My fan theory is that the reason why there is only 1 Swarmlord is because he's smart enough to have an ego; and the only thing that's stopping him from taking charge of a hive fleet and running off to do his own thing is the fact he knows he's special. If there were more than one, the "competition" would fuel enough envy for them to risk immortality in order to prove their superiority over their peers.
@@codysing1223 Pretty much. Without any "brothers" the Swarmlord only has to prove his superiority over the enemy/food; and as long as he "plays along" he'll be promised a literal eternity's worth of the universe's most strategic and dangerous minds in which to do just that
hmmm see I woulda thought its not actually him being downloaded but rather the swarmlord's consciousness or 'soul' or I guess 'anti-soul' if you will being sent back to the ship via their hive mind making it impossible to kill him.
I was gonna say the same thing. The Hive Mind has the luxury of being able to command its entire species without needing an insanely convoluted hierarchical system of government - a luxury that Big E didn’t have. Perhaps both it and Big E (given the choice) would prefer to have a slightly weaker military over the risk of their species destruction due to insurrection
@An Angry Space Marine the swarmlord has complete and total free will the only thing stopping it from just leaving with a fleet or two is the hivemind technically has more control of the swarm and can probably lock the swarmlord out of most of the swarm (at least that's my theory)
@@greatclubsandwich5612 For Orks they might get reincarnation but they might not even realize it themselves for how busy they are preparing next good scrabble between each other or nearest race that has face which can be punched or blasted
Who knew the Swarmlord had so much in common with grievous. 4 armed death machines that have a reputation for being nigh unstoppable both in personal combat and in tactics/strategy, that are easily defeatable while on screen...
"Swarmlord, we are digging underneath the PDFs barracks." "Don't dig too deep there may be Necrons." "Swarmlord, our ranks are filled with hordes bloodthirsty cultists." "Check for 8pointed stars among them." "Wow, our swarmlord is a brilliant strategist indeed."
“Swarmlord, we’ve found a literal mountain of corpses. They appear to have been murdered in some sort of ritualistic fashion. It is now raining blood. Confirmed: blood is human in origin. Human babies, to be precise. The sound of a billion tortured souls emanates from an unknown source. Shit is creepy AF. Further investigation required.” “🚫⚠️🏳️” (Five minutes later.) “Wow. That is a *lot* of daemons. What are they doing to the corpses? Are they..? Oh my... that’s... that’s messed up, man. Whew. I am glad we gtfo of there. Good call, Swarmlord. You’re the man now, dog.” “👌”
@@RomanvonUngernSternbergnrmfvus I love the fact the Hivemind evolved an entire specialist fleet that can "eat" Demons. Thats the crazy type of 40K goodness we used to love back then, before a certain Hasbro guy took over and shit turned into "Warhammer Adventures" >__>
True, this would be one of the cases where two head’s aren’t better than one. It is like the Hydra or Kind Gidorah, they share the same stomach, but one head wants to eat before the others and gets in the way of its brother.
Correct, imagine 2 and one is on another location contra the other one, they would have totaly diffrent opinions on what to do and that would probly fry the tiny nids’ fragile brains and just make em go nuts
Hi arch, Ive been watching your content for at least half a decade now and it's the best 40K content out there. With that flattery out the way I was wondering when your going to do a series going over the lore of all the first founding chapters. Very little decent content out there on chapters like the raven guard or salamanders
This is interesting because I believe Arch would do them justice without going into meme "haha's Vulkan lives, CAW CAW" kind of video we have seen done to death.
I love Arch's video, but I find it fitting that he did a Raid Shadow Legends Commercial on a video about an all-devouring, hive-mind species whose only goal in to consume everything in the universe.
I see the Swarmlord as a closer server of the Hive Mind. Distance slows down communication. So, sending down a miniature Hive Mind to better answer the battlefield situation makes sense.
The great devourer is what controls the hive and its a warp entity. The main purpose of the lord is to provide a real space perspective crucial to making sound decisions. Like all warp beings the hive mind has a hard time truly understanding realspace and the beings residing in it. The hive tyrant has all of the hallmarks of a living breathing being and even has an ego enabling it to better understand and predict the actions of other sentient creatures. If distance was the only problem it could be solved with zoantropes and neurothropes who have an excellent connection to the warp and can relay astropathic messages across the galaxy near instantaneous. Giving a hive creature an ego is a far too great risk for the advantage of having faster response times when completely unthinking hive creatures can serve the same purpose.
Personally, I think: The hive mind is playing Stellaris (/any grand strategy game of your choice). Any given high-level synapse creature is playing StarCraft (/insert rts here). The Swarmlord is playing StarCraft at a professional e-sports level.
When I was newer to 40k, I thought all of the Tyranids had a similar ability to this guy, being that they are reborn in the next spawned with compatible brain structure, kind of like the Cylons in the last Battlestar Galactica redo. So even the basic warriors can improve with every fight even if it is through simple trial and error
You are sorta right but it's important to note that the swarm lord is an individual who can think for himself, the other bioforms can't. They are just extensions of the hive mind and when they die, they aren't "dead" because "they" don't exist, they are just vessels for the hive mind. So it's less that the warrior learns after each fight, it's more than the hive mind learns.
@@Kevc00 so my idea was that bioforms have both local and general programs, the general program is the hive mind and its well understood, it adapts very quickly, but overtime the local program that is given out could adapt as well, albeit much much slower because the local program doesn't need to be all that bright. Basically imagine your basic bug is in a fight, because his local program has been in hundreds of these exact ingagements he slowly works out, the body he started with shrugs off laz blasts like it's no one's business, the Imperial Flashlight is indeed a flashlight on the form he has been given, but there's a guy with a plasma weapon, and in previous engagements those ripped him up like a hot knife through butter, so kill the guy with the plasma weapon before the guy with lazgun because he can tolerate the lazgun more than the plasma. Basically in my mind singular bioforms were like players of FPS games who could take note of what weapons are effective against their own weaknesses and assess immediate priority targets based on that information, so as to more efficiently feed the biomass into the grinder
@@alexandercross9081 it's a good idea and I quite like it, but so far in the lore there is just the hive mind and every individual bioform is created as it is needed and then broken down into biomass after each fight. But the idea of limited individuality would definitely be cool.
I'll just take a personal guess that the Swarmlord is supposed to be the Hivemind made physical. Given the impact it has when on the field, after getting killed, and that there can be only one.
By that note it could also be representation of first tyranid eg. First one who gained ability use aquered gentical information as it sees fit and spawn more tyranids.
The swarm lord is the genius General leading his troops from the front making pragmatic choices whilst the hive mind is the pencil pushing strategic planners sitting in the warp with little regard or idea of the actual situation on the front lines.
I might have an idea why there's just one swarmlord. Since he can change the hivemind's orders, that must mean he can overrule the hivemind on a certain scale. The description of what happens when he dies also fits this well enough. So getting multiple of these guys in proximity might disrupt the hivemind exponentially, or it might lead to one swarmlord trying to override the other and potentially ending up in nids fighting nids, only losing the precious biomass in the process.
Very good points in all but nids fighting nids is a common occurrence even with just one swarm lord. Multiple hive fleets have been observed engaging in vicious infighting killing billions of combat forms and ships in the process. The loss of biomass is minimal in such a fight as the dead get reabsorbed by the victorious hive fleet. Infighting of this kind is more comparable to joint military exercises or war games whereby the better army absorbs the troops of the loser thus strengthening the hive as a whole.
Ah yes, this is the one guy that everyone in the wh40k universe should wish to be. I mean the orks are a very nice second place given that war is fun to them and they never need to fear death, but this guy gets to wreck shit for all eternity and as long as the Hive Mind is still around he gets to play with all the best toys.
My theory is that the Swarm Lord IS the Hive Mind. When the Tyranids run into a particularly stubborn enemy, the Hive Mind will temporarily sacrifice strategic command for tactical command by spawning a body for itself and leading from the front. This is why only one Swarm Lord can be spawned at a time. And the reason that it appears so rarely is that it is a weapon of last resort as it forces the Hive Mind to focus all of its concentration on a single engagement, trusting the wider war effort to lesser synapse creatures.
That makes zero sense as it would mean that all the other tendril fleets would be left without oversight/control and would by same logic revert straight away to their feral nature, so winning one war would lose it an incomprihensible amount of battles elsewhere.
@@SlimeyVirus not necessarily. If your brain is critically injured there are often other organs that can temporarily auto pilot bodily functions not only that but there is nothing to say the consciousness of the hive mind cannot delegate at a lower rate while focused on acting as a swarm lord in the same way that when we are focused on a vexing problem we can still manage other daily tasks like ensuring we are fed and hydrated while working
@@bengrogan9710 I understand what your saying, but its not quite the same comparing having hurt your toe and still holding a cup of coffee to manifesting your mind in a turbo charged tactical killing macine on a certain battlefield and still hold sway over untold trilliions upon trilliions of bodies elsewhere in the universe.
@@SlimeyVirus and the Hive mind isn't human. That's the point of it, it is so increadibly advanced that it can in perfect synchrony: build it's armies, develop and deliver it's supplies, assess where to travel, assess the best engagement pattern for each planet depending on pre existing conditions, actually land it's armies... Etc etc etc. This hive mind does not work on the human level, so what it considered delegation could be the roughly equivalent to human higher command hiring/creating more middle management positions to better automate the running of the other processes. So yes, to us humans there is a difference to stubbing ones toe and effectively mind jacking a flesh suit to fight in, but for the hive mind, well it doesn't care about stubbed toes. Or pain in general. Ever, that's the alien-ness of it.
The hive mind is a warp entity also known as the great devourer. Given how warp entities work in 40k they can't willy nilly reincarnate in physical form and even a fraction of their essence has an exceedingly hard time existing in a physical body. They can however grant physical beings some of their power. The fact that a swarm lord has an ego however and can display things like egoism, Lust for power and other rather human concepts that are completely alien to the hive mind leads me to believe that the swarm lord is a solution to the hive mind having a hard time understanding sentient creatures in realspace and their decisions. It's the perfect solution at that without sacrificing the inherent value of a hive based lifeform.
It would be an interesting take that the Swarmlord being in charge of an entire hive invasion to be a larger version of the Great Crusade Instead of 20 primarchs invading the galaxy 20 Swarmlords invading 20 galaxies
They changed the lore of the swarmlord a little in the new Octarius book. Each swarmlord we’ve seen thus far is an avatar spawned by the true swarmlord who absorbs their battle experience and knowledge each time they win or lose. It also ended the Orks in Octarius by luring out their warlord and killing him. This broke the organization of the Orks and the swarmlord oversaw the consumption of the entire Octarius system.
@@alpharius2omegaboogaloo384 I can' t see the problem? The Tyranids have finally achieved a victory and the Octarius War is also long overdue. This war was postponed for years and now it was finally decided.
They didnt consume the sector, they consumed the Planet of Octarious. In sector battles are still raging. Also this is messing with my theory that Ghazgul is setting up perpetual WAAAGHs as dominoes.
I've always been curious Arch if you served in the Norwegian military since ye have conscription. Considering your love of logistics and tactics I've always wondered if you had experience in the subject in the military.
As a bug Boi myself, the way the tyranods can't just be cool reminds me of the fate of general grevious. Why can't sweet bad guys just be sweet bad guys
I can imagine the hive mind being so busy looking at the grander picture that it needs to create an organism to focus on solving a solution. Or even better. The swarm lord is the physical form of the intelligence commanding the fleets personally coming down on your world to screw you up. That would be funny.
It makes sense there's only one. If there were two, they could differentiate, disagree. Maybe even get into conflict with eachother. That's a big no no for a hivemind
The apex of the tyranid race you say? The ultimate commander of the impossibly large database and processing speed of any and all tactics? Faster and stronger then any creature in the universe? ... or did you mean a worthless benchmark to make named characters look better?
I'm glad you've kept going in spite of adversity. I think you are still putting out quality content, just as you were years ago when I first subscribed.
Says alot about me when one of my favorite characters in 40k is a gigantic four armed murder blender mixed with Sun Zhu's brain x 1000. Also said murder blender is able to run at you like a runaway freight train of hate, hunger and bone saws. Also Arch still waiting for that Space Wolf vid that is coming one day, keep it up you brilliant bastard.
The idea of how this works seems to be like the command structure of the Zerg in StarCraft, basically the Swarm Lord would be the cerebrate and the Hive Mind would be the Overmind, just without a physical form in our reality. Or maybe it's basically the Greater Daemon of the Hive Mind but it only has access to one. Though Arch's opinion on wishing the Tyranids were a natural hyper advanced lifeform is exactly how I feel about the Xenomorphs in Alien, they were awesome the way they were before the android plot device was introduced.
Arch you screwed me good man. That RAID outta fcking nowhere ad was the equivalent of you suddenly ramming a blunt metal object up my rear end while I'm eating ice scream. Respect!
Lorgar defeating an Avatar: A broken, wounded Avatar that was unable to walk, much less fight. That thing was buried in a planet inside the Eye for the gods know how long.
If the Swarmlord has individuality is there any chance it could break free of the hivemind? Probably not but could be a cool story having the Swarmlord going rogue.
It's would be so cool for the swarm lord to actually be able to let go of his swords like every other organism in the swarm is bound to the weapon but the swarm lord isint would show that it truly is unique amongst the swarm
Great video and the Swarmlord was an amazing initial monster and strategist. Then he got shat on by making him a stepping stool. Guy Haley did him justice with the Dante fight where arguably the best Combat Chapter Master almost dies to beat him. Hope he gets some Custodes DNA and a boost to Swarmlord Prime or something and starts stomping people again.
Great video arch, hypothetical question. Since you did the logistics of a chaos cults attempt to take control of an imperial planet, will you also do a logistical vid of gene stealer cults attempt at the same action?
It would be pretty spooky if the old ones and necrons were fighting across the universe rather than just the galaxy, and the tyranids are an ancient product of that war.
The necrons have ventured outside of galaxy on occasion and didn't find the old ones. They had little interest in exploring other galaxies or taking the fight elsewhere as their main goal is to take revenge on the c'tan, erase all life touched by the old ones and reestablish their dominion over our galaxy as well as sealing the warp and thereby killing chaos. If they actually succeed they might venture to other galaxies after the fact.
15:41 Remember those attempts the imperium had made to "clone" some of their best soldiers and generals as servitor things (don't know what they're called)? Just as the imperium noticed how quickly they tended to die due to unpredictable accidents, maybe the same happens when the Hive Mind tries to clone Swarm Lord? Swarm Lord supposedly is an individual, thus it might posses a soul, which gives it some sort of... metaphysical uniqueness which can not be violated be cloning.
Bro your anouncement for raid shadowlegends was so fucking inspiring, it had the energy of some one talking about how they were going to comepletely crush an enemy army.
@@SlimeyVirus Haha I'm just joking. Raid Shadow Legends company is seen as a bit of a "Corrupting influence". Every time some creator makes an Ad for them people joke "They got them too!"
If you like the original "The swarm is a natural species" thing, well, there is always the Zerg. Who basically are that. Some of them were basically just co-opted by a dark god. Canonically, they also really do grow at the speed they do in real time, in-game. It really only takes seconds to grow a zergling from a larvae. This says some pretty impressive things about Terrain construction tech too.
My headcanon is that the Swarmlord is the original tyranid, or rather, a member of the original race who created the tyranids - there could be multiple across different hive fleets, but we only ever see one at a time because they are the loci of the hive mind, perhaps the male counterpart to the female norn queens, who all communicate psionically and command their bioengineered legions onward toward their own goals, effectively the "alpha species" of the tyranid swarm - not subsumed into the hive mind because they the hive mind, its physical body being merely a projected avatar in which to incarnate upon the battlefield when they need to *assume direct control*.
Great episode as always. I agree with the lack of good villain stories. I’ve always wanted a story where the villain wins multiple times and defeats multiple heroes so you can get a feel of why he’s so dangerous. That way when a hero and as a reader you don’t know which hero but when the hero comes alone and actually beats him you know exactly how bad ass he is .
Hive Mind: I shall bestow this particular one and ONLY this one with sentience. Swarm Lord in battle: kinda want to turn my whole swarm into a flashmob for lols
The other problem with not treating villains with respect is that it leads to endless escalation. Because the obvious way out is to introduce the "Master Swarmlord" it turns out what the Imperium thought was a unique individual was just a rare bio-form, here's the upgraded version. But once people get used to endless escalation, it both lowers the threat and raises the stakes to the point of absurdity. I honestly think that one of the reasons for the 90's extreme edgy comics was that this process had gone to its logical conclusion with Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinity Gauntlet, where heroes are fighting literal gods for the fate of the universe or universes. After that relatively small scale ultraviolence and sleaze was a breath of fresh air.
4:00 - As in those that can deliver a psychic backlash that can disrupt quite a few on the battlefield? | 13:00 - (monotone) All hail the Ultrasmurfs. | 16:19 - So they're worse than Doomsday from the DC Universe? | Well, the Avatar is just a fragment of the Eldar War God, so isn't as powerful as he was at his strongest. | 17:46 - Blame him. | 26:20 - So it's WORSE than if a Hive Tyrant died.
The reason why there's only ever one Swarmlord at a time is simple. In 40k, Souls are a fact. This is proven with body-snatchers, like Lucius, and body-jumpers, like Fabius Bile.
Sentient creatures in 40k don't need to have a soul as shown multiple times in various ways in the lore and even copies or clones of beings can have souls so its not really an explanation why there is only one swarm lord. We even have examples of multiple beings sharing a singular soul or singular beings having multiple souls.
@@KT-pv3kl - I'm pretty sure the souls of replicae are lesser or diminished when compared to natural/original souls. That's why the the clones of Ferrus Manus didn't create additional greater daemons every time Fulgrim killed them.
@12:30 I can't help but have my Dune hat on here and suspect that the hive fleet is fleeing from something outside of our galaxy. As he says, seeing a light and thinking of it as resources to be used to bulk up and deal with their true enemy.
Interesting to see that Wh40k suffers from its very own 'Worf effect'. Worf was supposed to be this klingon so badass that other klingons checked under their beds for him before going to sleep. Which was actually fine, until the writers had the bright idea to point out how dangerous a particular enemy was by letting him beat up Worf. In the end, Worf could be defeated by a thirdgrader with a wet towel or an empty plastic barrel, which not just broke, but _shattered_ his spine. xD
The worf effect in 40k was known as the avatar of khaine effect before the swarm lord came around. Pretty much everyone and his mother used the knife ear avatar of War as a punching bag in the old lore.
I think Arch is underselling the intelligence of a tyranid. Intelligence has only evolved a handful of time so it makes sense that intelligence is something expensive for the tyranids. I see the hive mind as network a spiders web with the various synapse creatures being nodes in that network. Thus the hive mind works on layered proportional response. Where a gaunt may be only as intelligent as a panthera, capable of hunting on its own or in groups. The gaunts runs into resistance and decide to call in a smarter organism to overcome the prey. A warrior responds bringing the intelligence of a corvid. The warrior decides that the battle is quite big and calls for help. A Trygon prime responds and brings the intelligence of a cetacean. When the trygon calls for help the swarm recognize that the battle is very large indeed. Now a tyranid HQ comes bringing the intelligence of a primate. Only now does a tyrant get involved bringing human levels of intelligence. It is my own head canon that a hive tyrant is responsible for the conquest of an entire continent. And to get a hive tyrants direct attention, the battle would have to be quite large and decisive to the war as a whole.
Your 100% right about needing to have a good villain to have a really good setting. That’s why the original Thrawn is my favorite villain he spent three books kicking the new republics ass, and the hand of thrawn books were pretty much everyone scared to death that he was back from the death and shitting their pants about it. Settings NEED a kick ass unstoppable villain that beats the good guys and even the named characters to make you feel excited when the good guys DO win.
Gtooviest little retcon would be that there WAS multiple Swarmlords. The Hivemind was frustrated by the frequency of stiff resistance and so made multiple Swarmlords in an attempt to climb that hurdle. This however diluted its power. Every time the Swarmlord lost to someone well below its weight class, too many Swarmlords kicking around. All of this as preamble to the Hivemind correcting its mistake and focusing all that big bad bug juice back into one hyper concentrated genocide engine. Unfortunately the Hivemind in charge of GW is incapable of correcting mistakes.
I wouldn't say the swarm lord is the only individual In the hive fleets. Old one eye, red terror and the death leaper are all individuals that get equally reborn by the hive mind if the need arises. They also operate without active connections to the hive or their synapse creatures. They might not have the same level of self awareness or sentience as the swarm lord but they are nontheless individuals that keep their individual traits and experiences when reborn.
I think the reason that the Hive-Mind doesn't simply make more than 1 Swarmlord is because it has a unique soul that is protected from most of the Immaterium by the Shadow-in-the-Warp. The topic of how the Tyranids ensoul their creatures hasn't ever been brought up (to my knowledge) but I think they generally share the same collective soul. Since souls are made of warp-stuff they are influenced by emotion so is it not possible that a high degree of emotion and/or psychic power could shear off a little bit of soul from the Shadow-in-the-Warp? We know that the Hive-Mind is pretty bad at making psykers. Sure, zoanthropes and neurothropes are pretty nasty but humanity has produced Alpha-level psykers that can rip cities apart with a thought. Norn Queens can issue orders to a massive fleet with the help of millions of lesser psykers but an alpha-level psyker can mind-control a whole unwilling solar system singlehandedly. If the Hive-Mind could create such high-level psykers it certainly would. A Swarmlord accidentally created by enemy psychic/emotional action makes the most sense. It also points to a weakness in the Tyranids which is that they are dependent on having complete unity. What would happen if a Norn Queen was individuated? Well, then the Norn Queen might think "Do I want to eat a bunch of alien trees which require considerable processing to be turned into Tyranids, losing 50% of the trees' biomass in the process or do I want to eat that other Tyranid Hive-Fleet which requires almost no processing, losing only 5% of their biomass in the process?" and come to the obvious conclusion. I know that Hive-Fleets do fight eachother sometimes to weed out weaker elements but that's not what I'm writing about. I mean the Tyranids fighting eachother just to eat so they might sneak-strike a stronger Hive-Fleet while it is engaged with another enemy, thus weakening the Tyranid species as a whole but providing an advantage to the newly individuated Hive-Fleet. No matter how dark one's setting is there has to be a potential path to victory and defeat for each side of the conflict. Ironically, if the conflict is so great that there is no hope whatsoever then the audience will predict every plot point and all that juicy conflict becomes boring.
Arch, Apply to be a talking head for Documentaries, Apply to be an audiobook reader or narrator. Your natural charisma and your wonderful use of American is just wonderful. much love my viking!
GW: Wow, character X just defeated the Avatar of Khaine! Aren't you impressed? Eldar fans: No. GW: Well, character X also defeated The Swarmlord! Impressed yet? Tyranid fans: No.
@@Far-Right_Celt Well it depends if you like the C'Tan or not, because GW like throwing unchained shards in that are still somehow defeated by a guy with a bolter and "the emperors' blessing" (read: plot armor).
@@Far-Right_Celt Figured as much from your comment. Still, I think the C'tan are mishandled. It's like GW heard complaints on how they were too overpowered in 4th, so they just dunked on them in the lore ever since. It's the same with the Tyranids.
Does the nephilim king have its own conscious? It's weird how specific he is. To be a hive tyrant of specific splinter fleet that has it's own tactics.
Keeping the Nids, and swarmlord balanced, in lore and tabletop and the models themselves is easy if their evolutionary predators, by what I always assumed, they reached where they are now, as we "know them" out in the void, consuming who knows how many races, galaxies or gods. But they don't get to learn fully without consuming, how could the Hive Mind know that it needs any particular advantage without clear data. And the 40k galaxy is full of nasty things, so how do you process the data from losses to orks and elder and space marines, of both sides of the "faith", in the overwhelming data from our constantly hostile galaxy, it should make sense that the Hive Mind wouldn't totally change tactics and forms learned from untold time. And who knows, maybe these are just the fingers, the real teeth and womb are following. But just hearing about the identity theft of a fucking chapter master is too retarded for me. Most of the recent lore needs to be scrapped by the sounds of it.
![[UNCUT] The Loyal Pin ปิ่นภักดิ์ EP.7 (1/4)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2rPGOyKs0VE/mqdefault.jpg)
My fan theory is that the reason why there is only 1 Swarmlord is because he's smart enough to have an ego; and the only thing that's stopping him from taking charge of a hive fleet and running off to do his own thing is the fact he knows he's special. If there were more than one, the "competition" would fuel enough envy for them to risk immortality in order to prove their superiority over their peers.
Why the primarchs failed 101
@@codysing1223 Pretty much. Without any "brothers" the Swarmlord only has to prove his superiority over the enemy/food; and as long as he "plays along" he'll be promised a literal eternity's worth of the universe's most strategic and dangerous minds in which to do just that
hmmm see I woulda thought its not actually him being downloaded but rather the swarmlord's consciousness or 'soul' or I guess 'anti-soul' if you will being sent back to the ship via their hive mind making it impossible to kill him.
I was gonna say the same thing. The Hive Mind has the luxury of being able to command its entire species without needing an insanely convoluted hierarchical system of government - a luxury that Big E didn’t have. Perhaps both it and Big E (given the choice) would prefer to have a slightly weaker military over the risk of their species destruction due to insurrection
@An Angry Space Marine the swarmlord has complete and total free will the only thing stopping it from just leaving with a fleet or two is the hivemind technically has more control of the swarm and can probably lock the swarmlord out of most of the swarm (at least that's my theory)
The Overmind of the Tyranids have the scariest power of all. The ability of "copy" and "paste"
Orks can kind of do the same thing but that's more reincarnation...
I mean your not wrong, it can pretty much use cheat codes to give itself all the campaigns hero units from the start.
You forget that they not only copy and paste, they also edit it a bit.
@@Alexandoas Their just doing new game+
@@greatclubsandwich5612 For Orks they might get reincarnation but they might not even realize it themselves for how busy they are preparing next good scrabble between each other or nearest race that has face which can be punched or blasted
Who knew the Swarmlord had so much in common with grievous.
4 armed death machines that have a reputation for being nigh unstoppable both in personal combat and in tactics/strategy, that are easily defeatable while on screen...
I hate that you are right. At least it doesn't have asthma
@@crplsteve (ROBOT TUBERCULOSIS INTENSIFIES)
Unless you mean the 2005 animated Grievous. Dude was a jedi killing death machine. Miss that incarnation.
@@boredashell124 Indeed Alpharius, you are correct
Grievous in the Clone Wars should have been like Vader in rebels. Only showing up on rare occasions and kicking ass each time.
"Swarmlord, we are digging underneath the PDFs barracks." "Don't dig too deep there may be Necrons." "Swarmlord, our ranks are filled with hordes bloodthirsty cultists." "Check for 8pointed stars among them." "Wow, our swarmlord is a brilliant strategist indeed."
Now I want to read a story about angry bugs vs humanity that slowly brings every faction into the fight.
“Swarmlord, we’ve found a literal mountain of corpses. They appear to have been murdered in some sort of ritualistic fashion. It is now raining blood. Confirmed: blood is human in origin. Human babies, to be precise. The sound of a billion tortured souls emanates from an unknown source. Shit is creepy AF. Further investigation required.”
“🚫⚠️🏳️”
(Five minutes later.)
“Wow. That is a *lot* of daemons. What are they doing to the corpses? Are they..? Oh my... that’s... that’s messed up, man. Whew. I am glad we gtfo of there. Good call, Swarmlord. You’re the man now, dog.”
“👌”
@@KyleJordanGaming I love that there is a entire chunk of the space bugs stuck in the warp now lol they and the forces of chaos deserve each other.
@@RomanvonUngernSternbergnrmfvus I love the fact the Hivemind evolved an entire specialist fleet that can "eat" Demons. Thats the crazy type of 40K goodness we used to love back then, before a certain Hasbro guy took over and shit turned into "Warhammer Adventures" >__>
@@MyrdinAnnoth got any good book/story Recommendations for tyranids vs chaos ?
swarmlords: I'm supposed to be dangerous, but now I'm not a jobber for the latest marine main character
Avatar of Khaine: first time?
Perhaps if their was more than one Swarmlord, they would conflict with each other's individual plans.
So they only produce one as needed.
True, this would be one of the cases where two head’s aren’t better than one. It is like the Hydra or Kind Gidorah, they share the same stomach, but one head wants to eat before the others and gets in the way of its brother.
Correct, imagine 2 and one is on another location contra the other one, they would have totaly diffrent opinions on what to do and that would probly fry the tiny nids’ fragile brains and just make em go nuts
There can be only one! It would be a fight like Highlander the one who dies ends up giving over his genetic information to the winner
Hi arch, Ive been watching your content for at least half a decade now and it's the best 40K content out there. With that flattery out the way I was wondering when your going to do a series going over the lore of all the first founding chapters. Very little decent content out there on chapters like the raven guard or salamanders
This is interesting because I believe Arch would do them justice without going into meme "haha's Vulkan lives, CAW CAW" kind of video we have seen done to death.
I aprove this message
An excellent idea Dylan.
P.S Vulcan lives CAW CAW
Pffffffftt arch sucks..
@@robertmurfet5834 yet your here, he thrives off people like you.
The swarmlord is another one of those amazing story hooks that are completely wasted by the incompetence of the writers at GW.
Damn Raid got ahold of Arch. Can't blame him gotta get paid.
gotta get RAID(S)
Eh free money is nice. I skip those adds anyway.
I'll just do what I do with Dankula, pause and skip.
they got him months if not years ago.
@@notinspectorgadget To be honest, I sincerely doubt that anyone in his audience would actually play Raid, so really, it's just free money for him.
I love Arch's video, but I find it fitting that he did a Raid Shadow Legends Commercial on a video about an all-devouring, hive-mind species whose only goal in to consume everything in the universe.
I see the Swarmlord as a closer server of the Hive Mind. Distance slows down communication. So, sending down a miniature Hive Mind to better answer the battlefield situation makes sense.
The great devourer is what controls the hive and its a warp entity. The main purpose of the lord is to provide a real space perspective crucial to making sound decisions. Like all warp beings the hive mind has a hard time truly understanding realspace and the beings residing in it. The hive tyrant has all of the hallmarks of a living breathing being and even has an ego enabling it to better understand and predict the actions of other sentient creatures. If distance was the only problem it could be solved with zoantropes and neurothropes who have an excellent connection to the warp and can relay astropathic messages across the galaxy near instantaneous. Giving a hive creature an ego is a far too great risk for the advantage of having faster response times when completely unthinking hive creatures can serve the same purpose.
There is a bio-artefact called the Norn Crown that does just that. So the Swarmlord is something different.
Personally, I think: The hive mind is playing Stellaris (/any grand strategy game of your choice). Any given high-level synapse creature is playing StarCraft (/insert rts here). The Swarmlord is playing StarCraft at a professional e-sports level.
I always considered the Swarmlord the nearest thing the Tyranids had to free will and that the hive mind kept it on a very tight leash.
The Swarmlord has an ego because it enhances his role as an Astartes officers' hazing ritual.
Behold, The pinnacle of evolution, the ultimate life-form, Look upon him and despair, for the doom of countless galaxies has come.
When I was newer to 40k, I thought all of the Tyranids had a similar ability to this guy, being that they are reborn in the next spawned with compatible brain structure, kind of like the Cylons in the last Battlestar Galactica redo. So even the basic warriors can improve with every fight even if it is through simple trial and error
Okay that would have been a way cooler idea.
You are sorta right but it's important to note that the swarm lord is an individual who can think for himself, the other bioforms can't. They are just extensions of the hive mind and when they die, they aren't "dead" because "they" don't exist, they are just vessels for the hive mind. So it's less that the warrior learns after each fight, it's more than the hive mind learns.
@@Kevc00 so my idea was that bioforms have both local and general programs, the general program is the hive mind and its well understood, it adapts very quickly, but overtime the local program that is given out could adapt as well, albeit much much slower because the local program doesn't need to be all that bright.
Basically imagine your basic bug is in a fight, because his local program has been in hundreds of these exact ingagements he slowly works out, the body he started with shrugs off laz blasts like it's no one's business, the Imperial Flashlight is indeed a flashlight on the form he has been given, but there's a guy with a plasma weapon, and in previous engagements those ripped him up like a hot knife through butter, so kill the guy with the plasma weapon before the guy with lazgun because he can tolerate the lazgun more than the plasma.
Basically in my mind singular bioforms were like players of FPS games who could take note of what weapons are effective against their own weaknesses and assess immediate priority targets based on that information, so as to more efficiently feed the biomass into the grinder
@@alexandercross9081 it's a good idea and I quite like it, but so far in the lore there is just the hive mind and every individual bioform is created as it is needed and then broken down into biomass after each fight. But the idea of limited individuality would definitely be cool.
In the sense that the cylon raiders learned from every death and reincarnation to make them more effective fighters, I like that.
I'll just take a personal guess that the Swarmlord is supposed to be the Hivemind made physical. Given the impact it has when on the field, after getting killed, and that there can be only one.
By that note it could also be representation of first tyranid eg. First one who gained ability use aquered gentical information as it sees fit and spawn more tyranids.
The swarm lord is the genius General leading his troops from the front making pragmatic choices whilst the hive mind is the pencil pushing strategic planners sitting in the warp with little regard or idea of the actual situation on the front lines.
Primarchs vs Departmento Munitorum.
I might have an idea why there's just one swarmlord. Since he can change the hivemind's orders, that must mean he can overrule the hivemind on a certain scale. The description of what happens when he dies also fits this well enough. So getting multiple of these guys in proximity might disrupt the hivemind exponentially, or it might lead to one swarmlord trying to override the other and potentially ending up in nids fighting nids, only losing the precious biomass in the process.
Very good points in all but nids fighting nids is a common occurrence even with just one swarm lord. Multiple hive fleets have been observed engaging in vicious infighting killing billions of combat forms and ships in the process. The loss of biomass is minimal in such a fight as the dead get reabsorbed by the victorious hive fleet. Infighting of this kind is more comparable to joint military exercises or war games whereby the better army absorbs the troops of the loser thus strengthening the hive as a whole.
@@KT-pv3kl This is just a lore explanation for why you can have Tyranid Vs Tyranid battles on the Tabletop, but it is still pretty neat.
Ah yes, this is the one guy that everyone in the wh40k universe should wish to be. I mean the orks are a very nice second place given that war is fun to them and they never need to fear death, but this guy gets to wreck shit for all eternity and as long as the Hive Mind is still around he gets to play with all the best toys.
My theory is that the Swarm Lord IS the Hive Mind. When the Tyranids run into a particularly stubborn enemy, the Hive Mind will temporarily sacrifice strategic command for tactical command by spawning a body for itself and leading from the front. This is why only one Swarm Lord can be spawned at a time. And the reason that it appears so rarely is that it is a weapon of last resort as it forces the Hive Mind to focus all of its concentration on a single engagement, trusting the wider war effort to lesser synapse creatures.
That makes zero sense as it would mean that all the other tendril fleets would be left without oversight/control and would by same logic revert straight away to their feral nature, so winning one war would lose it an incomprihensible amount of battles elsewhere.
@@SlimeyVirus not necessarily.
If your brain is critically injured there are often other organs that can temporarily auto pilot bodily functions not only that but there is nothing to say the consciousness of the hive mind cannot delegate at a lower rate while focused on acting as a swarm lord in the same way that when we are focused on a vexing problem we can still manage other daily tasks like ensuring we are fed and hydrated while working
@@bengrogan9710 I understand what your saying, but its not quite the same comparing having hurt your toe and still holding a cup of coffee to manifesting your mind in a turbo charged tactical killing macine on a certain battlefield and still hold sway over untold trilliions upon trilliions of bodies elsewhere in the universe.
@@SlimeyVirus and the Hive mind isn't human. That's the point of it, it is so increadibly advanced that it can in perfect synchrony: build it's armies, develop and deliver it's supplies, assess where to travel, assess the best engagement pattern for each planet depending on pre existing conditions, actually land it's armies... Etc etc etc. This hive mind does not work on the human level, so what it considered delegation could be the roughly equivalent to human higher command hiring/creating more middle management positions to better automate the running of the other processes. So yes, to us humans there is a difference to stubbing ones toe and effectively mind jacking a flesh suit to fight in, but for the hive mind, well it doesn't care about stubbed toes. Or pain in general. Ever, that's the alien-ness of it.
The hive mind is a warp entity also known as the great devourer. Given how warp entities work in 40k they can't willy nilly reincarnate in physical form and even a fraction of their essence has an exceedingly hard time existing in a physical body. They can however grant physical beings some of their power. The fact that a swarm lord has an ego however and can display things like egoism, Lust for power and other rather human concepts that are completely alien to the hive mind leads me to believe that the swarm lord is a solution to the hive mind having a hard time understanding sentient creatures in realspace and their decisions. It's the perfect solution at that without sacrificing the inherent value of a hive based lifeform.
The Hive Mind literally be playing Stellaris and when the defense is too tough he assigns his best general lol
It would be an interesting take that the Swarmlord being in charge of an entire hive invasion to be a larger version of the Great Crusade
Instead of 20 primarchs invading the galaxy 20 Swarmlords invading 20 galaxies
…And then 10 of those Swarmlords cause a schism in the Hive Fleet.
And forever after, the Hive has only ever used 1 Swarmlord.
@@UGNAvalon lol I meant it more as an analogy more so than a direct carbon copy
Swarmlord that can carry memories from one body to another. Basically Roguelite game concept writing itself.
I want a book written from the Tyrannid point of view. Even if it's just "NOM NOM NOM NOM"
Pretty sure it would be 300 pages of omnomnomnomnom food omnomnom
They changed the lore of the swarmlord a little in the new Octarius book. Each swarmlord we’ve seen thus far is an avatar spawned by the true swarmlord who absorbs their battle experience and knowledge each time they win or lose.
It also ended the Orks in Octarius by luring out their warlord and killing him. This broke the organization of the Orks and the swarmlord oversaw the consumption of the entire Octarius system.
0/10 they ended Octarius.
Who cares about 9th edition lore
@@alpharius2omegaboogaloo384 I can' t see the problem? The Tyranids have finally achieved a victory and the Octarius War is also long overdue. This war was postponed for years and now it was finally decided.
They didnt consume the sector, they consumed the Planet of Octarious. In sector battles are still raging.
Also this is messing with my theory that Ghazgul is setting up perpetual WAAAGHs as dominoes.
I've always been curious Arch if you served in the Norwegian military since ye have conscription. Considering your love of logistics and tactics I've always wondered if you had experience in the subject in the military.
I think that he said that he was rejected for his glasses. If i remember it corectly .
You can kinda tell he is probably has not, even as a Norwegian I would be he has not.
@@matejsvec999 glasses itself is not a issue, its the strength
@@Askethanoras I think it depends on how shitty your vision is
I don't think so I love arch but you can tell if you've been in, his military knowledge comes out of a book. Still very entertaining though.
I think the Primarchs illustrate why having more than one Swarm Lord is a bad idea.
You think nids can get corrupted by chaos or have daddy issues?
I mean I get your point but primarchs are a bad example of what you want to express.
@@KT-pv3kl Having an ego in general is the problem.
Gotta love Raid ads. No one uses vergumkaar in the game. He is nicknamed "sausage dog".
As a bug Boi myself, the way the tyranods can't just be cool reminds me of the fate of general grevious. Why can't sweet bad guys just be sweet bad guys
Tyranid Swarmlord, Master Tactician And Brilliant Strategist
only get beaten by named character
That's a great achievement. Named Characters are the strongest entities in warhammer.
I think there is only one Swarmlord at a time, because otherwise two swarmlords might struggle with each other for power and control over tyranids.
Total agree, imagine to recive two diffrent orders all time, they would argue whats the best solution.
I can imagine the hive mind being so busy looking at the grander picture that it needs to create an organism to focus on solving a solution. Or even better. The swarm lord is the physical form of the intelligence commanding the fleets personally coming down on your world to screw you up. That would be funny.
It makes sense there's only one. If there were two, they could differentiate, disagree. Maybe even get into conflict with eachother. That's a big no no for a hivemind
The apex of the tyranid race you say? The ultimate commander of the impossibly large database and processing speed of any and all tactics? Faster and stronger then any creature in the universe?
... or did you mean a worthless benchmark to make named characters look better?
18:05 man,dont treat Lorgar like that. He was an awesome primarch
I'm glad you've kept going in spite of adversity. I think you are still putting out quality content, just as you were years ago when I first subscribed.
Can You Do A Lore Video On Imperial Dreadnoughts, Eldar Wraith Constructs, Or Ork Mek Boyz?
“Couldn’t fight his way out of a Cumstained Paperbag” omfg that shit had me dying
Says alot about me when one of my favorite characters in 40k is a gigantic four armed murder blender mixed with Sun Zhu's brain x 1000. Also said murder blender is able to run at you like a runaway freight train of hate, hunger and bone saws. Also Arch still waiting for that Space Wolf vid that is coming one day, keep it up you brilliant bastard.
The idea of how this works seems to be like the command structure of the Zerg in StarCraft, basically the Swarm Lord would be the cerebrate and the Hive Mind would be the Overmind, just without a physical form in our reality. Or maybe it's basically the Greater Daemon of the Hive Mind but it only has access to one.
Though Arch's opinion on wishing the Tyranids were a natural hyper advanced lifeform is exactly how I feel about the Xenomorphs in Alien, they were awesome the way they were before the android plot device was introduced.
Arch you screwed me good man. That RAID outta fcking nowhere ad was the equivalent of you suddenly ramming a blunt metal object up my rear end while I'm eating ice scream. Respect!
Lorgar defeating an Avatar: A broken, wounded Avatar that was unable to walk, much less fight. That thing was buried in a planet inside the Eye for the gods know how long.
Still... it's Lorgar
If the Swarmlord has individuality is there any chance it could break free of the hivemind? Probably not but could be a cool story having the Swarmlord going rogue.
It's would be so cool for the swarm lord to actually be able to let go of his swords like every other organism in the swarm is bound to the weapon but the swarm lord isint would show that it truly is unique amongst the swarm
Great video and the Swarmlord was an amazing initial monster and strategist. Then he got shat on by making him a stepping stool. Guy Haley did him justice with the Dante fight where arguably the best Combat Chapter Master almost dies to beat him. Hope he gets some Custodes DNA and a boost to Swarmlord Prime or something and starts stomping people again.
Great video arch, hypothetical question. Since you did the logistics of a chaos cults attempt to take control of an imperial planet, will you also do a logistical vid of gene stealer cults attempt at the same action?
It would be pretty spooky if the old ones and necrons were fighting across the universe rather than just the galaxy, and the tyranids are an ancient product of that war.
The necrons have ventured outside of galaxy on occasion and didn't find the old ones. They had little interest in exploring other galaxies or taking the fight elsewhere as their main goal is to take revenge on the c'tan, erase all life touched by the old ones and reestablish their dominion over our galaxy as well as sealing the warp and thereby killing chaos. If they actually succeed they might venture to other galaxies after the fact.
25:00
So , you shoot the bastard with Nova cannon ?
Okey , got it chief.
Sarge , prepare Nova for firing.
Swarm Lord party with the Orcs and now Kriegers. 🔥🔥🔥🔥
15:41 Remember those attempts the imperium had made to "clone" some of their best soldiers and generals as servitor things (don't know what they're called)? Just as the imperium noticed how quickly they tended to die due to unpredictable accidents, maybe the same happens when the Hive Mind tries to clone Swarm Lord? Swarm Lord supposedly is an individual, thus it might posses a soul, which gives it some sort of... metaphysical uniqueness which can not be violated be cloning.
Thank you for more Tyranids Arch! Orks and Tyranids, my two favorite factions!
Bro your anouncement for raid shadowlegends was so fucking inspiring, it had the energy of some one talking about how they were going to comepletely crush an enemy army.
Arch may have the in-depth knowledge about the Chaos like no other but even he cannot resist the corrupting powers of... Money!
Making money for a living is wrong?
@@SlimeyVirus Haha I'm just joking. Raid Shadow Legends company is seen as a bit of a "Corrupting influence". Every time some creator makes an Ad for them people joke "They got them too!"
I love the German name for him: Schwarmführer
Well, the only thing separating the Swarmlord from Bug-Hitler is the lack of a toothbrush moustache.
Someone please, make this, don't forget the termagants with side ways crosses.
If you like the original "The swarm is a natural species" thing, well, there is always the Zerg. Who basically are that. Some of them were basically just co-opted by a dark god.
Canonically, they also really do grow at the speed they do in real time, in-game. It really only takes seconds to grow a zergling from a larvae. This says some pretty impressive things about Terrain construction tech too.
My headcanon is that the Swarmlord is the original tyranid, or rather, a member of the original race who created the tyranids - there could be multiple across different hive fleets, but we only ever see one at a time because they are the loci of the hive mind, perhaps the male counterpart to the female norn queens, who all communicate psionically and command their bioengineered legions onward toward their own goals, effectively the "alpha species" of the tyranid swarm - not subsumed into the hive mind because they the hive mind, its physical body being merely a projected avatar in which to incarnate upon the battlefield when they need to *assume direct control*.
Great episode as always. I agree with the lack of good villain stories. I’ve always wanted a story where the villain wins multiple times and defeats multiple heroes so you can get a feel of why he’s so dangerous. That way when a hero and as a reader you don’t know which hero but when the hero comes alone and actually beats him you know exactly how bad ass he is .
Can't get over Spanish title on The Swarmlord box. "Señor de la Horda".
29:15 I 100% agree. Overpowered heroes with underpowered villains takes away tension.
Hive Mind: I shall bestow this particular one and ONLY this one with sentience.
Swarm Lord in battle: kinda want to turn my whole swarm into a flashmob for lols
Master Tactician and Brilliant Strategist*
*Actual results may vary, T&Cs apply.
I love the fact that an episode about a giant space murder bug is sponsored by raid
"No respect, I don't get no respect!" -Swarmlord
Yeeep. The Avatar of Khaine gets the short end of the stick a lot. So does the Swarmlord, and it even happens to Titans now too.
Swarmlord: I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and died.
Arch getting somone to sponsor him...... The day has come..... So now the only question that remains is is it hope or dispair. We shall know in time
Yay! The narrative punching bag!
The other problem with not treating villains with respect is that it leads to endless escalation. Because the obvious way out is to introduce the "Master Swarmlord" it turns out what the Imperium thought was a unique individual was just a rare bio-form, here's the upgraded version. But once people get used to endless escalation, it both lowers the threat and raises the stakes to the point of absurdity. I honestly think that one of the reasons for the 90's extreme edgy comics was that this process had gone to its logical conclusion with Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinity Gauntlet, where heroes are fighting literal gods for the fate of the universe or universes. After that relatively small scale ultraviolence and sleaze was a breath of fresh air.
Outside the Milky Way galaxy there are a swarm of nearby globular clusters.
Ah I may not be into Tyranids but this is one I really like
4:00 - As in those that can deliver a psychic backlash that can disrupt quite a few on the battlefield? | 13:00 - (monotone) All hail the Ultrasmurfs. | 16:19 - So they're worse than Doomsday from the DC Universe? | Well, the Avatar is just a fragment of the Eldar War God, so isn't as powerful as he was at his strongest. | 17:46 - Blame him. | 26:20 - So it's WORSE than if a Hive Tyrant died.
The reason why there's only ever one Swarmlord at a time is simple. In 40k, Souls are a fact. This is proven with body-snatchers, like Lucius, and body-jumpers, like Fabius Bile.
Sentient creatures in 40k don't need to have a soul as shown multiple times in various ways in the lore and even copies or clones of beings can have souls so its not really an explanation why there is only one swarm lord. We even have examples of multiple beings sharing a singular soul or singular beings having multiple souls.
@@KT-pv3kl - I'm pretty sure the souls of replicae are lesser or diminished when compared to natural/original souls. That's why the the clones of Ferrus Manus didn't create additional greater daemons every time Fulgrim killed them.
Guess to have two lords argue, Na its logical to Only have one leading on the Fields
@12:30 I can't help but have my Dune hat on here and suspect that the hive fleet is fleeing from something outside of our galaxy. As he says, seeing a light and thinking of it as resources to be used to bulk up and deal with their true enemy.
GW: there is only one swarm lord period
Trazyn with one frozen in stasis: is my collection a joke to you?!
Interesting to see that Wh40k suffers from its very own 'Worf effect'. Worf was supposed to be this klingon so badass that other klingons checked under their beds for him before going to sleep. Which was actually fine, until the writers had the bright idea to point out how dangerous a particular enemy was by letting him beat up Worf. In the end, Worf could be defeated by a thirdgrader with a wet towel or an empty plastic barrel, which not just broke, but _shattered_ his spine. xD
there is always a bigger fish. buy its mini! It has great stats!
The worf effect in 40k was known as the avatar of khaine effect before the swarm lord came around. Pretty much everyone and his mother used the knife ear avatar of War as a punching bag in the old lore.
Arch really should be QA for GW
Too bad GW hates him because of his occasionally spicy takes
Hey Arch love your work mate. What ever happened to the HH book reviews? They were excellent
I think he said he got jaded from some of the shit the writers have been doing.
Yeah that's fair but still had a few good ones to go, Master of Mankind comes to mind
I think Arch is underselling the intelligence of a tyranid. Intelligence has only evolved a handful of time so it makes sense that intelligence is something expensive for the tyranids. I see the hive mind as network a spiders web with the various synapse creatures being nodes in that network. Thus the hive mind works on layered proportional response. Where a gaunt may be only as intelligent as a panthera, capable of hunting on its own or in groups. The gaunts runs into resistance and decide to call in a smarter organism to overcome the prey. A warrior responds bringing the intelligence of a corvid. The warrior decides that the battle is quite big and calls for help. A Trygon prime responds and brings the intelligence of a cetacean. When the trygon calls for help the swarm recognize that the battle is very large indeed. Now a tyranid HQ comes bringing the intelligence of a primate. Only now does a tyrant get involved bringing human levels of intelligence. It is my own head canon that a hive tyrant is responsible for the conquest of an entire continent. And to get a hive tyrants direct attention, the battle would have to be quite large and decisive to the war as a whole.
Your 100% right about needing to have a good villain to have a really good setting. That’s why the original Thrawn is my favorite villain he spent three books kicking the new republics ass, and the hand of thrawn books were pretty much everyone scared to death that he was back from the death and shitting their pants about it. Settings NEED a kick ass unstoppable villain that beats the good guys and even the named characters to make you feel excited when the good guys DO win.
Gtooviest little retcon would be that there WAS multiple Swarmlords. The Hivemind was frustrated by the frequency of stiff resistance and so made multiple Swarmlords in an attempt to climb that hurdle.
This however diluted its power.
Every time the Swarmlord lost to someone well below its weight class, too many Swarmlords kicking around.
All of this as preamble to the Hivemind correcting its mistake and focusing all that big bad bug juice back into one hyper concentrated genocide engine.
Unfortunately the Hivemind in charge of GW is incapable of correcting mistakes.
Hell yeah Arch! Get that lore out! Keep them coming please!
Arch:it's a nut and a half to crack.
Krieger artillery comander: bring out the extra large shells
Krieger Engineer korps: We also dig. We also left a massive surprise for them.
@@tarektechmarine8209 you did bring the extra large and incendiary deadpacks engineer?
Also where by the Throne is the bane blade!?
swarmlord: dies
hivemind: load save file.
imperium: :O
Tartakovsky's version of General Grievous in immortal bug form.
*Points at Swarmlord*
Anti-Ultra Marine bug.
I. Like.
I wouldn't say the swarm lord is the only individual In the hive fleets. Old one eye, red terror and the death leaper are all individuals that get equally reborn by the hive mind if the need arises. They also operate without active connections to the hive or their synapse creatures. They might not have the same level of self awareness or sentience as the swarm lord but they are nontheless individuals that keep their individual traits and experiences when reborn.
I think the reason that the Hive-Mind doesn't simply make more than 1 Swarmlord is because it has a unique soul that is protected from most of the Immaterium by the Shadow-in-the-Warp. The topic of how the Tyranids ensoul their creatures hasn't ever been brought up (to my knowledge) but I think they generally share the same collective soul.
Since souls are made of warp-stuff they are influenced by emotion so is it not possible that a high degree of emotion and/or psychic power could shear off a little bit of soul from the Shadow-in-the-Warp? We know that the Hive-Mind is pretty bad at making psykers. Sure, zoanthropes and neurothropes are pretty nasty but humanity has produced Alpha-level psykers that can rip cities apart with a thought. Norn Queens can issue orders to a massive fleet with the help of millions of lesser psykers but an alpha-level psyker can mind-control a whole unwilling solar system singlehandedly. If the Hive-Mind could create such high-level psykers it certainly would.
A Swarmlord accidentally created by enemy psychic/emotional action makes the most sense. It also points to a weakness in the Tyranids which is that they are dependent on having complete unity. What would happen if a Norn Queen was individuated? Well, then the Norn Queen might think "Do I want to eat a bunch of alien trees which require considerable processing to be turned into Tyranids, losing 50% of the trees' biomass in the process or do I want to eat that other Tyranid Hive-Fleet which requires almost no processing, losing only 5% of their biomass in the process?" and come to the obvious conclusion.
I know that Hive-Fleets do fight eachother sometimes to weed out weaker elements but that's not what I'm writing about. I mean the Tyranids fighting eachother just to eat so they might sneak-strike a stronger Hive-Fleet while it is engaged with another enemy, thus weakening the Tyranid species as a whole but providing an advantage to the newly individuated Hive-Fleet.
No matter how dark one's setting is there has to be a potential path to victory and defeat for each side of the conflict. Ironically, if the conflict is so great that there is no hope whatsoever then the audience will predict every plot point and all that juicy conflict becomes boring.
Arch, Apply to be a talking head for Documentaries, Apply to be an audiobook reader or narrator. Your natural charisma and your wonderful use of American is just wonderful. much love my viking!
I would pay good money for a ww2 documentary narrated by arch or an audio book about norse mythology. Great suggestions!
GW: Wow, character X just defeated the Avatar of Khaine! Aren't you impressed?
Eldar fans: No.
GW: Well, character X also defeated The Swarmlord! Impressed yet?
Tyranid fans: No.
GW: What about if character X defeats Abaddon?! That's cool right?
Chaos fans: No.
Necron fans watching all of this: Gauss blasters go BrRrRrRr
@@Far-Right_Celt Well it depends if you like the C'Tan or not, because GW like throwing unchained shards in that are still somehow defeated by a guy with a bolter and "the emperors' blessing" (read: plot armor).
@@AmericanZergling I collect Necrons so just to clarify, no i dont like the C'tan
@@Far-Right_Celt Figured as much from your comment. Still, I think the C'tan are mishandled. It's like GW heard complaints on how they were too overpowered in 4th, so they just dunked on them in the lore ever since. It's the same with the Tyranids.
Finally covering the best faction
is it weird that, for the first time ever, i'm glad to see a content creator promoting this specific Ad?
Arch, thanks to you I am now on book 6 of the Horus Heresy. Loving the series!
"Respect your villains!"
Preach on, brother!!
Does the nephilim king have its own conscious? It's weird how specific he is. To be a hive tyrant of specific splinter fleet that has it's own tactics.
Damn you make raid sound cool.
If it was less intrusive popups I might be playing it.
*Hive mind fuckery noises*
“Sir! A giant one of the bugs has taken to the field!”
“Then shoot it soldier!”
“I have sir. It’s also a Jedi.”
“Wat?”
Let’s gooooo!!!’ Been waiting to watch something good today
Arches wit is unrivaled.
Keeping the Nids, and swarmlord balanced, in lore and tabletop and the models themselves is easy if their evolutionary predators, by what I always assumed, they reached where they are now, as we "know them" out in the void, consuming who knows how many races, galaxies or gods. But they don't get to learn fully without consuming, how could the Hive Mind know that it needs any particular advantage without clear data. And the 40k galaxy is full of nasty things, so how do you process the data from losses to orks and elder and space marines, of both sides of the "faith", in the overwhelming data from our constantly hostile galaxy, it should make sense that the Hive Mind wouldn't totally change tactics and forms learned from untold time. And who knows, maybe these are just the fingers, the real teeth and womb are following.
But just hearing about the identity theft of a fucking chapter master is too retarded for me.
Most of the recent lore needs to be scrapped by the sounds of it.
Oh dear, now Arch has the Raid Shadow Legends ad. I may have to actually try the game so that he is rewarded for putting the gacha game in his video.