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Seems like Hierophants get their asses royally kicked and the nids got nothing bigger.

Bigger things have been mentioned rarely in the fluff, but generally they make a hole in the armour and kill the crew from the inside.

The exact way you used to kill them in the Titan Legions board game: boarding actions.

You don't need a mega-kaiju to kill one. You just need to get swarms of genestealers and/or gargoyles inside (the latter especially as an Imperator has limited flak protection).

Finally, the Tyranids do have a bigger, tougher unit - the Dominatrix/Hydraphant. It's still a long way from Emperor-class, but the thing is obscenely tough, especially since it's a bio-titan scale synapse creature with psychic potential to match.

It's only ever existed in epic, I'm afraid.

Do Hive ships do anything? I remember Tau using space ships to take out Titans back when they didn't have any.

How strong are Hive Ships?

Gothic Armada 2 is noncanon and their awesome tyranid ship designs are also noncanon.

beast_gts wrote:
Bigger things have been mentioned rarely in the fluff, but generally they make a hole in the armour and kill the crew from the inside.

So which Tyranids make the holes and how do they get the nids into the holes? and which Nids go into the holes? Just genestealers and gargs?

roboemperor wrote:
Seems like Hierophants get their asses royally kicked and the nids got nothing bigger.

Does the fluff explicitly say that they have nothing bigger? Or are Hierophants just the largest unit available to Tyranids on the tabletop? I've always assumed that pretty much every faction had units that were just too large or too strong for regular 40k games.

Maybe they have some sort of orbital bombardment. Or swarms of tiny creatures capable of burrowing through metal.

Or given their numbers, perhaps they can just straight-up ignore the titan. It'll run out of ammo eventually, and when it does, they can eat all of their dead to recover the biomass. By the time they leave the now-dead planet, the titan is still standing, but has been completely harmless for days.

.

-Guardsman- wrote:

roboemperor wrote:
Seems like Hierophants get their asses royally kicked and the nids got nothing bigger.

Does the fluff explicitly say that they have nothing bigger? Or are Hierophants just the largest unit available to Tyranids on the tabletop? I've always assumed that pretty much every faction had units that were just too large or too strong for regular 40k games.

Maybe they have some sort of orbital bombardment. Or swarms of tiny creatures capable of burrowing through metal.

Or given their numbers, perhaps they can just straight-up ignore the titan. It'll run out of ammo eventually, and when it does, they can eat all of their dead to recover the biomass. By the time they leave the now-dead planet, the titan is still standing, but has been completely harmless for days.

.

Tyranids been out for a really long time now. Necrons got titans in lore like crypt stalker or that weird comic with the giant humanoid necron titan in the background. Tyranids got jack.

Hive Fleet Gorgon's defeat. It was one of the most advanced tyranid armies there were to even house dominatrixes yet if a hive fleet doesnt create anything bigger in the face of total annihilation, then they got nothing bigger.

i was asking about the orbital bombardment. I could see battlefleet gothic's tyranid units taking out Titans from orbit but they're noncanon. How strong are canon hive fleets? From what I gather they're the weakest space fleet.

Waiting until titan runs out of ammo is just pathetic and sad. If that were true I'd really not like tyranids anymore.

Tyranids have three Titan Class models - Dominatrix, Hierophant and Hydrophant. All three are broadly similar in size, though the Dominatrix was far chunkier in body mass and was mounted with a powerful psycher.

Thing is Titan Legions never really had Tyranids whilst Epic 40K was killed off before many armies were all that much expanded beyond the Marine and Imperial side.


Until more recently we haven't had a titan game and the 40K options for anything bigger than a knight are expensive, resin and limited in practicality. So there's been no real pressure on GW creatives to actually make any bigger beasties to go toe to toe with something like an Imperator (which in the old games was still supposed to be the biggest and most scary thing you'd ever encounter).



So I'm very sure tyranids can breed things bigger. Heck when their ships arrive and they start feeding they build huge capillary towers into space to drain the world of biomass. As for hiveships in orbit they could certainly use orbital weapons.

That said Tyranids would most likely focus on an Imperator as noted above - instead of going toe to toe with it they'd aim to distract it's primary weapons with juicy targets whilst working gaunts and smaller units close enough to break into the Titan and tear its crew and its innards apart from the inside. It would actually be a neat part of the game if it were to come back because it would highlight how powerful a single model is; but that its also vulnerable, if left alone, to being overwhelmed with numbers. Sure it can blast anything, but when its weapons take time to reload and when its only got so many targets it can hit - a swarm can tear into it.

With the new Droppod systems and some increase in air units there's also other ways they can attack it or get units onto it to cause damage. Targeting it from orbit and dropping sports and Tyranocites down right on top!

This is one of the many reasons that Epic 40k needs to make a comeback. The old Tyranids were fine, but imagine the levels of awesomeness that new Epic Tyranid models would bring.

I also don't see any reason why GW couldn't flesh out the Titan size models in the Tyranid army. Even if none bigger than a Hierophant have been mentioned til now they can always invent a few new bio-titans.

I don't see why Tyranids would necessarily need a titan as big as an Emperor Titan. Just because a faction doesn't have an equivalent doesn't mean they don't have a way to kill it. When's the last time GW made an Emperor Class Titan anyway? Back in the 90s? It would be cool to see one now as part of Adeptus Titanicus, I don't think it's necessary though.

Giant Ork Mega Gargants like God-Breaker or the absolutely massive war machines in Deff Skwadron are more of a issue - as they filled with Ork Boyz as well.



or they just wait till other Orks blow em up

Tryanids have no trouble killing entire Titan Legions be sheer weight of numbers - the Emperor class has to reload and repower its weapons and its voids can be overloaded, if the nids can get swarms in from all angles its in trouble even with supporting Skitarii or even other Titans.

and if its a city......

roboemperor wrote:Do Hive ships do anything? I remember Tau using space ships to take out Titans back when they didn't have any.

Do Tau have titans now? Vaguely disappointing. I think I liked it better when the Tau would laugh at such a ridiculous thing and fire huge ordnance at it.

roboemperor wrote:Necrons got titans in lore like crypt stalker or that weird comic with the giant humanoid necron titan in the background.

Hey, that was a great comic!

Overread wrote:That said Tyranids would most likely focus on an Imperator as noted above - instead of going toe to toe with it they'd aim to distract it's primary weapons with juicy targets whilst working gaunts and smaller units close enough to break into the Titan and tear its crew and its innards apart from the inside.

Not a million miles from one way space marines would deal with titans in-game: insert a bunch of terminators up close, and punch holes in it's ankles.

Mr Morden wrote:

Spoiler:

That was another great comic.

I don't think the Tau have anything bigger than the KX-139 that we've ever seen, and that's more of a biggish Knight (which is not a million miles away from a scout titan, granted).

But I agree, I'd like to see them not go any further and just keep using big flying gunships instead, I thought it was a nice bit of character.

locarno24 wrote:
The exact way you used to kill them in the Titan Legions board game: boarding actions.

You don't need a mega-kaiju to kill one. You just need to get swarms of genestealers and/or gargoyles inside (the latter especially as an Imperator has limited flak protection).

100% this. You don't need big things to defeat big things.

That said, I'm pretty dissapointed in the scaling down of the Heirophant. The old Epic model was the size of a Warlord Titan, the FW model feels smaller than a WarHOUND.

So what I have learned in this thread is that titans are hard-countered by ripper swarms

(/sarcasm)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

roboemperor wrote:
Gothic Armada 2 is noncanon and their awesome tyranid ship designs are also noncanon.

Technically, yes. But GWs own depictions of hive ships since then have been extremely similar (to the point of being identical), so I would say the game is a reasonable enough indicator so long as it is not taken too strictly.

I assume they overwhelm with numbers rather than pure size then? I also assume that they usually plaster the crap of them with spore pods with bio-beasts inside, given the size of an Emperor Class Titan, you can't really miss and even a few that get through can do pretty good damage.

FW retconned bio titans when they released the hierophant.

Heirophants used to be warlord titans, now they're scout titants.

The hierodule was the original EPIC scout titan.

Before specialist games closed though, they did release a test army list with hierophants as scout titans a new battle titan scale unit called the Hydraphant.

whether this is still considered accurate now I don't know..

Titan Armor is super easy to punch through to the point lots of lowest mob units can break through and invade?

I vaguely remember the 'Lords of Mars' book having a princeps who was a veteran of a Tyranid war and suffered severe PTSD. The book described the sensation of Tyranids breaching the armour and eating him away from the inside. It was not pleasant.

 Insectum7 wrote:
That said, I'm pretty dissapointed in the scaling down of the Heirophant. The old Epic model was the size of a Warlord Titan, the FW model feels smaller than a WarHOUND.

Yup. I think the redesign to fit in with the nids from 3rd ed+ could have been handled better. Worked for the trygon, I think, but the hierophant and assault spawn just got turned into stretched-out carnifexes, with the H receiving the worst stretching. The original epic model had insectoid legs, but still chunky claws for lumbering and smashing. The current look is so spindly, I have trouble imagining it not snapping in a breeze, either as flesh-and-carapace or resin.
Also, it's one of the instances where being more insectoid and gribbly than the smaller, 40K-familiar nids works in it's favour. Helps the impression that it's something different, more alien than even it's fellow nids, a class apart. Less a hard-shelled space-dinosaur snarling in your face, more a barely-relateable, spiky, tentacled, squamous thing far above your head, smashing buildings and standing on tanks. More of a kaiju, more like Cthulhu. Again, the new look is just too ironed-out and weirdly familiar, in comparison.

Was there ever any idea what a hydraphant looked like? Like a bigger version of a hierophant or dominatrix? Was it worth it...?

I dunno what you could do with the old slug spawn. Should've kept at least one like that, for old time's sake.

(Carnifii? Carnifices...?)

 Vermis wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
That said, I'm pretty dissapointed in the scaling down of the Heirophant. The old Epic model was the size of a Warlord Titan, the FW model feels smaller than a WarHOUND.

Yup. I think the redesign to fit in with the nids from 3rd ed+ could have been handled better. Worked for the trygon, I think, but the hierophant and assault spawn just got turned into stretched-out carnifexes, with the H receiving the worst stretching. The original epic model had insectoid legs, but still chunky claws for lumbering and smashing. The current look is so spindly, I have trouble imagining it not snapping in a breeze, either as flesh-and-carapace or resin.
Also, it's one of the instances where being more insectoid and gribbly than the smaller, 40K-familiar nids works in it's favour. Helps the impression that it's something different, more alien than even it's fellow nids, a class apart. Less a hard-shelled space-dinosaur snarling in your face, more a barely-relateable, spiky, tentacled, squamous thing far above your head, smashing buildings and standing on tanks. More of a kaiju, more like Cthulhu. Again, the new look is just too ironed-out and weirdly familiar, in comparison.

Was there ever any idea what a hydraphant looked like? Like a bigger version of a hierophant or dominatrix? Was it worth it...?

I dunno what you could do with the old slug spawn. Should've kept at least one like that, for old time's sake.

(Carnifii? Carnifices...?)

Agreed. I really liked the design of the epic ones (Heirophant and Heirodule). Their poise looked more aggressive and alien.

The current Heirophant is still pretty cool (I have one), but an older-sized-and-styled one would be about 100x more terrifying.

The best way to tackle an Emperor class using Hierophants under the old Epic rules was to engage in close combat. For the same cost of an Emperor, you could get several Hierophants and they were notoriously hard to put down since they could regenerate wounds (and if you were lucky, you got the Hive Mind card that instantly heals one up to full health). Arm them with the razor claw weapon option and rush the Emperor class. It would be unlikely that the Emperor could put more than 1 down before being engaged in close combat. Ideally try to get multiple Hierophants into close combat to get the combat bonus for multiple combatants and if you win the close combat, use the razor claw against the leg or reactor. Roll off with bonus to the hierophant. If you win that roll off you snap the leg or rupture the reactor and it is an instant kill.

one thing is that nid "titanesque" units have speed on the Emperor in addition to the multilegged design & stability that entails.

But they should be countered by the skirmishing titans(warhounds etc) so weight of numbers either way might shift the balance.

At first I was put off by the spindly design of the current big H, but it definitely grew on me. Especially after I realized it is supposed to be walking over top of a scuttling tide of lesser beasts. Model one on a base filled with other nids beneath it and I suspect it would look far more appropriate.

 Vermis wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
That said, I'm pretty dissapointed in the scaling down of the Heirophant. The old Epic model was the size of a Warlord Titan, the FW model feels smaller than a WarHOUND.

Yup. I think the redesign to fit in with the nids from 3rd ed+ could have been handled better. Worked for the trygon, I think, but the hierophant and assault spawn just got turned into stretched-out carnifexes, with the H receiving the worst stretching. The original epic model had insectoid legs, but still chunky claws for lumbering and smashing. The current look is so spindly, I have trouble imagining it not snapping in a breeze, either as flesh-and-carapace or resin.
Also, it's one of the instances where being more insectoid and gribbly than the smaller, 40K-familiar nids works in it's favour. Helps the impression that it's something different, more alien than even it's fellow nids, a class apart. Less a hard-shelled space-dinosaur snarling in your face, more a barely-relateable, spiky, tentacled, squamous thing far above your head, smashing buildings and standing on tanks. More of a kaiju, more like Cthulhu. Again, the new look is just too ironed-out and weirdly familiar, in comparison.

Was there ever any idea what a hydraphant looked like? Like a bigger version of a hierophant or dominatrix? Was it worth it...?

I dunno what you could do with the old slug spawn. Should've kept at least one like that, for old time's sake.

(Carnifii? Carnifices...?)

When the EPIC Armageddon experimental lists were released for necrons, tyranids etc, they did have a couple of very rough sketches for some of the units in them.

There MIGHT have been a Hydraphant sketch, but at the time they were just saying 'use the old hierodule as the new heirophant and the old heirophant as the new hydraphant'.

So I imagine it would look pretty similar to a bigger version of the FW hierophant....

there are various transcriptions of those lists floating around (NetEPIC EA etc) where many people have just photographed the 2nd ed heirophant as the hydraphant, or conversions made out of 40k models. Epic UK does that: http://epic-uk.co.uk/lists/CodexTyranids.pdf

NetEPIC just has a plain pdf and uses the 2nd ed terminology https://www.net-armageddon.org/tp/army-lists/tyranid.html

-Guardsman- wrote:

roboemperor wrote:
Seems like Hierophants get their asses royally kicked and the nids got nothing bigger.

Does the fluff explicitly say that they have nothing bigger? Or are Hierophants just the largest unit available to Tyranids on the tabletop? I've always assumed that pretty much every faction had units that were just too large or too strong for regular 40k games.

.

There's no 40k emperor class titans either good thing too. Imperator model would be near meter tall and be even more ridiculous i lose button than warlord is

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At first I was put off by the spindly design of the current big H, but it definitely grew on me. Especially after I realized it is supposed to be walking over top of a scuttling tide of lesser beasts. Model one on a base filled with other nids beneath it and I suspect it would look far more appropriate.

Yeah, having it walking over swarms of Rippers and Genestealers would really put it in perspective. Remember, it's not the job of a single organism, its 1k-10k-100k of them working in unison.

roboemperor wrote:
Titan Armor is super easy to punch through to the point lots of lowest mob units can break through and invade?

I don't think that's what anyone is saying.

Titan armour, like all armour, will have points of relative weakness. Eventually one will be found and exploited. Nobody is arguing that a grot can leisurely amble over to a Titan, whistling nonchalantly, and bring it down solo.

Also, Tyranids have acid saliva 'cause Alien was awesome.

roboemperor wrote:
Titan Armor is super easy to punch through to the point lots of lowest mob units can break through and invade?

No one said that - the armour is think and will last a long time but when the atmosphere and the blood of the dead nids can be corrosive, plus battlefield damage and wear and tear then eventually their will be weak spots that can be exploited.

The Swarm would have to be very large to deal with a full Titan battlegroup but they are are often big enough to overwhelm entire Forge Worlds with Titan Legions as defenders so a single very large Titan is just a speed pump when the fighting is on this scale.

Oh yeah, the nids did take out a lot of forgeworlds. gryphonne was supposed to be a mega fortress right?

But they don't talk about how its titan legions got brought down. Only that it did.

"Yet, it was not enough to halt the Tyranid onslaught. The Skitarii were annihilated and devoured by waves of inexhaustible Hormagaunts and their Titan Legions torn asunder by Tyrannofexes and Tyranid Bio-Titans. "

from the wiki
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Legio_Gryphonicus

So Tyrannofexes are the Titan killers.

The thing with a fictional universe is that the history of it is literally telling a story.

For most people, huge beasties fighting huge robots is a more 'epic' and appealing image than thousands - if not millions - of Hormagaunts grinding a Titan down.

So GW publishes huge beasties fighting huge robots.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At first I was put off by the spindly design of the current big H, but it definitely grew on me. Especially after I realized it is supposed to be walking over top of a scuttling tide of lesser beasts. Model one on a base filled with other nids beneath it and I suspect it would look far more appropriate.

I've always felt the FW version looks like its missing something, but I think that's becasue the fine detailing of resin and scale doesn't show off all that well in photos. That said I think its also a design poorly made for resin. Most of the ones I've seen the builders tend to either go nuts putting metal rods all into the legs and/or they put some trees/bodies under the lower point of the body to put a support peg there. In resin 4 very long very thing legs holding up a solid central chunk of resin body is just - well - sheer madness. It's not my favourite design, but I think I'd warm to one if I owned it - but I'd always wish it were plastic (or plastic resin hybrid which GW has done before with the Warpfire Dragon - poor critter that got removed).