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In the fluff, did the Tyranids ever tried fighting a strong daemonic force on a daemon world or a strong necron force on a tomb world? if they did, how well did the Tyranids do on those fights? And do you think a daemon force would be harder for the nids to defeat or would a necron force be harder for the nids to defeat?

The only time we've ever seen 'Nids fight Necrons it ended in a victory for the Necrons (when they cleansed a Tau planet of a Gorgon splinter-fleet, then immediately proceeded to murder all the Tau).

It speaks volumes that Kraken (iirc?) went lightyears out of its way to avoid a Tomb World, even to the point where the tendril in question starved itself into hibernation rather than confront the Necrons.

The newest 'Nids codex makes it clear that the Shadow in the Warp severely weakens Daemons.

Tyranids avoid active Tomb Worlds, presumably because they're not worth the effort. They will feed on the planet if the Necrons are dormant, though in the case of Ka'mais the Necrons were hiding inside of the planet's moon.

Against the Necrons, the Tyranids would fare as well as anyone else.

Of course, unless the Necrons were occupying a cheeseburger the size of a star system, they wouldn't choose to go near them.

 Tardzan wrote:
In the fluff, did the Tyranids ever tried fighting a strong daemonic force on a daemon world or a strong necron force on a tomb world? if they did, how well did the Tyranids do on those fights? And do you think a daemon force would be harder for the nids to defeat or would a necron force be harder for the nids to defeat?

In the new codex, Shadowbrink was an imperial work with a small Grey Knight task force trying to contain a chaos relic. The Tyranids slaughtered the imperials and started feeding on the planet when the relic blew and opened a door to the Warp. A Keeper of Secrets, Bloodthirster, Great Unclean One, and a Lord of Change came through with an army. They were sad the Imperials were dead, but thought all they had were some bugs to kill before launching an assault on the Imperium. Before they realized how they were, the GUO tried to wipe out the Tyranids in a charge. He exploded under an apocalyptic barrage from swarms of Biovores and Exocrines. After that, they realized that Shadows in the Warp > Warp and they were starving. The Lord of Change ran home while the Bloodthirster, Keeper of Secrets, and the rest of the demonic army were destroyed in an insane last battle of attrition with swarms of Tervigons spewing termagants before finally sending the last of them back to the warp under hordes of Carnifexes and Tyrannofexes.

The whole time, they were beating Nurgle's diseases through adaptation.... Demons are a cakewalk. Necrons give them a lot more work for their money. A Tyranid will go around a Necron for easier food. It doesn't mean that they won't attack them if the Necrons have something the Hive Fleet needs.

The Hive Mind does normally avoid both if it can though, because both are inedible for the most part.

It's still a big threat to to the goals of both (mainly because the goals of both daemons and necrons rely on mortals), and Necrons (or at least, the Silent King) knows this. One wonders if the Chaos gods realized it as well, yet.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
The only time we've ever seen 'Nids fight Necrons it ended in a victory for the Necrons (when they cleansed a Tau planet of a Gorgon splinter-fleet, then immediately proceeded to murder all the Tau).

That is not the only Tyranid vs. Necron reference.

The Necron invaders of forge world Lucius are themselves crushed by a splinter fleet of Hive Fleet Kraken.

p. 59, 4th edition Tyranid Codex

Much of the territory once ruled by the Charnovokh Dynasty lies far to the galactic southeast. Many of its dormant Tomb Worlds were devoured by Hive Fleet Behemoth...

p. 10, 5th edition Necron Codex

Tyranids can and have defeated Necrons before. However as others have noted, the cost usually outweighs the expected gain of victory if the world being fought over has little life.

And, in the case of Charnovokh, it should be noted that it suffered its losses because its Tomb Worlds had not yet awakened.

 Unyielding Hunger wrote:

 Tardzan wrote:
In the fluff, did the Tyranids ever tried fighting a strong daemonic force on a daemon world or a strong necron force on a tomb world? if they did, how well did the Tyranids do on those fights? And do you think a daemon force would be harder for the nids to defeat or would a necron force be harder for the nids to defeat?

In the new codex, Shadowbrink was an imperial work with a small Grey Knight task force trying to contain a chaos relic. The Tyranids slaughtered the imperials and started feeding on the planet when the relic blew and opened a door to the Warp. A Keeper of Secrets, Bloodthirster, Great Unclean One, and a Lord of Change came through with an army. They were sad the Imperials were dead, but thought all they had were some bugs to kill before launching an assault on the Imperium. Before they realized how they were, the GUO tried to wipe out the Tyranids in a charge. He exploded under an apocalyptic barrage from swarms of Biovores and Exocrines. After that, they realized that Shadows in the Warp > Warp and they were starving. The Lord of Change ran home while the Bloodthirster, Keeper of Secrets, and the rest of the demonic army were destroyed in an insane last battle of attrition with swarms of Tervigons spewing termagants before finally sending the last of them back to the warp under hordes of Carnifexes and Tyrannofexes.

The whole time, they were beating Nurgle's diseases through adaptation.... Demons are a cakewalk. Necrons give them a lot more work for their money. A Tyranid will go around a Necron for easier food. It doesn't mean that they won't attack them if the Necrons have something the Hive Fleet needs.

So in other words it is a boring over the top roflstomp match? Well that kinda sucks... I think I preferred it when the nid vs daemon reference was left vague. Imperial go to check and then see what's happening and just say forget that *Blow the planet to smitherines* also wait how is shadows in the warp > warp when daemons are the warp meaning that shadows would simply make daemons dissapear I'm confused. Then again I also get annoyed where a single regiment of guardsman.... defeats an entire hive fleet or some nonsense in some fluff in the guardmsan book I think. I need to drag that back.

Anyways, with this being the first sign of what usually happens, it seems like Daemons have 0 chances of fighting Nids and Nids and Necrons have almost 0 chance of beating Necrons (bar dormant ones and small minor expeditions). So now I am imagining all the races as this one short skit of monty python where a bunch of rich people argue about how bad their past life was as they continue to escalate!

The thing to consider is that the SitW basically "statics out" the local Warp connections, and so unhosted Daemons lose their grip on reality and vanish.

In the event of a smaller Hive presence, where the Shadow is not that strong, that might not happen.

If there is one impression I get from a lot of these discussion, it's this: Necrons destroy all comers and there is no stopping them. The only race that would have any kind of edge is dying out so it doesn't matter.

It seems, the way the fluff reads sometimes, that the final two races will be the Nids and the Necrons.

 Envihon wrote:
If there is one impression I get from a lot of these discussion, it's this: Necrons destroy all comers and there is no stopping them. The only race that would have any kind of edge is dying out so it doesn't matter.

It seems, the way the fluff reads sometimes, that the final two races will be the Nids and the Necrons.

Well to the best of our knowledge the tyranids can not enter the webway of the eldar, so in theory if the eldar race would ride out the tyranid threat there, the the long term affect that would have on the remaining craftworld eldar is unknown thou. Seeing as the dark eldar became the way they are do more tot he birth of Slaanesh then their long presence in the web way. As for the Necrons being unbeatable, that is far from true as they have been beaten by the the Sisters of Battle, eldar, Marines and guard (IIRC). The power of the necrons really comes down to the writer portraying them which makes them highly inconsistent.

Now to the topic of the thread, tyranids would defeat a host of daemons more often then not because of the disturbance (the Shadow in the Warp) which though weakens their grip on the material world. However, if the tyranids entered the eye of terror and descended onto a true daemon world it might be a much different story since their would be no biomass for the tryanids to replenish their numbers.

Am I correct that at some point in the Fluff it was stated many Necron Tomb Worlds suffer from complete desertification? Maybe it was a ploy by the Necron so there worlds would lack biomass and therefore be unattractive to the Hive Fleets.

In relation to Daemon worlds, I seem to remember some Kroot feeding on Noise Marines I think it was and going all crazy, think of the possibilities of a hive fleet corrupted by the Ruinous powers.....

Wasn't there something about a Necron piece of tech that caused the Hive Mind to fail and repelled them from invading the planet? I feel like I recall reading that somewhere.

 Archer wrote:
Am I correct that at some point in the Fluff it was stated many Necron Tomb Worlds suffer from complete desertification? Maybe it was a ploy by the Necron so there worlds would lack biomass and therefore be unattractive to the Hive Fleets.

Possibly.

They may have just had a lot of dead worlds in their possession due to the C'tan eating everything on the planets they conquered.

Or the C'tan knew what was coming in thousands of years and were preparing really early ;-) cue ominous music.

I wonder how well a fully restored Ctan would fair against a major fleet of Tyranids?

WabbaDanceParty wrote:
I wonder how well a fully restored Ctan would fair against a major fleet of Tyranids?

C'tans and Greater daemons could easily solo entire swarms.

VampireDeLaVega wrote:

WabbaDanceParty wrote:
I wonder how well a fully restored Ctan would fair against a major fleet of Tyranids?

C'tans and Greater daemons could easily solo entire swarms.

You mean like how 3 greater daemons got destroyed in the latest Tyranid Codex and how that ex-Imperial world is now a dead world not a daemon world? You're letting your bias for Chaos show through when you cannot accept that they could be defeated (to the point of using the sour grapes claim of "the daemons weren't really trying" in another thread on this forum), just as people with a bias for Necrons for years argued that the Tyranids could never defeat Necrons, but then had to accept the Tyranids had in fact consumed Tomb Worlds as stated in the Necron Codex. No factions in 40K are invulnerable or dominating over others. All have suffered defeats from the other factions. No Greater Daemon of Khorne would "not really try to fight". It is in their very nature to fight, at every moment, even if it means killing their own.

However the only tombworlds devoured were not awaked yet so I don't think that counts.

Anyone can beat a force that doesn't or barely fights back.

C"Tan aren't affected by SitW, since the C'Tan don't use Warp powers, at all. They also don't actually have any physical bodies, and are, when they want to be, larger than stars.

A fully formed, Transcendent C'Tan would probably gorge itself on a Hive Fleet like a fat guy at Thanksgiving dinner.

I would guess Tyranids are pretty effective against deamons because of their shadow in the warp thing.
Necrons would b a really hard fight though. Since Necrons are not edible and most of their worlds are desert-like, the Tyranids would run out of biomass pretty soon I imagine.
Tyranids in the fluff also run huge circles around Tomb Worlds in order to avoid confrontation with the Necrons.

The Necron Codex also has the Tyranids as the main threat that the Silent King sees, and the reason why he runs around trying to re-unite the Necron dynasties. He believes that unless they are united, they will all individually fall before the Tyranids. The threat assessment and reaction of the Silent King, who cannot be all that incompetent if he won against the C'tan, suggests Tyranids are far from the pushover that Necron fanatic players would like to think.

A variation of this same debate has been had in past editions, such as over the still ongoing Orks vs. Tyranids Octarian War. Similarly, at the beginning, there were some Ork players claiming Ork spore biology would render Orks completely immune to Tyranid Genestealer subversion or actually being consumed. Needless to say, both these points have been explicitly disproven by GW's own texts on the fates of Orrok and Ghorala, both from last edition and this current one.

In-universe propaganda is one thing, but it starts becoming excessive when players buy into it themselves in RL, to the point of believing their faction invincible and being unable to accept flaws or defeats (either in game or in universe fluff). That is the difference between playing a certain faction, liking a certain faction, and becoming a fanboy of that faction.

Quickie disclaimer: I don't think we've seen the Hive Mind attack a REAL Daemon world. It's run into worlds in the throes of becoming one, but an actual one? Not yet. That situation is rare in general because most daemon worlds are at least partially within the warp, making an actual invasion of them quite difficult. Presumably, if the tyrannids attacked an honest-to-goodness true daemon world, they'd have as much success as the other factions. IE, not much. Yea, it's possible to purge a daemon world within the warp (the Abyssal Crusade actually DID successfully purge a few hundred) but for the most part chaos has a HUGE advantage on a true daemon world ("a few hundred" was a pretty terrible amount considering that it took like, what, 25 entire space marine chapters and fleets? Most of whom became corrupted)




In regards to last faction standing, the fluff is purposefully "what-if" in regards to the Necrons and Tyrannids. Both could possibly be the strongest races, but it's based upon the what-if of just how many tomb worlds are in-tact and just how many tyrannids are going to arrive. Of the two, though, the Tyrannids are slightly less "what-if" and more "probably going to happen", though. The Silent King seems aware of this though which is why he's taking the Tyrannid threat very seriously.

That said, although it's true that I'd give the Tyrannids and the Necrons the best odds of "winning" (if the plot hypothetically progressed towards a winner, which it won't for obvious reasons), there's still hope for the other factions (a hope that, if the plot ever progresses at all, is narratively guaranteed to happen just to maintain the stalemate).

Silly things like logistics and numbers and physics means nothing to the Chaos Gods if they get more of the galaxy enveloped in warp and/or to become daemon worlds. So Chaos will always have a chance.

The Eldar might end up awaking Ynead early. This is admittingly doubtful, but even if they don't, they'll always be able to survive as long as there are other silly meat shields around for them to direct threats towards (like say, Orks or the Imperium)

Once the gak hits the fan enough for the Imperium, if the plot somehow hypothetically "progressed" to that point, GW could just reawaken/bring back the loyalist primarchs and suddenly the Imperium has a chance again (whether or not they plan to do that, I'm not sure, but it's obvious they're at least keeping the option open). Sure, in a head-up fight a few extra primarchs probably won't make much of a difference against the entirety of the Tyrannid hive mind descending on the galaxy, but the primarchs would probably use their genius to come up with some strategies that end up tipping the odds back towards a more balanced scenario. If that doesn't seem good enough to save the Imperium and thus keep the stalemate going, then in a pinch GW could bring back the Emperor or have the Emperor get unleashed into the warp as a true god, although I doubt they'd bring the plot forward THAT much or to that point.

Orks are numerous and hardy enough that unlike other factions, they don't need a plot device to keep their hope alive. They could probably take on Tyrannids and/or Necrons near indefinitely in a straight up battle, although of course it depends on the "what-if" numbers behind each faction. Of course, narratively speaking, the "what-if" numbers will always be "whatever it takes to maintain the stalemate".

The Tau's situation is kinda similar to the Elder. They'll be fine (for a given relative definition of "fine") no matter how many tyrannids and necrons arrive as long as the other factions are there to soak up the blunt.

I just want to point out two things:

1) Necron tomb worlds are badly damaged when Tyranids attack(due to the way they travel, a tyranid swarm causes natural disasters like earthquakes that shatter a tomb world)

2) The Silent King fear tyranids because if they eat everything, then the necrons have no hope of returning to biological bodies, not because they can hurt necrons.

 Exalted Pariah wrote:


2) The Silent King fear tyranids because if they eat everything, then the necrons have no hope of returning to biological bodies, not because they can hurt necrons.

Not really, the Tyranid Hive Fleets have the potential to defeat an united Necron race if they manage consume enough biomass. And that is without considering that current Hive Fleets are only a small portion of the whole Tyranid race.

time to use MSP to describe SITW.

 the shrouded lord wrote:
time to use MSP to describe SITW.

 Blackhair Duckshape wrote:

 the shrouded lord wrote:
time to use MSP to describe SITW.

..... this is probably the greatest way to respond to every forum out there xD

In the Necron's own fluff: The fact that the Silent King, who stood up to and defeated Gods that would eat stars for sustenance, is afraid of Tyranids, should really tell you something...