Bug hunt

So last night I played my third game with my DE, still playtesting units to a certain extent.

My list:
Archon with court (2 Med, 3 Sslyth) in raider
Succy with Grots in raider
Mandrakes
2 Warrior Gunboats in raiders
2 Warrior blaster squads in venoms
Razorwing
9 Reavers with blasters and caltrops
Scourges with heat lances
2 Talos
2 Ravagers

roughly speaking I was facing:
2 Flyrants with twin devourers
Trigon Prime
2 Tervigons
2 Carnifexes
Exocrine
2 Zoanthropes
2 Warrior Broods
Raveners
2 units of hormagaunts
2 Biovores
A ton of termagants

We rolled up Purge the alien (3 games with DE, 3 purge the alien missions!)
I got +1T for my drugs, and fear for my warlord trait.

Turn 1 the flyrants took off, cast paroxysm on my talos to make them BS1. I took three casualties on the bikes despite extra toughness and jink. In return the talos managed to force a wound on the flyrant, causing it to crash, lance raiders targeting the exocrine.

Turn 2 all his reserves arrive, including the trigon in my deployment. Talos take a huge amount of fire, but only suffer 1 unsaved wound. Everything still moving forward. tervigons have now spawned 36 termangants between them, though one does double out thankfully. Ravager takes Trigon down to 3 wounds, Talos charge that and the grounded Flyrant, IDing the Trigon and taking three wounds off the flyrant.

Turn 3 the Talos got swamped - 3 Raveners and a brood of poisoned gaunts managed to cause just enough wounds to take them down before they could wipe the flyrant. Turn 3 shooting was excellent for me, took down one flyrant, the other down to 1 wound, killed both zoanthropes, exocrine and carnifex, and totalled a couple of termangant units. court and grots both got into combat this turn, though succy only hit once with five attacks.

Turn 4 Jinking raiders were the bane of the Tyranids this time round, despite pouring a lot of fire at them, none were destroyed (2 immobilised and another down to 1 HP). Court finished off their unit. Tervigon taken down by combined fire and causes damage to nearby gant unit. succy fails all four attacks this turn. concentrated to thinning out gant units.

Turn 5. Endgame: 2nd Flyrant goes down to a lucky raider shot, grot unit kills warriors and therefore breaks and runs down the raveners and hormagaunts. lack of synapse means other hormagaunt unit breaks. Failed to kill the second carnifex, but DE win on VP's.


Conclusions: If reavers are on the board on turn 1, my opponents will target them - this has happened twice now and both times it's meant the unit is combat ineffective.

The Talos once again were an absolute rock, they soaked up so much fire in the first two turns that my opponent had to target them with most of his combat specialists. They really need to avoid poison weapons though, that's what's killed them both times i've used them.

Warrior gunboats were stars, the splinter racks and night shields meaning i could jink away to my hearts content without worrying about reduction of firepower, which shredded his base units, i deep struck 4 raiders into his table half and he couldn't deal with them.

Helm of spite really unnerves psykers! He perilled one turn thanks to rolling double 6, and this actually meant that next turn he used psychic power elsewhere instead.

Need to be careful about using deep strike reserve as opposed to normal reserve. at 2500 pts per side, particularly with extra spawned termagant units, the board was crammed full of models. I was really luck not to end up over any units, which would have no doubt sparked off the skimmer mishap discussion and I didn't want to have that. It really helped though that my opponent was intent on getting across the board to me - I could then safely deep strike into his deployment zone to get at the heavier stuff and his warlord.

Splinter cannons are pretty decent against flying monstrous creatures. Yes, my opponent was unlucky in failing both of his grounding tests, but that number of shots (particularly with twin linked from the Talos) meant i wasn't too worried about shooting at them, despite only hitting on 6's.

Tyranids are a good matchup for us, though one significant issue can be mowing down hordes - target priority against them is crucial, as is focusing firepower to take out whole units - a tyranid player will quite happily get half a dozen termagants into combat if it means tying up a shooty unit helping their big beasts into combat.

Wow, nice report. thanks!

I think the Bikes going away in some sense is a good thing. Keep in mind that SOMETHING was going to get shot turn one. SOMETHING. So if you know that and you know the enemy tendency, you might just want to KEEP letting them do that and just plan accordingly. In a good list, no one component is so important you cant live without it.

Talos Strike me as an INCREDIBLY good idea. I just so happen to own a fair number so I fully intend to ram them into peoples aces. Glad to hear they are working it and working it hard for you. I love the Formation in the coven book. Flawlessly DS them in turn two, and your entire army will go unscathed for a round while the enemy tries to pound on the Talos. Expensive but they wont kill them all, and th Talos can end any tank they want on the drop using Haywire with five of them in there!

Thanks for the write-up. I especially enjoyed this one as Tyranids and DE are my top two armies. The conclusions at the end are always a nice touch as well.

Thanks for the comments guys, I always like to try and learn stuff from my games, even if everything apparently goes my way - sure it's more difficult to learn from wins but there are still things to be learned even so.

@Unorthodoxy - you're right of course, something is going to be shot at in turn 1, I guess really the problem has been the fragility of the reavers if they don't get cover saves, or sheer volume of shots if they do. I've switched them out of my basic list now so my board presence on turn 1 is two ravagers and two Talos, it worked really well for me last night so I'll keep that setup for a few games.