Warhammer 40K: Battle For Oghram – Predictions & Picks
Games Workshop is hosting a world wide campaign and the winner’s getting an early release. So who’s our pick to win?
The Battle for Oghram was announced this week. In the global campaign players will get to decide the fate of the planet. Additionally, the winner will get to see their new units rules first — so this does have some stakes. Players will need to get a copy of the Leviathan boxed set to participate with a redeemable code. The idea is that you’ll get your new minis and play from the box, play a game with them, and record the results.
Predictions And Picks
So now that we know the contents of the box, the core rules, and also have access to BOTH Indexes for the two armies, it’s time to play a game of Mathhammer. Or more accurately Guess-hammer.
Tyranids
The Tyranids are a close-combat powerhouse…at least they look like that on paper. More specifically, the Screamer-Killer and Psychophage are while the rest of the army generally puts out some medium-to-short range shooting. There’s a lot of strength 5 shots and a whole lot of strength 4. However, there’s a lack of AP that troubles me for this battle for the ‘Nids. However, they do have the raw numbers…or do they?
Download the Tyranid Index Here
Space Marines
The Space Marines are coming in with what feels like a unit list specifically designed to squash the Tyranids. I’m totally biased here, but look at the contents! It’s a smaller force for sure but they have great armor saves and straight up HARD counters to the Tyranids. I know a lot of folks were thinking of sticking the Terminator Captain in with the Terminators but I’d rather put the Librarian in there for the extra Psychic defense. I don’t know what the Tyranids are supposed to do against that unit. The Ballistus Dreadnought has the firepower to seriously cripple the Screamer-Killer…at 48″ range. And for anything that gets close, the Inferus Squad just unloads.
Additional Factors
While we don’t have the exact points values, we do have a pretty big clue that these two forces aren’t equal. That’s courtesy of the Warhammer+ team:
WarCom: Were both armies formed using the Warhammer 40,000: Leviathan boxed set?
Nick: That’s right – we wanted to put the new models through their paces. The Space Marines side is literally just the contents of the boxed set by itself, and to make it match in points we added another unit of Termagants and another unit of Barbgaunts to the Tyranid side. It worked out about right, and let me tell you, it made for a really close fight!
So yeah – they had to add another unit of Termagants AND another unit of Barbgaunts to help balance things out. That should tell you that the Tyranids are down a couple hundred points right off the bat.
Missions Matter
If your playing with the boxed contents then you might want to bust out the mission cards. Those might be a big balancing factor for your games. That said, depending on what you draw can have a pretty big impact on the ONE game you’re going to report.
Also if you’re playing the mission out of the Core Rulebook, you should also know the mission is long ways. And that can also have a huge impact on the game. So terrain and deployments are going to have another huge impact on this game.
Final Answer?
Personally, I think that the Space Marines are in a much stronger position right out of the gate. If two new players didn’t know any better and were just playing a game based on the box contents the Space Marines will probably win. Who’s going to tell them that the Tyranids are down XXX points? How will they know if they don’t know to check? Or how about the Combat Patrol route?
That’s probably a much more balanced option — but again, how will brand new players know to look for that? Without some additional leg work I’m predicting that the Space Marines are going to protect the Battle for Oghram. It pains me to say that but it looks like a rough, uphill battle for Tyranids the way the box is stacked so far. But hey — that’s just one more reason to root for the underdog. And if the Tyranids do manage to win it’s going to be a nice surprise!
Who do you think will score the win in Oghram?
