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So, as I've heard (but can't rememver where or when), the Eldars and Orks seem kinda ill equipped to survive on the long run as a species. In the case of the Aeldari, two things come to mind : their extremely low birth rate and their inclination to pursue such extreme experiences that they murderbirthed a Chaos God which teared a hole in the galaxy and almost wiped them out in the same instant. Since then, most of the aeldari factions have struggled to regrow their population and bring their race back from the brink of extinction. Plus, without the spiritstone technology, they are doomed to be devoured by Slaanesh after their physical demise. The one notable exception is the Drukhari, who have found a way to snatch back the soul of the dead to their corpse (or a part of it) and thus come back from death. But then again, this is a priviledge that only a few members of their society can afford. As such, one could wonder if the Old Ones had any other plan for the Aeldari than use them as psychic footsoldiers against the Necron. Just like the Astartes and Thunder Warriors before them, they seem to he genecrafted beings built to fight, die and then be disposed of.
This is even clearer with the Orks, and by extension the Krorks. The Orks are on a never ending quest for war, even if when they have no reason for it. The only reason why there race hasn't become extinct by trying to fight everyone everywhere for no reason is because of their means of reproduction. But besides that, one could wonder what would happen if Orks were stranded on a planet, with no means of leaving it and with a very limited quantity of finite ressources. I mean, I guess the spore things would allow a few generations to persist, but I also guess that Orks need to eat. I wonder if thry wouldn't simply genocide themselve.

All in all, the Aeldari and Krorks seem to be two species made for a war their masters lost. Plus, they don't seem to have designed them to be fully well-adapted to life outside of war. My guess is the Old ones wouldnhave wiped them had tjey won the war in Heaven. Similarly, I think the Emperor planned the same thing with the Astartes, just like he did with the Thunder Warriors.

What is your take on the subject ?

If you're looking at the subject under that theory, then they did a terrible job with Orks, who can survive almost any environment and reproduce anywhere. Even godly beings would have difficulty eliminating that.

Orks are a solid win from an engineered soldier race. Tough, fierce, self generating and reliant even with minimal resources. You can beat them back, but they are hard to remove as an infestation. Fighting them just makes them bigger and better, and if they don’t have anyone else to fight, they will “train” against themselves, or hitch a ride to somewhere there is a better fight. It may have been the Old Ones had a plan to clean them up after the war that they never got to use, or were OK with them being a moderate ongoing issue in the galaxy. Without external threats how big and tough would they get? Would they just simmer down to savage orks living in the background? Takes a good scrap to get them worked up.

Eldar are a bit more tricky.

IIRC the current low birthrate is due to the limitation of spirit stones. I thought pre-fall, their souls just reincarnated or were new, so there was not that restriction. With the war in heaven, they would have had a goal and focus to keep their decadence at bay. It was only in victory that they had issues. With a more active hand from the Old Ones would they have strayed into the fall? As a race, they seem very high risk, high reward. They gain a LOT of power by tapping into the warp, but there is risk in doing so. As an engineered race, this might be an acceptable trade off. Burn bright, but burn short. And birthing a new chaos god as a result? That’s fine. The war in heaven was not about Good vs. Evil, it’s Law vs. Chaos. And the Old Ones were on the chaos side.

Note:
These are pre-coffee ramblings from someone versed in the remembered scraps of the old lore. YMMV.

I'm surprised to hear the Old Ones were with Chaos. However, considering their tampering with the Eldar and Ork races is what turned the immaterium into a nightmatish Hell, I guess it nakes sense.

 Khornate25 wrote:
I'm surprised to hear the Old Ones were with Chaos. However, considering their tampering with the Eldar and Ork races is what turned the immaterium into a nightmatish Hell, I guess it nakes sense.

With 40k what we see is the evil side of chaos. It also represents life, change, growth and individuality. Law is order, but also stagnation, mechanization, loss of self, and death. IIRC, the Old Ones were tapped into the warp, and the vibrant wildness and randomness of life. Their foes were more locked into science and reality. One could argue that the Old Ones drew too far from the warp to win the war, and what we see in the grimdark is the results of that.

one could wonder what would happen if Orks were stranded on a planet, with no means of leaving it and with a very limited quantity of finite ressources.

Just wanted to comment on that line, because Ork fluff seems to be pretty clear on that: In a case like that Orks "degenerate" into feral orks. And feral Orks, well, don't need a lot of ressources, because they're just half naked maniacs with stone axes and wooden shields .
Nevelon also mentioned what happens to Orks if you leave them alone - the rise of the Beast seems to show what happens in this case, the Imperium simply let the Orks grow on the fringe of the galaxy(because they considered them to be broken after their leader was killed in the Great Crusade) and they came back with the biggest waaagh ever seen.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
If you're looking at the subject under that theory, then they did a terrible job with Orks, who can survive almost any environment and reproduce anywhere. Even godly beings would have difficulty eliminating that.

Yup. I always thought the subtext was Orks were created to be nightmarishly difficult for the Necrons to purge; that form of live that just refuses to stop living. Not unlike actual fungus, actually.

Yeah considering who the Krork were designed to fight, it makes perfect sense for them to be the way they are,

However, it seems clear the Krork / Ork species had some sort of degeneration over time. Even thought we have very little information regarding the Krorks, Fabius Bile noted, while visiting the galleries of Solemnace and witnessing a paralyzed Krork, that his power armour seemed to be extremely advanced, even more so than the ones of the Astartes. This might indicates that the Krorks were somewhat highly advanced on a technological level, something they kinda lost over time, since their technology seems to be kinda crude and only works because of their collective psychic might. Another possibility is that their technology was given to them by the Old ones or another affiliated species, and that, after the Old Ones died out, they didn't have the knowledge or intelligence to replicate and / or maintain it at the same level. Another sign of degeneration is their physical stature. The Krork that Fabius Bile saw was way taller and larger than the ones present in the 30k or 40k era. This might suggest that their genes suffered some form of change over the course of their many generations. Event thought Orks can become quite large over time thanks to the effect of gathering a Waagh !, the baseline Orks seem quite smaller than a Krork, whose leaders might have been even bigger than the largest of Orks. The one exception might be the Prime-Orks witnessed during the War of the Beast, but one might wonder if these were not the last of the original Krorks.

I would argue that it is self-evident that the Krork "degenerated" (i.e. become smaller, less technologically advanced, less organized) because the threat has greatly diminished. The Imperium and all the factions added together are nothing compared to unleashed C'tan (literal star gods) and Necrontyr at their height in power. Hence, Krorks devolved, splintered, etc. Eldar were never a serious threat to them because the Eldar could avoid them at will (they had full control over the webway for millions of years) and were a mostly isolationist species. So, the Krork devolved, awaiting a new challenge.

 Khornate25 wrote:
However, it seems clear the Krork / Ork species had some sort of degeneration over time. Even thought we have very little information regarding the Krorks, Fabius Bile noted, while visiting the galleries of Solemnace and witnessing a paralyzed Krork, that his power armour seemed to be extremely advanced, even more so than the ones of the Astartes. This might indicates that the Krorks were somewhat highly advanced on a technological level, something they kinda lost over time, since their technology seems to be kinda crude and only works because of their collective psychic might. Another possibility is that their technology was given to them by the Old ones or another affiliated species, and that, after the Old Ones died out, they didn't have the knowledge or intelligence to replicate and / or maintain it at the same level. Another sign of degeneration is their physical stature. The Krork that Fabius Bile saw was way taller and larger than the ones present in the 30k or 40k era. This might suggest that their genes suffered some form of change over the course of their many generations. Event thought Orks can become quite large over time thanks to the effect of gathering a Waagh !, the baseline Orks seem quite smaller than a Krork, whose leaders might have been even bigger than the largest of Orks. The one exception might be the Prime-Orks witnessed during the War of the Beast, but one might wonder if these were not the last of the original Krorks.

The psychic technology thing is only a supposition. My headcannon is that it's actually the same kind of fungal nanotechnology that underpins their weird lifecycle and ecosystem - that's why so much of it is reliant on squiqs, squig juice, grots etc and why their cyber stuff is particularly effective. The psychic gestalt they have going on is what stores the blueprints and it's why they have degraded over time but get bigger and more advanced the more of them get together and fight (the weirdboys psychics are like psychic resistance circuits they've repurposed as explosives). Plus "nanotech warrior" feels much more like an Old weapon from the dawn of the universe than just a big Ork in Power Armour.

I have another, more out their head canon that's relevant to the thread: the psychic supersoldiers the Old Ones created to fight the War in Heaven were the actually the Eldar Gods, who then created the Aeldari in imitation of the Krork, like Aule creating the dwarves in Tolkein. This makes a bit more sense of Aeldari mythology, and also is a funny reversal of the usual orc-elf relationship. And it explains why the Aeldari are arrogant artists rather than super soldiers.

My belief is that any current sentiment warp sensitive species in 40K universe was probably created by the old ones, and then the ones that evolved to be most useful were used in the war in heaven, the rest left to their own devices.

I read somewhere that the larger ork communities get, the more advanced and civilised they become. So possibly if an ork waaaaaaghhh were to grow big enough then eventually Krorks would be born into the society and the tech being used would become more sophisticated. But as the Orks just love to fight their numbers never get big enough for these stages of thier civilisation to emerge

Nevelon wrote:Orks are a solid win from an engineered soldier race. Tough, fierce, self generating and reliant even with minimal resources. You can beat them back, but they are hard to remove as an infestation. Fighting them just makes them bigger and better, and if they don’t have anyone else to fight, they will “train” against themselves, or hitch a ride to somewhere there is a better fight. It may have been the Old Ones had a plan to clean them up after the war that they never got to use, or were OK with them being a moderate ongoing issue in the galaxy. Without external threats how big and tough would they get? Would they just simmer down to savage orks living in the background? Takes a good scrap to get them worked up.

Eldar are a bit more tricky.

IIRC the current low birthrate is due to the limitation of spirit stones. I thought pre-fall, their souls just reincarnated or were new, so there was not that restriction. With the war in heaven, they would have had a goal and focus to keep their decadence at bay. It was only in victory that they had issues. With a more active hand from the Old Ones would they have strayed into the fall? As a race, they seem very high risk, high reward. They gain a LOT of power by tapping into the warp, but there is risk in doing so. As an engineered race, this might be an acceptable trade off. Burn bright, but burn short. And birthing a new chaos god as a result? That’s fine. The war in heaven was not about Good vs. Evil, it’s Law vs. Chaos. And the Old Ones were on the chaos side.

Note:
These are pre-coffee ramblings from someone versed in the remembered scraps of the old lore. YMMV.

Chimpick wrote:
I have another, more out their head canon that's relevant to the thread: the psychic supersoldiers the Old Ones created to fight the War in Heaven were the actually the Eldar Gods, who then created the Aeldari in imitation of the Krork, like Aule creating the dwarves in Tolkein. This makes a bit more sense of Aeldari mythology, and also is a funny reversal of the usual orc-elf relationship. And it explains why the Aeldari are arrogant artists rather than super soldiers.

I like these ideas with the Aeldari gods, but maybe we can combine them. Perhaps the Aeldari gods were meant to be a conduit or stabilizer for the aeldari themselves. A strong leadership to keep the mental powers of their people directed and controlled. It just happen to be a twist of fate that their gods died out and their people survived. The Aeldari were never meant to be left to their own devices or plans were never made for this eventuality. And in a time when there were no gods of chaos, having a race of powerful psychers didn't seem like the giant hazard it is in the current time period.

I'm not sure about Orks dying off if they are stuck on a low-resource planet. If Gorkamorka is still canon, then they were quite happy to keep going even after their Space Hulk made Angelis a nuclear desert, and immediately started trying to build a new ship, or at least "something" out of the wreckage of the hulk.

And I get the impression that in-game, they had been there for multiple generations, as the Explorator ship that got brought down in the crash had seen multiple generations of degeneration and mutation. Long enough for the crew to turn into mutant tech-cultists with little definite knowledge of even their own ship's original name.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I'm not sure about Orks dying off if they are stuck on a low-resource planet. If Gorkamorka is still canon, then they were quite happy to keep going even after their Space Hulk made Angelis a nuclear desert, and immediately started trying to build a new ship, or at least "something" out of the wreckage of the hulk.

And I get the impression that in-game, they had been there for multiple generations, as the Explorator ship that got brought down in the crash had seen multiple generations of degeneration and mutation. Long enough for the crew to turn into mutant tech-cultists with little definite knowledge of even their own ship's original name.

They don't die off. Feral orks and wildboyz are still around in background of the current codex. There's even a life-cycle to it, where they start breeding bigger and bigger squigs to replace war machines, and as those die off in raids, they replace them with captured and rebuilt machines, eventually picking up their grasp of technology again. Without opposition or resources, they'll stay feral, but even feral orks are a threat.

Orks and eldar where designed to help winn the war. Not nesaserraly survive it. We do not know what plans the old once had after that. Could they control the orks somehow? They seems like a rather bothersome thing to have around. It is also unsure if they have lost the brain boys strain, or if that was just old once.

Regarding orks Stranded on a planet they tend to do just fine. They come with their own Terra forming and ecosystem. If they find metal (or refine it out of the earth) they eventually leave the planet. Squig oil is rocket fuel.

There has been some wild speculation on how the eldars used to be. Birthing slanesh seems like a design flaw.

 Niiai wrote:
Orks and eldar where designed to help winn the war. Not nesaserraly survive it. We do not know what plans the old once had after that. Could they control the orks somehow? They seems like a rather bothersome thing to have around. It is also unsure if they have lost the brain boys strain, or if that was just old once.

Regarding orks Stranded on a planet they tend to do just fine. They come with their own Terra forming and ecosystem. If they find metal (or refine it out of the earth) they eventually leave the planet. Squig oil is rocket fuel.

There has been some wild speculation on how the eldars used to be. Birthing slanesh seems like a design flaw.

Less a design flaw and more an emergent property of their strengths.

The Eldar are basically warp powered super weapons, either enhancing their physical prowess or throwing it as a devestating weapon. Their heightened emotions gave them more raw warp stuff to pull on.

To use a really crude analogy, ecstasy gives people a buzz so it's good if that's what you want. However it interferes with thermoregulation and causes people to overhydrate to death...

Taking the opposite tack from my headcanon upthread, what if birthing gods literally was their strength. The Aeldari as the warpsmiths and the eldar gods as the weapons. Would create a pleasing symmetry with the Ynnead stuff, and make the Fall more shameful and tragic if there's some suspicion that it wasn't accidental at all, but a deliberate power grab by some Eldar proto-Horus.