Games Workshop - Warhammer 40,000 - Necrons Canoptek Doomstalker

Product Information

Finally, it’s worth highlighting that one unit of Ophydian Destroyers is a great addition to lists where you can find points for them. They provide a strong Rapid Ingress tool, more than capable of flattening an enemy utility piece, and their ability to do a redeploy gives you some late-game flexibility, or enduring value from them after they’ve done their first strike. How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Hordes?

Melee is good now! Being able to compete in the fight phase is proving essential in 9th, and this book gives Necrons the tools to deal with their opponents up close.

Planning Your Army

Relentlessly Expansionist: At the start of the first battle round, before the first turn, units with this code can make a Normal Move of up to 6″. Overall, this terrain is easily the most mobile terrain we’ve ever seen for the game. Although, as we said before you’ll want to be running multiple Crypteks to get the most out of shooting these things around the board. Ophydian Destroyers If the number of dice in that pool is greater than or equal to the Wounds characteristic of any of the reassembling models, select one of those models to be Reanimated. A Reanimated model: Each one of these is also coming with a pretty nasty short-range gun that is oddly…only S4 but doing -3AP 3 Damage. Necrodermis - The armour of Triarch Stalkers is made up of the same living metal Necrodermis that makes up all Necron bodies and vehicles. Its remarkable regenerative properties allow it to automatically repair damage to itself; whether this is the regeneration of parts of its hull, the reknitting of metal plates, and the reconnection of circuits and other delicate systems to bring its weapons online again. Many a foe has celebrated prematurely after landing a solid hit on an Triach Stalker only for it return its lethal firepower after a few moments of repair.

Depending on your budget Skorpekh are going to be easier to come into, but Wraiths are a great kit and a strong independent unit so we’ll leave it to your personal preference. Lychguard are also no slouches in combat, though they are slower, so if you want a good midfield threat that can shield your characters that’s not a bad option. Once you have a few large melee threats established you’re going to want to fill out your list with some sturdy troops and fast objective-grabbers/harassers, which Warriors and Scarab Swarms fill quite nicely. A lot of players also really enjoy bringing along a C’tan Shard of the Nightbringer, who is a HUGE threat to anything nearby and provides solid offense and/or distraction (note it does not benefit from the Dynasty traits). With the new book in play, Necrons play pretty much how you’d expect just from looking at them. Legions of durable infantry lumber up the board, surrounded by a panoply of strange and terrible damage dealers, whether they be viciously be-clawed constructs, robot space wizards wielding arcane relics, imprisoned star gods or looming ancient war machines. Your core forces are extremely durable, while your specialist units are exceedingly effective when deployed in the right situations. The tradeoff for all of this is that you have to think ahead. Many units are relatively ponderous, while the powerful Command Protocols have to be planned out before battle is even joined. Get your strategy right and you can grind your foes before you. Get it wrong, and the pesty galactic usurpers will run rings around you, forcing you to make a tactical withdrawl to your tomb world rather than be undone. You can also make use of the Stratagem sheet to help punch up into big targets – full wound re-rolls on shooting from Protocol of the Conquering Tyrant can allow smaller stuff (or regular Lokhusts) to flay wounds off almost anything, while Protocol of the Hungry Void can often push you to a Strength breakpoint. Even with that, being realistic about what you can or can’t expect to kill at a given moment is very important, and you should always focus on the things that realistically threaten to clear your units, as you can weather firepower from lesser enemies comfortably. What Combos Should You Build Around?One such fear ability, we got to see during the preview. Nightmare Shroud is simple enough if enemies are within 6 inches of this unit they get -1 leadership and -1 to combat attrition. Solid and simple, hopefully, its points/datasheet will justify taking him so we can see more of that spectral goodness. Chronomancer With the flavor of time-bending, their special ability helps to make it easier for them to get into combat as well as soak up fire. If a unit is within 9 inches you can choose it to re-roll charge rolls and get a 5+ Invulnerable save until your next command phase. Flayed Ones C’tan are terrifying! C’tan get a gigantic power boost (and, to be fair, cost hikes to match) making the star gods the absolute monsters they should be. Especially the NIghtbringer. Oh we’ll get to the Nightbringer.

Just like most armies, Necrons have sub-factions each specialising in different aspects of warfare, in this case the Dynasties. Most units have a keyword, which you replace with the name of one of your choice when adding them to your army. Choosing to draw a whole detachment from the same Dynasty allows units in that detachment (other than Dynastic Agents and C’tan Shards) to benefit from a Dynastic Code, boosting their capabilities. Quantum Shielding: Rewritten completely, this now functions as both a 5++ and a permanent transhuman (can only ever be wounded on 4+). Last of all we have the Sautekh. Like with the Nihilakh the faction trait here is a little underwhelming. The gauss reaper has moved to being an assault weapon, so essentially this is a boost of 6″ to the rapid fire range of gauss flayers and 3″ to blasters. That’s fine, but not spectacular. Re-rolling morale is also kind of only OK – Necrons tend to either be fine or dramatically past the point where a re-roll will do that much.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Tanks and Monsters?

Welcome to the first in a series of Faction Focus articles for 10th Edition. 10th has now been in the wild for long enough that people have really started to get to grips with what each faction can do, and starting today we’re going to be publishing articles exploring each one in turn. This Edition, we’re planning to be much more modular about how we handle our enduring competitive content for the game’s various factions, aiming to make it easier to maintain, and this is the first step down that road. This is a very basic intro modelling set, but offers a bundle of some test models and a good spread of paints for the “standard” Necron color scheme. With 6 paint colors, 3 models, and a brush, this set works out to about the same amount as if you bought them on their own, although the Agrax Earthshade and Tesseract Glow containers are smaller than the retail versions which are more expensive so separately you’d get slightly more paint for slightly more money.

Dynastic Agent: Units that can be added to any Necron detachment without breaking detachment abilities or protocols. Overall, I am pleased about this change. While it hurts some units, most notably the large Destroyer squads that were staples of older builds, I’m reasonably convinced that the payoff in making the core 1W infantry much, much better is worth it, and it being rolled out for free to a bunch of Canoptek stuff is just gravy. Command Protocols Next up, shooting. This is an area where the Q3 2023 Dataslate hit the best Necron options quite a bit, so there’s a few ways you can go with this. Lokhust Heavy Destroyers and Doomsday Arks are your top quality choices, but you definitely pay for them. Doomsdays are just all-round good and durable, but hard to hide, a little swingy and run you 210pts each. Lokhust Heavies, on the other hand, are extremely good at killing whichever target you build them for, and fairly easy to hide, but way, way more fragile than you’d normally expect from a 150pts “heavy shooting” unit. You generally need something that can kill enemy tanks, so either three Gauss Lokhusts or a Doomsday is a fine place to start here, which you can either supplement with the choices below, or a second unit of the same (with the option on Enmitic Lokhusts on a second unit).Next is the one that we will be seeing on almost every table, the Sempiternal Weave. This is a simple, amazing upgrade that can be put on any Necron character that provides them with a 4+ Feel No Pain ability. This has a ton of applications for it, especially when we are taking into account the d3 minimum heal, and is particularly strong on the Command Barge Should the Triarch Stalker's firepower prove insufficient for the task at hand, it can instruct nearby Necron phalanxes to add their firepower to its own, and even transmit targeting data to ensure these augmentative volleys are as accurate as possible. Only the toughest and bravest of foes can withstand such a barrage -- others are driven screaming from the battlefield, or mown down by the pinpoint salvoes. Overall, with a random D6 shot output and only hitting on a 4+, you’ll most definitely want to bring more than one of these to get the most value out of your points. Definitely a sweet model though.