Warhammer 40,000: Tyranids Codex
November 4, 2017 by dignity
Join us as we delve into the pages of the new Tyranid Codex for Warhammer 40,000 By Games Workshop, up for pre-order today.
The new codex has us all excited as it offers up new and interesting ways to play these gribbly creatures on the tabletop as a horde or even as a more elite and tactical smaller force.
They have some fascinating new rules and plenty of interesting combinations to draw on as a force so make sure to give us your tactical thoughts on them in the comments.
We did hear a squeal from Warren when this arrived!
Are you looking forward to the Tyranid release?

If painting 400 models for one army not sounding ridiculous enough the price tag will…
But… don’t hold yourself back. Go for it 😀
Kha’banda is the Bloodthirster who constantly torments the Blood Angels and has been doing so since the Horus Heresy. By getting between the Swarm and its prey, he has probably just made himself a very powerful enemy indeed. The Tyranids can’t eat him directly, but by putting himself between them and their feeding grounds he has made himself a target, and the Hive Mind has an awful lot of psychic power to draw upon to deal with nuisances like Daemon Princes.
In the earlier fluff, one of the things that hacks the Chaos powers off most about the Tyranids is not only that the bugs aren’t afraid of, or in the least bit impressed by, the Chaas Gods, but also that they offer the Ruinous Powers nothing to work with. Khorne feeds on rage, hatred and bloodlust – all emotions the Tyranids don’t understand and aren’t capable of. Tzeentch is empowered by manipulation, lies and deceit, and yet the Hive Mind holds the Tyranids to an absolute unity of purpose that leaves Tzeentch nowhere to go. Nurgle embodies disease, entropy and decay, but the Swarm endlessly renews itself. It is not infected, but rather takes disease and moulds it to its own purposes, and its most powerful, conscious beast are all effectively immortal through reincarnation by the Hive Mind. Finally, Slaanesh is concerned with moral corruption and degradation, pleasure and excesses of sensation, and yet the Tyranids are so totally alien that it isn’t even known if they can experience pleasure, and their senses are so far removed from the experience of anything else that Slaanesh has nothing to offer them .
In a universe full of mortal toys, the Tyranids not only don’t play ball – they are one of the few legitimate rivals to the Chaos powers. Worse, they are a threat. If the Tyranids consume all the mortals whose emotions give form and power to the Chaos gods, then it is game over for the big four.
In the fluff, the Necrontyr were a technologically advanced species that evolved on a world in a solar system with an energetic and unstable star. The constant exposure to radiation caused germ line genetic damage that left their entire species sickly and with foreshortened lifespans , and even their technology couldn’t help them fix that. They travelled interstellar distances in huge cryo-vessels called Tomb ships that employed an early, less advanced form of their inertialess drive systems, and ultimately encountered the techno-mystical Old Ones with their unblemished forms and de facto immortality.
The Old One’s either couldn’t or wouldn’t help the Necrontyr with their biological woes, which ultimately led to a war between the two species. Despite their technology, the Necrontyr were losing badly, in part due to the edge the Webway offered to the Old Ones and their armies, and it was at this time that the Necrontyr first discovered the existence of the C’tan – energy beings that feds directly on the photospheres of stars and possessed immense powers that allowed them to directly manipulate physical reality itself. The Necrontyr created the Necrodermis technology that allowed the C’Tan to take on physical form, and the C’tan struck a deal with the Triarch Council, the ruling body of the Necrontyr, lead by Szarekh the Silent King. The C’tan offered to help the Necrontyr both escape their biological doom and defeat the Old One’s at one stroke through biotransference, where they exchanged their biological bodies for technological ones (essentially an alien version of mind upload transhumanism with a hefty dose of Lovecraft-esque cosmic horror thrown in, though the Necrontyr didn’t know about that last part). In the words of Admiral Ackbar, it was a trap, and the process fed the electromagnetic energy of the Necrontyr people to the C’tan (people apparently being tastier than stars) and left them as slaves to their betrayers, with only the senior Necrons having any scrap of their own will and identities still left to them.
The C’tan went on to consume the energy of the Old Ones and their armies to a large degree, but in the process essentially ate too much and left themselves bloated and vulnerable, which was when Szarekh turned on them and used the most incredibly powerful weapons in the Necron arsenal to shatter the C’tan into Shards (the C’tan are all but impossible to actually kill, and actually managing to do so has really dire consequences for whoever dares to to strike the blow) and bind those Shards into Tesseract Vaults.
A legacy of the war with the Old Ones was the creation of so many psychic warriors by the Old Ones (amongst them the Eldar) that it led to the Enslaver invasion of real space from the Warp. The Necrons weathered the Enslaver assault, and the attempted revenge of the remaining warriors created by the Old Ones, by going into Stasis for a million odd years. Szarekh, the only surviving Triach, did not go into stasis, blaming himself for the terrible doom that had befallen his people because he had trusted the C’tan, and instead remained awake along with his elite legion of bodyguards and warrior servants, the Triach Praetorians. They ultimately travelled out of the Galaxy in self imposed exile, and it was out there in the darkness between unknown stars that Szarekh first encountered the Tyranid Swarm hundreds of thousands of years later, and came to understand the threat it represented. Szarekh still hoped that the Necrons might one day find a compatible organic species to use as a means of returning to a biological existence and thus stave off the creeping insanity that their existence as machines is bringing to all Necrons, but that would never happen if the Tyranids ate all the candidate species first, and even the Necron’s machine bodies themselves might wind up on the menu once more palatable alternative food sources for the Swarm were exhausted, so Szarekh returned to the Milky Way Galaxy and sent his Traich Praetorians to accelerate the reawakening of the Tomb Worlds to try to stave off the Tyranids before it was too late.
So far as I understand it, bodyguard units of the type Tyrant Guard are allow a D6 roll for each wound suffered by the character being protected, and for each roll of a 2+ one of those wounds is converted to a mortal wound taken by the Bodyguard unit instead. This is still very good though, since a Hive Tyrant is toughness 7 with a 3+ armour save and 4+ invulnerable save. With Catalyst it can block any wound suffered on a 5+ before testing for the Tyrant Guard, and then there are the Adaptive Biology warlord trait and Hivefleet Gorgon Hyper Adaptive Biology bio artifact to consider, that both trigger when the model is wounded and from the end of the first phase in which the carrying model is wounded add +1 to its toughness (so 8 for a Hive Tyrtant) and reduce by 1 to a minimum of one the damage it suffers from any attack respectively. Throw in a 6 strong unit of Tyrant Guard who can soak lots of wounds before going down, and you will have a very resilient source of 18″ synapse that also has considerable psychic ability and can ruin people’s day in close combat.
The Stratagems offer so much more in the way of shenanigans for Tyranids. A few I have seen previews of over on the Warhammer Community site and elsewhere should especially appeal. Endless Swarm allows you to replace a destroyed unit of Termagants, Hormaguants, or Gargoyles, bringing them back on from any table edge. If you are using a Hive Fleet Hydra army, then it becomes any infantry unit, so you could bring a full unit of 20 Genestealers back on and ruin your opponent’s day. Combine that with the Pheromone Trail Stratagem, and your replacement unit it can instead be deployed near any Lictor you already have on the table.
As for Toxin Sacks, Hive Fleet Gorgon has a stratagem called Hyper Toxicity, that for 1 CP causes Toxin Sacks on a unit to cause attacks to deal an extra point of damage on a wound roll of 5+ rather than 6+.
Kronos has the Deepest Shadow, that for 1 CP can force your opponent to take a psychic test on 1D6. Combine that with Shadow in the Warp and the Kronos warlord Trait Soul Hunger (the one that deals D3 mortal wounds if an opposing psyker fails a psychic test) if you really, really hate enemy psykers.
Caustic Blood is great fun applied to large but disposable unit of cheap troops like Termagants. For 1 CP, in the fight phase each time a model in the unit loses its last wound, roll a D6. On a 6, the enemy model that killed it suffers a mortal wound after all its attacks have been resolved. Even the elimination of your troops can prove costly for your opponent if this stratagem is employed wisely.
Perhaps my favourite of all is Feeder Tendrils. If an enemy character is killed in the Fight Phase by a creature with the Genestealer keyword (that includes Broodlords), a Lictor (including the Death Leaper), a Venomthrope or a Toxicrene (the last one is a monster that can do hefty damage), then for one CP you can immediately gain D3 command points. At minimum that refunds your outlay, and you could come out one or two command points ahead for use with other stratagems, all courtesy of the enemy’s tasty, tasty brains. It is just so horrifically gruesome and gribbly that it feels very appropriate for the Tyranids, and turns every opposing character, including squishier support characters that could readily be hunted by the likes of Lictors, into a potential source of bonus command points.
Here’s a link to the warhammer Community article. https://www.warhammer-community.com/2017/11/02/codex-tyranids-preview-stratagems/
The swarm army plan is awesome and sounds like it would play as the Tyranids are portrayed in the audio books.
I’m going to build the army – 6 termagants a month until finished……. 🙂