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Games Workshop introduced Genestealers in 1989 in the game Space Hulk. The first recognizable incarnation of Tyranid warriors appeared in Advanced Space Crusade in 1990, featuring biological weaponry such as boneswords and deathspitters.[2]

Tyranids were first mentioned under the heading Tyranids and the Hive Fleets in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, and were illustrated in a form not too different from that of Gaunts.[1]

The first Tyranids used conventional, non-biological equipment such as lasguns and flak armor (although the rulebook stated that these represented organic equipment with similar capabilities).[3] The principal unit available to the Tyranids was the Zoat, a centaur-like creature enslaved to fight on the behalf of their Tyranid masters.

Second Edition Warhammer 40,000, released in 1993, featured the Tyranids in the supplemental books Wargear and Codex Imperialis, and then later in their own devoted army Codex. An extensive model range was released, representing most of the units described in these publications. The army was, however, very different from the factions previously seen in the game.[4]

- From Wikipedia

Here's my argument -

Alien 1979
Aliens 1986
Alien 3 1992
Very popular Aliens vs. Predator comics that came out late late 80s.

Aliens were at the forefront of sci-fi culture. GW wanted to capitalize on this and the take the genestealer idea to a new level. They went too far with the great devourer trope and created a race that negatively impacts the company's ability for progressive storytelling. Now they have a race that either must be killed or kills everything.

Then they did the same thing with Necrons.

As grimdark as it all is it hampered their ability to do anything. So Necrons got retconned. Orks at least have rivaling warlords and some semblance of a society(did orks always have this or was it introduced later?). Chaos still needs lifeforms to exist because of the symbiotic relationship of getting power via souls.

I believe that Tyranids will be retconned via GS cults and the hive mind realizing they can't win and become a race with either traveling hive fleets or established worlds. I think it will be shown that the hive fleets have an end and that Tyranids are not an endless swarm. They have to change. The current fluff is cheap and uninspired.

I'd love to see things progress to where the nids are nearly wiped out. GS cult emissaries cutting deals with orks and other races works. Nids become weapons of war for the cults that are used only when required. Secretly everything is being manipulated by the hive mind for some sinister purpose. The hive mind could really be fleshed out as an entity with grand scheme to become a god or perhaps it was a god cast out by the other chaos gods and wants revenge so it made its own flesh and blood realspace demons rather than warp entities.

Regardless of what happens. GW wants to move the story forward and it really looks like they want to make more, refined and in depth story lines and they can't do it with the current iteration of Tyranids.

Discuss!

Why do they have to make tyranids more complex? We've got the entire forces of the Imperium, the orks, chaos worshippers, eldar, tau and now even the necrons for some reason. To say nothing of anything else they could flesh out or just invent. There is a lot more room left for the factions that rely on humanity and charm, trying to make tyranids more approachable seems like missing their whole deal.

The most I would like to see is adding the tidbit that tyranids are also an abundant source of rare materials and are as potentially valuable as they are dangerous. That would call back to Weyland-Yutani viewing the xenomorph as a tremendous resource with no heed for the human cost in exploring it.

Naaris wrote:
Now they have a race that either must be killed or kills everything.

Then they did the same thing with Necrons.

As grimdark as it all is it hampered their ability to do anything. So Necrons got retconned.

I very much disagree with the bolded assertion. Necrons could have done plenty without their shift in tone. Characters/species do not have to be anthropomorphic to make compelling stories.

However it does require either more imagination from writers, or bolder direction from product managers.


That said, I did prefer Tyranid Warriors when they were more center stage. I found their earlier manifestations more imperious, intelligent and dangerous. I felt they were closer to the "real Tyranid", as they are the synapse locus. Sinister and threatening. These days I never see them on the table, and when I do they look more like dinosaurs. Even though their first model is primitive by todays standards, the aesthetic behind it had more presence, imo.

I know a lot of Tyranid players, me and my wife included, for whom the whole appeal of Tyranids is that they are NOTHING like other factions. Nothing humane, nothing anthropomorfic about them - they are the space ants, space bees, Orson Scott Card "Ender's Game" "buggers" - an entomologist "dream come true" on depiction how insect evolution could reach technological/cosmic travel era.

And as GSC are now a thing once more, there is absolutely no reason to "castrate" entire faction feel. Want "bugs with Queen", individual character, interactions with other races and with clothes on? No problem now. Want a collective mind species? Tyranids then...

And the part on "hive mind could really be fleshed out as an entity with grand scheme to become a god" is totally misunderstanding what a "Hive Mind" is. Hive Mind is NOT a "queen", it is not a Chaos God, not an Eldar Warp entity coalescent on soul energy, nor it is C'Tan "godlike" material universe being. It is a collective mind, emergent thought process of an entire species, for which single Tyranid creatures are as synapses are for human brain and nervous system. Just read some scientific texts on how inteligent ant colonies are when treated/analysed as a single organism with separate small, independent "body parts". Tyranids should not be retconned to be divided into fleets of particular, separate interests, because that would require giving them something humane, humanely understandable reasoning and desires. They are good just as they are.

And "progressing the story" is completely possible, because even the unstoppable flow of Hive Fleets can be slowed down so much, that Tyranid invasion could last millenia and for what it's worth, Tyranids could just consume forests growing on long dead bodies of other 40K species in say, 400K, and be completely indifferent about it.

They are a constant background, an ideal reference point on just how small the entire Imperium vs Chaos quarrel is in cosmological timescale. They are not an unbeatable force, they are a law of nature incarnate.

No insult TC but I think your idea is a terrible idea.

Leave the nids alone. Even though I think GW will rip off Star Craft and give them queens and select characters with sentience it is the wrong way to go about it. We need at least one endless one mind faction in the game. Not everyone has to want to order pizza from the Blood Angels and go shopping at the Tau malls and trade with each other like the bastardized Necron lore. Granted Trazyn is awesome, but the only good thing to happen out of all that.

If they did a Necron sub-faction that was the old flluff of C'tan ruling the Necrons and the necrons trying to become one mindless faction again I would start collecting instantly. The only reason I didn't collect them in the first place was that dumb lore change.

Love the Nids exactly the way they are...and there ARE individual exampled of stand-out individuals in the Tyranid codex - The Red Terror and Old One-Eye, for example, as well as Deathleaper and the Swarmlord.

This sounds like such a bad idea on so many levels. It sounds like someone is jealous of the character development the rest of the races have been getting. Some people (most nids players) like the mindless, endless, characterless aspect of the nids.

 Gamgee wrote:
Even though I think GW will rip off Star Craft and give them queens and select characters with sentience it is the wrong way to go about it.

I think Tyranid Norn Queens have always had sentience.

Interesting perspective. It's a good question.

My brother collects Tyranids and loves the straight up bad guy feel. There is no "seeing things from a Tyranid's perspective" because they are so utterly foreign/alien to us that we cannot relate at all. Where Orks are basically rowdy humans and Eldar are enlightened humans and marines are stoic humans and Tau are cooperative humans, Tyranids are the one true alien in 40k, the only race totally incomprehensible to us. It definitely limits their story and plot options (and we have struggled a bit at times to create original scenarios for our campaign), with some thought, you can still have engaging stories like the Anohelion Project.

I think a game of Imperial Guard vs Tyranids is almost as classic as Orks vs Marines. There's just something more terrifying about fighting a totally alien menace where there is no negotiation, no surrender, only to survive or be eaten.

That being said, they do need to continue to advance the plot and can't leave the hive fleets menacingly approaching forever. But good story writers will have no problems coming up with engaging ways to involve the 'Nids. I was always picturing the Imperium would come up with some biological weapon to stall the tyranid push but that there could be unintended side effects.

Personally I vastly preferred Necrons back when they were an unexplained deadly phenomenon (and hard as heck to kill!). Giving them character ruined them for me.

Likewise I vastly prefer Tyranids as a ravening horde. If anything I don't think GW gives enough time to them (or they don't have enough of a genuine presence in the universe). You can create plenty of story - but understand it won't be based around the Tyranids side of things quite so much. No one starting up Tyranids is wishing they could talk or plan or strategize. The game needs the faceless eating/killing machines.

That idea creates a world of scenarios just in itself.

Sorry, I agree with everyone else.

Actually the Tyranids have plenty of relatable qualities if you just role play a bit... I play Advanced Space Crusade with my 7 yo son. He loves the dice rolling and DAKKA. I explained the concept this way:

So here's this huge space squid ship full of monster aliens, just minding its own business and eating planets, and suddenly it gets shot and infected with these little metal-covered germs (Space Marines) that spread through its body and try to kill it! So these little Tyranid monsters are like the space squid's antibodies trying to stop the infection before it gets terminal organ failure and passes out. Because then the Imperial ships could just shoot it to death.

He is totally sympathetic to the plight of the poor Tyranid Hive mind.

Of course that doesn't stop him from playing Marines sometimes.

"Wait, The ship I'm inside of is a giant animal? I want go find its eyes and blow them up from behind, then it's blind!"

"Funny, that's pretty much *exactly* the Space Marine strategy in this game!"

So the Imperium is about as sophisticated as my 7 year old.

I agree the nids are good as an impossible-to-understand hive mind, kill or be killed, enemy. The advancement GW could do is have the Nids win taking over a whole sector or something. There's no coming to terms with Nids, and I like that. As somebody else said, IG standing against waves of Nids is classic.

 Master of the Forge wrote:

So the Imperium is about as sophisticated as my 7 year old.

Lol, that's not the first time a kid has been spot on about strategy. Sometimes a new way of looking at something turns out to be the better way!

imho all nyds need it's a bit of difference between hive fleets or norn queens, not as character development but as locked in evolutionary focus.

So hive fleet A norn queen focus mostly in apply psy develop to the nids she command while hive fleet B norn queen focus a tad more in evolving new types of bioweapons for long range engagements.

The entire point of Tyranids is that they are utterly alien, totally unrelatable by anything that we would call sentient.

They are a super organism. You cannot look at them as a collection of a bunch of individuals. No. Each tyranid organism is simply a single cell in a massive super organism.

We can no more relate to the Hive Mind then an amoeba can relate to the mind of a human. That is what humans, orks, eldar, etc... are to the Hive Mind. Single celled organisms. At best a curiosity to learn from as it studies us under a microscope, while at the same time it consumes entire worlds for lunch. It is utterly unfathomable and incomprehensible.

At the same time, it is neither evil or good. It is beyond petty morality. It simply knows one thing that we can understand. It hungers...

This doesn't limit story telling. Not everything needs to be in-depth and nuanced. People mistake depth for quality, the two are sometimes related, but often you can do just as effective story telling with something simple. Tyranids being an unfathomable great devourer is a perfectly acceptable thing. You then use it as contrast to the humans struggling against it. If you make the tyranids have character, it just causes the whole thing to break down and you actually lose effective means of telling a story.

Tyranids should be big stompy horrors of flesh and sinew backed up by waves of little gribblies. They should have some of the biggest and nastiest MCs in the game.

As Lord Perversor says, you can totally make distinc hive fleet have character.

Just make them different at a evolutionary level. Thats the point of diferent Hive Fleets.
And thats why in the fluff, when two diferent Hive Fleets collide, they try to anihilate the other. The winner its the stronger and asimilated all the biomass of the weaker Hive Fleet.

The writers of the Tyranid codex should look to how the Zerg function for crunch ideas. Horamgaunts should be zerglings, which means a huge speed increase.

This is a fascinating thread:

- everybody (except for OP) agree with everyone else;

- everybody (except for OP) agree, that GW has done something right.

This must be trully the first time in the history of Dakka

Wait for Peregrine. He think that the Tyranids should be squatted. (With his own reasons)

Giving the Tyranids any sort of relatable character would completely destroy the faction and greatly upset most of the fans.
It would be absolutely horrible.
The idea described in the OP is even worse, first of all because it relies on assumptions that are just completely wrong. The Tyranids in their present form make for great storytelling exactly because they are like a mindless force of nature. They make for a great tool to control the pace of the setting, add tension and raise the stakes and make for a great challenge for the heroes to overcome against all odds.
And since Chaos or the Orks lack the impact needed to be a credible threat in the minds of the readers, the Tyranids are essential to create the '5-minutes to midnight' feel that the 40k setting needs.
Changing the Tyranids would ruin 40k.

Another wrong assumption in the OP is that the Tyranids are a race that either kills or is killed. This is not true. It is possible to defeat the Tyranids without wiping them all out, because they are divided in hive fleets. See the Ultramarine victory at Macragge for a good example. You can defeat a Tyranid hive fleet, but that doesn't mean you have wiped the Tyranids out. There are still many more left. It is no different from defeating an Imperial Guard regiment. Defeating an Imperial Guard regiment doesn't mean you have defeated humanity as a whole.
The statement only becomes true if you mean by defeating the Tyranids literally defeating the Tyranid race as a whole. In that case the statement applies equally to most factions in 40k. The Imperium too for example, either defeats and wipes out its enemies to claim the universe for mankind, or it is defeated and wiped out itself. There is no middle ground with the Imperium, just as with the Tyranids. This is needed, because in the grim darkness of the far future, there is supposed to be only war (and no compromise and peace).

Martel732 wrote:
The writers of the Tyranid codex should look to how the Zerg function for crunch ideas. Horamgaunts should be zerglings, which means a huge speed increase.

You mean like they had back in 2nd edition?

Like SM, nids need a Base rules(Behemoth, Kraken, Leviathan) and then a few specialized fleet rules(2-3) with a unique unit / figure to give said specialized fleet some flavor. The fluff is there, its really up to the writers and codex designers. Alot to play with really, no excuse other then development cost don't make up for the sales.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/List_of_Hive_Fleets

Hive Fleet Colossus: Comprised of centaur-like creatures

Hive Fleet Ouroboros: Described as consisting of winged monsters, vomited from the bellies of great beasts, that descended from the heavens and stripped the countryside of life.

Hive Fleet Jormungandr: Favoured subtler methods than the siege tactics displayed by the other Hive Fleets. Its bio-vessels rarely entered planetary orbit. Instead, Jormungandr snared asteroids and other space debris, hurling them at the target world and launching Mycetic Spores in concert. The devastation wreaked by the bombardment ensured that a greater proportion of the Spores make planet-fall. Each Mycetic Spore that landed unleashed a Ravener brood, or sometimes a Mawloc or Trygon. These immediately buried underground and went dormant to avoid detection. Only when the infestation reached critical mass did the Hive Fleet send the psychic stimuli to awaken its slumbering serpents

Hive Fleet Tiamet: Is theorized to be a Tyranid implant-probe sent into the Galaxy ahead of the larger Hive Fleets.

Hive Fleet Scylla & Charybdis: Twin fleets closest to Terra...

 Viridian wrote:

Hive Fleet Colossus: Comprised of centaur-like creatures

I'm pretty sure that's a reference to Zoats.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Viridian wrote:

Hive Fleet Colossus: Comprised of centaur-like creatures

I'm pretty sure that's a reference to Zoats.

Good old Zoats..

And remember Squids were originally nids

GodDamUser wrote:


Good old Zoats..

And remember Squids were originally nids

I'm sure Squgs was autocorrected there. But yeah, I had forgotten that!

nou wrote:
This is a fascinating thread:

- everybody (except for OP) agree with everyone else;

- everybody (except for OP) agree, that GW has done something right.

This must be trully the first time in the history of Dakka

Spot on observation! Not your typical thread.