(Part 2 of AbusePuppy’s Tyranid review)
Oh god, here it comes. First of all, the Elites slot is where pretty much all your anti-tank firepower is located, which means using them on anything else is risky at best. We have a variety of excellent selections here, so many- even most- Tyranid armies will find their Elites filling up well before anything else.
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(This review comes courtesy of forum-user AbusePuppy.)
Just like it says, a unit-by-unit review of the whole dang codex, talking over what I think of everything, including upgrades, unit combinations, and some vague army lists. Why should you care what I think? I dunno, for starters I can type complete sentences with correct spelling. That counts for something around here. Other than that, I don’t claim to have any sort of gospel truth on the new units, but I have spent quite a bit of time taking in various people’s opinions on the new book and comparing them to my own assessments. If you disagree with something, I would be more than happy to argue about things with you; I love arguing.
I didn’t post this in the larger Tyranid tactica thread because it seemed like eating up that much space would be slightly impolite, being that rather a lot of the long, wordy posts there are already mine.
With all that said, let’s begin.
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(Continued from last week’s post by WHITE MAN’S MINIS)
This Genestealer counts as a Space Marine in Apocalypse games.
With the advent of Apocalypse comes a whole new world of Tyranid conversion opportunities. I thought it would be fun to convert some Genestealer-like Tyranids with guns to play as counts-as Space Marines. Eventually the plan is to give them a counts-as Rhino based upon the Malefactor, an old Tyranid from the game Epic and produced for 40k by Armorcast. The Malefactor was a troop transport and it would be a great challenge to try to convert up a living beast that could carry ten Space Marine equivalents.
The Tyranid Trygon appears in an Apocalypse datasheet, but the Forge World model carries a hefty pricetag. Old Alien toys make a great basis for Tyranid conversions – this Trygon was made from an enlarged Carnifex and the tail from a Snake Alien toy by Hasbro.
(Continued from last week’s post by WHITE MAN’S MINIS)
The Devilfex's gun sat around for a while before being used for anything.
My Devilfex plays very differently from my Sniperfex. It’s very mobile, constantly on the move to find and eliminate different targets with its powerful bioweapons. I decided once again to have a back-mounted cannon, this one made from four connected Devourers. This would accurately represent the two sets of twin-linked Devourers. With that idea in place the weapon was roughly converted from spare bits. The more of your model is made from bitz the better, for several reasons. It reduces the amount of sculpting you have to do, ensures the products will stay close to the established Tyranid look, and makes overall assembly and test-fitting much easier. Tyranids have enough organic shapes that with a bit of hacking you can find an appropriate piece for almost any situation. After construction, the weapon then sat in my bitz box for a good many months before I got around to buying a Carnifex to go with it. Sometimes it’s good to vent your inspiration while it’s there; plus, then you’ve got the thing sitting and serving as further incentive to get back to the project before you forget about it.
To embody the idea of mobility I decided to give the Carnifex long legs and a straight tail, with grasping clawed feet to give good running traction. I had seen other Tyranid conversions with tiny vestigial hands or talons used to serve as fillers for empty arm slots, so I decided to make my Carnifex with tiny two-fingered arms. See where this Carnifex revamp is heading?
(This article contributed by EoW forums poster WHITE MAN’S MINIS.)
Tyranids are an enormously fun army to collect and play. I’ve been a fan of them since back when the newest Warriors were pewter, and Tyranids were always my primary draw to the Warhammer 40,000 universe. In my mind, then, there’s only one thing better than a Tyranid model – and that thing is a converted Tyranid model!
This article shows how Tyranid players can go about converting models, using their old models along with their new ones, and using Apocalypse to go all-out with what the Hive Mind has to offer. While at some points the article may seem as much a photo gallery as a text document, the goal is to show how much the Tyranid army has to offer in every aspect of the game. The same principle applies to any army, however; the hobby doesn’t have to stop at your 2,000 point army list. From expansions to Warhammer 40,000, terrain, specialist games… if you really love the army you’re playing, the possibilities are endless. As you read this article try to think of ways that the general ideas for customization could be applied to your own race.
Hopefully you’ll be inspired to whip out the knife and greenstuff or throw down some old classics you thought might look outdated on the battlefield. For the Great Devourer! (more…)
Welcome to another new (semi) regular feature: the Pic of the Week! Today’s pictures are from EoW forums poster POSTIN’ DIRTY’s Tyranids. Using extra bits from a Carnifex kit and some ingenuity, he made an awesome mycetic spore pod, burst open and ready to dispense crazy bugs all over the battlefield:
In my previous installment of Mathhammer 101, I explained a method of getting the most effective army for the least money. In those calculations, points were used as the sole measure of effectiveness. Of course, anyone who’s been around the wargaming block knows that points are an imperfect measure of effectiveness. Dozens of models lie unused at the bottom of a carrying case because they’re “not worth its points.”
The problem is, points are only roughly related to effectiveness, and even “effectiveness” itself is a slippery term. A 100 pt model is not always twice as effective as a 50 pt model (for some definition of “effectiveness”). An upgrade that costs 10 pts does not always make you 10 pts-worth more effective.
To try to at least roughly decide whether a model or upgrade is “worth its points”, you can calculate its kills per point, or kpp.
This is calculated by figuring out how likely it is to kill an enemy model, divided by how many points it costs. Doing this for a variety of units or upgrade permutations can give you a guideline for which units or upgrades are “worth it” and which “aren’t.”
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