Tyranids vs Blood Angels

Our Nachmund Gauntlet campaign is over, so it’s back to non-narrative games for a while!

For this friendly competitive game I took my Tyranids out for a walk, testing out the Vanguard Onslaught detachment, vs Blood Angels testing out the new Rage-Cursed Onslaught detachment. Which onslaught is the onslaughtiest? Will I be onslaughtered? Let’s find out!

The Mission

Card draw: Hidden Supplies, Hammer & Anvil, Bloodlust

The Battle

Turn 1: I send my Hormagaunts, Lictor and Von Ryans forward in an alpha strike, but do minimal damage besides the Lictor assassinating a Sanguinary Priest. My big monsters focus fire on the Land Raider, but leave it on four wounds, allowing it to move forwards and burn up a hormagaunt swarm.

A redemptor dreadnought charges my Norn for some mecha-kaiju punching action, but the bladeguard fail their charge.

Turn 2: The Norn finally finishes off the Land Raider. My Genestealers charge the Bladeguard, but the Lieutenant activates their Fights First relic I forgot about and the Captain kills the Broodlord.

My other Genestealers do better against the Death Company. My Screamer-Killer charges a Brutalis for more Mecha-Kaiju action but doesn’t do much damage.

The Bladeguard charge in. The Norn explodes. The Redemptor explodes. Everybody dies.

The surviving Genestealers finish off the Death Company and take out half the Assault Intercessors, but get sandwiched between them and the dreadnought and wiped out.

I forgot to take photos of Turn 3, likely because I didn’t have much left on the table to take photos of. The Blood Angels still had most of their army active, held all the primary and overtook my early points lead, so at the end of the turn I conceded.

Post-mortem

I think this is probably my worst defeat so far (possibly tied with this game, also vs Blood Angels) – if we’d continued playing I almost certainly would have been tabled.

I made a few mistakes:

A recurring theme was that I seduced myself with special abilities and forgot fundamentals. The main example is that I got carried away with the mission Twist – 3D6 charges – and my detachment’s advance and charge rule, which let me catapult stuff across the board at Ludicrous Speed. I didn’t want the Blood Angels to charge me and get their horrible bonuses, so I charged them first. But I did it with a bunch of weak squishy stuff that got spread out without support and basically just fed the Blood Angels a nice entree without achieving much. Only the Lictor made his points back. This is because…
Having played the last 10 games with unkillable Necrons, I forgot just how squishy Tyranids are. They also don’t have the damage potential of Orks. They’re a good scoring army, but they need to survive to do that and I should’ve been a lot more cagey with them.
Similarly, I threw away my big Genestealer blob against the Bladeguard, forgetting that their character had a Fights First enhancement.
My priority target was the Land Raider Redeemer, the flamers of which could easily eliminate any of my infantry units in one shooting round (and again in overwatch). So, I set up a shooting castle around my Hive Tyrant with the express aim of taking it out turn 1. This was an OK plan, but I stuffed up the execution, not moving the Zoanthropes far enough forwards to be in range and forgetting that the Hive Tyrant’s aura gives Lethal Hits as well as Assault. So, the Land Raider survived til round two, cooking two of my units, dropping the Bladeguard at my doorstep and worst of all taking a second round of shooting that should’ve been going into the Redemptor and Bladeguard.
My list was very suboptimal – I wanted to try out Vanguard Onslaught, but it’s a detachment than mainly benefits ‘Vanguard Invader’ units, and only four units in my army had that keyword so I didn’t really spec into it. The passive bonus that everyone gets – fall back and charge – didn’t have much utility because nothing could survive a Blood Angels melee round long enough to use it. I think I’d need to buy and paint a lot of new models to make the most of this detachment. So, probably sticking to Invasion Fleet for the time being.

Victory Pointless