It hurts to see Tyranids so low but I tend to agree. I do think the "all is lost" is a big setback for them. They have a lot going for them and I have been doing well with them but all is lost deters me from doing the stuff they are designed to do. Also, what about Dark Eldar? Probably low?
Nah. "All is lost" gets a lot of attention, but it's really not that big of a handicap. It can only happen if you board, and a good tyranid player won't typically be boarding with his ships unless he wants to. While the IB chart does cause the ships to board on their own, Tyranid ships don't just wander within 15cm of an enemy. Your opponent is typically actively preventing that from happening, so if your ships are in that position it's likely because you really wanted them to be in that position. (People talk about luring ships off with escorts and such, but it's not realistic. The IB table is, aside from the final result, a powerful tool that allows you to use special orders for free as long as your ships are properly positioned.)
So once you've put them into a position where "All is lost" might come into play, you're as likely to find it advantageous as detrimental - I've seen opponents who were willing to ensure the destruction of a whole cruiser for the chance to damage four escorts. Whether they board or not Tyranids have good close range weapons, but what's interesting is that, as much as possible, they are armed to make boarding a reliable offense. They waive or counter many of the penalties they'd normally face and get to roll twice as many dice. Their weapons (the ones you're interested in, anyway
) are designed to inflict maximum damage at the point of impact, massive claws in particular having a
huge damage potential. The larger Tyranid vessels are absolutely deadly if they get to board, but even small squadrons of escorts can overtake a cruiser with surprising ease. And since you can't brace boarding damage, one bad roll can have irreversible consequences. Anyway, the point is, people get jittery when facing Tyranids in boarding, and they are always willing to consider self-destructing.
In my experience people facing Tyranids self-destruct as soon as they consider there to be even a reasonable chance they could lose the boarding action. After all, why do down almost without a fight when you can take the whole enemy pack with you? But that works to your benefit because the enemy can't brace boarding action damage, but you
can brace lance shots, and your escorts are really cheap and your capital ships are tough. Escorts are likely to die even to small warpdrive implosions, but they're likely to survive in reasonable numbers against the other half of results they'll face. Even if a number of them die they're not that expensive, and if even one of them survives you'll get a chance to disengage and take the bulk of the VPs with you. A braced cruiser with six hits and two shields (obviously a ship armed with claws and meant to board would be bigger and tougher, but the FAQ took care of that.
) is likely to survive anything other than a warpdrive implosion from a battleship or grand cruiser. Then, since it has (obviously) earned back its points (and will have about +30 to it's ld to disengage
) it will promptly do so.
Plus, I often see people who play Tyranids so confident in self-destructing as a defense that they'll pull back with the rest of their fleet if you manage to jump on a ship. Aside from how easy it is to simply shoot it at that point, it almost assures that your victory should you choose to board will be swift and total, and people always seem to forget that self-destructing is not automatic. Nothing is more priceless than the look on someone's face when a ship fails its Ld test, gets promptly obliterated, and then their whole flank collapses.
I know my performance at the end of the last game of adepticon seems counter to what I was just talking about (I lost about half of my fleet to a self-destructing Despoiler on the last turn) but it's actually a perfect example, as I didn't have to board with any of those ships. It wasn't mandated by IB; even had I not passed all of my synaptic control rolls, I didn't have a single ship within 15cm and in the front arc, and not by chance. It also wasn't necessary to destroy the Despoiler; the tentacles and claws did enough damage to destroy it in the subsequent two ending phases far more reliably than the the boarding action would have. I just boarded because I wasn't playing super-seriously, and it was fun and cool!
If you're really trying to be successful with Tyranids just don't become preoccupied with what they're "supposed" to be doing and focus on what they're good at doing. On the other hand, if you're more concerned with theme and fluff, what's a few ships lost to explosions?
I think what really prohibits Tyranids from doing well in tourneys is simply their unwieldy playing style. They are a close-range fleet that relies very heavily on setting up a good position and then inflicting maximum damage. They need at least two or three turns to get in position, and then go for the kill. Unfortunately their construction makes this very difficult. Especially now that the FAQ messed with their options (the elimination of access to refits eliminates the lowest model-count builds as viable lists) they are large model-count fleets. They either need huge numbers of escorts or immense amounts of attack craft, and spore impact rules alone make large amounts of escorts take a long time just to move. Tyranids just don't have the time in a tourney to get ideally positioned, unless the rounds are three hours long.
In fact, I would look at the changes to Tyranid rules in the FAQ as evidence that they at one point ranked toward the
top of the strongest fleet list. The rules committee didn't decide to nerf them without even considering the consequences just for fun (one hopes) so there must have been backlash coming from somewhere. And the all Mega-Hive list
was pretty powerful... and boring.
