Frickin' Necrons

So, the guys and me normally play four armies and we link two of the armies up to fight each other. Two teams of two armies each. You know, its not a bad way to play but there's something about it that always seems a bit stupid. First of all, you get link ups between grey knights and chaos, but still why would the marines fight the imperial guard. Oh, I know, you can all think of a thousand reasons, but still.

What I really like is a good 2000 pt. battle between two races. That way you get to play around with your list and buy things you probably otherwise wouldn't. The 1000 point marine list kind of always looks the same, and well it probably should, but with 2000 points you have more leeway. Yeah, I know, so get to the point...

Well, I brought this up with everyone and we decided to play a 2000 pt. Eldar v. Necron battle, and as it turned out I ended up playing Eldar. I figured I'd share a bit of my wisdom on this subject with you.

Okay, first of all, I've been playing Eldar for a long time, and for the most part, I've kind of stopped playing them so much, and here's why. Vehicles. It's plain, it's simple. If you're playing Eldar, you are almost required to spend all your points on vehicles. There's really no reason not to. Now, I'm not saying that striking scorpions aren't neat and all that, but let's face it, the fire prism can jump out from behind cover, shoot, blow whatever it aims at up, and then jump back behind cover. I lost to the Necrons because I couldn't take out their Monolith, and you know what the answer was? Don't buy fire dragons, buy a fireprism.

Everything in the Eldar army--every kind of infantry--has a more useful vehicular counterpart. Vypers are better than Dark Reapers, Fire Dragons, and Wraithguard. If you have to choose between an Avatar and a Wraithlord, always take the Wraithlord. The only thing that isn't better to buy in vehicular form is the guardian squads and they probably would be if you could put a brightlance on the bikes. People talk about the insane power of the Eldar army, and I agree, but you can tell if you're fighting one of those kinds of armies--does it have any spiffy looking infantry. If so, you're in for a fair fight. In any case, Eldar should not be allowed the Vyper in 40k in 40 minutes, because the Crystal Targetting Matrix just makes that ridiculous.

So, you may ask, at what point value is it feasible that you are willing to try infantry along with the vehicles? And this I cannot answer. Honestly, I play Saim Hann which means that if you give me more points, I'll just buy more vypers. In the 2000 pt. battle, I nearly ran out of points before I got to my infantry. I actually had to not buy the falcon, and then I lost because I decided on Fire Dragons rather than a fire prism. Sad.

Are Eldar powerful? Oh yes. If you want to you can make a nigh unstoppable army. The only problem is that it's the same army every time: wave serpent with your seer council (twin linked star cannons and a shuriken cannon), six vypers (Shuriken and star cannons), a fire prism, and two squads of guardians with star cannons. After that, it's all just garnish.

Now, I did lose, so don't think I'm strutting too much. The truth is, no matter your army, you have to play smart against Necron. This is not an army you can chip away at. If you fire everything you have, you will find that the next round, you have really only killed one or two of them--and probably not even that if they're near the monoloith. The monolith itself is extremely invulnerable, and even the lowliest of necrons has the firepower to take down a Land Raider, plus the range of their weapons makes them.... Look, let's try this another way, everthing about the Necrons is totally nasty. They have only two weaknesses, if you can manage to hit them with a nuclear bomb, they won't come back, and they aren't great at hand to hand. I keep hearing people tell me that they aren't good at hand to hand. That's not true--they're marines that don't come with any special weapons. That's not bad.

Part of the tactic is to lock them into hand to hand with a guy with a power weapon, this can be useful, but only if the resurrection orb isn't anywhere nearby. My recommendation is that you never target any squad near a monolith--what you manage to kill vs. the ammount of firepower you need to kill it with is just insanely out of proportion. Either destroy the monolith, or if that can't be done, destroy the squad with the necron lord, or if that can't be done, destroy a squad far enough away from both lord and monoith that you have some assurances that they will die. To kill, keep shooting. Start shooting and do not stop until the entire squad is gone. If you don't manage to kill the entire squad, you probably shouldn't have attacked at all. Enough of them will be coming back to make the whole thing a moot point. Meanwhile, while your fucking around killing one necron a round, the monolith is coming up with that gauss field thingee that hits everybody 1-6 times. That's just plain nasty!!

Mind you, if the Necron player is smart, he'll keep throwing scarab swarms at your wraithlords, etc. to tie them up for the whole game. My problem is that I tried to fight a three front battle against these jack asses. I'd applaud myself for shooting down 3 or 4 flayed ones a round, and yes, after four rounds, I had utterly destroyed them, but that's three rounds that my wave serpent (and its twin linked star cannons) could have been doing real damage elsewhere. And besides, flayed ones??

If you are playing Eldar against the necrons, watch out for the destroyer bikes. It doesn't take too many of them to make quick work of your vypers, crystal targetting matrix or no. Your target priority should be monolith, lord, destroyers, stragglers, and for god's sake, don't stop shooting until its dead.

Necrons are, by the way, the only army where knocking out quantity is better than knocking out quality because of the "we'll be back" rule or something like that. If you can kill enough schlemiel necrons the rest of them phase out. This is the best way to win the battle because you can do it in one turn and they don't get to make all those resurrection rolls.