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Pacman.

Matt Cruddace, the spawn of Matt Ward and Cruddace that will nerf and ruin all codecies in its path. The Tyranids fear it as it destroyed their own galaxy long ago and seek to starve it by devouring all other codecies before they can create more twisted creations....

Perhaps it is not fleeing, more they are being ordered by the bigger Hive Fleets or Emperor knows what else. These just maybe the vanguard before the even bigger bugs invade the milky way, in which if that is the case, we're screwed.....But if we're to stick with the whole them running away theme, perhaps gods themselves walk the universe? Or maybe some faraway Eldar craftworlds we don't know about are reuniting for some kickass retaking of the galaxy? They are a psychic presence which I imagine if brought back to former strength could scare even hive fleets. Not sure, though I doubt we will ever get an answer, thank you GW fluff writers..

CthuluIsSpy wrote:Its likely that they ate everything in their own galaxy and are searching for a new feeding ground.

That was 10 galaxies ago.

But this is correct. Someone made a really intelligent post in another thread, which basically amounts to Tyranids being such a huge force of living organisms that that simply need to keep eating to survive. While they can, and do, go into hibernation (for example, Jormungandr, which was in hibernation for a few centuries after being 'defeated'), they need to wake up eventually and eat. They're still victims of entropy, and the more they eat, the more they're affected by it, but their will to survive means they refuse to accept shrinking in size.

-Loki- wrote:

CthuluIsSpy wrote:Its likely that they ate everything in their own galaxy and are searching for a new feeding ground.

That was 10 galaxies ago.

Well, I guess they still got the munchies then.

blood reaper wrote:Matt Cruddace, the spawn of Matt Ward and Cruddace that will nerf and ruin all codecies in its path. The Tyranids fear it as it destroyed their own galaxy long ago and seek to starve it by devouring all other codecies before they can create more twisted creations....

lol

I'm liking a mix of a few previous ones;

'nids are created by John in the Galaxy 42. He shows them to his boss Terry, king of their half of the galaxy and they decide to use it to conquer Adam's empire, on the other side of the galaxy. Little do they know the horror that they have unleashed. After the initial success of their new shock troops, they breed more and more, eradicating the empire of Adam, but instead of only breeding seemingly mindless soldiers, they have created something altogether more sinister. At first, army posts set to eliminate the remainder of their new shock troops on Adam's worlds start to fall silent, then there are reports of spores dropping to planet surfaces in their half of the galaxy. This cannot be true! The shock troops have returned, ravenous and implacable! Terry and John get their heads together and decide they are done for, unless they can effectively remove what their troops need to survive. Life. As their galaxy falls into the maw of the Hive Mind, the survivors souls are interred into vehicles of war, capable of battle anywhere, from the vacuum of space to the depths of the ocean, indomitable and, most importantly, devoid of anything that their once-troops can feed upon. They wait for the swarm to reach them, allow their scratching claws to feel their cold metal bodies for sustenance, waiting until it has been communicated to the consciousness which controls them that they are not for eating. Then with super weapons (this is where it really falls apart, but I'm sure someone can come up with something about how they know the true weakness which tyranids can't adapt to or something because they created them, I dunno), they start to attack, make the Hive Mind start to leg it, and chase it between galaxies. Ta dah.

Points for recognition of Monty Python and Lord of the Rings (movie)

motyak wrote:I'm liking a mix of a few previous ones;

'nids are created by John in the Galaxy 42. He shows them to his boss Terry, king of their half of the galaxy and they decide to use it to conquer Adam's empire, on the other side of the galaxy. Little do they know the horror that they have unleashed. After the initial success of their new shock troops, they breed more and more, eradicating the empire of Adam, but instead of only breeding seemingly mindless soldiers, they have created something altogether more sinister. At first, army posts set to eliminate the remainder of their new shock troops on Adam's worlds start to fall silent, then there are reports of spores dropping to planet surfaces in their half of the galaxy. This cannot be true! The shock troops have returned, ravenous and implacable! Terry and John get their heads together and decide they are done for, unless they can effectively remove what their troops need to survive. Life. As their galaxy falls into the maw of the Hive Mind, the survivors souls are interred into vehicles of war, capable of battle anywhere, from the vacuum of space to the depths of the ocean, indomitable and, most importantly, devoid of anything that their once-troops can feed upon. They wait for the swarm to reach them, allow their scratching claws to feel their cold metal bodies for sustenance, waiting until it has been communicated to the consciousness which controls them that they are not for eating. Then with super weapons (this is where it really falls apart, but I'm sure someone can come up with something about how they know the true weakness which tyranids can't adapt to or something because they created them, I dunno), they start to attack, make the Hive Mind start to leg it, and chase it between galaxies. Ta dah.

Points for recognition of Monty Python and Lord of the Rings (movie)

Take away the running away bit and then put in that the 'nids ate whoever created them and then went of on their own and i think thats pretty accurate.

Eh, I was happy with my ramble the way it was

Perhaps chaos Gods or daemons. Also some of the dark eldar stuff is nasty, They have created nasty things. It says that mandrakes are in league with 'terrible creatures'. Could be something from the warp

Frum da boyz, o course!

If anything can make the tyranids run, it's got to be robotic. I've had this vision of a race a lot like the tyranids, but they're metallic and they swell their numbers by harvesting star mass. Whatever it be, it's got to be something that makes the tyranids want to stop trying to overcome it. But I don't understand this whole runnning-away theory, where in the fluff does it suggest that the tyranids are running away from anything?

*whack*

Shuttup Squiggy! Da nids iz running frum da ORKS!

The only thing the Nids fear

That is in fact the most sensible answer in this thread.

They are running away..... from starvation. Worlds taken by Tyranids are left completly devoid of Bio-matter when they're done. If they dont move on to find more biomass, they die.

This is also why Nids avoid necron tomb worlds. They arent afraid, they're just not interested because fighting Necrons doesn't provide anything to eat, it only makes the hunger worse because they'll expend precious bio-matter and energy wiping out Necrons while getting no food in return.

I thought that the astronmicon beacon on terra was attracting them?

In my opinion the tyranids are just like a swarm of locusts, scarabs and army ants all rolled into one. They swarm a planet like a locust swarm consume it and move on like an army ant colony and they can hibernate for long periods before potential prey is found like scarab swarms. If anything they're just moving onto a new field to consume. Either that or fleeing from a rent-a-kill van

The Tyranid's invasion into the Milky Way does resemble a freeing horde more then an actual attack.

If you look at how they collect biomas. It's not the most efficent way, but one of the fastest.

Think about it it ike this. If you want some food. You work (In most cases) earn the money and go buy it. But if you need it now. Then the risks envolved with throwing a brick through a store window, running in and grabing it might be worth it.

If the Tyranids where not "Rushed" then they would have moved into the Milky Way like a grazing herd. Slowy sucking up everthing they could get. Instead they are doing a mad rush to get everything they can as fast as they can.

Something that might be important to note. The Tyranids did not have to be what we know them to be now. When they got chased out of their home galaxy. They could have been a very minor threat that has grown out of proportion. Like a Grasshopper. They get are easy to deal with. But when they start to swarm and become Locus then it becomes a huge problem.

Orks.

GentlemanGuy wrote:I thought that the astronmicon beacon on terra was attracting them?

This.

Considering that the Hive Fleets have entered the Milky Way from different directions it can be reasonably assumed that they are in fact not running away from anything, rather they are moving towards something.

Any non-organic, organized opponent that could block/confuse the synapse creatures and the Hive Mind would do... need not be any more difficult to handle than marines.... just less organic.

There not running from anything but starvation....

They need Biomass, but don't create any. They come, eat up the biomass, and move on. They changed galaxy only to avoid dying out is what i gathered.

My theory would be an old one created them as a curse upon the Star Gods to deprive them of food and as a mass of blanks to displace Chaos. Of course this only really works under the oldcrons where the Necrons were slaves.

They aren't blanks.

clively wrote:

GentlemanGuy wrote:I thought that the astronmicon beacon on terra was attracting them?

This.

Considering that the Hive Fleets have entered the Milky Way from different directions it can be reasonably assumed that they are in fact not running away from anything, rather they are moving towards something.

Not true. The Tyranids attacked with Hive Fleet Behemoth. The next attacks came spreading out northish around the Milky Way. And finally with Laviathan coming from the direction of the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. If it was the Astronmicon attracting them. The Laviathan would have come from the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy and attacked Terra. Not spread out attacking accross the galactic south.

As far as the Tyranids attacking for Biomas to avoid starvation. Consider that the building blocks of life can be found in greater quantities in nebula there you will ever find on the surface of planets. So the starvation theory fall flat really quikly.

The Tyranid invasion of the Milky Way is a smash and grab. The run before the bad guys catch you. Even if they have reched a point that the "Bad Guys" are not even a potential threat anymore.

Stonerhino wrote:As far as the Tyranids attacking for Biomas to avoid starvation. Consider that the building blocks of life can be found in greater quantities in nebula there you will ever find on the surface of planets. So the starvation theory fall flat really quikly.

Which would make them an incredibly dull tabletop race, considering they wouldn't exist as a tabletop race. Their 'hunger' is a well document part of the fluff. Everyone knows there's far more efficient ways of getting their 'food', but it still needs to be wrapped into a race that can be played on the tabletop.

As for the astronomican attracting the hive fleets, maybe when they reached the galaxy. But it didn't draw them to the galaxy initially. The astronomican has a limited reach, and doesn't even extend all the way to the galactic east. The Tyranids wouldn't have 'seen' it until they were in the galaxy. Not to mention the galactic east is where the initial hive fleets came from.

It's just another poorly thought out peice of Crudda-fluff.

-Loki- wrote:

Stonerhino wrote:As far as the Tyranids attacking for Biomas to avoid starvation. Consider that the building blocks of life can be found in greater quantities in nebula there you will ever find on the surface of planets. So the starvation theory fall flat really quikly.

Which would make them an incredibly dull tabletop race, considering they wouldn't exist as a tabletop race. Their 'hunger' is a well document part of the fluff. Everyone knows there's far more efficient ways of getting their 'food', but it still needs to be wrapped into a race that can be played on the tabletop.

By making them flee from something else makes their "Hunger" more believable. They simply don't have the precieved time to gather biomass in the more effective ways.

Really you are faced with a fluff choice. On one hand you can believe that as a race the Tyranids are "rushed" by an outside force, real or imagined. Or that as a race the Tyranids are so stupid that they are purposely avoiding the means to greatly increase their resource intake. Just so that they have a reason to fight other races.

They are being chased by other Tyranids. A different hivemind. They're all trying to rush to the food and if they stop they'll be eaten by the hive behind them.

the astronomnicon isnt strong enough to reach out of our galaxy, its stated in fluff that you can barely see it at the edge, a more likely thing to have attracted the nids is Slannesh's birth scream, it resonated across the warp, and that is at least the same scale as the universe.

when the nids got closer they probably spotted the astro... and started to head towards the most powerful psychic beacon, my reasoning would be that if you want to absorb the most powerful useful bits of a species, then a super psychic beacon would be red rag to a bull

Its just a plot device.
When ever they want to push a new powerful race, that X race would be whats scaring Tyranids off.

LoL answer: They are running from Chuck Norris

serious answer: I read somewhere that the "Hivemind" is a C'Tan what ate to many Old Ones and 'became' a multiple being which used its powers to spawn the nids. The Hivemind could have relised what it actually is, and called for help from an unshattered C'Tan. A raging god will make anything run.

The 'hunger' is explained above, but the attack patterns aren't. I think they were running around the milky way and heard Slaanesh's scream. Going toward the source (and possible food) they saw the Astronomnicon and where drawn closer.
They attack in a random fashion because they know the chasers are close, so they pick some food up and leg it (or tentacle it)

Its the two missing marine Legions. The Emperor foresaw the threat of these creatures and created two brothers, one of them a blank, specifically to take the fight to the nids. The masterplan was to herd them back to the Imperium where they would then be caught between the hammer and the anvil of the combined Legions. Its taken a long time but the brothers are finally coming home. Unfortunately, Horus getting in a huff wasn't part of the plan.....