Necrons Arise

I had my first run with the new Necron rules yesterday, against Matt's Charcaradons, the result was a decisive victory for the metal zombies. I used the Decurion detachment, and believe me when I say, there is not a single reason not to use that when taking Necrons.




My plan with the list was to take advantage of the 4+RP, so first on the list were two 20 man strong Warrior squads. Nothing has changed regarding the stats of this unit, so there were no big surprises here. Units got in range and 20 to 40 Gauss Flayer shots removed the target, it was the 4+ RP that really helped as they only lost a single warrior during the game. There is no substitute for these being the backbone of your army, they are that reliable.

I did have a single Ghost Ark to try and back up the Warriors by replenishing the squads, I will probably buy another so I have one for each squad, because, even though they only replenish D3 units per turn, unless they are focused, they will be at full strength for most of the game. Sadly, in this game, a lucky lascannon shot, penetrated the Quantum Shielding and destroyed it with one shot.

This was the first game that I had ever used Tomb Blades, and it did bring up an interesting point. Giving it the Nebuloscope to ignore cover will only be any use against vehicles to deny them a jink, if you are using them to hunt infantry, then your weapons will more than likely never deny them an armour save. My preferred load-out right now would probably be Gauss Blasters, Shield Vanes and a shadowloom, but it may work out to not put any special equipment on at all and just rely on a 3+ Vane save.

I took the Canoptek Harvest formation, mainly to prey on the paranoia of my opponent when Wraiths are on the table. Giving them Reanimation Protocols is dirty and keeps them alive a lot, it also makes the scarabs a bit more survivable. In fact, I was more impressed with the Scarabs than I thought, 30 attacks from 6 bases devoured a Predator as easy as it would if it munched it with the old entropic strike rule. They managed to survive two round with Lightning Clawed Terminators too, which held them up just enough.

The Wraiths however, they are quite tough to shift, but I feel that they lack punch. You are relying on rolling 6's to get any guaranteed damage and that didn't work for me. I do wonder if they would have stuck around for as long if the Spyder was shot first, only allowing one of those in the formation as opposed to a squad does bring in a single point of failure to the formation along with it being outrun. I will have to see how that goes in future games.

I took an Overlord with a Lychguard retinue, but after the Lychguard butchered a unit of marines in the first turn, they didn't really do much else. The Overlord was tooled to the teeth with almost every special rule I could put on him along with getting Eternal Warrior from the warlord traits. It goes against how I usually play, but with spare points I chose to put them into the Overlord as opposed to fielding a couple of extra scarab bases which probably would have worked out better.

Rounding out the list was a 10 man Immortal squad, sadly, the Warriors outgunned them, so they didn't have a huge amount to do in a game where I outnumbered the marines by pretty much 2 to 1.

The huge benefit to this new book is how Reanimation Protocols work, 4+ is huge, and being able to reroll 1's when near the Warlord is big too. To go against Necrons, you need to think horde and take lots of multishot, or template weapons and just force failures through the number of rolls. I don't think reserves or drop pods help either, you need to match the gunline, otherwise, you end up feeding your models to the Necrons in a conveyor belt fashion.

This new book has strengthened the metallic horde, it's going to be interesting to see what the solution to taking them down will be.