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.