First game of 11th – Tyranids vs Imperial Knights

Big Robots! Big Kaiju! Smash!

This was the thought process that lead to this game. Probably this is not the ideal way to learn a new edition, but I’ve been wanting to do a matchup like this for ages, so screw it.

Forces

Tyranids – Crusher Stampede + Talons of the Norn Queen – Take and Hold: Hive Tyrant, Neurotyrant + 6 Zoanthropes, 2 x Tyrannofex, Norn Emissary, Norn Assimilator, Maleceptor, Biovore, Trygon, Neurolictor, Lictor

Imperial Knights – Freeblade Company – Purge the Foe: Cerastus Knight Castigator, Castellan, Crusader, Errant, Armiger Helverin, 2 x Armiger Warglaive

The Game

I got first turn and proceeded very gingerly, keeping everything in hiding and just toeing into objectives to avoid Big Knight Guns

The Knights pushed forward and did some damage to the Assimilator and Lictor, but failed to kill either.

One enemy armiger went down to the combined shooting of almost my entire army, then the Assimilator was able to charge and kill a second one, despite the Heroic Intervention of the Errant.

The Assimilator then got the combined firepower of three big Knights put into it and went down, but not without some effort and doing some mortal wounds via Corrosive Viscera on its way out.

Unfortunately not everything else was as resilient and the Knights were now positioned to do more damage – the Lictor, Maleceptor and most of the Zoanthropes were gunned down.

My Trygon popped its head out of a hole and managed to both score me some secondary points and divert the Knight Errant backwards. Sadly it didn’t do much else, the Errant’s mega-melta doing a total of 36 wounds to it and blasting it to atoms.

My Neurolictor was left alone on the central objective and things looked a bit bleak, but it managed to tank a charging Cerastus and escape.

After rolling a bunch of 1s and 2s all game so far, one of the Tyrannofexes finally managed to hit something considerably larger than a barn door and took out the Cerastus. Meanwhile the Norn Emissary toed into the centre objective and charged into the remaining Armiger and I made a literal big brain move charging my Neurotyrant into the Castellan. His little whippy tentacles weren’t going to do much harm but it prevented the big robot moving into my home objective.

The Norn Emissary survived a second round of shooting with barely a scratch, while the Castellan took out its annoyance at being stuck in place, finishing off a Tyrannofex but failing to kill the Neurotyrant.

As a final display of xenos dominance, the Emissary brought the last Armiger crashing down. This still left three big stompy knights on the table verses more significantly depleted bugs, but by this point we were out of time and I was well ahead on points.

Final Result: Tyranid Victory, 74 to 43

Analysis

My game plan was to push forwards with Norns and Lictors to score and draw focus and hopefully delay the knights long enough for the Tyrannofexes and Zoanthropes to spike and pick off the big bots. This eventually worked but it took a lot longer than I ideally would’ve liked. When half my army evaporated in turn 2 it was looking bad for me and if I hadn’t managed to finally kill the Cerastus in turn 3 (taking back the centre objective and scoring both Bring It Down and A Grievous Blow in the process) I think the game would’ve swung the other way.
The Knights had much greater damage potential, I had much greater scoring potential (and also got pretty lucky with the secondaries I drew, I think). I see a lot of Tyranid players bemoan the low damage output of Tyranids but (as discussed previously) I quite like this state of affairs because it leads to fun games. Every game I play as Tyranids is nicely tense and dramatic as my forces get whittled down but I fulfill my objectives anyway. Hopefully getting to squash some bugs is fun for my opponent as well.
That said, my list was built around the idea of boosting my damage output somewhat by getting +1 to wound from various sources – the Crusher Stampede detachment rule, the Neurolictor/tyrant, enhancements on the Tyrant and Norns… etc. However, most of these are dependent on either monsters being injured (which puts control in your opponent’s hands) of battleshock (which is, at best, a coin-flip). So none of this ended up being particularly impactful.
My Maleceptor and Trygon both suffered New Model Syndrome and died without doing any damage, although in the case of the Trygon I think pulling the Errant backwards was worth the sacrifice. These were both due to mis-plays – I deployed the maleceptor very badly stuck in one corner where it got blocked in by the Emissary and had to smash its way through a building to escape, sadly leaving it out of cover in the process. I should’ve deployed it earlier and more centrally. The Trygon I should’ve Rapid Ingressed.

As mentioned up top, this is probably not the best game to use as a test of 11th edition, since it was basically all monsters and titanics and half new rules didn’t really apply. But, on the whole the changes I did get to experience seem like good ones. Particularly:

I really like that you get to hold onto more than 2 secondaries now. It makes it feel like a late-game swing is more possible and there’s more of a decision-making process around ‘do I try to score this now, or do I hold on and hope to score it later, perhaps for more points, but then my opponent will have more opportunity to deny, and… etc. etc.’
I like the new terrain and cover systems so far – boards feel a lot more open, there’s a nice risk-reward system in deciding whether to actually move onto an objective or not and getting cover feels like it matters a bit more. My main worry is that it feels more that certain things will always be optimal approaches – being able to toe-in to terrain objectives feels very powerful and the little hidey-nook I had my Neurolictor in for most of the game feels like it’s going to be a pretty standard place to put stuff like that.
I think I like dispositions. Having slightly assymmetric primary missions is certainly cool. Again my worry is that it might get a bit samey after a while and it also clearly privileges a detachment-first approach to list building which isn’t how I prefer to do it.

Victory Pointless