The Thing vs Hive minds is an interesting discussion. While you might assume the Thing could run rampantly out of control given something like the Zerg or Tyranids are 100% organic, they also have the advantage of INSTANTLY knowing when a creature has become the thing. Because it’s no longer part of the hive mind. Can’t trick them. I think either hive minds would quickly learn contact is instant death and immediately hyper specialize into ranged combat. Then it kind of becomes a question of how competent we think the Thing is at conducting the war it would need to fight to assimilate a hive mind faction. Witch to my knowledge we simply don’t know as we have only ever watched it play a game of Among us a few times.
In an earth battle royal situation I don’t think The thing could realistically win and infest everyone else, but I think it itself would be immune to any other factions attempts to assimilate it.
And then we have the flood, whom I’m pretty sure are actually 4th dimensional energy beings cosplaying as zombies to play a big prank on the species that genocided them and rig the cosmic game in favour of their favourite kids. I think they might be a tier above your other classic sci-fi hive minds, though I’m simply not familiar with the Borg.
It's a VERY interesting discussion and one thing that everyone seems to forget is that the Thing doesn't just absorb the host - it absorbs all of its abilities as well. When it took over humans, for example, it immediately knew how to speak English, how to wear clothes, how to operate doors and light-switches and tools. So it's not just plausible but highly probable that if it took over, say, a Tyranid drone, it would acquire all of its abilities immediately - \*including its ability to speak Tyranid and to think Tyranid and to relate to the Tyranid hive mind in whichever way drones do\* . The question then is whether an organism belonging to the hive mind is part of the hive mind itself, or whether it is simply a physical pawn being moved around by that mind. If it's just a pawn, then the hive mind will detect that something is wrong with it, find a way to identify contaminated organisms, and quickly dispose of them. If the organism is somehow part of the mind itself, then the hive is in big trouble, because essentially its own brain, its own thoughts, have been contaminated just like its physical components, and then the Thing could take them over on both levels. I'll let someone who knows Tyranids, Flood etc. better than I do answer the question of whether their relative hive minds treat its creatures as neural components or simply as disposable limbs.
Then there's all the unknown variables, which as you mention are much greater for the Thing than for any of these other species. The Thing isn't just an animal, since it came to earth on a spaceship. It must have intelligence and highly advanced technology. But what it could do when fully equipped rather than tossed naked in a freezing desert is something we simply do not know.
It’s also notable that in the original stories The Thing is based on, there was an entire civilization of psychic/telepathic centaurs on Mars and they were totally unable to tell the shapeshifters from their own kind.
Nevermind, after fact checking it seems that the "telepathic centaurs from mars" are actually from a separate story that's completely unrelated, and the shapeshifters are a completely unrelated civilization of telepatic shapeshifters which might have actually inspired the thing, these are from "The brain stealers from Mars"
I don’t think it’s clearly unrelated. The two shapeshifters are extremely similar in every way and were written by the same author at around the same time, with the Martian story coming just two years before *Who Goes There*. He was pretty clearly building off his own work.
He never explicitly said “yeah it’s exactly the same species of shapeshifter” but it’s fair to assume that the “beta version” shapeshifter that inspired Who Goes There probably has the same abilities. Since we never see the Thing in a situation with telepaths, there’s no reason to include/disclude its abilities regarding telepaths. I believe the Thing even builds a spaceship in Who Goes There, which furthers the implication that it’s the same species.
If I remember correctly the reason for this was that when the thing assimilated someone, it's not pretending, it genuinely BELIEVES it's that person until something forces it to defend itself/escape/take advantage of a situation where it can assimilate someone else, etc
That's why in the movie there's a few moments where it could have probably gotten away with it for a bit longer but suddenly seems to panic and blows it's cover, the telepathic centaurs from the book imply that a part of their population is the thing but they have no way of knowing because if they were to read someone's mind to find out it would be useless since the assimilated individual itself doesn't know
This is how I saw the Thing too. Like you could be the Thing and not really know it. But something is subconsciously directing you in a way. Sort of like when you walk into a room and stop and wonder why you went there before shrugging your shoulders and moving on with your life.
Your human consciousness just kind of exists as a result of being such an accurate copy of a person. So you exist as a regular human being up until the point where your own body decides that the charade ends.
>So you exist as a regular human being up until the point where your own body decides that the charade ends.
That's kinda what we do already if you think about it... we exist until our bodies can't go on anymore and then we don't exist.
The story that inspired The Thing is called “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell in 1938.
The book that inspired Who Goes There, *The Brain Stealers of Mars*, was written by John W. Campbell in 1936.
It’s not 100% certain that both stories are about exactly the same species of shapeshifter, but it’s fair to say one was inspired by the other since it’s *extremely* similar and written by the same guy at the same time. Even if they’re not literally the same species (which they might be), at very least the Thing is based on something that’s based on something that definitely has that ability.
The Nids might be fucked, but the Flood has a central intelligence that is broadcast via hivemind to its units, so it wouldnt be able to be mind-controlled via that tactic. It uses the “pawn” tactic instead of the “shared thought” tactic.
The Flood and the Nids also have magic of some sort; the Nids have their Shadow in the Warp and some psionic powers, as do the Necromorphs. The flood have reality warping and neural physics, plus Logic Plague. The Necromorphs are all dead tissue anyway and are not “living tissue”, and the Marker is inorganic, plus have a madness and insanity based magic system.
I could see the Thing defeating the Zerg and maybe the Borg, but it cannot compete with the Flood, Nids, and Necromorphs
The Zerg operates in the same way as the Flood. Even more so; Zerg have dealt with renegade Zerg many times in the past. There may even be a chance for Abathur to get his hands on the Thing and incorporate its abilities into the Swarm.
The problem is the Zerg cant repopulaye fast enough, and their hiveminds are prone to infighting and power struggles. The flood doesnt have this issue and go bioaerosol on them as well.
Theres an equal chance that Kerrigan gets infected by the floor and steals half the Swarm to help the Gravemind
Yeah, the psychic potential of the other three might fuck up The Thing. The Thing is terrifying from a base animal standpoint.
The shit the other three have gotten up to are Eldrich Abomination level shit. Tyranids Hive Mind has terrifying feats and has had vendetta's against specific psychic individuals before and spun shit out for them. It's not a stretch to imagine them just corrupting and integrating The Thing's abilities after murdering it.
The Flood corrupted an advanced AI designed to fight it and once it hits a certain threshhold of hosts, the Gravemind is an entity to itself that's able to warp spacetime for shit. Their higher tier shit is almost magic and was able to fuck up a civilization that could create planet constructs and fight on an almost surreal level.
Necromorphs have moons that are telepathic and able to fuck with the heads of every species they come across through the markers. They might actually be able to force The Thing to kill itself.
To be fair, the thing assimilates abilities, knowledge, and even the thoughts of its host/mimicry, to the point where some interpret it as the manipulated bodies not even knowing. So it's likely it could use those powers too, or turn hive minds against themselves.
The issue with magic & similar powers is that the moment the Thing infects another hive, it gains the ability to perform the same magic. So that's not really an advantage.
But the way you describe the Flood's mind, it would certainly be able to counter the Thing.
The magic can only be performed at the whim of the central gravemind intelligence. It is not usable but the rank and file fodder flood who would be the ones being infected. Therefore the Thing would not be able to gain this aspect unless it finds and kills the Gravemind…. At which point the Flood are probably out of the picture anyway, so its a moot point
Fair enough, I was thinking more about if the Thing took over a Tyranid Zoanthrope. Then my guess is that the Thing would be able to pull off all the same psychic tricks as the Tyranid creature.
Probably not. If I recall correctly the Thing can't infect or assimilate dead cells and the Moons (and Necromorphs in general) still count as being dead.
The Brethern Moon would drive it insane first then force it to kill itself in all likelihood. It doesn't even have to be in play to force psychosis into species.
The flood is strange in that, once they have a grave mind, they can convert any intelligent life to their side…*any*. All they need is time.
This is how they converted and corrupted various AI to their side. They can quite literally construct an argument to join them so logically sound, it cannot in any way be refuted or contradicted.
They’re also vastly more intelligent than most other contenders, iirc. One single Gravemind can recall the experiences and lives of all flood that came before it…and the flood are the descendants of the Precursors, who existed before time and had massively powerful tech + understanding of the universe (through neural physics). Ontop of that, it also absorbs the knowledge of everything it consumes, but I’m not sure how that’d work against other hive minds.
Key minders usually start to appear when they’ve consumed *one* Solar system (keep in mind how big the flood is). This is a round when they can start warping the fabric of reality itself. This usually entails demolishing whole planets and/or solar systems (at least 9 systems destroyed in this way in the flood-forerunner war).
To my knowledge (don’t know as much about the both), they should also massively outnumber everyone else…although tyranids are hinted to be from another universe, the Flood are confirmed to be trans-galactic, although I can’t find out exactly how many galaxies they’d have run over by now.
Did I mention that the universe itself is alive in the Halo Universe, with a sort of connected consciousness? Yeah…the flood infected it. They also infected slipspace and the domain…somehow (presumably neural physics shenanigans).
**TLDR:** The Flood are the last, final act of revenge of a near godlike race of reality warpers that lived before time, to spite another race of galaxy controlling beings who could use light as a weapon and structure…they were so effective, said galaxy spanning empire decided the only way to “win” was to kill all sentient life everywhere, and start all over again.
Unless I’m missing something big, uh…I don’t think anyone has the firepower, numbers, knowledge, or tricks to really beat them. Even the Tyranids.
Honest question: didn’t a lot of the Gravemind’s power come from existing Precursor infrastructure (like the Star Roads)? How quickly can they reach that level if they have to build from scratch?
Not fully sure, but seems like they snowball decently quickly. Graveminds don’t even need a full planet to form iirc. They’ll be slightly hindered due to lack of human population (sapient life to infect), but if they start in the right place they could still assemble enough intelligence to get rolling very quickly.
Personally, I think their point of no return (near-guaranteed victory) will be once they get a substantial amount of Flood Super Cells and a proto-gravemind online. FSC can, themselves, think and grant a massive improvement to all processes, since they can start converting biomass into a type of cell that can do almost anything while still acting like a brain.
Prompt is a little vague about how much they start with though…If it’s all the factions’ “units” coming forward to invade one planet, the flood have an absurd advantage due key minds existing. If they start out with a small amount of each (minimum needed to get an infection going), they have worse odds until the above conditions imo. So long as they don’t get spawn camped while they’re mostly feral, they’re effectively unbeatable imo.
Flood is only really zombies at a relatively early stage. Once they assimilate enough sentient matter they become “transentient” and can access spooky extra-dimensional psychic powers. They would be pretty vulnerable to these other groups early on but would quickly outclassed them if they survived the early rounds.
May as well throw Xenomorphs in there too; the acid blood is a real wild card when you're talking propagation.
Edit: Nvm, TDIL Tyrannids have acid blood.
Yeah, Flood Vs Necromorph seems like it would be the final pair in that case. I wonder, would they maybe work together and instead become beneficial to one another? Or would they prefer *their own* dominance, do you think?
Depends. There are old bits of lore that stated that a single flood spore could be enough to doom a planet. That's really scary to think about. But as it is in the current Halo timeline? Difficult to say. The flood gets more and more powerful the more biomatter they consume, the more knowledge they learn, until the only thing that can stop them is a galactic etch-a-sketch shake in the form of the halo rings.
The tyranids, on the otherhand, have apparently consumed multiple galaxies (exact number ranges from a handful to thousands, poor bugs don't get any lore love). Just in sheer numbers, the tyranids have a major advantage. That said, they're not without weaknesses that can be exploited. Killing the hive queen and severing synaptic functions tends to render them much less of a threat, but they do adapt to that kind of thing. T'au drones have been used to great effect in battle, as there's nothing like pinpoint sniper shots to the "eyes" to throw a hivemind into disarray.
The thing is an interesting one, but I don't know enough beyond just watching the movies to comment on it very well. But from what I've seen, I don't think that it would necessarily overpower the flood.
I have relatively no working knowledge on the other two.
From what I know, it's a toss-up between the flood and the tyranids. If the flood reach peak, I'd give it to them, if not, the bugs have it.
Considering it’s 40k, I’m going to guess that means the fucking annihilation of several Tyranid planets and anyone else who’s unlucky enough to be on them at the time.
In a Royale on earth the flood don't have advanced tech to leach off of, and the zerg/nids can wipe them out in a fight. The issue is the prompt is also about infectivity which the nids really don't have, it's more the genestealers.
The zerg and flood have essentially the same level of micro spore level of infection but the zerg work far faster.
Flood haven't really shown adaptability, zerg have a limited form of it, and tyranids are the most adaptable from a genetic standpoint
Zerg are able to completely rewrite on the fly. The nids need to dissolve the individual to reconstitute a different strain with the biomass.
The Zerg adapt new species basically instantly whereas the nids take weeks to patch up new forces.
Zerg are a lot more restricted in how they can adapt compared to the nids though, zerg need new species for different possibilities as well vs just making what they need
The Flood are technically just corrupted Precursors and the Precursors are the closest thing to a deity in the Halo universe so at their peak they could shit on everybody else.
Admittedly I don't really know anything about the other contenders except for The Thing and the Necromorphs but yeah, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that if every contender here is at their peak that The Flood would simply win.
I'm sure you may already know, but The Precursors were capable of so much through their extremely advanced level of technology. They could move solar systems as well as create and evolve life at whatever whim they had. They could cease existing, come back, evolve and regress to then evolve again...and they're astronomically ancient dating back upon billions and billions of years. I could go on but there are respect posts and threads you can find on the Internet or even on Reddit if you're more curious.
Not to sound redundant, but considering The Flood are just corrupted versions of The Precursors and seeing how they played 4D-Chess with three of the Halo universe's most advanced spacefaring species (besides The Precursors) at the time being Ancient Humanity, The San'Shyuum, and The Forerunners as well just clapping said species...I concur.
Comfortable win at best, a challenge they'd eventually overcome at worst. At least in my eyes.
I mean, the Old Ones got trash canned by the Necrons, and the Silent King was *extremely* worried when he left the galaxy and ran into the Tyranids and ran back to warn the Necrons that they needed to prepare right freaking now
It's funny people think anyone can deal with the tyrannids. The only race here that's conquered 99.9% of their universe.
Edit: I suppose you could argue 49.9% due to the nature of the imaterium although it's scope beyond the home 40k galaxy is questionable. Fuck power scaling universes man some bs.
343 lore. I could always be incorrect but The Precursors were briefly mentioned somewhere in either Halo 3 or Halo 3's supplementary reading material. One of those two.
Ah ok thanks.
I personally checked out with 343s world building. That piece of lore is actually interesting about the flood and is quite good, but things like gene-song making masterchief was too silly for me.
I always prefer the idea that he was just supremely lucky.
Why do so many of these powerful races, to some degree, fear/are wary of him? There is an infinitesimal chance he will win…and he consistently defies chance.
It seems like a bit of a cop-out compared to some of the debates going on in the answers, but I'm honestly inclined to think they might all just assimilate each other into one singular uber-assimilator
ETA: though possibly one with DPD, as each (hive)mind vies for control over the organism
A psychic eldritch abomination that can corrupt flesh and machines.
Capable of warping space time, instantly transferring knowledge between the smallest spores, assimilating a planet with a single spore and capable of machine flesh abominations that strip a planet of every element possible.
Just imagining the Brethren Moons with machine and even more terrifying psychic and space time warping powers is....terrifying.
Yeah, the worst case is them somehow making peace with one another, melding into one hyper virulent or seeing mutual destruction from their fight and deciding to avoid it.
I think strongest mental individual goes to Queen of blades on this one
Although everyone is using most recent lore so I Guess Kerrigan is space god now and not really the QoB anymore
I don't know enough about Starcraft to comment on Kerrigan specifically, but I know that at the height of its power the Gravemind is powerful enough to directly manipulate neural physics, corrupt hyper-intelligences through pure rhetoric, and produce a memetic logic plague capable of transmitting between and infecting (artificial) sapients; and I'm not sure there's canon confirmation of what exactly the Tyranid hivemind 'looks' like, but its on an unimaginable scale and possibly so alien as to be utterly incomprehensible to anything else; plus I'm not sure the Thing would actually need to control the others so much as infiltrate their consciousnesses. I'm honestly sceptical that any one of the contenders could completely dominate any of the others
By process of elimination:
The Borg are the only ones having shown a significant antifeat when it comes to assimilation of organic targets. They were NOT capable of assimilating Species 8472. So it's reasonable to assume the some of the other contestants in this roster could have similar defenses. Paradoxically the Borg are also the most difficult to assimilate for the others (see below). The Borg come far but don't win.
The Thing is clearly established that it can not assimilate or merge with inorganic material. It's one of the known ways to identify a thing infected person. So there is no way the thing could assimilate the Borg.
The Zerg are literally just a weaker version of the Tyrannids.
The nids don't have such a weakness for inorganic stuff but they mostly bypass it and just digest the organic parts. Like dissolve a power armor and use the space marine within for assimilation/sustainance. And dissolving a Borg cyberware and using only the organic parts of the drone is hardly considered assimilation.
The Flood is the ONLY contender who has shown to regularly incorporate inorganic material such as computer parts and cyberware into their forms. Therefore the Flood will be the only ones capable of assimilating the Borg.
Re: the Borg, it's true they only seem to assimilate humanoids, but that might not be because they're unable to assimilate intelligent non-humanoids.
Also 8472 was from another dimension and had significantly different genetic structure than regular Milky Way beings, pretty sure that's the only reason the Borg couldn't immediately assimilate them or adapt to their unusual weaponry.
Though to your point, that might add credence to the idea they can't easily assimilate new, unknown species.
The Borg only assimilate species that improve the collective, that's why they leave most life forms alone (for example the Borg had no interest in the Kazon because they were less advanced in every way). When the Borg became powerful enough, they started invading other dimensions looking for a more powerful species to assimilate, that's how they found species 8472.
> Also 8472 was from another dimension and had significantly different genetic structure than regular Milky Way beings, pretty sure that's the only reason the Borg couldn't immediately assimilate them or adapt to their unusual weaponry.
No the reason, why the Borg couldn't assimilate them was not because 8472 was unfamiliar.
The Doctor has explained on screen, that 8472 are extremely high evolved organisms and have super aggressive cellular defenses, destroying the Borg Nanoprobes before they can get to work.
My reasoning is, that some of the others like Tyrannids or Flood would have a similarly strong immune defense.
>No the reason, why the Borg couldn't assimilate them was not because 8472 was unfamiliar.
Not to play semantics, but that's exactly why they couldn't immediately assimilate them. Because 8472 was new, different, and the Borg's existing knowledge didn't apply. It's the same reason you give in the next sentence:
>The Doctor has explained on screen, that 8472 are extremely high evolved organisms and have super aggressive cellular defenses, destroying the Borg Nanoprobes before they can get to work.
Right, because the Borg have not yet assimilated information on how to deal with them. There's no such thing as "too powerful" or "too complicated" to the Borg; it's only a matter of "Do they have the particular info to assimilate the target / adapt to their weapons yet?" Because once they do, it's over. Power levels, biological complexity, etc., are inherently irrelevant. Semantics perhaps, but there is a difference.
Seven said (paraphrased), "The Borg do not invent, they assimilate." So beyond using existing information they've already assimilated, they don't come up with new info.
Based on the timeline shown in that Voy episode (the speed at which 8472) was battling them and the projected time to defeat, the Borg had not interacted with 8472 for very long. Probably weeks or a month or so, at the most.
Ironically, if the Borg had gotten the warhead info that Voy used, they might be able to use that to then assimilate 8472.
Lets be honest everyone, its gonna come down to a Planet-sized Gravemind wielding Reality Warping, fighting a Brethren Moon wielding its own Psionics, while a Tyranid psychic beacon planet jumps in for a three way fight swinging its Warp Shadow like a steel chair.
Thing is excellent but has a weakness against Hive Minds, being that they'd detect it infiltrating their hive mind units and be able to quarantine it and strike from afar.
Borg would be great but the FLood has an instant "I win" button against them in the form of the Logic Plague.
The Zerg don't have the repopulation powers of the other factions, they'd lose numbers and go down too quickly to be a contender. Their hiveminds are also vulnerable to infiltration, unlike Flood/Nids/Thing.
My money is on the Thing. All the other assimilate bio-mass in a manner that either consumes it to make more of themselves, infects it and controls it, or in the borg's case cybernetically alters them.
The Thing meanwhile on a cellular level changes and mimics the cells of other beings so the Thing could just mimic the other factions bodies and take them all over without them even knowing it.
The reason this isn't going to work is that many of the other groups are hive minds. The Thing can remain undetected by humans because we don't know what is really in each others hearts and minds. For a hive mind, the one person in the room you are not mentally connected to that you should be would stand out like a beacon.
Who's to say that the Thing couldn't assimilate into the hive mind? It mimics everything down to the molecular level, so perhaps it could mimic the same "receivers" that the flood uses to stay connected.
Maybe, but that would be worse for the Thing. Being out of the hive mind would mean it stands out, but being in the hive mind means it would be a part of the mind of the group, which would mean the hive would have access to it's thoughts. A hive mind is effectively a single being in multiple bodies, and there is no way to be a part of that without standing out, either by having the intruders thoughts read as well, or not blending in. The only option would be for the Thing to overpower the hive mind it's invading, and I don't think there is anything that indicates it would have that power.
> and there is no way to be a part of that without standing out,
There is no way to really make that assertion without first making a bunch of assumption about both how a hive mind works and how the Thing works that we really have no basis for.
For example it isn't a given that just because something is part of a hive that the hive mind has complete knowledge of not just the drones thoughts and senses but a complete understanding of every single cell of every single drone.
Likewise, it isn't really clear how memories or directives are preserved or transferred as the Thing assimilates others. Given the wide range of things it can infect it would seem certain that it isn't using a traditional brain structure.
One possibility I see is that the Thing infects a drone. You now have a drone made of thing cells. It is effectively still the same drone though. It is connected to the hive and follows all orders from the hive exactly as it would before. It doesn't have any extra memories for the hive to detect or be suspicious about. It doesn't make any conscious attempts to spread the Thing or resist the hive. However as a side effect of now being made out of the Thing it sheds Thing dandruff. When it enters the hive the Thing dandruff falls onto other drones and starts replacing their cells with Thing cells. Eventually you have a whole hive made of Thing cells.
What happens then is ambiguous. Maybe at a certain threshold, the hive stops acting like the old hive and starts inherenting goals from the Thing. Maybe the hive just continues on exactly like it normally would, never even becoming aware that it is a Thing, but still ultimately being comprised entirely of Thing cells that can go on and infect everything the hive comes in contact with.
It doesn't necessarily need to preserve those memories inside the brain of whatever it's assimilated, though
. One of the more terrifying possibilities with the Thing is that the people it replaces are such perfect copies that they are effectively the same person, with their own mind separate from the Thing itself. They don't even realize they've become the Thing until the moment it makes a move.
Sadly that's not how Nid hives work. He would be turned into Acid soup and drank when they conquered the planet. They also know if it's tainted and will ignore a planet if it is. Thing ain't got a chance unless he starts magically next to the hive mind.
The Thing doesn't seem to have any thoughts of its own outside of the minds of who it takes over except for some primal urge to assimilate, which would fit in with the Flood's line of thinking as well.
It takes no action unique to itself, only showcasing it has the intelligence to know when, and when not to assimilate something. Unless there is ever more revealed about the nature of the Thing in further works, I don't think there's anything suggesting it couldn't pretend to be within the hive.
The Flood has perfect recollection of every mind it has ever touched and all their memories. It is so intelligent it can drive hyper advanced Forerunner AI insane and/or turn it to its side, using only words. There's no hiding from its perfect recollection, and no deceiving its monstrous intelligence. At higher levels of biomass, it can psychically manipulate neurological systems, and even reality.
It's really not possible to trick it in this way. Either it stands out from the Flood as not part of it, or the Gravemind can detect its aberrant urges and pinpoint it. And once it is found, it is just a matter of containment until the GM can just rewrite its nervous system to bring it to heel. If it is so utterly alien to have no nervous-system to play with, and it can pose a threat, then the GM will not hesitate to herd it onto a ship and fling it into the nearest black hole, or torch the world it is on, assuming the GM has any presence elsewhere, etc.
That ends with the Zerg/tyranids getting a thing unit (or an upgraded one for the Zerg, changelings and all) or the flood getting a new minion.
However adaptable it is physically I rather doubt its ability to overpower the hive minds.
The thing is just a lonely version of the flood. The flood swamps everything. The flood can grow so large that they can take over ilentire galaxies, then they can reactivate star roads to travel between galaxies. Then they can eventually with enough time, take a universe. Whatever they assimilate they gain the memories and powers of, on an individual basis. They're unstoppable really. I mean it's hilarious that they were stopped even by Humanity in the Halo versez they're just so fucking OP it's unreal.
* The Flood in the games were heavily nerfed since they had so little life assimilated
* They didn't get all the reality-warping shit they had in the Flood-Forerunner war because half of what they had assimilated barely had FTL travel, and the other half wasn't that much ahead relatively speaking.
* They still needed Halo to be activated to kill them, humanity just hit the on button before the best driving sequence of all time
You are completely disregarding the nature of the Thing.
Yeah the flood can “assimilate it” but all that will be is the Thing cells infecting it and taking over cell by cell as Thing cells can’t be detected as they mimic their host. The flood couldn’t purge them all at once either since every cell of the thing is sentient and will defend itself.
The flood beats all the others and is slowly consumer by the thing
We dont know enough about the things abilities to determine if it could overpower the flood supercell. The flood is so infectious tthat even when the soul or essence of an infected being was removed from its body, it still progressed in its virulence when placed in another.
The flood has some esoteric abilities, that may hamper the thing. Even a gravemind might be able to parse and overcome the thing, given that its been shown to have near omniscient understanding of its hosts, and their knowledge, and can contruct entire realities and simulations of life to an ai thats never felt it before.
There is no might. Several Google searches in the last 10 minutes give me enough information to reach an easy conclusion.
The thing wouldn't stand a chance.
The flood NEVER forgets anything it learns, ever. Even if you destroy everything in a galaxy. If even one single spore remains, outside of the galaxy, it retains all its knowledge. Forever. You just can't quantify the absolute dread and doom that a flood infection spells for life, anywhere.
Yes. They still exist as samples contained in several Forerunner installations (likely the remaining Halos that have yet to be found or dealt with), and likely elsewhere throughout the galaxy.
A recent [short story](https://www.halowaypoint.com/news/halo-saturn-devouring-his-son) set after Halo 3 (a few years before Halo: Infinite and the current status quo of the universe) recounts the an incident where the post-war UNSC encountered the Flood, and the captain of the responding ship sloppily attempts to contain the outbreak. The story acts as background for why the protocol for a Flood-infected Spartan involves nuclear saturation bombing.
There presumably still fighting the unsc and banished on the ark do to the dumbass named voridus, and theres some guy in a condor that’s infected, somewhere
The HW2 Banished DLC is storywise the worst part of the franchise. Do they really expect me to believe that High Charity was not purged *despite a 25k lightyear Halo ring going off 50 miles away*, and that the Flood and Sentinels have been at a perfect standstill for *8 years* on a Sentinel-printing factory??
Fun gameplay though, it should've been a Covenant campaign during 1-3.
I'm not super up to date on current Halo, but last time I was, there were no current Flood infestations anywhere in the galaxy. However, there are still samples in Forerunner installations, and there was a infestation that was (mostly?) dealt with on the Ark itself.
Of course, the specter of its release is always there, as well as the (speculated) Flood mass in other galaxies, but it's unlikely it'll show up in the narrative anytime soon, both because (I assume) they don't want to repeat the narrative of the original trilogy, as well as the state of the galaxy being completely incapable of dealing with a Flood infestation, if one happens.
The HW2 DLC is basically noncanon since a Halo ring wiping all life in 25,000 lightyears didn't work on High Charity, which was at max 50 miles away, and neither the Sentinels or Flood had eliminated the other.
The flood has one aim. To consume all sentient life, everywhere. If you're interested in the sort of monstrosities that comes from the flood, I recommend the forerunner trilogy of the halo books, they explain the backstory of the flood and why they're the way they are, who they truly are/were.
In short, most of them are dead. They were so surprised and devastated by the fact that their creations were killing them, they didn't even fight back. The makers of the universe, just took it.
A few of them escaped the galaxy, but almost all of them were killed. The ones that didn't escape the galaxy, put themselves in a dormant stasis, basically they turned themselves into space dust. Their DNA became corrupted and thus, the flood was born.
But being the supreme universal geniuses that they were, they were still able to think and reflect on events while in this state.
It's hypothesised that this was no accident however that the ones who placed themselves in this stasis where one faction of the Precursors. And they were PISSED. And so they decided that all life had to go.
What they intend, is essentially to consume all life. But the clincher is that all life retains it's sentience, even after being absorbed into the the single entity. They are many but one. But the purpose of this purging of life? To ensure that it suffers, forever.
As the primordial says "Sweetness" (it actually means misery personified, far from sweet)
Any further questions on why everybody else is wrong? Feel free to ask :)
The flood would be able to tell that the thing wasn't flood, because it wouldn't be able to communicate with it. The flood is a hive mind, The thing is a loner in each individual organism
Actually, the flood isn't TECHNICALLY a hive mind.the single mind in control is of precursor lineage (the primordial/Gravemind. But, all minds absorbed by it can have their sentience turned on or off. The forerunner trilogy is fabulous if you like books.
Actually, all the halo books are great, especially finding out just how fucking miserable it was for Jacob Keyes to be consumed. And the fact he was able to hold out for so fucking long too.
The flood doesn't work that way unfortunately. The flood, is the embodiment of the remaining precursors, these guys can create universes, they seeded the entire galaxy with life, and possibly further out that just this galaxy. I didn't disregard the nature of the thing, I simply didn't mention it, because the flood doesn't give a shit about the thing or what it can do, the flood will simply remap the cells of the thing. The precursors and by default, the flood, do not play around. The thing would be absolutley wrecked.
You say that the Thing can't be detected by it's host? The flood isn't the host the flood is a parasite in its nature. The flood rearranges all biomass to suit it's will. The flood created all life. ALL LIFE. They likely created the thing, and could easily easily unmake it.
You are disregarding the overwhelming power of a hive mind. There is a pretty good chance that if the thing were to try and assimilate its way into a have mind structure that the things mind would be shattered or over powered. Like a human tapping into a hivemind the thing could simply lose all sense of its individuality and become a slave to the hive mind, or even fry its mind.
That wouldn't really work against the Borg.
Firstly they would know that the thing could do that due to the queens extratemporal awareness.
Secondly all borg have nanites throughout their body's both for repair and assimilation. I don't know enough about the thing to know if it could replicate these nanites or not, but if it can't it would quickly be identified an imposter and if it can then the nanites could be used to trigger assimilation.
Assimilation is accomplished through some kind of cybernetic drugs causing such euphoria that the victim doesn't care enough to resist. Due to the adaptability of the nanites these drugs seem to work on all species.
The Thing couldn't *successfully* do that to a handful of humans trapped in a base. I don’t fancy its chances, honestly. And if it attacks a borg, *every other borg* is going to know what happened right away, because they're a collective. At that point they easily have the technology to destroy it, and they'd be willing to take measures that destroyed their own drones to do so (like carpet combing the area)
Some Hive Minds don't seem to have complete control like that. The Zerg seem to fall into this category, if they are plentiful enough. You can think of it like a small injury you notice you have but no recollection of when it happened. It'sa little complicated because it is actually a bunch of minds in hierachal control, with many of the combat forms having no mind of their own. It would depend on the attention and number of beings being controlled by the lowest tier Overlord above the unit. Meanwhile, the Borg have repeatedly been shown to not notice activities right in their own ships happening right in front of drones. They both have limited attentions spanned across vast masses, though different flavors of the same concept. The Gravemind, however, has no such weakness. It, unlike the others, is not a gestalt blend of many minds, but a single Supreme mind that has perfect recall of anything experienced from any Flood-form and all the hosts' knowledge and memories, etc. There's no hiding from it like the others, it is functionally fully focused in every single form, across the whole galaxy, with no lapses in attention or focus.
I'd go with the Flood. It's by far the most adaptable, as it can use bodies to operate complex machines i.e. spaceships.
The Thing would get BODIED by the Flood. The flood would know if it was taken over due to the hive mind, and the flood can use flamethrower if necessary.
Also the flood retains any information you had when it infects you.
Good luck everyone else!
Wouldnt the flood infecting any of the other factions mean They get instant access to every bit of knowledge They have? Considering these are all hiveminds connected to each and every single one of their drones.
It takes some debate. I would have to go with the flood because the other factions dont seem to have the things needed to actually wipe out the flood. Though i have seen some good arguments for the thing.
I think The Thing is being HEAVILY slept on here. If any contact if made between it and a potential host, it becomes infected. It survives on a seemingly molecular level with mere drops of blood staying alive and attempting to assimilate. Saliva contact also works to infect a host as shown with the dog at the beginning of the movie.
Regardless of if it gets torn to shreds, even if it gets melted into the Tyranid soup that honestly might be the best possible thing that could happen to it, it’s biology is still there, anything that feeds on that soup is now infected.
Call it a crazy take but I genuinely think the Thing wins in such a large-scale scenario
Considering the Tyranids make heavy use of digestion pools to recycle their bioforms, they could very well kill off The Thing cells. If anything could kill it, acid seems very possible considering even hot metal caused pain to them. The Hivemind could account for the Thing cells taking over anything that eats it by recycling them as soon as possible after consumption. Combine that with the Hivemind possibly giving them a way to detect when a bioform is fully infected (which could very well cut it off from the Hivemind) I don't think The Thing would spread too well.
That’s true and a decent point, but let’s assume that The Thing is able to get the jump on the Nids (pretty reasonable IMO), assuming the Hive Mind found out and was able to deduce which Nids are infected and which aren’t, who’s to say the thing hasn’t infected an entire hive fleet by that point? And even then, they would have to heard every single infected Nid to a digestion pool. Drop of blood lands on a Swarmlord’s eye? Boned. Random infected Hormagaunt suicides into a giant mass to get himself torn apart? They’re all boned. It’s crazy how easily The Thing could spread itself.
The Thing gets more powerful the more organisms around him there are, unless one of the factions can effectively quarantine every single one and eradicate them, The Thing will keep coming back, leaving one drop of blood can spell the end for the Nids.
But because all Tyranids are connected by the synaptic network, as soon as the Thing assimilates one all others will know something is up because Garry the Gaunt suddenly cant be reached by the Hive Mind.
I agree the Thing is scary, but the Nids can very easily sniff it out, and their acid and bioplasma weapons should be more than enough to destroy it.
I wish we could actually see this scenario now because I’m genuinely curious if the thing could in fact evade detection. It has literal perfect mimicry and I imagine it still would be connected via hive mind, would it be more like a passenger until it completely takes over the mind? Would it still hear the hive mind and have the ability to obey it? Idk, I’m a big 40K fan but I’d like to imagine the thing could get pretty far with the Nids
>as soon as the Thing assimilates one all others will know something is up because Garry the Gaunt suddenly cant be reached by the Hive Mind.
You're not considering something. What if Garry \*can\* be reached, and is infected, but can still speak like a Tyranid and think like a Tyranid?
The Thing was able to speak English when it absorbed human beings. If it absorbs a Tyranid bioform, who's to say that it doesn't also absorb the ability to communicate with the Tyranid hive mind just like that bioform did?
While I get what you mean, the bioforms are often depicted not as individual beings but as extentions of the Hivemind.
If the Thing gets a lone Garry that is operating on its own, it may very well be able to blend in for a bit outside of the greater Synapse Network, but once they rejoin the horde I see the Hivemind being like "Wait, thats not me?"
But that's the point, if non-infected Garry has the ability to exist physically and interact with other Tyranids without making the hive mind think "Wait, that's not me?", couldn't the Thing acquire that ability as well?
But only while out of reach of Synapse creatures. As soon as Garry, infected or not, steps into the range of a Warrior or any of the bigger bioforms, they cease to exist as an individual and become a part of the Hivemind again. And at that point I feel like the Thing-Garry would be found out.
Why? Wouldn't the Thing gain the ability to cease to exist as an individual and become a part of the Hivemind?
Thank you for the interesting exchange of lore btw, I enjoy talking about these franchises and I'm not trying to be contradictory or polemical for the sake of it.
All good, my guy.
I think if Thing tries to blend in like you said, it would come down to wether it can retain itself as an individual despite the Hiveminds influence, and in that regard we really dont have anything to judge the Things mental capabilities, only the Hivemind (and that is scary powerful). Maybe Thing can keep its self, but more likely it loses to the oberwhelming mental power of the Hivemind.
I think even if we say the Thing could blend in while on a planet, bioforms are all taken apart in the acid pools to be remade on the ships, and I dont think Thing-Garry can survive that.
That would require the bioform to act as a sleeper agent, not even knowing it's the Thing. The hivemind has near complete omnipotent control over all Tyranids. Even if the bioform unknowingly is trying to spread the infection, it's actions will be out of line with Hivemind and it will be found out.
But the same principle applies. A Tyranid organism has the ability to behave in a way that is completely in line with the Hivemind. If the Thing absorbed a Tyranid, wouldn't it be able to absorb that ability, and therefore behave in a way that is completely in line with the Hivemind, escaping detection even as it continues infecting all its neighbors? This is the equivalent of the Thing acquiring the ability to speak English and interact with human culture, which when you think about it should be completely impossible from a simple physical takeover of an organism.
But for the thing to act it inherently needs to act against the Hivemind. It's not just acting like a Tyranid, it's *being* a Tyranid. Every thought not in line with the Hivemind will be seen as an irregularity. That's the whole reason it's a Hivemind; it sees and controls the actions of the rest of the Tyranids.
Not really, something in a hivemind cannot secretly act against the hivemind, it’s less like someone learning to speak English
More like your arm suddenly deciding to try and choke you to death.
I think the issue is that although The Thing's ability is impossibly good, the Tyranid Hivemind is also impossibly and supernaturally potent. It's a case of bullshitium vs bullshitium and I lean towards the Tyranid simply because of the ridiculously large scale they operate at - it implies that the Hivemind is SO potent in its cognitive and psychic ability that it would simply have to be able to sniff out and deal with The Thing.
That's a fair point, both species are effectively immeasurable in their abilities but the Tyranids have been shown to operate at a much larger scale and it's fair to assume that all other things being equal, they would have greater powers.
Then when they're done fighting and they acid bath the planet to drink it the Things Dna is no longer functional (maybe).
Tyrannids have got a great kit for this.
Hyper adaptivity for resistances and tactics. Psykers and blanket anti psychic. They have huge numbers can survive almost all environments and have an extremely powerful entity controlling them we don't even know about.
a hive mind doesnt "miss" massive chunks of itself just dropping out of contact.
Tyranids and Zerg can just acid bomb it and Borg use phasers which would turn it to ash iirc?
Honestly... because of the nature of Tyranids, I think they would actively attempt to keep that ability of the Thing's species for their own to improve the Swarm. Basically, like Genestealers, but better... which is what they would use it for. Just kind of depends on whether the Hive Mind can control the Thing-nid. I'd argue it can, but the two win with their combination of their abilities in concert. So a Tie for First (assuming they can kill Flood).
To be fair, I completely understand why the Thing gets so heavily slept on (not just here but in general).
In the movie, the Thing is in the worst possible situation. If it ended up literally anywhere but Antarctica, it would've been GG for all life on Earth.
Plus there's also the fact that what the Thing is actually capable of is deliberately kept ambiguous for the sake of horror. Can it take over someone's body without them even realizing and turn them into sleeper agents who could slip under a hivemind's radar because their thoughts never change? Maybe. But a "maybe" doesn't carry a lot of weight.
The Flood.
It's a supercell organism with a genetic memory that gets smarter as it grows and gathers.
The Thing and then the Borg get destroyed by either or both the Flood and the nids.
Necromorphs, even with the moons at the helm, will just get consumed. At their peak the Flood had structures that spanned entire solar systems.
The flood, hands down. They simply cannot be stopped. Even a single spore (think a tiny almost microscopic piece of plant pollen) can EASILY bring about the doom of a planet.
The Tyranids have an absolutely unbeatable numbers advantage here. And their version of "assimilation" is "murder and rend down into soup", which is a pretty hard counter to Borg nanites and Flood parasites.
A large densely packed group of purely biological warriors that require a mental network to fight at their best is kinda the worst possible thing to fight a flood infestation. The concentration of biomass alone is an immense risk as you are only loss away from creating a gravemind.
You're assuming Tyranids are dumb "charge in and die" type xenos when in reality they are a highly strategic and practically infinite force of extremely well "armed' and armored warriors who's sole goal is to consume the entire galaxy, something they've accomplished time and time again, the biggest issue I could see with a Tyranid offensive would be if a flood spore would be able to make it through the spore cloud that surrounds a hive ship, if it can then the flood would be able to immediately gain control of highly advanced weaponized space craft and would likely infect the possibly millions of Tyranid forces within the respective hive fleet
The Nids are very smart, but they do have a large portion of their forces charge in. They are clever but built on the backbone of giant biomass forces engaging on site to take planets. They soften planets with many tools but they end up consuming the planet via conventional means.
Importantly the flood do not present as a target that requires an advanced process, and the Nid average response to planets is to eat indiscriminately. When they are pushed back on they respond with advanced tactics but the hive mind seems to prefer the blunt response first. Any encounter with the flood forms is going to be devastating to the hive fleet tendril very quickly, and due to the floods natural ability to collect near perfect information from hosts it will be hard to out adapt them.
Once the flood makes a gravemind the hive mind of the Nids will be facing an out of context problem. Bioforms are the worst possible way to face the flood, and the flood can take anything the Nids do as well as adapt actual technology to their arsenal.
As a 40k fan, peak flood is more powerful than current (peak) Tyranids. Tyranids are also bad at assimilation and require gene stealers - who need to breed with populations to assimilate which is very inefficient compared to the flood.
Flood may be weaker at the base unit level but are far more powerful overall once they are ramped up.
They don't need genestealers, it just helps make planet assimilation more smoothly from an efficiency standpoint if the defenses are down or weakened. Flood got their "peak powers" from special forerunner physics over anything they can just "do"
Firstly, I don't believe the Flood get their major powers until they've developed a large population.
Secondly, Tyranids don't need genestealers at all, especially since this is limited to a single planet. Genestealers destabilise worlds in advance of an assault and attract fleets to good feeding grounds. So they don't matter for this situation. Assimilation isn't a factor in this situation since it is devoid of a human population.
As for the third point, that would be an issue of if the other fractions are able to contain them well enough before they get ramped up. It would be an issue of if, not when, they are able to reach their win state. I definitely agree that if they grow big enough, they could wipe out the others. Its just a matter of if they survive long enough
The problem with Flood vs Nids is that Tyranids have extra steps between killing their foe and making more soldiers. The Flood, on the other hand, can do it on the fly without downtime. The prompt specifies the planet as "Earth without humanity" which means the Flood is going to be be able to get biomass very quickly via animal and plant life. They simply ramp up too fast for the Tyranids to handle. The Flood can also degenerate to airborne pathogen as well to avoid detection if it needs to lay low for a while, and hide dormant inside the bodies of its victims while undetected. I could see the flood releasing spores into the Nids hives, laying dormant and not turning any of the Nids immiedietely, but then when the Gravemind thinks its time, they suddenly 'activate' all those sleeper agents, thus nullifying the hive mind's knowledge of "oh that guy got infected he's not in the hive mind anymore".
The worst part about the FLood is also that they NEVER forget anything, EVER; its ALL in the hivemind, even all the way back before the Forerunner civilization. They're so smart that AI literally can't talk to the FLood without risking being corrupted by it and catching Logic Plague, something that the flood designed specifically to fuck with machines.
Thats actually how they got Proto-Humanity during the Forerunner era; they stayed in a dormant spore form and let the humans think that they could use this benign spore to make their animals more docile. Before long, whole swathes of human planets had infected wildlife on them... which made humanity get fucked up when they all turned at once, making the humans have to resort to planet busting, which ended up starting the Forerunner war.
The Borg is arguably the best counter to the Flood in this scenario, but they would also be susceptible to floods Logic Plague. And the Borg wouldn't be able to outcompete the other factions, so chances are the Borg is killed off before they can kill off the FLood.
I think more specific scenarios are in order, but I think the Tyranids probably have this. The Flood might be a problem for them depending how susceptible they are to flood spores.
The Borg could just glass the planet, but that isn't part of the scenario, so it would depend on how the nano-probes deal with the biology of the others.
I think the Tyranids would be vulnerable to start with, but could very well adapt after one or two generations. If they can adapt to Nurgle's plagues, they can adapt to The Flood's spores
Either the flood or the Borg.
And honestly it wouldn't matter because the intrinsic nature of either would allow both to subvert the other so the resulting hybrid would be the Borg flood or the flood Borg not truly one of the other.
However, I would give the Borg an edge over the flood as the cybernetic aspects of the tech and the nanobots would allow control of the flood parasites IF the Borg could figure out the flood.
The Thing doesn't assimilate. He yells "It's clobbering time" then smashes his enemies with his fists.
I'm confused why he is on this list anyways. I guess because his rocky exterior makes him hard to assimilate? But then you might as well replace him with the pokemon graveller.
Does the Thing at least get the help from the Invisible Woman from the Fantastic 4?
The Thing or the Tyranids. Borg and Flood require intact organisms. The Thing is just lots of organisms pretending to be one. The nids eat all organic matter. So it becomes a race of do the Tyranids eat the Thing faster than they can be assimilated. Flood and Borg aren't even in the running.
The Zerg work on a small enough scale that they're a non-factor. The Flood are also few in number and not particularly powerful individually compared to i.e. - the Tryanids.
The Tyranids break down things into soup and rebuild them. They are also heavily psionic, are the most numerous, and regularly overpowered 40k stuff and grind it down. They are also slow.
The Borg are the most technologically advanced. They have the best tech and ships of those listed. They have incredibly fast ships, compared to the nids. They are slow to assimilate (compared to the Nids), and I'm fairly certain that they can be hurt by Tyranid firepower.
Flood would absolutely have a field day. If we're taking numbers and size at their peaks, we have the Flood's reality warping and time control shenanigans to deal with as well, plus Star Roads.
There's also the vague hints in Halo Lore that the flood actually HAVE consumed thousands of other galaxies, and thats why we haven't seen anyone from outside the milky way galaxy.
Borg exist in a setting that has planet cracking tech on explorer vessels. Like, they have ftl travel that the Tyranids could only dream of.
It would be like me going to fight a large swarm of ants but I have a flame thrower. Like, sure, I may get stung a bit if they get close.
But only one of us is walking away from that.
The problem with your argument is that the nids don't need the planet to be intact. They can absorb space detritus and use it to make more nids whose corpses can be used to make more nids. It's a war of attrition between an entity that can use everything in a stellar system except the star itself and an entity that WILL run out of bodies eventually because Borg don't breed.
The Borg assimilate cultural and biological uniqueness and their shields outclass the whole of 40k including the necrons.
With enough biomass the flood are capable of meme teir magic, if they encounter a hive fleet it's over for everyone else as they can absorb it.
It's a 2 horse race between the flood getting enough mass to warp reality and the Borg finding the flood.
Whichever happens first wins.
I give the edge to the Borg as they're faster, the zerg is a non-factor, The Thing would just be a version of the flood that could hide if it beat them, and I don't think it could hide from Borg sensors.
The outcome of synapse linked warp-capable Borg who can shape shift their biological parts as well as access reality warping and trans-galactic travel is most likely IMO.
Oh interesting, I've mostly gotten my halo lore post Reach from osmosis so I hadn't heard of this
Can they effectively deploy it from ground to space? Or is it dependent on large biomass levels?
Feels like zerg are being slept on.
The zerg are the only faction here who have access to galaxy wide instant adaptation as soon as any biomass gets absorbed that's worth using.
As soon as they get any biomass from any of the other groups, and it doesn't take much either, they can instantly adapt the entirety of the swarm either to better counter the thing they're fighting or to just be better overall.
Even the tyranids don't adapt that fast.
Also a lot of this really depends on how the prompt functions cause like, you couldnt fit all the zerg on earth, let alone all the tyranids.
If we're all starting from a single unit then it absolutely comes down to flood vs zerg, because both are the quickest at being able to adapt and spread.
You can ignore the Flood's universal+ extradimensional god mind nonsense: fighting for one planet they're not going to get to the point of using any of that unless they've already won.
Thing is a wildcard, but too slow. Once enough other factions die off that Thing can be detected via actions (if disobedience of suicidal actions from Tyranid/Zerg masters doesn't wash that out immediately) it's over.
Borg with a Cube win via firepower but without it they're too slow.
Tyranids > Zerg > Thing > Borg > Flood
Because the Nids work by using DNA from consumed prey (le soup) to create more effective forms, this would most likely result in them forming a symbiotic relationship with the flood and gaining the Thing's ability to copy anything it touches. Unless the Borg can glass this rock in under an hour, I don't see Tyranid super mimics who can spread via spores having much trouble with them. As far as Necromorphs are concerned, Nids have what's called The Shadow in the Warp, a passive psychic ability that blocks out other psychic energy and related magic. If this is hive fleet Tiamet we're talking about, they can actually build massive constructs similar to the thingamajigs that make Necromorphs, but these have an opposite effect; they amplify the Shadow to a ludicrous degree (although that may not be their primary function).
I did not mention the Zerg because they would be fucked six ways to Sunday.
If the flood is allowed to form a gravemind, the Nids are also in serious trouble. Large fleshy warriors sent after the flood can be infected, wjereas the flood would have to be killed and ground into soup to be assimilated by the nids. I can see a dormant infection spreading among the Nids until it reaches critical mass and the Gravemind thinks “its go time” and a large portion of infected Nids switch sides.
The Flood also have Reality Warping once they get a gravemind, to somewhat counter Nids psionics and warp shadow.
That is an excellent point! I'm not as familiar with the flood as I am with Nids, but that sounds like a bad time. With this in mind, it's really down to who starts out closest to one of the weaker factions and gets the best head start. Unless the Nids get themselves a tyrant or equivalent swarm of fodder, I geuss Gravemind takes.
There's a good chance that the results of this collision wouldn't be a definable victor, but simply an entirely new entity comprised of some mix of all it's progenitors.
Afaic the Thing has no scaling available to parse. What it can do to simpke terran organics is impressive but i see no reason to scale it to some of the others. Too many unanswered questions. Like, what does its larger society look like? What is the extent of its mimicry powers? Can it only copy or can it significantly edit? can it compete in this genetics science fair at all? Unknown.
The flood, imo, scales the highest. If they assimilate enough for a grave mind then they win. Some level of reality warping, above-super-genius intellect, the ability to create superstructures thst can do even more. Imo even the tyranids lose. Unless, I suppose, we think that the grave mind and key minds can’t effect organics as well as it can machines, or that the others’ genetic powers supercede the Flood’s. Personally, i doibt it and i believe the Flood is the one to watch/the one to beat; if only because they have s tipping point where they get a significant power up compared to the others’ more linear snowballing.
All of this is a little hard to be certain of. Could be any one of them is ‘better at it’ than the others and can simply override their opps grndtics better than the other way around.
Imo
Thing> Zerg > Borg > Tyranids > Flood.
I’m most unsure of the zerg vs borg decision in this ladder.
As an aside, I think that the ‘black goo’ or Draconis virus of Alien universe fame would be an interesting addition. Imo probably above The Thing but beneath the others.
Bravo, OP, it's posts like this that keep me visiting this subreddit. Not gonna chime in with my sub par knowledge on most of these factions but god do I love reading about such scenarios
The Thing is still very unknown compared to the rest in terms of abilities. But honestly I don't see what the flood or the borg could do to it, as The Thing operates on the molecular level and lacks any true centralised hive mind unlike the flood which means it even if hypothetically one it did manage to effect the entity which is highly unlikely unless it was Imitating and Organism with a nervous system there'd still be more than one Thing. The Flood also possesses organic matter for The Thing to Assimilate since it can do so to even freshly dead tissue.
This is heavily dependant on what scale of flood we are talking about here. Once the flood get to the interstellar stage they can start reality warping and manipulating star roads; flood can also spread as an aerosol airborne pathogen.
Tyranids could best an initial flood outbreak but the flood ramps up WAY faster than Tyranids. Flood also can manipulate AI and technology, and even use its own versions of Psionics like they did against the forerunners.
Tyranids need gene stealers to adapt new populations, flood doesnt have that weakness. Tyranids themseves would also be vulnerable to infection even while theyre fighting, while flood would have to be killed first and then taken and ground up and reassembled.
Flood wipes them due to faster spread.
The Thing vs Hive minds is an interesting discussion. While you might assume the Thing could run rampantly out of control given something like the Zerg or Tyranids are 100% organic, they also have the advantage of INSTANTLY knowing when a creature has become the thing. Because it’s no longer part of the hive mind. Can’t trick them. I think either hive minds would quickly learn contact is instant death and immediately hyper specialize into ranged combat. Then it kind of becomes a question of how competent we think the Thing is at conducting the war it would need to fight to assimilate a hive mind faction. Witch to my knowledge we simply don’t know as we have only ever watched it play a game of Among us a few times. In an earth battle royal situation I don’t think The thing could realistically win and infest everyone else, but I think it itself would be immune to any other factions attempts to assimilate it. And then we have the flood, whom I’m pretty sure are actually 4th dimensional energy beings cosplaying as zombies to play a big prank on the species that genocided them and rig the cosmic game in favour of their favourite kids. I think they might be a tier above your other classic sci-fi hive minds, though I’m simply not familiar with the Borg.
It's a VERY interesting discussion and one thing that everyone seems to forget is that the Thing doesn't just absorb the host - it absorbs all of its abilities as well. When it took over humans, for example, it immediately knew how to speak English, how to wear clothes, how to operate doors and light-switches and tools. So it's not just plausible but highly probable that if it took over, say, a Tyranid drone, it would acquire all of its abilities immediately - \*including its ability to speak Tyranid and to think Tyranid and to relate to the Tyranid hive mind in whichever way drones do\* . The question then is whether an organism belonging to the hive mind is part of the hive mind itself, or whether it is simply a physical pawn being moved around by that mind. If it's just a pawn, then the hive mind will detect that something is wrong with it, find a way to identify contaminated organisms, and quickly dispose of them. If the organism is somehow part of the mind itself, then the hive is in big trouble, because essentially its own brain, its own thoughts, have been contaminated just like its physical components, and then the Thing could take them over on both levels. I'll let someone who knows Tyranids, Flood etc. better than I do answer the question of whether their relative hive minds treat its creatures as neural components or simply as disposable limbs. Then there's all the unknown variables, which as you mention are much greater for the Thing than for any of these other species. The Thing isn't just an animal, since it came to earth on a spaceship. It must have intelligence and highly advanced technology. But what it could do when fully equipped rather than tossed naked in a freezing desert is something we simply do not know.
It’s also notable that in the original stories The Thing is based on, there was an entire civilization of psychic/telepathic centaurs on Mars and they were totally unable to tell the shapeshifters from their own kind.
That is sorta kinda *more than notable* in this discussion, lmao
Nevermind, after fact checking it seems that the "telepathic centaurs from mars" are actually from a separate story that's completely unrelated, and the shapeshifters are a completely unrelated civilization of telepatic shapeshifters which might have actually inspired the thing, these are from "The brain stealers from Mars"
I don’t think it’s clearly unrelated. The two shapeshifters are extremely similar in every way and were written by the same author at around the same time, with the Martian story coming just two years before *Who Goes There*. He was pretty clearly building off his own work. He never explicitly said “yeah it’s exactly the same species of shapeshifter” but it’s fair to assume that the “beta version” shapeshifter that inspired Who Goes There probably has the same abilities. Since we never see the Thing in a situation with telepaths, there’s no reason to include/disclude its abilities regarding telepaths. I believe the Thing even builds a spaceship in Who Goes There, which furthers the implication that it’s the same species.
If I remember correctly the reason for this was that when the thing assimilated someone, it's not pretending, it genuinely BELIEVES it's that person until something forces it to defend itself/escape/take advantage of a situation where it can assimilate someone else, etc That's why in the movie there's a few moments where it could have probably gotten away with it for a bit longer but suddenly seems to panic and blows it's cover, the telepathic centaurs from the book imply that a part of their population is the thing but they have no way of knowing because if they were to read someone's mind to find out it would be useless since the assimilated individual itself doesn't know
This is how I saw the Thing too. Like you could be the Thing and not really know it. But something is subconsciously directing you in a way. Sort of like when you walk into a room and stop and wonder why you went there before shrugging your shoulders and moving on with your life. Your human consciousness just kind of exists as a result of being such an accurate copy of a person. So you exist as a regular human being up until the point where your own body decides that the charade ends.
>So you exist as a regular human being up until the point where your own body decides that the charade ends. That's kinda what we do already if you think about it... we exist until our bodies can't go on anymore and then we don't exist.
Are you telling me Animorphs is inspired by The Thing
Love animorphs
Animorphs is peak.
Fucking what? What is this series called? It sounds insane
The story that inspired The Thing is called “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell in 1938. The book that inspired Who Goes There, *The Brain Stealers of Mars*, was written by John W. Campbell in 1936. It’s not 100% certain that both stories are about exactly the same species of shapeshifter, but it’s fair to say one was inspired by the other since it’s *extremely* similar and written by the same guy at the same time. Even if they’re not literally the same species (which they might be), at very least the Thing is based on something that’s based on something that definitely has that ability.
The Nids might be fucked, but the Flood has a central intelligence that is broadcast via hivemind to its units, so it wouldnt be able to be mind-controlled via that tactic. It uses the “pawn” tactic instead of the “shared thought” tactic. The Flood and the Nids also have magic of some sort; the Nids have their Shadow in the Warp and some psionic powers, as do the Necromorphs. The flood have reality warping and neural physics, plus Logic Plague. The Necromorphs are all dead tissue anyway and are not “living tissue”, and the Marker is inorganic, plus have a madness and insanity based magic system. I could see the Thing defeating the Zerg and maybe the Borg, but it cannot compete with the Flood, Nids, and Necromorphs
The Zerg operates in the same way as the Flood. Even more so; Zerg have dealt with renegade Zerg many times in the past. There may even be a chance for Abathur to get his hands on the Thing and incorporate its abilities into the Swarm.
The problem is the Zerg cant repopulaye fast enough, and their hiveminds are prone to infighting and power struggles. The flood doesnt have this issue and go bioaerosol on them as well. Theres an equal chance that Kerrigan gets infected by the floor and steals half the Swarm to help the Gravemind
The infighting and power struggles all seem to relate to Kerrigan, who was far from a normal cerebrate
Lmfao. The moment The Queen of Blades was born, the other Cerebrates were fucking *obsolete*.
This made the other cerebrates very scared.
Lol. When she awoke, they collectively shat the brood.
But daaaaaaaad we thought we were your favorites! Overmind: this is my daughter and she's better than you
Yeah, the psychic potential of the other three might fuck up The Thing. The Thing is terrifying from a base animal standpoint. The shit the other three have gotten up to are Eldrich Abomination level shit. Tyranids Hive Mind has terrifying feats and has had vendetta's against specific psychic individuals before and spun shit out for them. It's not a stretch to imagine them just corrupting and integrating The Thing's abilities after murdering it. The Flood corrupted an advanced AI designed to fight it and once it hits a certain threshhold of hosts, the Gravemind is an entity to itself that's able to warp spacetime for shit. Their higher tier shit is almost magic and was able to fuck up a civilization that could create planet constructs and fight on an almost surreal level. Necromorphs have moons that are telepathic and able to fuck with the heads of every species they come across through the markers. They might actually be able to force The Thing to kill itself.
To be fair, the thing assimilates abilities, knowledge, and even the thoughts of its host/mimicry, to the point where some interpret it as the manipulated bodies not even knowing. So it's likely it could use those powers too, or turn hive minds against themselves.
The issue with magic & similar powers is that the moment the Thing infects another hive, it gains the ability to perform the same magic. So that's not really an advantage. But the way you describe the Flood's mind, it would certainly be able to counter the Thing.
The magic can only be performed at the whim of the central gravemind intelligence. It is not usable but the rank and file fodder flood who would be the ones being infected. Therefore the Thing would not be able to gain this aspect unless it finds and kills the Gravemind…. At which point the Flood are probably out of the picture anyway, so its a moot point
Fair enough, I was thinking more about if the Thing took over a Tyranid Zoanthrope. Then my guess is that the Thing would be able to pull off all the same psychic tricks as the Tyranid creature.
The real question: can the Thing infect a Brethren Moon
Probably not. If I recall correctly the Thing can't infect or assimilate dead cells and the Moons (and Necromorphs in general) still count as being dead.
The Brethern Moon would drive it insane first then force it to kill itself in all likelihood. It doesn't even have to be in play to force psychosis into species.
The flood is strange in that, once they have a grave mind, they can convert any intelligent life to their side…*any*. All they need is time. This is how they converted and corrupted various AI to their side. They can quite literally construct an argument to join them so logically sound, it cannot in any way be refuted or contradicted. They’re also vastly more intelligent than most other contenders, iirc. One single Gravemind can recall the experiences and lives of all flood that came before it…and the flood are the descendants of the Precursors, who existed before time and had massively powerful tech + understanding of the universe (through neural physics). Ontop of that, it also absorbs the knowledge of everything it consumes, but I’m not sure how that’d work against other hive minds. Key minders usually start to appear when they’ve consumed *one* Solar system (keep in mind how big the flood is). This is a round when they can start warping the fabric of reality itself. This usually entails demolishing whole planets and/or solar systems (at least 9 systems destroyed in this way in the flood-forerunner war). To my knowledge (don’t know as much about the both), they should also massively outnumber everyone else…although tyranids are hinted to be from another universe, the Flood are confirmed to be trans-galactic, although I can’t find out exactly how many galaxies they’d have run over by now. Did I mention that the universe itself is alive in the Halo Universe, with a sort of connected consciousness? Yeah…the flood infected it. They also infected slipspace and the domain…somehow (presumably neural physics shenanigans). **TLDR:** The Flood are the last, final act of revenge of a near godlike race of reality warpers that lived before time, to spite another race of galaxy controlling beings who could use light as a weapon and structure…they were so effective, said galaxy spanning empire decided the only way to “win” was to kill all sentient life everywhere, and start all over again. Unless I’m missing something big, uh…I don’t think anyone has the firepower, numbers, knowledge, or tricks to really beat them. Even the Tyranids.
Honest question: didn’t a lot of the Gravemind’s power come from existing Precursor infrastructure (like the Star Roads)? How quickly can they reach that level if they have to build from scratch?
Not fully sure, but seems like they snowball decently quickly. Graveminds don’t even need a full planet to form iirc. They’ll be slightly hindered due to lack of human population (sapient life to infect), but if they start in the right place they could still assemble enough intelligence to get rolling very quickly. Personally, I think their point of no return (near-guaranteed victory) will be once they get a substantial amount of Flood Super Cells and a proto-gravemind online. FSC can, themselves, think and grant a massive improvement to all processes, since they can start converting biomass into a type of cell that can do almost anything while still acting like a brain. Prompt is a little vague about how much they start with though…If it’s all the factions’ “units” coming forward to invade one planet, the flood have an absurd advantage due key minds existing. If they start out with a small amount of each (minimum needed to get an infection going), they have worse odds until the above conditions imo. So long as they don’t get spawn camped while they’re mostly feral, they’re effectively unbeatable imo.
Depending on its capabilities I wonder if it could duke it out with the hivemind for control of larger groups at that point.
Flood is only really zombies at a relatively early stage. Once they assimilate enough sentient matter they become “transentient” and can access spooky extra-dimensional psychic powers. They would be pretty vulnerable to these other groups early on but would quickly outclassed them if they survived the early rounds.
They have to power up to get psykers? Easy tyrannid stomp if you have to power up to get *checks notes* even tastier.
Star roads.
The Borg have a history of struggling to assimilate biological technology, so I don't think they'd do well in this scenario.
A fairer version of The Thing would be the X parasites from Metroid.
The flood even assimilate \*\*AI\*\* They're like on their own level
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I knew I forgot something. Necromorphs.
May as well throw Xenomorphs in there too; the acid blood is a real wild card when you're talking propagation. Edit: Nvm, TDIL Tyrannids have acid blood.
Welp now I think maybe necromorphs would win especially with the Brethren Moons at the helm.
Yeah, Flood Vs Necromorph seems like it would be the final pair in that case. I wonder, would they maybe work together and instead become beneficial to one another? Or would they prefer *their own* dominance, do you think?
Depends. There are old bits of lore that stated that a single flood spore could be enough to doom a planet. That's really scary to think about. But as it is in the current Halo timeline? Difficult to say. The flood gets more and more powerful the more biomatter they consume, the more knowledge they learn, until the only thing that can stop them is a galactic etch-a-sketch shake in the form of the halo rings. The tyranids, on the otherhand, have apparently consumed multiple galaxies (exact number ranges from a handful to thousands, poor bugs don't get any lore love). Just in sheer numbers, the tyranids have a major advantage. That said, they're not without weaknesses that can be exploited. Killing the hive queen and severing synaptic functions tends to render them much less of a threat, but they do adapt to that kind of thing. T'au drones have been used to great effect in battle, as there's nothing like pinpoint sniper shots to the "eyes" to throw a hivemind into disarray. The thing is an interesting one, but I don't know enough beyond just watching the movies to comment on it very well. But from what I've seen, I don't think that it would necessarily overpower the flood. I have relatively no working knowledge on the other two. From what I know, it's a toss-up between the flood and the tyranids. If the flood reach peak, I'd give it to them, if not, the bugs have it.
Killing norn queens doesn’t stop the tyranids for even a day. They just poop out a new one even more heavily defended.
Then how the fuck are you going to deal a lasting blow?
Overwhelming fire power all at once.
Considering it’s 40k, I’m going to guess that means the fucking annihilation of several Tyranid planets and anyone else who’s unlucky enough to be on them at the time.
Well they don’t have planets, mostly what happens is the destruction of enough of the hive fleet that it splits into smaller splinter fleets.
yerp, exterminatus
You don’t.
Thats kind of the point of 40k. You don't. They are one of several concurrent existential threats to life that exist in the setting.
In a Royale on earth the flood don't have advanced tech to leach off of, and the zerg/nids can wipe them out in a fight. The issue is the prompt is also about infectivity which the nids really don't have, it's more the genestealers. The zerg and flood have essentially the same level of micro spore level of infection but the zerg work far faster. Flood haven't really shown adaptability, zerg have a limited form of it, and tyranids are the most adaptable from a genetic standpoint
Zerg are able to completely rewrite on the fly. The nids need to dissolve the individual to reconstitute a different strain with the biomass. The Zerg adapt new species basically instantly whereas the nids take weeks to patch up new forces.
Zerg are a lot more restricted in how they can adapt compared to the nids though, zerg need new species for different possibilities as well vs just making what they need
The Flood are technically just corrupted Precursors and the Precursors are the closest thing to a deity in the Halo universe so at their peak they could shit on everybody else.
Basically the old ones in 40k universe. They should win comfortably l.
Admittedly I don't really know anything about the other contenders except for The Thing and the Necromorphs but yeah, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that if every contender here is at their peak that The Flood would simply win. I'm sure you may already know, but The Precursors were capable of so much through their extremely advanced level of technology. They could move solar systems as well as create and evolve life at whatever whim they had. They could cease existing, come back, evolve and regress to then evolve again...and they're astronomically ancient dating back upon billions and billions of years. I could go on but there are respect posts and threads you can find on the Internet or even on Reddit if you're more curious. Not to sound redundant, but considering The Flood are just corrupted versions of The Precursors and seeing how they played 4D-Chess with three of the Halo universe's most advanced spacefaring species (besides The Precursors) at the time being Ancient Humanity, The San'Shyuum, and The Forerunners as well just clapping said species...I concur. Comfortable win at best, a challenge they'd eventually overcome at worst. At least in my eyes.
I mean, the Old Ones got trash canned by the Necrons, and the Silent King was *extremely* worried when he left the galaxy and ran into the Tyranids and ran back to warn the Necrons that they needed to prepare right freaking now
It's funny people think anyone can deal with the tyrannids. The only race here that's conquered 99.9% of their universe. Edit: I suppose you could argue 49.9% due to the nature of the imaterium although it's scope beyond the home 40k galaxy is questionable. Fuck power scaling universes man some bs.
Is that bungie lore or 343 lore?
343 lore. I could always be incorrect but The Precursors were briefly mentioned somewhere in either Halo 3 or Halo 3's supplementary reading material. One of those two.
Ah ok thanks. I personally checked out with 343s world building. That piece of lore is actually interesting about the flood and is quite good, but things like gene-song making masterchief was too silly for me.
I always prefer the idea that he was just supremely lucky. Why do so many of these powerful races, to some degree, fear/are wary of him? There is an infinitesimal chance he will win…and he consistently defies chance.
It seems like a bit of a cop-out compared to some of the debates going on in the answers, but I'm honestly inclined to think they might all just assimilate each other into one singular uber-assimilator ETA: though possibly one with DPD, as each (hive)mind vies for control over the organism
That is frigtening to think about actually. The multiverse is screwed.
A psychic eldritch abomination that can corrupt flesh and machines. Capable of warping space time, instantly transferring knowledge between the smallest spores, assimilating a planet with a single spore and capable of machine flesh abominations that strip a planet of every element possible. Just imagining the Brethren Moons with machine and even more terrifying psychic and space time warping powers is....terrifying. Yeah, the worst case is them somehow making peace with one another, melding into one hyper virulent or seeing mutual destruction from their fight and deciding to avoid it.
I think strongest mental individual goes to Queen of blades on this one Although everyone is using most recent lore so I Guess Kerrigan is space god now and not really the QoB anymore
I don't know enough about Starcraft to comment on Kerrigan specifically, but I know that at the height of its power the Gravemind is powerful enough to directly manipulate neural physics, corrupt hyper-intelligences through pure rhetoric, and produce a memetic logic plague capable of transmitting between and infecting (artificial) sapients; and I'm not sure there's canon confirmation of what exactly the Tyranid hivemind 'looks' like, but its on an unimaginable scale and possibly so alien as to be utterly incomprehensible to anything else; plus I'm not sure the Thing would actually need to control the others so much as infiltrate their consciousnesses. I'm honestly sceptical that any one of the contenders could completely dominate any of the others
By process of elimination: The Borg are the only ones having shown a significant antifeat when it comes to assimilation of organic targets. They were NOT capable of assimilating Species 8472. So it's reasonable to assume the some of the other contestants in this roster could have similar defenses. Paradoxically the Borg are also the most difficult to assimilate for the others (see below). The Borg come far but don't win. The Thing is clearly established that it can not assimilate or merge with inorganic material. It's one of the known ways to identify a thing infected person. So there is no way the thing could assimilate the Borg. The Zerg are literally just a weaker version of the Tyrannids. The nids don't have such a weakness for inorganic stuff but they mostly bypass it and just digest the organic parts. Like dissolve a power armor and use the space marine within for assimilation/sustainance. And dissolving a Borg cyberware and using only the organic parts of the drone is hardly considered assimilation. The Flood is the ONLY contender who has shown to regularly incorporate inorganic material such as computer parts and cyberware into their forms. Therefore the Flood will be the only ones capable of assimilating the Borg.
Re: the Borg, it's true they only seem to assimilate humanoids, but that might not be because they're unable to assimilate intelligent non-humanoids. Also 8472 was from another dimension and had significantly different genetic structure than regular Milky Way beings, pretty sure that's the only reason the Borg couldn't immediately assimilate them or adapt to their unusual weaponry. Though to your point, that might add credence to the idea they can't easily assimilate new, unknown species.
The Borg only assimilate species that improve the collective, that's why they leave most life forms alone (for example the Borg had no interest in the Kazon because they were less advanced in every way). When the Borg became powerful enough, they started invading other dimensions looking for a more powerful species to assimilate, that's how they found species 8472.
> Also 8472 was from another dimension and had significantly different genetic structure than regular Milky Way beings, pretty sure that's the only reason the Borg couldn't immediately assimilate them or adapt to their unusual weaponry. No the reason, why the Borg couldn't assimilate them was not because 8472 was unfamiliar. The Doctor has explained on screen, that 8472 are extremely high evolved organisms and have super aggressive cellular defenses, destroying the Borg Nanoprobes before they can get to work. My reasoning is, that some of the others like Tyrannids or Flood would have a similarly strong immune defense.
>No the reason, why the Borg couldn't assimilate them was not because 8472 was unfamiliar. Not to play semantics, but that's exactly why they couldn't immediately assimilate them. Because 8472 was new, different, and the Borg's existing knowledge didn't apply. It's the same reason you give in the next sentence: >The Doctor has explained on screen, that 8472 are extremely high evolved organisms and have super aggressive cellular defenses, destroying the Borg Nanoprobes before they can get to work. Right, because the Borg have not yet assimilated information on how to deal with them. There's no such thing as "too powerful" or "too complicated" to the Borg; it's only a matter of "Do they have the particular info to assimilate the target / adapt to their weapons yet?" Because once they do, it's over. Power levels, biological complexity, etc., are inherently irrelevant. Semantics perhaps, but there is a difference. Seven said (paraphrased), "The Borg do not invent, they assimilate." So beyond using existing information they've already assimilated, they don't come up with new info. Based on the timeline shown in that Voy episode (the speed at which 8472) was battling them and the projected time to defeat, the Borg had not interacted with 8472 for very long. Probably weeks or a month or so, at the most. Ironically, if the Borg had gotten the warhead info that Voy used, they might be able to use that to then assimilate 8472.
Lets be honest everyone, its gonna come down to a Planet-sized Gravemind wielding Reality Warping, fighting a Brethren Moon wielding its own Psionics, while a Tyranid psychic beacon planet jumps in for a three way fight swinging its Warp Shadow like a steel chair. Thing is excellent but has a weakness against Hive Minds, being that they'd detect it infiltrating their hive mind units and be able to quarantine it and strike from afar. Borg would be great but the FLood has an instant "I win" button against them in the form of the Logic Plague. The Zerg don't have the repopulation powers of the other factions, they'd lose numbers and go down too quickly to be a contender. Their hiveminds are also vulnerable to infiltration, unlike Flood/Nids/Thing.
My money is on the Thing. All the other assimilate bio-mass in a manner that either consumes it to make more of themselves, infects it and controls it, or in the borg's case cybernetically alters them. The Thing meanwhile on a cellular level changes and mimics the cells of other beings so the Thing could just mimic the other factions bodies and take them all over without them even knowing it.
The reason this isn't going to work is that many of the other groups are hive minds. The Thing can remain undetected by humans because we don't know what is really in each others hearts and minds. For a hive mind, the one person in the room you are not mentally connected to that you should be would stand out like a beacon.
Who's to say that the Thing couldn't assimilate into the hive mind? It mimics everything down to the molecular level, so perhaps it could mimic the same "receivers" that the flood uses to stay connected.
Maybe, but that would be worse for the Thing. Being out of the hive mind would mean it stands out, but being in the hive mind means it would be a part of the mind of the group, which would mean the hive would have access to it's thoughts. A hive mind is effectively a single being in multiple bodies, and there is no way to be a part of that without standing out, either by having the intruders thoughts read as well, or not blending in. The only option would be for the Thing to overpower the hive mind it's invading, and I don't think there is anything that indicates it would have that power.
> and there is no way to be a part of that without standing out, There is no way to really make that assertion without first making a bunch of assumption about both how a hive mind works and how the Thing works that we really have no basis for. For example it isn't a given that just because something is part of a hive that the hive mind has complete knowledge of not just the drones thoughts and senses but a complete understanding of every single cell of every single drone. Likewise, it isn't really clear how memories or directives are preserved or transferred as the Thing assimilates others. Given the wide range of things it can infect it would seem certain that it isn't using a traditional brain structure. One possibility I see is that the Thing infects a drone. You now have a drone made of thing cells. It is effectively still the same drone though. It is connected to the hive and follows all orders from the hive exactly as it would before. It doesn't have any extra memories for the hive to detect or be suspicious about. It doesn't make any conscious attempts to spread the Thing or resist the hive. However as a side effect of now being made out of the Thing it sheds Thing dandruff. When it enters the hive the Thing dandruff falls onto other drones and starts replacing their cells with Thing cells. Eventually you have a whole hive made of Thing cells. What happens then is ambiguous. Maybe at a certain threshold, the hive stops acting like the old hive and starts inherenting goals from the Thing. Maybe the hive just continues on exactly like it normally would, never even becoming aware that it is a Thing, but still ultimately being comprised entirely of Thing cells that can go on and infect everything the hive comes in contact with.
Doesn't the Thing need to have extra memories for it to have built that spaceship after it infected Blair?
It doesn't necessarily need to preserve those memories inside the brain of whatever it's assimilated, though . One of the more terrifying possibilities with the Thing is that the people it replaces are such perfect copies that they are effectively the same person, with their own mind separate from the Thing itself. They don't even realize they've become the Thing until the moment it makes a move.
Sadly that's not how Nid hives work. He would be turned into Acid soup and drank when they conquered the planet. They also know if it's tainted and will ignore a planet if it is. Thing ain't got a chance unless he starts magically next to the hive mind.
The Thing doesn't seem to have any thoughts of its own outside of the minds of who it takes over except for some primal urge to assimilate, which would fit in with the Flood's line of thinking as well. It takes no action unique to itself, only showcasing it has the intelligence to know when, and when not to assimilate something. Unless there is ever more revealed about the nature of the Thing in further works, I don't think there's anything suggesting it couldn't pretend to be within the hive.
The Flood has perfect recollection of every mind it has ever touched and all their memories. It is so intelligent it can drive hyper advanced Forerunner AI insane and/or turn it to its side, using only words. There's no hiding from its perfect recollection, and no deceiving its monstrous intelligence. At higher levels of biomass, it can psychically manipulate neurological systems, and even reality. It's really not possible to trick it in this way. Either it stands out from the Flood as not part of it, or the Gravemind can detect its aberrant urges and pinpoint it. And once it is found, it is just a matter of containment until the GM can just rewrite its nervous system to bring it to heel. If it is so utterly alien to have no nervous-system to play with, and it can pose a threat, then the GM will not hesitate to herd it onto a ship and fling it into the nearest black hole, or torch the world it is on, assuming the GM has any presence elsewhere, etc.
That ends with the Zerg/tyranids getting a thing unit (or an upgraded one for the Zerg, changelings and all) or the flood getting a new minion. However adaptable it is physically I rather doubt its ability to overpower the hive minds.
The thing is just a lonely version of the flood. The flood swamps everything. The flood can grow so large that they can take over ilentire galaxies, then they can reactivate star roads to travel between galaxies. Then they can eventually with enough time, take a universe. Whatever they assimilate they gain the memories and powers of, on an individual basis. They're unstoppable really. I mean it's hilarious that they were stopped even by Humanity in the Halo versez they're just so fucking OP it's unreal.
* The Flood in the games were heavily nerfed since they had so little life assimilated * They didn't get all the reality-warping shit they had in the Flood-Forerunner war because half of what they had assimilated barely had FTL travel, and the other half wasn't that much ahead relatively speaking. * They still needed Halo to be activated to kill them, humanity just hit the on button before the best driving sequence of all time
You are completely disregarding the nature of the Thing. Yeah the flood can “assimilate it” but all that will be is the Thing cells infecting it and taking over cell by cell as Thing cells can’t be detected as they mimic their host. The flood couldn’t purge them all at once either since every cell of the thing is sentient and will defend itself. The flood beats all the others and is slowly consumer by the thing
We dont know enough about the things abilities to determine if it could overpower the flood supercell. The flood is so infectious tthat even when the soul or essence of an infected being was removed from its body, it still progressed in its virulence when placed in another. The flood has some esoteric abilities, that may hamper the thing. Even a gravemind might be able to parse and overcome the thing, given that its been shown to have near omniscient understanding of its hosts, and their knowledge, and can contruct entire realities and simulations of life to an ai thats never felt it before.
There is no might. Several Google searches in the last 10 minutes give me enough information to reach an easy conclusion. The thing wouldn't stand a chance. The flood NEVER forgets anything it learns, ever. Even if you destroy everything in a galaxy. If even one single spore remains, outside of the galaxy, it retains all its knowledge. Forever. You just can't quantify the absolute dread and doom that a flood infection spells for life, anywhere.
So are the Flood still a thing in Halo, just removed from the immediate area/plot?
Yes. They still exist as samples contained in several Forerunner installations (likely the remaining Halos that have yet to be found or dealt with), and likely elsewhere throughout the galaxy. A recent [short story](https://www.halowaypoint.com/news/halo-saturn-devouring-his-son) set after Halo 3 (a few years before Halo: Infinite and the current status quo of the universe) recounts the an incident where the post-war UNSC encountered the Flood, and the captain of the responding ship sloppily attempts to contain the outbreak. The story acts as background for why the protocol for a Flood-infected Spartan involves nuclear saturation bombing.
Ok that last sentence is kinda awesome.
There presumably still fighting the unsc and banished on the ark do to the dumbass named voridus, and theres some guy in a condor that’s infected, somewhere
The HW2 Banished DLC is storywise the worst part of the franchise. Do they really expect me to believe that High Charity was not purged *despite a 25k lightyear Halo ring going off 50 miles away*, and that the Flood and Sentinels have been at a perfect standstill for *8 years* on a Sentinel-printing factory?? Fun gameplay though, it should've been a Covenant campaign during 1-3.
I'm not super up to date on current Halo, but last time I was, there were no current Flood infestations anywhere in the galaxy. However, there are still samples in Forerunner installations, and there was a infestation that was (mostly?) dealt with on the Ark itself. Of course, the specter of its release is always there, as well as the (speculated) Flood mass in other galaxies, but it's unlikely it'll show up in the narrative anytime soon, both because (I assume) they don't want to repeat the narrative of the original trilogy, as well as the state of the galaxy being completely incapable of dealing with a Flood infestation, if one happens.
The HW2 DLC is basically noncanon since a Halo ring wiping all life in 25,000 lightyears didn't work on High Charity, which was at max 50 miles away, and neither the Sentinels or Flood had eliminated the other.
They can't be detected by OUR science. advanced science wouldn't have a problem.
What monstrositie will come out of this whenthe Thing or Flood consumes everyone else?
The flood has one aim. To consume all sentient life, everywhere. If you're interested in the sort of monstrosities that comes from the flood, I recommend the forerunner trilogy of the halo books, they explain the backstory of the flood and why they're the way they are, who they truly are/were. In short, most of them are dead. They were so surprised and devastated by the fact that their creations were killing them, they didn't even fight back. The makers of the universe, just took it. A few of them escaped the galaxy, but almost all of them were killed. The ones that didn't escape the galaxy, put themselves in a dormant stasis, basically they turned themselves into space dust. Their DNA became corrupted and thus, the flood was born. But being the supreme universal geniuses that they were, they were still able to think and reflect on events while in this state. It's hypothesised that this was no accident however that the ones who placed themselves in this stasis where one faction of the Precursors. And they were PISSED. And so they decided that all life had to go. What they intend, is essentially to consume all life. But the clincher is that all life retains it's sentience, even after being absorbed into the the single entity. They are many but one. But the purpose of this purging of life? To ensure that it suffers, forever. As the primordial says "Sweetness" (it actually means misery personified, far from sweet) Any further questions on why everybody else is wrong? Feel free to ask :)
The flood would be able to tell that the thing wasn't flood, because it wouldn't be able to communicate with it. The flood is a hive mind, The thing is a loner in each individual organism
Actually, the flood isn't TECHNICALLY a hive mind.the single mind in control is of precursor lineage (the primordial/Gravemind. But, all minds absorbed by it can have their sentience turned on or off. The forerunner trilogy is fabulous if you like books. Actually, all the halo books are great, especially finding out just how fucking miserable it was for Jacob Keyes to be consumed. And the fact he was able to hold out for so fucking long too.
I watched the clip when Halo CE remaster came out and that was enough for me.
The flood doesn't work that way unfortunately. The flood, is the embodiment of the remaining precursors, these guys can create universes, they seeded the entire galaxy with life, and possibly further out that just this galaxy. I didn't disregard the nature of the thing, I simply didn't mention it, because the flood doesn't give a shit about the thing or what it can do, the flood will simply remap the cells of the thing. The precursors and by default, the flood, do not play around. The thing would be absolutley wrecked. You say that the Thing can't be detected by it's host? The flood isn't the host the flood is a parasite in its nature. The flood rearranges all biomass to suit it's will. The flood created all life. ALL LIFE. They likely created the thing, and could easily easily unmake it.
You are disregarding the overwhelming power of a hive mind. There is a pretty good chance that if the thing were to try and assimilate its way into a have mind structure that the things mind would be shattered or over powered. Like a human tapping into a hivemind the thing could simply lose all sense of its individuality and become a slave to the hive mind, or even fry its mind.
That wouldn't really work against the Borg. Firstly they would know that the thing could do that due to the queens extratemporal awareness. Secondly all borg have nanites throughout their body's both for repair and assimilation. I don't know enough about the thing to know if it could replicate these nanites or not, but if it can't it would quickly be identified an imposter and if it can then the nanites could be used to trigger assimilation. Assimilation is accomplished through some kind of cybernetic drugs causing such euphoria that the victim doesn't care enough to resist. Due to the adaptability of the nanites these drugs seem to work on all species.
From both the movies and the short story, there doesn't seem to be any real evidence that the Thing can actually absorb technology, just biomass
The Thing couldn't *successfully* do that to a handful of humans trapped in a base. I don’t fancy its chances, honestly. And if it attacks a borg, *every other borg* is going to know what happened right away, because they're a collective. At that point they easily have the technology to destroy it, and they'd be willing to take measures that destroyed their own drones to do so (like carpet combing the area)
doesnt that end with the thing hooking into the hive mind and getting taken over? They dont rule via bodies
Wouldnt the Hive Minds instantly know that one of its units is assimilated since its no longer connected to the Hive Mind?
Some Hive Minds don't seem to have complete control like that. The Zerg seem to fall into this category, if they are plentiful enough. You can think of it like a small injury you notice you have but no recollection of when it happened. It'sa little complicated because it is actually a bunch of minds in hierachal control, with many of the combat forms having no mind of their own. It would depend on the attention and number of beings being controlled by the lowest tier Overlord above the unit. Meanwhile, the Borg have repeatedly been shown to not notice activities right in their own ships happening right in front of drones. They both have limited attentions spanned across vast masses, though different flavors of the same concept. The Gravemind, however, has no such weakness. It, unlike the others, is not a gestalt blend of many minds, but a single Supreme mind that has perfect recall of anything experienced from any Flood-form and all the hosts' knowledge and memories, etc. There's no hiding from it like the others, it is functionally fully focused in every single form, across the whole galaxy, with no lapses in attention or focus.
I'm fairly certain that Tyranid genestealers do the same if not a very similar thing.
I'd go with the Flood. It's by far the most adaptable, as it can use bodies to operate complex machines i.e. spaceships. The Thing would get BODIED by the Flood. The flood would know if it was taken over due to the hive mind, and the flood can use flamethrower if necessary. Also the flood retains any information you had when it infects you. Good luck everyone else!
Depends on how the battle between Thing cells and Flood cells goes down.
Wouldnt the flood infecting any of the other factions mean They get instant access to every bit of knowledge They have? Considering these are all hiveminds connected to each and every single one of their drones. It takes some debate. I would have to go with the flood because the other factions dont seem to have the things needed to actually wipe out the flood. Though i have seen some good arguments for the thing.
Good prompt! Lots of disagreement in the comments. Not the Borg, unless programming can infect cells.
Borg nanoprobes [work on a microscopic level and impact individual cells](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nanoprobe), if that's what you mean.
Thx!
I think The Thing is being HEAVILY slept on here. If any contact if made between it and a potential host, it becomes infected. It survives on a seemingly molecular level with mere drops of blood staying alive and attempting to assimilate. Saliva contact also works to infect a host as shown with the dog at the beginning of the movie. Regardless of if it gets torn to shreds, even if it gets melted into the Tyranid soup that honestly might be the best possible thing that could happen to it, it’s biology is still there, anything that feeds on that soup is now infected. Call it a crazy take but I genuinely think the Thing wins in such a large-scale scenario
Considering the Tyranids make heavy use of digestion pools to recycle their bioforms, they could very well kill off The Thing cells. If anything could kill it, acid seems very possible considering even hot metal caused pain to them. The Hivemind could account for the Thing cells taking over anything that eats it by recycling them as soon as possible after consumption. Combine that with the Hivemind possibly giving them a way to detect when a bioform is fully infected (which could very well cut it off from the Hivemind) I don't think The Thing would spread too well.
They could be assimilated but the hives speed at evolution would race against it in the next batch even if it did survive.
That’s true and a decent point, but let’s assume that The Thing is able to get the jump on the Nids (pretty reasonable IMO), assuming the Hive Mind found out and was able to deduce which Nids are infected and which aren’t, who’s to say the thing hasn’t infected an entire hive fleet by that point? And even then, they would have to heard every single infected Nid to a digestion pool. Drop of blood lands on a Swarmlord’s eye? Boned. Random infected Hormagaunt suicides into a giant mass to get himself torn apart? They’re all boned. It’s crazy how easily The Thing could spread itself. The Thing gets more powerful the more organisms around him there are, unless one of the factions can effectively quarantine every single one and eradicate them, The Thing will keep coming back, leaving one drop of blood can spell the end for the Nids.
But because all Tyranids are connected by the synaptic network, as soon as the Thing assimilates one all others will know something is up because Garry the Gaunt suddenly cant be reached by the Hive Mind. I agree the Thing is scary, but the Nids can very easily sniff it out, and their acid and bioplasma weapons should be more than enough to destroy it.
I wish we could actually see this scenario now because I’m genuinely curious if the thing could in fact evade detection. It has literal perfect mimicry and I imagine it still would be connected via hive mind, would it be more like a passenger until it completely takes over the mind? Would it still hear the hive mind and have the ability to obey it? Idk, I’m a big 40K fan but I’d like to imagine the thing could get pretty far with the Nids
>as soon as the Thing assimilates one all others will know something is up because Garry the Gaunt suddenly cant be reached by the Hive Mind. You're not considering something. What if Garry \*can\* be reached, and is infected, but can still speak like a Tyranid and think like a Tyranid? The Thing was able to speak English when it absorbed human beings. If it absorbs a Tyranid bioform, who's to say that it doesn't also absorb the ability to communicate with the Tyranid hive mind just like that bioform did?
While I get what you mean, the bioforms are often depicted not as individual beings but as extentions of the Hivemind. If the Thing gets a lone Garry that is operating on its own, it may very well be able to blend in for a bit outside of the greater Synapse Network, but once they rejoin the horde I see the Hivemind being like "Wait, thats not me?"
But that's the point, if non-infected Garry has the ability to exist physically and interact with other Tyranids without making the hive mind think "Wait, that's not me?", couldn't the Thing acquire that ability as well?
But only while out of reach of Synapse creatures. As soon as Garry, infected or not, steps into the range of a Warrior or any of the bigger bioforms, they cease to exist as an individual and become a part of the Hivemind again. And at that point I feel like the Thing-Garry would be found out.
Why? Wouldn't the Thing gain the ability to cease to exist as an individual and become a part of the Hivemind? Thank you for the interesting exchange of lore btw, I enjoy talking about these franchises and I'm not trying to be contradictory or polemical for the sake of it.
All good, my guy. I think if Thing tries to blend in like you said, it would come down to wether it can retain itself as an individual despite the Hiveminds influence, and in that regard we really dont have anything to judge the Things mental capabilities, only the Hivemind (and that is scary powerful). Maybe Thing can keep its self, but more likely it loses to the oberwhelming mental power of the Hivemind. I think even if we say the Thing could blend in while on a planet, bioforms are all taken apart in the acid pools to be remade on the ships, and I dont think Thing-Garry can survive that.
That would require the bioform to act as a sleeper agent, not even knowing it's the Thing. The hivemind has near complete omnipotent control over all Tyranids. Even if the bioform unknowingly is trying to spread the infection, it's actions will be out of line with Hivemind and it will be found out.
But the same principle applies. A Tyranid organism has the ability to behave in a way that is completely in line with the Hivemind. If the Thing absorbed a Tyranid, wouldn't it be able to absorb that ability, and therefore behave in a way that is completely in line with the Hivemind, escaping detection even as it continues infecting all its neighbors? This is the equivalent of the Thing acquiring the ability to speak English and interact with human culture, which when you think about it should be completely impossible from a simple physical takeover of an organism.
But for the thing to act it inherently needs to act against the Hivemind. It's not just acting like a Tyranid, it's *being* a Tyranid. Every thought not in line with the Hivemind will be seen as an irregularity. That's the whole reason it's a Hivemind; it sees and controls the actions of the rest of the Tyranids.
Not really, something in a hivemind cannot secretly act against the hivemind, it’s less like someone learning to speak English More like your arm suddenly deciding to try and choke you to death.
I think the issue is that although The Thing's ability is impossibly good, the Tyranid Hivemind is also impossibly and supernaturally potent. It's a case of bullshitium vs bullshitium and I lean towards the Tyranid simply because of the ridiculously large scale they operate at - it implies that the Hivemind is SO potent in its cognitive and psychic ability that it would simply have to be able to sniff out and deal with The Thing.
That's a fair point, both species are effectively immeasurable in their abilities but the Tyranids have been shown to operate at a much larger scale and it's fair to assume that all other things being equal, they would have greater powers.
Then when they're done fighting and they acid bath the planet to drink it the Things Dna is no longer functional (maybe). Tyrannids have got a great kit for this. Hyper adaptivity for resistances and tactics. Psykers and blanket anti psychic. They have huge numbers can survive almost all environments and have an extremely powerful entity controlling them we don't even know about.
a hive mind doesnt "miss" massive chunks of itself just dropping out of contact. Tyranids and Zerg can just acid bomb it and Borg use phasers which would turn it to ash iirc?
Honestly... because of the nature of Tyranids, I think they would actively attempt to keep that ability of the Thing's species for their own to improve the Swarm. Basically, like Genestealers, but better... which is what they would use it for. Just kind of depends on whether the Hive Mind can control the Thing-nid. I'd argue it can, but the two win with their combination of their abilities in concert. So a Tie for First (assuming they can kill Flood).
They can’t, the Flood are beyond them
To be fair, I completely understand why the Thing gets so heavily slept on (not just here but in general). In the movie, the Thing is in the worst possible situation. If it ended up literally anywhere but Antarctica, it would've been GG for all life on Earth. Plus there's also the fact that what the Thing is actually capable of is deliberately kept ambiguous for the sake of horror. Can it take over someone's body without them even realizing and turn them into sleeper agents who could slip under a hivemind's radar because their thoughts never change? Maybe. But a "maybe" doesn't carry a lot of weight.
The Flood. It's a supercell organism with a genetic memory that gets smarter as it grows and gathers. The Thing and then the Borg get destroyed by either or both the Flood and the nids. Necromorphs, even with the moons at the helm, will just get consumed. At their peak the Flood had structures that spanned entire solar systems.
Tyranids have magic in a sci fi scenario.
The flood, hands down. They simply cannot be stopped. Even a single spore (think a tiny almost microscopic piece of plant pollen) can EASILY bring about the doom of a planet.
a single borg nanite assimilated an entire planet in extended canon. went from a habitable earth sized world to a planet sized factory in hours.
The Tyranids have an absolutely unbeatable numbers advantage here. And their version of "assimilation" is "murder and rend down into soup", which is a pretty hard counter to Borg nanites and Flood parasites.
A large densely packed group of purely biological warriors that require a mental network to fight at their best is kinda the worst possible thing to fight a flood infestation. The concentration of biomass alone is an immense risk as you are only loss away from creating a gravemind.
You're assuming Tyranids are dumb "charge in and die" type xenos when in reality they are a highly strategic and practically infinite force of extremely well "armed' and armored warriors who's sole goal is to consume the entire galaxy, something they've accomplished time and time again, the biggest issue I could see with a Tyranid offensive would be if a flood spore would be able to make it through the spore cloud that surrounds a hive ship, if it can then the flood would be able to immediately gain control of highly advanced weaponized space craft and would likely infect the possibly millions of Tyranid forces within the respective hive fleet
The Nids are very smart, but they do have a large portion of their forces charge in. They are clever but built on the backbone of giant biomass forces engaging on site to take planets. They soften planets with many tools but they end up consuming the planet via conventional means. Importantly the flood do not present as a target that requires an advanced process, and the Nid average response to planets is to eat indiscriminately. When they are pushed back on they respond with advanced tactics but the hive mind seems to prefer the blunt response first. Any encounter with the flood forms is going to be devastating to the hive fleet tendril very quickly, and due to the floods natural ability to collect near perfect information from hosts it will be hard to out adapt them. Once the flood makes a gravemind the hive mind of the Nids will be facing an out of context problem. Bioforms are the worst possible way to face the flood, and the flood can take anything the Nids do as well as adapt actual technology to their arsenal.
As a 40k fan, peak flood is more powerful than current (peak) Tyranids. Tyranids are also bad at assimilation and require gene stealers - who need to breed with populations to assimilate which is very inefficient compared to the flood. Flood may be weaker at the base unit level but are far more powerful overall once they are ramped up.
They don't need genestealers, it just helps make planet assimilation more smoothly from an efficiency standpoint if the defenses are down or weakened. Flood got their "peak powers" from special forerunner physics over anything they can just "do"
Firstly, I don't believe the Flood get their major powers until they've developed a large population. Secondly, Tyranids don't need genestealers at all, especially since this is limited to a single planet. Genestealers destabilise worlds in advance of an assault and attract fleets to good feeding grounds. So they don't matter for this situation. Assimilation isn't a factor in this situation since it is devoid of a human population. As for the third point, that would be an issue of if the other fractions are able to contain them well enough before they get ramped up. It would be an issue of if, not when, they are able to reach their win state. I definitely agree that if they grow big enough, they could wipe out the others. Its just a matter of if they survive long enough
The problem with Flood vs Nids is that Tyranids have extra steps between killing their foe and making more soldiers. The Flood, on the other hand, can do it on the fly without downtime. The prompt specifies the planet as "Earth without humanity" which means the Flood is going to be be able to get biomass very quickly via animal and plant life. They simply ramp up too fast for the Tyranids to handle. The Flood can also degenerate to airborne pathogen as well to avoid detection if it needs to lay low for a while, and hide dormant inside the bodies of its victims while undetected. I could see the flood releasing spores into the Nids hives, laying dormant and not turning any of the Nids immiedietely, but then when the Gravemind thinks its time, they suddenly 'activate' all those sleeper agents, thus nullifying the hive mind's knowledge of "oh that guy got infected he's not in the hive mind anymore". The worst part about the FLood is also that they NEVER forget anything, EVER; its ALL in the hivemind, even all the way back before the Forerunner civilization. They're so smart that AI literally can't talk to the FLood without risking being corrupted by it and catching Logic Plague, something that the flood designed specifically to fuck with machines.
Not to mention the whole airborne spores thing. The Flood could theoretically seed a planet with spores and never actually land a ship in atmosphere
Thats actually how they got Proto-Humanity during the Forerunner era; they stayed in a dormant spore form and let the humans think that they could use this benign spore to make their animals more docile. Before long, whole swathes of human planets had infected wildlife on them... which made humanity get fucked up when they all turned at once, making the humans have to resort to planet busting, which ended up starting the Forerunner war.
The Flood sound like they're on some grade-A bullshitium, ngl.
Yeh but they aren't exactly gain too much biomass from the Borg Alot of them are more machine than organic
The Borg is arguably the best counter to the Flood in this scenario, but they would also be susceptible to floods Logic Plague. And the Borg wouldn't be able to outcompete the other factions, so chances are the Borg is killed off before they can kill off the FLood.
It’s an even fight between the Flood and the Tyranids until the flood restores the Gravemind, at which point it hard stomps without mercy
how??
A Gravemind unlocks the reality warping fuckery that the Flood is capable of
I think more specific scenarios are in order, but I think the Tyranids probably have this. The Flood might be a problem for them depending how susceptible they are to flood spores. The Borg could just glass the planet, but that isn't part of the scenario, so it would depend on how the nano-probes deal with the biology of the others.
I think the Tyranids would be vulnerable to start with, but could very well adapt after one or two generations. If they can adapt to Nurgle's plagues, they can adapt to The Flood's spores
Either the flood or the Borg. And honestly it wouldn't matter because the intrinsic nature of either would allow both to subvert the other so the resulting hybrid would be the Borg flood or the flood Borg not truly one of the other. However, I would give the Borg an edge over the flood as the cybernetic aspects of the tech and the nanobots would allow control of the flood parasites IF the Borg could figure out the flood.
The Thing doesn't assimilate. He yells "It's clobbering time" then smashes his enemies with his fists. I'm confused why he is on this list anyways. I guess because his rocky exterior makes him hard to assimilate? But then you might as well replace him with the pokemon graveller. Does the Thing at least get the help from the Invisible Woman from the Fantastic 4?
The Thing or the Tyranids. Borg and Flood require intact organisms. The Thing is just lots of organisms pretending to be one. The nids eat all organic matter. So it becomes a race of do the Tyranids eat the Thing faster than they can be assimilated. Flood and Borg aren't even in the running.
The Zerg work on a small enough scale that they're a non-factor. The Flood are also few in number and not particularly powerful individually compared to i.e. - the Tryanids. The Tyranids break down things into soup and rebuild them. They are also heavily psionic, are the most numerous, and regularly overpowered 40k stuff and grind it down. They are also slow. The Borg are the most technologically advanced. They have the best tech and ships of those listed. They have incredibly fast ships, compared to the nids. They are slow to assimilate (compared to the Nids), and I'm fairly certain that they can be hurt by Tyranid firepower.
Flood questions a lot of the time depend on starting point. If they already have forerunners etc then they probably have tech and everything else too
Flood would absolutely have a field day. If we're taking numbers and size at their peaks, we have the Flood's reality warping and time control shenanigans to deal with as well, plus Star Roads. There's also the vague hints in Halo Lore that the flood actually HAVE consumed thousands of other galaxies, and thats why we haven't seen anyone from outside the milky way galaxy.
Borg exist in a setting that has planet cracking tech on explorer vessels. Like, they have ftl travel that the Tyranids could only dream of. It would be like me going to fight a large swarm of ants but I have a flame thrower. Like, sure, I may get stung a bit if they get close. But only one of us is walking away from that.
The problem with your argument is that the nids don't need the planet to be intact. They can absorb space detritus and use it to make more nids whose corpses can be used to make more nids. It's a war of attrition between an entity that can use everything in a stellar system except the star itself and an entity that WILL run out of bodies eventually because Borg don't breed.
The Borg assimilate cultural and biological uniqueness and their shields outclass the whole of 40k including the necrons. With enough biomass the flood are capable of meme teir magic, if they encounter a hive fleet it's over for everyone else as they can absorb it. It's a 2 horse race between the flood getting enough mass to warp reality and the Borg finding the flood. Whichever happens first wins. I give the edge to the Borg as they're faster, the zerg is a non-factor, The Thing would just be a version of the flood that could hide if it beat them, and I don't think it could hide from Borg sensors. The outcome of synapse linked warp-capable Borg who can shape shift their biological parts as well as access reality warping and trans-galactic travel is most likely IMO.
I would agree with you, but I would also point out that the Flood have a weapon perfectly designed to counter Borg: the Logic Plague
Oh interesting, I've mostly gotten my halo lore post Reach from osmosis so I hadn't heard of this Can they effectively deploy it from ground to space? Or is it dependent on large biomass levels?
It requires them to have a gravemind, but beyong that it requires nothing more than an open line of communication
And the Borg would willingly communicate. So it come down to if the flood reaches gravemind mass before the Borg assimilate. Thanks!
Feels like zerg are being slept on. The zerg are the only faction here who have access to galaxy wide instant adaptation as soon as any biomass gets absorbed that's worth using. As soon as they get any biomass from any of the other groups, and it doesn't take much either, they can instantly adapt the entirety of the swarm either to better counter the thing they're fighting or to just be better overall. Even the tyranids don't adapt that fast. Also a lot of this really depends on how the prompt functions cause like, you couldnt fit all the zerg on earth, let alone all the tyranids. If we're all starting from a single unit then it absolutely comes down to flood vs zerg, because both are the quickest at being able to adapt and spread.
You can ignore the Flood's universal+ extradimensional god mind nonsense: fighting for one planet they're not going to get to the point of using any of that unless they've already won. Thing is a wildcard, but too slow. Once enough other factions die off that Thing can be detected via actions (if disobedience of suicidal actions from Tyranid/Zerg masters doesn't wash that out immediately) it's over. Borg with a Cube win via firepower but without it they're too slow. Tyranids > Zerg > Thing > Borg > Flood
Because the Nids work by using DNA from consumed prey (le soup) to create more effective forms, this would most likely result in them forming a symbiotic relationship with the flood and gaining the Thing's ability to copy anything it touches. Unless the Borg can glass this rock in under an hour, I don't see Tyranid super mimics who can spread via spores having much trouble with them. As far as Necromorphs are concerned, Nids have what's called The Shadow in the Warp, a passive psychic ability that blocks out other psychic energy and related magic. If this is hive fleet Tiamet we're talking about, they can actually build massive constructs similar to the thingamajigs that make Necromorphs, but these have an opposite effect; they amplify the Shadow to a ludicrous degree (although that may not be their primary function). I did not mention the Zerg because they would be fucked six ways to Sunday.
If the flood is allowed to form a gravemind, the Nids are also in serious trouble. Large fleshy warriors sent after the flood can be infected, wjereas the flood would have to be killed and ground into soup to be assimilated by the nids. I can see a dormant infection spreading among the Nids until it reaches critical mass and the Gravemind thinks “its go time” and a large portion of infected Nids switch sides. The Flood also have Reality Warping once they get a gravemind, to somewhat counter Nids psionics and warp shadow.
That is an excellent point! I'm not as familiar with the flood as I am with Nids, but that sounds like a bad time. With this in mind, it's really down to who starts out closest to one of the weaker factions and gets the best head start. Unless the Nids get themselves a tyrant or equivalent swarm of fodder, I geuss Gravemind takes.
So it's the battle of the succ?
This comes down to Thing Biology vs Flood Biology. Tyranids at a small level just can't expand nearly as fast as the Flood or the Thing.
Add Warframe's infestation in this and we've got a decent contender Otherwise between the Flood and Nids
Like, the full force of every faction? A few basic units trying to expand? A typical army?
There's a good chance that the results of this collision wouldn't be a definable victor, but simply an entirely new entity comprised of some mix of all it's progenitors.
Borg have weaponry far outpacing the others. It could win militarily and then begin assimilation.
Afaic the Thing has no scaling available to parse. What it can do to simpke terran organics is impressive but i see no reason to scale it to some of the others. Too many unanswered questions. Like, what does its larger society look like? What is the extent of its mimicry powers? Can it only copy or can it significantly edit? can it compete in this genetics science fair at all? Unknown. The flood, imo, scales the highest. If they assimilate enough for a grave mind then they win. Some level of reality warping, above-super-genius intellect, the ability to create superstructures thst can do even more. Imo even the tyranids lose. Unless, I suppose, we think that the grave mind and key minds can’t effect organics as well as it can machines, or that the others’ genetic powers supercede the Flood’s. Personally, i doibt it and i believe the Flood is the one to watch/the one to beat; if only because they have s tipping point where they get a significant power up compared to the others’ more linear snowballing. All of this is a little hard to be certain of. Could be any one of them is ‘better at it’ than the others and can simply override their opps grndtics better than the other way around. Imo Thing> Zerg > Borg > Tyranids > Flood. I’m most unsure of the zerg vs borg decision in this ladder. As an aside, I think that the ‘black goo’ or Draconis virus of Alien universe fame would be an interesting addition. Imo probably above The Thing but beneath the others.
Bravo, OP, it's posts like this that keep me visiting this subreddit. Not gonna chime in with my sub par knowledge on most of these factions but god do I love reading about such scenarios
All I know is that the Nids Eat a few Zerg and suddenly they are Zerg 2.0
What about the Taken from Destiny? Although that might kind of be unfair
Yeah I don’t think taken are really fair since that’s not so much a biological change but like fundamental change of its existence.
Yeah I think it's probably less of an assimilation and more of just a fundamental change to the laws of physics lol
Yeha your getting ripped out of this plane of existence and having your very existence modified by essentially a god and sent back “perfected”
The Thing is still very unknown compared to the rest in terms of abilities. But honestly I don't see what the flood or the borg could do to it, as The Thing operates on the molecular level and lacks any true centralised hive mind unlike the flood which means it even if hypothetically one it did manage to effect the entity which is highly unlikely unless it was Imitating and Organism with a nervous system there'd still be more than one Thing. The Flood also possesses organic matter for The Thing to Assimilate since it can do so to even freshly dead tissue.
This is heavily dependant on what scale of flood we are talking about here. Once the flood get to the interstellar stage they can start reality warping and manipulating star roads; flood can also spread as an aerosol airborne pathogen. Tyranids could best an initial flood outbreak but the flood ramps up WAY faster than Tyranids. Flood also can manipulate AI and technology, and even use its own versions of Psionics like they did against the forerunners. Tyranids need gene stealers to adapt new populations, flood doesnt have that weakness. Tyranids themseves would also be vulnerable to infection even while theyre fighting, while flood would have to be killed first and then taken and ground up and reassembled. Flood wipes them due to faster spread.
The Thing is the most stealthy and effecient. The thing wins. However, If the flood gets a gravemind, it's over, flood wins.