Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hammer18 wrote:at: ambrosius: they do have a common goal. kick you off their land and then make you worship them

Actually some of their Empires have fixed borders already. There are only some empires willing to expand and therefore threaten other races caught in their path. This also creates diversion among them. Some empires just do not care whether or not the others are expanding, as long as they are not trying to expand to their territory.

I think the main issue now is two fold, at least for me;

1) The Necrons are now interested in conquest. At best, before, they wanted to keep control there own Tomb World. Most other planets attacked were basically C'tan food. There are a couple of rare cases where they're doing something like investigating the Warp, because of it's danger to them and there desire to tame it, but they didn't want to hold planets bar the Tomb Worlds.

Unlike the Tyranids, Imperium, and even Chaos Necrons have limited numbers. They can make more chassis for Necron spirits to go in, but there will never be more new Necrons. Every time a Tomb World dies the Necrons with it are also doomed, at least as I understand it, and once destroyed can't be brought back.

So it doesn't matter if there are trillions of Necrons around - there are trillions of worlds, too, and a single Necron can't conquer a world. There numbers are going to run out before they run out of planets to conquer.

2) The loss of decent travel. If they can't access the Webway in that area, they're screwed. If that section of the Webway is damaged (as listed in the codex) they're screwed. If the section of the Webway they need is used by the Eldar (either flavour) they're in serious trouble.

Although not as badly off as the Tau for galactic travel, the Necrons got shafted pretty hard there (I always assumed the Necron ships were basically the next step, technologically, after the webway - able to carve a sort of temporary webway passage to wherever they need to go) and it leaves whole chunks of galactic real estate off limit.

The whole Necron using the Webway thing seems stupid to me anyway. I like the rest of the fluff pretty much but that irks me.

I really don't see the problem with the webway. They still have FTL, likely still faster and safer than anything the Imperium has. It just so happens their super tech has also given them access to the webway, and it is hard to beat the webway. Potentially you can cross the galaxy in hours or minutes, in total secrecy, and appear downtown or in the middle of an enemy base, without the use of ships. Of course crossing real space is slower than that.

They don't have FTL. They make a point of it, about how they had to hijack the Webway because they have no psykers to navigate through the warp.

"As a race bereft of psykers, the Necrons are incapable of Warp travel, and without access to the Webway, they would be forced once more to rely on slow voyaging stasis ships, dooming them to isolation."

That's on page 8, the Dolmen Gates. On page 16, in the Trantis, the Raider's Moon part, it details a Tomb World whose section of the Webway is useless and cut off, and although it keeps raiding and looting they can't transport the materials to anywhere useful/

Yes, I've seen that part, but that is where we have a problem. First of all, it doesn't actually say "no ftl", just that they have to use slow moving stasis ships. I will grant that we would typically construe that to mean slower than light sleeper ships.

But that blatantly contradicts numerous other pieces of of fluff, e.g. their teleporters that can transport in troops from other systems, flayers abilities, their ability to slip between dimensions, their galaxy spanning empire.

So we are left with a problem of interpretation. We can throw out one portion as incorrect (always an option in 40k fluff as it is blatantly stated that fluff is often contradictory and incorrect), or we can attempt figure out a way that both statements are true.

Going with the second option, I still think the best interpretation is that they have ftl (which it never clearly says they don't have), but it is much slower, and requires the use of stasis (possibly due to time dialation effects, stress, or some sort of exotic side effect of whatever method of transportation they use).

Going with the first option (choosing one side to be wrong), I think it could go either way. The line you present is certainly the most straight forward, but it is contradicted by so many other bits of fluff. I think it could go either way.

I think the stasis ships were just their early days. By the time the war in heaven was coming to a close they had all kinds of fancy stuff.

I think that Necrons not having their own FTL travel makes no sense. Especially during the civil war.

Messenger: "My lieges! Planet blah blah is under attack from the blah Dynasty... Wait, you're not the Triarchs I remember..."

Triarch: "Oh you're talking about the battle of blah blah blah, yeah, that happened about 3,000 years ago. we got message of it about 500 years ago. Too bad you didn't get here on time, we could have launched a siege force which would have gotten there about now and retaken the planet. Now we'll have to wait another 2,500 years before we can reclaim the planet. Sorry bub, you can leave now."

Messenger: "3,000 years? My family...."

Yeah, battles that last thousands to millions of years. Sounds sort of pointless to have an empire and triarchs.

I beleive tarkus from DoWII said it best
"The necrons are a far deadlier foe on the battlefield, their weapons are unlike anything I've ever seen, but the tyranids pose a bigger threat, I think. The necrons have never been know to threaten enitre sectors like a hive fleet"

^As badly handled as the DoW games are with fluff, that's probably pretty accurate. But then, there are few things in the galaxy which can match a hive fleet as a threat anyway.

I'm going go and say that the Necrons are actually a bigger threat now than they were.

In the First codex, we had no idea what they were really capable of. Most of the Codex was about the great things the C'tan did, more so than the Necrons themselves. Now you have Imotekh, who is launching campaigns against entire sectors at a time. The Necrons are significantly more aggressive now. Necrons were destroying companies of space marines left and right in the new codex. The Sautekh Dynasty alone has claimed back over 80 worlds. That's nearly what the entire Tau empire comprises of, isn't it? (I read somewhere recently that they had like a 100 or so planets, please correct me if I'm wrong) The Necrons ruled the entire galaxy at one point, it's quite possible that there are still millions of Tomb worlds scattered about, each with billions of Necrons.These are just some of the first Dynasties to fully awaken.

The only thing that Irks me, and doesn't make sense is the Retcon of the Inertia-less drives. That just doesn't make sense. The Necrons conquered the Entire Galaxy, and were winning a war with the Old ones, without FTL Travel? No, that makes no sense. The Dolmen gates didn't come till the end of the War in Heaven, So I'm going to assume this was just a major oversight.

Another major thing is that they now employ things like, strategies, and tactics. Before it seemed to be "Throw bodies at it till it fell" which is the same thing Tyranids do. Now they have people like Zahndrekh that are quite literately decimating everything, the other armies try to do. Imotekh as well.

Overall, the Necrons ARE a bigger threat. Are they as Mysterious as they were before? No. I think a part of the problem is that people deem Mysterious as a bigger threat, which is simply not the case here.

On a planetary scale? They're probably are more dangerous. It was never exactly clear how intelligent the individual Lords were, although they had some brains, so now they're being led by walking robotic versions of Creed the Necrons are most likely to do better.

On a galaxy wide scale? No. It would make more sense if they still had a decent means of travel, but the Raider's Moon section makes it pretty clear that without a connection to the Webway at large they're stuck. Which, given everything out, is damned poor writing...

Even if they do have full FTL abilities to negate the damaged webway sections and that moon is simply not equipped with them, they still have the numbers problem - they don't have the numbers to conquer much. Trillions of Necrons aren't much in the grand scheme of things - single Hive Worlds can populations in the Trillions. True, your average human is no match for even a Scarab, but there are a lot of them - not to mention Orks, Tyranids, and Chaos. The Necrons could probably defend the small chunks they take pretty well, but I don't think they can ever take large chunks.

I think you are extrapolating from the text more than you should. 40k has ALWAYS had a problem with numbers. You have to look at things a little more critically.

We know there are supposed to still be millions of tomb worlds, whereas the Imperium is typically stated to have "over 1 million" worlds, so they likely out number the Imperium. And we are supposed to believe their population consists of only billions? So there are only a few thousand necrons per tomb world? No, I'm not buying it. The Necron population HAS to number in the trillions. And they don't suffer much from attrition either, 99.9% of the time they self repair. Eventually numbers are going to be a problem, but no where in the codex is that presented as a current theme. Quite the opposite in fact.

As has been stated numerous times, they HAVE to still have non-webway FTL. The traitors moon fluff only indicates that from a shipping perspective they are isolated, which only tells us that being isolated from the webway cuts you off from Necron trade channels, which isn't surprising. It just means the Necrons no longer have a major transport economy outside of the webway, which makes sense. It is like a 1950's city with no airports, harbors, or train stations. People can still get there, but without some industrialized modes of transportation it is pretty isolated when it comes to trade.

afaik there never was a set amount of tomb worlds in the old 'dex so saying they have more #s is pointless. They now have less powerful tech -with the exception of the Celestial Orrey, or what ever you call it- they are no longer the supreme space combatants and are not united. Also the argument that they didn't do any thing before is moot as they were just waking up and if we were at the point that the dynasties were just waking up it would be the same thing. However if we go to what COULD have been if their fluff was just advanced there would be a lot more activity as they would have started to cull worlds and start eating away at the various empires and such as tomb world after tomb world came online and began eliminating all surrounding life then progressing outward or in what ever pattern their twisted alien minds could come up with.

As for the humanization making them more threatening, I don't see it. So now its possible that you could bargain with them, not much threat there. I'd also like to point out that they already had unpredictability, as they were alien totally and completely and had no know objective and so it was impossible to predict their moves. Now they're more like humans and have a known objective and are therefor MORE predicable. As well as knowing that once they starte an attack on a planet they WILL NOT stop until everything is dead, is a lot more frightening then having a hope that you could convince them to stop or live on as slaves.

IMO the fate of the C'tan doesn't make the 'crons look strong it makes the C'tan look weak and pathetic. I mean REALLY, The Deceiver master of tricks and deception DID NOT see the betrayal coming!?! The Nightbringer death incarnate couldn't defeat HIS OWN SLAVES!?! The Void Dragon Master of all technology couldn't stop an ENTIRELY MECHANICAL race!?! As for the out cast *shrug* don't know much about him other than hes in a Dyson's sphere. So as far as I can see the C'tan are now nothing but a bunch of SPHESS WHIMPS. And to think THEY defeated the Old Ones hmmm good thing at the time there were thousands of them.

runmymouth wrote: They have something better than FTL they use the webways like the Eldar/Dark Eldar. T

riplikash wrote:And they do still have FTL travel. They had FTL before they had access to the webway and isolated worlds are still able to function, just at a more limited scale. The webway is just a lot faster and safer, so they prefer it.

Why do people seem to think that the Inertialess drive is so much worse than the WebWay? I mean I don't see how sharing a WebWay system that is damaged and cannot be repaired is better than travelling "from one edge of the universe to the other in a blink of an eye." Not to mention ONLY Necrons had this tech and when they were at FTL they were untouchable. So safer? NO. Faster? NO. How is the WebWay better than what they had before exactly?