Tyranid Invasion Dataslate

[WestRider]

After the underwhelming Vanguard Dataslate, it looks like GW finally got a hit with the second round.

 

1. Incubator Node
1 Tervigon
3 Termagant broods
Special rule: Tervigons must reroll 1’s when spawning

2. Synaptic Swarm
1 Tyranid Prime
3 Warrior Broods
Special rule All units in formation have 18’ synape range

3. Sky blight Swarm

1 Hive Tyrant (must take wings)
1 Crone
2 Harpies
3 Gargoyle broods
Special rule All Gargoyles have “Objective secured” which means they can control objectives even if it is being held by an scoring enemy unit. Also they get “Sky Swarm” If a Gargoyle unit is wiped out it returns to play in reserves on the roll of a +4


4. Living artillery node
1 Exocrine
3 biovores
1 Warrior brood (must take 1 basic biocannon)
Special Rule: Organic Bombardment with these units range weapons are pinning and any range weapon (from the formation) fired from with in 12 inches of the warriors can reroll scatter dice for barrage or blast weapons

5. Endless swarm
3 Hgaunt broods
2 Tgant broods (possibly 3. The eBook and iBook versions disagree.)
1 Warrior brood
Special rule: Endless Swarm If a HGaunt or Tgant unit is wiped out it returns to play in reserves on the roll of a +4

 

All of these look at least usable to me if your list was inclined in that direction, and the Skyblight Swarm and Living Artillery Node look excellent. Scoring Gargoyles outside of the FOC that can respawn? Extra accuracy for my Blasts while opening up Heavy Support slots? Yes, please.

[PumpkinHead]

As fun as it would be to field 90 gargs and 6 FMCs, the game would take to long. I see that as more of a garage hammer and not tournament. I am looking at the living artillery. That looks pretty sweet!

[WestRider]

None of them require you to max out the Broods. If I were running SkyBlight, I'd probably be looking at bringing ~45 Gargoyles or so, with the 6-9 FMCs doing most of the heavy lifting.

 

The Artillery Node is definitely the first one I'm going to be trying, tho. I've got everything for it, and Heavy Support is really crowded for Nids these days, so it's a nice direction to expand outside the FOC. And I usually run a minimal Warrior Brood with Barbed Strangler anyhow, so that isn't the "tax" that it might be on some players.

[PumpkinHead]

Still, moving 45 gargoyles around is no small feat for a timed game.

 

For my pocket book I will be tied down to the living artillery for a while until I can get more gargoyles.

[WestRider]

Eh, now that I've got mine magnetized on their flying stands, it's not really that much harder than moving 45 of anything else. Even the last time I took Chaos Marines to OFCC, I was rocking more Models than that.

[AbusePuppy]

Yeah, gargoyles are a pain, but I ran 40-60 of them alongside 60+ 'Gants quite a number of times and didn't time out on games particularly often. It's definitely doable.

 

Skyblight is probably the strongest of those, because it lets you bring more of two of the best things in the codex (FMCs and Gargoyles) as well as shoring up your scoring potential. Artillery one is pretty decent and does help with some issues, although the Warrior tax is annoying it's probably something you'd end up paying anyways in order to hold backfield Synapse. In both cases the real advantage is that you're getting extra "free" slots more so than any abilities that are part of the dataslate.