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I ran a tournament this past weekend. It was 750pts with the following limitations... At a friend's suggestion, I brought an interesting army. Although I didn't get to play in all 3 games, it did get a little bit of a test. I was expecting some vehicles in this one, and I wasn't disappointed. One guy brought 3 Predators in his Chaos army. There were a number of other vehicles as well, with several Landspeeders. I didn't get to play as the Ringer army, but one player arrived too late for the tournament, so I offered to play him once I got the second round started. He had an odd Demonhunters list. He had a small platoon of Guard with some heavy weapons and a large squad of Space Marines with a special weapon and a Landspeeder Tornado. Due to stupid Deployment (I haven't used Gaunts of any variety since the codex came out, and I haven't used walking gaunts since, uh, geez, I think I used them in a megabattle 3 or so years ago...) I left one unit of gaunts (the "small" one) out of Synapse. Even so, if I had remembered about Lurking, I would have been fine, but no, I decided to try to run them forward first turn and they Instinctive Behaviored right off the board. Crap. Ah well, I forged ahead anyway, letting my gaunts spread out into teardrop formations pointing back toward the Warriors who were hiding in cover. I managed to stun the landspeeder once, then shake it the next turn, but then it got over to my Warriors and killed two before the VC took it out. (Actually, looking back, I'm not sure that it hadn't been shaken the turn before that, oh well.) The Gaunts continued forward and charged into the command section (that had moved forward, I think the idea was for it to go deal with the Warriors in my backfield, but why would you move up toward Tyranids? Why?) While one of the platoon squads was charged, the first Gaunt brood killed all but the jr. officer, who managed to actually run from the combat toward the board edge. The third brood of gaunts continued to be stuck in with the platoon squad, while the other brood shot and assaulted the other platoon squad. Unfortunately, due to time constraints (I was running the tournament, and I had to settle questions and rule disputes and hand out result sheets) we had to finish there. We tallied up the points, he got 220.5, and I got 200 (Landspeeder, Cmd Section and half a platoon squad, though I think I had another squad down below half as well now, not sure) It was pretty obvious how the game was going to go, however. Next turn the other brood of gaunts would have swamped in and the squad of Marines would have been engulfed in the melee. With 50-60 Gaunts left, I would have ground down his troops over the next couple of turns. Not a bad outing, despite my mistakes, I think the concept definitely has potential. Basically, the reason this army worked so well (despite my mistakes, I might add!) is that it's got so much redundancy. With 99 Gaunts, you really can't shoot them all before they run all over your lines. As long as the Warriors can keep them in Synapse range, they won't go anywhere and they will just grind units into the ground. They don't do a lot of damage, but it's like a swarm of locusts or army ants, all those bites add up, and they don't care how many of them you kill. In addition, the S4 guns they carry, while short ranged, pack a double wallop. Not only do they get to shoot (a lot) but they get to reroll failed Wounds, so they are pretty effective even against Space Marines. Even more important, however, is the fact that they are S4, meaning they can glance AV10 vehicles such as Landspeeders, or even the back of most tanks! Not terribly fast, not terribly strong, not terribly fierce, just terribly, terribly many! I'm confident that this army would have stood up well against any of the armies at the tournament. In fact, I was so pleased by it (both performance, and the sheer fun of running a complete horde, that I might just have to pick up more Gaunts! (Because you just know I don't have enough Tyranids!) If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know |