40K: What 9th Edition Means for Tyranids
Let’s talk about how everyone’s favorite faction of unstoppable organisms, Tyranids may fare in 9th Edition with what we know so far.
Last week, the Games Workshop Studio Team did a live Q&A session on the new edition of Warhammer coming soon, and Tyranids were name-dropped a few times, but there were finally some relatively concrete rules discussed that matter to the Hive Mind. Let’s check them out:
Monsters:
It seems pretty confirmed that yes, Tanks can shoot into combat when they are engaged, but they also said so can Monsters. They also made a reference that Monsters can also fight better than Tanks, and I am all for this. While being able to tag and lock down Tanks with Hormagaunts was an essential strategy for Tyranids, and losing it hurt bad, at least in the new edition, our monsters may be far more viable. I am thinking Carnifexes with guns and Acid Maws for some quality shooting with some decent melee prowess, making them a threat in multiple phases of the game. Tyrannofexes also get a big boost as while they don’t necessarily fight that well, being able to double Acid Spray anything that gets into them is pretty sweet.
A big line was about Carnifexes not being able to attack things hiding on the second story of ruins, and the team has said “this is fixed”. If the terrain rules are reworked so that Monstrous Creatures can finally climb stairs (or jump), this is a big boost for us Nidzilla players. I love playing with the Big Bugs, but in a competitive environment, without the FLY keyword, they were really easy to counter-play. I’ll go more into Terrain in a moment, but this definitely made me happy when I heard it as my Carnifex Carnival list is fun as hell to play, but it was equally frustrating when my opponent would just sit on a ruin all game.
Terrain
Terrain is an essential part of the tabletop experience, and hearing the team say that the rules have been reworked is absolutely great news. Terrain is also essential to many Tyranid builds doing well. It seems that the ITC ruling of ruins blocking LoS on the bottom floor has been adapted into the newest edition as now terrain pieces have specific keywords with specific properties, and the Obscuring one means that you can’t draw LoS through it. This is again big as the more fire lines are restricted, the more viable our assault elements are, whether it be infantry or big beefy monsters. It also means that our tried and true MVPs, the Hive Guard, are still going to get work done.
I am so curious to see what other terrain keywords there are and what they do. Dynamic and interesting terrain rules really make the game better overall, but seeing as how Tyranids are an army designed to play in every phase of the game, being able to ensure that our melee threats get to do what they do gives me hope. It would also be quite fluffy and narrative driven if Tyranids had a way to interact with terrain in different ways.
Morale
Something that was mentioned in the stream was that morale is being reworked to be more important. This can be both good and bad depending on the precise implementation. One of the defining features of playing Tyranids is that so long as you are in Synapse, you ignore Morale, and I’d like to see that stick. It is a feature that our codex is built around, so hopefully, our immunity while the leader bugs are alive stays there. It certainly adds to the tactical tension of the game.
On the good side, Tyranids do have morale debuffs, so it would be nice to actually use them. Especially in Blood of Baal, I commented that there were several leadership penalty abilities but that morale wasn’t exactly an important part of most competitive games, but here we see that in the long run, maybe these abilities are much stronger than I could have known. Horror from Beyond might suddenly be a Hive Trait worth considering as well as Abhorrent Pheromones. If morale is suddenly much more meaningful for most armies, then this can lead to a new and interesting build: the Tyranid Terror-Bomb.
Modifiers
A comment that plenty of people have already latched on to is that modifiers are now capped at +1 or -1. It is unclear to me what specific modifiers that they were referring to as the context of the conversation was about Flyers and specifically Eldar flyer spam. Perhaps it is only on modifiers to hit. Perhaps it is on any dice roll. I am not quite sure what to make of this yet as without actually seeing the wording, it is not worth getting too worked up either way.
Assuming that this is referring to hit rolls, this is a net positive for Tyranids. We lose the super annoying Tervigon of Doom that could have a -2 to hit in shooting, but our own shooting becomes much more effective as we have very few rerolls and to-hit bonuses, so the less penalties that are out there, the better off we are. I would very much welcome this knowing that my Devil-Gants are hitting on 5s at the worst.
Command Points
This one is a give and take. CPs are no longer tied to detachments but game size. This ensure that you don’t see the game flooded with CP batteries. The problem of course is that Tyranids are really good at generating CPs. We have several cheap HQ choices and dirt cheap (but still useful) Troop choices, and unless I was doing a true skew list, I rarely went into a game with less than 10 CP and more often than not had 14. As I’ve said before, Tyranids are CP hungry as we have a lot of stratagems that get us so much more efficiency out of our army, so we are going to use a lot of CP, and we have precious few ways to regenerate it. Starting CP in a standard game lower than what we could easily do, means I’ve actually lost CP for no gain. This is especially true for my horde lists where rocking 3 Battalions was easy.
That said, this is thinking in an 8th edition mindset, and in 9th, it seems that it doesn’t matter if I brought 3 battalions or just a dozen Carnifexes, I am still getting the same CP, and again, as someone who played the hell out of Nidzilla in 4th, I love my big bugs, and having CPs to fuel them? That’s good. This is the give and take of the new system. Our standard, often infantry based builds may not get the advantage of the CP generation, but other lists, particularly Monster based lists, get a big boost with more CPs. Even more balanced lists that try to take a bit of this and a bit of that could more or less break even.
Well, those are the highlights for me, but I am sure there are others that tickled you, so sound off in the comments. While hordes may not be the way forward, I am quite thankful that it appears my investments into 3 Tyrannofexes might just pay dividends. Thanks as always for reading everyone, and stay healthy, stay safe, and stay hungry.
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