring?

[DukeMantis]

Jun 10, 2022 7:13:42 GMT kazetanade said:

Male Zoey Neu work in any fleet, but assuming you're castling, Jorm gets stacking defensive benefits.

Kronos is an offensive list - get in range, blast with extremely high ap guns, and turn off psychic. If a 1ksons or a GK tries casting in that mess.... hoo boy.

Don't you find this playstyle a little... boring?

I defo had the wrong idea about Kronos attack plan, thank you for that.

I probably would find that a little boring, I like to punch stuff 😁

Do you feel that Jorm is actually the fleet that wants to castle and play defensively to be most competitive? Rather than Kronos as I mistakenly thought

[DukeMantis]

Jun 8, 2022 6:02:00 GMT Raven said:

You could also go custom fleet to have Territorial Instincts as your primary adaptation while still having some flexibility with the second.

True, I'd probably go with a mobility based adaptation for the other

[No One]

Having played a little bit with Jorm doing this (in fact, all of my few games have been Jorm), now planning on going Kronos (though yet to get a game in):

kazetanade said:

Male Zoey Neu work in any fleet, but assuming you're castling, Jorm gets stacking defensive benefits.

Kronos is an offensive list - get in range, blast with extremely high ap guns, and turn off psychic. If a 1ksons or a GK tries casting in that mess.... hoo boy.

It depends a bit on list/match up, but I don't think there's any way you can castle full defensive and still win (or well, outside of 'nids super OP and just auto-win', but we'll leave that level of list match up aside). So you're looking to push mid, sit on your midfield side objectives/middle objective, and threaten your opponent's, leveraging nid's strong defensive statlines, and obsec to prevent point flips (and potentially being used to flip points yourself with more mobile/disposable units e.g. mawloc/t-cyte, possibly something like DS screamer killers).

Since you're looking to sit mid, 18" dense is often just not going to be super helpful (I think I've had it come up once with any relevance: partly because some good match ups, but also just because I'm pushing mid, so my opponent is either able to get within 18" to turn it off, or just generally not able to get effective angles through obscuring). 12" more so, but if you're looking to leverage lurk, infantry is less central part of the gameplan. You'll still have some, because you take zoans/warriors, but less central and less what you want to be exposing when necessary.

Kronos gives you a bit more ability to pressure out from mid: depends a lot on exact list as to how relevant this'll be, though. Extra AP swaps to obsec if you're going this route, so extra range, which is only really t-fex for our MCs. And while t-fex slots in well in this strategy, especially with extra range, it's still probably only a unit or two that really benefits, rather than a 'nice to have' like a walkrant/warriors. I swapped because I'm running pyros+t-cyte though, and extra range helps that a lot: drop down, burn something, hold a point with obsec and a lot of wounds that're still ultimately fairly disposable. You also get the power to support a more ranged damage force, in particular the option to go from S6->7 or 4->5 is quite nice for aforementioned units.

Behemoth benefits more to an infantry force: +1 S isn't super relevant to a lot of our combat MCs, neither is +1 to wound when MCs have full rrs. I could maybe see it with fexes, pushing to S7, 8 with AG, but only counting as a single model is awkward there, and outside of massed fexes, Jorm might be better for strat.

Gorgon...does actually seem interesting for the mirror, especially with a lot of the secondaries etc, but Kronos seems just better generally (esp when power will sometimes just do the same thing), and maybe even better in the mirror anyway: getting to shoot>not shooting with better guns (though I doubt that'd be a huge issue there).

[Freeman]

Did really well against a super optimal Tau list yesterday with a good pilot, running Jormagunda, T8 obsec spam.