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 Deadshot wrote:

Tyran wrote:
The Swarmlord isn't going to duel Guilliman, as neither would force a duel unless they are confident they will win it.

Why not? The Swarmlord's principal use is as a force multiplier, to maximise strategy and control over the swarm but other Hive Tyrants and Dominitrixes are able to do such a thing.

What you're describing is simple risk vs reward. For Guilliman, the risk is death and dooming the Imperium to inferior leadership and demoralisation, with the reward being killing the Swarmlord but not ending the threat entirely.

For the Swarmlord, the risk is death, and reabsorbtion back into the Hive. The reward is completely breaking the enemy morale and leadership, absorbing the incredible biomass and enhancing the swarm's physical and intellectual prowess unfathomably, and destroying the biggest threat to the Tyranid race from its greatest enemy.


Seems like a no brainer to me.

Because the Swarmlord is a force multiplier, not a beatstick. If the Swarmlord wants Guilliman dead, it will send something with far better odds, like a bio-titan. You don't expose your king to kill another king unless you are sure the gambit will work or have nothing better than the king left.

SomeRandomEvilGuy wrote:

Lance845 wrote:http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Fall_of_Shadowbrink

What happens when Nids fight deamons.

One internally inconsistent battle between a Hive Fleet and a piddly four Greater Daemons. One could just as easily say that Ka'bandha wrecking Tyranids in the Baal System demonstrates what happens when Tyranids fight Daemons.

Games Workshop aren't going to have a situation whereby one faction will always dominate another faction.

The full story isn't "a piddly four Greater Daemons". The artifact once unleashed pours massive amounts of deamons out of the warp from all 4 factions being lead by the 4 greater deamons. Find other examples in the lore of how horrible it is for anyone to fight against a full blown deamonic incursion lead by all 4 groups of deamons and then call it "piddly".

SomeRandomEvilGuy wrote:

 Carnikang wrote:
I don't know if I would call it that. They do have genetic variants that act like leader beasts, and are usually solitary aside from subordinates (Red Terror, Old One Eye, DeathLeaper, Broodlords, etc.). That and in the lore, variant/evolutionary mutations have happened surronding other Hive Tyrants and Warriors, coming out to appear as characters, despite being just another chasis with a fancy new biomorph and a little extra exp. The Swarmlord could just be a leader of leaders, and as such is afforded greater autonomy from the Hive Mind because of it's sheer mental and psychic might combined to make it unique. Yet not, as it's supposed that the Swarmlord can be present in many places at once across the galaxy if need be.

They're faceless bodies, but there are always some sort of characterizations with them.

I don't think of any of them as characters though. Aside from the Swarmlord and Patriarchs (which admittedly I had forgotten about) they don't have personalities or anything. They're used as stand-ins for characters but since they can die and be reborn they're likely to lose in fluff pieces against actual characters. The autonomy of the Swarmlord is weird and not very well explained. Why is it the only one allowed such autonomy? Does it risk Tyranids breaking off?

I think it has to do with the fact that the Hive Mind is the collective mental consciousness of the Hive. Synapse Creatures have more Autonomy than the lesser beasts who need synapse, but the 'characters' have even greater Autonomy. Then again, Old One Eye, and the Red Terror, need Synapse to function with the Hive Fleet. The Deathleaper requires it for in battle coordination, but functions well on it's own outside of the influence of the Hive Mind. Most Lictors and Genestealers function fine outside of the Hive Minds influence as well.
Going back to Old One Eye, on Maccrage still as far as I know. He 'leads' the lesser Tyranids that still infest parts of that world, but he's not mentally strong/intelligent enough to function as a conduit of the Hive Mind. He's Autonomous, but he's not when a part of the swarm.

The same could be said of the Swarmlord, but he's also autonomous within the swarm. It could function without them, not just because of synapse being innate, but because it has a wealth of knowledge to work with, because it's the oldest. It's mentally stronger and more adept. This allows for flexibility on the fly, while with other Tyrants it would be a slower adjustment as they absorb the changes. Thinking on it, a lot of Tyrants should function closer to the Swarmlord, if they'd survived battle for centuries of experience to accumulate, for that to be passed on as their conscious is reabsorbed and used in another body. It's weird that they haven't made not of that. Tyrants that survive continually as a physical being seem to absorb information and grow in cunning, using better tactics. But it's like a hard reset when they get turned into slurry.

Maybe the Swarmlord is the Hive Mind's answer to that, a back up file of the entire swarm's knowledge. It only needs one creature to do this, and to act as the guiding conscious within it's bounds. Giving this Autonomy to more creatures would likely create more diverging thoughts/tactics, but would it create such a division to create another faction within the swarm? And what if it has? What if it's already happened and it's a change of thought process within the swarm, requiring it to consume the entirety of the rest of the Hive Mind to change it? What if that's what's happening with Hive fleet Hydra? They've bypassed ripe worlds to attack other Hive Fleets.

What if the Refugee Theory AND the Tiny Portion Theory are both right? What if what we've seen is not just a bunch of smaller hive fleets running, but a splinter of the Hive Mind that has diverged and begun to think differently, and lost the battle to control the Tyranid Race as a whole. The rest follow, devouring the splinter Hive Mind, and absorbing all of their knowledge and biomass that has been gathered thus far?

Now I'm rambling.

It's been theorized, and is pretty likely considering how often tyranids are engaged in battles, that they spawn multiple swarm lords at the same time. Just never more then one at a time in a single conflict.