Alrighty folks, next up in the faction wars is the Imperium vs the Tyrinids.
Assumption -
No other interference, imperium has access to EVERYTHING, this includes but is not limited to
Titan legions
All adeptus Astartes
Entire Inquisition
Admech tech
All assassins
Sisters of battle
The Grey knights
Over arching command goes to Creed, with chapter masters
Dante, Azreal, and Calgar, taking up command positions in field.
These are basically the strategic minds of the imperium. Though if need be will gladly enter the field of battle.
other chapter masters and the like operate as a more field oriented role of leadership.
No falling to chaos
The nids-
Have access to all hive fleets
are NOT endless in number, they can have numbers that rival orks, but not endless just to put to rest the "countless more fleets are yet to reach " argument.
Genestealer cults are active.
Lets remember some things-
Please use citations for arguments involving fluff
(Ie working of a weapon to talent of a command/skill in battle)
Please follow rule 1 of dakka forums.
If you are not going to cite information, do not present it as facts. If you cannot remember a page number/not on internet just leave the name of the book you read. All codex citations should have page numbers or at least a reference.
Keep the amount of fanboy arguing to a minimum, as this lead to breaking of rule 1 in the last thread.
Most of all, please enjoy the debate, and have fun!
If the IoM has all of their resources able to be put against this, they've got it covered. The reason the IoM is failing is because it's being attacked on all sides constantly, and it still makes victories like that. Granted, the nids will be scary still, but I don't think they can win, unless they just throw IG at them until the nids are triple the size from that. I voted for nids, but I made the mistake of not reading the description for, and I assumed it meant "IoM (in its actual state) vs Nids (IE more would show up)" so I messed up with that.
All in all, it will be a very hard battle, but I believe the IoM would pull through.
All known hive-fleets united VS imperium with 0 other threats to worry about, no infinite more Tyranids on the way?
Yeah, that goes to IoM no problem. The only "issue" will be splinter-fleets after the main push has been defeated, but even those will still be dealt with after enough time.
If not distracted by other threats I'd put my money on IoM. The speed in which the body count would stack up on both sides would be pretty juicy but the currently known fleets would run out before the IoM would. It would be a victory through attrition.
I also voted for IoM.
Tyranid's strength is also their weakness. Only way I see to defeat them would be to contain and starve them. Evacuate planets in the tendrils path/reach and virus bomb them to destroy all biomass. Divert the industrial resources used for planetside war and produce more spaceships with fewer crew and more guns.
Use Space Marines and Titans to eventually purge planets that had Tyranid infestations, after the tendrils have been eliminated.
Forgot to also include the AdMech, since they are more machine then organic.
I did a thought experiment on numbers a while back. So basically Nids assuming my math was correct
Spoiler:
So lets begin with the Nids.
In the BRB there is a passage on the Hive Fleets (sub box page 237) which states there have been 9 distinct Hive Fleets in the Galaxy thusfar with "millions" of ships comprised of "mililons" of creatures ready for invasion.
Taking the lowend numbes first that would give us:
9 x 2,000,000 (2 million) x 2,000,000 (2 million)
Im taking 2 million as the very lowest end as the word "millions" implies more than one.
Hence, that totals:
3.6 to the power of 13.
That equals 360 trillion.
Next we take the extreme upper end. Since millions implies more than 1, the Nid fleets could reach a cap of 999,999,999 (or nine hundred and ninety nine million). So could the creatures onboard (as per the passge quoted).
There are 9 distinct fleets.
Hence
9 x 999,999,999, x 999,999,999
= 9 to the power of 18 which is called 9 quintillion afaik (9,000,000,000,000,000,000).
So thats the known Nids upper and ower ends. Obviously the other fleets int he Galactic Void and elsewhere could be even larger than this (or smaller too) but there is no hard evidence on them at all from what I can see.
Next is Humanity - I havent tried to do the Imperial Guard as the numbers are hard to pin down.
It is quoted in the BRB (page 170) that Humanity numbers around 1 million worlds. It also states this could be more or less due to the inherent inefficencies of tracking all the worlds so lets take the 1mil mark as a good base.
This is where things get less clear imo though.
Wiki quotes the IoM as having 32,380 Hive worlds. Each world can have 5-20 Hives with populations ranging fro 10 to 100 billion.
http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Planets
Personally Im unsure of where these numbers came from but lets try them out to see.
Lets start with the lower end for Hive worlds.
32,380 x 5 (hives) x 10,000,000,000 (10 billion)
= 1.6 to the power of 15 or 1.6,000,000,000,000,000)
or 1.6 quadrillion in short hand.
Things get difficult here however as there are no hard numbers for the other types of IoM worlds, civilised, fuedal, forge, death, agri, death etc.
Sticking with the low end figures fuedal worlds are stated to have a min population of about 10,000,000.
So taking 1,000,000,000 (total worlds) minus 32,380 (the Hives) leaves us with 967,620 worlds.
967,620 x 10,000,000 = 9.6 to the power of 12 or 9.6,000,000,000,000
or 9.6 trillion (note not even a patch on the Nid lowend numbers).
High end IoM then:
High end Hive
32,380 x 20 (hives per world) x 100,000,000,000 (100 billion)
= 6.5 to the power of 15 or 6.5,000,000,000,000,000
or 6.5 quadrillion
Taking the remaining 967,620 worlds and maxing all of them below a Hive worlds cap 99 billion (acknowledged this is wacky and dosent fit with feral, fuedal worlds) gives:
967,620 x 99,000,000,000
= 9.57 to the power of 16 or 950,000,000,000,000,000
or 950 quadrillion
+ Hives = 956 quadrillion.
Note still nowhere near the Nid upper levels.
Finally we can do an extreme IoM and say 1 millio worlds by the Hive cap of 100 billion
1 million x 100 billion=
1 to the power of 17
or 100,000,000,000,000,000
100 quadrillion.
Well if the psykers aren't held back, you'll have guys like Dak'ir just shredding Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra with little effort. The main thing constraining the Imperium is Chaos... without that it's open season on Tyranids as humans can utilize their psychic powers without restraint. Alpha Psykers in general will just go to town and reap trillions.
Also then there's other things, like the legions of Imperial Daemons besieging the Eye of Terror now pursuing new targets (good luck fighting avatars of fire), the Legion of the Damned. and most importantly areotech. If the Admech starts pumping out more DAOT tech, the Imperium will put the hurt on the Nids hard, especially in space.
"millions" of ships comprised of "mililons" of creatures ready for invasion.
is fine, but 9 x 2,000,000 (2 million) x 2,000,000 (2 million) implies each of those two million ships in a fleet has two million warrior-forms aboard. The boxout wording isn't necessarily stating that; even the assumption that it's stating each fleet is 2 million plus is not confirmed, and - since hive ships are of a similar scale to imperial capital ships, which have a crew population in the tens or hundreds of thousands (see Rogue Trader or novels like Resolute/Relentless), then having a 'troop complement' in the millions is unlikely.
Millions of warrior forms held in 'spore readiness', maybe, but that's not ready troops - youve got to sieze biomass to make them into actual combat units.
I'd concur that an otherwise undistracted Imperium Of Man would be capable of slapping down any threat currently described (disregarding ancient, sleeping necrons, currently-in-the-void hive fleets, and disunited ork empires). What makes it threatened is all of the dangers happening at once.
but 9 x 2,000,000 (2 million) x 2,000,000 (2 million) implies each of those two million ships in a fleet has two million warrior-forms aboard. The boxout wording isn't necessarily stating that;
Granted, its likely those ships have very much less than 2 million aboard them. However the math is based on the number ranges given, its simply impossible to say without more detail from fluff which I couldnt find tbh and likely is nowhere to be found outside of fanfic stuff.
The 2mil (+) aboard each ship was based on the number ranges quoted - not an exact science Im afraid.
I'd still wager however Nid numbers are collasol, there was also that 4th/5th IG codex quote that stated IG military preparation would have to ramp to 500% of current to meet a full scale Nid invasion. Until we get a hard number on what the current IG military forces look like its still a bit vague but they're going to be big numbers.
Seems to be a lot less debate on this one. That's both good and bad I guess.
Id like to point out that imperial worlds could be chosen as bait.
It wouldn't be hard at leaat first or second time, to lure the nids to a lush, organic enriched world, and let them swarm it and exterminatus it.
That said, imperium would need space superiority and while quite capable of doing so, would assuredly take losses.
Also, on the upper end of power, it is, cannoncily possible to discover a toxin that is incredibly deadly to the hive fleet. (Dawn of war 2) that upon consumptiom could quite possibly kill the entire hive that recives it. Of course this seems to require the hive fleet already be eating said planet. And does nothing for bugs on the ground or not around the hive minds ship.
Ive also heard of an instance where an imperial battle barge kamakazied into a large need fleet, forced its reactor to go critical and took almost a large portion of the tendrils ships. I cant site this one due to bad memory, but if anyone knows what I am talking about please do share.
Another note, nids are all combat ready, only about 75-80% of the Imperium can say the same. IIRC the numbers from the codex correctly - again, just going off memory
Wyzilla wrote: Well if the psykers aren't held back, you'll have guys like Dak'ir just shredding Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra with little effort. The main thing constraining the Imperium is Chaos... without that it's open season on Tyranids as humans can utilize their psychic powers without restraint. Alpha Psykers in general will just go to town and reap trillions.
Also then there's other things, like the legions of Imperial Daemons besieging the Eye of Terror now pursuing new targets (good luck fighting avatars of fire), the Legion of the Damned. and most importantly areotech. If the Admech starts pumping out more DAOT tech, the Imperium will put the hurt on the Nids hard, especially in space.
Wyzilla wrote: Well if the psykers aren't held back, you'll have guys like Dak'ir just shredding Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra with little effort. The main thing constraining the Imperium is Chaos... without that it's open season on Tyranids as humans can utilize their psychic powers without restraint. Alpha Psykers in general will just go to town and reap trillions.
Also then there's other things, like the legions of Imperial Daemons besieging the Eye of Terror now pursuing new targets (good luck fighting avatars of fire), the Legion of the Damned. and most importantly areotech. If the Admech starts pumping out more DAOT tech, the Imperium will put the hurt on the Nids hard, especially in space.
Imperial Daemons? What?
The Legion of the Damned. They are, for all intents and purposes, daemons born of the Emperor.
Wyzilla wrote: Well if the psykers aren't held back, you'll have guys like Dak'ir just shredding Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra with little effort. The main thing constraining the Imperium is Chaos... without that it's open season on Tyranids as humans can utilize their psychic powers without restraint. Alpha Psykers in general will just go to town and reap trillions.
Also then there's other things, like the legions of Imperial Daemons besieging the Eye of Terror now pursuing new targets (good luck fighting avatars of fire), the Legion of the Damned. and most importantly areotech. If the Admech starts pumping out more DAOT tech, the Imperium will put the hurt on the Nids hard, especially in space.
Imperial Daemons? What?
The Legion of the Damned. They are, for all intents and purposes, daemons born of the Emperor.
We've only seen isolated incidents of the Legion of the Damned, what evidence is there that there are "legions" of them?
I think the combined military might of all Imperial forces and all their dakka-dakka would be enough to win the day, eventually. It would be messy as feth, but I think they'd pull through.
Wyzilla wrote: Well if the psykers aren't held back, you'll have guys like Dak'ir just shredding Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra with little effort. The main thing constraining the Imperium is Chaos... without that it's open season on Tyranids as humans can utilize their psychic powers without restraint. Alpha Psykers in general will just go to town and reap trillions.
Also then there's other things, like the legions of Imperial Daemons besieging the Eye of Terror now pursuing new targets (good luck fighting avatars of fire), the Legion of the Damned. and most importantly areotech. If the Admech starts pumping out more DAOT tech, the Imperium will put the hurt on the Nids hard, especially in space.
Imperial Daemons? What?
The light of the Astrnomicon spawns legions of angels of fire that besiege the outer worlds of the Eye of Terror and purge all life upon them.
Wyzilla wrote: Well if the psykers aren't held back, you'll have guys like Dak'ir just shredding Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra with little effort. The main thing constraining the Imperium is Chaos... without that it's open season on Tyranids as humans can utilize their psychic powers without restraint. Alpha Psykers in general will just go to town and reap trillions.
Also then there's other things, like the legions of Imperial Daemons besieging the Eye of Terror now pursuing new targets (good luck fighting avatars of fire), the Legion of the Damned. and most importantly areotech. If the Admech starts pumping out more DAOT tech, the Imperium will put the hurt on the Nids hard, especially in space.
Imperial Daemons? What?
The light of the Astrnomicon spawns legions of angels of fire that besiege the outer worlds of the Eye of Terror and purge all life upon them.
Source? This seems like a really cool piece of fluff, I'd love to read some of the lore behind it
Talon of Horus, I believe. This was shamelessly lifted from another discussion on the subject over on B&C.
Immersturm wrote:
For those who are interested, here is the passage I am talking about:
Quote
There, sat in placid splendour on my throne, was the ghost of a murdered god.
The god’s face was covered by a mask of shining gold, its features wrenched into a rictus of crying torment. The expression – eyes open, mouth wide, even the parted teeth showing in detailed gold – was a man’s death-scream immortalised in holy metal. Bladed sunrays flared from the edges of the metal face, forming a crest of golden knives.
The rest of his manifestation existed in contrast to the dark ostentation of his sacred helm. He was thin, cadaverously so, and wearing a plain toga of imperial white. His skin didn’t commit to paleness or duskiness – it seemed a caramel blend of both, perhaps born from genetics, perhaps stained by the light of a natural sun.
Quote
‘You are the Astronomican,’ I said.
The golden mask tilted in a nod. ‘I stare into eternity and witness the dance of daemons. I sing forever into the endless night, adding my melody to the Great Game. I am Imperious, the Avatar of the Astronomican. I have come to ask you to turn back.’
Quote
‘You are harming my crew,’ I said to the Solar Priest. ‘These mortals cannot understand your words, and your power wounds them.’
‘I have come as the Voice, not as the Warlord. Harm is not my intent.’
After the Heresy, the Traitors are essentially trapped inside the Eye of Terror. They don't yet have any known safe passage back to realspace.
The protagonists of the novel are looking for the Vengeful Spirit (Horus's flagship),which they've been led to believe is hidden somewhere in the Eleusinian Veil - the dust cloud and crone worlds marking the edge of the Eye. To get there they have to traverse the Firetide.
Where the light of the Astronomican meets the Eye is called the Firetide - like an immense Warp storm crossed with an epic daemonic battle between the Neverborn of the Eye and fiery angels manifest from the Astronomican.
It's this that's keeping the Traitor Legions bottled up in the Eye. Beyond the Firetide are the Radiant Worlds - planets that are bathed in the light of the Astronomican but not burned by it.
They plan to bypass the Firetide using a deserted section of the webway. When they leave it, Imperious shows up to warn them off. He's a daemon, to all intents and purposes - a Warp entity created by the psychic energy of the Astronomican. He tells them continuing on this path (which ultimately results in them finding Abaddon and founding the Black Legion) will lead to the end of the Imperium and the damnation of mankind. That goes down well: Lheor, a World Eater, shoots him.
In 40k rule terms, he would be daemonic character, maybe a herald or even a greater daemon. The essence of the Emperor's will personified in the Warp. In that instance he was an emissary, sent to try to talk to them out of it. But he suggests that if they ignore him, next time they meet he will come as "fire and fury":
Quote
‘My place is to ask you to turn back, and so I ask it once more.’
We looked at each other, we warriors from a handful of rival Legions, not understanding the spirit’s words.
‘Why?’ asked Telemachon. His face mask was a visage of serenity opposing the Solar Priest’s image of wracking pain. ‘What threat are we to you?’
‘You are no threat to me, for I am simply a bridge in the Song. You are a threat to the Singer.’
‘And if we don’t turn back?’ Lheor asked.
‘Then the Song’s next verse will be fire and fury, not wisdom and mercy. It will come – not now, not soon, but in time and in force. The Fate you seek to engineer cannot be allowed to come to pass.’
I'm assuming that the Legion of the Damned are the Angels of Fire, the ones keeping the Traitor Legions bottled up in the eye. Perhaps the Emprah turns the spirits of heroic Astartes into his Legion of the Damned/ Angels of Fire? they really need to expand upon this and make LotD a full-fledged faction in 40k.
2BlackJack1 wrote: If the IoM has all of their resources able to be put against this, they've got it covered. The reason the IoM is failing is because it's being attacked on all sides constantly
I agree. The Imperium is extremely powerful, but the problem is that they're a target for every other serious threat in the galaxy - Orks, Necrons, Tyranids, Chaos. Excepting Chaos, arguably, in the long-term sense, any one of these threats is not enough to seriously damage the Imperium, and they only get as far as they do because the Imperium is diffuse and distracted. Any one of them could be eradicated by the Imperium if the Imperium were able to concentrate on eliminating them and managed to coordinate its efforts to do so.
The Imperium reminds me of many historical states that were clearly the dominant power in their region without being totally so. The late Roman Republic, for instance, in its last century or so was frequently at war, but after the conclusion of the Punic Wars it never truly faced an external threat to its existence. The wars against Mithridates VI of Pontus and the Germanic tribes invading northern Italy were serious conflicts, but they were threats to Roman domination of their world, not to the continued existence of the Roman civilisation. The only real threats Rome faced in this period were civil wars.
I think the Imperium is similar. The Orks or the Tyranids can threaten thousands of worlds, maybe even take control of an entire segmentum if not properly checked, but they're no real threat to the continued existence of the Imperium as a whole.
DoomShakaLaka wrote:That is epic. Why can't THEY be a faction?
There is a pretty good reason. Right now, you can see lots of Imperial daemons. At the moment you can read about Gaunt meeting an elderly nun who used to be a soldier and loans him her car, and then later it turns out she has been dead for 2000 years. There is an imperial saint leading a host of guardsmen who is kind of a fake, except that she kind of isn't, and it turns out miracles do happen. The background for Dante is that he was really in the doghouse and threw himself into the fire, but he was blessed by the Sanguinor and now he is who he is. If your palatine dies, (it used to be that) you get more faith points for her army to avenge her.
But if the 40k sigmarines become a faction, then all you have are a bunch of chumps. The models aren't going to actually radiate fire that burns but does not consume. It would just be dumb.
I'm assuming that the Legion of the Damned are the Angels of Fire, the ones keeping the Traitor Legions bottled up in the eye. Perhaps the Emprah turns the spirits of heroic Astartes into his Legion of the Damned/ Angels of Fire? they really need to expand upon this and make LotD a full-fledged faction in 40k.
The Legion of the Damned didn't exist at the time that novel is set.
Imagine the imperium as is. In a 1 on 1 grudge match, you would slowly see the imperium building up the outer perimeter or perhaps a distance within to create a defensive region of systems for safety. What most likely would occur is that Mars would eventually come up with a way to detect tyranid encroachment. Tyranids, as much as I love them, have a fatal flaw when it comes to transportation. Their ability to move through space is dependant on the distance of nearby celestial bodies. When the gravitational forces react with their fleets, it shunts them out quite a ways from their intended targets, and using traditional sublight propulsion, they can be years or even decades away from attacking their target if the system is large enough.
So, what you would see would be the creation of large integrated defense screens designed to detect Tyranids as well as destroy them through the use of orbital defense guns. As long as the fleet is not too massive, the odds of Tyranids reaching the ground are slim, and it would also make the use of large fleets relatively pointless unless a fleet manages to enter the imperium on a new axis where defenses are limited, and a rapid remobilization of firepower is required.
Imagine the imperium as is. In a 1 on 1 grudge match, you would slowly see the imperium building up the outer perimeter or perhaps a distance within to create a defensive region of systems for safety. What most likely would occur is that Mars would eventually come up with a way to detect tyranid encroachment. Tyranids, as much as I love them, have a fatal flaw when it comes to transportation. Their ability to move through space is dependant on the distance of nearby celestial bodies. When the gravitational forces react with their fleets, it shunts them out quite a ways from their intended targets, and using traditional sublight propulsion, they can be years or even decades away from attacking their target if the system is large enough.
So, what you would see would be the creation of large integrated defense screens designed to detect Tyranids as well as destroy them through the use of orbital defense guns. As long as the fleet is not too massive, the odds of Tyranids reaching the ground are slim, and it would also make the use of large fleets relatively pointless unless a fleet manages to enter the imperium on a new axis where defenses are limited, and a rapid remobilization of firepower is required.
Also, phone autocorrect sucks.
If that's the case though, the Tyranids may well go with a Kraken style "spread out all the way across that front" approach, use hundreds of thousands of tiny fleets, slip straight past the cordon and ravage all the poorly defended worlds behind the line. Remember, you can't build a "wall" in space; the only reason something like the Cadian Gate works is because it's a relatively small region of space to police... and even then Chaos slips by in reasonable force on a regular basis.
If all the soft target agri-worlds and others start to fall, then after a couple of decades the supply lines to that shield wall collapse and all those trillions of Guardsmen begin to starve to death. There's also nothing to stop the fleets from focusing on all the non-Imperial worlds to begin with.
In this scenario, Tyranid victory is less likely to come from a hammer-blow fleet smashing key human bastions as it is from the Imperium having the galaxy quietly devoured when they aren't looking. It's a big galaxy and it doesn't matter if the first 50% of it to fall is not populated by humans.
Imagine the imperium as is. In a 1 on 1 grudge match, you would slowly see the imperium building up the outer perimeter or perhaps a distance within to create a defensive region of systems for safety. What most likely would occur is that Mars would eventually come up with a way to detect tyranid encroachment. Tyranids, as much as I love them, have a fatal flaw when it comes to transportation. Their ability to move through space is dependant on the distance of nearby celestial bodies. When the gravitational forces react with their fleets, it shunts them out quite a ways from their intended targets, and using traditional sublight propulsion, they can be years or even decades away from attacking their target if the system is large enough.
So, what you would see would be the creation of large integrated defense screens designed to detect Tyranids as well as destroy them through the use of orbital defense guns. As long as the fleet is not too massive, the odds of Tyranids reaching the ground are slim, and it would also make the use of large fleets relatively pointless unless a fleet manages to enter the imperium on a new axis where defenses are limited, and a rapid remobilization of firepower is required.
Also, phone autocorrect sucks.
If that's the case though, the Tyranids may well go with a Kraken style "spread out all the way across that front" approach, use hundreds of thousands of tiny fleets, slip straight past the cordon and ravage all the poorly defended worlds behind the line. Remember, you can't build a "wall" in space; the only reason something like the Cadian Gate works is because it's a relatively small region of space to police... and even then Chaos slips by in reasonable force on a regular basis.
If all the soft target agri-worlds and others start to fall, then after a couple of decades the supply lines to that shield wall collapse and all those trillions of Guardsmen begin to starve to death. There's also nothing to stop the fleets from focusing on all the non-Imperial worlds to begin with.
In this scenario, Tyranid victory is less likely to come from a hammer-blow fleet smashing key human bastions as it is from the Imperium having the galaxy quietly devoured when they aren't looking. It's a big galaxy and it doesn't matter if the first 50% of it to fall is not populated by humans.
It is part of the problem with space born empires. Realistically, a true wall is impossible with the issue of covering all axis, however, it is possible to turn systems and suitably dense areas into fortresses, the only issue is that while that would take considerable amounts of time, small density areas do raise the issue of allowing them to spread out and sneak through the lines. Ironically, you would have to rely on the massive amount of biomass contained within these hard points to persuade Tyrants to not go after weak targets.
The only way I see a clear cut victory for the imperium is if Mars found a way to create large scale gravity wells in space.
The IoM, without any other threats, would defeat the entire implied threat of the Tyranid race. Honestly, the full power and capability of the IoM is seriously under appreciated.
Heck, all Space Marines, focused against the Tyranids, would likely be able to halt them entirely.
The tyranids are stupid, wasteful and ultimately unfit to live. Even if the IoM can't stop them they will die in our galaxy. Something as silly as that couldn't have had any success against intelligent opponents.
Spetulhu wrote: The tyranids are stupid, wasteful and ultimately unfit to live. Even if the IoM can't stop them they will die in our galaxy. Something as silly as that couldn't have had any success against intelligent opponents.
If everything is actually getting organised by competent minds, the Tyranids are fethed: the Deathwatch games established that they can be beaten in space without any extra cheese as they are very vulnerable when feeding and traveling between planets (awakning them there is terrible for them - unable to hibernate or feed on biomass or sufficient sunlight/atmosphere, they slowly starve if the IoM can simply let the battle last long enough).
On land, the Cult Mechanicus codex establishes that they can be beaten simply by setting the entire atmosphere on fire after they begin feeding (but the recordkeepers lost the file in a typical display of insanity).
: the Deathwatch games established that they can be beaten in space without any extra cheese as they are very vulnerable when feeding and traveling between planets
Not according to BFG rules and background they dont - they are lethal at mid-close range and once an enemy ship is entangled its like having a whole SM Legion board you in terms of ferocity.
Scale shot
The tyranids are stupid, wasteful and ultimately unfit to live. Even if the IoM can't stop them they will die in our galaxy. Something as silly as that couldn't have had any success against intelligent opponents.
The Tyranid strategy since invading the 40k universe has been to fly their fleets straight towards the largest lightbulb.
On a grand scale the entire Nid faction is just a big, fat moth. The Imperium, without any distractions, would be able to destroy a nearly unlimited number of tyranids.
Not according to BFG rules and background they dont - they are lethal at mid-close range and once an enemy ship is entangled its like having a whole SM Legion board you in terms of ferocity
The key words in your argument are mid-close range (really just close range), which means Imperial fleets can happily pulverize all your capital ships (read; ability to continue travel towards food).
On a personal level I must admit to bias against the Nids because I think their "we are a species of unlimited perfect organisms, oh wait, we just evolved to be more perfect and automatically beat whatever we evolved against in the last five minutes" is an assault on my brain's ability to function.
So, to sum up this entire thread; the imperium wins as long as you can neutralize Tyranid fleets before they get in close range. After that, it is pretty much a given that they have the upper hand?
Unyielding Hunger wrote: So, to sum up this entire thread; the imperium wins as long as you can neutralize Tyranid fleets before they get in close range. After that, it is pretty much a given that they have the upper hand?
Unless those fleets are consisted of space marines and or storm troopers/admech.
Regular imperial navy ships however, will usually have a bad day.
Man, people assuming the IoM would just win outright are really overlooking some incredibly important points. First, the Tyranids act as a single entity if they are all assembled together. Second, IoM doesn't exactly have the most efficient and stable system of transportation. They are a lumbering giant even in the best case scenarios. Third, Tyranids evolve constantly as the war progresses.
Of course, these types of discussions are always a bit silly. The fluff is always full of hyperbole. The IoM is struggling because it is constantly under attack. True. The Tyranids haven't exterminated the galaxy because they are scattered and haven't brought their full numbers to bear. True. The Orks would be an impossibly powerful killing machine protected by the greatest psychic field as the collective psyker abilities of the orks when multiplied to their fullest extent would probably just tear a new Eye of Terror in reality and birth Gork or possibly Mork. True. The Necrons, should they ever awake simultaneously and with full mental capacities, would eradicate all that stood in their way. True. One day demons will just the whole universe in an orgy of maniacal slaughter. Etc. Etc.
The whole premise of the 40k universe is that it is far, FAR from a perfect situation for any of the super factions. Hence, the universe is constantly on the verge of destruction but god only knows who 'wins'. Which, of course, is why we all love it so much.
Grumblewartz wrote: Man, people assuming the IoM would just win outright are really overlooking some incredibly important points. First, the Tyranids act as a single entity if they are all assembled together. Second, IoM doesn't exactly have the most efficient and stable system of transportation. They are a lumbering giant even in the best case scenarios. Third, Tyranids evolve constantly as the war progresses.
Of course, these types of discussions are always a bit silly. The fluff is always full of hyperbole. The IoM is struggling because it is constantly under attack. True. The Tyranids haven't exterminated the galaxy because they are scattered and haven't brought their full numbers to bear. True. The Orks would be an impossibly powerful killing machine protected by the greatest psychic field as the collective psyker abilities of the orks when multiplied to their fullest extent would probably just tear a new Eye of Terror in reality and birth Gork or possibly Mork. True. The Necrons, should they ever awake simultaneously and with full mental capacities, would eradicate all that stood in their way. True. One day demons will just the whole universe in an orgy of maniacal slaughter. Etc. Etc.
The whole premise of the 40k universe is that it is far, FAR from a perfect situation for any of the super factions. Hence, the universe is constantly on the verge of destruction but god only knows who 'wins'. Which, of course, is why we all love it so much.
The Tyranids do not function as a single organism, Hive Fleets act as separate entities and have IIRC even come to blows before, they don't play well together. Rather the bigger and meaner fleet consumes the lesser in a pitched fight before moving on.
And no, the main ailments of the Imperium is Chaos. Chaos strains the warp and slows their transportation, it messes with their communication, and it demands constant and eternal warfare around the Eye of Terror. As in this scenario, where Chaos just goes up in a cloud of smoke, nothing is holding back consistent FTL, consistent and reliable FTL comms, and frees up massive garrison forces and fleets. Being able to focus exclusively on the Tyranid threat frees up the Imperium completely, allowing them construct fleets in months, marshal forces with greater efficiency, and start tossing massive flotillas at the 'Nids while scrounging for STC's without any worry of molestation by other enemies- especially Chaos.
Without distractions like Chaos, Tau and orks to worry them, IOM has got this well covered.
Even if the Tyranids win the first few battles, IOM has got the advantage in manpower, raw firepower and fleet size and strength.
With specialized bastions like the Rock and the Phalanx star fort (White Scars), not being utilized against chaos, IOM forces could wipe out tyranid fleets.
Deathwing and all the other space hulk games reveal that IOM would probably dominate chewing out genestealers before they land on the majority of planets.
Finally, Tyranids have never had the majority of IOM attention on them before, it's always been just a fleeting glimpse of their power.
Also. Tigarus and his link to the hive mind could end up basically second guessing most of the tyranids movement,. exterminus a few of the planets in their path, and bingo....tyranids are weak, and you board their ships and kill them whilst they are hibernating/take out the ship.
Grumblewartz wrote: Man, people assuming the IoM would just win outright are really overlooking some incredibly important points. First, the Tyranids act as a single entity if they are all assembled together. Second, IoM doesn't exactly have the most efficient and stable system of transportation. They are a lumbering giant even in the best case scenarios. Third, Tyranids evolve constantly as the war progresses.
Of course, these types of discussions are always a bit silly. The fluff is always full of hyperbole. The IoM is struggling because it is constantly under attack. True. The Tyranids haven't exterminated the galaxy because they are scattered and haven't brought their full numbers to bear. True. The Orks would be an impossibly powerful killing machine protected by the greatest psychic field as the collective psyker abilities of the orks when multiplied to their fullest extent would probably just tear a new Eye of Terror in reality and birth Gork or possibly Mork. True. The Necrons, should they ever awake simultaneously and with full mental capacities, would eradicate all that stood in their way. True. One day demons will just the whole universe in an orgy of maniacal slaughter. Etc. Etc.
The whole premise of the 40k universe is that it is far, FAR from a perfect situation for any of the super factions. Hence, the universe is constantly on the verge of destruction but god only knows who 'wins'. Which, of course, is why we all love it so much.
The Tyranids do not function as a single organism, Hive Fleets act as separate entities and have IIRC even come to blows before, they don't play well together. Rather the bigger and meaner fleet consumes the lesser in a pitched fight before moving on.
And no, the main ailments of the Imperium is Chaos. Chaos strains the warp and slows their transportation, it messes with their communication, and it demands constant and eternal warfare around the Eye of Terror. As in this scenario, where Chaos just goes up in a cloud of smoke, nothing is holding back consistent FTL, consistent and reliable FTL comms, and frees up massive garrison forces and fleets. Being able to focus exclusively on the Tyranid threat frees up the Imperium completely, allowing them construct fleets in months, marshal forces with greater efficiency, and start tossing massive flotillas at the 'Nids while scrounging for STC's without any worry of molestation by other enemies- especially Chaos.
So the Tyranids are going to be at each other's throats but the IoM are utterly at peace? Seems like you are overlooking the prompt. In a perfect scenario where it is just purely all of IoM vs all of Tyranids (i.e. no internal strife) yes, the Tyranids would be able to communicate instantly and operate like a single swarm. The Hive Minds are greatest living psykers in the galaxy. Additionally, not every human can fight, nor has the will to fight, but absolutely every tyranid will die without a seconds hesitation.
I'm not saying the Tyranids win, but such a war would be a conflict of attrition that would last thousands of years.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Doctadeth wrote: Finally, Tyranids have never had the majority of IOM attention on them before, it's always been just a fleeting glimpse of their power.
Also. Tigarus and his link to the hive mind could end up basically second guessing most of the tyranids movement,. exterminus a few of the planets in their path, and bingo....tyranids are weak, and you board their ships and kill them whilst they are hibernating/take out the ship.
And the IoM has never had all the attention of the Tyranids on them, just like the IoM has never had the full attention of all the Orks in the galaxy. Exterminatus is not a viable tactic. You can't just destroy every planet that Tyranids land on - it would entail destroying most of the galaxy. Again, the Tyrands vastly outnumber IoM.
Tigarius mind would explode if the Tyranid hive minds focused on it. He is not a god, lets not exaggerate - ok, I can't even finish that because all of 40k fluff is hyperbole, haha.
Grumblewartz wrote: Man, people assuming the IoM would just win outright are really overlooking some incredibly important points. First, the Tyranids act as a single entity if they are all assembled together. Second, IoM doesn't exactly have the most efficient and stable system of transportation. They are a lumbering giant even in the best case scenarios. Third, Tyranids evolve constantly as the war progresses.
Of course, these types of discussions are always a bit silly. The fluff is always full of hyperbole. The IoM is struggling because it is constantly under attack. True. The Tyranids haven't exterminated the galaxy because they are scattered and haven't brought their full numbers to bear. True. The Orks would be an impossibly powerful killing machine protected by the greatest psychic field as the collective psyker abilities of the orks when multiplied to their fullest extent would probably just tear a new Eye of Terror in reality and birth Gork or possibly Mork. True. The Necrons, should they ever awake simultaneously and with full mental capacities, would eradicate all that stood in their way. True. One day demons will just the whole universe in an orgy of maniacal slaughter. Etc. Etc.
The whole premise of the 40k universe is that it is far, FAR from a perfect situation for any of the super factions. Hence, the universe is constantly on the verge of destruction but god only knows who 'wins'. Which, of course, is why we all love it so much.
The Tyranids do not function as a single organism, Hive Fleets act as separate entities and have IIRC even come to blows before, they don't play well together. Rather the bigger and meaner fleet consumes the lesser in a pitched fight before moving on.
And no, the main ailments of the Imperium is Chaos. Chaos strains the warp and slows their transportation, it messes with their communication, and it demands constant and eternal warfare around the Eye of Terror. As in this scenario, where Chaos just goes up in a cloud of smoke, nothing is holding back consistent FTL, consistent and reliable FTL comms, and frees up massive garrison forces and fleets. Being able to focus exclusively on the Tyranid threat frees up the Imperium completely, allowing them construct fleets in months, marshal forces with greater efficiency, and start tossing massive flotillas at the 'Nids while scrounging for STC's without any worry of molestation by other enemies- especially Chaos.
So the Tyranids are going to be at each other's throats but the IoM are utterly at peace? Seems like you are overlooking the prompt. In a perfect scenario where it is just purely all of IoM vs all of Tyranids (i.e. no internal strife) yes, the Tyranids would be able to communicate instantly and operate like a single swarm. The Hive Minds are greatest living psykers in the galaxy. Additionally, not every human can fight, nor has the will to fight, but absolutely every tyranid will die without a seconds hesitation.
I'm not saying the Tyranids win, but such a war would be a conflict of attrition that would last thousands of years.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Doctadeth wrote: Finally, Tyranids have never had the majority of IOM attention on them before, it's always been just a fleeting glimpse of their power.
Also. Tigarus and his link to the hive mind could end up basically second guessing most of the tyranids movement,. exterminus a few of the planets in their path, and bingo....tyranids are weak, and you board their ships and kill them whilst they are hibernating/take out the ship.
And the IoM has never had all the attention of the Tyranids on them, just like the IoM has never had the full attention of all the Orks in the galaxy. Exterminatus is not a viable tactic. You can't just destroy every planet that Tyranids land on - it would entail destroying most of the galaxy. Again, the Tyrands vastly outnumber IoM.
Tigarius mind would explode if the Tyranid hive minds focused on it. He is not a god, lets not exaggerate - ok, I can't even finish that because all of 40k fluff is hyperbole, haha.
And you don't seem to understand the level of psychic power humans can throw out. All Alpha Psykers are now going to be fully directed at the Tyranids. These are the guys that can puppet entire star systems and control billions of minds, annihilate fleets, or casually rip apart titans by wiggling their eyebrows. Now they no longer have to worry about Chaos corruption with daemons claiming their souls if they unleash their powers without full restraint. Which in turns means the chances of them getting a bolt to the head from an Inquisitor is reduced.
Then there's other aces the Imperium has up its sleeves. Y'know the Phalanx? According to the Codices/Rulebook, the Imperium can still build mini-me versions of the star fort that are both fully mobile and the size of an entire continent or larger. This is then coupled with the unrestrained industry of the Admch, which can make flagships in a matter of months- let alone far smaller things such as Titans or escorts.
But the real killer is Alpha Psykers. If the Imperium could rally a single, stable, Super Saiyan-esque psyker similar to Dak'ir when empowered by the geneseed of Salamanders from the Horus Heresy, each world they were garrisoned on would be effectively immune to by any Tyranid Hive Fleet attack.
My friend, I believe you have missed my point. I am not denying anything about the IoM's capabilities, what I am pointing out is that the scale of the conflict is beyond anything imaginable. It has been a well established premise that the Hive Mind are the most powerful psychic forces in the galaxy - hence, their ability to control trillions of creatures. The shadow in the warp, as has been explained in numerous instances, clogs out the vast majority of human psykers. Now, how powerful would mankind be with the emperor's mind unfettered by combating Chaos? Who knows.
My point from the beginning is that the anecdotal evidence for IoM vs Tyranids that has been available is just glimpses of both sides' veritably innumerable military strength. Just like it has always since the beginning of the 40k universe an accepted notion that should all the Orks ever unite, mankind would be doomed, it is essentially the same for all the major powers. Therefore, we can really only conclude that if 2 of the galactic powers were completely unfettered by any sort of internal or external division, it would be a titanic conflict of quite literally unimaginable size and with a completely unpredictable consequence. The only thing that we could reasonably deduce is that the galaxy would be ripped apart, it would be Pyrrhic victory for whomever was the last standing.
Shouldn't the Shadow in the Warp mess with these Alpha Level psykers?
Further more, if the Tyranids suffer a crippling loss to some guy waving his hands and smashing them with Warp energy then it won't be long until some sort of anti-psyker weapon turns up (the Maleceptor is already the first step on the way to that, and a trio of those completely punk Mephiston, who is lauded as "one of the most powerful psykers in the galaxy" - it's not even a struggle for them, they just crush him).
Xyptc wrote: Shouldn't the Shadow in the Warp mess with these Alpha Level psykers?
Further more, if the Tyranids suffer a crippling loss to some guy waving his hands and smashing them with Warp energy then it won't be long until some sort of anti-psyker weapon turns up (the Maleceptor is already the first step on the way to that, and a trio of those completely punk Mephiston, who is lauded as "one of the most powerful psykers in the galaxy" - it's not even a struggle for them, they just crush him).
You are greatly underestimating an alpha level psyker.
Mephiston, tigurius, these guys are beta level. Top notch beta, but beta, then again you can argue they are one step below even that. Here is a refrence on psyker level.
Lets see, 2 hive fleets were splintered by both Eldar and Space Marine forces.
Heck, Behemoth was taken down by a battlefleet and the ultramarines by themselves. If ONE single hive fleet was defeated by a chapter with support, imagine what the full might of all the space marines could do.
Then you have the Ordinance mechanicum, the Knight homeworlds (And how many Knights actually have experience vs nids). You don't need to exterminus all of the planets in the tyranids area, just the ones that are hive nest grounds. Then you take on the ships.
Then you have untouchables. If enough untouchables gathered, the effect could concievably destroy the hive mind. Raevenor mentions that they amplify each other....that would just shred any hive fleets.
Remember guys, the premise of this thread presumes each faction is united (Huge boost for Imperium/not a whole lot of change for the nids) and specifically cuts off any potential inter-universe spill-over for the Tyranids.
Both of those facts tilt favor towards IoM.
EDIT: Forgot the "no other enemies" clause. Even more huge for the Imperium, which has a vast amount of territory to protect, only so-so for the nids (reduces biodiversity even. possible to argue for a net negative if we assume they would conquer and subsume these other factions).
Spetulhu wrote: The tyranids are stupid, wasteful and ultimately unfit to live.
Can you elaborate on this?
They consume everything behind them in their hunger, then pick a direction to a new target. It's like the mongols before they realized that unburnt cities and living taxpayers was better in the long run than killing everyone and taking their stuff. You can only do that once, you see. Every journey to a new target is a deathmarch they must succeed in or die. And so-called living ships and weapons is one of the most inefficient things you can come up with, especially the warrior critters that can't eat but instead run on until their internal energy reserves are depleted. Not to mention the fixed weapons. If a human heavy weapons trooper dies his squadmates can pick up his gun, if the tyranids lose the heavy dakkafex they'll have to bring a whole new one. It's incredibly inefficient. Couple that with opponents that can actually see your weaknesses and you're screwed.
Xyptc wrote: Shouldn't the Shadow in the Warp mess with these Alpha Level psykers?
Further more, if the Tyranids suffer a crippling loss to some guy waving his hands and smashing them with Warp energy then it won't be long until some sort of anti-psyker weapon turns up (the Maleceptor is already the first step on the way to that, and a trio of those completely punk Mephiston, who is lauded as "one of the most powerful psykers in the galaxy" - it's not even a struggle for them, they just crush him).
You are greatly underestimating an alpha level psyker.
Mephiston, tigurius, these guys are beta level. Top notch beta, but beta, then again you can argue they are one step below even that. Here is a refrence on psyker level.
Alpha level psykers.... these guys can potentially exterminatus planets with their mind. They can literally pulp the brains of an entire ork waaaagh.
They are few, excptionally rare, (like, rarer than nids beating marines in fluff of imperium books)
Empy is aplha+, look at what he can do.
Also, where is this story about 3 malcepters punking .mephy?
This intrests me.
Shield of Baal: Deathstorm campaign book. Mephiston overpowers a few Zoanthropes, then the Maleceptor trio turn on him and he collapses into a psychic coma, completely and utterly defeated.
There's also a short novella that came out around the same time in which a swarm releases a Maleceptor to try and kill Tigurius, and his powers are no match for it either. He suddenly finds himself with a portion of the Emperor's own psychic might and manages to kill it, but without a little divine intervention he too would have fallen to the latest anti-psyker weapon beast.
Doctadeth wrote: Lets see, 2 hive fleets were splintered by both Eldar and Space Marine forces.
Heck, Behemoth was taken down by a battlefleet and the ultramarines by themselves. If ONE single hive fleet was defeated by a chapter with support, imagine what the full might of all the space marines could do.
Then you have the Ordinance mechanicum, the Knight homeworlds (And how many Knights actually have experience vs nids). You don't need to exterminus all of the planets in the tyranids area, just the ones that are hive nest grounds. Then you take on the ships.
Then you have untouchables. If enough untouchables gathered, the effect could concievably destroy the hive mind. Raevenor mentions that they amplify each other....that would just shred any hive fleets.
The scale of each fleet has been an order of magnitude greater than the last. The single tendril of Leviathan that smashes the Blood Angels shield worlds in the Shield of Baal campaign is significantly larger than Behemoth was. Said system is reinforced by the majority of the Blood Angels chapter, including their First Company, all of their greatest heroes and the Sanguinor. They don't win. The Necrons even explode the local gas giant with stellar energy to try and exterminatus the Hive Fleet, and the Necrons fail to inflict crippling damage on the fleet, which drains what's left of the system and then moves on. Hive Fleet Leviathan is so huge and intelligent that engagements with the previous fleets are giving the Imperium a false sense of security.
The untouchables comment is just supposition too; it's never been tested in the field.
They consume everything behind them in their hunger, then pick a direction to a new target. It's like the mongols before they realized that unburnt cities and living taxpayers was better in the long run than killing everyone and taking their stuff. You can only do that once, you see. Every journey to a new target is a deathmarch they must succeed in or die. And so-called living ships and weapons is one of the most inefficient things you can come up with, especially the warrior critters that can't eat but instead run on until their internal energy reserves are depleted. Not to mention the fixed weapons. If a human heavy weapons trooper dies his squadmates can pick up his gun, if the tyranids lose the heavy dakkafex they'll have to bring a whole new one. It's incredibly inefficient. Couple that with opponents that can actually see your weaknesses and you're screwed.
Amen brother. Tyranid folk will say there's no loss as all biomatter is subsumed into the fleet after fighting and eating is over. That's bullcrap. Energy is being expended with each alteration/recreation there is. Current Nid practices are woefully inefficient, which leads me to believe their previous galaxies were pushovers compared to 40k (the average fictional, and real, universe can't compete with 40k).
They consume everything behind them in their hunger, then pick a direction to a new target. It's like the mongols before they realized that unburnt cities and living taxpayers was better in the long run than killing everyone and taking their stuff. You can only do that once, you see. Every journey to a new target is a deathmarch they must succeed in or die. And so-called living ships and weapons is one of the most inefficient things you can come up with, especially the warrior critters that can't eat but instead run on until their internal energy reserves are depleted. Not to mention the fixed weapons. If a human heavy weapons trooper dies his squadmates can pick up his gun, if the tyranids lose the heavy dakkafex they'll have to bring a whole new one. It's incredibly inefficient. Couple that with opponents that can actually see your weaknesses and you're screwed.
Amen brother. Tyranid folk will say there's no loss as all biomatter is subsumed into the fleet after fighting and eating is over. That's bullcrap. Energy is being expended with each alteration/recreation there is. Current Nid practices are woefully inefficient, which leads me to believe their previous galaxies were pushovers compared to 40k (the average fictional, and real, universe can't compete with 40k).
Except that the Tyranids eat far more than what they expend fighting. The sheer amount of material consumed makes their approach efficient. The Tyranids drink the oceans and the atmosphere and subtract enough material that there is a visible reduction of the planet's radius.
Except that the Tyranids eat far more than what they expend fighting. The sheer amount of material consumed makes their approach efficient. The Tyranids drink the oceans and the atmosphere and subtract enough material that there is a visible reduction of the planet's radius.
You misunderstand my point if you think that gobsmacking quantities of raw materials makes my objection go away.
However many quintillion tons of biomass the Tyranids have to work with, they would have much more if they did things differently.
If the Tyranids worked "realistically", they would throw a virus to the planet that would turn everything in bio goo ready for possessing. But then we wouldn't have a miniature game.
Hell, if the fluff was realistic in any way, there wouldn't be something as stupid as the Space Marines.
Tyran wrote: If the Tyranids worked "realistically", they would throw a virus to the planet that would turn everything in bio goo ready for possessing. But then we wouldn't have a miniature game.
Hell, if the fluff was realistic in any way, there wouldn't be something as stupid as the Space Marines.
True. But in my mind there's a difference between "they're uber and have rocket launcher machine guns" and "they use well understood real world physics incorrectly." One is quite clearly not taking itself too seriously/obviously a product of the fictional world. The other makes a real thing fake.
"What the Imperium cannot know is that, should the Necrons ever fully wake and unite,
they would face a foe as numerous as themselves."
Page 23 Necron Codex
Having Encountered the Tyranids in the outer Void the Silent King returns to the Galaxy.
Page 89 Necron Codex
It is the Silent King's wish that the younger races' flawed attempts to destroy the Tyranid do not simply feed the Hive Fleets beyond the point where even a united Necron People have any hope of Victory
Codex Necron 5th Ed page 26
He said, “They are the rising storm, and you must become the shield”.
Last page of Words of the Silent King (to dante)
---
Right now i would say the IoM without outside Help doesn't win (Shadow of the Warp => Human Psykers are Useless. I seem to recall that only the BA or the UM Libby survived sending his mind into the Shadow of the Warp. When tyranids win a planete they can recup their loss when feeding of everything that is dead. They Evolve in order to adapt (The crossing of the Castelan Belt for example "Shield of Baal Exterminatus"
The best way to fight the nids is to not fight them if possible. They more or less drift in a set path so it doesn't take long for them to determine a pattern then it's just a matter of sacrificing some planet to choke their resources then to fight the hive in space. Really if they weren't so busy they could take the lost dead planets and sort of make a blockade along key points of the eastern fringe, keep it so the Tau empire are the first living worlds they should come across.
But nope have to fight them on the surface with chainswords.
n0t_u wrote: The best way to fight the nids is to not fight them if possible. They more or less drift in a set path so it doesn't take long for them to determine a pattern then it's just a matter of sacrificing some planet to choke their resources then to fight the hive in space. Really if they weren't so busy they could take the lost dead planets and sort of make a blockade along key points of the eastern fringe, keep it so the Tau empire are the first living worlds they should come across.
But nope have to fight them on the surface with chainswords.
Also when Kryptman tried it, everyone else on the IoM accused him of treason, in part because it was the worst case of human self-genocide since the age of Apostasy.
sgc8647 wrote: "What the Imperium cannot know is that, should the Necrons ever fully wake and unite,
they would face a foe as numerous as themselves."
Page 23 Necron Codex
Having Encountered the Tyranids in the outer Void the Silent King returns to the Galaxy.
Page 89 Necron Codex
It is the Silent King's wish that the younger races' flawed attempts to destroy the Tyranid do not simply feed the Hive Fleets beyond the point where even a united Necron People have any hope of Victory
Codex Necron 5th Ed page 26
He said, “They are the rising storm, and you must become the shield”.
Last page of Words of the Silent King (to dante)
---
Right now i would say the IoM without outside Help doesn't win (Shadow of the Warp => Human Psykers are Useless. I seem to recall that only the BA or the UM Libby survived sending his mind into the Shadow of the Warp. When tyranids win a planete they can recup their loss when feeding of everything that is dead. They Evolve in order to adapt (The crossing of the Castelan Belt for example "Shield of Baal Exterminatus"
*Ahem*
Remember guys, the premise of this thread presumes each faction is united (Huge boost for Imperium/not a whole lot of change for the nids) and specifically cuts off any potential inter-universe spill-over for the Tyranids.
Both of those facts tilt favor towards IoM.
EDIT: Forgot the "no other enemies" clause. Even more huge for the Imperium, which has a vast amount of territory to protect, only so-so for the nids (reduces biodiversity even. possible to argue for a net negative if we assume they would conquer and subsume these other factions).
Also, let's take a closer at part of your statement, shall we?
....When Tryanids win a planet....
And when they lose they're completely and utterly shattered. But continue...
...they can recoup their loss when feeding off everything that is dead...
Exterminatus. Done.
Seriously folks, all the Imperium has to do is monitor Nid fleet movement (easy) and pop the planets after the nids land. It is explicit tyranid fluff that long periods without feeding weakens them. Every planet they hit they will lose biomass and cannot do anything about it. IoM can do this for thousands of systems.
Seriously folks, all the Imperium has to do is monitor Nid fleet movement (easy) and pop the planets after the nids land. It is explicit tyranid fluff that long periods without feeding weakens them. Every planet they hit they will lose biomass and cannot do anything about it. IoM can do this for thousands of systems.
1) Exterminatus isn't "easy" to pull off. You've got to get in range, you've got to make sure it's effective, you've got to make sure you get enough Tyranids to make it worthwhile. As for "monitoring the Tyranid fleet movements being easy"... it's explicitly stated that one of the things that makes the Tyranid advance so hard to handle is because it is ridiculously hard to determine where they are going. Sure, once they reach a system you usually have a chance of getting your act together as they often move very slowly*, but as the Shadow in the Warp crashes communication actually telling each other where the ships are becomes incredibly difficult. You can get a rough idea where they are because you find dead worlds/systems, but where they actually appear next is often a complete surprise. Unless you bait them in somehow.
*Furthermore, recent Tyranid fluff has Tyranid Hive Fleets millions strong crossing systems in a matter of days, implying that they are either arriving a lot closer to planets than they used to, or they are actually faster than a lot of sources give them credit for.
2) Tactics don't usually work against a Tyranid fleet for long. They adapt their strategies on a grand scale. If a large number of heavy losses are sustained while preparing to feed (lots of successful exterminatus incidents) who's to say that they won't modify their feeding style by either not commiting more than they have to or (worse) committing such ridiculous numbers that entire systems are wiped clean in less than a week, giving the Imperium no time to plan an exterminatus at all. In the Shield of Baal campaign, the Leviathan tendril crushes a rock-hard system in three days, and if the Blood Angels chapter (that's almost their entire chapter, by the way, plus assorted allies) had been just a few days later the consumption phase would have been over and it would have been far too late for any exterminatus attempt at all.
Note: Tyranids were my second choice of army to play in game. I just don't think their fluff justifies beating the big dogs in 40k. On to my reply, good sir.
In the scale of "all of the IoM is fighting the tyranids" it is excessively 'easy' for Iom to do an exterminatus. Easy being a very relative term.
The suggested change in Nid tactics is to send in more at a time to get fethed? Or, alternatively, to know exactly how much force they need to win before the fact. mhm...... half the reason why tyranids win any battle is by using more 'biomass' in soldiers than the entirety of the planet's population.
Days to cross a system is the fastest tyranids are recorded at? I didn't know that the tyranids were that slow. Seriously, that is a huge liability.
Strategy. Strategy is different than tactics The nids are travelling towards terra. period. Nothing is going to change that.
Scrabb wrote: Note: Tyranids were my second choice of army to play in game. I just don't think their fluff justifies beating the big dogs in 40k. On to my reply, good sir.
In the scale of "all of the IoM is fighting the tyranids" it is excessively 'easy' for Iom to do an exterminatus. Easy being a very relative term.
The suggested change in Nid tactics is to send in more at a time to get fethed? Or, alternatively, to know exactly how much force they need to win before the fact. mhm...... half the reason why tyranids win any battle is by using more 'biomass' in soldiers than the entirety of the planet's population.
Days to cross a system is the fastest tyranids are recorded at? I didn't know that the tyranids were that slow. Seriously, that is a huge liability.
Strategy. Strategy is different than tactics The nids are travelling towards terra. period. Nothing is going to change that.
The Tyranids eat far more than what they expend fighting.
The Tyranid FTL doesn't works inside a star system.
Terra is a big "dinner here" sign, and not all Tyranid fleets travel towards Terra.
A Tyranid fleet relies on some of its smallest organisms known to the Imperium as Narwhals to let the fleet move faster than light. Once they encounter large gravitational bodies however, the narwhal is unable to continue its processes and the fleet must resort to standard bio-organic sublight propulsion. Large systems have been noted to take many months to a year to reach the inner core of the system, while yet larger bodies can force them to take years if they are unwilling to circumvent and skirt the perimeter to reach their goal if it is on opposite side.
Wyzilla wrote: Well if the psykers aren't held back, you'll have guys like Dak'ir just shredding Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra with little effort. The main thing constraining the Imperium is Chaos... without that it's open season on Tyranids as humans can utilize their psychic powers without restraint. Alpha Psykers in general will just go to town and reap trillions..
You have forgotten one extremely important thing in this statement. Nids have psykers too and also the Big BIG thing you forget is the Shadow in the Warp. On such a massive scale that Tyranid force would block the warp to the extreme. To reference several source materials at once gathered by Lexicanum:
"The effects of the shadow are varied:
The average citizen experences uneasiness and terrible nightmares.
The psyker or anybody with warp sensibility suffers severe headaches, uncontrollable screaming, bleeding eyes and unconsciousness.
It blocks most astropathic signals.
Complicates warp travel.
Disrupts psychic phenomena.
And this is just from your average lone Hive Fleet. On such a massive scale Psykers would be completely ****ed to the point that they probably couldn't even sustain ordinary combat. Hell most psykers (special snowflake Tigirus excluded) go crazy or die upon attempts to just contact or "touch" the Hive Mind.
Not according to BFG rules and background they dont - they are lethal at mid-close range and once an enemy ship is entangled its like having a whole SM Legion board you in terms of ferocity
The key words in your argument are mid-close range (really just close range), which means Imperial fleets can happily pulverize all your capital ships (read; ability to continue travel towards food).
Sure they can. And the nid ships even as they die will continue to launch their spores filled with genestealers and the like at your ships by the hundred thousands. So those ships go down too. The largest hive fleet recorded to date was only defeated after an emperor class ship blew its warp engine to transport the nid fleed to oblivion. Nids kept launching boarding craft the entire time.
I'm not suggesting that the Tyranids would definitely win nor am I saying that the IoM would definitely lose. Just that it wouldn't be such a cake walk as many of the comments and counters on here imply.
People keep pointing out how the IoM would be unified, well the Tyranids would be too. As it stands Tyranids as creatures are adapted to best face the many different threats that the 40k universe has to offer them. A jack of all trades so to speak. With only one threat, one faction to focus on they would adapt to combat humans and their weapons chiefly above all else.
Unlike the Tau the IoM can't reoutfit or adapt their tactics completely. Where Tau choose the best blade for the circumstance the Imerium uses the same combat knife and only changes their fighting stance. Regardless of stance one weapon can only kill in one way.
On the other side I do think that just all the Space Marines in the Galaxy gathered to fight them would spell a very very difficuld battle for the nidz. There are about a Million or so SM in the galaxy right? 1000 chapters of 1000 men give or take a couple. (Don't reference the damn Black Templar as an argument here they are quite literally one in a thousand)
On a final note as has been said by one other person the Imperium is a lumbering giant in every regard. While they have their chain of command and operate as a unified military force at best, the Tyranid swarm operates as a single entity.
Even if the IoM is stronger you can look at it like this. There are two people fighting. One (the IoM) is a 6 and a half foot 240 pound Schwarzenegger like man and fights with each body part acting individually towards the same goal. They can work well together and are rather powerful, but are somewhat clumsy at times. Their opponent a 5 foot Tall Bruce Lee esque man who fights with each body part in harmony able to move quickly to adapt to the situation and apply excessive force to one point at a moments notice. (Disregard the fact that Bruce Lee is an expert martial artist otherwise this seems pretty one sided)
It can be won by either side. but not without difficulty for either.
Seriously folks, all the Imperium has to do is monitor Nid fleet movement (easy) and pop the planets after the nids land. It is explicit tyranid fluff that long periods without feeding weakens them. Every planet they hit they will lose biomass and cannot do anything about it. IoM can do this for thousands of systems.
1) Exterminatus isn't "easy" to pull off. You've got to get in range, you've got to make sure it's effective, you've got to make sure you get enough Tyranids to make it worthwhile. As for "monitoring the Tyranid fleet movements being easy"... it's explicitly stated that one of the things that makes the Tyranid advance so hard to handle is because it is ridiculously hard to determine where they are going. Sure, once they reach a system you usually have a chance of getting your act together as they often move very slowly*, but as the Shadow in the Warp crashes communication actually telling each other where the ships are becomes incredibly difficult. You can get a rough idea where they are because you find dead worlds/systems, but where they actually appear next is often a complete surprise. Unless you bait them in somehow.
*Furthermore, recent Tyranid fluff has Tyranid Hive Fleets millions strong crossing systems in a matter of days, implying that they are either arriving a lot closer to planets than they used to, or they are actually faster than a lot of sources give them credit for.
2) Tactics don't usually work against a Tyranid fleet for long. They adapt their strategies on a grand scale. If a large number of heavy losses are sustained while preparing to feed (lots of successful exterminatus incidents) who's to say that they won't modify their feeding style by either not commiting more than they have to or (worse) committing such ridiculous numbers that entire systems are wiped clean in less than a week, giving the Imperium no time to plan an exterminatus at all. In the Shield of Baal campaign, the Leviathan tendril crushes a rock-hard system in three days, and if the Blood Angels chapter (that's almost their entire chapter, by the way, plus assorted allies) had been just a few days later the consumption phase would have been over and it would have been far too late for any exterminatus attempt at all.
I think you are missing the point here.
You don't destroy the planets the Nids are already on. You figure out which planets they are heading to and then completely blow them up right before they arrive, when they have already expended the most energy to get there.
And you have to completely vaporize it, so there is no biomass left for the Nids to feed on.
Do this for a few systems and they should be sufficiently weakened to allow a strike on the Hive Fleet itself.
You don't destroy the planets the Nids are already on. You figure out which planets they are heading to and then completely blow them up right before they arrive, when they have already expended the most energy to get there.
And you have to completely vaporize it, so there is no biomass left for the Nids to feed on.
Do this for a few systems and they should be sufficiently weakened to allow a strike on the Hive Fleet itself.
what about the genestealer cults subverting the Iom supply lines. Causing rebellions in the hive worlds and taking up key positions throughout. The nids would win any prolonged campaign of attrition.
Wyzilla wrote: Well if the psykers aren't held back, you'll have guys like Dak'ir just shredding Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra with little effort. The main thing constraining the Imperium is Chaos... without that it's open season on Tyranids as humans can utilize their psychic powers without restraint. Alpha Psykers in general will just go to town and reap trillions..
You have forgotten one extremely important thing in this statement. Nids have psykers too and also the Big BIG thing you forget is the Shadow in the Warp. On such a massive scale that Tyranid force would block the warp to the extreme. To reference several source materials at once gathered by Lexicanum:
"The effects of the shadow are varied: The average citizen experences uneasiness and terrible nightmares. The psyker or anybody with warp sensibility suffers severe headaches, uncontrollable screaming, bleeding eyes and unconsciousness. It blocks most astropathic signals. Complicates warp travel. Disrupts psychic phenomena.
And this is just from your average lone Hive Fleet. On such a massive scale Psykers would be completely ****ed to the point that they probably couldn't even sustain ordinary combat. Hell most psykers (special snowflake Tigirus excluded) go crazy or die upon attempts to just contact or "touch" the Hive Mind.
Except this completely forgets that most trained psykers like Librarians don't suffer perils of the warp from exposure to nearby Hive Fleets, and rather seem fairly untroubled. Especially when Alpha Psykers make the Tyranids look like gammas.
As people really don't seem to get this, a full blown Alpha Psyker completely unrestrained would be wiping out entire Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra, only not on splinters. It would only take one psyker on the level of empowered Dak'ir to wipe out an entire hive fleet. These are the psykers capable of blowing up planets, cutting capital ships apart with swords, or mind controlling people over several lightyears.
Except this completely forgets that most trained psykers like Librarians don't suffer perils of the warp from exposure to nearby Hive Fleets, and rather seem fairly untroubled. Especially when Alpha Psykers make the Tyranids look like gammas.
As people really don't seem to get this, a full blown Alpha Psyker completely unrestrained would be wiping out entire Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra, only not on splinters. It would only take one psyker on the level of empowered Dak'ir to wipe out an entire hive fleet. These are the psykers capable of blowing up planets, cutting capital ships apart with swords, or mind controlling people over several lightyears.
Mephiston's power is (and I quote GW "gods eye text" here) a candle before a raging star when compared with the Hive Mind being channeled through the Maleceptor trio that beat him into a coma.
Furthermore, I'm just not buying this "alphas are gods" thing. If alpha psykers are invincibly powerful... why haven't they destroyed/conquered the galaxy? Do you have a citation for this, or is it just tenth hand information?
If they are that powerful, then obviously they've been brought down before as well. If so, how?
the ability to destroy a planet Is impressive. But there's only a handful of alpha psykers. That, IMO, is like adding three times their number in capital ships. A bare fraction of the actual strength of the IoM.
I'm always willing to learn though. If there's evidence they can control/destroy entire systems without much thought. Then they'd be a significant boost to the IoM.
the ability to destroy a planet Is impressive. But there's only a handful of alpha psykers. That, IMO, is like adding three times their number in capital ships. A bare fraction of the actual strength of the IoM.
I'm always willing to learn though. If there's evidence they can control/destroy entire systems without much thought. Then they'd be a significant boost to the IoM.
We would also need to see evidence that they are immune to the shadow in the warp, because most psykers go wild, and I would think that an alpha gone mad would be a bigger liability to blow itself and anything near itself up than an entire hive fleet.
Psykers simply won't be a problem for Tyranids. The Shadow in the Warp makes utilizing Psykic Powers dangerous, and the Shadow created by a fleet as big as the OP means would have a colossal shadow. Of course it's conjecture, but you'd imagine that the Shadow would even be able to blot out the Astrominician or at least dim it if it got close to Terra. With that in mind, as soon as the Astrominician goes down, all Imperial Reinforcements are practically useless as they are now blundering around the warp with no point of reference.
Also remember Tyranids don't have to battle their way through the Galaxy to get to Sol, because the Galaxy isn't 2D. Leviathan is shown to be coming *up* from under the Galactic Plane, so all it would take is a concentrated assault spearing its way almost straight into Sol, blotting out the Astrominician which in turn stops most far flung reinforcements (neutralizing most of the IoM's numbers) and then it's one big royal rumble about defending Terra.
Of course, this is assuming the IoM doesn't predict this and pre-emptively move their military forces to Sol, but assuming the forces are as spread out around the Galaxy as they are now, Tyranids have a major advantage by popping up wherever they like from under the Galactic Plane.
Didn't ANY of you see Starship Troopers? The attractive humans will survive, no matter the odds. The lovable friends, sadly, will not all make it, while unlikable humans will go extinct. A 1 v 1 nid war sounds like it would be the best thing to happen to humanity.
Also the IoM never tried it again for some weird reason.
Probably because it was really dumb (and from what I've heard a retcon from previous background). Detonating your warp drives like that would cripple any attack. Considering the size we're talking about it'd likely drag entire planets into the Warp. And the Imperium has a large number of willing martyrs.
ALEXisAWESOME wrote:Psykers simply won't be a problem for Tyranids. The Shadow in the Warp makes utilizing Psykic Powers dangerous, and the Shadow created by a fleet as big as the OP means would have a colossal shadow. Of course it's conjecture, but you'd imagine that the Shadow would even be able to blot out the Astrominician or at least dim it if it got close to Terra. With that in mind, as soon as the Astrominician goes down, all Imperial Reinforcements are practically useless as they are now blundering around the warp with no point of reference.
Some Psykers are still capable of forcing themselves through the Shadow of the Warp. Alpha-plus Psykers wouldn't be stopped by it. I believe there's a line about "theoretically nothing being beyond their power" with sufficient will behind it.
Additionally, the closer you get to Terra the strong the Astronomicon shines. It's entirely possible the Shadow would be unable to dull it completely. Indeed, in theory the opposite could happen.
Seriously folks, all the Imperium has to do is monitor Nid fleet movement (easy) and pop the planets after the nids land. It is explicit tyranid fluff that long periods without feeding weakens them. Every planet they hit they will lose biomass and cannot do anything about it. IoM can do this for thousands of systems.
1) Exterminatus isn't "easy" to pull off. You've got to get in range, you've got to make sure it's effective, you've got to make sure you get enough Tyranids to make it worthwhile. As for "monitoring the Tyranid fleet movements being easy"... it's explicitly stated that one of the things that makes the Tyranid advance so hard to handle is because it is ridiculously hard to determine where they are going. Sure, once they reach a system you usually have a chance of getting your act together as they often move very slowly*, but as the Shadow in the Warp crashes communication actually telling each other where the ships are becomes incredibly difficult. You can get a rough idea where they are because you find dead worlds/systems, but where they actually appear next is often a complete surprise. Unless you bait them in somehow.
*Furthermore, recent Tyranid fluff has Tyranid Hive Fleets millions strong crossing systems in a matter of days, implying that they are either arriving a lot closer to planets than they used to, or they are actually faster than a lot of sources give them credit for.
2) Tactics don't usually work against a Tyranid fleet for long. They adapt their strategies on a grand scale. If a large number of heavy losses are sustained while preparing to feed (lots of successful exterminatus incidents) who's to say that they won't modify their feeding style by either not commiting more than they have to or (worse) committing such ridiculous numbers that entire systems are wiped clean in less than a week, giving the Imperium no time to plan an exterminatus at all. In the Shield of Baal campaign, the Leviathan tendril crushes a rock-hard system in three days, and if the Blood Angels chapter (that's almost their entire chapter, by the way, plus assorted allies) had been just a few days later the consumption phase would have been over and it would have been far too late for any exterminatus attempt at all.
Virus Bombs
Imperial Virus Bombs release a special virus known as the Life-eater Virus that was genetically designed to quickly spread and destroy all organic cellular structures it infects, reducing all planetary life, whether flora or fauna, to an undifferentiated organic sludge of biochemicals. This process of cellular decay also produces huge volumes of flammable gases as a by-product, which is later ignited and turns the atmosphere into a firestorm that usually takes out whatever life may be left. Only those who may have escaped into especially-deep underground shelters can survive a Virus Bomb attack. The population of Tallarn managed to escape complete destruction this way, but their once-verdant world was forever transformed into a desert. Virus bombs are known for their extreme speed; in the fiction surrounding the Horus Heresy, they completely wiped out Istvaan III's entire population of 16 billion people in only minutes.
Basically, all biomass is burned in a matter of minutes. Seems pretty easy to me. Virus bomb a system the 'Nids are going to hit in a few hours, then leave. Seems pretty dang easy to me.
Wyzilla wrote: Well if the psykers aren't held back, you'll have guys like Dak'ir just shredding Hive Fleets in a similar fashion to Maugan Ra with little effort. The main thing constraining the Imperium is Chaos... without that it's open season on Tyranids as humans can utilize their psychic powers without restraint. Alpha Psykers in general will just go to town and reap trillions..
You have forgotten one extremely important thing in this statement. Nids have psykers too and also the Big BIG thing you forget is the Shadow in the Warp. On such a massive scale that Tyranid force would block the warp to the extreme. To reference several source materials at once gathered by Lexicanum:
"The effects of the shadow are varied:
The average citizen experences uneasiness and terrible nightmares.
The psyker or anybody with warp sensibility suffers severe headaches, uncontrollable screaming, bleeding eyes and unconsciousness.
It blocks most astropathic signals.
Complicates warp travel.
Disrupts psychic phenomena.
And this is just from your average lone Hive Fleet. On such a massive scale Psykers would be completely ****ed to the point that they probably couldn't even sustain ordinary combat. Hell most psykers (special snowflake Tigirus excluded) go crazy or die upon attempts to just contact or "touch" the Hive Mind.
The God-Emperor (yes, he is a God of the Warp, we have more than ample evidence of that) of mankind is currently holding four other gods in check. He may be losing the war, but he is still stopping them from filling the entire galaxy with Daemons, as they could easily do with all of the power the Imperium of Man is constantly feeding them (Emprah really fethed up with building the Imperium). The Emperor is easily a match for two of these Gods combined, a third and he struggles, a fourth and he is gradually losing. You say that the Shadow in the Warp would be sufficient to negate the advantage of Alpha Psykers, but I say that the Emperor's full force (and that includes the LotD and the "Legions of Fire", aka, a metric asston of the Emperor's Daemons constantly battling Chaos) would be more than capable of negating that, and still having a massive impact upon any battlefield. Of course, any such conflict would likely result in more Chaos Gods being generated by all of the negative energies feeding into the Warp, but this new pantheon would likely be guided by the Emperor, so it would just add even more power to humanity. If there were no Chaos Pantheon, than humans would be able to curbstomp all other races combined (except for the Orks, because Gork and Mork) through the sheer power of the Emperor, and their own psychic emanations (even the non-psykers release energies into the Warp that feed the Gods, or create new ones to embody said energies) combined with the might of Alpha Psykers, who, now unfettered, would be able to summon an army of Daemons whom they have molded themselves to serve the Imperium, as, with no threat of Chaos, they would be able to freely dabble in the energies of the Warp and mold it to obey their will. Said Daemons could then combat the Tyranids as well. Altogether, the humans would win simply because they would have almost of the entirety of the Warp behind them.
Virus Bombs
Imperial Virus Bombs release a special virus known as the Life-eater Virus that was genetically designed to quickly spread and destroy all organic cellular structures it infects, reducing all planetary life, whether flora or fauna, to an undifferentiated organic sludge of biochemicals. This process of cellular decay also produces huge volumes of flammable gases as a by-product, which is later ignited and turns the atmosphere into a firestorm that usually takes out whatever life may be left. Only those who may have escaped into especially-deep underground shelters can survive a Virus Bomb attack. The population of Tallarn managed to escape complete destruction this way, but their once-verdant world was forever transformed into a desert. Virus bombs are known for their extreme speed; in the fiction surrounding the Horus Heresy, they completely wiped out Istvaan III's entire population of 16 billion people in only minutes.
Basically, all biomass is burned in a matter of minutes. Seems pretty easy to me. Virus bomb a system the 'Nids are going to hit in a few hours, then leave. Seems pretty dang easy to me.
I'm tempted to quote Trinity from the Matrix:
"Adapt to this."
Or, alternatively, that quote can be attributed to the BBEG from X-men origins, who actually said exactly that. Trinity did it with more style though.
Virus Bombs
Imperial Virus Bombs release a special virus known as the Life-eater Virus that was genetically designed to quickly spread and destroy all organic cellular structures it infects, reducing all planetary life, whether flora or fauna, to an undifferentiated organic sludge of biochemicals. This process of cellular decay also produces huge volumes of flammable gases as a by-product, which is later ignited and turns the atmosphere into a firestorm that usually takes out whatever life may be left. Only those who may have escaped into especially-deep underground shelters can survive a Virus Bomb attack. The population of Tallarn managed to escape complete destruction this way, but their once-verdant world was forever transformed into a desert. Virus bombs are known for their extreme speed; in the fiction surrounding the Horus Heresy, they completely wiped out Istvaan III's entire population of 16 billion people in only minutes.
Basically, all biomass is burned in a matter of minutes. Seems pretty easy to me. Virus bomb a system the 'Nids are going to hit in a few hours, then leave. Seems pretty dang easy to me.
I'm tempted to quote Trinity from the Matrix:
"Adapt to this."
Or, alternatively, that quote can be attributed to the BBEG from X-men origins, who actually said exactly that. Trinity did it with more style though.
Except for you know, all the survivors on Istvaan...
Furthermore, the BFG fluff features virus weapons being used on Tyranids, which quickly become immune and (worse) then spit the sa,e virus right back at the humans next time they board a ship.
Life Eater itself might be more challenging but if humans built it Tyranids can figure out how it works and come up with a counter. It is what they do.
Virus Bombs
Imperial Virus Bombs release a special virus known as the Life-eater Virus that was genetically designed to quickly spread and destroy all organic cellular structures it infects, reducing all planetary life, whether flora or fauna, to an undifferentiated organic sludge of biochemicals. This process of cellular decay also produces huge volumes of flammable gases as a by-product, which is later ignited and turns the atmosphere into a firestorm that usually takes out whatever life may be left. Only those who may have escaped into especially-deep underground shelters can survive a Virus Bomb attack. The population of Tallarn managed to escape complete destruction this way, but their once-verdant world was forever transformed into a desert. Virus bombs are known for their extreme speed; in the fiction surrounding the Horus Heresy, they completely wiped out Istvaan III's entire population of 16 billion people in only minutes.
Basically, all biomass is burned in a matter of minutes. Seems pretty easy to me. Virus bomb a system the 'Nids are going to hit in a few hours, then leave. Seems pretty dang easy to me.
I'm tempted to quote Trinity from the Matrix:
"Adapt to this."
Or, alternatively, that quote can be attributed to the BBEG from X-men origins, who actually said exactly that. Trinity did it with more style though.
Except for you know, all the survivors on Istvaan...
Furthermore, the BFG fluff features virus weapons being used on Tyranids, which quickly become immune and (worse) then spit the sa,e virus right back at the humans next time they board a ship.
Life Eater itself might be more challenging but if humans built it Tyranids can figure out how it works and come up with a counter. It is what they do.
I'm not talking about using it on the 'Nids. Use it on the humans. If a 'Nids fleet is about to NOM a system, then send a fleet there to forestall them, and virus bomb every habitable world in the system. Then retreat to a stronghold and observe the 'nids to see where they will go next.
raiden wrote: Mephiston is not an alpha level psyker, ELDRAD is probably not registered as an alpha.
As for the emperor comment....
Empy, single handendly, pulps the minds of an entire ork wwaaaaggghhh. (A VERY big one) with a single thought. Without breaking a sweat.
Interesting head cannon considering that the Empy and his Primarchs have faced a big Waaaagh! before and he wasn't capable of single handedly turning their minds into pulp, indeed he couldn't even do that to their Warboss known as "The Beast" and had to be save by Horus. I'm thinking you are falling prey to the myths and legends created by the authors from the point of view of the average Imperium who is made to believe that the Empy is a god.
Virus Bombs
Imperial Virus Bombs release a special virus known as the Life-eater Virus that was genetically designed to quickly spread and destroy all organic cellular structures it infects, reducing all planetary life, whether flora or fauna, to an undifferentiated organic sludge of biochemicals. This process of cellular decay also produces huge volumes of flammable gases as a by-product, which is later ignited and turns the atmosphere into a firestorm that usually takes out whatever life may be left. Only those who may have escaped into especially-deep underground shelters can survive a Virus Bomb attack. The population of Tallarn managed to escape complete destruction this way, but their once-verdant world was forever transformed into a desert. Virus bombs are known for their extreme speed; in the fiction surrounding the Horus Heresy, they completely wiped out Istvaan III's entire population of 16 billion people in only minutes.
Basically, all biomass is burned in a matter of minutes. Seems pretty easy to me. Virus bomb a system the 'Nids are going to hit in a few hours, then leave. Seems pretty dang easy to me.
I'm tempted to quote Trinity from the Matrix:
"Adapt to this."
Or, alternatively, that quote can be attributed to the BBEG from X-men origins, who actually said exactly that. Trinity did it with more style though.
Except for you know, all the survivors on Istvaan...
Furthermore, the BFG fluff features virus weapons being used on Tyranids, which quickly become immune and (worse) then spit the sa,e virus right back at the humans next time they board a ship.
Life Eater itself might be more challenging but if humans built it Tyranids can figure out how it works and come up with a counter. It is what they do.
I'm not talking about using it on the 'Nids. Use it on the humans. If a 'Nids fleet is about to NOM a system, then send a fleet there to forestall them, and virus bomb every habitable world in the system. Then retreat to a stronghold and observe the 'nids to see where they will go next.
raiden wrote: Mephiston is not an alpha level psyker, ELDRAD is probably not registered as an alpha.
As for the emperor comment....
Empy, single handendly, pulps the minds of an entire ork wwaaaaggghhh. (A VERY big one) with a single thought. Without breaking a sweat.
Interesting head cannon considering that the Empy and his Primarchs have faced a big Waaaagh! before and he wasn't capable of single handedly turning their minds into pulp, indeed he couldn't even do that to their Warboss known as "The Beast" and had to be save by Horus. I'm thinking you are falling prey to the myths and legends created by the authors from the point of view of the average Imperium who is made to believe that the Empy is a god.
The Emperor wasn't threatened by the Ork. Not only is he a perpetual, but after Horus "saved" him the Emperor immediately wiped out the entire Ork force with mindbullets.
Not to mention by scaling the Emperor should also be able to use multi kilometer long flagships like Battle Barges as projectiles to be flung through space like how Khayon leveled the Emperor's Children base of operations in the Eye of Terror. Throwing an Ork Warboss into space or punting Titans is trivial in comparison. I'd simply chalk it up to few authors bothering to research what Alpha Psykers are capable of doing in 40K.
raiden wrote: Mephiston is not an alpha level psyker, ELDRAD is probably not registered as an alpha.
As for the emperor comment....
Empy, single handendly, pulps the minds of an entire ork wwaaaaggghhh. (A VERY big one) with a single thought. Without breaking a sweat.
Interesting head cannon considering that the Empy and his Primarchs have faced a big Waaaagh! before and he wasn't capable of single handedly turning their minds into pulp, indeed he couldn't even do that to their Warboss known as "The Beast" and had to be save by Horus. I'm thinking you are falling prey to the myths and legends created by the authors from the point of view of the average Imperium who is made to believe that the Empy is a god.
Except for the fact that we have canon in which the Emperor's Daemons (Angels of Fire, Spirit of the Astronomicon) communicate with Abaddon. Wyzilla would know more about it than me, but still. The Emperor is far more powerful now than he was before. Something to remember is that all creatures feed energies into the Warp (except for some exceptions like the Necrontyr and Tau), and thus sheer belief in the Emperor as a God by the quadrillions of humans would be more than sufficient to empower his soul to God-level power. It's these same energies that created the Chaos Gods and their Daemons, and continues to feed them sustenance. It's these same energies that are established in many canon sources as being fed the energy of Ork WAAAAGHS!!! to give the two Ork Gods Gork and Mork a physical manifestation in the Materium, as well as the same energy as what created them in the first place.
The moment you stop to count the cost, that is the moment you fail.
Yet the Imperium despite touting such a quote, did stop to count the cost when it came to Kryptman and did shirk from the cost.
Even so, Kryptman's strategy only slowed the advance of Leviathan. Even conducting Exterminatus on worlds that were in the process of consumption did not really stop the Tyranids, only slowed them, because there were examples of Tyranids surviving the resultant firestorm:
There are two reported methods by which Tyranid creatures have survived the destruction of a world. The first, which has been confirmed at Tethris and Caelus Delta and is suspected at Lamarno, is achieved by way of smaller-bio-forms, such as Rippers, burrowing deep beneath a world''s crust, there to enter a state of hibernation until such time as the presence of life upon the surface is detected...
...The second observed manner in which Tyranid organisms have survived Extermiantus was reported to the Strategic Collective following a Deathwatch mission to the world of Ariadne IV. Following Exterminatus by way of Damnatus-pattern, mass-yield cyclonic saturation, the surface of the world was reduced to drifting ash, the atmosphere entirely seared away. Yet, pict-logs of the mission show what was at first believed to be a natural rock feature rising out of the swirling dust storms. Closer inspection revealed the truth - the structure was in fact a member of the Carnifex genus, which had survived the cataclysmic effects of the cyclonic torpedo, and entered a state of dormancy within which it could mend the grievous wounds down to it.
p. 27, 4th edition Tyranid Codex
It is also demonstrated by the FW book Anphelion Project that even a few Tyranid organisms are enough over time to re-establish new forms and reconstruct the Tyranid mobile ecosystem.
I am growing tired of all the talk about alpha psykers and their pants wettingly terrifying power. If you reread my post I wrote what the Shadow in the Warp does to normal people and normal psykers which NEWS FLASH make up the vast and overwhelming majority of imperial forces. Even with a handful of your alpha psykers that wouldn't be enough to defeat them single handedly. It would still amount to a difficult fight for both sides. Unless your alpha psyker could protect all soldiers from the shadow which even with their considerable power would be quite difficult what with trillions of people to cover. And even with your psyker argument all but these top tier psykers would be USELESS. Look what 3 maleceptors did to Mephiston who is clearly an above average psyker. Three of those is a drop in the literal interplanetary ocean of biomass the tyranids have to use.
How hot are you at work the next morning after a horrible nights sleep? Try to imagine fighting a war like that. Now try to imagine every other man in the army has the same problem and this is the average effect against your average individual with no pronounced warp sensitivity which is more than 99 percent of all of the imperium.
Yaavaragefinkinman wrote: I am growing tired of all the talk about alpha psykers and their pants wettingly terrifying power. If you reread my post I wrote what the Shadow in the Warp does to normal people and normal psykers which NEWS FLASH make up the vast and overwhelming majority of imperial forces. Even with a handful of your alpha psykers that wouldn't be enough to defeat them single handedly. It would still amount to a difficult fight for both sides. Unless your alpha psyker could protect all soldiers from the shadow which even with their considerable power would be quite difficult what with trillions of people to cover. And even with your psyker argument all but these top tier psykers would be USELESS. Look what 3 maleceptors did to Mephiston who is clearly an above average psyker. Three of those is a drop in the literal interplanetary ocean of biomass the tyranids have to use.
Then provide evidence of the Shadow of the Warp having an impairment on the powers of Alpha Psykers, or Betas for that matter. Tigurius for example seems to have at the very least hacked into the Hive Mind to predict its movements. I also don't recall any notation of psykers having difficulty casting their powers. For all the hype of the Hive Mind, Librarians seem to never be given any serious trouble by it. The point of Alpha Psykers is that they can demolish an entire fleet of ships. Hell even Beta's can toss a Strike Cruiser like an asteroid, albeit demanding their full attention. The only thing that holds back humanity are the Chaos Gods and the Daemons of the warp preying upon psykers forcing their number to be monitored and frequently executed to prevent disaster.
And then there's still things like legions of Imperial Daemons, who appear to be far nastier and more powerful than the Chaos variety.
How hot are you at work the next morning after a horrible nights sleep? Try to imagine fighting a war like that. Now try to imagine every other man in the army has the same problem and this is the average effect against your average individual with no pronounced warp sensitivity which is more than 99 percent of all of the imperium.
You mean the supposed horrible nightmares that never seem to manifest in the Black Library?
The only faction I've read about causing sleeping problems is chaos.
Note on empy vs 4 chaos gods, he is not losing, he isn't winning, but he ain't losing.
Thing about the virus bomb- if used on feeder tendrils (and as such sent directly to biomass wells) the life eating virus has an extremely high chance of.shattering, if not outright killing a hive fleet and or the hive queen.
That said, its probably difficult to do, and must be administered directly to the tendrils, and multiple ones. So its likely a suicide mission.
Yaavaragefinkinman wrote: I am growing tired of all the talk about alpha psykers and their pants wettingly terrifying power. If you reread my post I wrote what the Shadow in the Warp does to normal people and normal psykers which NEWS FLASH make up the vast and overwhelming majority of imperial forces. Even with a handful of your alpha psykers that wouldn't be enough to defeat them single handedly. It would still amount to a difficult fight for both sides. Unless your alpha psyker could protect all soldiers from the shadow which even with their considerable power would be quite difficult what with trillions of people to cover. And even with your psyker argument all but these top tier psykers would be USELESS. Look what 3 maleceptors did to Mephiston who is clearly an above average psyker. Three of those is a drop in the literal interplanetary ocean of biomass the tyranids have to use.
Then provide evidence of the Shadow of the Warp having an impairment on the powers of Alpha Psykers, or Betas for that matter. Tigurius for example seems to have at the very least hacked into the Hive Mind to predict its movements. I also don't recall any notation of psykers having difficulty casting their powers. For all the hype of the Hive Mind, Librarians seem to never be given any serious trouble by it. The point of Alpha Psykers is that they can demolish an entire fleet of ships. Hell even Beta's can toss a Strike Cruiser like an asteroid, albeit demanding their full attention. The only thing that holds back humanity are the Chaos Gods and the Daemons of the warp preying upon psykers forcing their number to be monitored and frequently executed to prevent disaster.
And then there's still things like legions of Imperial Daemons, who appear to be far nastier and more powerful than the Chaos variety.
How hot are you at work the next morning after a horrible nights sleep? Try to imagine fighting a war like that. Now try to imagine every other man in the army has the same problem and this is the average effect against your average individual with no pronounced warp sensitivity which is more than 99 percent of all of the imperium.
You mean the supposed horrible nightmares that never seem to manifest in the Black Library?
You're the one that needs to provide proof that Alpha Levels are except from the Shadow in the Warp, not the other way around. The Shadow in the Warp effects psykers, causing them to hear a ''cerebral cacophony'' , which gets a lot worse if they try to actually manifest powers. All but the strongest* turn insane. The Shadow is highly effective against Astropaths, which as we know, would stop where ever they attack calling for long distance aid. We also have provided instances were the Shadow effected powerful Psykers, in the case of Mephiston and in DOW 2 were all the Librarians of the Battle Barge Litany of Fury except Jorah Orion die when they are trying to infiltrate the Hive Mind.
*Note Strongest, in my opinion, is not based on Power, but in fact based on willpower and discipline. I would argue the reason Librarians have a better time under the Shadow then any other psykers is there extreme mental conditioning, they still hear the horrible scratching inside their brain but they are better at ignoring it. Similarly i would argue Tigarius didn't intercept the Hive Mind because he was powerful, but because he had the willpower to listen to the sounds in his head (which is basically the Tyranid version of the Radio) and decipher them without going insane. Will power, not Psyker level seems to be the best diffence against the Shadow in the Warp. Moreover, it is stated that Alpha and Beta Level Psykers are almost without exception not mentally sound. With Broken, shattered minds already you think that they are the Imperiums greatest weapon? God no! Whenever an Alpha tries to manifest his power, he will feel the hunger and the scratching and skittering and it will break him. Then what happens when you have an Alpha + psyker in the middle of your starfleet, who was your ace in the whole, starts thinking he has bugs under his skin and crawling up his back? Yeah...Boom. As far as i know, only Librarians and Inquisitors would be able to reliably manifest without going insane, everything else is a time bomb waiting to happen. Unless of course you can provide me a good argument that Strong actually means Psyker Level, however i can't find any other fluff to support that claim.
ALEXisAWESOME wrote: Strongest, in my opinion, is not based on Power, but in fact based on willpower and discipline. I would argue the reason Librarians have a better time under the Shadow then any other psykers is there extreme mental conditioning, they still hear the horrible scratching inside their brain but they are better at ignoring it. Similarly i would argue Tigarius didn't intercept the Hive Mind because he was powerful, but because he had the willpower to listen to the sounds in his head (which is basically the Tyranid version of the Radio) and decipher them without going insane. Will power, not Psyker level seems to be the best diffence against the Shadow in the Warp. Moreover, it is stated that Alpha and Beta Level Psykers are almost without exception not mentally sound. With Broken, shattered minds already you think that they are the Imperiums greatest weapon? God no! Whenever an Alpha tries to manifest his power, he will feel the hunger and the scratching and skittering and it will break him. Then what happens when you have an Alpha + psyker in the middle of your starfleet, who was your ace in the whole, starts thinking he has bugs under his skin and crawling up his back? Yeah...Boom. As far as i know, only Librarians and Inquisitors would be able to reliably manifest without going insane, everything else is a time bomb waiting to happen. Unless of course you can provide me a good argument that Strong actually means Psyker Level, however i can't find any other fluff to support that claim.
You've admitted that it's your opinion. Why should someone need to find evidence to counter an opinion?
Strength can be measured in willpower, but also in potential psyker abilities too. As there is no data to say otherwise, in a similar way to what you stated, you can't find any fault.
Also mentioning Astropaths, they are some of the weakest forms of psyker. Hardly a massive achievment there.
Just throwing it out there, do we know what effect Nulls and Culexus Assassins have on the Tyranid Psykers? As far as gameplay is concerned, they seem to be affected like normal psykers, but gameplay isn't always right.
Ah, forgive me, replace the word opinion with interpretation.
The reason someone would need evidence to discredit my interpretation is that my interpretation is backed by that Librarians seem to be less effected by SiW while weaker willed Psykers seem to be heavily effected.
So unless my interpretation is discredited with an equally plausible theory then my theory will be the going one.
Based on Ciaphias Cain books, Blanks have an effect that cuts the Synapse links between warrior organisms which seems to disorientate them. According to Aberly this has never been tested on a large scale. A more powerful Blank such as a Culexus would have a more profound effect, but what is anyones guess.
You're the one that needs to provide proof that Alpha Levels are except from the Shadow in the Warp, not the other way around.
No, the burden of proof belongs to all who make a claim based upon fluff. If you do not substantiate your claim, then your claim is worth nothing, and should therefore be cast aside. All must provide fluff if they want to win the argument. I've honestly been combing the internet for ages looking for fluff, and I'm starting to get pissed.
Firstly as to the discussion of Alpha psykers: I may have missed a reference but only one source was ever posted as to their abilities; lexicanum-The assignment. So that is all the info I have to go off of about them, given that until now I had never heard of them. That and they don't show up at all in lexcanums regular descriptions about psykers.
So to start lets look at numbers: delta and gamma psykers occurs in approximately one per billion human births. That is pretty rare already and we're only talking about delta/gamma. Alpha psykers occur in even less numbers and here's a quote from the cited lexicanum that was linked here:
" Beta // Alpha
Exceedingly rare and dangerous. Mainstream Medicae Imperialis discussion agrees that current human beings do not possess the necessary evolutionary development to contain Beta and Alpha levels of psionic talent. As such, the great majority of those discovered at this Assignment rating usually suffer from mental instability."
Ok so we have no numbers for how many alphas there are out there but we can assume that it is rarer than 1 in a billion. That leaves few alpha level psykers and of those that are alpha level how reliable can they be given their mental instability? I don't know the answer to this but just looking at this info it would seem that alpha level psykers may not be as reliable a counter-measure as the IoM would hope.
Lastly the big dogs: Alpha-plus, these are the big guys that have the theoretical (note theoretical) power to snap a titan in half. Even more rare than Alpha psykers here is what lexicanum had to say about them:
"Alpha-Plus
In the rarest of all cases, the twenty-four point scale of the Assignment does not adequately characterize a being of indescribable ability. Such individuals, for all intents and purposes, pass beyond the scale entirely. These subjects are known as Alpha-Plus psykers.Uncontained, Alpha-Plus psykers represent an immediate and catastrophic threat to the Imperium. In theory, there is nothing that a trained Alpha-Plus psyker cannot accomplish through force of will; from snapping a Titan in half to summoning a legion of Greater Daemons. Representing such a great danger, the Inquisition usually executes Alpha-Plus psykers on sight unless the possibility for capture is nearly assured."
So You take the rarest of all psykers, possibly dogged by insanity, given that that is a problem for the psyker level beneath them I'm going on the assumption that they possibly suffer from it aswell. On top of all this the IoM has a tendency to shoot them on sight (also inferring that they aren't invincible in any way, shape or form).
Let's throw this all into the universal war scale and here is the glaring issue I see: Even if the alpha and alpha-plus psykers are as powerful as people are claiming them to be, and even assuming they are stable and of sound enough mind to combat the nids there just simply won't be enough of them. They can't be everywhere at once, in all systems and all threatened planets. One may even be in the right system but if the nids attack the system they won't stop at just one planet within that system, they'll attack all planets with any useable biomass. How many planets can one psyker watch over effectively? I see no reference to an alpha or even an alpha-plus psyker being able to implode an entire fleet in space with his mind before said fleet makes planetfall. Only reference to him being able to snap a titan in half, and no reference to how much exertion it takes or if that takes a toll on his body/mind. With that in mind I'd say he could wreak havoc in a pitched battle and kill bio-titants in 1v1 (note again this is alpha-plus NOT alpha, regular alpha has no reference I could find about them being able to destroy titans with their mind). Even on a planetary scale this isn't enough, he could hold a tide on one battle, one location. if the defenses of the rest of the planet crumple then the planet will be lost with or without that alpha-plus psyker.
All of this with no mention of shadow in the warp. I admit at the scale of this nid invasion I have no idea how the shadow in the warp would function against the imperium so I won't debate it's effectiveness, only state that it exists and that it would cause problems for the imperium.
As for da emprah, last I checked he's a quasi-corpse sitting in a chair on terra with the craziest life-support system ever. I'm not entirely convinced that he's in any shape to do any real fighting from where he's at. As for his psychic potential, to my knowledge he's a glorified lighthouse. A lighthouse powered by a thousand dead psykers a day, how much of that psychic energy is his then at that point of they have to sacrifice that many psykers to keep his beacon going? Without some referenced info on what the emprah can do now I just have a hard time seeing him being of any real use. Horus heresy references are a far-shot too cause he was a different person back then. 10,000 years of bed-sores I'm sure have wreaked havoc on him.
Here's a final point that I find worthy of note. The IoM is the GW posterboy. That is to say that if this were a movie, they are the good guys, you know the type, the ones that despite all odds, against any foe they always win the day AND the girl. Something around like 80% of all the fluff and black library stuff is about the IoM, they have almost as many army factions within the IoM as there are other factions in the entirety of 40K. IoM are the good guys and they are written to win. the nids are the perfect example of faceless henchmen. That enemy you can kill by the billions and not feel bad cause none of them wear nametags. Not even their great leaders generally have names (looking at you Hive Tyrants). So of course in almost every bit of fluff the nids will always lose. Who wants to see a universe infested by roaches anyways? I just feel it's worth noting that almost every novel you read involving the nids they will more than likely lose because they are never protagonist. the fluff is already skewed against the nids, and so are the numbers. Nids is one faction in 40k and IoM is atleast 10. So anyone playing guard, marines, blood angels, SoB, mechanicus, wolves etc. are more likely to simply side with the IoM and say they would win because: reasons. This bias is expected, no one wants to see their army wiped out, but it does exist and I'm sure will affect the numbers in this poll. there are simply more IoM players than there are nid players.
I don't want to say the IoM is destined to lose but I think it's at least acknowledging that the nids will be one hell of a fight and the nids are well prepared to stand toe-to-toe. this won't be the one-sided slaughterfest that some people seem to believe it's going to be.
Sorry I have no proper references to quote right now as I am at work currently. Here is the link again to that lexicanum page I was referencing though.
Remember, 1 billion is not all that large a number.
It's safe to assume the imperium has 1 million worlds, give or take a few hundred at a time, and its not a stretch to say on average, each world would contain equivalent numbers to about 8-9 billion each. (Ofc, hive worlds would have more than feral/death worlds) so, minimum of around 7-10 psykers per world x 1 million worlds.
Another quote from a wiki-
"There are different grades used to incrementally rank the power of a psyker within the Imperium of Man, ranked from the most powerful to least powerful, top to bottom:
Alpha Plus
Alpha
Beta
Gamma
Delta
Epsilon
The grades continue on down through the letters of the Greek alphabet. Grade Sigma and below are levels of "anti-psychic power". Such people are more commonly known as "psychic blanks" since they cannot be detected, manipulated or affected by psychic means and possess the pariah gene.
The psychic power the top four grades represents is immense. A high Delta level can read the minds of all the people in a good-sized town simultaneously, or crush a man to death against a wall in seconds. High-grade psykers are extremely powerful, and not to be taken lightly.
An Alpha Plus grade psyker, however, is a being of almost grotesque power. They are described as being able to "turn a man inside-out with a glance", "snap a Battle Titan in half with a flick of the wrist", and "a muttered syllable can turn an army upon itself in a frenzy of blood lust". They are capable of destroying entire worlds -- sometimes unintentionally."
I just skipped about 3 pages so someone has probably already said this but I saw people ranting about alpha psykers. Shadow in the warp? kind of messes with psykers in a similar way to old necron pariahs or culexus assassins (who's anti psyker powers came from aforementioned pariahs). It would deny not only communication in the front lines but would also seriously weaken/debilitate most psykers. An example being that astropaths and navigators can hear an immense chittering sound, and that's outside of the shadow.
On a note of hive fleet sizes, after consuming a planet, be there great quantities of biomass or not, they will use what they find to create more organisms. In a similar vein a war of attrition would also be futile as the nids would use there own dead alongside the dead of the guard and astartes etc. Splinter fleets that slip through any defensive net could if undetected due to shadow could build up into a full hive fleet again.
The only way I see the IOM coming out of this with a victory is blitzkrieg, the tyranids are far too good at attrition, numbers increasing from both sides dead and being able to evolve new methods of attack/defense. Also exterminatus would have very mixed results, in the BFG books it tells of an imperial fleet encountering a splinter fleet. they then precede to viral bomb it. The next tyranid spore attack a few hours later caused symptoms that where analogous to those caused by the viral bombs used in that method of exterminatus. Also whilst psykers don't need to worry about demonic possetion and whatnot they do still have to maintain control of the ridiculous amounts of energy that they are channeling. If their concentration wavers too greatly they could just explode and cause a bit of a ruckus among their own lines.
Also if I've made any glaringly obvious mistakes feel free to correct me, I'm just contributing that which I remember.
Psienesis wrote: Then don't virus bomb it, use cyclonic torpedoes. Hard to become resistant to getting blown the feth up.
As I posted already above and repeated below, the Tyranids already have done so.
There are two reported methods by which Tyranid creatures have survived the destruction of a world. The first, which has been confirmed at Tethris and Caelus Delta and is suspected at Lamarno, is achieved by way of smaller-bio-forms, such as Rippers, burrowing deep beneath a world''s crust, there to enter a state of hibernation until such time as the presence of life upon the surface is detected...
...The second observed manner in which Tyranid organisms have survived Extermiantus was reported to the Strategic Collective following a Deathwatch mission to the world of Ariadne IV. Following Exterminatus by way of Damnatus-pattern, mass-yield cyclonic saturation, the surface of the world was reduced to drifting ash, the atmosphere entirely seared away. Yet, pict-logs of the mission show what was at first believed to be a natural rock feature rising out of the swirling dust storms. Closer inspection revealed the truth - the structure was in fact a member of the Carnifex genus, which had survived the cataclysmic effects of the cyclonic torpedo, and entered a state of dormancy within which it could mend the grievous wounds down to it.
That would be an author not actually understanding what a Cyclonic Torpedo does.
Cyclonic torpedoes don't just burn off the surface with fire, the way the Life-eater Virus does (and seems the author team believed), it Alderaans the entire fething planet.
Psienesis wrote: That would be an author not actually understanding what a Cyclonic Torpedo does.
Cyclonic torpedoes don't just burn off the surface with fire, the way the Life-eater Virus does (and seems the author team believed), it Alderaans the entire fething planet.
It depends of the type of the cyclone torpedo, but most of them don't do that. And even then they are not even a fraction of what happened to Alderaan.
raiden wrote: Remember, 1 billion is not all that large a number.
It's safe to assume the imperium has 1 million worlds, give or take a few hundred at a time, and its not a stretch to say on average, each world would contain equivalent numbers to about 8-9 billion each. (Ofc, hive worlds would have more than feral/death worlds) so, minimum of around 7-10 psykers per world x 1 million worlds.
Another quote from a wiki-
"There are different grades used to incrementally rank the power of a psyker within the Imperium of Man, ranked from the most powerful to least powerful, top to bottom:
Alpha Plus
Alpha
Beta
Gamma
Delta
Epsilon
The grades continue on down through the letters of the Greek alphabet. Grade Sigma and below are levels of "anti-psychic power". Such people are more commonly known as "psychic blanks" since they cannot be detected, manipulated or affected by psychic means and possess the pariah gene.
The psychic power the top four grades represents is immense. A high Delta level can read the minds of all the people in a good-sized town simultaneously, or crush a man to death against a wall in seconds. High-grade psykers are extremely powerful, and not to be taken lightly.
An Alpha Plus grade psyker, however, is a being of almost grotesque power. They are described as being able to "turn a man inside-out with a glance", "snap a Battle Titan in half with a flick of the wrist", and "a muttered syllable can turn an army upon itself in a frenzy of blood lust". They are capable of destroying entire worlds -- sometimes unintentionally."
I know that real numbers can be very hard to come by given the broad and vague descriptions GW likes to write their universe in but I think we may be able to draw some inferences from some numbers we have been given. The 1 in a billion psykers number applies for gamma and delta psykers. I don't know the number of worlds in the 40k universe so I will defer to your numbers for number of worlds, populations of hive worlds and death worlds etc.
So I'll go with the high end of the spectrum and say there are 10 gamma/delta psykers per planet. Multiply that by a million planets and you now have 10,000,000 gamma/delta. The problem comes in that we don't know the ratio of alpha/beta psykers in comparison to this. A couple psykers that are theorized to be of Alpha level are Ahriman and Eldrad. I can't see psykers of those levels being made very often, especially since neither of them are human in the pure sense of the term. I know I have no basis for this next number, so it is pure conjecture on my part but I have a hard time seeing there being more than 1 alpha psyker per 10 billion citizens. That leaves one alpha level psyker per populated IoM planet. I can't even hazard a guess at the rarity of Alpha plus at this point and sadly that's the important one we need because they are the only ones that theoretically could swing the tide if the war was predicated on the IoM having powerful psykers. Ahriman or Eldrad alone could not change the tide of the whole war on their own if there was was a million of them. It's worth noting too that of the extremely rare cases that Alpha-plus psykers do pop up the IoM has a tendency to put a round in their head. All I have to go on at the moment is a discussion I read (I believe it was on relicnews) where they were speaking about alpha-level psykers. By the discussion it seems that the Eisenhorn novels may be a decent source to read up on alpha-plus level psykers, apparently most of those psykers were evil though and wanted to destroy the Imperium.
The crux of this is despite how powerful the alpha-plus level psykers may be I just don't think there can be enough of them to adequately stave off the nid invasions. They may be all-powerful but they are certainly not omnipresent. I think it's also worth noting that if the IoM is able to bring all these fluff weapons to the fight (there are no alpha-plus level psykers on the tabletop) then what about the nids bring their own super-psyker too? How much damage could the hive mind wreak against the IoM? I don't think there is enough nid fluff out there to truly explore the capabilities of the hive mind beyond directing the nid forces.
Realistically what I see happening is the IoM losing the war of attrition and then going for one big hail-mary attack to locate and shut down the hive mind using a hyper-elite-hand-picked-hero-team led by Stalone... errr someone. This team infiltrates deep into nid space while the main bulk of the IoM fights the nids on an open front in a do-or-die assault. The team locates Hive mind, detonates super-psychic-mega-bomb-plot-device and make their daring escape riding the shockwave of the bomb to safety in their crippled shuttle. Hive mind dies, nids go berserk and eat themselves, cheers all around and the hero kisses the girl. Thanks Hollywood. I just don't see the nids being beat in a war of attrition, at least not in any meaningful way where they won't get a sequel titled "IoM Vs Nids 2; Hero of the federation" that will get terrible ratings.
raiden wrote: Remember, 1 billion is not all that large a number.
It's safe to assume the imperium has 1 million worlds, give or take a few hundred at a time, and its not a stretch to say on average, each world would contain equivalent numbers to about 8-9 billion each. (Ofc, hive worlds would have more than feral/death worlds) so, minimum of around 7-10 psykers per world x 1 million worlds.
Another quote from a wiki-
"There are different grades used to incrementally rank the power of a psyker within the Imperium of Man, ranked from the most powerful to least powerful, top to bottom:
Alpha Plus
Alpha
Beta
Gamma
Delta
Epsilon
The grades continue on down through the letters of the Greek alphabet. Grade Sigma and below are levels of "anti-psychic power". Such people are more commonly known as "psychic blanks" since they cannot be detected, manipulated or affected by psychic means and possess the pariah gene.
The psychic power the top four grades represents is immense. A high Delta level can read the minds of all the people in a good-sized town simultaneously, or crush a man to death against a wall in seconds. High-grade psykers are extremely powerful, and not to be taken lightly.
An Alpha Plus grade psyker, however, is a being of almost grotesque power. They are described as being able to "turn a man inside-out with a glance", "snap a Battle Titan in half with a flick of the wrist", and "a muttered syllable can turn an army upon itself in a frenzy of blood lust". They are capable of destroying entire worlds -- sometimes unintentionally."
I know that real numbers can be very hard to come by given the broad and vague descriptions GW likes to write their universe in but I think we may be able to draw some inferences from some numbers we have been given. The 1 in a billion psykers number applies for gamma and delta psykers. I don't know the number of worlds in the 40k universe so I will defer to your numbers for number of worlds, populations of hive worlds and death worlds etc.
So I'll go with the high end of the spectrum and say there are 10 gamma/delta psykers per planet. Multiply that by a million planets and you now have 10,000,000 gamma/delta. The problem comes in that we don't know the ratio of alpha/beta psykers in comparison to this. A couple psykers that are theorized to be of Alpha level are Ahriman and Eldrad. I can't see psykers of those levels being made very often, especially since neither of them are human in the pure sense of the term. I know I have no basis for this next number, so it is pure conjecture on my part but I have a hard time seeing there being more than 1 alpha psyker per 10 billion citizens. That leaves one alpha level psyker per populated IoM planet. I can't even hazard a guess at the rarity of Alpha plus at this point and sadly that's the important one we need because they are the only ones that theoretically could swing the tide if the war was predicated on the IoM having powerful psykers. Ahriman or Eldrad alone could not change the tide of the whole war on their own if there was was a million of them. It's worth noting too that of the extremely rare cases that Alpha-plus psykers do pop up the IoM has a tendency to put a round in their head. All I have to go on at the moment is a discussion I read (I believe it was on relicnews) where they were speaking about alpha-level psykers. By the discussion it seems that the Eisenhorn novels may be a decent source to read up on alpha-plus level psykers, apparently most of those psykers were evil though and wanted to destroy the Imperium.
The crux of this is despite how powerful the alpha-plus level psykers may be I just don't think there can be enough of them to adequately stave off the nid invasions. They may be all-powerful but they are certainly not omnipresent. I think it's also worth noting that if the IoM is able to bring all these fluff weapons to the fight (there are no alpha-plus level psykers on the tabletop) then what about the nids bring their own super-psyker too? How much damage could the hive mind wreak against the IoM? I don't think there is enough nid fluff out there to truly explore the capabilities of the hive mind beyond directing the nid forces.
Realistically what I see happening is the IoM losing the war of attrition and then going for one big hail-mary attack to locate and shut down the hive mind using a hyper-elite-hand-picked-hero-team led by Stalone... errr someone. This team infiltrates deep into nid space while the main bulk of the IoM fights the nids on an open front in a do-or-die assault. The team locates Hive mind, detonates super-psychic-mega-bomb-plot-device and make their daring escape riding the shockwave of the bomb to safety in their crippled shuttle. Hive mind dies, nids go berserk and eat themselves, cheers all around and the hero kisses the girl. Thanks Hollywood. I just don't see the nids being beat in a war of attrition, at least not in any meaningful way where they won't get a sequel titled "IoM Vs Nids 2; Hero of the federation" that will get terrible ratings.
My fluff knowledge on exactly what the Hive mind is and how it functions is sorely lacking. I apologize for any error I'd make in the assumptions of it's capabilities. Would you please elaborate on how I messed up the Hive mind stuff?
Psienesis wrote: That would be an author not actually understanding what a Cyclonic Torpedo does.
Cyclonic torpedoes don't just burn off the surface with fire, the way the Life-eater Virus does (and seems the author team believed), it Alderaans the entire fething planet.
It depends of the type of the cyclone torpedo, but most of them don't do that. And even then they are not even a fraction of what happened to Alderaan.
No, they do create an asteroid field. A cyclonic torpedo dropped on a moon by Talos of the Eighth Legion 10th Company blew it up like a fragmentation grenade.
Inevitable_Faith wrote: My fluff knowledge on exactly what the Hive mind is and how it functions is sorely lacking. I apologize for any error I'd make in the assumptions of it's capabilities. Would you please elaborate on how I messed up the Hive mind stuff?
Please note the above is not sarcasm.
The Hive Mind doesn't has a "center" that you can blow up. As long as the Tyranid race exist the Hive Mind will exist (and it is impossible that the IoM could eradicate the Tyranids, regardless of the outcome of this thread)
Psienesis wrote: That would be an author not actually understanding what a Cyclonic Torpedo does.
Cyclonic torpedoes don't just burn off the surface with fire, the way the Life-eater Virus does (and seems the author team believed), it Alderaans the entire fething planet.
It depends of the type of the cyclone torpedo, but most of them don't do that. And even then they are not even a fraction of what happened to Alderaan.
No, they do create an asteroid field. A cyclonic torpedo dropped on a moon by Talos of the Eighth Legion 10th Company blew it up like a fragmentation grenade.
Moon can mean a lot of things, from a few kilometers wide to Earth sized or larger. But I was referencing to the fact that the Death Star puts far more energy than needed to mass scatter Alderaan.
Actually to be more precise the Hive Mind exists and controls tyranids within range of the ones that have the synapses. Not all do. However these numbers are still staggering at a macro level if intent on killing the hive mind. But withiin the pitch of battle up close it's a good tactic to take out the synapses cause the less complex tyranid forms to lose coherency after losing contact with the hive mind.
The best way to imagine the Hive Mind is to picture a Beowulf Cluster.
For those not in the know, a Beowulf Cluster is an older type of super-computer that's made by linking hundreds of off-the-shelf processor units together and programming them to operate as a single computer.
The Hive Mind is kind of like that. The indivudual CPUs are the minds of the Synapse Creatures. The Hive Mind is the sum of all those Synapse brains working together and parralel-processing.
In theory, that means that every time you kill a synapse creatures, the Hive Mind gets a little bit less intelligent... in practice, there are so many synapses that the real effect is negligible, as a Hive Tyrant is at least as intelligent as a smart human on its own.
Psienesis wrote: That would be an author not actually understanding what a Cyclonic Torpedo does.
Cyclonic torpedoes don't just burn off the surface with fire, the way the Life-eater Virus does (and seems the author team believed), it Alderaans the entire fething planet.
It depends of the type of the cyclone torpedo, but most of them don't do that. And even then they are not even a fraction of what happened to Alderaan.
No, they do create an asteroid field. A cyclonic torpedo dropped on a moon by Talos of the Eighth Legion 10th Company blew it up like a fragmentation grenade.
It's worth keeping in mind that Talos used more than one torpedo, and that the moon's size was not specified.
There's also the Ariadne Effect which was detailed in one of the Planetstrike stratagems, a method by which any Tyranid creature can survive Exterminatus by simply burrowing Zerg-style.
Also I just remembered some critical fluff. All you need to do to severely cripple the Nids is pop the Synapse, more specifically the Swarmlord. As Marneus Calgar showed in his rematch with the Swarmlord, kill him and the rest of the Nids can be casually mopped up with little fuss.
A few Tyranid organisms surviving Exterminatus is not a victory for them in any case. All the harvestable biomass has been burnt off the planet and it's not worth the resources to recover the survivors.
Thank you guys for your descriptions of how the hive mind works. I appreciate it. That Beowulf cluster description was a realy kool way of describing it too, really helped solidify the concept.
Wyzilla- "Pop the synapse" has been a big strategy when fighting nids for a long time now. On an individual battle scale it's a great tactic, it's proven to be effective numerous times. It's even fairly well represented on the tabletop even though it doesn't necessarily mean an auto-lose for the nid player. Nids to function on a small amount of auto-pilot for those who are reliant on synapse. Not all of them are reliant on synapse though so that's worth remembering.
The problem is that this discussion isn't about one battle, it's about an entire universe at war. It's not reasonable to assume that every imperial outpost on every planet in every sector will without fail pop every single synapse creature systematically for an easy mop-up of the gribblies. They'll win some, they'll lose some, it's the nature of war, you won't win every battle. You just need the sum of your victories to overshadow those of your opponent.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have a nid codex with me but isn't the Swarmlord a special character? There wouldn't be a swarmlord at every battle then right? And doesn't he have a special rule that if he dies the damage to the synapse is worse than if a Hive tyrant dies or am I just confusing that with the rules for a tervigon dying near termagaunts?
Psienesis wrote: "Pop the synapse" will also work (theoretically) on the macro-scale, too, but that is at such a scale as to be unfeasible from a resources standpoint.
That of course begs the question: How would eliminating synapse creatures on a grand scale be accomplished? Full-on assaults to break through tyranid lines to slay them seems like a fool's errand. Mass deployment of assassins to specifically track, infiltrate and target the synapse creatures seems unfeasible. especially with a finite number of trained and capable assassins for this purpose. On a macro scale I just don't see much for viable options to specifically target and eliminate the synapse without having to dedicate exorbitant amounts of men and firepower to fight off the smaller gribblies as well.
Of course I may not be thinking of some other options the IoM may have for this task. If you know of any I'd love to hear them.
Psienesis wrote: "Pop the synapse" will also work (theoretically) on the macro-scale, too, but that is at such a scale as to be unfeasible from a resources standpoint.
That of course begs the question: How would eliminating synapse creatures on a grand scale be accomplished? Full-on assaults to break through tyranid lines to slay them seems like a fool's errand. Mass deployment of assassins to specifically track, infiltrate and target the synapse creatures seems unfeasible. especially with a finite number of trained and capable assassins for this purpose. On a macro scale I just don't see much for viable options to specifically target and eliminate the synapse without having to dedicate exorbitant amounts of men and firepower to fight off the smaller gribblies as well.
Of course I may not be thinking of some other options the IoM may have for this task. If you know of any I'd love to hear them.
The Nid forces we are using for the sake of this argument, whilst huge, are mainly attacking one enemy: mankind. Sure, we have Octarius and the remnants of Gorgon in the Tau Empire, but the bulk of Tyranid forces are directed on Imperial worlds, meaning that the majority of Tyranids' military efforts are accomplishing what we see now.
However, we don't see this in the Imperium. Why? Mainly becuase they are split over an entire galaxy fighting a dozen different races, on a hundred different fronts. And they still endure. They lose ground very gradually (due to GW's obsession with the status quo), but they still endure. Now take away all those enemies bar one. One on one, who wins? All of the Imperium's might can be focused on one battlefront, to face one enemy, and win.
That is why, Imperium vs any enemy race as we currently see them now, the Imperium win. Whilst mankind are split in the normal universe, in a head-to-head, the Imperium's combined power can pretty much destroy any other enemy.
The Nid forces we are using for the sake of this argument, whilst huge, are mainly attacking one enemy: mankind. Sure, we have Octarius and the remnants of Gorgon in the Tau Empire, but the bulk of Tyranid forces are directed on Imperial worlds, meaning that the majority of Tyranids' military efforts are accomplishing what we see now.
Except that the reason why Behemoth, Kraken and Leviathan are well known Hive Fleets is because they have been focused on the IoM (until Octarius happened in Leviathan's case). But there are many more Hive Fleets in the galaxy, some of them hadn't even touched the IoM yet. The Tyranids probably have far more conflicts with the Orks than with the IoM if you consider the Orks' far larger population and territories.
But you are still somewhat right, current known Hive Fleets aren't enough to defeat the IoM.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have a nid codex with me but isn't the Swarmlord a special character? There wouldn't be a swarmlord at every battle then right? And doesn't he have a special rule that if he dies the damage to the synapse is worse than if a Hive tyrant dies or am I just confusing that with the rules for a tervigon dying near termagaunts?
Don't know about the game rules, but 'nid special characters are odd. They're not actually individuals - they're more like 'boss spawns'. The Hive Mind can create multiples of them... it just never does in one place at any one time because of the additional resources required making it inefficient.
The whole synapse popping would probably only work if you eliminated an orbiting hive fleet and then slowly whittled away the larger ones on the ground. Cutting them off from the fleet would massively reduce their brain power and situational awareness (of the ongoing conflict). In a similar manner to if a supercomputer's main processor was isolated from the other processors and/or it's network.
Also could someone clarify what shadow in the warp actually does to psykers as I am not 100% certain of the effects that it has. I believe that it makes it difficult or impossible to use powers depending on how disciplined the psyker is. Thanks in advance
SitW is basically a static field in the Warp. It drives Psykers mad, because they can't help but "hear" it, and are touching minds with a wholly alien intellect.
The Nid forces we are using for the sake of this argument, whilst huge, are mainly attacking one enemy: mankind. Sure, we have Octarius and the remnants of Gorgon in the Tau Empire, but the bulk of Tyranid forces are directed on Imperial worlds, meaning that the majority of Tyranids' military efforts are accomplishing what we see now.
Except that the reason why Behemoth, Kraken and Leviathan are well known Hive Fleets is because they have been focused on the IoM (until Octarius happened in Leviathan's case). But there are many more Hive Fleets in the galaxy, some of them hadn't even touched the IoM yet. The Tyranids probably have far more conflicts with the Orks than with the IoM if you consider the Orks' far larger population and territories.
But you are still somewhat right, current known Hive Fleets aren't enough to defeat the IoM.
I mean, I am going on the assumption that we aren't counting Nids from beyond the borders of our galaxy, as we have no concrete evidence defining their possible size. So don't hold what I say as absolute.
As for da emprah, last I checked he's a quasi-corpse sitting in a chair on terra with the craziest life-support system ever. I'm not entirely convinced that he's in any shape to do any real fighting from where he's at. As for his psychic potential, to my knowledge he's a glorified lighthouse. A lighthouse powered by a thousand dead psykers a day, how much of that psychic energy is his then at that point of they have to sacrifice that many psykers to keep his beacon going? Without some referenced info on what the emprah can do now I just have a hard time seeing him being of any real use. Horus heresy references are a far-shot too cause he was a different person back then. 10,000 years of bed-sores I'm sure have wreaked havoc on him.
The Emperor is the collective reincarnation of all the shamans of Neolithic humanity's various peoples, the first human psykers. The foul Warp entities that would become the four Great Powers of Chaos had not yet fully formed when the Emperor was born on Earth during prehistoric times, somewhere in ancient central Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the 8th Millennium B.C. But even before the birth of the Emperor, as humanity grew and progressed, the Warp began to become increasingly disturbed by the dark undercurrents of humanity's collective psyche, and the shamans began to lose their former ability to reincarnate into new bodies. Instead, upon dying, their souls were being consumed by the entities and daemons of the Warp. Eventually the shamans of humanity, unable to reincarnate, would become extinct, and without the shamans and their psychic abilities to guide the race, humanity would inevitably fall prey to the corruptions of Chaos, just as eventually happened to the Eldar. In these ancient days, all the shamans of Earth gathered in a grand conclave to decide what must be done to stave off the day when they had all been consumed by the Warp.
In the end, the shamans decided to pool their collective psychic energies by reincarnating as a single soul in a single human body to create an individual they called "the New Man." The thousands of shamans, as one, took poison, and as one, they died, their souls flowing into the Immaterium in a rush of psychic power that overwhelmed those daemons who sought to feast upon it with a cleansing, purifying fire, a flame imperishable that became one soul out of many. A year later the child who would become the Emperor was born in a Neolithic settlement of Anatolian herders and farmers. His psychic power was so great that its energies altered his genome and physiology in the womb and rendered him immortal so he would no longer need to reincarnate and could not be assaulted by the daemonic creatures of the Immaterium upon his death.
And now from Lexicanum
The oldest information given on the Emperor's origin relates that he was born to mortal parents in the 8th Millennium BC[3a] manifesting his powers as a youth. One account of the Emperor's origin goes so far as to say that he had mortal brothers and sisters and details the time and location of his birthplace - eight thousand years before the first millennium, in the region of Terra then known as Central Anatolia. This account also claims that the Emperor's birth, while a natural process, was actually the result of a scheme created by the wisest and most powerful of living humans at that time; the conclave of Shamans. These men, termed 'shamans' by their society, were powerful psykers with great experience of the Warp. Finding their souls - and those of humanity - endangered by the growing perils of the Warp-gods, these psykers decided to pool their power into one human, a being they called 'the New Man'. Already having gained the power to reincarnate themselves (upon death, the shamans' souls would transfer to the Warp, accumulating power enough to reincarnate as human) the shamans entered a suicide-pact. Thousands of them poisoned themselves and sped their souls to the warp at the same time. Presumably pooling their soul-energy and using their reincarnation ability, they brought about the birth of their New Man - the Emperor - one year later. This New Man, once he had learned of his special nature, proceeded to haunt the history of humanity as a ghost; watching, waiting and occasionally influencing.[3x]
And now exerpts from the HH novel Mechanicum about the C'tan known as the Void Dragon, which was one of the few to escape the Necrons when they turned on the C'tan, and how the Emperor defeated it with ease
Spoiler:
First, the effects of merely witnessing the Void Dragon's presence upon a Psyker whose power-level is never stated (though it seems that she is a fairly weak Psyker, with merely the ability to access the knowledge contained within the Warp)
The angles were impossible, the geometry insane. Distance was irrelevant and perspective a lie. Every rule of normality was turned upside down in an instant and the natural order of the universe was overthrown in this new, terrifying vision of distorted reality. The cavern seemed to pulse in every direction at once, compressing and contracting in unfeasible ways, moving as rock was never meant to move.This was no cavern. Was this entire space, the walls and floor, the air and every molecule within it, part of some vast intelligence, a being or construct of ancient malice and phenomenal, primeval power? Such a thing had no name; for what use would a being that had brought entire civilisations into existence and then snuffed them out on a whim have of a name? It had been abroad in the galaxy for millions of years before humanity had been a breath in the creator’s mouth, had drunk the hearts of stars and being worshipped as a god in a thousand galaxies.It was everywhere and nowhere at once. All powerful and trapped at the same time.The monstrous horror of its very existence threatened to shatter the walls of her mind, and in desperation, Dalia looked down at her feet in an attempt to convince herself that the laws of perspective still held true in relation to her own body. Her existence in the face of this infinite impossibility was meaningless, but she recognised that only by small victories might she hold onto her fracturing reason.
The creature gave out a deafening roar that shook stones from the city walls and the burning radiance in its breast was extinguished. Its grasp upon the knight loosened and the lightning faded from its eyes as the great beast fell to the ground.Perceiving that the Dragon was helpless, though not dead, the knight untied the long white banner from his shattered lance and bound it around the neck of the monster.
Dalia looked towards the horizon over which the knight had vanished. ‘Then that was?’ 'The Emperor? Yes,’ said Semyon, turning and walking away as the reality of the desert landscape began to unweave. ‘He brought the defeated Dragon to Mars and bound it beneath the Noctis Labyrinthus.’
the Golden Throne also now functions as a complex life support device and psychic amplifier, projecting the Emperor's mind into the Warp and across the galaxy.
Only through his power can the Astronomican beam its guiding light, allowing Imperial ships to navigate the Warp in relative safety. The Emperor is not just a beacon for space travel, however, but is said to continue to guide humanity through his Tarot, and through dreams and visions given to selected individuals. It is also popularly believed that he created the warp storm known as the Storm of the Emperor's Wrath during the Age of Apostasy, and that the Emperor's will holds Chaos at bay. Were it not for his unceasing struggle, the Chaos of the Warp would flood the material realm with madness and horror, causing untold destruction.[1]
In addition to these already profound powers, the Emperor is capable of stopping time for undetermined lengths and guiding his servants through manipulation of his Tarot and sheer influence
This basically says that the only stable Alpha+ Psyker in 40k history now has his powers able to be used anywhere in the galaxy (Imperial Cult calls instances of this "miracles"), as well as the fact that he has demonstrated immense powers (miracles) in the physical realm. (note: it states his ability to stop time as a fact and not as an Imperial belief).
In the early history of the galaxy, the powers of the Warp had yet to form into distinct entities. At this time, the emotions of mortals flowed and ebbed as water does in a stream. As the mortal races grew and prospered, so did the strength of their emotions. Eventually, the gods grew to such a point where they could act independently of the general flow of emotions and thus became the Gods of Chaos. They reached into the dreams of mortals and demanded praise and servitude in order to increase their own power, as the of more one emotion is exhibited (in both thought and action) the stronger that god becomes.[1]
This basically states how the Gods of the Warp are formed and how they gain power (worship, as well as emotional energy, but big thing here is worship). The Emperor has already become an entity of the Warp (due to the Golden Throne), and he is now worshiped by at least 6000000000000000000, aka 6 e 18, aka 6 quintillion humans (assuming the average population of an Imperial world is 6 bil, and there are 1 mil Imperial worlds), which is far more than the number of people worshiping Chaos (most of the xenos worshiping Chaos were exterminated during the Great Crusade, along with most of the humans who did, but some still exist from pre-Crusade along the fringes of the Galaxy, and many new human Chaos Cults have been spawned since). Chaos Gods, of course now, still draw immense power from human emotions and actions, regardless of whether or not humans are intentionally worshiping them (Khorne by every Imperial action in the history of ever, Tzeentch by hope in general, Nurgle by death and despair in general, etc.). It is generally assumed that the Emperor, in his current state, is as powerful as the Chaos Gods, and is the highest target on their hit list, just as they are for his, and he is continually battling them, and isn't even fething losing against 4 other Gods .
I've been searching for a thread that I was arguing in a few weeks ago, and in the thread, Wyzilla posted a quote about how the Astronomicon is basically the Emperor's own little Daemon Prince, and the Emperor is continually spawning "Angels of Fire" (Daemons), but I can't, for the life of me, find it.
Edit: The Eldar also believe the LotD to be the Emperor's version of Daemons, and, considering the fact that they make plans for events that won't happen for thousands of years, I'd be inclined to believe them.
"They are creatures born of the Warp; that much even a child could divine. That they wear the shape of Mankind's vaunted defenders is a matter as immaterial as the warriors themselves. They are daemons, and they must be brought low, just as with all their malefic kind."
— Eldar Autarch Eluinne Starshaper
Whether Dalia's a psyker or not is rather contested - she's 'machine-touched', rather, with the only powers she shows being to act as a focus for the Silver Throne and healing a Knight's damaged knee - a power implied to have been 'borrowed' from the Void Dragon rather than her own psychic might.
So he became a god without creating another Eye of Terror and embroiling the galaxy in a thousand yr long period of Warp Storms?
As Hulk would say; "Pffft, puny god."
Or maybe Real Space erupted into the Warp and from their perspective they are experiencing Real Space storms that cause everything nearby in the Warp to arrange into proper sequential Order and nearby Warp entities find their plans chained to itinerant processes.
Of course the way Slaaanesh was born doesn't necessarily mean that all Warp gods will be born the same way but I would expect something more then the words of an Eccelsiarchy whom declare they are hell bent on promoting the Empy as a Deity.
Toyful teasing aside. Considering the way the Warp operates I am truly convinced myself that an "Emporer God" can coelesce based on the beliefs of the Imperium. I'm not so sure the entity will be the Emporer though but rather a new manifestation of the Warp while the Emporer himself is still at Terra on the Throne phhysically and psykcally guarding the Terra Webway.
The Nid forces we are using for the sake of this argument, whilst huge, are mainly attacking one enemy: mankind. Sure, we have Octarius and the remnants of Gorgon in the Tau Empire, but the bulk of Tyranid forces are directed on Imperial worlds, meaning that the majority of Tyranids' military efforts are accomplishing what we see now.
However, we don't see this in the Imperium. Why? Mainly becuase they are split over an entire galaxy fighting a dozen different races, on a hundred different fronts. And they still endure. They lose ground very gradually (due to GW's obsession with the status quo), but they still endure. Now take away all those enemies bar one. One on one, who wins? All of the Imperium's might can be focused on one battlefront, to face one enemy, and win.
That is why, Imperium vs any enemy race as we currently see them now, the Imperium win. Whilst mankind are split in the normal universe, in a head-to-head, the Imperium's combined power can pretty much destroy any other enemy.
I understand the point your are making here but I feel it does go deeper than this. It's not IoM vs allied orks, nids, elder, chaos etc. It's IoM vs nids vs orks vs chaos vs elder vs etc. The other factions of 40K all fight not only the IoM but each other and themselves as well. By that vein then all other factions have thus successfully held their own against every other faction proving that they all have what it takes to partake and survive in this universe of war. The IoM is not exclusive in having many enemies at their doorstep. I doubt the IoM would be faring as well as they are now if the other factions stopped fighting amongst each other and focused solely on the extermination of the IoM.
Dusara217- First of all I want to say that I was thoroughly impressed and thrilled to see the well written and referenced post you made. Whether or not we ever agree about the emperor is in the air but know that I highly respect the post you made. Took me a while to go through the references and info but I did manage to glean a lot of info that I had no idea about. Learned a TON about the emperor and I feel there is definitely a basis for him being much more than a figurehead. I really don't feel there is much room for poking any holes in your references and info so suffice to say that I would be intrigued to see how much the emperor would need to "intervene" in this fight should the IoM begin losing too much ground. Chalk it up to my CSM roots but my mind still reels at the thought of the emperor post-heresy being anything other than a figurehead and marketing tool for the ecclesiarchy to control the Imperium's population and morale. Too much fluff from the "he's a corpse-god" perspective I guess. I'll definitely need some time to come around to the idea but you presented some good evidence for the emperor.
On another note something else occurred to me: If all the other 40k factions just poofed out of existence then what about the planets they controlled? Are they now un-defended areas of the galaxy ripe for the conquest? Because if so the IoM doesn't want to waste any time in either destroying them or garrisoning them because that much uncontested biomass ripe for the picking for the nids could very well tip the scales in their favour. With enough uncontested feeding frenzies the nids may very well gain an opportunity to swell their forces beyond anything the IoM could hope to defend against. Figured I'd throw this idea out there as food for thought as well.
I understand the point your are making here but I feel it does go deeper than this. It's not IoM vs allied orks, nids, elder, chaos etc. It's IoM vs nids vs orks vs chaos vs elder vs etc. The other factions of 40K all fight not only the IoM but each other and themselves as well. By that vein then all other factions have thus successfully held their own against every other faction proving that they all have what it takes to partake and survive in this universe of war. The IoM is not exclusive in having many enemies at their doorstep. I doubt the IoM would be faring as well as they are now if the other factions stopped fighting amongst each other and focused solely on the extermination of the IoM.
Not really. The majority of Chaos' influence/power is spent against the IoM. The IoM has the largest footprint in the galaxy (minus orks) and as such the majority of Ork and Necron strength is also spent against the IoM. Eldar are an infinitesimally small percentage of all actual, physical conflict in the galaxy as to not be worth mentioning. Same with Eldar and Tau. Nids, again, run into and wreck IoM territory far, far more than anyone else's, by simple virtue of the IoM consisting of so many more systems than all others.
Again, one vs one matchups are a huge boon to the IoM from the status qu.
(Obviously a united front of all xenos would be catastrophic for the IoM)
I understand the point your are making here but I feel it does go deeper than this. It's not IoM vs allied orks, nids, elder, chaos etc. It's IoM vs nids vs orks vs chaos vs elder vs etc. The other factions of 40K all fight not only the IoM but each other and themselves as well. By that vein then all other factions have thus successfully held their own against every other faction proving that they all have what it takes to partake and survive in this universe of war. The IoM is not exclusive in having many enemies at their doorstep. I doubt the IoM would be faring as well as they are now if the other factions stopped fighting amongst each other and focused solely on the extermination of the IoM.
Not really. The majority of Chaos' influence/power is spent against the IoM. The IoM has the largest footprint in the galaxy (minus orks) and as such the majority of Ork and Necron strength is also spent against the IoM. Eldar are an infinitesimally small percentage of all actual, physical conflict in the galaxy as to not be worth mentioning. Same with Eldar and Tau. Nids, again, run into and wreck IoM territory far, far more than anyone else's, by simple virtue of the IoM consisting of so many more systems than all others.
Again, one vs one matchups are a huge boon to the IoM from the status qu.
(Obviously a united front of all xenos would be catastrophic for the IoM)
But, don't forget, the Tau are meant to represent the other small Xenos Empires that are out there. They are one of thousands of Empires that are threatening Imperial space, they just happen to be commies, too.
Most of those other Xeno Empires get crushed within a few years, though. The Tau represent a *single* Xeno conglomeration that has managed to survive a century or so. Imperial history is littered with footnotes referencing entire Xeno empires crushed utterly and driven to extinction.
Psienesis wrote: Most of those other Xeno Empires get crushed within a few years, though. The Tau represent a *single* Xeno conglomeration that has managed to survive a century or so. Imperial history is littered with footnotes referencing entire Xeno empires crushed utterly and driven to extinction.
More crop up every day, though. It's sort of a case of the Hydra - kill one, and two more take its place. Or, it's like playing wackamole - you think you've killed 'em all, but then another one pops up.
Yeah, but most of them are tiny. Like, "they are in 1 system with four planets" tiny. A passing IG/Navy force rolls by, goes "oh, there's gribblies", lays waste to their cities and kills every man, woman, and larvae, plants an aquila flag, and rolls on.
Psienesis wrote: Yeah, but most of them are tiny. Like, "they are in 1 system with four planets" tiny. A passing IG/Navy force rolls by, goes "oh, there's gribblies", lays waste to their cities and kills every man, woman, and larvae, plants an aquila flag, and rolls on.
Or the xenos empire defeats the Imperial force, and then the Imperium blockades or quarantines off the pocket empire and then redacts any information about the aliens or the conflict (since the Imperium cannot afford to be seen by its citizens as losing). I would imagine the same procedure would occur for any secessionist regime that successfully fought off the first Imperial attack. Of course the Imperium may internally justify to itself that it will try again later, but that could be centuries or an indefinite later.
That is why the Imperium consists of islands of Imperial human civilization interspersed with swathes of wilderness space which can contain all sorts of minor alien empires or non-Imperial human empires. There are examples of such minor alien races that have no Codex but which survive and are mentioned repeatedly in GW references over periods of time, indicating that the Imperium has not wiped them out, such as the Fra'al and Barghesi.
in a typical display of insanity).
the whole universe in an orgy of maniacal slaughter. Etc. Etc.
