Arson Fire

These things are the best anti-tank option in the codex, and with their blast profile they're pretty solid at taking out infantry too. I find it hard to pass up taking 2 full units of them (I'm lucky I already got lots of them in earlier editions). They're a bit slow. Walking them up with a hive tyrant to grant their guns Assault helps, but you probably want to think about walking some in from a table edge to help get them into range. The neurothrope ability is kinda forgettable. It exists, you get it for free, but I wouldn't expect it to come up much. The main weakness on these guys is getting stuck in melee. You want to keep them screened against assaults. The new vanguard detachment also looks handy, with the stratagem to let them run away when something gets close.

It has some uses. It's one of our cheaper characters, which is good in smaller 1k point games if you don't want to pay heaps for your warlord. The only cheaper warlord is the winged tyranid prime, which is sadly trash. Although this might change soon with that new detachment that lets deathleaper be a warlord. I wouldn't want to send the parasite into combat against anything scarier than basic infantry, but it can bully a light squad off an objective. Plus Lone Operative makes it hard to remove. It's certainly not a model that you can charge straight down the middle of the table into the enemy army, but I've had some success with sneaking it around flanks and grabbing poorly held objectives.

It's decent enough in combat patrol because there it has a very good enhancement that makes it a lone operative, gives it a 4++, and -1 to be hit in melee. With all those defensive buffs it's fine running around by itself. In big 40k though it's lacking a good unit to lead. It would have made a lot more sense if they had released a unit of shrikes for it to flap around with, but for whatever reason we didn't get those this time around. Now it either gets slowed down by a squad of warriors, or is a very confused addition to a unit of gargoyles.

Yes, they were pictured with the new biovore

10th edition tyranids are an army geared more for outscoring your opponent than for tabling them. In a straight up firefight nids will generally lose, but they have a bunch of stuff for objective play to help win the mission. Horde units for flipping and holding objectives. Infiltrating lone operatives like lictors, which can start on a midfield objective and be tricky to remove. Biovores launching spore mines across the table to perform secondary objectives (this works currently, but I'd guess GW will alter spore mines eventually to disallow it) Not to mention a bunch of stuff for forcing battleshock tests to reduce your opponents hold on objectives. Nids do have some good heavy hitters, but generally they're used to pick off specific threats rather than to just blow apart your opponents army.

Leapers have very similar stats to raveners, and have the same price. In terms of pure combat power raveners are stronger. They're getting an additional attack per model and re-rolls to wound, along with a weak shooting attack. Plus the ability to teleport around the battlefield from turn to turn definitely comes in handy for scoring secondaries. However leapers are a bit more sneaky with their infiltrate/stealth abilities, and fights first + pouncing leap makes charging them or even being near them dangerous. Personally I like the raveners a little more, but I can see the use for a forward deploying unit of leapers to start the game on a midfield objective, daring the opponent to send anything forward to take it off them.

I use a variation on hive fleet behemoth. Swapping the black talons/claws to bone, the black guns to leathery brown, and with a much brighter blue carapace.

Yeah the one in the space marine 2 trailer is definitely a warrior, not a hive tyrant. But whether it's a prime or a regular warrior is slightly more debatable. It definitely looks like a prime, as it has the torso with extended shoulder plates, and the slightly wider head carapace. However the devs have been a bit weird in their gameplay trailers by making just about every warrior look like that. Seems unlikely that every warrior you run into would be a tyranid prime; it looks like they've just adopted that design in their game for the regular warriors.

Of the two leaper comparisons posted (32mm base vs 40mm base), the 40mm base looks more correct. The base rim is too short on the 32mm comparison, and the limbs a bit too thin. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the leapers did make a dual kit with lictors. They're a tiny bit smaller than the current lictor model, but not majorly so. It's close enough in size and appearance that I could see lictors just being made marginally smaller so they could be the same kit. The height of the models is already about the same, it's just the leaper is a little more slender, and is posed leaning forwards. On the other hand, if lictors do become a separate kit then I'd imagine they'll be made to look quite different than they currently do. As the size difference and appearance between the leapers and the current lictor is close enough that I'd think GW would want to distinguish them more. Perhaps by making the lictor significantly larger.

The thing is they already did that with the Maleceptor. It has a head design which is clearly inspired by that old zoanthrope, Same pattern of spines around its head, same design of head carapace blending into the brain area, etc. It also shares the tail which curves down under its body. I'm not sure it would make sense for them to create a second model that's a callback to that one.

I play them from time to time. Honestly I think allarus terminators are more cost efficient, but some of the weapon options on aquilons are still interesting. Adrathic destructors are nice for access to 3 damage weapons in an army that's mostly 2 damage. I'm not a big fan of the flamers, as they cost extra and the auto-hits aren't so important in an army that has BS 2+. The power fists are decent, but I think the extra attack + wound re-rolls from the power talons offers something that you can't find quite so easily elsewhere in the faction. Last game I had a vexilus standing by them with the extra attack banner, Dacatarai stance for the extra attack at no penalty (weapon is already D1), and also was running Dreadhost with the 6's count as 2 hits warlord trait. They were producing a fairly ludicrous number of hits, all re-rolling to wound, AP-3 due to dreadhost. They shredded everything they touched.

Flyrant wings usually require a bit more support than you get from magnets alone. I added a pin to mine to help support them. Here you can see the pin I drilled into the wing, along with the hole it fits into in the body. Sure it means there's a tiny hole in the body when I'm not using the wings, but it's not easy to see.

The exocrine/haruspex is one of the easier kits to magnetise. The arms are just the standard approach of drilling out the socket, gluing in magnets, then cutting off the ball joint on the arms and sticking magnets to them. The heads can be attached with a single magnet each. Drill in a 5mm magnet at the point where the two halves of the body carapace meet with the 'neck plate'. This matches up with the top of the haruspex heads neck, and just above the base of the exocrines cannon. The exocrine's head will require something to attach the magnet to, as it's hollow. You can either use a blob of milliput/greenstuff like I did, or you can just glue a bit of sprue in there. Here's a picture so you can see where I placed the magnets. The tervigon/tyrannofex is slightly more complex, but not by much. Mainly just because it features two handed guns which means to have to take slightly more care to make them line up. You'll have to leave the tyrannofexes body spines off in order for the tervigon's gaunt sack to fit. The trick to magnetising the sack is that it grips quite tightly to the detailing on the body, so as long as the two halves of it are together you don't actually need to magnetise them directly to the body. You just magnetise the two halves of the sack to each other. It might help to elevate the models front legs just slightly by a half centimeter or so to make it easier to add or remove the sack. Just stand it on a small rock. The head, tervigon melee arms, and tyrannofex fleshborer hive are straightforward. The acid spray's supporting arm grips the body quite tightly and connects underneath the gun, so as long as you do a good job of magnetising that then it holds the gun arm up and stops it sliding down. The rupture cannon is pretty much guaranteed to swivel down slightly. It's very long and heavy. However fortunately it doesn't matter much as GW was nice enough to place a spike on the underside of the end of the barrel which is only barely above the surface of the table. Meaning it can only swivel down a short distance before it touches the table, so it looks fine.

The spore nodes wording is kinda bad. Yes it says you can perform the action while 6" away from the enemy deployment zone. However, you can only place the spore node created by the action within the enemy deployment zone, and it can also only be placed within 1" of your unit. So effectively you have to be within 1" of the enemy deployment zone for it to work. Otherwise you aren't able to place the node.

Cranial feasting isn't quite as bad as the OP suggests. It doesn't require you to kill things with a Feeder Tendril model to get the victory points. You can kill them in melee with any unit. Feeder Tendril units just have improved chances to gain a command point from it. That said, you're still talking about killing 8 characters or unit champions in melee in addition to the warlord. A savvy opponent may choose to allocate any shooting wounds to their sergeants first in order to deny you the points. On top of that it's a very situational secondary, as not all armies even have unit champions. Spore nodes requiring you to take the action far apart from where you previously took the action makes it actually kinda difficult. To max it you would need your troops to traverse most of your opponents deployment zone over the course of the game. Keeping sufficient troops alive and mobile over that much of the game in your opponents deployment zone seems like a tall order to me. But maybe it has some play. Synaptic Insight was actually released in a white dwarf article 2 or 3 months before the codex release. So it has been around a while. It's the weakest of the three, being so dependent on your opponents army composition, your own, along with the inconvenience of spacing out your kills. The secondary objectives are the weakest part of an otherwise very strong codex. None of them are particularly good. I think I'll be sticking to core secondaries for the most part.