'New' Tyranids Vs Iron hands. Tourney battle 1250 pts - The Relic

So Anders and I once again play the Relic mission. But this time he's bringing the new Tyranid Codex and units! The Spore pod (spore pod prime!) down on the right side of the image is the Relic for this game. worth 3 victory points.

His army looked something like this.
a hive tyrant with boneswords and a venom cannon, with two Tyrant guards, A Tervigon, a Venomthrope, 2 units of termagaunts, an Exocrine, 3 hive guard, a Zoanthrope and a Hive Crone.

I brought my Chapter master with artificier armor, plasma pistol and Axe of medusa.

5 honour guard, with chapter banner and 1 power axe, the rest toting power swords.

10 tactical marines, heavy bolter, meltagun and a sgt, with a gravgun and meltabomb.

5 sniper scouts, one with a missile launcher+ flakk.

3 centurions, 2 grav-cannons a TL-Lascannon, omniscope and 3 Missile launchers

Ironclad dread with 2 HK-missiles, heavy flamer and meltagun, in a Drop pod

3 Attack bikes, 2 Heavy bolters and one Multimelta

There was a couple of things we got wrong in this game, the biggest one is that we have always thought Instant death took away all saves except cover saves (!) wich is pretty huge.
I didn't know I could move and shoot with slow and purposeful as if stationary, thus severely shortening the range of my grav-cannons in this game.

I got first turn + night fighting and I have never deployed worse in my life! I dunno what the heck I was thinking. My centurions were off on the right side, far back in a ruin, not in range for anything, my tacticals were far back in the centre, which was so stupid because I already knew I was gonna have a hard time to even get to the relic against the Tyranids. my snipers were in a good positions in a ruin to my left, backed up by my attack bikes.
But on top of my poor deployment I decided that hey! lets just move the attack bikes further up on the left flank in behind a building so they can't do shit for a turn, waggle my Centurions up to try and get in range/LoS so at least the lascannon+missile launcher can fire and hey, lets move my only close combat unit into the central ruin so they will be even slower! And then I moved up my tactical squad, out of cover and into the open.  Then instead of drop podding my Ironclad near his warlord to try and go for first blood/slay the warlord I drop him near the exocrine and zoanthrope and do one wound to the Exocrine...

in total I killed two Termagaunts on turn 1 because everything pretty  much had 3+ cover saves.

Tactical genius achieved!

On tyranid turn one he managed (due to us not knowing how Instand death worked!) kill 5 tactical marines in one blast from the venom cannon, then he killed the dreadnought with the exocrine taking one hull point and then the Zoanthrope one shotted it with a s10 ap2 Lance shot! Giving him first blood and breaking Dreadberts run of staying alive for 3 turns and smashing things up :(

on my next turn I instead of keep the bikes going towards his table edge, I doubled back and shot the 2 Heavy bolters and multimelta + TL-bolters into the gaunts that had moved up to the Relic. Missing horribly!

I dropped the Orbital Bombardment on the Hive tyrant, killing a tyrant guard. in hindsight I should have nuked the Venomthrope. That would have made shooting the rest of his army so much easier.

My centurions did very little on turn 2 as well, which is really bad. I need them to start wasting enemies turn 1....Not turn 3!

The Tyranids then opted to kill one centurion and take the Relic. And then just generally moved up the board, the Tervigon spawning even more termagaunts. The Hive Crone came in and killed two honour guard in the ruins with his vector strike! 

The Iron hands answered by letting the rookie bs3 scouts fire at it, one sniper and the flakk missile actually hit. the sniper failing to wound but the missile not only put a wound on him, it also grounded the foul beast, taking another wound from it! the halved tactical squad shot at it bringing it down to one wound left that the Chapter master saw fit to take with is plasma pistol, slaying the Hive Crone. Thank the Emperor!

The tyranids retalieted by charging the honour guard through the ruins with a group of fresh termagaunts, stalling the Chapter master from getting to the Relic. Needless to say the Honour guard decimated most of the gaunts, but as they are fearless in synapse they didn't move. the Gaunts with the Relic started moving away from my lines to steal it away.

My Honour guard and chapter master cut their way through the last gaunts and moved to try and catch up to the relic, but was intercepted by even more gaunts with the tervigon right behind them.

the attack bikes tried to drive past and go for line breaker to give me at least one victory point for the tournament, but the hive tyrant chased them down and crushed them.

I think I had lost my centurions around this point to the Exocrine and Zoanthrope duo.
My snipers tried to make the gaunts drop the relic but even though I got a precision shot in, it failed to wound. 

At the end the snipers were all that was left and we decided that the game could end now with Anders getting all the Victory points possible from the Relic mission and me getting 0.

Not a great start to the tournament for me but at least it was cool to see the new Nids in action. Not a bad codex, with lots of cool combos possible. Not an OP codex either wich, as always, leave the internet trolls raging like it's the end of the world. I like it. though Venomthropes are such a pain!