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Unfortunately I don't play tyranids but they always have been among my favourite armies. Their miniatures are wonderful and they have a unique style so they're actually very challenging and fun to play.

The only downside is that models in the same unit look exactley the same. That's the reason I never collected them, I hate having two identical miniatures, even in hordes armies. In fact I don't have two identical orks, even with tons of them.

Overall tyranids are an amazing army, not competitive right now, but I'd rather start them than boring armies like necrons, daemons, AM or SM.

I've never understood why people like SM so much, maybe because they're overpowered? I love some particular chapters, like space wolves or blood angels, but regular marines lack of personality and they're so easy to play that I'd get tired of them after 5 games.

Truthfully, it was because they were the first army I won off of Ebay (although they weren't the first army I played, that honor goes to the Chaos Marines who came decently painted).

However I love them for the combination of being a cosmic horror and specifically because they have no individual goals or aspirations beyond "eat".

In lacking traits they instead are one of the most interesting factions to me. Chaos is motivated by ambition and the will of the gods, the Imperium is motivated by superstition and fear of collapse. Eldar is faced with extinction, the Tau wants to spread their word, the Orks wants to have fun, and the Necrons want to reclaim their lands. These are all complex emotions but they're all distinctly *human* emotions and very relatable to us.

The nids? They want to devour everything to the exclusion of all else. They are a primal force of nature, un-tameable by anything resembling rationality. Their troops will be born without digestive systems if it is deemed that they will die before starvation. They will clog up the enemy's cannons with their own corpses if it is a simpler solution. There is no morality, no malice, no hesitation.

Also in terms of gameplay, you really needed to have played with the 3rd and 4th edition codex to truly appreciate Nids on the table. With only around 2-3 entries per slot and the mutation table, they had more variety than any other army at the time. Hell the Gaunts alone had so many options at the time that it spawned a whole dictionary of nicknames (let alone the carnifex and Warriors).

I hope they don't go back to a mutation codex. I feel that whilst its a neat idea, with GW Balance you end up with a host of options but only a handful of actual choices which range form bad through to broken good. And, of course, if you want to win you thus go for the broken (because the other choices are bad) and then everyone hates you

Also I feel that nids are far bigger in terms of model variety today; so I'd rather see more reasons to field different units in different viable combat roles instead of custom tweaking everything all the time.


That and I'd like GW to actually put all our primary model choices in the box. They've still not even produced an upgrade kit for gaunts for weapons ot her than the fleshborer and devourer and spinefists. Meanwhile warriors are still without wings (though they did at least add wings to the hive tyrant with the new plastic kit).

 Overread wrote:
I hope they don't go back to a mutation codex. I feel that whilst its a neat idea, with GW Balance you end up with a host of options but only a handful of actual choices which range form bad through to broken good. And, of course, if you want to win you thus go for the broken (because the other choices are bad) and then everyone hates you

Also I feel that nids are far bigger in terms of model variety today; so I'd rather see more reasons to field different units in different viable combat roles instead of custom tweaking everything all the time.


That and I'd like GW to actually put all our primary model choices in the box. They've still not even produced an upgrade kit for gaunts for weapons ot her than the fleshborer and devourer and spinefists. Meanwhile warriors are still without wings (though they did at least add wings to the hive tyrant with the new plastic kit).

I hope they make the Tyranid Prime function like the Consul in 30k. One base unit with options to be upgraded into other roles.

I would love for a Prime to be able to become a Ravener Prime or a Shrike Prime with options to buy a unit of the appropriate type to join them without taking up another slot.

A partial mutation codex would be nice. It doesn't need to be tons of stuff. But options that make sense and allowed key units to be adaptable to different roles would be great.

Lance845 wrote:

Davor wrote:

Lance845 wrote:The horror from beyond is a big pull. The Nids carry the Lovecraftian torch in 40k. They are the only extra galactic threat. Because of it nobody knows where they came from, how many galaxys they have been to before. If their eating whole systems has another goal besides perpetuating the race? Nobody knows.

They appear to be the end of all things, devouring everything in their path.

Only the Necrons really come close to rivaling Nids for biggest threat to the galaxy.

Or one of my other favorite "what ifs". What if they are running away from something or someone instead of just devouring and moving on?

Which would make sense if they were not drawn here by that artifact super powerful psychic artifact from the horus heresy.

This is the first I ever herd of this. Fact? This was never ever mentioned once in the Tyranid codices. From what I read on the interent, the 40K books are not cannon so not sure how to take this. Can you please explain more of this?

Earlier Tyranid codexes were not even written from the Hive Fleets perspective but are more logs of Imperial (mostly) records and reports of interactions.

As a result the Tyranids don't even really have a "voice" in the lore of Warhammer. As a result of that their actual motivations are unknown and only guessed at - for which there are many theories.

One is that the Hive simply goes galaxy to galaxy devouring all it encounters. Another is that there is a VAST number of hive fleets approaching and that what has hit so far is but the tip of a tentacle.
Others are that the Tyranids are not so much moving forward to devour but running away from something else. This latter argument is often brought out under the "lets have a new faction" line of thinking -- since its hard to create new factions in the 40K universe; heck Tau exist mostly because of fluff protection and supposed Eldar protection on the quiet -- because in general no other faction can get its head up in a Galaxy where there are huge players who can just sweep in and wipe them out before htey get advanced (and this is without the Genocidal Imperium of Man already having gone through most of hte Galaxy doing just that).

Davor wrote:

Lance845 wrote:

Davor wrote:

Lance845 wrote:The horror from beyond is a big pull. The Nids carry the Lovecraftian torch in 40k. They are the only extra galactic threat. Because of it nobody knows where they came from, how many galaxys they have been to before. If their eating whole systems has another goal besides perpetuating the race? Nobody knows.

They appear to be the end of all things, devouring everything in their path.

Only the Necrons really come close to rivaling Nids for biggest threat to the galaxy.

Or one of my other favorite "what ifs". What if they are running away from something or someone instead of just devouring and moving on?

Which would make sense if they were not drawn here by that artifact super powerful psychic artifact from the horus heresy.

This is the first I ever herd of this. Fact? This was never ever mentioned once in the Tyranid codices. From what I read on the interent, the 40K books are not cannon so not sure how to take this. Can you please explain more of this?

In the beginning, someone made a thing. It was a shiny thing and it was epic. Then the people who made it died out and the thing was forgotten. Flash forward to the heresy, and the loyalists had it. Then the disloyalists found out about it, and wanted it. Then the thing broke, and both sides were sad. Then, while the sad people were sad and didn't notice, it did a thing. This thing lasted for the briefest of seconds, but it was the biggest and shinest of things if you happened to be looking at the galaxy from outside of it. And we saw the thing happen from a point 10,000 years away. To us it said, "something happened here", and so we set out to find the place the thing was before it broke.

And that is how Tyranids became relevent.

I don't play Nids, I picked Tau over them when I first started out, but it was a very narrow decision. Based on the current state of things, I don't regret it.

That said, I still like them, and occasionally toy with the idea of building a carnifex for fun,in anticipation of the day when they can be fielded with confidence.

I think for me, the appeal comes from playing swarming bug dudes from a certain other game. Like the Nids, I considered these bugs to be mindless beasts without solid motivation, finishing the human campaign and starting up with them, I knew there was no way they'd ever be able to convince a young me me otherwise.

Then their mission control said hello.

That stuck with me. It's really, really cool.

Nids have this massive super-organism thing going on, everything in a given army specifically created for this very moment. Ideally they should be massive swarms of weaker creatures that deceptively seem less important than the big scary bruisers in their midst, only to pounce in with unexpected speed and get stuck amongst the enemy, tying them up while the big monsters converge and tighten the noose they'd been forming around something important, a noose you didn't even notice they were forming because you were distracted by the carnifex over on the opposite side of the field.

They're also one of the few armies that can easily roll with a complete and utter loss and still justify... you know, existing. A dead carnifex will be replaced by a live one eventually, the Imperial Fists 4th company is unlikely to inter a fallen brother in a dreadnought just because they recovered the wreck of one that happened to have the same name emblazoned on it.

 Lance845 wrote:
The Nids carry the Lovecraftian torch in 40k.

They really don't, though. If anything they started out as Heinlein's bugs with a dash of Card's formics, shifting hard into the rough modern idea of what they are by way of the Starship Troopers movie and (yes) Starcraft.

The Necrons were GW's attempt at doing Lovecraft and the implementation was sloppy. Their oft-maligned tonal shift is pretty much anti-lovecraft in every way (to their benefit, imo).

Zerg were also my favourite faction in Starcraft - heck one time I kept playing a map long enough (by not winning it) to cover most of the map in creep!

I also loved one of the last Terran missions where your base is overrun at the end. By using the cheat that prevents the level ending you could play it out for a while holding out until being overrun (actually after the initial swarm the game only spawns zerglings so as long as you survive the first few moments you can hold out forever with a few siege tanks) - but still fun!

Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7XV9fRAhu0

Heck the previous generation of Tyranid models had raveners which I'm sure were lifted right from Hyrdalisks - split lower jaw, upper claws and serpent body and all. Thankfully that edition of Tyranid models wnt out of fashion fast (I don't even see many on ebay). I'm grateful because the original metal tyranids and their current form I consider the best looking; that middle segment was a blip (though it did give us the great hovering brain of the zoanthrope).

Heck from our current roster the only bad looking model is the biovore; which is an old model. I'm still waiting for a bio/pyro vore combined plastic kit (and am honestly surprised we don't have one already - a 3 vore kit with sporemines is almost a given next time we get some nid models)

 Unyielding Hunger wrote:

Davor wrote:

Lance845 wrote:

Davor wrote:

Lance845 wrote:The horror from beyond is a big pull. The Nids carry the Lovecraftian torch in 40k. They are the only extra galactic threat. Because of it nobody knows where they came from, how many galaxys they have been to before. If their eating whole systems has another goal besides perpetuating the race? Nobody knows.

They appear to be the end of all things, devouring everything in their path.

Only the Necrons really come close to rivaling Nids for biggest threat to the galaxy.

Or one of my other favorite "what ifs". What if they are running away from something or someone instead of just devouring and moving on?

Which would make sense if they were not drawn here by that artifact super powerful psychic artifact from the horus heresy.

This is the first I ever herd of this. Fact? This was never ever mentioned once in the Tyranid codices. From what I read on the interent, the 40K books are not cannon so not sure how to take this. Can you please explain more of this?

In the beginning, someone made a thing. It was a shiny thing and it was epic. Then the people who made it died out and the thing was forgotten. Flash forward to the heresy, and the loyalists had it. Then the disloyalists found out about it, and wanted it. Then the thing broke, and both sides were sad. Then, while the sad people were sad and didn't notice, it did a thing. This thing lasted for the briefest of seconds, but it was the biggest and shinest of things if you happened to be looking at the galaxy from outside of it. And we saw the thing happen from a point 10,000 years away. To us it said, "something happened here", and so we set out to find the place the thing was before it broke.

And that is how Tyranids became relevent.

Basically this. It's in the HH books. Which are cannon. And might be mentioned in the 30k campaign books. But I am not 100% sure on that. But now one of the brightest lights in the galaxy is the astronomicon. It's been heavily implied that each hive fleet has taken a kind of meandering path (lots of pit stops at every available food source along the way) more or less heading for Terra.