I finally got a playtest game in (woo hoo!!
) and was also able to discuss the games the other guys had played in detail. The breadth of experience is not great as the Nids were primarily gaunt-based armies and the opponents were all various flavors of Orks. Nonetheless, there seems to be some common themes that should hold across other kinds of battles.====
Spawning: The feel of the end-of-turn spawning is VASTLY better. It does, however, have a few side effects that might not be so great.
1) It multiplies the value of synapse creature formations. Not only is there the normal activation count issues, but now each synapse generates its own broods constantly. Some of that is mitigated by more expensive SCs getting more spawning. Overall, though, the bigger SCs seem to be somewhat frowned upon and I think this may aggravate that problem.
2) It's a bit too fast. In pretty much every turn of every game played, virtually the entire Nid army has regenerated every turn. Even without Mycetic Spores it happens. In some of the games my friends played, the Nids had excess spawning capacity every turn and never used a spore. It should be possible, barely, to wear down a swarm that comes charging willy-nilly across the battlefield at you.
Regeneration: While I don't think that the average regeneration is too fast, it is highly randomized and can result in some amazing recoveries, especially for the 8DC beasties.
Firefight Tactics: I didn't use this, but a tactic they reported from previous games was essentially a variant on a Tyranid token assault. The Nid player moved some of the FF-strong units into range for support. Then they did multiple assaults on the target formation with token troops. The goals was NOT to win the assault. In fact, that was almost a bad thing. The goal was to inflict casualties via the supporting fire. Even with the new assault rules, it won't stop that. They can throw enough Hormagaunts into the mix that the enemy is highly unlikely to stall the assault by killing all of them.
This is obviously what prompted the "they are FF monsters" comment. The "monsters" in question were either 250 point Heirophants or a formation of Haruspex (FF version) and Trygons.
To be fair, part of the problem was that they were allowing broods to move out of coherency and not killing them off at the end of the move so SCs were sending waves of troops to start the assaults. Nonetheless, the tactic would work almost as well without that.
Units: Some minor concern about the Trygons' price, but certainly not to the point anyone thinks it is broken. And, obviously, you saw the previous comments about Raveners which are being adjusted. Other than that, the broods, SCs and biotitans feel just about right. No comment on Stealers and Lictors as they haven't been used. Same for the arty units.
Garrison "tricks": They haven't been using any of the 0cm garrison/handoff the broods tricks to "deep garrison" troops that would otherwise be unable to do so. When I described them and we discussed it, they pretty much felt that such things were bordering on cheesy. Starting so close would undoubtedly have aggravated the spawn speed issue.
==Suggestions==
Spawning: Reduce the amount of spawning. The ideas we kicked around were
1) reduce to d3 as the base - ~-1.5 per swarm, per turn and less randomness
2) reduce the "bonus" numbers by 2 - possible exceptions for Dom (leave at +6) and lesser nodes (leave at d6 or drop to d3)
3) modify the mycetic spores to 15 points, +d3
Regeneration: We really don't know. As noted, it's not the average that is a problem. It's the potential mega-regen. Also, it may look very different against forces with better TK options than the armies that have been played so far.
Firefight: Tweak some of the FF values is justa bout the only thing we could think of. The problem units are mostly the WEs because you can pack in a lot of FF firepower in a small area. You could use a horde of Termagaunts to do the same thing, but it would be much more difficult due to space constraints.
Garrison Nodes: Either revised garrison standards for Nids or disallowing it outright.
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Hope some of that is helpful.
