Hey everybody,
After all of this auditing lark that I’ve been doing lately, I’ve been struck once more by just how much I enjoy my Necrons, and while I always think of them as my first love and my first army etc, it’s interesting to me how they’re actually not really a finished army yet.
Long term readers of my blog are not only a fabulous bunch, but will no doubt remember that I began my love affair with Necrons in 2014 and set about painting a batch of Lychguard. Over the autumn of that year, I produced something resembling an army, with my take on the classic gold and green Sautekh colour scheme. It wasn’t very good, I have to say, and when GW discontinued the Mourn Mountain Snow texture paint that I had been using to base them all, I seized on this as the excuse I needed to start afresh. And so, in the summer of 2017 I began anew with my take on the Thokt Dynasty, the black and grey with blue weapons scheme that you used to get on the back of the old boxes, before they decided to change them all again.
Anyway.
For 9th edition, Necrons became the main antagonist, and had a range makeover. Lots of new models came along, and we only really lost the heavy destroyer upgrade kit, but these new models haven’t really appealed to me. Don’t get me wrong, stuff like the Psychomancer is an incredible looking figure, and I’m really quite pleased with how he turned out in my scheme, but I hate the fact that they have now sculpted battle damage into the models. Necrons are meant to be a vastly superior race, technologically, to the Imperium, and their necrodermis is a living metal capable of self-repair. While it makes some vague sense for the warriors to be a bit dinged up, if their self-repair protocols are wearing out, the fact that the Lords also have this damage does annoy me more than it should! I’ve painted some of the new models, but in the main I find myself sticking to my older models, where I can get a more pristine look. Plenty of people like to have their Necrons looking like they really are thousands of years old, but I prefer to think of them as better than that!
So I’ve been taking a look at what I’ve got, and I must admit to being really surprised at just how many models I have, both in physical number and in points! In terms of units, I have 33 in total (assuming minimum squad sizes), and in terms of points, I have 3479 points of the old-wave kits. This is both fully painted and not (but does not count the unassembled – of which there are at least a further 7 units / 1080 points). For those of you who may be interested, my collection of new-wave kits totals 12 units and 950 points, though I do also fancy getting the Chronomancer model, as he does look really nice. Anyway. This does beg a very interesting question now, of course – what am I ever going to do with all of these miniatures? Do I really need this many models for an army, when I normally play games around the 1000 point mark?
As always, the answer is complicated.
See, in terms of function within the army, I have 4 HQ options and five big units of troops. I then have a little bit of everything that the Codex has to offer, which allows me to mix things up if I feel like fielding a different type of army. So I can bring some Tomb Blades and Wraiths if I want some fast options, I can pepper in some Triarch Praetorians if I feel the urge; I can field a big phalanx of Lychguard for some heavy hitting, with some Triarch Stalkers to shoot the battlefield up. All the while backed up by the immense gunline of 40 Immortals and 10 Warriors.
So I suppose, even though I’m never going to play a game with everything on the table at once (well, at least I think I won’t!) it’s good to be able to switch up the way the army will run for a bit of variety.
With that variety in mind, I think it’s time I once again looked for a game with my beloved Necrons, and I’m thinking of the following build.
With all of the recent points adjustments, a big chunk of my army will fit quite nicely into a 1500-point battalion, it seems! I do have a lot of guns in here as well, even if they aren’t particularly heavy. The Triarch Stalker is there almost for distraction purposes – it costs a lot considering it only has the one weapon (making 6 shots, admittedly!)
This army idea is able to combine two of my greatest loves about the Necrons, though – the gunline, and the Lychguard. I may yet swap out that Stalker for a group of Lychguard with swords, although doing so would mean the Spyder almost becomes obsolete, as he only has one target for his repair ability, admittedly a fairly important one! But by dropping those two units, I could include more Lychguard and some Deathmarks, so it’s swings and roundabouts, really.
Lychguard have been my favourite Necron models almost from the start, and they were definitely the ones that got me interested in the army to begin with. A melee-dedicated bodyguard unit, it’s often difficult to make them work, I find. Each model makes 3 attacks, and equipped with warscythes, a single five-man squad is making 15 attacks, hitting on 3s, at S7 AP-4 D2 apiece. There is also a stratagem to give them +1 attack when within 3” of a friendly Noble model, so if they’re close to the Command Barge, that’s 20 attacks. They’ll be wounding power armour on 3s as well, although another stratagem will give them +1 strength, so wounding power armour on 2s. Delightful. With ten, I should be causing absolute carnage with them, but that 5” movement is often the death of me. In the past, however, I’ve used the Veil of Darkness to move the Command Barge and a massive blob of Immortals into the backline of my opponent to attempt to destroy him, but even given the fact that you can now only move one additional unit with it (it used to be D3), I think moving a blob of Lychguard is the best play.
Whenever I play my Necrons, my buddy JP has nightmares over how brutal tesla can be, even though I generally don’t roll that well! But this army configuration does have effectively thirty tesla carbines, between the Immortals and the Tomb Blades. Each carbine is making 2 shots, so that’s 60 tesla shots that are hitting on 3s, most likely wounding on 3s too as they are S5 AP0 D1, but of course each hit roll of 6 causes 2 additional hits. Even with all of those odds for getting additional hits in there, if the target unit is still alive, there’s a stratagem to dish out mortal wounds to nearby units, causing yet more mayhem!
It should be a nice, fairly robust army. But it does have me at the helm, rolling the dice, so anything could happen…
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