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A lot of 40K factions and races have an endgame / Ragnarok-style apocalypse for mankind and the universe in general.

Giving all the 40K baddies their own potential apocalyptic scenario makes sense for GW, as it helps make all the factions feel like viable threats. The Orks kill everyone else if they get a big enough, stable enough Waaagh going. Chaos dances the Watusi on everyone's ashes. The Mechanicus or Necrons wake up the big Dragon thing on Mars or something (I'm fuzzy on this one.). And the Tyranids just keep coming in inexorable waves with overwhelming numbers and end up eating everything.

But lately I've been getting the sense that fan consensus is coalescing around the Tyranid apocalypse. More and more I'm hearing 40K enthusiasts say that the Tyranids will definitely ultimately win, based on how they function and their apparently unstoppable nature. (Sometimes a lone Necron fan will pipe up and suggest that maybe Necrons are inedible so they might have a chance, but that's about it.)

My question is, is it really widely accepted amongst fans that the Tyranids must ultimately prevail over everything? That their apocalypse is now the Uber-apocalypse that eclipses and overrides all the others?

If so, that biological fatalism seems more boring than interesting. You can have a long moral, philosophical, and physical battle between the Imperium and Chaos, for example, but regardless of how that proceeds, it's fated to end with a Tyranid deus ex machina OM NOM NOM NOM NOM from offstage left. That may be "realistic," but it sure is dull.

People like to think in terms of final winners and losers but that's not really what 40k is. Everyone is either already a loser or doesn't actually have stakes in the game.
I'll split the various "factions" into the above categories.

Losers



Non-Players

 Talking Banana wrote:
But lately I've been getting the sense that fan consensus is coalescing around the Tyranid apocalypse. More and more I'm hearing 40K enthusiasts say that the Tyranids will definitely ultimately win,

 Talking Banana wrote:

My question is, is it really widely accepted amongst fans that the Tyranids must ultimately prevail over everything? That their apocalypse is now the Uber-apocalypse that eclipses and overrides all the others?

If so, that biological fatalism seems more boring than interesting. You can have a long moral, philosophical, and physical battle between the Imperium and Chaos, for example, but regardless of how that proceeds, it's fated to end with a Tyranid deus ex machina OM NOM NOM NOM NOM from offstage left. That may be "realistic," but it sure is dull.

What's actually boring is fans whose engagement with the lore doesn't surpass the "Let's Do Power Rankings" level.

Wasn't this an issue for Dorn with the break up of the legions? That, would the Imperium be able to respond to extra galactic threats (don't quote me)

Guilliman's Codex was an effort to reorganise the Legions into independent rapid strike forces that the new Imperium would need while also placating the (justifiable) concerns of the High Lords.
Dorn believed it to be a form of punishment heaped on all Astartes for the infractions of those who followed Horus, and things spiraled out of control from there until he came to the realisation that the Codex was necessary.

I’d argue Orks are their own worst enemy.

All it takes to fragment if not outright stop a Waaagh! is to cut off the head.

Granted that’s much harder than it sounds. But in the trying, especially if you’re successful, a lot of the Warlord’s closest cronies - those most likely to simply scrap it out between themselves, are going to get perished too.

The Orks need that strict pecking order to be cohesive. And they’ll tear themselves apart until it’s more or less spent. Yes you’ll still end up with large sub-Waaaghs! as certain Orky held regions stabilise. But it’s the work of decades to get anywhere near Ghaz or The Beast etc in terms of overall cohesion,

Nids and Necrons have their own pros and cons.

Necrons? Well. Nobody really knows how many survive. Tomb Worlds have been lost, or suffered catastrophic malfunctions. Some just don’t seem to be awakening,

The Nids biggest weakness is how comparatively slow they are. If you can engage them as they enter an inhabited system, you can inflict horrific losses upon the Hive Mind, to the point that tendril now needs to consume the system or end up shattered if not entirely destroyed

Proof of Victory.

You're just linking game trailers that aren't adding anything to the discussion.

chaos ultimately wins, even if the Nids wipe out the milky way and move to another galaxy eventually a new species will evolve sentience and chaos will rise again as a shadow of that species or others, the same gods in a different aspect will return, entropy, war, change and excess or similar things, being multiversal the 40k universe just does not matter to them at all.

 Formosa wrote:
chaos ultimately wins, even if the Nids wipe out the milky way and move to another galaxy eventually a new species will evolve sentience and chaos will rise again as a shadow of that species or others, the same gods in a different aspect will return, entropy, war, change and excess or similar things, being multiversal the 40k universe just does not matter to them at all.

Not necessarily.

First it’s not at all clear what would happen to things like the Maelstrom, Great Rift etc with no psychic beings in realspace.

Given it wouldn’t be a quick turnaround from “They’re dead Dave. They’re all dead” to sentient populations, we could be talking millions if not billions of years of regeneration and iteration.

I mean, we understand the Earth to be 4,500,000,000 years old, more or less, based on the best science available to date. And our earliest hominid ancestors appeared around 2,000,000 years ago, with our merry bunch of incredibly self destructive idiots not cropping up until around 200,000 years ago, with civilisation as we consider it dragging its heels being around 6,000 years old..

If that can be applied to other Earth like planets - some of which may not have generated life, let alone sentient life at all, then assuming a single reset event, which I would consider a Mass Buffet to be? That’s a long, long time before the Chaos Gods get anything from our Galaxy.

If (and only if, I’ve nothing to say one way or the other) a lack of realspace psychic energies would erode and potentially, eventually, seal/heal realspace warp rifts? Chaos would be going back to square one. And this time, there’s no guarantee a species like The Old Ones would be zipping about creating psychic races for a war they’d go on to lose.

Given the other truly native sentient species we know of would be the entirely non-psychic Necrontyr? It’s not even certain psychic abilities would manifest naturally - and less certain that even if it did, it would lead to particularly powerful Psykers.

But couldn't evolution already be in progress somewhere in the galaxy to cut down on the wait time? Just not plalettable to Nids right now?

Not sure that’s how Nids work.

Biomass is Biomass, its relative evolutionary advancement is just a bonus.

I mean, given the choice between a bowl of gruel and a slap up Steak Dinner, cooked medium rare with peppercorn sauce, I’d take the latter. But if all that’s left in the galactic pantry is said simple gruel? Dinner is dinner.

The Cawl novel however demonstrate worlds aren’t completely stripped. Some resources remain, and whilst I can’t say for certain, I think it says that included microbial life.

We do know that given a vacuum evolution is accelerated, as the only associated pressure is room. And so relatively simply, but still multi-cellular life can evolve surprisingly quickly.

But to get to the level seen in 40K among sentient species - those able to comprehend the warp powers let alone treat with them? That takes a long time. And so far as we can tell, requires some level of psychic potential. Which in 40K canon is the latest/last step for such potentially talented species.

No Psykers, no warp connection. No warp connection, no influence from beyond.

But as I said, we just don’t know if a sudden or relatively gradual extinction of all sentient, potentially psychic species would do anything to the rifts.

But race from another galaxy could show up and seed everything the Nids mowed down.

They’d still need to be a race with some form of psychic potential. And unlike Ork Society, with something Chaos can exploit through empty promises.

Every Tyranid currently encountered in the history of the galaxy is the smallest, most insignificant tip of the probing tendrils of the greater mass of the full Tyranid macro-organism. Eventually the full mass of the Tyranids will engulf the milky way and drown everything in an endless wave of bodies and teeth and claws

As all non-Tyranid life is consumed, their echoes in the Warp die too, and Chaos - in the original meaning, representing the turmoil that spread through the Warp allowing the birth of the Gods - dies as well. The Warp is overcome by the Shadow.

Inorganic materials are not spared: with the consumption of all the efficient biomass, the Hive Fleet - singular for at this point they have all merged - turns its efforts to leeching every form of mineral and energy from the galaxy. Planets are consumed wholesale, either eaten by creatures larger than we can possibly comprehend or devoured by molecular acids into a chemical slurry to be slurped up by titanic hiveships.

Stars are leeched of their gases and either go supernova, or die cold. Gravity is meaningless to a species who can out-mass the entire galaxy and has total domination of the Warp. Stars and black holes alike are torn apart, and the remnants of what make the galaxy a discrete entity are scattered to the cold blackness of space.

It is the year 80,000 and everything is Tyranid.

(the Necrons might be able to escape and survive in one of their many pocket dimensions, but there would be nothing to return to, so they'd be stuck there, forever, slowly going insane)

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
They’d still need to be a race with some form of psychic potential. And unlike Ork Society, with something Chaos can exploit through empty promises.

I'm sure we could come up with something if needed.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Formosa wrote:
chaos ultimately wins, even if the Nids wipe out the milky way and move to another galaxy eventually a new species will evolve sentience and chaos will rise again as a shadow of that species or others, the same gods in a different aspect will return, entropy, war, change and excess or similar things, being multiversal the 40k universe just does not matter to them at all.

Not necessarily.

First it’s not at all clear what would happen to things like the Maelstrom, Great Rift etc with no psychic beings in realspace.

Given it wouldn’t be a quick turnaround from “They’re dead Dave. They’re all dead” to sentient populations, we could be talking millions if not billions of years of regeneration and iteration.

I mean, we understand the Earth to be 4,500,000,000 years old, more or less, based on the best science available to date. And our earliest hominid ancestors appeared around 2,000,000 years ago, with our merry bunch of incredibly self destructive idiots not cropping up until around 200,000 years ago, with civilisation as we consider it dragging its heels being around 6,000 years old..

If that can be applied to other Earth like planets - some of which may not have generated life, let alone sentient life at all, then assuming a single reset event, which I would consider a Mass Buffet to be? That’s a long, long time before the Chaos Gods get anything from our Galaxy.

If (and only if, I’ve nothing to say one way or the other) a lack of realspace psychic energies would erode and potentially, eventually, seal/heal realspace warp rifts? Chaos would be going back to square one. And this time, there’s no guarantee a species like The Old Ones would be zipping about creating psychic races for a war they’d go on to lose.

Given the other truly native sentient species we know of would be the entirely non-psychic Necrontyr? It’s not even certain psychic abilities would manifest naturally - and less certain that even if it did, it would lead to particularly powerful Psykers.

oh yeah we are talking across a very long timeline here, also given the Nids are psychic in nature we can easily assume that such races are common enough in other galaxies, also all races, including nids, have a warp presence so project into the warp and thus create a shadow/mirror and that is all you need to form nacent warp entities as even a rather nasty battle creates a demon (Black Legion has a demon formed by the destruction of rome iirc).

that is assuming of course that the destruction of all sentient life in the milky way even matters to the gods, time does not matter in the warp and they exist across all times and realities so the loss of the 40k galaxy for 10 billion years is no different than it happening for 10 min to them.

It's why Chaos is such a non-player in the wars of reality.
Slaanesh only awoke in M30 but the nature of the Warp meant that despite only just arriving on the scene, Slaanesh had been worshipped by hundreds of cultures for millennia. The Colchisian humans and the Laer are two prime examples of races that had extensive cultural ties to Slaanesh despite the God only existing for around one hundred years before contact with the Imperium.
It doesn't matter to the Gods if in M43 all sentient life in the Milky Way has been consumed by the Tyranids because time has no meaning to them.

I feel there is an old Adage that is appropriate here:

"There is always a bigger fish".

As soon as the Nids "win", then the HYPER ELITE DRUKARI SOLAR ORKS OF FENRIS would awaken, and basically Thanos Snap everything back. 40k will never end, that is the crux of this money pit. GW knows a good dealer doesn't let their junkies go dry. They will keep up the steady drip of lore until the end of days.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
I feel there is an old Adage that is appropriate here:

"There is always a bigger fish".

There’s always the theory that the Tyranids aren’t just a mindless hunger driven force that’s simply following a natural source of biomass, but that they’re actually running from something much much worse and the Milky Way is just an overpriced Burger King on the intergalactic equivalent of the M4.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

The Cawl novel however demonstrate worlds aren’t completely stripped. Some resources remain, and whilst I can’t say for certain, I think it says that included microbial life.

To be more specific, the survivors were extremophiles that live in the mantle and that the Tyranids couldn't bother to dig deep enough to get too.

But there is a massive jump to get from mantle archaea organisms to eukariote multi-cellular life, specially as the place multi-cellular life originally evolved (the oceans) is outright gone.

 Tyran wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

The Cawl novel however demonstrate worlds aren’t completely stripped. Some resources remain, and whilst I can’t say for certain, I think it says that included microbial life.

To be more specific, the survivors were extremophiles that live in the mantle and that the Tyranids couldn't bother to dig deep enough to get too.

But there is a massive jump to get from mantle archaea organisms to eukariote multi-cellular life, specially as the place multi-cellular life originally evolved (the oceans) is outright gone.

3rd ed codex had Tyranids stripping everything of a planet down to the core.

I like to think that as time has passed Tyranids have shifted from strip-mining worlds to just cleaning house for the most readily accessible biomass. Which suggests that their feeding is specific and targeted. This also explains why they use Genestealer cults to infiltrate and then draw hive fleets closer as the cult grows; and why they go after specific powerhouse worlds such as how they almost ate their way through the Ultramarines.

No point sitting there feeding for ages to got past the crust when you just need the readily accessible biomass on the surface to keep going and it denies the world to your enemies for a very long time. Win win and you've got a world full of mineral value that you can come back to feast upon later once you've, you know, won the war in the Galaxy.

I would think they would just go into farming.

 Overread wrote:


3rd ed codex had Tyranids stripping everything of a planet down to the core.

I like to think that as time has passed Tyranids have shifted from strip-mining worlds to just cleaning house for the most readily accessible biomass. Which suggests that their feeding is specific and targeted. This also explains why they use Genestealer cults to infiltrate and then draw hive fleets closer as the cult grows; and why they go after specific powerhouse worlds such as how they almost ate their way through the Ultramarines.

No point sitting there feeding for ages to got past the crust when you just need the readily accessible biomass on the surface to keep going and it denies the world to your enemies for a very long time. Win win and you've got a world full of mineral value that you can come back to feast upon later once you've, you know, won the war in the Galaxy.

You are actually quite correct. Devastation of Baal notes that Tyranids have reduced their feeding behavior and eat less from each world and move faster.

The Tyranids seem to attempt to optimize between the 3 priorities:

1. Quantity of biomass
2. Quality of biomass (i.e. genetic information/diversity)
3. Time

The Tyranids could spend more time processing worlds to squeeze out more per world, but there seems to be a point where the additional time and resource expenditure is judged not worth it. Instead the fleets move on to the next world with a biosphere for easy to process biomass and biodiversity. Squeezing an already digested world's bedrock for more resources does not meet this 2nd need.

Of course the exception is Tiamet, which is too occupied building a planet sized super Tyranid thing.

 Tyran wrote:
Of course the exception is Tiamet, which is too occupied building a planet sized super Tyranid thing.

The Hive Mind has created fleets that seem to be able to run "at a loss" if it meets the overall longer term strategic goal of the Tyranids as a whole, which presumably means an ultimate net gain. Kronos is designed to fight daemons, which yield no return in biomass or genetic information, but is supported by other fleets offering Kronos easy targets to feed from. Denying worlds to daemons aids the Tyranids as a whole.

Whatever Tiamet is doing is likely along similar lines, with the expected reward worth the investment of time and resources. If I had to guess, it is something to do with further projecting the Shadow in the Warp to cause more disruption to all the other races. It may also be a countermeasure to the Necrons' Pariah Nexus and the 2 maybe would end up counteracting each other's effects. That would be a nice symmetry. Kronos to counteract Chaos and daemons. Tiamet to counter the Necrons and their anti-warp technology.

Seeing as Tyranids are attacking the Galaxy from nearly every angle, and are a unified force, it does represent the biggest threat to the the galaxy.

Even if they have only consumed all the biomass of say 2 galaxies, that means they still have far more biomass than this galaxy can produce, then add in how the biomass of this galaxy is divided between factions and sub factions that are all too entrenched in their own feuds to unite... doesn't seem too hopeful that this galaxy can put up a reasonable defence.

End game would be the Tyranids consume the galaxy, then move onto the next galaxy. The galaxy would be a collection of lifeless rocks. The only races who could survive this, are the Drukhari, and the Necrons. One doesn't live in realspace, so can just hide, same for the Necrons in their pocket dimensions. A few Chaos stuff could also survive in the Warp, but due to the galaxy being lifeless, it would mean the Warp rifts close as they don't have the emotions of the living to 'fuel' them.

This is why Tyranids always lose, because they are narratively too powerful and such an end game. So they have to be beaten in the fluff when it comes to anything important... they are to 40k what Darleks are to Dr Who.

Technically every faction always loses.

Every Chaos Crusade fails; every Imperial victory is bought at a vast loss, half the time they win protecting one world but lost a dozen in the process; every major Ork Whaaag basically falls apart on its own after a while. etc...


Basically every faction always loses.

The main issue with Tyranids is because we don't have a specific set of characters and writing styles that give them "Their own voice" outside of Genestealer Cults, this means that even when they do win we don't see a "character" as such advancing. We don't even really know the Tyranids objective or anything about them.


So its easy to focus on their ultimate losses because whenever there's a victory there's no victory parade element. It's just another world consumed

Heck considering Tyranids have nearly wiped out Ultramarines, that feat alone is massive within the setting; esp considering the Ultramarines are the poster-child of the setting for the marketing team