About this deal
With three warriors assembled, I need to assemble two or three more to be ready to play Kill Teams with them. While I was little concerned at first when building them, I think the three warriors look nice together, unified in their strangeness! Hopefully you all enjoyed the pictures of these monstrosities as much as I did building them! When a hive fleet encounters a prey world, it does not invade for territorial gain or out of a sense of pride or vengeance. Indeed, it is doubtful the Tyranid Hive Mind even comprehends such concepts. Tyranid Kill Teams have access to a single unique ability in the form of Synapse. In effect, operatives that activate within six inches of an operative with the SYNAPSE keyword – meaning Tyranid Warriors – are immune to the effects of being injured. This is a great ability, and effectively means your Tyranid Warriors always ignore injury penalties. Not owning a huge number of tyranids, I thought it would be fun to start building a small tyranid force for use in Kill Teams, focusing mainly on tyranid warriors. The tyranid warriors have always been an iconic element of Warhammer 40,000, represented in several classic illustrations (I particularly remember those from the 2nd edition of Warhammer 40K; quite a few good ones are in the Codex Imperialis). Nothing in the tyranid range has achieved the wholly alien and bizarre look captured by the original plastic tyranid warriors . Their bipedal ant-like frames tower over their modern counterparts and their faces have a subtle, yet horrible, resemblance to a rat. These creatures live in a highly symbiotic fashion, fusing into each other's flesh so that it is often impossible to say where one Tyranid creature ends, and another begins. In this way, Tyranid warrior-beasts wield living weapons that are literally extensions of their own bodies, each one a killing machine, perfectly adapted to slaughter its victims.
These are used by the Hive Mind to enhance the Tyranids' effectiveness in consuming new worlds to gain more of the necessary organic raw materials for further reproduction and directed evolution. All Tyranids are reproduced by a single, highly intelligent female bioform known as a Norn-Queen. Regarding ignoring the movement debuff, Trajann and the Grey Knights terminator brother captain both let you ignore all modifiers to your stats. I've faced both of those, although I faced Grey Knights as Admech. In my limited games it seems the stuff I want to slow down is immune to the slow down debuff. That's entirely ignoring how many vehicles and monsters you end up facing, all that it does not work against. On the battlefield, Tyranid tactics are based around the notion of superior numbers, as they generally try to outnumber the enemy fifty to one. Tyranids overrun opposition in close combat, closing faster than most armies. The synapse creatures that channel the commands of the Hive Mind are mostly, if not all, potent individual psykers. How any of this is done without drawing the attention of countless daemons of Chaos or the other psychic predatory entities of the Warp into the midst of the Tyranid swarm is unknown and possibly unknowable to the humans of the Imperium.The Tyranids are unlike any other intelligent species encountered by Humanity. They are the ultimate predators; to them, all living things, from the lowliest insect to the most advanced starfaring civilisation, are mere prey. Only now are the inhabitants of the galaxy realising the scale of the threat; unless the Tyranids can be stopped, it will mean nothing less than the extinction of all life. Barbgaunts - I just haven't been able to get these guys to work. They need direct line of sight to shoot and are very squishy, so even if they pose a threat to an enemy they are likely to be killed by artillery. Their debuff only effects infantry, but the best units like terminators or custodes can just ignore the debuff. They are cheap, but I struggle to make these guys have a meaningful impact. Some weapons have ‘Blast’ listed in their profile’s abilities. These are referred to as Blast weapons. In addition to the normal rules, the following rules apply to Blast weapons: Members of the swarm and subsequently, the Hive Mind, were awakened, but this swarm was eventually defeated. However, the Inquisition was unsettled by the fact that the Tyranids had developed a presence in the galaxy possibly before even the start of the Age of the Imperium.
Each wave of the invasion unleashes a fresh menagerie of biological nightmares, perfectly designed to sow despoilment and death. In mere solar days, a once-thriving planet is scoured of every drop of organic matter. It is unknown if the Shadow in the Warp is created deliberately by the hive fleets, or if it is simply a by-product of the Hive Mind's innate synaptic control. In any case, the Shadow in the Warp creates fear and panic wherever it falls, instilling a pervasive dread into the minds of a prey world's defenders, plunging entire planets into misery and despair. Tyranids, unlike many of the other teams, have no single defining set of traits or statistics across their range of operatives other than being AP 2. OperativesThe Harpy is still the other flyer, and at range it is effective against elite threats. It can perform bombing runs or deploy D3 Spore Mines at the end of a Normal Move.
Hive Tyrant: Probably the best of the bunch, but still pricey at 220 for what it brings to the table. The shooting it provides barely makes an impact. In combat it hits only OK. It is fairly tough, especially in a unit of Tyrant Guard. The free CP for a strat on ANY unity in 12" is nice. The 6" aura of turning weapons to assault I have very hard to get value of. 6" isn't that big of an aura, and Tyrant Guard without guns take up a lot of that space. I found that to use the Assault Aura I often had to position my Tyrant and bodyguard in a spot that was bad for them, just to buff some shooting units. I think this is decent and well rounded, but overpriced. Unlike most Tyranid bio-ships, the Narvhal is almost completely defenceless, and possesses almost no bio-weaponry and only a very thin protective carapace. A cluster of monofilament spines on the Narvhal's bow allow it to take in a wide variety of sensory input, including a broad spectrum of gravimetric and electromagnetic signals.Tyranids have access to the Invasion Fleet Detachment, which provides access to the Hyper-Adaptations ability and several Enhancements. We expect that there will be other Detachments in the future which will include restrictions on what can be included, but in the case of an Invasion Fleet you can bring whatever you want. Hyper-Adaptations Much like Tau Hunter Cadres, Hive Fleets have enough options that they can either be an elite team or a horde team, and UNLIKE TAU, many of these options are actually good. The first thing to note is that despite what you might expect Tyranids, even at their most numerous, still fall short of the numbers that teams like Pathfinders or Veteran Guardsmen can put on the table. This is due to the Swarm Fire Team being limited to a single choice per Kill Team, leaving you with more limited options: The hybrids continue to breed and multiply among the population of the host species, eventually forming a Genestealer Cult. As the cult grows in numbers, it begins to spread its influence throughout the planet's political and social structure, placing its members in positions of power within the government and the military. Rather, they invade to harvest valuable biomass and feed their insatiable hunger. The Tyranids require an endless supply of food, not only to nourish the hive fleets, but to grow new organisms. Therefore, when a hive fleet invades a planet rich in life, every action of every Tyranid creature is honed to a single goal -- the total and rapid absorption of that world's organic population, ecosystems and bioresources. Venomthropes: I think these guys got a pretty big downgrade. They provide cover in an edition where everyone gets cover all the time already. The -1 to hit is for infantry only and I didn't find it made much impact when everyone is already rerolling everything. The offense output is non existent. Might be OK in a horde army, which is not competitive.
Every thought and action, every spark of life in the Tyranid species, is bound and interlinked into a single unfathomable consciousness, a great entity that stretches across hundreds of light years of space. This gestalt sentience is known as the " Hive Mind." the Tyranids slumbered in a state of frozen hibernation, but now they have arrived, they have awoken and they are hungry. All these creatures are born to service the ship, and the ship in turn exists only to service the needs of the Hive Fleet. Whereas other armies like those of the Imperium and the T'au fight for conquest or self-defence, and the forces of Chaos and the Ork tribes battle merely for the chance to wreak violence and havoc, the Tyranid hive fleets are driven by the will of the Hive Mind, which itself is motivated by the most ineradicable instinct inherent to all lifeforms -- reproduction, and through reproduction and the acquisition of new genetic traits, evolution to a better adapted form. Thus can a hive fleet adapt to generate a force capable of overwhelming any opposition, unleashing a vast throng of ferocious alien monsters that can fly, run, burrow and stalk through the defences of any foe. There is a cancer eating at the Imperium. With each decade it advances deeper, leaving drained, dead worlds in its wake. This horror, this abomination, has thought and purpose which functions on an unimaginable, galactic scale and all we can do is try to stop the swarms of bio-engineered monsters it unleashes upon us by instinct. We have given the horror a name to salve our fears; we call it the Tyranid race, but if it is aware of us at all it must know us only as Prey."
Sample List
According to Imperial research conducted by the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Tyranicus gladius species itself is highly adaptable to any battle role, with over 212 known variants of Tyranid Warriors having been observed -- combining flying, walking, leaping biomorphs, with biomechanical symbiotes that serve as ranged weapons like the Deathspitter or assault symbiotes like scything talons or rending claws or both. The massive Warp presence of the Tyranid Hive Mind, however, manifests itself in that realm through the Shadow in the Warp phenomenon. The current collection of Tyranid hive fleets have migrated to the Milky Way Galaxy, presumably after overpopulating or overfeeding in other nearby galaxies of the Local Group. This plastic kit contains 89 components with which to make 3 Tyranid Warriors, or 2 Tyranid Warriors and a Tyranid Prime.