Which is better: Zerg (StarCraft) vs Tyranids (Warhammer 40,000)

Which alien species do you prefer?

  • Tyranids are better

    Votes: 48 68.6%

  • Zerg are better

    Votes: 22 31.4%
  • Total voters
    70
Concerned Apostate

Concerned Apostate

The Perfidious Xanite
The Zerg have more room for character growth. Along with the main characters like Kerrigan and Abathur there's also multiple sapient strains like the Queen variations, Overlords and Overseers, Infested Terrans and formerly, Cerebrates (R.I.P). There's also the Primal Zerg but they're not everyone's cup of tea.

And I personally like how they're self sustainable. They don't run the risk of starvation if they don't expand.
They also look cooler.
 
Deadguy2001

Deadguy2001

Harvester of delusions
I felt like the Zerg were cooler up until Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. The Cerebrates, the Overmind, and Brood War Kerrigan were terrifying, amoral, and interesting characters with lots of room for narrative creativity. The Tyranids OTOH are just a faceless doom blob of death.

SC II Kerrigan turning the series into a shitty version of Twilight meets Dragon Ball Z killed my interest in the Zerg though.
 
Mr Sheldon

Mr Sheldon

I want to kill the lampreys
Nids all the way. All hail the Great Devourer, down with the pacifistic pussies who actually made peace with the dinner. The Hive Mind should never make peace with dinner. Dinner will make peace with itself before being consumed.
KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE FOR LIFE!

I also feel that the Tyranid’s design is much better with the biomechanical aspects. The only thing Zerg do better than Tyranid’s is FTL. But that just means they can run. They will never run far enough.
 
Wyzilla

Wyzilla

Grand Master
Zerg lost the ability to be an intimidating alien force when they gave a psychic woman a BDSM esque stripperific outfit and plastered her across their faction as their "Queen".

That and Genestealers are far more fucked up, disgusting, and disturbing than any of the Zerg biomorphs.



Probably the biggest weakness of the Nids is that, due to the tabletop, they are rarely presented as a horrifying looking faction like they are in Deathwing or some of the older art. They're shown in bright, cheerful color schemes with high contrast and intense lighting that kind of remove their appearance as a bug dinosaur with far too many teeth and beady little glowing eyes. Just compare and contrast the above pic with the close-to-tabletop appearance of Nids in DOW II.

 

Rookie12

Pariah
Tyranids had a lot of potential, but with recent changes about their character (that they now can hate, instead of being led by logic and hunger, they just want to settle grudges) they kind of starting to lost a lot of their flavor for me. Truly alien beings are always more interesting for me. As of now, I still like nids more, zerg were changed too much in StarCraft 2 for my taste.
 
Nano Soldier 2016

Nano Soldier 2016

The Anti-Cynic
RIP
I think the Zerg looks better, at least to me. There's just something about the purple, green and brown of the Zerg that appeals to meon some unknown level. I also think that the Zerg do the assimilation thing in a more interesting way than the Nids
 
Blackout

Blackout

Fed By Comments
I like the 'Nids for being actually alien and mysterious.

I personally really like how the lore leaves lots of things ambiguous about them. Where did they come from? How did they come about? Have they been to the Milky Way before? Why are they the way they are, eating everything and then moving on? What the fuck are they building in the Tiamet system? They dont just spell thngs out, they give you some hints here and there and let you draw your own conclusions.

And then there's the Hive Mind, which really lives up to the role of incomprehensible alien super-intelligence behind the Tyranids.

Compare and contrast this to the Zerg with their meticulously-laid out backstory of being a runaway Xel'Naga creation and the BDSM bug-lady in charge.

Sure, if that's your thing go for it, but I'll pick the Great Devourer any day of the week.
 
Mr Sheldon

Mr Sheldon

I want to kill the lampreys
Rookie12 said:
Tyranids had a lot of potential, but with recent changes about their character (that they now can hate, instead of being led by logic and hunger, they just want to settle grudges) they kind of starting to lost a lot of their flavor for me. Truly alien beings are always more interesting for me. As of now, I still like nids more, zerg were changed too much in StarCraft 2 for my taste.
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Waitaminut. They can hate now? They can... feel? This isn't right. Not right at all. Where did you get this information?
 
Blackout

Blackout

Fed By Comments
Mr Sheldon said:
I see.
*searches for a way to salvage the situation*
What kind of hate? The "you steal my food-TRIGGERED" rage or "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD HIVE MIND" rage?
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Across the central deeps of the Ultima Segmentum the Red Scar spread its sanguine pall. A stellar desert tinted bloody, hard and inimical to man. The suns imprisoned within its bounds were all red in colour, whether senescent supergiants or early sequence infants. Deadly radiation bathed this benighted subsector, rendering its worlds uninhabitable by any sane measure.

The Imperium had long passed the point of sanity.

Perhaps because of their situation, the planets of the Scar were rich in exotic resources, and so generations of humanity had lived out brief lives under baleful stars, toiling at the will of the High Lords of Terra. Sustained by elixirs manufactured on Satys, the inhabitants of the Cryptus, Vitria and other systems afflicted by the Scar’s poison lived a life, of sorts, in service of the species.

Against all the odds, by human ingenuity and for human greed, there had been billions of humans in the Red Scar region. So it might have been for generations more, but nothing is permanent and mankind no longer held sway.

The tyranids had come to the Scar, scouring every world they encountered down to the bedrock to feed an ancient and powerful hunger, extirpating humanity in the process.

The invader was Hive Fleet Leviathan, by Imperial designation, though the governing intelligence of the hive mind made no such distinctions between the component parts of its body. To its incomprehensibly vast intellect, Leviathan was a limb, a foot or an arm. If the hive mind regarded Leviathan as distinct from the other fleets devouring the galaxy in some way, it was by categories too alien for men to understand.

From across the cold gulfs of intergalactic space the hive fleets had come, moving from one feeding ground to the next. The hive mind did not know and did not care what its food called itself, but noted, in its alien way, the strangeness of this prey-cluster; an environment where the realities of the mind and form were intermingled. There was risk there, but good hunting in the dangerous shoals. The galaxy teemed with life, and the hive mind glutted itself on a staggering array of biological abundance.

From the human point of view, the tyrannic wars had raged for close to a half millennium. In that time, hundreds of Imperial worlds had been devoured. Several minor races had been consumed. Thousands of unknown planets outside the Imperium’s notice had been turned from living orbs to rocky spheres that would never bear life again. Had the High Lords of Terra known how devastating the tyranids truly were, they may have acted sooner.

Like the mythical plagues of locusts of Old Earth, the tyranids stripped everything they came across bare. With each feast the hive mind became stronger, absorbing the genetic profiles of everything it devoured and adding their strengths to its own. With every new creature eaten, its repertoire of genetic tricks grew. When it encountered a threat, it adapted. Its methods became more efficient, its fleets more numerous. Its creatures proliferated and multiplied, the essences of the galaxy’s worlds converted into yet more elements of the never-ending swarms. So overwhelming was the threat it posed, the race had been declared Periculo Summa Magna, and was deemed by many departments within the Imperium’s higher echelons as the most serious challenge to mankind’s continued existence.

They were wrong about that, but only by a little. These were dangerous years, well blessed with horrors.

Nevertheless, the hive mind did not advance unopposed. There were brave men and women, heroes all, who stood against it no matter that the odds were impossible, and death was their only reward.

Imperial losses were many. Victory was rare. At many junctures the Blood Angels Space Marines had defied Hive Fleet Leviathan, stealing away its food, and in some cases destroying its splinter fleets in their entirety. The hive mind responded to them as it did to other threats in the prey-cluster, creating new beasts to beat the defences of its prey, improving those it already possessed, and devising new strategies. All to no avail. Though pushed back, the red prey warriors fought on. At Cryptus the Blood Angels performed one last supreme effort, destroying a tendril of the greater whole, in truth a trivial victory at the cost of a rich system.

Nothing could halt Leviathan’s encroachment on the Red Scar. After Cryptus there was Baal, home world of the Blood Angels, lying directly in the swarm’s path.

This was not accidental.

The sages of the Imperium thought the hive mind a non-sentient intelligence. They believed the actions of the myriad creatures in its swarms were performed instinctively, and that the sheer numbers of interactions between them gave rise to complex behaviour. At the very highest level these behaviours were remarkable, but only had the semblance of thought. Ultimately instinct drove the hive fleets, they said, not free will. Similar false intelligences had been witnessed so very many times in social animals across space, after all, from the ants of ancient Earth to the thought-trees of Demarea. The hive mind’s actions could be ascribed to sentient consideration, but the sages insisted they were nothing of the sort. The biologans held the hive mind to be only a complicated animal, a supreme predator driven by a devastatingly powerful reactive mind, nevertheless devoid of soul. It was an automaton, they said. Unfeeling. It was as unaware of what it did as the wind is unaware of the cliff whose face it scours away, grain by grain. The hive mind was biological mechanics writ large. Mind from mindlessness.

The Imperial scholars were wrong.

The hive mind knew. The hive mind thought, it felt, it hated and it desired. Its emotions were unutterably alien, cocktails of feeling not even the subtle aeldari might decipher. Its emotions were oceans to the puddles of a man’s feelings. They were inconceivable to humanity, for they were too big to perceive.

The hive mind looked out of its innumerable eyes towards the dull red star of Baal. It apprehended that this was the hive of the warriors that had hurt it so grievously, who had burned its feeding grounds and scattered its fleets. It hated the red prey, and it coveted them. Tasting their exotic genomes it had seen potential for new and terrible war beasts.

And so it drew its plans, and it set in motion its trillion trillion bodies towards the consumption of the creatures in red metal, so that their secrets might be plundered, and reemployed in the sating of the hive mind’s endless hunger. This was deliberate, considered, and done in malice.

The hive mind was aware, and it desired vengeance.
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-Devastation of Baal
 
Jake Void

Jake Void

to be fair the new codex tyranids have a lot more for lack of a better Personalty, not so much as in they have characters but they are different in the sense, as they have interesting and different objectives to cripple the galaxy for the Hive Mind,

for example one of the new hive fleets Kronos is specifically designed to fight Chaos and ignores other species and worlds (They even got another victory at Shadow Brink).

Another hive fleet named Hydra targets other hive fleets to gain their unique genetics to add to it's own and seen as the next phase of the hive minds plans

While Hive Fleet Ouroboros is said to be first hive fleet to have attacked the imperium and dates back to lore from 4th edition

Tiamat is the most interesting one as they are not nomadic at all but stay around the Tiamat system and building some sort of bio superstructure that stretches across continents of unknown purpose.
 
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Mr Sheldon

Mr Sheldon

I want to kill the lampreys
Rookie12 said:
This is the most interesting part of the nids to me so far Hive Fleet Kronos
They sounds really cool.
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They're really the only Hive Fleet adapted for ranged combat. I believe the Tau would hate them for copying their schtick. Also, have the Daemons actually won any battles against any significantly large Hive Fleet? Say, significantly large as in big enough to not be counted as a splinter fleet.
Jake Void said:
to be fair the new codex tyranids have a lot more for lack of a better Personalty, no so much as in they have characters but they are different in the sense as they have interesting and different objectives to cripple the galaxy for the Hive Mind, for example one of the new hive fleets Kronos is specifically designed to fight Chaos and ignores other species and worlds (They even got another victory at Shadow Brink), another hive fleet named Hydra targets other hive fleets to gain their unique genetics to add to it's own and seen as the next phase of the hive minds plans, while Hive Fleet Ouroboros is said to be first hive fleet to have attacked the imperium and dates back to lore 4th edition, and Tiamat is the most interesting one as they are not nomadic at all but stay around the Tiamat system and building some sort of bio superstructure that stretches across continents of unknown purpose.
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I say they're building a living planet.
 
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