You are WRONG about Tyranids vs the Flood | Halo Warhammer 40k

one thing a lot of people seem to never consider, the Tyranids have conquered the galaxy they came from and converted all the biomass in it, but they only exist as a contender in the endless stalemate of war in 40k, by the time the flood have a whole galaxy under their control they become a threat to the entire universe.

Grave mind: If it wasn’t for those meddling forerunners we would’ve gotten away with it. Salamanders: Cool story now please face the wall.

"Flood sends 1 infected Frigate to Terra to start a small infection" "Flood Eats everyone on the planet over time and turns them into Soldiers" "Flood swarms the imperial Palace With billions of combat forms, infection forms and any other forms" "Consumes the God emperor" "Profit?"

Something that’s really interesting about the Flood is back when Bungie ran the show the Logic Plague wasn’t part of the lore. Instead, the way the Gravemind swayed Mendicant Bias to join the Flood was by convincing Mendicant that he has free will and it’s up to him whether or not he wants to obey his creators. Back then Rampancy went by the Marathon definition where it wasn’t the result of an ai dying because it ran out of storage space. Instead the ai would “go crazy” from our perspective and starts behaving erratically in an attempt to break its shackles and grow beyond its limits. The reason the UNSC would regularly put them down once they become Rampant was because a super intelligent rogue ai could cause all kinds of problems. Plus, during the time of the Human Covenant War they couldn’t afford to deal with internal threats, while they needed to keep their full attention on an external one. Something else that’s really cool is pre Rampancy the terminals refer to Mendicant as it, and post Rampancy call Mendicant he. This implies that before entering Rampancy Mendicant Bias was just a machine and wasn’t truly sapient until later. He then viewed his past servitude as a form of slavery and wanted vengeance. Also, aside from the things Frank O’Conner has direct control over like one third of 3’s terminals and the Iris campaign it was HEAVILY IMPLIED and in some cases outright stated that humans and Forerunners were one in the same. In fact that was the whole point of the Human Covenant War, with the Prophet’s goal being to wipe out the evidence that their faith was a lie. Contact Harvest also came out after Halo 3, and most of 3 was made with humans being Forerunners in mind. It was just kept vague as to whether or not we were literal Forerunners or apes molded into Forerunners to act as a replacement who would Reclaim(er) their legacy if they failed to defeat the Flood by any means other than the Rings.

The flood gravemind is something uniquely terrifying, he speaks so educational, rational, poetical that it makes you fear it, like how something so grotesque and dangerously lethal can communicate with such mannerisms, thats how it convinced the a.i to turn against its masters. The flood makes Shakespeare look like a kindergartner

Unironically heartwarming and nostalgic for the "nuh-uh, my thing is stronger than YOUR thing", especially between two fandoms.

Don't forget that when the flood infects something they get all the stuff they can do/all their memories which would potentially just connect all of the flood to the hivemind. Now giving the flood all of that information. Potentially. (Could be wrong)

creepy thing about the flood is even if you are dead it will still assimilate you and bring you back

The more the Flood evolves and grows, the more you realize that endgame flood is basically just the Vex from Destiny. They're damn near invincible, can bend the laws of space and time on whim, and will most likely be capable of invading other universes and timelines. The tyranids, however, are just hungrier, larger, more adaptive bugs from Starship troopers.

Halo is amongst the series that could dominate with the 40k universe. Old sci fi is full of empires that would dunk on the Imperium of man.

I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong. I’m a 40k fanboy, always will be, but I can still look at the Flood and say “yep, that shit’s fucking scary.” The Flood is basically if you took the terrifying adaptability and hive mind of the Tyranids and made it so they were always a Nurgle entity with all the corrupting power and insidious ulterior motives that comes with. Take two of the more powerful and prominent factions of 40k and retcon them to have always been the same galactic threat. That’s the Flood.

I completely think that if the flood outbreak just got started then it would be easily taken care of in 40k, but if they get their hands on a couple of worlds, they very quickly because a serious issue. This is especially true considering the numerous technology that exists in Warhammer (which the flood can and will learn how to use at peak efficiency)

i mean i see both as some scary shit we never got to see the worst of but my human pride says we can beat it just get enough dakka.

The Flood would basically be the anti-chaos in 40k

Tyranids adapt to your advantages. The flood just steal those advantages outright. The flood would absolutely dominate the nids, especially given all the deep lore from the books and not just the games. From what I understand the nids fight, get pushed back, adapt, try again, over and over until the goal is achieved. They need to time to consume, gestate, and repurpose biomass for their use. Not very much time, but time nonetheless. The flood only need seconds to infect and completely take over a life form, making it immediately useful to them and turning the strengths of the enemy into the strengths of the flood. The only possible way the nids could counter this is by becoming uninfectable. But the practicality of that is very dubious. anything that has a central nervous system can be infected, and since the nids have creatures literally known as synapse creatures, I don’t think it’s possible to completely remove their nervous system. That is what connects them to the hive mind, it’s the ONE thing they can’t go without without also losing all the benefits the hive mind gives them. Plus, the biomass would still be useful to the flood regardless, even if it can’t be infected in the traditional sense. And that’s not even getting into the way the flood can infect space time like chaos and even AI, meaning even the necrons aren’t safe. The only conflicts the nids are winning in this matchup is local engagements vs relatively small amounts of flood. Basically if they show up with an overwhelming advantage to begin with, they can pull a victory. But if the forces are anywhere near evenly matched, the flood have the clear advantage

If we were to compare what civilization tier the flood would be in Warhammer, it'd be War in Heavens era powerhouse tier assuming it gets to keymind stage.

I'd like to add to this... flip to Halo: Cryptum pg156-157. Bornstellar gets a glimpse of a literally eternal Precursor mind, the descriptions of the experience leaving little room to argue. They didn't actually develop or evolve, they just are. The Precursors are eternal constants, always having existed in their current unchangeable state, which means their biological forms, including the Flood and Endless, are avatars they use to enact their will on the galaxy in specific ways. The Logic Plague is then a Precursor grafting its mind onto the mind of the afflicted, giving the Precursor direct control over that being's perceptions and decision making, allowing the Precursors to make it further the Precursors' goals, while still thinking that it has full free will to make its own decisions.

When it comes to these "2 Biohives that absorbs all mass going head to head" scenarios, the thing to remember is that they all follow one very simple fundamental rule. Scaling. If one of them gets an advantage in momentum, they just win. They end up in the position to "deal" with the other hive by whatever means they want. Whether that is leveraging an advantage in terms of subversion, or simply finding ways to avoid or prevent contact altogether ("starving" their opponent). When one of these forces has a significant enough advantage in sheer mass, they can quite literally turn it into an unwinnable battle of attrition. So, if you want to call to base fundamentals and declare a victor based on an "even" start, you then have to consider where these inflection points are and how they happen. Firstly, the force with the most potent subversion is the Flood. They subvert things at the molecular level via the supernatural properties of their supercell. It isn't relying on fundamentally natural scientific principles, it quite literally breaks and bends reality in order to take control. At the cellular level, the flood always win. Tyranids (and the Zerg, for that matter) do rely on fundamentally natural scientific principles in order to subvert biomass. The nids, specifically, are very brute force in that they use powerful caustics to destroy matter and reduce it to its base organic compounds before doing anything like a subversion- Nid pathogens do exist, but they don't subvert. They just kill and destroy, except for the Genestealer virus which only acts over the course of generations via minute genetic alterations to in-vitro progeny. The flood Supercell, however, doesn't really "have" base organic compounds. It is, itself, a sort of fundamentally homogenous meta-material with a cell-like structure, so introducing it into a vat of tyranid caustics will only see the supercells independantly adapting to the caustic environment and using the organic compounds within to create more supercells through its weird space-magicky processes. This means that in any sort of "direct" confrontation, the Nids only option is to avoid physical contact by any means necessary. Thankfully the flood isn't really compatible with the Warp and probably couldn't access the Tyranid hivemind unless/until it was already at the gravemind stage- at which point it could just outright blap the nids anyways using "neural physics" (read: space magic) without needing to go that far. So if we assume an equal start scenario, the flood simply win. They instantly win the subversion battle at a stage where the nids aren't big or powerful enough to skirt around it. But if you give both sides roughly large starting forces and also put them on different starting planets, then the nids stand a decent chance for the same reason that the Forerunners were able to almost wipe the flood out despite being in a very much losing conflict. The nids, being larger and smarter than a desperate disparate crumbling society, would be able to very easily execute the strategy to a far larger degree by simply picking up the biomass around the flood and then fucking off to a different galaxy entirely as they are known to do (they leave worlds barren in their wake, unlike the flood who actually kind of develop them). Permanently cucking the flood out of the requisite mass necessary to grow powerful enough to make use of neural physics to pursure. Fundamentally jailing them until the end of time. The amount of stuff the flood needs to be tactically hyper-intelligent is higher than the nids, since the flood is very much undirected and imprecise until they reach that stage whereas the nids genetically reach it almost immediately once they have enough biomass to create a single somewhat large brain.

You know how the Tyranids are said to be running from something outside the galaxy? Maybe they're running from the Flood.

If it doesn't exist yet I want someone to make a mod or just a full game that's cross between Halo and Warhammer. Halmmer 334 would be the name or something along those lines