Greetings broodlings!

The Tyranid list has been essentially “frozen” for just over a year and now it’s time to crack it open and see what’s survived.

A lot of games have been played; wins, losses, and a remarkable number that ended on Turn 2 due to lack of time (People really need to speed up their drinking to get more gaming in!). I’ve got records of 37 completed battles using the v9.2.1 list that were either posted as reports or as results emailed/PMed to me.

Here’s a few crunched numbers:

Tyranid Wins: 17

Tyranid Loses: 19

Tyranid Ties: 1 (VPs within less than 100 point difference)

Most Common Foe: Space Marines, which, surprising to me, won more games than they lost against the Bugs!

End of Game Turn: 3rd (20), 4th (16), 5th (1)

Most Common Tyranid Victory Condition: Blitzkrieg, claimed in just over half the games, regardless of winner.

Least Common Tyranid Victory Condition: Defend the Flag

Tyranid Tie-breakers: Win (1), Loss (2), Tie (1)

Opponents scored “Break Their Spirit” against the Tyranids in just under half the games played, regardless of winner. Tyranids scored it against opponents just over 25% of the time. (My main thought on this is that the Tyranids don’t have anything to “pursue” broken BTS formations that hide in corners or move away from the action; other armies often use aircraft to finish off such targets.)

No known games played vs Dark Eldar, Feral Orks, Necrons, or Siegemasters, but just about every other core army, and a few variants, made a showing.

(more to come)

*waits patiently*

I would be surprised if this is a coincidence; swarm construction leads to a longer list writing and set up time, fluid swarms and spawning are equally both time wasters in game. The sheer number and length of special rules means a lot of looking up specific situations, which also burns time. When combined with a list that has a lot of units on the table it doesn't surprise me at all that nid games are running out of time.

Number of models indeed slow down.

The list writing should be done at home?

Special rules and all, yes that may cause time issues.

However, the statistics are good. An almost 50/50 win/loss ratio is perfect. That would not ask for changes.

After about the 3rd game, the special rules are no longer an issue as the Nid player has used each of them several times by that stage.

If the opponent wants to review the rules however...

They still take time ingame however. Time has to be devoted to spawning, reorganising swarms, removing units out of synapse range etc.

As you mention, often a lot of time is taken up explaining the rules to the opponent. This, for me, is the biggest failing of the list.

The nid list is unique in that the formations are not made until the game starts. Sure, the swarms can be written at home, but how they are combined is decided at the start of the game, no?

I guess my "do your drinking faster" thing didn't reveal that to be a more of a humourous data point than a "serious" one; it was four different submissions of "incomplete" games due to, mainly, "we started late and were drinking"... *laugh* Nothing to do with actual slow-downs due to game play.

I'd note that slow.overrunning games were always a problem with my 'nid games too.


Affects every game equally, in my experience.

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The statistics are virtually meaningless actually, with such a small data set and against wildly different armies, but, even with such a small sample, it looked close. And, while a win/loos close to 50/50 may indicate "balance", it doesn't indicate good or appropriate.

I really wish I had more data.

Lack of experience for the opponenet seems to be the biggest indicator as to whether Bugs will dominate or not; as I've said before, fighting them is not always immediately intuitive after fighting other armies... which, I honestly think is a good thing.

The presence of a Dominatrix doesn't seem to correlate strongly with the opponent getting BTS at all; She's in about half the armies, perhaps a bit more as some submissions didn't come with army lists. It's mainly "number of Synapse" that does it, the more there are, tougher it is for the opponent.

That's certainly possible, but I know of no one who doesn't have their basic formation composition planned before they get to the table; they'll have a plan of use for various formations, such as arty swarm, garrisoned Carnifex swarm, etc.

There certainly might be a little bit of swapping, but not wholesale swarm composition as one deploys.

As time is seemingly an issue is there anything that could/should be done to this list to help?

As you can't get away from large numbers of stands in what is a swarm style army that leaves composition, synapse and spawning as areas where time could be being eaten up.

Composition can be time consuming if you're making a list at game time but I agree with Chroma that I think an advance list with a game plan involving rough swarm composition contributes very little time wasted over a normal fixed list.

Synapse and Spawning, if they do take up time that significantly slows the game down then I can't see anything that can be streamlined that would not put the list development back. I think it is probably best to effectively make some of the minor changes suggested (Ravener CC, Cheaper/Scout Meiotic Spores etc) and lock the list down as a stable Tyranid list.

Then there can be a clean slate regarding changes to Synapse and Spawning in a new list covering modern fleet composition.

I really don't want to setup a situation where there's an "old" set of core rules for one version of a list and a "new" set of core rules for a different version of the list; that's going to cause even more confusion and problems for new players. No other army has variants that change the "core rules" of a given army; not different types of "ATSKNF" for different Space Marine armies.

The differences for variant lists tend toward compositional differences and additional rules/tweaks, not wholesale changes.

"Putting list development back" is not a grave concern, there is no "deadline" that the Bugs need to be done by; I'd prefer sooner than later, but I'd even more prefer "right" over "almost good enough".

The issue of explaining the rules to the opponent is linked in with the fact that people always seem to lose against nids at first. The nid rules are too complicated to explain everything in detail to the opponent, so will lead to an unfair game first time out. Does noone else think this is a real problem?

The sheer number of special rules needs to be cut back.