WARHAMMER 40k - The Tyranids - Dino-bugs that make Zerg and Starship Trooper bugs look... lame...

almost 2 years ago

Good day all, Zak here from Cape Town, South Africa.

We have been dealing with a lot of Chaos and Daemons as such lately in my lore posts. Let's look at a far more physical, realspace threat to the Imperium of man and indeed for ANY living creatures in the 41st Millenium: The Tyranids.

These creatures do NOT come from any one place in the Galaxy. Instead, they have been coming to the local Galaxy where the Imperium is, from another Galaxy. These creatures have a Hive mind and their army is controlled by something called synapse.

The main goal of the Tyranids is simple: The Devour.

Their sole mission is not good or graceful, nor particularly evil. They are purely fulfilling a biological need to feed... by a race of an alien Hive that treats the entire biomass of a planted as a meal to be consumed for a few days or a week or two maybe, before leaving behind a dry and desolate world.

When the Tyranids land on a habitable planet with little or no defenders the following happens:

The Tyranids make their arrival by spores landing from space.
The Tyranids quickly swarm across the landscape killing and cornering all -living things.
Ripper swarms start eating everything. All plant and animal biomass.
Tendrils sink down from the Hive ships.
Ripper swarms and other Tyranids for digestion pools and the Rippers jump into these, being dissolved in the asset along with whatever the Rippers ate.
The fighters on the planet are reduced to gaurd the digestion pools while the rest go back to the Hive Ships.
The tendrils suck up all the water and atmosphere.
The nutrients, water and biomass is stored in the Hive ships.
The tendrils retract and leave behind an empty husk of a planet.

Now... the EXACT same thing happens on a planet that has a defense force of some sort. What is added is the military part:

The Tyranid forces land on the planet and spread out, finding resistance.
Warrior strains begin to assault the defenders.
Should the defenses turn out to be able to repel the first wave of attackers then the Hive Mind begins engineering the next generation of warrior Tyranids.

Yes. This is where things go beyond the abilities of the Zerg or the Starship Trooper bugs... These things can evolve after each dying wave as they tweak the genes of the next swarm to hit the battlelines, spawning them within hours of the last wave.

If your planet is cold, so cold, the Tryranids and most living things die trying to walk there, they will overcome it slowly but surely, each wave being able to better handle the extreme environment.

If your planet has other environmental challenges, they will adapt to those.

If your army has a specific strength, then they will adapt to that and they will find your weak spot!

Their weakness? Synapse.

I do not know if this is still true in 9th edition because I have yet to learn to play properly and I have yet to watch a Tyranid battle play out, but usually, if you manage to kill off the synapse creatures, the rest of the swarm gets debilitated.

What I do know about the Tyranids now is that they have even more units than when I played and they can be fielded as either a Horde army:

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