A swarm of faceless monsters, each one designed specifically for its job...

Nothing in that example has anything to do with the Swarmlord or justifies its existence in anyway.

It works like this.

>Fight race A using strains X126.b, X129.a, Y.6794.a, Z.932.c
>Race A is defeated, X129.a suffered the most casualties, Z.932.c suffered the least and had the highest kill ratio
>Attack race B using a higher ratio of strain Z.932.c and lower ratio of X129.a

And so on.

i think a lot of nids have genders actually, given Gaunts can breed

>rerelease the codex
>make bonesabres a generic loadout
>call swarmlord any hive tyrant that has the highest synaptic priority on the invaded world
>each swarmlord has the memories of previous deployments of other swarmlords for better tactical development
>make the "individual swarmlord" more the way its enemies perceive it than what it actually is

I see a problem in presentation, not in content

Literally every tyranid is covered end to end in penises.

Even catachan women aren't as manly as your average tyranid.

Hormagaunts are born pregnant, so they're all technically female.

Termagants cannot breed on their own because they require Fleshborers that have to be bred and melded separately, that's why they have Tervigons to spawn them.

Genestealers are all male in a way because they invasively rape their genetic material into other races.

Hive Tyrants are all male because they are the counterparts to the all-female Dominatrixes.

Most other Tyranids are default female or genderless, or maybe hermaphroditic. However the race evolves so quickly any of these could stop being true and be replaced with another method at any time.

in old lore they were hermaphrodites

currently I don't think they are capable of breeding at all: the majority of creatures are spawned by the norn queens, only survivalist strains have reproductive adaptations.

who knows tho, maybe tyrants could stress-develop a gender away from battle.

This is a workable solution. The problem is the omniscient third party narrator in descriptions of Swarmlord in the Cruddexes that explicitly makes it out to be the horseshit mary sue garbage that OP called out.

>I was keen to do a gravid Hive Tyrant that spews Rippers from its womb as a special character
Fuck yes, that's aweso...

>but then I came to my senses
... by making a special snowflake tyrant ? Even though there's no problem with Nid special characters, as long as they are specialized organisms ?

What the hell.

Also, I miss the parasite of mortrex. THAT was a good idea. Just bring it back.

Osmosis Jones?

Norn Queens don't physically give birth to every Tyranid - the Hive Ships themselves do that, and not every ship has a Norn Queen. The Norns are more the engineers that create the genetic blueprints for the strains and the Hive Ships are the factories that take that information and mass produce them.

>they invasively rape
I find this description problematic and xenophobic: it's not rape if she gives consent to my charming eyes

Read the whole paragraph, dumbass. And Phil Kelly never made the Swarmlord, Cruddace did that. It's pretty clear that the Parasite of Mortrex was the thing based on Kelly's original throw-away idea of a Ripper-spawning Tyrant.

Reading comprehension.

except hive tyrants aren't even the most important synaptic creature in a fleet.

Refugees fleeing from Tyrannic-infested worlds welcome!

This.

Typically they are amongst the ground forces.

Let me rephrase by saying that only Norn Queens have gender because they are the only organisms that can accept / create / select for new DNA. With the possible exceptions of Genestealers, all of the other birthed nids are just straight clones in a similar way to stem cells undergoing fission. Yes they can reproduce, but they have no method for the exchange/incorporation of novel DNA.

>her

You're right, thanks for correcting me.

Beyond the Mortrex, I also never understood why pic related couldn't spawn hormagaunts. Since I'm never using shooting gaunts, I would have bought one of those if only they were able to spawn the close-quarter variant. But as things are, I just don't see any appeal in them.

What nids really lack right now is customisation, 3rd edition style. Just let me custom-tailor my bugs, dangit !

>pic related, I said !

4th edition did the customization better

Yet when they did the same thing for Necrons you redditors loved it
>finally we can have soulless machines with PERSONALITY

Here is how I think of it. The Hive Mind is doing all the logistics and the grand strategy of the Hive Fleets, while Hive Tyrants handle tactics. As such, they need a higher cognitive power to make decisions.

Basically, the Hive Mind is playing Civilization, while the Tyrants are playing Starcraft, and the Swarmlord is Korean.

Yeah I agree, although personally I would like the ability to just spawn Hormagaunts all over the map as they erupt from their underground egg clusters. The fact that they're more self-sufficient because they don't carry ranged weapons is interesting and could be played with.

However what I think they definitely got wrong with the Tervigon was not giving it the Fleshborer Hive weapon that the Tyrannofex has. Since it's spawning Termagants with Fleshborers it should also have a ton of Fleshborers inside it as well. On top of that, the bit for them looks kinda like the arms on the old Malefactor slug tank, which the Tervigon is supposed to be the spiritual successor to as a "Tyranid not!Transport". Totally missed the mark on that one.

except thats not how it works.

>all of the other birthed nids are just straight clones in a similar way to stem cells undergoing fission.
except we know they can develop phenotypic alterations as shown by the anphelion incident.

even genotypic if we do assume different biomorphs have different genetic sequences.

The problem with that isn't the division of thought-labor between the higher Hive Mind and Hive Tyrants.

It's the speshul snowflakeness of the Swarmlord itself compared to other Hive Tyrants. All Tyranids are just mass-produced clones of genetic templates. If the Norn Queens can make one Swarmlord, they can make ten thousand of them.

The only time it makes sense for Tyranids to have a unique character is if it was a spontaneous mutation on the battlefield that was only around for that one historical battle and then either killed or reabsorbed into the swarm and its mutations spread to the rest of the creatures, like Red Terror getting turned into the entire strain of Mawlocs or Old One Eye getting turned into the Regeneration upgrade for MCs.

Or the Doom of Malan'tai getting turned into Neurothropes, that was one they actually did right, so good on them.

>It's the speshul snowflakeness of the Swarmlord itself compared to other Hive Tyrants.
but the swarmlord fluff does imply that the other tyrants work in a similar way
>The Swarmlord is essentially immortal, like a Hive Tyrant, as once killed it is reborn by the Hive Mind with the exact same experiences, character and knowledge, in essence becoming stronger than its predecessor every time because of its new experience. But unlike a Hive Tyrant, the reincarnation of the Swarmlord appears to be a stress-induced response that is triggered only when conventional strategies of the Hive Mind fail and greater resourcefulness and tactics are needed.

>Yeah I agree, although personally I would like the ability to just spawn Hormagaunts all over the map as they erupt from their underground egg clusters.
it's not like you can't, it's that it has pyrovore-tier rules

Problem is though is why is the Swarmlord needed for it's tactics and resourcefulness? Those aspects of it should be absorbed in to the hivemind, and thus be available at any time. The physical form of the Swarmlord really should have no bearing on how well the hivemind is doing.

It still doesn't make sense that there is only one.

All memories are, are just patterns of neurons in the brain. If you clone the brain you clone the memories. Furthermore, if the Hive Mind as a whole has these memories stored somewhere else in the first place, why does it need to respawn the Swarmlord again to stick them back into? All Hive Tyrants should know everything it knows by definition of how they work.

Basically everything about the Swarmlord directly contradicts the entire point and concept of a gestalt Hive Mind. It's just bad fluff written by a stupid writer who doesn't understand what he's talking about.

Why wouldn't they spawn it every time ?

The question is more, why would they even need to? And why would they have to limit it to one even if they did?

But yeah EVEN IF they found some bullshit justification for both of those, then you have still poked yet another hole in it.

The Swarmlord fluff just DOES NOT WORK for Tyranids, period. Furthermore, the name is fucking stupid, and the creature itself has now come to represent the era of Cruddex-nids, which are the worst off they've ever been in terms of not only fluff but also crunch.

Everything about it and both the Codexes it was part of needs to be deleted and never spoken of again.

the hive mind is a psychic construct generated by physical minds.

the hive would still need to have a psychical processing entity that contributes to the psychic network and activating it only when needed and locally may be a way to enhance performance.

I never liked newcrons t.b.h., I think people who likes them mostly jumped into the necron wagon after the change or never cared much about fluff. They're like completely different factions.

It's almost like Veeky Forums isn't a single individual.

Also, Tyranids came first, so Necrons can fuck off with the soulless death machine posing - they needed a change to differentiate themselves.

The argument is that for them to reproduce that physical mind when it is destroyed, they have to have a back-up copy somewhere. Which precludes the need for giving it a body to walk around in when its memories can already be accessed by any Tyrant or other powerful psychic synapse organism.

>The question is more, why would they even need to? And why would they have to limit it to one even if they did?
Ok let's take it from another point of view that would solve both. For the hivemind, at a hive fleet level, having a swarmlord on the field feels like being on coke. The hive mind gets more reactive, more perceptive, her percieved hold on the swarm (the body) gets tighter. However, it requires a higher energy upkeep, and that is biomass lost forever. That or it gives the swarm slowly space cancer.

Isn't the Swarmlord just a really old Hive Tyrant and so is recognizable/assigned characteristics by the Imperials? I thought that was the lore behind the Tyranid special characters, they're only special to the Imperium, the Hive Mind doesn't really differentiate between them.

Good ideas as well. Also, nice call on the Malefactor inheritance.

I must say that I would have preferred the ability to stick almost any possible biomorph onto any bug for an hefty point-tax.

A Carnifex with a grasping tongue ? Sure. An armored Tyrant with a rupture cannon ? Go for it. A Lictor with motherfucking boneswords ? Can do !

Even if the end result of such a fully converted army would be a monstrously overpriced force, probably tabled by turn two by any space marine worth its salt, it would be nice to have all of the options needed to represent the Hive Mind's adaptability (and its evolutionary dead-ends).

Except it doesn't do any of those things. You're making up weird bullshit excuses that just create even more questions instead of accepting that the entire idea of the Swarmlord AND its execution are both awful and have no place in the Tyranids.

>Biomass lost forever
>Nids obeying laws of thermal dynamics
Oh you sweet child. If something that conventional was an issue the nids would not be the massive threat they are. Pretty sure they either in universe straight up break that laws of thermal dynamics, or out of universe they are just poorly written. And the former would be a result of the latter.

Nids do obey the laws of thermal dynamics.

Biomass =/= energy.

But the idea that they would somehow lose that biomass by shaping it as a Swarmlord is also stupid.

>that there is only one.
I don't think it is ever stated that there can only be one at a time, only anecdotal supposition because you only ever find one.

why do you download information on your computer when they are already somewhere else?
why don't all computer store all informations ever available?
efficiency and limitations.

we know that the tyrants know their direct previous selves, we technically don't have confirmation that the other tyrants also don't share all or part of that.

I believe it has to do with "psychic capability" being a precious resource or sonething, or we would have little reasons not to have each gaunt be a psychic beast.

I'm not talking about the memories, but the hardware necessary to process them.

you can have all the back ups of einstein works, but you still need a mind to comprehend them.

>or we would have little reasons not to have each gaunt be a psychic beast.
Psychic power requires large and fully developed brains, which take more biomass and, more importantly, longer time to gestate.

This would explain why highly psychic races like Eldar have low birthrates with long development time in the womb, while Tau have short rapid lifespans and almost no psychic presence.

Gaunts not being psychic means they can be churned out en masse in a couple hours. Tyrants and Zoanthropes probably take months - years to breed new ones.

Except in this case everything is wetware, and Norn Queens are biological supercomputers that can decompile an entire races genome in minutes.

except thats not true.

I'm suddenly curious if Tyranids ever considered making poisonous food-Nids.

>Psychic power requires large and fully developed brains
it is also something related to a connection to a "soul" in the warp; i.e. workings we really can't try to define or explain to a satisfactory degree and enable writers to make all the excuses they want.

we're in a corner

what do you think a 'death world' is user?

What part is not true?

The Eldar and Tau birthrates are. The rest of it is not contradicted anywhere in the fluff.

Its worth noting that the nids seem to give not a single fuck about the chaos gods.

there's nothing to suggest that zoans ect take a long time to create, infact the story of the doom of malantai suggests the opposite, they were able to create it rapidly.

That's because Oldcrons were spoopy, robo-skelly reskins of Necrons, who's only noteworthy differentiation, was their Anti-Chaos Gods, the C'tans, who would only serve to add yet more "just as planned" bullshit into 40k.

>wetware
the difference is arbitral

We don't know how norn queens decompile genes, it may be an automatic mechanism like digestion; you don't need much conscious or subconscious thoughts processing to do it.

I don't think anything about that story indicated the Doom was bred during the conflict.

You mean Chaos Androids?

I don't see how that ties to the discussion.

souls are often talked about in qualitative terms on top of quantitative ones: as a soul more attuned to the concepts that spawned a specific god may he more relevant to it a soul, albeit enormous, swinging in a completely alien way in the warp may not cause interaction.

it's magic I don't want to explain shit.

I think he meant to say reskins of Tyranids.

no, they don't
Because there is fluff that when two hivefleets meet the weaker is eaten by the stronger.
so "all biomass is regained" and "nothing is lost".
So a massive battle happens, but nothing is expended. Ie, for GW, biomass=energy, or rather biomass=the only thing that matters.

That's why the nids only bother eating a planets biomass, which is tiny tiny portion of the total potential energy of the system.

>a special tyranid that was able to completely fuck over the eldar specifically because they didn't understand its power
>appeared during the conflict
>brought victory
>clearly wasn't bred specially for this purpose

ok retard

except nids seem not to have souls

>Because there is fluff that when two hivefleets meet the weaker is eaten by the stronger.
>so "all biomass is regained" and "nothing is lost".
Yes. And biomass isn't energy.

>So a massive battle happens, but nothing is expended. Ie, for GW, biomass=energy, or rather biomass=the only thing that matters.
Yes, because energy doesn't matter, they can always get more from the stars.

>That's why the nids only bother eating a planets biomass, which is tiny tiny portion of the total potential energy of the system.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of why they go after biomass. It's not to digest it for energy like when you and I eat food. It's so they have more raw material to make more Tyranids.

>implying in circumstances where there're no subatomic reactions loss of energy means loss of mass
you STILL don't understand how this stuff works after all the threads?

2e crons were just raiders without fluff, Andy Chambers wanted killbots and ancient eeevil in 3e, this was not liked so Ward's revision into eccentric Necron Lords who had defeated the C'tan was approved by GW.

The move was planned long before the 5e Necron codex too, even in 5e rulebook's Necron blurb (2008, Ward was one of the authors) it was mentioned that Necron Lords were the faction's driving force, while 4e book (2004) said it was the C'tan.

Everything about the Doom suggested that it was an aberration which happened to get into the World Circuit. It was just a mutant Zoanthrope that got superpowered by eating a Craftworld full of souls.

biomass is made from carbon, using energy.
You realize this right?
Energy is what makes matter into the form we call biomass. It's solar energy used to create potential energy in the form of chemical energy.

If you have the energy, and rocks, you can make biomass.

You fail at biology

Well if Chambers was behind it that explains why Oldcrons and Tyranids were so similar.

Mainly I don't get why it wasn't an upgrade for MCs back then. They still believed in upgrades and wargear back then.

they don't have conventional souls, but they do have one: the hive mind.

it looks like a soul, behaves like a soul and quaks as a soul.

The original special characters were one off creatures. Random very powerful mutations. These creatures, because tyranid fleets don't carry whole creatures off planet, were simply reabsorbed, and parts of them became wargear or troop choices in later codexes.

Swarmlord, by comparison, is like a super hero being reborn "when he's needed most" or something. Its been seen as a specific entity on multiple separate planets and engagements. Which doesn't make any real sense with tyranid fluff.

The only way to reconcile it is and even then it touches the edges of making sense within given fluff.

mass is unimportant, increase in enthropy, that is decrease in energy in a usable form, through repeated enegry transfers is the problem.

Mass is the easy thing to get. Getting more carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, is easy. Getting the energy concentrated in the right way to have those atoms be in a useful form is the hard bit.

Yes. And Tyranids do this.

They also seek out genetic material, because they want more to assimilate into their genepool, which explains why they don't just go after rocky planets.

It's possible the Tyranids don't understand the concept of entropy or eventual heat death, so they don't care. They're just functioning off of a very high instinct.

They seek biomass because they want genetics and mass to convert into more Tyranids. They can get more energy from solar sources than they will ever need so aren't concerned about its expenditure.

they can harness pretty much all the energy they want from solar radiations and possibly from psychic reactions.

what they can't obtain by standing still is mass, that's the important bit.

like many other factions they are on the brink of energetic post-scarcity.

but that's not what they say in the fluff.
They don't do the nerg fluff of saying that they want new genetic material for more information, treating genes and biochems like technical information (Which btw humans do, it's why people gather rare organsims for science).
They talk about gathering lots of biomass as gathering raw physical material to build things with. But thats dumb, because the raw physical material comes from rocks.
Biomass is just the easier way of getting that energy into the rocks, but if you have to spend a shit load of energy taking out the defenders, you've lost that advantage.

But 40k, basically across the damn board, doesn't care bout the laws of thermodynamics. Nids are just one of the more obvious examples.

>but that's not what they say in the fluff.
an old piece of fluff supposedly says otherwise.

the predatory nature of the fleets has likely been developed from a time they didn't decide on it consciously but on instics and limited capabilities and stuck with it later because it still works well.

The mass is rocks.
Life makes biomass from combining solar radiation with rocks.
If they have all the energy from solar radiation they could need, then they have all the mass they could need from rocks.
But they never bother with the damn rocks.
And they also never bother talking about energy.

It's all biomass. 40k is laughing at science levels of soft scifi. Actual, it's just pure space fantasy. Tyranids are a clear example of this.

Biomass is magic life stuff used to make magic bioweapons. Just like psykics, the warp, Dark Eldar powering everything by pain, Orks doing things by thinking it's true, etc.
It fits the setting, because it's pure nonsense.

>But thats dumb, because the raw physical material comes from rocks.
I'm not a geologist, but I don't think rocks actually have that much carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, user, or at least not much of the last two.

But fine, let's just say it's another sci-fi writers not doing their research and move on.

rocks get made into soil. I used rocks not soil, because soil is created primarily form decomposed biomass.
You start with rocks and air, then you get soil later.

Even if I'd said soil and air, my point would stand, the matter used to make biomass exists on the planets. biomass is the result of using the solar energy combined with non-biological mater.

Biomass only matters as a matter of convinence and energy concentration. So if you expend a lot of energy getting biomass, that energy matters. It not just an issue of getting the biomass.

>But they never bother with the damn rocks.
they do, in the reports about the tyranids invasion there's a statement that they bring away large quantities of inorganic resources.

why would they go for lifeless worlds when they can invade ones full of life and get both easily accessible biomass, raw mass and genetic samples all in one interstellar voyage?

it's also worth noting that the fleets may go after life because it is easier to spot from large distances than gravitational pulls thanks to the psychic nature of it, maybe.

Then Chambers went to Blizzard and worked on SC2 story, helping develop an ancient evil entity as the ultimate opponent.

But if he had stayed on GW, who would have merged with the Phoenix Force to defeat the C'tan?

They do leech all of the useful minerals and elements out of the soil, though.

That was primarily Metzen who did the whole overarching SC2 plot, if I'm not mistaken.

That's because Oldcrons have absolutely zero personality with virtually no room for personalization or logical reasoning for differentiation between different sects/army styles.

Also, C'tan were too OP in the fluff, and directly competed with Warp/Psychic Gods (like every other god in the game) despite being something completely and totally different. They also somehow were responsible for Humanity becoming uplifted, which made like zero sense.

Warcraft 3, starcraft 2, same tihng.

I'm no geologist either, but think of this way, to start off with every planet is just a big ball of molten rock, all thats there is rock. Over time some of the rock goes solid, but its just a big chunk of rock, nothing else. Then through volcanic activity gases are released from the rock, and start forming an atmosphere, water condensates out of those gases, then through some bizarre coincidence carbon from the gases falls together into a way that makes life, evolution happens, and then you have a nice planet teaming with all sorts of organisms. But ultimately, it all came from the rock.

It's time like these I really miss the days GWs website wasn't just a glorified shop and had a variety of lore articles as well, I remember them having one that went into a lot of detail of what happened when the Nids were eating a world, they take literally everything from the surface down to the tough bedrock, and even sent specialised creatures burrowing through the crust so they could get at the useful minerals from the mantle.