Noob V.S. Nids

[Darius Macab]

this is my army, i regularly fight a nid player who has a tervigon list and i need some help to beat him. i know my list is far from the best, but i just started collecting so this is what i have (assault on black reach + battleforce + 2 tanks), not much i know but if you could give my some tips on how best to use each unit it would be much appreciated. i would appreciate tactical advice but not advice for reconstructing my army, i have a post for that in the army list section :rolleyes:

 

HQ

 

Space Marine Captain

Lightning Claws

Melta bombs

135

 

Elites

 

Terminator squad

200

 

Dreadnaught

105

 

Troops

 

Tactical squad 10 strong

Missile Launcher

Melta Gun

Melta bombs

Rhino

215

 

Tactical squad 10 strong

missile launcher

Plasma Gun

180

 

Scout squad 5 strong

teleport homer

Heavy Bolter

100

 

Fast attack

 

Assault Squad 5 strong

power fist and combat shield

Plasma pistol

145

 

Heavy support

 

Whirlwind

85

 

Predator

heavy bolter sponsons

85

 

Total 1250

 

His list: (forgive the vagueness)

 

Tervigon

 

Trygon Prime

 

3 wariors with bone swords and some gun that causes pinning tests

 

16ish hormagaunts

 

10ish genestealers with a broodlord (full upgrades on them all)

 

thats about it i think, i am not shure about the numbers but that should give you the gist of it.

 

any help would be great.

 

DM

[thade]

I'm no expert at fighting Tyranids, but I have some quick clean-up recommendations for your list.

 

Drop the melta bombs; they are useful only against Land Raiders (and then, only barely) and bunkers. For what tiny use they provide in games, they provide zero use against Nids.

 

Drop the combat shield off the assault squad serg; not worth it's points.

 

Try to go for more Power fists. <3

 

Consider painting one of your tactical squads extra-fancy with more bits and gold trim and make it a Sternguard; Hellfire rounds are beastly against Tyranids (as they're great against Monstrous Creatures in general.

[Brother-Captain Isaac]

Can you give me the link to the army list topic? I will conjure a few lists that may help. But for the time being:

 

Drop the Melta Bombs and the Combat Shield. Then use the extra 10 points to upgrade your Dreadnought's Multi-Melta to a Plasma Cannon, pure gold against hordes.

 

How your army should work:

 

Place an objective on one corner of the board, that will be your "home" objective as you could easily defend it.

 

In deployment, place the Whirlwind in cover (out of LOS if possible) and place the Predator close to it. Put your Assault Marines between the WW and the Pred. Your Tac Squads will form a gunline, surrounding the tanks to prevent the tanks from being assaulted from Deep Striking Nids and MCs.

Terminators start on the board in the other corner to serve as a distraction, so take away the Teleport Homer and replace it with some useful upgrades.

Scouts Infilitrate on some faraway objective.

 

When the game starts, get those Terminators to advance, firing along the way.

Scouts take pot-shots with their Hellfire Shells at the horde and hope your opponent doesn't care to devote forces to them. If he does, he is slowing his advance and will allow more time for your firebase to shred them.

Your Assault Squad should jump out and charge those bugs when they get too close, should that happen.

Dreadnought moves towards the Scouts firing the Plasma along the way, then beats up some little guys when they get too close.

Tacticals and Pred focus their fire on a single unit at a time, if they somehow fall back, switch targets. MCs first. Your Captain has no particular use so I'll skip him.

[Commander Sasha]

Place an objective on one corner of the board, that will be your "home" objective as you could easily defend it.

Danger Will Robinson! Genies get Infiltrate, and thus can outflank; if you're objective is in a corner, and you have a squad on it, the brood will move on when available, charge and mince you before you can shoot them down; 30 attacks Init6/7, rending...and the 'lord can freeze your powerfist.

 

I've found with 'Nids, you need some sharp pointy sticks and a sofa to hide behind: Cluster your guns in cover, preferably with objectives and clear space around them. Don't forget that they don't have assault grenades, so if you're in cover, when they charge they do so at Initiative 1.

 

For the pointy sticks, hone your attack squads as suicide units: Maybe give your captain a jumppack and fist, run him with the assault squad, and charge the Tervigon asap; the sooner she stops spawning gaunts the better.

 

Definitely use 1 tac squad as sternguard, with mine I literally only painted their shoulderpads silver.

 

Dump all your melta toys, they're only useful for anti-vehicle, and claws can't operate the keys. Plasma for bugspray, missile launchers for Instant Death-ing the warriors.

 

Assuming you're opponent consents, experiment with assault terminators: more attacks with re-rolls for claw guys, ultimate survivability for hammernators.

 

But the best bit of advice I ever got for fighting Tyranids is:

 

You've lost the battle before it starts if you let him arrange the cover!

 

'Nids die in open spaces, and you die in jungles and ruins. Don't just accept a heavily scenic board and go "Yeah, fine, I don't really care how much cover there is!"

Make sure you have open spaces that his horde will have to cross before getting to the sofa you're hiding behind.

Good luck!

[Arnil]

Whirlwind Should definently be in a corner.

 

Run your captain behind your dred towards the nids as he has no shooting ability but lightning claws are awesome in close combat.

 

Park your pred in cover but make sure he has LOS to the nids.

 

Both Tac squad a should be on an objective for sure. Possibly two but if you do that you'll have to keep the termies back for extra support.

 

Attack Squad protects the tac squads.

 

Scouts, i would get them to the side of the main nid force behind cover and able to shoot at them. You should expect them to die.

 

Termies deep strike to the scouts or protect tac squads as stated earlier. I would even deep strike them into the main horde area. Risky but if you kill enough nids and don't die deep striking its worth it. Make sure you attack big points units so he wants to spend extra turns killing them. Tervigon, Trigon, and Warriors.

 

Otherwise, entrench and pray to the emperor to save you from the alien tide!

[Mysticaria]

Hello,

 

His list is actually pretty tame. Not much there really. Try and shoot the hormogaunts and genestealers without letting them assault you. If you can't prevent the assault, you can go into terrain and force them to hit you at I1. Neither unit has any long-range so distance is your friend. There isn't really any shooting in his list at all except for 3 warriors, and that isn't going to hurt anything. You should be able to set up a nice firebase and chew him up as he has to come to you. Seriously, don't worry about the randomly created gaunts, they might kill a marine every now and then if you are outside of a rhino, but once you kill the tervigon, trygon, and warriors they pretty much can't do anything at all.

 

krak missiles would go a long way in this army. None of his monstrous creatures will get a save and the warriors will be instakilled. Don't be afraid to assault the tervigon, even with tactical marines (hopefully with a P-fist). Worse case scenario you are going to tarpit the thing forever, and if you lose use combat tactics to back out and give him another dose of plasma. Tervigon isn't really that good except to produce gaunts. 3 attacks at WS3 is not great, and the strength is not high enough to instakill your captain. It has 6 wounds but dies to krak missiles and power-fists pretty easy.

 

Don't teleport your terminators, use them to shoot his hormogaunts/stealers and assault any unit that doesn't start with Gene or Try. As already mentioned, you want to stay more than 18" away from the board edges if the genestealers outflank. This pretty much makes teleport homer extra, so definately get something else with those points. In your list, the suboptimal elements are the scout squad and the assault squad. I would drop both of those and look for something with Missile launcher. You already have enough troops with the 2 tactical squads so I would look for some landspeeder typhoons (pure awesome against close-combat nids with different missile types and superb speed) or even another dred. Do you have the option to take a cyclone missile launcher on your terminators? That would be solid 30 points here. Hunter/killer missiles would also be decent as they could help knock out the warriors or Tervigon on the first couple turns.

 

Is he deep striking the Trygon? how do the stealers normally deploy?

 

-Myst

[Darius Macab]

Drop the combat shield off the assault squad serg; not worth it's points.

 

i find that the combat shield is quite useful, how is 5 points not worth an invulnerable save of any kind? also in the games i have played it has been the thing inbetween my sargent and certain death.

 

Drop the melta bombs

 

this seems to be the general consensus from all the posts, i can drop both melta bombs, melta gun and teleport homer for 30 points, enough to get 2 combi plasmas, one for each tactical squad and a plasma cannon for the dread, sound good?

 

Is he deep striking the Trygon? how do the stealers normally deploy?

 

trygon normaly deep strikes, stealers move down flank

 

DM

[Mysticaria]

I missed your comment about not wanting list advice so I'll try and focus some more tactics. first though, I have to say that the combat shield isn't really helpful on the assault squad as it only provides saves versus Tervigon, Trygon, genestealers, and Warriors. If a 5-man assault squad is facing any of those units then they are going to die (poss exception of a wounded Tervigon) and no amount of 6+ saves are going to help. It could even be a 3+ save and wouldn't help. The only reason to take this is that it looks boss, which I support, but there is not really a tactical reason for it here. Especially when he has a powerfist that you won't be risking until he's the last guy standing.

 

Yeah, those are good changes. Not sure about the plasma canon though, I guess it is ok although it misses out on S8 so it doesn't really want to shoot at warriors now. Actually, I am not sure what it wants to target... think I'd rather have a multimelta against this list. More accurate, instakills Warriors, wounds everything on 2+ and the only down side is 24" range. The plus to plasma is that you can shoot at gaunts with it, but once you are shooting at gaunts the game should already be over. Could you upgrade his storm bolter to a heavy flamer? That would be awesome against this list, lots of targets there. If not, I would rather have a multimelta plus a hunter-killer missile on a rhino or pred. Remember, those warriors with bone swords are W3 models with 45-50 points each and die easily to one krak/melta shot. They are resilient to bolters and plasma but die too easy to S8 AP3 stuff. Be aware of wound allocation, with the different weapon type in the squad he can take 4 plasma/bolter wounds before he has to lose even 1 model.

 

When you say "move down the flank" do you mean "outflank" or just that they stay away from the center of the board? Either way, what you are looking to do is set it up so that you get a clean shot with rapid fire bolters when they are out in the open. If you can get that then go for it even if it means sacrificing a unit. For example, if the enemy is in assault range of your tactical squad (13"-18" range) you can shoot them once at long range and then possibly interpose your assault marines in such a way that he can't get around them to assault the tac squad, preferably so that after he wipes them out you get another round of shooting with the tactical squad in rapid fire range with no cover. With only 10 models these guys will be susceptible to getting worn down. Be sure to put any stray rhino storm bolters, bolt pistols, or anything else that doesnt have a good target on these guys because even if taking the unit from 10 to 8 doesn't seem like a big deal on turn 1, that could turn out to be a huge difference after your tactical rapid fire reduces them to 3 models instead of 5. Once they get down to less than half strength this unit will be less of a threat. Same thing goes with hormogaunts, they hit like a ton of bricks in full-size squads because number of attacks and re-rolls. If they get whittled down they won't be as scary. Just remember to keep one primary target until it is destroyed. Only stuff that can't shoot at the primary, either because it is out of range, would give a cover save, is the wrong weapon, etc should take traget secondary units.

 

This matchup is all about target priority and matching your weapons to his targets and prioritizing.

 

weapon matchups:

bolters, storm bolters, heavy bolters = hormogaunts, genestealers, termagaunts

plasma = Trygon, Tervigon

missiles = Warriors, Trygon, Tervigon

chainswords = Termagaunts

 

Timing:

With the deepstriking Tyrgon and no way to speed up reserves, you have a 50% chance to not even face this guy on turn 2, possibly arriving turn 3 or later. If you go first then the first 2-3 turns of your shooting will be directed at the rest of his army before this guy even shows up. Definately try to bring down the Tervigon and possibly the warriors in this time. Going first isn't necesarilly a bad thing here because it means that you get at least 2 full turns to target the tervigon. I'd like to save the combi-plas and plasmagun volley for this guy, because you know he will not land in terrain so you'll have a clean shot. A tactical squad salvo should have this guy half dead, and if he happens to land anwhere near both of the squads he's probably toast.

 

One more thing... pay attention to the morphs. Do the hormogaunts have toxin and furious charge? If so this means they will wound on 4+ re-rollable on the charge but won't get a re-roll if you assault them. They are also only I4 and A2 when you assault them versus I5 and A3 on the charge. It may be worth it to go after these guys if they are standing around after wiping something out, especially if you get to bolt pistol them first. Does the Tervigon take crushing claws (+d3 attacks), a S5 pie plate, or feel no pain? These things can make a difference in how he performs. If he has claws, good for you since your plan was to shoot him anyway. If he has feel no pain, then melta and plasma become better than krak missiles.

 

-Myst

[Marlow]

Do the hormogaunts have toxin and furious charge? If so this means they will wound on 4+ re-rollable on the charge but won't get a re-roll if you assault them. They are also only I4 and A2 when you assault them versus I5 and A3 on the charge. It may be worth it to go after these guys if they are standing around after wiping something out, especially if you get to bolt pistol them first. Does the Tervigon take crushing claws (+d3 attacks), a S5 pie plate, or feel no pain?

Good advice. One minor correction, Hormagaunts are I 5 base, I 6 with Furious Charge. With Toxic Sacs they can be about as deadly as Genestealers.