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Tyranids have pretty poor ships in comparison to say the imperium so the majority of tyranid give fleets are either defeated in space by superior vessels or space marine ships alpha striking into key ships that contain Norn queens.

I wasn't aware that Tyranids had an appetite for Necrodermis. Then again, it is described as 'living metal', so perhaps it's more appetizing to them than one would think. I stand corrected!

@Bacon

These don't look poor to me!:



I understand what you're saying though about their weak points - but executing those attacks successfully on key vessels/queens are not easy by any means due to sheer numbers of Tyranid vessels.

Tyranids are a greater threat than Chaos ever will be for the single reason that Tyranids are out to consume the galaxy and thus will wipe out humanity entirely. Chaos may condemn humanity to a tormented hardscrabble life of barbarism but humanity will still exist in some form, just in a form normal people or the Imperium find abhorrent. The same goes for every other faction threatening the Imperium. They all want to conquer, enslave, or oppress humanity in some way but not actually render humanity extinct.

Tyranid ships are individually inferior to just about every other race's ships out there, but the key thing is they can field many many more of them. Leviathan in particular has been described in the 4th edition Tyranid Codex as being so numerous that the Imperial Navy could only slow but not stop it in open combat, which ultimately resulted in Kryptman's plan to divert Leviathan to attack the Orks. The fact the Imperium has to resort to such Eldar-like tactics shows the Imperium's numbers are not up to the current task of outright attritional warfare.

The is the final point too: attritional warfare is about who loses more. While the Tyranids have lost major battles that have shattered past hive fleets, what isn't mentioned except in sideboxes is the threat of the splinter fleets. They penetrate behind the main defenses and prey on lightly defended low priority worlds like frontier or agri-worlds. These worlds would still have biomass in their ecosystems and this allows these splinter fleets to regrow, while the Imperium concentrates its defenses on the big worlds. Yes, the Tyranids haven't had a major victory over a famous heavily defended world since Gryphonne IV, but the issue is they are winning a lot of smaller victories over minor worlds. The energy content of even a single agri-world's biomass is staggering. The Imperium could very well be in the position of winning major battles at fortified worlds because it diverts all its resources there, only to ultimately lose the war because then other vulnerable worlds are being picked off and the Tyranids growing in numbers off the rich feeding from those worlds.

The Imperium is stuck in a defensive posture versus the Tyranids because the Tyranids have no territory and no fixed assets to strike back at. The pattern of the Imperium's interactions have pretty much been along the lines of responding to a world that gets attacked and the world having to hold out long enough for reinforcements to arrive. The soft targets the splinter fleets are picking off are unable to do this.

As written, the Tyranids are probably the greatest threat to the Imperium and humanity. The perfect story/plot way to get out of this corner that GW have written themselves into? Necrons vs. Tyranids. The super science of the Necrons vs. the adaptability and numbers of the Tyranids. The two sides can batter each other in a stalemate, explaining why neither side brings down the Imperium. Of course that would require a bit of cognitive readjustment from the Imperium or Imperial players to recognize that perhaps they are not the top dog anymore or that brute force and numbers are no longer enough for the Imperium.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:

Spoiler:

Compare the size of their fleet to the size of the galaxy.

We have to assume those are invasion arrows drawn as tentacles. If those are styrings of ships thern the galaxy has already fallen.

The other point to note is that if GW says they are ships it still doesn't mean they are, just ignore them. GW studio has a lot of idiot designers with no respect for scale and don't give proportion a moments notice, if something sounds 'kewl' roll with it and move on. Tyrannids apparently consume whole atmospheres and biomass down to the bedrock, if they did even one looted planet would provide enough support volume for a truly enormous fleet, so instead I take it they siphon off the atmosphere barthing in its etc but the majority of the matter is not used.

Supposedly the orks can match there numbers anyhow, and the Necrons have a dyson sphere somewhere, and each of these races can have a sizable proportion of their total force killed off by one thousand space marines in one battle.

Best solution to canon scale in 40K is to assume its all part of Imperial hype and has no bearing on the reality of the situation. Confessors tell ignorant peasants that the hivefleets are this big, it becomes a Moral Truth and they get donations and recruitment out of it.

Because flesh is weak. Faith and steel shall prevail.

You have to also bear in mind that tyranids took a major kick to the background in the last codex and other codices around it, in terms of their biology.

The wakening from the hibernation of space travel and adaptations to a new combat frontier and the extremely aggressive species of our galaxy are highly draining on the hive and it requires immediate and regular biomass intake.

Basically, nowadays, the tyranids are not super-eternal, ongoing and unstoppable, instead they are massively terrifying initially and throw themselves into a massive assault on a system in a starving rush to feed. If this is met with strong resistance, if they are forced to start altering and changing up their attack forms and are getting little biomass to compensate, they are boned.

If they are forced into a war of attrition, the norn queens burn themselves out trying to adapt, experimenting with new forms. They exhaust their limited energies and stored resources and once that's gone, they are easy pickings.


I have it on extremely good authority that the tyranids and necrons were deemed to have overshadowed Chaos and Chaos is supposed to be the ultimate bad, so there is a concerted effort to tone down the apocalyptic nature of both, towards the second half of 5th into 6th, by the design team.

I think space itself is a "brake" for them. I know that they have ship sized critters to transport and fight in space, but I honestly don't see those as being all that prolific. The enormous amount of food they need alone makes them far less effective than "man made" ones. I cant remember but they don't use warp travel do they? That slows them down as well where "man made" ships can use the warp to travel faster and more effectively transport what is needed where it is needed.

I think that the bugs are only REALLY effective "on the ground". That I think slows them down overall.

I think a concerted effort could wipe them out till the next "wave" (if there is one). the problem is all the squabbling and wars between the different races and factions are preventing that and since it is more of a subtle and silent growth into the area, it is usually overlooks in favor of the more "immediate" "political" concerns.

To be fair, I think it makes more sense for the Tyranids' "consumption schtick" to be more limited even in the "old-school fluff".

It only makes things like Genestealer Cults have a place again in the 40K-verse. By undermining the defenses and society of a planet, they weaken it, "preparing it" for Tyranid Invasion. If a Nid invasions could self-perpetuate themselves on a given planet's biomass alone, no matter the resistance, strategies like these would be pointless.

Also (from early 5th Edition fluff):

A splinter fleet of Moloch was stopped from consuming a Hive city on Karak Prime by the veteran Vostroyan 9th regiment "Old Irascibles". For eighteen months a Tyranid swarm that stretched from the base of the city walls to the distant horizon was held back by the Vostroyans. Realising they were doomed if they ran out of ammunition, the Vostroyans opened the city's gates and drew the horde inside. When the bulk of the Tyranids had entered the city, the Vostroyans detonated the hive's nucleonic stack and incinerated the hive, along with all its defenders and an estimated eighty-five percent of the Tyranid swarm. As the city entered midwinter, the surviving Tyranids starved to death and the splinter fleet was destroyed.

It's possible for hardy humans to "out-starve" Tyranids.

But Tyranids still have so many advantages. They do not go insane from psychological warfare. They do not get sick from any conventional disease, it takes bio-engineered anti-Tyranid toxins to take them down. Tyranids do not need advanced and sometimes faulty facilities for their materiel, and they do not need to maintain them. Tyranids do not need to sleep, either, which starts becoming a real advantage they can exploit once a battle becomes long and grinding enough.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:
But Tyranids still have so many advantages. They do not go insane from psychological warfare. They do not get sick from any conventional disease, it takes bio-engineered anti-Tyranid toxins to take them down. Tyranids do not need advanced and sometimes faulty facilities for their materiel, and they do not need to maintain them. Tyranids do not need to sleep, either, which starts becoming a real advantage they can exploit once a battle becomes long and grinding enough.

But most Tyranid "combat organisms" are described as having no digestive organs, long-term metabolism, etc.. (with a few exceptions like Genestealers, Lictors, etc..).

They may not suffer trauma or require sleep, but your average Gaunt or Carnifex probably doesn't even live long enough (even without a violent death) for prolonged wars of attrition. Presumably, these kind of "organisms" are also a lot less "efficient" and more taxing for a swarm to create than whatever sluggish "digestive creatures" transform biomass into Nid-energy.

But that's the thing with Tyranids, it doesn't matter if they die. Presumably when a combat organism dies not in battle, it's in tyranid territory and will be eaten and digested. No biomass lost. That's why its totally OK for gamesworkshop to play the ''The battled hard, and took thousands of tyranids with, but they where over come'' card because how many tyranids died doesn't matter, as long as they left their corpses.

That's why Necrons are the best counter to 'Nids because any tyranid killed by guass fire doesn't leave a corpse, but disintegrates the body into atoms. No way to get that bio mass back. And even if they do win a battle, the Necrons would phase home and leave no bio mass (debatable if Tyranids could even digest necrodermis, due having read about tyranids eating tech priests but leaving the implants). Its simply not worth it for the 'Nids.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:
But Tyranids still have so many advantages. They do not go insane from psychological warfare.

1. Neither do Necrons.
2. If the forces of Chaos go insane (by their standards), they're even more dangerous.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:
They do not get sick from any conventional disease,

1. Neither do Necrons.
2. As for Chaos, Nurgle takes care of his own.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:
it takes bio-engineered anti-Tyranid toxins to take them down.

That is not the only way to defeat them.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:
Tyranids do not need advanced and sometimes faulty facilities for their materiel, and they do not need to maintain them.

They do need biomass to maintain their ships or the fleet will starve. The longer they go without feeding, the weaker they get.

 ALEXisAWESOME wrote:
But that's the thing with Tyranids, it doesn't matter if they die. Presumably when a combat organism dies not in battle, it's in tyranid territory and will be eaten and digested. No biomass lost.

Only if you assume there is nothing lost at all in "energy" as the organism is (a) created, (b) fights and is (c) recycled, and a "dead" - say - Carnifex is perfectly recycled into a new Carnifex.

That seems unlikely. Calories are burnt. Stuff is lost. Presumably, creating a Carnifex, having it run around and recycling it all have a cost, a "loss" of Biomass invested or expended in the energy of growth, motion, breaking down of functionless biomass into "basic material" and re-growing it. The whole thing is still a "net-loss" if the Carnifex's rampage doesn't net enough "other" biomass to make up for it.

Also, just because a Carnifex dies on "Tyranid Territory" doesn't mean it's already back in a digestive pool, broken down and "reborn". For a time, that biomass is "stuck", and the faster it is "digested" and "re-grown", the less efficient that process is likely to be.

But people, while you may disagree with the first point I made in the OP (That is fine, it is interpretative and we have not been given a definite answer either way to my knowledge) the actual point of the second thing stands.

Tyranids, unlike any other race, is the most effective war and harvesting machine imaginable. They do not waste anything. For every thing someone else match them in, for example Necrons being equally immune to breaking of morale, they have a drawback, such as Necrons having honour, eccentric leaders, or similar.

No other race, not even the Orks, are as perfectly adapted to their chosen task. Tyranids are inherently a superior faction because of this. Tyranids never waste resources on anything that will not effectively further their goals. Other races do. Infighting is one thing that is frequent in other races yet practically non-existent in Tyranids. (And when two Hive Fleets clash, the winner consumes the loser, so not only is the biomass harvested but the winner also learns from the genetic material of the loser.)

To all the people talking about ships and creatures dying in transit through starvation;

What's to say that the fleet doesn't canibalise a handful of their own ships to continue survival? No biomass is wasted and the hive as a whole surviving longer to gain more to replenish losses.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:
But people, while you may disagree with the first point I made in the OP (That is fine, it is interpretative and we have not been given a definite answer either way to my knowledge) the actual point of the second thing stands.

Tyranids, unlike any other race, is the most effective war and harvesting machine imaginable. They do not waste anything. For every thing someone else match them in, for example Necrons being equally immune to breaking of morale, they have a drawback, such as Necrons having honour, eccentric leaders, or similar.

No other race, not even the Orks, are as perfectly adapted to their chosen task. Tyranids are inherently a superior faction because of this. Tyranids never waste resources on anything that will not effectively further their goals. Other races do. Infighting is one thing that is frequent in other races yet practically non-existent in Tyranids. (And when two Hive Fleets clash, the winner consumes the loser, so not only is the biomass harvested but the winner also learns from the genetic material of the loser.)

Perhaps. But they are constrained by the very premise of "growing" everything biologically. Though they may be very efficient at doing that, it's still a highly inefficient way of producing things such as weapons, armour, etc, which non-organic materials and technology can produce infinitely more efficiently. They may be less constrained by psychology. They are more constrained by the physicality of their existence. And the very strain - the constant calories-burn - they need to keep feeding to make it work, makes them vulnerable the being "starved" to death if their offensive isn't successfully overwhelming the opposition to make an attack a net-biomass gain.

The drawback the Tyranids have, where every (!) other 40K faction surpasses them, is the lack of in-organic material and the need (!) to keep pumping biomass into "the system" for simple menial processes (e.g. shielding organisms from the cold of the void) that other factions don't need to do to nearly that degree.

Also, they are a teeny, tiny faction to begin with, all things considered. A handful of fleets that arrive from the void between galaxies - the largest of which are roughly the equivalent of a Space Marine Chapter in "threat-level". Compared to the hundreds, if not thousands of worlds of even "small" factions like the Tau or Eldar Exodites, compared even to the 1000 Space Marine Chapters out there, that is almost negligible in the 40K-scale of things.

Infighting between hive fleets is not as uncommon as you make it sound. The tyranids are forever racing against the clock to feed a hunger that can never be sated. The vast majority presumably starve to death off the battlefield.

The strength of the necrons has only begun to have been seen, but if the Celestial Orrery is any indication...

 Deadshot wrote:


What's to say that the fleet doesn't canibalise a handful of their own ships to continue survival? No biomass is wasted and the hive as a whole surviving longer to gain more to replenish losses.

They probably do.

But that doesn't mean they get the "full value" out of it. A wolf-pack eating a dead wolf doesn't net them a whole new wolf. Probably not even a new cub (which would need food to grow, far more "biomass" in food than it's final weight as a fully-grown wolf will be). It simply is fuel for another few days and than the "cannibalized" biomass is "used up" - all the calories are burnt away - without anything left.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:


What's to say that the fleet doesn't canibalise a handful of their own ships to continue survival? No biomass is wasted and the hive as a whole surviving longer to gain more to replenish losses.

They probably do.

But that doesn't mean they get the "full value" out of it. A wolf-pack eating a dead wolf doesn't net them a whole new wolf. Probably not even a new cup (which would need feeding). It simply is fuel for another few days and than the "cannibalized" biomass is "used up" without anything left.

Scientifically, the biomass would lose much of it's worth.

If one examines how energy transfers across trophic levels in nature, biomass ingested only yields about 1/10 of the energy previously possessed.

Consuming this biomass seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, hardly an efficient or sustainable system.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:


What's to say that the fleet doesn't canibalise a handful of their own ships to continue survival? No biomass is wasted and the hive as a whole surviving longer to gain more to replenish losses.

They probably do.

But that doesn't mean they get the "full value" out of it. A wolf-pack eating a dead wolf doesn't net them a whole new wolf. Probably not even a new cup (which would need feeding). It simply is fuel for another few days and than the "cannibalized" biomass is "used up" - all the calories are burnt away - without anything left.

True, true. I will say a few days is a guestimate on your part? We don't know how nutritious Nid meat is- it could last them weeks.

Not that that's relevant. What I was going to say was that with how numerous the fleet is, its entirely possible that this, in combination with extended dormancy, could slow the metabolism down enough to survive the journey, waking up every couple billion lightyears to feed on the weakest ships and its contents, then immediately going dormant again.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:
Tyranids never waste resources on anything that will not effectively further their goals. Other races do. Infighting is one thing that is frequent in other races yet practically non-existent in Tyranids. (And when two Hive Fleets clash, the winner consumes the loser, so not only is the biomass harvested but the winner also learns from the genetic material of the loser.)

Re: the first part. You're wrong. Tyranid Hive Fleets are randomly sent into space with little idea of where they're actually heading (reports from scounting Genestealers might be millenia old before the Hive Fleet arrives to investigate the galaxy). They're rolling the dice, and there's bound to be wastage, on a Tyranid scale too.

Re: the second. Expending energy uses biomass, eating the exhausted remains of whatever expended that energy does not net you a precise return, there's going to be lost biomass. Please stop saying that simply eating your dead replenishes your losses, it's factually incorrect.

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
You have to also bear in mind that tyranids took a major kick to the background in the last codex and other codices around it, in terms of their biology.

The wakening from the hibernation of space travel and adaptations to a new combat frontier and the extremely aggressive species of our galaxy are highly draining on the hive and it requires immediate and regular biomass intake.

Basically, nowadays, the tyranids are not super-eternal, ongoing and unstoppable, instead they are massively terrifying initially and throw themselves into a massive assault on a system in a starving rush to feed. If this is met with strong resistance, if they are forced to start altering and changing up their attack forms and are getting little biomass to compensate, they are boned.

If they are forced into a war of attrition, the norn queens burn themselves out trying to adapt, experimenting with new forms. They exhaust their limited energies and stored resources and once that's gone, they are easy pickings.


I have it on extremely good authority that the tyranids and necrons were deemed to have overshadowed Chaos and Chaos is supposed to be the ultimate bad, so there is a concerted effort to tone down the apocalyptic nature of both, towards the second half of 5th into 6th, by the design team.

Sorry I became lost in your banner could you repeat that?

tyranids recycle lost biomass... uh huh, decomposition tells us this is not going to be efficient, every second that thing rots is another bit of biomass lost, especially if it is not gotten too fast enough.

also a question begs itself to be answered, can you eat nids?

Id assume you could eat them but i wouldnt be the first to try it haha. I guess it has the same issue as tyranids "eating" themselves. If its freshly made from the grass they just harvested then probably. If its been recycled from a previous nid then id imagine its like eating an inbread canabalistic cow.

So in short if you are loosing the war then the tyranids would be more edable, if they are winning then they might be a bit unhealthy to live off.

Not even kroot will eat tyranid. Very bad news, like The Thing bad...

I do remember kroot spitting out gene steeler/human hybrid flesh saying its tainted in a book i read but i thought thats because the gene is manipulative. I.E if you are what you eat (kroot) then maybe eating tyranid flesh makes you subject to the hive mind or something.

Tell me if im being far fetched but maybe thats why kroot cant eat it. We humans however might be safe.

 Swastakowey wrote:
I do remember kroot spitting out gene steeler/human hybrid flesh saying its tainted in a book i read but i thought thats because the gene is manipulative. I.E if you are what you eat (kroot) then maybe eating tyranid flesh makes you subject to the hive mind or something.

Tell me if im being far fetched but maybe thats why kroot cant eat it. We humans however might be safe.

Then there's the Astartes. The Tyranid issue might be solved in short issue if you inform the Flesh Tearers that Tyranid flesh is a savory delicacy and enhances your combat capabilities via eating its brain.

The big problem I see here is that re-absorption of biomass cannot be all that efficient of a way to get energy back. Its pretty negligible when you think about the energy being expended. You can't simply grow a cow with the energy of one cow's corpse. The ratio of the new to dead would have to be massive.
The energy isn't just spent creating, its spent maintaining, which cannot be overlooked. Only swift victory would make it possible to maintain such a massive organism for any extended period of time. Any resistance would slowly reduce its energy to nothing.

Humans use plants to continuously gather energy from solar radiation. Humans harness the power of the constant changing of the environment on a planet to gather energy, growing plants, power generation, etc. Because of this, we can regenerate our numbers, tyranids cannot, and that is why they are not the greatest threat. The only reason they could even be considered so is sheer numbers, but who's to say how they achieved such numbers in the first place. Its kind of like zombie movies, the zombies somehow gain massive numbers before anyone gets their act together, but in reality the individual zombies are not much of a threat to an organized society.

Some of these counterarguments to the Tyranids are to put it bluntly incorrect because they are based on wrong misconceptions about the Tyranids.

1. Hive Fleets are not randomly flying in space.

Likewise Genestealer infestations are commonplace enough that the HIgh Lords have issued no less than eighty decrees pertaining to their cleansing by Exterminatus in the last decade.

If all else fails it is believed that the hive-ships perform some form of spectrographic analysis of the radiation from the nearest stars to select a destination. This has been borne out by the fact that 72.3% of encounters with hive-ships (as opposed to the smaller drones) have taken place in systems containing class F2IV - K9V stars. This spectral band covers 81% of the worlds inhabited by humanity. -p. 7 BFG magazine issue #1, also reproduced in 3rd ed. Tyranid Codex

They clearly target worlds that are more likely to harbor life.

2. Tyranids do gather solar energy both in direct form and via plants.

Tyranid hive ships have a biomorph called solar vanes, that results in increase in combat speeds in BFG. Since the light pressure at such distances from the sun is miniscule, they must be gathering the energy via some form of photosynthesis or otherwise utilizing solar energy for energy.

As for the ground based Tyranids, the extensive WD articles on them in the past has detailed they subvert the plant life and triggers bursts of hypertrophy and rapid growth, leaching the soil of nutrients in the process. These plants are consumed by the Tyranid Rippers and they in turn go back into the digestion pools thus are a form of indirect harvesting of solar energy. This is in fact described in a story in the 3rd edition Tyranid Codex. The WD articles (US White Dwarf 254, ""Tyranid Planetary Assimilation Analysis" by Sherman Bishop) also describe how such subverted plant life becomes dangerous to native non-Tyranid organisms, and how their fruit becomes poisonous, either killing or weakening anything that eats them.

The WD articles also describe Tyranids utilizing geothermal power sources, and in some cases creating new access areas by using specialized suicidal creatures to bore down to release sources of heat.

The Tyranids themselves are described as being host to small microscopic organisms, and thus their flesh is inedible to non-Tyranid life. Those that do eat dead Tyranids are again either killed or weakened by these micro-organisms.

3. The Tyranids do regenerate their numbers.

The entry for Hormagaunts in the latest Tyranid Codex clearly describes them reproducing independently and laying eggs. Also the Dominatrix is described as supporting and producing more Tyranid ground swarm creatures. Finally there is the Forgeworld Brood Nest which is described as a form of breeding incubating chamber for yet more Tyranids. Their gestation times are also far shorter than humans. Tyranids regenerate their numbers far more easily and quickly than humans can.

4. The Tyranids are not small in numbers.

Each Hive Fleet is far more than just "mere" SM Chapter equivalent in strength. Behemoth effectively wiped out Battlefleet Bakka, or over 200 ships. One arm of Kraken had to be defeated by the most populous of the Craftworlds, and in the process effectively wiped out its fleet and most of Yriel's Eldritch Raiders, canonically described as the most powerful Eldar corsair force in the galaxy.

Hive Fleet Leviathan took out Gryphonne IV which was described as the forgeworld with the "finest defences of any world in the southern galaxy" (5th edition Tyranid Codex p. 28). One of the most heavily defended worlds in an entire Segmentum was wiped out. Subsequently the same Leviathan was described as being too much for Battlefleet Solar to defeat on its own, which ultimately necessitated Kryptman diverting Leviathan to the Orks in order to buy the Imperium time.

All these point to a Tyranid threat that the Imperium struggles to cope with. With the Tyranids out to extinguish humanity while other threats are merely out to enslave humanity, it is clear the Tyranids are the greatest threat to the Imperium. It's all fine to debate but at least use correct information, not stuff which is explicitly and directly contradicted by what is given by GW as given in the direct quotes and references given above.

Iracundus wrote:
Some of these counterarguments to the Tyranids are to put it bluntly incorrect because they are based on wrong misconceptions about the Tyranids.

1. Hive Fleets are not randomly flying in space.

This one is clearly directed at my post so I'll address only this point. An interesting piece of fluff you've quoted to be sure, but that's really only relevent once the Nids have arrived in a new Galaxy and want to find the choicest stars. It doesn't go any way to explain intergalactic travel which undoubtedly takes a toll on the fleets. Space is after all rather anathema to life.