So lore question fighting the nids: wouldn't it always be better to try to take them out in space? Or is it too hard and it's better to try to waste as much of their resources on the ground as possible until they all die or leave?
They do. The Word Bearers trilogy actually shows them doing a limited evacuation of a world in the sights of a Hive Fleet, before mercy-killing all the biomass left behind via bombardment.
Problem is, you can’t do that all the time, especially on key worlds that either sit in major systems, home worlds or forge worlds.
Good 40k fiction with the Tyranids will have them swarming a world the Imperium can’t destroy (Macragge) and then depicting to resulting metal war against locust-xenomorph-dinosaurs, as Space Marine 2 has done. Tyranids are much harder to fight than the Thousand Sons.
Possibly, I could still see them at least doing schizos that mutilate captives to make them more “perfect” at a minimum though. I think they can be pretty horrific without even focusing on the sexual aspects
I remember it was the Lucius novel that detailed the poor fucks whose fluids they drain for meth are in a Matrix-style pod and simulation. The token human was in the simulation, meets a cute girl with distinctive eyes, gets pulled out cause the marines need to talk to him, he gives them what they want and he sees one of the tubes and a withered husk of a woman has the same eyes.
That’s also the novel that has an EC terminator whose sole life ambition was to get terminator armor, but he’d never qualify in the legion days. So now after countless betrayals and schemes, including willingly becoming a sorcerer’s Igor, he has a full suit……… and its machine spirit hates him due to the suit being cobbled together.
EC are simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.