The first thing veteran Tyranid players will notice is that
the Custom Hive Fleet section is gone. Don’t
panic though. The army is just as customisable
as it ever was, perhaps even
more so. However, the emphasis has shifted from mutants within
broods to broods of mutants. Phil explains, "When
we sat down and thought about it, we came to the
conclusion that
the Hive Mind, consisting as it does of a gestalt consciousness
of billions upon billions of component brains,
spread out
over countless light years, is unlikely to experiment at
the level of the individual creature. Instead,
we thought it far
more appropriate that the experimentation be taking place
at a larger level and so changed the customizations
rules to
apply to broods not individuals."
 Something
existing players will also appreciate is the fact that
these customizations rules are built into the army
list
entries for each brood type. Thus, players will no longer
need to flick between different sections of the book.
Custom Hive Fleets have gone from an interesting aside in
the last Codex, to a fully integrated feature of the army.
This
change came about because of the enthusiasm of Tyranid players
for that element of the army.
This philosophy extends to another aspect of the army,
in that there are no Special Characters in the Codex. Phil
really
wanted to concentrate on the "horde" aspect of
the army and thus stripped out any concession to such un-Tyranid
individuality.
Another area that received a lot of attention was that
of Instinctive Behaviour. As existing Tyranid players know,
the
Instinctive Behaviour rules were intended to reflect the
nature of the Hive Mind’s control over the broods – if
the control was weakened by the destruction of certain Hive
Node creatures, the lesser broods were wont to behave in
a far less controllable fashion. Since these last rules were
written, the rules have generated a number of questions that
have needed attention in extensive FAQs. Phil set out to
address this problem and soon found that a new rule was required,
rather than a fix of the old one.
The new Instinctive Behaviour rules are simple and tied
to the existing Morale system. Thus, players no longer have
to refer to a table mid game. If a Tyranid brood outside
Synapse range wishes to move, it must pass a Leadership test.
If it passes, it may move; if it fails, it falls back.
What about the rules for synapse creatures though? Well,
Phil’s been a bit of a clever swine here. "One
of the problems that developed with the old Codex was the
vulnerability of the middle-weight beasties, which led to
Warriors and Raveners dropping out of players’ armies,
which was a shame as they were cool models." We’ve
all seen what happens when you introduce a good old krak missile
to a Tyranid Warrior! "To alleviate this problem, we’ve
rewritten the Synapse rules such that creatures within range
of the Hive Node are immune to the effects of the Instant
Death rule. This new rule simulates the Hive Mind invigorating
the creature despite horrific injury and gets around undesirable
weakness in the list – bonus!" |
