Swarms of Swarmy-ness!

Well, last night Gordon and played a new concept of 'Nids. I played the ultimate Nid swarms:

Five Warriors as HQ
10 Genestealers
2 Zoes (as synapse)
4 Ripper Swarms
64 Gaunts
64 homogaunts

I fought Gordon's Tau. It was a Recon mission, not the best for me, but oh well.

It didn't go well for me. I lost first turn which is what all Nid players want! I didn't quite get into H2H until the second round, but with units of 32 models each it didn't matter if I got shot up. I was anchored by the synapse creatures and wasn't going anywhere.

I took Zoes as they have the best saves, a good blast trick, and one of the only invulnerable saves in the Nid list. If I took Tyrants, I find that people go out of their way to shoot them first. Sometimes they leave the Zoes alone till they learn about their abilities.

If you up the strength of the gaunts, then they can swarm around to the back of any tank or skimmer and shoot the hell out it! And if that fails, they can then crawl up the tailpipe and try to blow it up. All they need is some lucky rolls, and with 32 shots one would think that at least a couple would come up 6!

What killed the most troops was the pie plates that only the Tau can give. Between the Zoes and gaunts I did manage to take out most of his skimmer's weapons. By turn six he only had one pie plate left. Heh!

In the end, I lost. We played Alpha and he had his Piranhas in my back field, but most of his troops were locked in H2H with my gaunts, with my homogaunts dying off first but locking the Kroot in place. The genestealers of course got shot up quickly and never made it into H2H, well except with drones and who counts them? But they absorb firepower that would have gone to my warriors. All that I had at the end of turn six was one warrior with four gaunts, one zoe with about six gaunts taking on the Tau's HQ. So I had nothing in his deployment zone.

This experiment I think went well even though I knew I lost after the second turn. But we played till the end and since he only had two scoring units in my deployment zone that might have been destroyed with better rolling, I thought I had done pretty good.