How would Warhammer 40K change if the Flood appeared. Which faction, other than the necrons...

Nurgle corrupts them and reigns victorius.

I've got no dog in this fight, but one of the points about MC is that he wasn't the biggest, baddest Spartan.

He was just insanely lucky, far beyond belief.

The flood were confined to a couple of planets, there was a weapon specifically designed to defeat them, and the MC is literal Jesus, if you take Halo 4 and the novelizations to account.

His luck is just the meta explanation for why the player has him succeed even where he shouldn't.

Literally no one would even notice. "Oh, a monster that consumes all biomass on a planet and turns it into more relays for the hivemind, while warping the laws of physics by its very presence.Must be Tuesday."

One that also absorbs the knowledge of those it assimilates and can operate technology better than its owners

...

so fucking tyranids then?

>How would Warhammer 40K change if the Flood appeared.

Nothing would change.

In 'grim drik melenium of fourty kay' its called business as usual.

Not a halo fanboy and I'm really just familiar with 1 and 2, so I don't know how post jump the shark powerful the flood are.

But they look like a less scary copy of the nids

At their height, the Flood got scary powerful. They were able to manipulate space-time without the presence of a space-time force like the Warp. The only reason that the Flood lost is because their food source, all life in the galaxy, was eredicated from existence which was later re-seeded by robots. The Flood is more scary than Nids, because the Flood was able to destroy a nigh-omnipotent super-civilization while the Nids can't even destroy the Imperium

Give them time. The Nids have only had a few centuries with their exploratory fleets. The Flood had millennia with massive forces.

Can I get some feats on the Flood? I only played up until 3

You realize that the imperium is only dealing with the little toe of the nid body and that the bids have already cleaned out an entire galaxy, right?

Short version:

The flood are scary, but there were extenuating circumstances that meant that the forerunners were greatly weakened when they showed up.

Spoilerific version:

The forerunners were forced to wipe out the technologically advanced and war-like interstellar human empire at great cost to themselves, and the flood appeared while they were in this weakened state. So, in truth, as scary as the flood are, they didn't fight the forerunners at their best

They had access to neural physics, which basically made time and space their plaything.
They had the logic plague, that allowed them to control both organic life and synthetic AI's withins seconds.
At their height, the Flood devoured a planet every 3 seconds, and this is using outdated math, the number is faster, but I can't find the new result.
Eventually, the Flood created entire planets made out of biomass that served as gigantic computers to even further their spread.
The only reason that the Flood were confined to the Milkey Way Galaxy was that it wanted to destroy the Forerunners before spreading beyond. But then the Forerunners commited Omnicide and wiped out the Flood before then
The Forerunners shitstomped the Humans because the Humans were also fighting the Flood. The Flood then appeared almost immediatly after they had devolved the humans.

The first game alone established that 1) the Forerunners were hideously advanced, to the point of being able to fairly easily exterminate all intelligent life in the galaxy with some sort of targeted supertech pulse, 2) the Flood beat the Forerunners so decisively that the Forerunners felt that racial suicide and multiple genocide was the best remaining option, and 3) the Flood themselves are depicted as wimpy space zombies.

Greg Bear likes writing sci-fi about civilizations that have gone beyond sufficiently advanced, so the Forerunners were inflated beyond even the extremely impressive capabilities already established in canon.

the halo writers had to come up with a way for these invincible space gods to be defeated by the Flood.

Power inflation that would earn the approval of the hypothetical lovechild of Dragonball and the Star Wars EU ensued.

leaving us with the bullshit tiers of power we have now.

Flood abilities as of now include but are not limited to: generating matter, blocking forrunner ships from usin ftl by "corrupting physics", "neural physics" and "star roads."

Well, the Flood were created by the Gods to strike down their children that had in turn struck down the gods. It is kind of hard to not have power creep
And not to mention that the Forerunners were wanked so hard, the Flood had to be wanked even harder

Also, the Flood are only wimpy space zombies because they are, literally, as weak as possible in Halo 1. They inflate HUGE, by the time Halo 2 comes along

Bear absolutely wrote the Forerunners in a way that we hadn't seen up until that point. Forerunners prior to Bear were engineers who built superstructures and made a doomsday plot device. At the end of the day anyone who reads the Bear novels and then plays the games is going to wonder how exactly the mighty prometheans/sentinels/etcs are being gunned down en masse by a dude with an assault rifle.

This has been a problem from the first game, but Halo 4 and 5 made it massively worse because suddenly we got to see Forerunner soldiers in action and they sure as hell weren't what Bear's novels say they are.
when it comes to what they actually use in the Halo games that most people are familiar with, you end up with energy shotguns and teleporting soldiers who are challenging but not nigh unbeatable for a generic sci-fi army.

This is exactly the problem. You can warble about how prometheans (and Didact) aren't "real" forerunner soldiers, but that's a dodge. Soldiers the forerunners used against the flood are easily defeated by a man with an assault rifle and power armor.

When I read Bear's descriptions of War Sphinxes and the like being able to ruin continents, when I read damn near everything in the Forerunner trilogy, every time I try to imagine that, my mind goes back to the prometheans in Halo 4 and I think "golly, that sure would've been handy for Didact to have." Sentinels might not be forerunner "soldiers", but the forerunners must have been extreme and utter retards to put the future prevention of flood outbreaks in the hands of drones that can be easily defeated by some dude with an assault rifle when they supposedly had technology so massively superior like the war spinx.

There are two versions of halo, the version that depicts mary sue humans with a manifest destiny where they and HFY everything.

And the version of halo that is depicted in the forrunner books.

The Sentinals were provably built for containment early in the infection. A group of infection forms can do jack shit against a flying drone with lazer beams. To your point about the prometheans, you aren't going to have your 1 supersoldier PC fight against hordes of exponentially better supersoldiers

Also, you can't argue using the point of how they are represented in game, as I am sure 40k strength in fluff is massively different to how they play in tabletop.

Actually the chief seems to be more powerful in the books due to cortana and reflexes a player could never have.
Also other stuff

Using the first version of power armor, The master chief was able to dodge individual machinegun bullets and slap a missile out of the way.

The Flood appear, become another threat to the Imperium, are narrowly defeated and go out to terrorize the galaxy.

Buy the Flood codex today!

Tiberium appears, become another threat to the Imperium, is narrowly defeated and goes out to terrorize the galaxy.

Buy the Tiberium codex today!

bump

So this is an important question. Is it just normal gravemind flood? Or are we talking awakened precursor flood? Because if it the awakened flood noone in the universe stands a chance... Unless someone has a halo ring.

It probably should be a gravemind flood. However, once the Flood grew enough, in a couple months at absolute "best", it would snowball into the power to destroy any enemy in its surroundings. It wouldn't have as many cheats such as the Star roads, but the flood would improve over every other faction.

bump

They wouldn't even put a dent in the setting. We already have a friendly neighborhood biomass monster. The Tyranids put the Flood to shame. And the Flood are beaten by a pathetically weaker version of humanity with some help from elites. The covenant and UNSC combined are probably on par with Tau.

If the 'Nids could pick up Necron weapons and start piloting their Monoliths better than actual Necrons, sure.

Have you read the thread? Flood make the 'Nids look like puppies.

Only time they lost was when they had literally every source of food removed. Modern Flood aren't actually beaten, a single Infection Form was enough to throw an entire UNSC Frigate into distress mode.

They actually "lost" a second time when they zerg rushed the Ark by sending literally every active Flood form to prevent the galaxy from being wiped from all life. The Ark then exploded, effectively sacrificng themselves for the rest of the galaxy.

>The Ark exploded
It actually didn't, only the Installation 03 replacement was destroyed. The Ark is still very much there, seeing as how it's where Halo Wars 2 takes place. It's still quite possible for dormant flood there to awaken and begin stretching their limbs again, especially with food nearby.

The Flood in the game are very different from the Flood in the books. That much has been said. However, if we take the Flood from the game and compare them to the 'Nids, I honestly think that the 'Nids would win, considering they have more biomass than the goddamn galaxy.

Precursor Flood could very well blow 40k out. Post Forerunner-Flood War not so much

ah, but the question is, how fast can the tyranaids adapt to the flood spores, and how fast can the flood out adapt the 'nids

I didn't pay attention to Halo Wars 2 so I had just assumed the Ark exploded as well
Cold War 3

On one hand, the 'Nids could change DNA strands quickly enough to not get fucked instantly, but on the other the only time I can remember the Flood being unable to infect something was Johnson, who had a metric ton of his DNA fucked up after using an entire crate of Plasma Grenades with a lot of good luck.

He had a fucked up nervous system after being a part of the pre-precursor to the SpartanII Project. The flood were unable to adapt to this as they couldn't connect to his nerves, but this would have killed him very soon as having a fucked up nervous system can only do bad things to your body. That is why I think that the nids are the only faction besides Chaos(as the energy that makes up demons is not biomass) that stands up to the Flood as the Nids could do something very similar. However, the technological edge that the flood has might balence this out

Squats

Here is how a usual Flood infection plays out:

A flood infected ship approaches a planet. It has all of the memories and intelligence of the people it absorbed prior tot his, and it has hijacked their bodies, so it can effortlessly fake any code or handshake protocol that anyone it infected knew. On top of that, all of the biomass on the ship is currently in the form of a giant unified biocomputer, which is strong enough to brute-force hack an AI. So the Flood ship stands a good chance of getting through defenses without firing a shot, and just as good a chance of assuming direct control of any automated planetary defenses that exist.

Once on the planet, the Flood begin to spread. Corrupting local organic matter, and using that organic matter to interface with electronic systems with the goal of assuming control of the planets data networks and infrastructure. It uses those data networks to identify organic populations, isolate them, and cripple their ability to fight back. Before it has taken full control of the area it landed in, it is already stuffing vehicles and airships with infected to send them to other parts of the planet to create new infection hotspots. By this point global communications have already been brought down and large scale coordinated military defense by the organics is all but impossible. Sources of especially strong military defense are destroyed from long range using hacked orbital defenses or any other military technology the Flood has taken over by this point.

Within 48 hours, military and civilian ships start taking off from the planet full of infected matter to spread the infection to other worlds while the remaining flood organisms finish up with this one. Each of those Flood ships is more intelligent than the one that first landed on that world, having learned from the entire infected population during this latest pandemic. Their smartest scientists, their most brilliant strategists, etc.

Repeat.

This is, by the way, part of why the Fore runners got so rekt by the Flood: they had super-AI and trusted it to do a lot. So losing control of their AI and data networks was incredibly fucking crippling. Half their own weapons were shooting at them instead of at the Flood.

There's a reason the Flood and the Culture are pretty much no-go subjects on the Stardestroyer.net forums, especially when you pit them against each other. The Flood's and the Culture's endgame powers are so ill-defined as to essentially be "It's magic bitches, we don't gotta explain shit" and it devolves into an argument over whether Gridfire could take out Star Roads or the logic plague could do anything to Minds.

The problem with giving the Flood star roads is that those were cinstructs in the Halo Universe. They would not have them in 40k

*constructs

If it required the Flood to get direct physical access to whatever machine the Flood wanted to corrupt, then how would they be able to do that to the Necrons before being atomized by mass-gauss flayer spam? This is even further complicated seeing how Necrons can phase out and return to their tombs.
Plus, the only thing worthwhile for them to corrupt would be lords or overlords because the other Necrons can't think for themselves. I doubt a lord is just going to sit by and let a Gravemind extend it's tendrils into his head.

I was mistaken and later the AI's needed only access to infected individuals. As in, like, talking distance

And took only seconds

>taking Halo 4 and beyond into account

I don't like Halo 4, I was just saying they say that the whole story of the MC was predestined and some shit by hypnosis and other subtle manipulations for decades to make Halo 4 unfold.

>an entire galaxy
>singular

> the version that depicts mary sue humans with a manifest destiny where they and HFY everything.
This, this is what pisses me off so much - Halo's degeneration from the outstanding classic HFY ("We're massively outgunned and/or outnumbered, but by god we're bloodyminded enough to make them bleed!") in the early games and related novels - Contact Harvest being my personal favourite - to nu-HFY ("YEAH BUT WE HAVE REVERSE ENGINEERING AND ENDURANCE HUNTING SO WE CAN TAKE DOWN LITERAL GODS") in 343's games. Seriously, it triggers me beyond belief. And I don't even play it that much. And I enjoyed Wars.
Underrated

That's what I hate most about the mind-boggling inflation of the power levels involved the Flood-Forerunner War - it obligated that the first trilogy was an entirely predetermined metagambit by an ancient gene magician that planned for LITERALLY EVERYTHING and thus takes the narrative out of the hands of the cast retroactively.

"Ancient superciv" worked better for Halo when the Forerunner were genuinely extinct, preserving a sense of scale and mystery. Shit's a lot less entertaining when you have practical gods running around past and present narrating the story.

>he doesn't like killing literal gods and demons with a rocket launcher
How have you survived the fps genre?

I am ashamed that I thought Halo 4 was okay when it came out. The last good Halo game was Reach
No, you kill them in quicktime events

Nurgle has the biggest erection since that time he played Metroid Fusion. Khorne would cry as he's dethroned as top god. His anger will increase. Slaanesh would see Nurgle's erection & spend the rest of his/her/it's days envying Isha. The envy & blueballs will be a sensation like nothing else. Tzneech would initially think it's according to plan, only to realize that he buggered himself over & will need to plan his way out. Probably happy.

>nu-HFY

>Cortana gets blown up
Five minutes later
>JK I downloaded myself to the Forerunner Internet and now I am Digital Jesus come back to lead my people to the Holy Land of Eternal Technoopression lmao
They really have been pushing it to the limit

Actually, pre-Halo 4 Forerunners included Onyx Sentinels who learn from fighting Spartans & who can combine to blow up Covenant ships far larger. It's also been said that just about all Covenant technology minus Brutes is one way or another watered down Forerunner tech.

>from outstanding classic HFY
I hadn't realised it until now, but it definitely was. Come to think of it, probably the best implementation of HFY I'd ever seen (or at least the one with the fewest tumours).

Now I just feel sad. Someone hold me.

At least 343 is starting to add the old art style into Halo again.

Didn't Cortana specifically say in Halo 3 that destroying the 03 replacement ring while it was still within the Arc would in turn destroy the Arc?

Having it still be there in Halo Wars 2 would completely undermine the ending of three. And make no fucking sense since the Gravemind's bizarre tech-powers should have allowed it to reopen the portal between the Arc and Earth or just warp back again using another ship.

It wouldn't change at all, newfag.
There is already heaps of shit like this, even worse.
Learn your fluff and stop trying to trigger autistic people with your gay halo shit.

>inquisitorial erection at the thought of galactic exterminatus weapons

Havin a new enemy that is kinda similar to tyranids but works very differently arrive in a space previously devoid of tyranids would not change anything at all? Good to know

Except no, because neither of you (nor the rest of this thread) seem to fucking understand the two factions beyond "fuckhuge biological swarm".

Nids' schtick (at least in theory) is their adaptability. Whatever you kill one wave with, the next'll be hardened against - and if you're still able to handle everything, they'll grow themselves a CINC and out-keikaku you.

The Flood, on the other hand, have a boner for corruption - they're most infamous as INFECTION forms, after all. Genestealers have fucking weak game compared to something that can even corrupt AIs to their will; and since their infection and combat forms don't physically adapt so well, they're quicker to throw biomass into a central "brain", which usually retains the knowledge of the forms already infected.

tl;dr: nids will skullfuck you and anything you try and fight them with; flood will mindfuck you then use the mush to grow a new brain to outsmart your allies

Forerunners after Bear were space gods with continent-wrecking power armor. Now you can argue that this is legit and that Bear was just writing the Forerunners in the way Bungie would have if not constrained to an FPS format styled after Aliens, but at the end of the day anyone who reads the Bear novels and then plays the games is going to wonder how exactly the mighty prometheans/sentinels/etcs are being gunned down en masse by a dude with an assault rifle.

If the Sentinels even aproached the levels of Stronk described in the books, they would have turned Master Chief into an ash smear in a seconds.

>There is already heaps of shit like this, even worse.

Objectivly wrong.

Please stop reminding me of that turd

The Flood are basically slightly less dangerous 'Nids.

So not much would change. Maybe more women would play with the addition of a another female-friendly army.

>3) the Flood themselves are depicted as wimpy space zombies.

The Flood are only as powerful as the civilisation they're destroying (since they take all their mass and hijack their tech).

Crons can teleport back to their tombs when critically damaged, and they don't bring non-Necron shit with them, or you'd be able to take out tombs by subduing an immortal, strapping a cyclonic torpedo to it and then shooting it's legs off.

Flood would infest the Cron, it'd register as disabled, it's living metal components would phase out and the parasite would be left flopping on the ground as useless biomass.

Coupled with the Cron's weapons working via molecular disintegration, their weaponry would be extremely effective against the parasite in a way the Forerunner's directed energy weaponry wasn't. Dispersing energy with extreme efficiency doesn't help when you're being ripped apart at an atomic level.

Scarabs would also be a hard counter to infection forms, which are the principle way Flood multiply, coupled with the fact most tomb worlds are dead worlds with little biomass, the Flood would land and rapidly lose biomass, being unable to even recycle their dead due to it being turned into free-floating atoms.

Plus an Immortal won't freak out just because an infection form has latched onto his face, he'll just keep shooting until disabled/crush it with his robo-grip.

tl;dr Milky Way would be fine, the Necrons have got this.

Problem is that the flood have a good track record of being able to infest AI-like systems and turn them to their side using a program known as the "logic plague".

>the forerunners maneged to lose and they were "vastly" more powerful then anything in 40k

Pretty sure they did have a map that can delete stars.

They needed to physically capture the Monitor to do that though. Necrons would phase out if captured long before they could be infested/turned in the same way Medicant Bias was.

Necrons aren't AI either, they still have emotions, so it's arguable whether trying to induce rampancy via a bunch of logic-loops and hard truths would even work when they're still biological enough in their thought processes to just shrug and go 'meh' when they don't understand something.

In 40k this will be pretty problematic. Due to all military space vessels having astropaths, navigators and possibly other psykers. Knowing codes and everything else is not enough.

And Flood trying to get psyker powers will probably lead to Chaos !!!FUN!!!

The Promethians an anti-Flood countermeasure & not the flesh & blood forerunners. Just look at some of their weapons. They disintegrate, that Incineration cannon would work wonders against carrier forms, etc. Even the Sentinel Beams are good for little more than killng Flood gameplay wise. The Didact is the only forerunner Chief fought & Chief got his ass kicked by him just about every encounter.

The onyx sentinels are special kinds made for special locations. The average sentinel doesn't need to be half as strong because of their duties & enemies faced. Besides, don't you remember all the humans = Reclaimer bullshit?

If an exterminatus had tities & asses. is it heresy to get an erection from it?

>so the Forerunners were inflated beyond even the extremely impressive capabilities already established in canon
The old lore had the Forerunners construct the Halo Rings in even LESS time than the current lore does. They could shit Death Stars hourly.

> Knowing codes and everything else is not enough
Going by novels, it will usually be enough
>Necrons aren't AI either
Right, but they do have and utilise AIs (master tomb control programs, for example, one of which went rogue, formatted necrons it was keeping and stuff

Here's how it plays out in 40k;

A flood infected ship approaches a planet. It has all of the memories and intelligence of the people it absorbed prior tot his, and it has hijacked their bodies, so it can effortlessly fake any code or handshake protocol that anyone it infected knew. This doesn't matter, because the astropaths on the planet's spacedock have been screaming in terror for the past three days about the arrival of the tortured psychic-amalgamation of the ship's crew and gibbering that the abomination must be destroyed.

System defence vessels launch building-sized torpedos at the infected vessel and atomise in on the edge of the system. The event is logged as contact with a vessel that had potentially suffered some sort of catastrophic Gellar field failure during warp-transit, and filed into the system administrator's databanks for future study. An Administratum serf coming to the end of his 29 hour shift, distracted by thoughts of what he'll do during his six alotted hours of free time before his next shift begins, accidentally files the report into a document of corpse-starch ration wastage for the local PDF.

There it remains for 600 years until the planet is razed by a passing Ork Waaagh! and the Adminstratum datastacks are smashed up and incorporated into an enormous dung-sculpture of Gork...or possible Mork.

See

As well the Flood wouldn't really gain much just by successfully infesting Warriors or Immortals (if they can even do that). Warriors are basically robots and Immortals are incapable of thinking of anything else besides war. If the Flood were able to corrupt a Necron Warrior it'd just be gunned down by its brethren.

Because of this, the only worthwhile target for the Flood to actually corrupt would be at least a Necron Lord, but there's multiple problems with that. For one, they aren't just AI, they still have a true consciousness. Simply giving them logical paradoxes won't phase them. Secondly, Necron Lords are incredibly hard to fight. The Flood would first have to get through all the Lord's forces then have to physically restrain the Lord himself. Then, thirdly, the Necrons can phase out and teleport back to their tombs. If the Flood are capable to actually infest the Lord he'll be teleported back to the tomb, leaving all the infesting Flood behind.

To be honest the Necrons seem like the perfect things capable to fight the Flood. They are basically what the Didact wanted to make to counter them.

>Having a map that can delete stars
>When you can have a ring world that can delete life
Are you even trying, m80

Samus is pure m8

Call me when Flood have biotitans.

Or can consume 100% of a planet's biomass. Pretty sure they're limited to things with a sufficiently complex nervous system, hence why the Halo array only kills complex, multicellular life and didn't just sterilise the galaxy.

Pure sex.

Genetically she has enough bird magic & flying jellyfish DNA to have downy feather pubes. I wouldn't be surprised if she ever got the urge to facehug until they lose consciousness.

>This doesn't matter, because the astropaths on the planet's spacedock have been screaming in terror for the past three days about the arrival of the tortured psychic-amalgamation of the ship's crew and gibbering that the abomination must be destroyed.
>
>System defence vessels launch building-sized torpedos at the infected vessel and atomise in on the edge of the system.

This is all implying that

>all planets with populations in the billions have an array of competent astropaths
>all planets with populations in the billions have sophisticated defense platforms, or that naval vessels can be redirected in time
>that the ship is not powerful enough to shrug off such attacks
>that the ship is not fast enough to crash into the surface before such attacks can destroy it
>that the ship isn't attacking the tau

All in all, flood's still got a decent chance.

>bio-titans
>implying ground warfare matters compared to nuking from orbit

oh and of course
>that the planetary governors of all planets are competent enough to heed the warnings of the astropaths.