Tyranid Adaption

How the fuck does it work? What exactly are the limits? and why do the tyranids still lose to factions that they've beaten and adapted to before? And how the fuck do tyranids counter shit like necrons and chaos, that aren't biological at all?

The ones who lose don't survive to adapt.

But really it's just a Xenomorph ripoff designed to help sell models.

Space Magic and hand waving. What the writer decides they ought to be. The ones that adapted didn't get into contact with the ones that lost or the race adapted faster. They don't, or with brute force.

>How the fuck does it work?

The Hive Mind can change the genetic blueprints of new Tyranids before they're spawned, considering how vast of an 'entity' it is and the amount of information it has on biological structure it's pretty trivial for it to change an existing bioform or create a new one to suit the situation.

>What exactly are the limits?

Don't know, we know that the Hive Mind can create entirely new forms based off of previously assimilated races, but it's never gone in-depth as to how adaptable it actually is.

> and why do the tyranids still lose to factions that they've beaten and adapted to before?

It's not plot armour, it's minor realistic adaptation, Tyranids that have fought Tau aren't immune to Tau weapons, their carapace is just slightly better at dealing with plasma and they're probably weaker but faster. Remember, adaptation isn't some magic thing where you can just adapt to fight every race at once, it's specialisation, and specialising too much is a military error in calculation.

>And how the fuck do tyranids counter shit like necrons and chaos, that aren't biological at all?

You don't need the opponent's genetic structure to adapt to them, it just helps. That being said Tyranids actually have a hard time adapting to Necron weapons and technology because it just screws with practical designs so hard due to being bullshit-tier, meanwhile it depends on what kind of Daemons/Chaos they're fighting (for example, they may start creating more smaller synapse creatures to strengthen the synapse web and Shadow, preventing the Daemons from abusing gaps and clashes as easily.)

READ THE CODEX
REEEEEEEEEEEE

Read books.
Tyranid have a warp shadow so strong chaos deamons just blink out of existance. near then. And chaos marines die as easily as normal marines

I think he was questioning how Tyranids would adapt providing the Chaos influence over local Warpspace is strong enough to actually sustain Daemons, which has happened before, the Shadow isn't an immediate immunity or 100% Warp-proof barrier, it just adds an additional obstacle in keeping the Daemons/psychic manifestations corporeal depending on the number and cohesiveness of the Tyranids as well as the thousand and one factors that determine Chaos influence.

>How the fuck does it work?
acquire and catalog genes based on phenotypic results of test broods, send into battle and analyse feedback
produce the better strains against their ideal targets using the memorised feedback
>What exactly are the limits?
plot
>and why do the tyranids still lose to factions that they've beaten and adapted to before?
before either the enemy changed, the situation changed, the adaptation was not actually relevant to the victory and/or plot
>And how the fuck do tyranids counter shit like necrons and chaos, that aren't biological at all?
the same kind of forced statistical selection above and behavioural adaptation like any other time

tyranids adaptation to an enemy doesn't come from collecting their genetic data, that's just to expand the possible mutations to experiment with.

The real question is why the tyranids have all those creature and even bother wasting time with war, when really all they need are those microscopic phage cells that break down biomass. Seriously, drop a few spores full of that shit on to a planet, watch as it virus bombs everything into a fine gruel, suck up the biomass, rinse and repeat.

No, read the 3rd and 4th ed Codices.

Don't read the new shit.

They do that, but they also release combat organisms to test them even if they don't need to in order to win, when invading undefended worlds and shit like that.

Thing is, when you invade a defended world, which has defenders behind force fielded Hive Cities and armies wearing hazmat gear, you need killing machines to take them on personally.

Throw Nids at it. If it doesn't work, tweak the Kids & do it again. Rinse, lather, repeat until successful.

Redundancy is the whole point. If the hivemind just dropped microscopic elements the inhabitants could focus on them and just find a way to neutralize them. Can't do that while you have to deal with more gaunts than you have ammo and your labs are being taken down by a carnifex.

Why do the Eldar still lose when they can see the future?

This
Its a galactic scale mind, with a hundred quintillion brains across a hundred quintillion bodies. It can process incredible amounts of information and reacts based off of what the enemy are doing. It can then genetically alter any new nids to be stronger or smaller or faster or more resistant to certain diseases or elements.

In fluff it can get pretty insane, being able to go from "dying in one pulse rifle shot" to "being able to take 3 hits before going down" which might not sound huge but that billion gaunts now requires triple the man power to kill

Because theyre often shown glimpses of the future or possible futures or self fulfilling prophecy futures, so its often hard to gauge how to react

>nigh immunity to pulse weapons

That's bullshit, I'm glad they retconned that into 2-3 shots vs 1. Near immunity to a whole weapon type for even your basic troops? If they did that shit with lasguns and attacked the imperium they'd be so fucked.

Personally I think shield of Baal is he best showing of tyranids adaptation, it feels more sensible than "lol we can become immune to your weapons"

It's bio-engineering, I ain't gotta explain shit.

Verisimilitude aside, the new version is somewhat more dull overall. They do the carapace upgrade initially, but after that it's just choosing different units from the army list.

>What exactly are the limits?
It can't be adaptable enough to threaten the Tau.

Source: Hive Fleet Gorgon

Actually, the adaptability of the Tyranids pretty much allowed them to cut through the Tau Empire until they reached Ke'lshan, though they still took a lot more casualties than they did in the older rendition of the fluff.

That being said, nothing is good enough to properly deal with Tau these days, 7E fluff has made them virtually flawless as a military with the best record besides Ultramarines, while also making them incredibly adaptable but really good at any specialisation, on top of constantly advancing. I fucking hate modern Tau fluff, by the way.

In order:
Space marines eat brains to steal memories.
Plot.
Each Hive Fleet adapts and evolves separately from the others; thus, while one fleet might be perfectly adapted to slaughtering orks, another might have no such adaptations and struggle against a sizeable WAAAGH. Fleets exchange adaptations and mutations when they meet, by attacking each other and allowing the winner to consume the loser.
Generally by avoiding them. Hive Fleets take avoid interacting with Warp Storms and pass over Tomb Worlds without attacking where possible, and gave the Outsider's Dyson Sphere a wiiiiiiide berth.

If the fleets are all part of one entity, why do they need to meet in order to exchange information? It doesn't make sense

Each fleet adapts to it's specific situation. In the event the two fleets meet, fighting allows the hive mind to determine which of those adaptive strategies is more efficient versus the other. The more efficient fleet wins, consumes the loser, and becomes more efficient with the growth in biomass and adaptation strategies available to it- it's a form of self selection for more efficient hive fleets.