Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

In the new 8th rulebook it has a piece on Nids.
One of the small sections says that Hive Fleet Hydra has started to veer of course and cannabilise splinters of other Nid fleets.
I wonder

has it gone rogue i.e. fallen outside the Hive Minds control
the Hive Mind has instructed it to in order to combine DNA biomass into new organisms
a bio weapon has been used on it causing it to attack other fleets
GW are going to NewCron the Nids and give individual fleets individual personalities and goals #shudder
something else

I'm gonna go with D for this. We haven't actually had a scenario where Nids from different fleets have actually crossed paths and interacted, so there would only be their base instinct to go off, feed and absorb. We also do not know if the hive mind is one overarching force or whether it is the cumulative presence of a splinter fleet in it's entirety, meaning although they are the same basis, they are unique amongst the other fleets. this does also lead to a rather concerning revelation regarding B, as Hydra will learn from the organic mass of the other fleets and become a much better organism adapted to several fronts across the galaxy, making it a much more aggressive adversary with a lot of mass to commit to its swarms.

 Ratius wrote:
In the new 8th rulebook it has a piece on Nids.
One of the small sections says that Hive Fleet Hydra has started to veer of course and cannabilise splinters of other Nid fleets.
I wonder

has it gone rogue i.e. fallen outside the Hive Minds control
the Hive Mind has instructed it to in order to combine DNA biomass into new organisms
a bio weapon has been used on it causing it to attack other fleets
GW are going to NewCron the Nids and give individual fleets individual personalities and goals #shudder
something else

I seem to remember reading some older fluff about when two hive fleets meet they attempt to consume one another in a form of Darwinian selection to produce the most effective weapons-creatures.

P.S.: Please not the Newcron option. I still can't quite get over how disappointing the Newcrons feel compared to the Oldcron fluff, and repeating it would just be a Bad Thing.

I think its more like moving all the dna data collected from all the pevious fleets into one then it can disseminate it via the hive mind.

Think of it as putting it all into one file to be shared with others.

Karaken after it was splinted would often cannibalise smaller splinter fleets

Skullhammer wrote:
I think its more like moving all the dna data collected from all the pevious fleets into one then it can disseminate it via the hive mind.

Think of it as putting it all into one file to be shared with others.

I'm sure consolidating genetic data is part of it.

I don't think there's any 'disseminating via the hive mind' going on though. If it worked that way, there'd be no need to consume the fleet in the first place. They're all linked to the hive mind anyway, so they'd just share the info the same way it's disseminated.

Pretty sure in Valedor the two Hive Fleets do fight each other.

NewNids would be terrible.

In some species when a mother animal has a litter of young but becomes starved the mother will eat her own young in order to survive; were the mother to starve then the young would die off anyway, so this is a good move from a species/population standpoint. Apply that analogy to Nids and it makes perfect sense; the overall advance is more likely to be destroyed piecemeal than if one splinter cannibalized the others.

 Ratius wrote:
In the new 8th rulebook it has a piece on Nids.
One of the small sections says that Hive Fleet Hydra has started to veer of course and cannabilise splinters of other Nid fleets.
I wonder

has it gone rogue i.e. fallen outside the Hive Minds control
the Hive Mind has instructed it to in order to combine DNA biomass into new organisms
a bio weapon has been used on it causing it to attack other fleets
GW are going to NewCron the Nids and give individual fleets individual personalities and goals #shudder
something else

The Xenos 2 book makes it totally clear that the Hive Fleets are all linked together in a single Hive Mind and share a single purpose. There will be no NewNids, GW are going out of their way lately to enshrine the Tyranids as a unified, monolithic presence (the only properly focused faction out there?).

Valedor dealt with two Hive Fleets meeting. It turns out that locally the Synapse web takes a bit of time to synth up. There's no analogy used in book, but you could liken it to one Fleet speaking French and one Fleet speaking German. They have a little trouble understanding each other at first, but they do learn. Plus, in this analogy they have a mutual friend who speaks both languages who keeps the, in line while they learn to talk to each other.

In Valedor it's suggested that the smaller Kraken fleet was going to be subsumed into the greater
Leviathan fleet in the end, and while at first the two Fleets avoided coming directly into contact (probably to stop their organisms fighting needlessly), by the end they are working together seamlessly.

Lastly I think it's worth noting that for Tyranids, being eaten/drank/throwing yourself into an acid bath to return your biomass to the next level up the chain is perfectly normal. If Hydra is becoming more active, perhaps the Hive Mind is using it to vacuum up some already harvested biomass and centralise it into another unchallengeable fleet before taking another bite out of the galaxy. The Cryptoid/Baal tendril was so massive that nothing could defeat it in space and no planet could hold it off; it took the great rift sucking it into the warp to get rid of it, and even then we don't know if it is totally dead or if some of it has survived and will pop up again one day...

Coming soon:
Tyranids will get individuals and personalities and will be able to ally with other races.

But to be serious, we do know the Hive Mind is one big overarching thing across Hive Fleets, that is never something that has been in doubt (In fact, seperate Hive Fleets aren't really seperate at all, they are all just forward 'tendrils' of the full Tyranid species that is in migration towards the Milky Way).
Hydra absorbing other Hive Fleets most likely just means that the Hive Mind is gathering forces for some kind of big assault.

I still think the tyranids, or more precisely the hive mind will turn out to be all that is left of the Old Ones. It would kind of parellel what happen to the Necrons. I think their final experiement was the creation of the hive mind and sacrificing their bodies and individuality for immortality in the hive mind.

Claas wrote:
I still think the tyranids, or more precisely the hive mind will turn out to be all that is left of the Old Ones. It would kind of parellel what happen to the Necrons. I think their final experiement was the creation of the hive mind and sacrificing their bodies and individuality for immortality in the hive mind.

What few indicators we have seem to imply Tyranids pre-date even the Old Ones.