Fourth Game With The Necrons

Welcome back my fellow self-repairing brethren and sister..en? Growing up in an overly religious household, I grew to loathe Sundays. What was to be the weekend for all of my friends was another day of sitting quietly in a large room full of equally-bored children at a desk with nothing to do but count how many little hole thingies there were in the ceiling tiles, praying to god (pun intended) that the day would end. If organized religion is your thing; more power to you and I mean no offense, it's just not my bag. Getting back on point, Sundays used to be the bane of my week. Now that I'm in my twenties and capable of allowed to make my own decisions, things are much more enjoyable and Sundays are one of the best days of the week. Why? It's 40k day! This week I went into a team-game scenario with the new Necron dex, something I have yet to do since my first game, and it was quite fun. This game, more than any, I learned a lot about the balance of the Necrons when constructing a list, but I'll go over that in full detail after the jump.

This game consisted of:

1000pt CSM

1000pt Grey Knights

1000pt Necrons

vs

1500pt IG

1500pt Vulkan

I'm not going to pretend like I remember everything in my opponent's or even my own team's list. What I do remember, however is there were lots and lots of vehicles to kill. Luckily for me the list I made a few days prior is as follow:

HQ

Anrakyr the Traveler w/ Command Barge

Royal Court

Cryptek w/ Eldritch Lance, Solar Pulse

Troop

65 - Warrior x5

65 - Warrior x5

170 - Immortal x10 (Pyrrhian Eternals)

Fast Attack

75 - Scarab Swarm x5

75 - Scarab Swarm x5

140 - Wraith x4 w/ 1x Whip Coil

Heavy Support

100 - Spyder x2

Honestly, I wanted to try the AV13 spam list I tried in a previous game so I could insure that it is viable, but you've all seen that list before so I wanted to try out this much talked about HQ; Anrakyr. He's that baddy that makes enemy vehicles shoot for you on a 3+ and while this looks good on paper, the 18" range makes things dicey and needs to be put into practice for a real evaluation.

Deployment Type: Spearhead

Game Type: Supply Drop

This game type was created by the CSM player, Mr. Lemon. Always one for taking a rulebook and promptly saying, "Yeah that's cool and all, but I can do it better," Mr. Lemon is the manipulator of game rules and does a smashing job in everything I've seen. The way Supply Drop works is each team has 3 points to capture, these points arrive via Deep Strike from reserve. For a point arriving safely on the board, the team deploying it gains a point. A troop standing within 2" of the point at the end of the game also gets a point. So it's essentially a 6 point Seize Ground game with points arriving from reserves via Deep Strike.

Roll for Initiative; team Griffondor (IG and Vulkan) wins. Remember me saying they had a lot of vehicles?

Yeah...

Team Slitheren (CSM, GK, Necrons) deployed as follows:

Instead of telling you all that I learned at the end, I'm going to change it up and explain as I go as some games are just too big to go into nostalgia on a blog. First, when you have a Command Barge running around and your deployment is Spearhead; go into reserve... Honestly our whole army probably should have gone into reserve to get an advantage in flanking our opponents, but I had new toys I wanted to try and decided to send it all in. As for the Command Barge, I think things would have been that much more nasty had Anrakyr come in on the flank. Secondly, I kept my Scarabs together going after similar targets, something I'm learning not to do. A Scarab Swarm can handle itself given a Solar Pulse and Spyders, but splitting them up would have made this game a lot more one-sided for us in my opinion.

First turn I popped the Solar Pulse as I knew my teammates and I wanted to press forward. This didn't stop much of anything, unfortunately. Our opponents came at us full-force with 2 Land Raiders full of Termies and Vulkan along with a RB with half a Tac Squad and 2 Leman Russ'. A Chimera on the other side of the board managed to peck away at my Scarabs, but with Spyders pushing out 2 more bases a turn didn't matter much. Mr. Lemon's Rhino full of 1k Sons got popped, but without many 3+ armour targets on that side of the board it didn't hinder us much.

Let's talk Anrakyr for a bit. I managed to move him 23" (giving me a cover save I completely forgot to take...doh!) over a Leman Russ squad, then moved back 1" as the ultimate dick move from someone with a new codex. Winning isn't really what I'm interested in. Pulling off sweet-ass moves on the other hand? Yeah, that's my bag. With the cheesy Sweep Attack from the Command Barge I managed to remove 2 weapons on one LR and Shake the other. For the shooting phase I used his Mind of the Machine ability (you can use it even if you moved flat out as it's not a shooting attack,) on a Land Raider's Multi-melta to shoot the other Land Raider that was barely within 12", managing to Immobilize it which becomes very important when we get to the Scarabs.

Speaking of which, I discovered that Scarabs (Beasts) get Fleet. To which I have to say, I don't understand why anybody thinks old Scarabs are better than these new ones. 6" move, 1-6" run, 12" assault? That's 1-6" better than Jetbikes ladies and gents, and that doesn't even include how deadly they've become.

The above image is what remains after a Scarab Swarm attack with only 5 bases. A Land Raider that had been Immobilized (thank you Anrakyr) and a Chimera that moved 6" were ready to be chewed up by my bugs. 15 hits into the Land Raider and 10 hits into the Chimera resulted in the LR becoming a 5/5/5 vehicle and the Chimera becoming 8/6/6. Rolls to glance/pen from these attacks resulted in a LR blowing up and a Chimera wrecked. Think about that; 75 points destroyed 295pts in one attack. That's almost four times their cost! The chance of 5 Scarabs wrecking (they couldn't explode anything with glances) these 2 vehicles in one assault with old Scarab rules is so minute I had to calculate it...it's a 0.0000000000000000006% chance. Anyone who whines about the new Scarabs, kindly shut it up nao.

A major thing I'm learning with the new Necrons is synergy. Similar to Warmachine, and more specifically Cryx, every unit working together while list-building is extremely important to the Necrons. This list I made was a poor one, however. I wanted to try out Anrakyr and well, that's it. Everything else was just tossed in without a lot of thought put into them. Aside from using Anrakyr to use a Land Raider to Immobilize another Land Raider to let the Scarabs auto-hit, there wasn't much synergy going on. In the beginning it's important to try new things out you've never seen before to gauge their usefulness, but with eyes-to-paper assessments better assessments could have been made.

As an example, I put Wraiths in the list for no other reason than they fit the points-cost I needed. They didn't contribute much because there wasn't a place for them around my army and so, ran off on their own to attempt to kill some vehicles. Also, I could have finagled some points to insure at least one more vehicle got into this list. Necrons have some of the most durable vehicles in the 40k universe and not using anything but the Command Barge which was a semi-suicide unit made me feel dirty during gameplay. I'm not saying vehicles are a necessity, but with this list I could have benefited from some shot absorption or last-turn rushes to enemy points.

The rest of the game will be told in a horribly unorganized fashion as me and my infinite capacity to not remember...well, anything, forgot to take pictures until the end. Both teams had their points land safely, and in our own deployment zones. My Warriors held our 3 points most of the game while a Tac Squad in a RB was holding all 3 of our opponent's. Anrakyr's barge blew up, of course, but he continued to foot-slog it to a RB, whiff with his Tachyon Arrow that was an inch from his face and assaulted it resulting in an explosion that actually wounded him. He was promptly gunned down by the Tac Squad of Senior Darrel's that I have dubbed the untouchables (anything that went after them failed their Ld or ran away for one reason or another.) Thankfully, Anrakyr managed his Ever-Living roll and got back into the game to make use of a Leman Russ' S10 AP1 cannon for a turn before Stunning it for the next.

A Heart-Warming Tale About A Leman Russ.

Mr. Lemon's CSM unit with 2 meltaguns was unkillable. Taking 11 wounds, 8 of which were Instant Death, managed to toy with the wound allocation and come out the other end with 2 Meltaguns and a Powerfist still alive gunning for a couple of Russ'. Sterling's GKs were the ultimate cleanup crew. Anytime the Necrons were forced into melee, his GKs popped in to finish them off before my guys bit it. He even kept a lot of shooting off of Anrakyr so he had the time to use Mind of the Machine a couple more times! If there was a Salamander on the board, the GKs were getting in their way; Terminator or otherwise.

I want to talk Immortals with Anrakyr. He gives one unit of Immortals Furious Charge and Counter-Attack. First of all, woop-dee-doo. A shooting unit gets assault stuff. However, the Furious Charge gave me the courage to assault two, count 'em, two whole Terminators! To which I only killed one and was slowly getting 1-2 Immortals killed every turn unable to kill off that last Termie... Thankfully Sterling's HQ Deep Struck in right next to us to help clean up the mess I had started. Teamwork!

I mentioned how I should have split up the Scarab units earlier; I thought about it during deployment and as time went on it became clear that I had made a grave mistake. At one point all of my Scarabs were gone being barely in range of a Chimera/Leman Russ Squad's fire and the other dying to flamers after their triumphant defeat of 2 Imperial vehicles. My Spyders were both alive, however, and sitting in the middle of the board and had a choice to make. On their right, a unit of IG infantry and a 5man Tac Squad further out that they could have easily handled. On their left, a Land Raider that could only be killed by glancing Gauss fire closing in on our points... Had my other Scarab unit gone off to the left of the board like I had considered when we were deploying I would have had a unit capable of taking that vehicle out. Unfortunately, I didn't do this and I had to make the choice between killing off the enemy's troops or saving my own. I chose the safer route and went after the Land Raider, but this is a decision I wouldn't have had to make had I listened to my gut... Live and learn.

Here's a shot of the end of turn 4 and Senior Darrel's crotch, where we had to end things due to me having to get to work, unfortunately. Not that I hate my job or anything like that, it's just 2 squads of Grey Knight Terminators had just arrived on this turn and the previous turn and Mr. Lemon's Daemon Prince had just arrived in between the enemy's last remaining Troops. Given another turn, provided the Daemon Prince survived to see melee and my Spyders managing to rid the table of the Land Raider, we would have seen victory. Either way, it was a fun game, and I got to test out what I wanted.

With 3 points landing safely on each side and 3 points captured on each side, this game ended in a tie.

Why yes, we are dorks. Thank you for noticing.

More battle reports on the way and another AdMech conversion to post this week. Stay tuned.