Warhammer 40k: Tyranids Versus Chaos Daemons
Now that Melissa has painted nearly all the tyranids from one of our Leviathan boxes, she was finally ready to throw down against our daughter's chaos daemon army. The roster for this battle was:
Chaos Daemons
- 1 fateskimmer
- 2 units of 10 dark blue horrors each
- 6 screamers
Tyranids
- 1 winged tyranid prime
- 1 unit of 20 termagants
- 1 screamer killer
- 1 psychophage
This was the battlefield, setup using a pair of 3 foot by 3 foot tables:
Since both armies are only around 520ish points, there are just three objectives: one in each deployment zone, and a third at the center. The center one is a chimera transport that is disabled, and chock full of guardsmen for either side to consume. I didn't have a suitable tyranid marker, so just used a generic marker that I picked up from an older set.
Here's the chaos daemon deployment...
...and the tyranids.
Our daughter started by removing the fateskimmer and attached screamers from the battlefield, burning a Comamnd Point to corrupt a nearby objective (so that it remained capped even when she moved away), and then rushing both squads of dark blue horrors forward.
Melissa responded by moving her big ass blob of termagants around the other way, moving the screamer killer as close as she could, and having the psyophase shoot before charging the lead squad of dark blue horrors.
She got a bunch of hits in, splitting a few horrors into blue horrors, and when it was the dark blue horrors' turn to fight they just pathetically and ineffectually caressed the psychophage's corpulent abdomen.
Next round, the dark blue horrors fled (not like they could do anything, anyway), giving the fateskimmer and screamers room to appear and charge into the fray. They mostly whittled the psyhophage down, and were able to rip it to shreds when it was Melissa's Fight Phase.
It didn't matter much, as by this point the fifth round was over, with the final Victory Point tally being 5 to 2 in the chaos daemon's favor.
In retrospect, Melissa realized she should have had her winged prime fly around and capture the objective in our daughter's deployment zone. She also didn't think to swarm the center objective to at least contest it, instead focusing on combat because she "wanted to see what her tyranids could do".
Whelp, the screamer killer tore most of the screamer unit to shreds, and the psycophage was nigh unstoppable. Prime did pretty well, though at 2 damage was a waste on 1 Wound horrors. Curious how well it would perform against space marines.
The dark blue horrors fared horribly, though to be fair they were mostly pitted against the tyranid equivalent of tanks, with a Toughenss of something like 9 and 10 compared to their Strength 4 fire balls: against the termagants they would have had at least a snowball's chance in the warp of inflicting damage.
Screamers were great with Lethal Hits. Really they're the only viable melee option for Tzeentch, but without the fateskimmer buffing them they obviously wouldn't have performed nearly as well. Downside is that the fateskimmer base is massive, making it difficult to place and move him about.
Melissa is enjoying tyranids far more than her eldar, and while still likes them wishes she would have gone with tyranids first. Luckily we have two Combat Patrol boxes worth of tyranids, so she can vary up her termagant load out, as well as add a few hive tyrants and half a dozen warriors to her roster.
There's also apparently a bunch of tyranid stuff going up for preorder this weekend, so she's going to be spoiled for choices. For our daughter, we have that big-ass Thousand Sons box, so she can add some rubric marines and sorcerers to the mix, and even Magnus the Red when we play a bigger game.
Melissa wants to do a huge free for all game with at least three armies, so I need to figure out what to play.
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