The Chime of Eons - The Great Devourer (Fourth Bite!)

“To think that Tyranids are mindless beasts is a grave mistake. When you fight Tyranids you face not only those before you on the battlefield, but the untold thousands which seek to surround you, which attack your supporting units and destroy your supply lines in perfect synchronicity. These aliens have shown evidence of both tactics and strategy that speaks of a far worse threat than that posed by a mere beast.”

- Marneus Calgar

One of the most interesting new game mechanics of the new expansion is the introduction of Synapse Creatures, that commit with their own secondary dial and act as mini-warlords.

Kudos is due to Brad Andres for introducing a game mechanic that changes the game so fundamentally, and which will be so hard to balance. This is something that will become harder and harder to balance as the card pool expands as well - as the command deficits of the tyranid core pool are diminished, it'll be harder and harder for them to be anything but dominant, unless we see a similar arms race of new tech from the other factions.

In fluff terms, the Synapse Units are probably a little misnamed, as there are many units in the game that are synapse creatures in fiction, but not in the game, and vice versa. However, the overall effect on gameplay is well thought out, and again cleverly makes a tyranid player feel like a tyranid player.

As Andres said in his recent interview (http://thetacticalsq...th-brad-andres/) it feeds into the feeling of Tyranids seeming like an overwhelming force from the outset.



SYNAPSE CREATURES

Blazing Zoanthrope

Back in the first Great Devourer Chime of Eons article I mentioned the Zoats, and how they faded out of the game and the game background. The Zoanthropes were added around the same time the Zoats left, and their name was a clear nod to the fans of the Zoats.

Like the Zoats, these were described as being psychically puissant, but in every other way they had changed. Zoanthropes are not physically powerful warriors, and indeed they are little more the psychic artillery pieces. New fluff suggested that the Hive Mind was able to develop them based on harvested Eldar DNA, though of course the sheer psychic force of the Hive Mind that powers them is far in excess of even the most potent Eldar psyker.

The LCG representation here is solid enough, with suitably weak combat stats for an elite creature, but with the ability to launch an up-front psychic blast at artillery range (that is, before even "ranged" units get to strike.

However, there's not much here to explain their status as roving Synapse creatures, nor their efficiency as command-sniping / command-attrition units.

Also extremely notable here is the Psyker trait: while no game text yet exists to interact with this trait, its notable that no Tyranid cards have been given this trait.


Gravid Tervigon

While I'm not normally a fan of the "adjective unit" school of card naming, I do love how this card is named.

Tervigons are massive lumbering beasts that carry in their bellies dozens of slumbering termagants. Notably, Tervigons do not go into deep-sleep while Hive Ships make their long interstellar journeys, but instead roam corridors and chambers to act as a mobile immune system. Should a Hive Ship be boarded, the Tervigons can birth swarms of termagants to fight the initial "infection", giving enough time for the Hive Ship proper to awaken its other defenders.

Because these young gaunts are not fully developed, the Hive Mind relies on the Tervigon's synapses to move and utilise them: if the Tervigon is killed it is not uncommon for its spawn to spontaneously seizure and die.

To me, this is one of the most creatively designed units in the wargame, in terms of its game rules and how that marries the fiction. The LCG approximation is satisfactory as well, helping bring the Swarm to the game board in a game-balanced and pleasing way.

My only complaint is the way the card art is cropped, though given the shape of the original painting (see top of page) I think that was unavoidable. I'd have loved to see Synapse Units get transparent text boxes, to visually put them halfway between ordinary army units and Warlords.


Savage Warrior Prime

This is a card that is worthy of the Elite and Synapse Unit tags and a great fiction representation of the concept.

In older Tyranid fluff, three was the magic number. A tyranid squad was three warriors, and the number three popped up time and again. Now, its more about huge-ass swarms and individual monsters.

When Tyranid fluff moved forward, the concept of the Tyranid Prime was introduced - an alpha organism more connected to the Hive Mind and a central synapse creature. This is a war leader, of course, not one deployed to scout or to mop-up biomatter, but rather placed in the front line of battle.

The stats, including the zero command and decent fighting abilities, are very well placed, as in combination with the ability text they create a game narrative that suggests the Prime being sent on sorties to initiate skirmishes and raids, to serve the war effort. There's a nice feeling of this unit marauding behind enemy lines, able to strike anywhere and everywhere. Short of a space marine drop pod assault, or your own Warlord facing off against it, there's not much to stop it slaughtering all opposition!


Stalking Lictor

First off, I love the elegant simplicity of this unit in game design terms. With a simple statline and unit type, it becomes one of the most interesting developments in the game.

In the game fiction, the Lictor is a vanguard organism, using its chameleonic skin and natural stealth to move ahead of the Tyranid advance, and its natural combat prowess to assassinate its prey in ones and twos.

They also exude a pheromone trail behind them, that is laden with information and guides the tyranid forces that follow towards enemy weakpoints. This matches well the role of the card in the game, moving ahead of the front line, avoiding direct battle and enabling the tyranid player to gather more cards and resources, and thus play more units more effectively.

The naming of this unit is odd, as historically IRL, lictors were the body guards and defenders of Roman magistrates. GW does pick out odd names for their units a lot, of course (vide Dominatrix).

Venomthrope Polluter

In stark contrast to the simplicity and elegant representation of the Lictor, the card presenting the Venomthrope Polluter has a big ole block of text. Oddly though, this increased wordiness doesn't make for a better fluff fit than the Lictor.

In the wargame, the Venomthrope was an early part of GW's drive towards multi-purpose kits, where you can build two or more units that share the same basic parts. They've gotten quite clever and creative with this, going beyond part swaps to having different pieces have different orientations on different minis. Their motivations clearly were related to shelf space, reduced sculpting costs and an illusion of value to justify their ever-hiking prices. The Venomthrope was basically the Zoanthrope kit with added tentacles and gas-sacs, and was early enough in the wave of multi-purpose kits that clever modellers managed to make units with magnetised chop-and-change parts, so as to actually get two options for the "price of one".

But this is the LCG, and the home of a much better value for money 40k experience! Okay sure, we get the odd regurgitated concept (warlord groupies, looking at you) but mostly every card brings something new and different to the game experience. The Venomthrope here is a great example, providing a subtle game mechanic that could prove to be a lot of fun.

However, in terms of the fluff, its a stretch. The Venomthrope is more or less a mobile spore chimney, floating around the battlefield, pumping out toxic gases and tyranid spores that corrupt or kill native organisms. An obvious (and dare I say, more useful) card ability would have been to place Infestation counters. Another interpretation would have been as a mobile debuff, perhaps inflicting -1HP or -1 attack on non-Elite enemy army units. The ability as it stands is, I presume, a representation of the way that Venomthropes bring with them a yellow fog that provides cover for nearby tyranids. Presumably what we're talking about here is the umbra of the cloud concealing redeployments. As always, that's something of a mismatch with the game's scale, but the abstract idea is there.



TYRANID ATTACHMENTS

Heavy Venom Cannon

The Venom Cannon fires corrosive poison crystals at high velocity, which shatter on impact. The heavy version fires bigger crystals faster, and also releases an electrostatic discharge on fragmentation.

In the wargame, its basically just a tyranid BFG.

The LCG stats, sure enough, represent a BFG, and the mutable aspects are in keeping with the overall tyranid metatheme of mutability. Of course, its hard to say the narrative this card presents in emergent play, as most players have categorised this as "only good for shields", as in play all it really achieves is to change the opponent's Klaivex play from 2-for-1 value to 3-for-1 value.


Noxious Fleshborer

The fleshborer is a nest of fleshborer beetles, held in a state of dormancy until the weapon is fired. At that time, an electro-chemical shock will wake the beetle into a blind frenzy, at the same time as it being ejected towards the opponent at high speed.

As one might expect from such a projectile, this is a short ranged weapon, and it is also one that is usually carried by gaunt-level organisms. In fact, for Termagants (you know, those little token guys) this is their standard armament.

This card can be added to the list of cards that represent standard armaments, and all my criticisms of those cards apply to this one too.

Likewise, there's not really anything in the fiction to suggest why this card should boost HP or cause infestation, or only give benefit on an infested planet.


Parasitic Infection

Time for some positivity!

There isn't any equivalent in the wargame of a termagant bursting out of an enemy's body (which certainly seems to be what this card represents).

However, there's also nothing about this card that is inconsistent with the overall vision or shape of Tyranid fiction.

We spoke in the first Great Devourer article about the fine genealogy of the concept of tyranids, and Alien was mentioned, which of course originated the chest-burster and brought us the body-horror of a parasitic alien organism being gestated within human flesh.

This is a card that brings something new to the mythos, which is consistent with what came before it, and which creates a mini-narrative every time it is played.

In other words, exactly the sort of card I love!
(If only it cost 1R, I might even have played it...)


Pincer Tail


While the gamer in me finds this card to like, I have to respect its design philosophy, starting with the fiction and seeking to represent it in card form, while also remaining true to the overall mechanical themes of the tyranids (adaptable biomorphs, replicating the abilities of existing cards with a twist, and so on).

Conceptually, there's not much to say about this card really.

A tail, with a pincer on it.

Yaaay.


Regeneration

Regeneration wasn't a feature of the earliest Tyranids (both in the fiction, where it was developed as a later biomorph variant, and in the game, where it was present as an option for more units as the game went on) but is now something that is very much tied to the tyranid fluff.

The card does pretty much what you expect it to: healing damage, plus some increase in overall resilience.





Next Time...

As always, the image limit per article forces a break here. We return next time, with the Tyranid Army Units.