Tuesday I played a game vs. Aaron and his "Living World" army. He started making an army out of sprue bits and foliage, making an army of tree-folk, using the Tyranid rules. At this stage he also subs in some other models while he makes more woodlings.
I broke out the Scythiak to go clear-cut him and we played 1000pts, Annihilation/Spearhead. Aaron's bud Owen graciously set up the terrain for us and we went to it!
Aaron had:
Hive Tyrant with some stuff and two guards
3 warriors
Tervigon
Deathleaper
Genestealer squad
Hormagaunt squad
I had:
Primaris Psyker
5 Ogryn
2xPlatoons, 2 squads each
ML squad, HB squad, Mortar Squad
Rough Rider squad
Spawn Rider with ML (Sentinel)
Aaron had the Genestealers outflanking, and I kept the RRs and one platoon in Reserve.
There are a couple of large pieces, but being along the edges they don't break up sight lines too much. The heavy weapons had a field day. I stretched the inf squads along the side to push outflanking stealers further up, with the platoon command squad's flamers ready to light them up once they appeared. The psyker was affected by Deathleaper and accordingly down to Ld7, so I kept him on his own instead of with the Ogryn. Despite his lowered Ld, he never missed a psychic test all game, as opposed to the Ld10 Tyrant who managed to fail one.
Here's the Terv-egg-on, spewing out more gaunts (proxied with elves). I was happy to let the Tervigon keep spewing out gaunt squads since it was a KP game.
Here we can see a couple examples of how the finished tree folk will look. The Hormagaunts bounce off of the Ogryn logging crew.
The Ogryn consolidate away from the Tyrant, while the heavy weapons pepper the enemy and infantry continues to move up the left side.
My Reserves arrive, and I put them on the right opposite the Tervigon. I had hoped that they would arrive after the genestealers, but start blocking off the right side. The riders can't quite get a charge off on the Tervi so instead stay back.
More gaunts are spawned, and attack a cultist squad, running it off the table.
But with flamer fire and rough rider assault they are quickly dispatched. I had hoped to save the rider's special charge for one of the big bugs, but I didn't want the boosted FNP gaunts to roll up the cultists or be able to sneak a charge off on the riders themselves.
Tyrant and gaunts move up towards the Ogryn.
The Ogryn blast and charge the gaunts, wiping them out.
The Tyrant crashes into the Ogryn, wiping out most of them with it's instant-death branches. Killgore remains and makes his morale test but is unable to fell the Treant and dies the following round.
Meanwhile, Deathleaper and the genestealers have appeared over on the left, killing some guardsmen but getting shot up.
Bereft of their lances, the riders are still a threat. They charge and destroy another freshly-spawned gaunt squad and consolidate back into the ruins.
The Tervigon and the Tyrant double charge into the riders, but the lack of grenades allows the riders to attack first, and Gyrok hews down the Tyrant with his trusty chainsword. Tiiiimmmberrr!
The battle ended with a pretty solid Scythiak win. A fairly open board and no Nid shooting let me pepper units pretty mercilessly with the missiles and heavy bolters, while not being afraid to clump up my teams and casually march up the edges. A barbed strangler or a biovore would have given me some serious trouble. Plus it was Aaron's first game with the Nids while I'm pretty familiar with what the Scythiak can and can't do. If I had been running the Nids, I think I might have had deployed in a mass instead of split like he did - hormagaunts giving cover to the warriors who give it to the Tervigon which gives it to the tyrant, and head in while spawning more gaunts. The hormagaunts and warriors might get shot away, but then spawned gaunts, and the two MCs would be up tearing up weapon teams, and once the missiles are down the MCs look a lot scarier. The Scythiak might still have won depending on charges, but I think it would be a lot closer.
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