Data Sphere

Still a very new infinity player, Mostly been playing with a vanilla ALEPH list but I have recently gotten my mitts on some morat.
looking through the list builder, it seems that hungries are absurdly cheep.
even with a fairly formidable group of morat troopers plodding around, it seems quite easy to have an entire second combat group of hungries+their handler.
I cant really see any downside to this, they are as cheep as aleph netrods, but are actually fast and shoot things.
am I missing something?

The big thing is that you either use up your one link team on them or they go running off on their own. That being said, there are people who will take them, start with them in link for the orders first turn and then break the link and use the orders somewhere else.

Hi, and welcome to MAF side of the Moon!
Generally speaking, Hungries swarm is our minor tactics.
First of all, you can only field 4+4 Hungries because of their AVA. Second, their flaw is that they are both Extremely Impetuous and Irregular. This can be mitigated linking them with Oznat, but you can link only 4 of them. Third, their performance hugely depends on terrain layout and deployment style. Sparse terrain and good defensive deployment can calm your swarm with AROs wall.
No doubt that one can master these beasts. But it could be challenging.
From my point of view, Hungries' main roles are distracting (flanking) threat, infiltrators murdering (perfect for infiltrators NOT in marker state), orders bump for first turn (requires Oznat and fireteam activation).

aye, that all makes sense thankyou very much!
I think mostly I want to just blast things with heavy artillery, I have a sogarat and a kurgat with auto cannon as my centrepieces so far.
I will probably get my hands on some hungries and use them to screen against alpha strikes. I play against yu jing a lot, and a very aggressive ariadna player, so a wall of cheep chainrifles might be useful, does that sound viable?

Yup, you can use Pretas in separate combat group. If you deploy wise, their two orders (Impetuous and Irregular) are enough to park them in total cover to guard corners and slow advancing foes.