So, here's the situation. My players are assaulting a Tyranid hive structure in order to eliminate the synapse creature inside. The hive is already a hot warzone, with imperial forces standing of against the Tyranid defenders. The acolytes are assaulting, as opposed to infilitrater as I figure in order to keep them from dying fast they'll have a solo inquisitor join them with a company of the New Tanith 3rd (paying homage obvious.) I know as they make their way to the throne chamber I want them to get into a few battles just to prove the point of how dangerous a situation they're in (as if the supporting company wasn't enough). As such, I was wondering if there were any suggestions on how I can really make this feel like the middle of a warzone to them. Also, suggestions on how I should treat said battle situations ruleswise (i.e. initiative) that would also be appreciated. I have some ideas on how to handle it, but input always makes the game better.

Sounds like a cool idea! I would suggest going to the Dark Reign site and downloading a file called "Dark Heresy Mass Combat V1.0" (find it on this page: http://www.darkreign40k.com/downloads/gaming-aids/38.html ... 3rd up from the bottom). Apparently it's modeled after the Pendragon mass combat rules, but basically how it works is you compute some modifiers, then roll on a d100 table, adding or subtracting as required, and end up with a battle "scene" that the PCs encounter. What's cool is that how well or poorly the PCs do in their scene gains or losses them victory points, which effects how their side does overall in the battle as a whole. There's also a good number of different scenes and variations listed. I ran a pretty successful series of games set in the Tranch War using this ruleset. On the downside, it's very much a rough draft document, and I found the scenes were better used for inspiration than literal. The number of suggested enemies, for example, is a bit wonky in some of them. Also, the system expects you to do a lot of rolling every "battle turn" which can lead to some annoying pauses during a session. After a few such sessions, I found that it worked a lot better to roll up all the different stuff ahead of time, and then fudge things for/against the PCs depending upon how they did. Not quite as true to the rules, but the sessions flowed a lot better, and it allowed me to think of more deals to add in ahead of time.

All in all, though, the document is great and really helped me get a handle on how to run an entertaining battlefield game.

Best of luck!

Ah, that's just the sort of thing I was hoping for. Thank you very much!

Another option that you could do is if you have the original Dawn of War you could download the tyranid mod http://www.moddb.com/mods/tyranid-mod for it, and they play out a battle in that. The way the battle goes will effect the players options on the battlefield.

Salcor