They kinda remind me of the Borg. Same mentality, kill, conquer, assimilate. They are driven to do one thing, and they do it well. The Tyranid army is fast, as I have been saying. The thing that primarily enables this rapid pace is the Hivemind, the Tyranid’s unique feature. It appears in your permanent command unit icon area, but when selected, reveals it is not a unit at all, rather, just a new build menu and some special abilities that all use Power, not requisition as the activating resource. Abilities vary from random spore strikes on visible areas of the map, to production inhibiting area of effect stuff. They can also slam huge flaming meteors into your base, once leveled. The Hivemind also allows you to build a unit, and deep-strike it to anywhere on the map where the fog of war has been lifted. Which is fucking sick to just drop whole squads of Hormagaunts or Genestealers right into the fray, without having them need to march out from a production structure. They just pop right in to the battle, ready to slaughter. I love this.

Also, they have a need for one to act quickly. Lingering around for economic upgrades will rapidly defeat the purpose of the Tyranid army: to take the field quickly owning all melee combat on the board, and recapping strategic points for economic suffocation. Because it’s damn near impossible to win on units, unless you happen to have a massive sum of them. I’ve been in skirmishes lateley, the last 3, where victory was achieved by placing power units in critical areas and restricting unit access beyond a slowly decreasing circle. Carnifex (Screamer-Killers) come in handy towards the end, when you need some serious firepower to combat the upper-tier stuff they brought out to counter the Warriors and Genestealers.

Victory comes at the hands of having all the unit-side power / toughness upgrades done before the tipping point occurs on the battlefield. My focal point, as it were, has been the arrival of fully upgraded Lictors which I have set to autobuild from the Bloodlord, once he’s been adequately upgraded. Then, with his infiltration turned on, he just sits there on enemy ground and cranks out a Lictor every few seconds. With 8 – 13 of them running around, structures tend to go down pretty fast. Commander units are toast, as Lictors eat them for lunch. Lictors represent the backbone of the army, with squads of Warriors upgraded for melee combat in there as well. Sometimes the first few squads of capping Genestealers are left over, so I buy them all the upgrades and turn them loose on the front lines. This has worked miraculously well, I must say. 3 tough opponents, all collapsed under this strategy.

I’ll be going through more testing today before my family has a big gathering this afternoon. I’ll be schmoozing with my fam, which I love, because they’re good people. Though, I don’t have anyone around to talk Ultimate Apocalypse with in that circle. As you may have noticed, I posted my letters back and forth with Will on the blog. I will continue to do so, as they accumulate. Anyway, hope you have a good Sunday. RTS on brothers.