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Maybe someone out there can give me some veteran advice. I'm slowly making my way into the 40K universe and have looked at the armies. I've have had reservations and admiration for all of them to some degree. (eldar excluded)
Trying to find a balance between appeal/fun painting/tactics, I've started looking at Necrons and Imperial Guard.

Comments I've scoured from the net suggest that Necrons are a bit dry. Lack of unit variety, dull paint scheme possibilities, and dull to play. Playing them/against them is an act of patience as their primary tactic seems to be, 'keep resurrecting, you'll score a kill eventually'. According to same numerous sources, the fluff is weak as well.

IG,also seem epic, but I hear some of these comments, "Boring to paint', 'Overplayed', 'All you do is throw waves of men'. The fluff was more positive, though.

Love the idea of a machine army, love 40K vehicles. Worried about boring tactics, and lack of painting versitility.

So, I thought it better to ask people who have actually played with/against them, painted and collected them. Is this accurate, and I should be looking elsewhere?

 Havlok wrote:

So, I thought it better to ask people who have actually played with/against them, painted and collected them. Is this accurate, and I should be looking elsewhere?

Nah, both armies are quite diverse. Actually, Necrons have the most varied codex IMHO. You can make CronAir, Wraithwing, Warrior Spam, AV13 Wall and any hybrid lists and still have a good army (stay away from Flayed Ones though). IG is similar but much weaker (there isn't much life outside of the Vendetta centered armies).

Luckily, the boring Oldcron fluff is a goner and the Newcrons are pretty much whatever you want them to be. And the Imperial Guard is the same. It is your regiment/dynasty - your choice.

Can't really speak for the Necrons, but as far as I'm concerned, IG is potentially the most diverse army in the game (gorram orks and their madboyz...)

It's easy to justify fielding anything from an armored company bristling with tanks and tech-priests to waves of poorly-equipped conscripts and penal squads to a relatively elite strike force full of stormtroopers and veterans. Boring to paint? I mean, maybe if you want to do a couple hundred Cadians in standard uniform, but you don't have to. That's the beauty of the Guard. They're raised from a million worlds with untold cultural traditions, when it comes to conversions and uniforms the sky's the limit! You don't even have to stick with one scheme if you want to represent a battlegroup or a recently-mixed regiment thrown together from several badly mauled veteran units. Now, it's quite likely you'll be painting a lot of things (even if you want an armored force!), so if you don't like horde armies I wouldn't go down this route. If you like the idea, though, they're fun to play and an absolute blast to come up with fluff for.

If you're unsure as to playstyle and have the opportunity to take a look at the relevant Codex, you might want to consider proxying a game or two (or playing it out over Vassal!). That might help you make a choice.

You found outdated information. The current necrons are a lot more variable.

 Havlok wrote:
Maybe someone out there can give me some veteran advice. I'm slowly making my way into the 40K universe and have looked at the armies. I've have had reservations and admiration for all of them to some degree. (eldar excluded)
Trying to find a balance between appeal/fun painting/tactics, I've started looking at Necrons and Imperial Guard.

Comments I've scoured from the net suggest that Necrons are a bit dry. Lack of unit variety, dull paint scheme possibilities, and dull to play. Playing them/against them is an act of patience as their primary tactic seems to be, 'keep resurrecting, you'll score a kill eventually'. According to same numerous sources, the fluff is weak as well.

IG,also seem epic, but I hear some of these comments, "Boring to paint', 'Overplayed', 'All you do is throw waves of men'. The fluff was more positive, though.

Love the idea of a machine army, love 40K vehicles. Worried about boring tactics, and lack of painting versitility.

So, I thought it better to ask people who have actually played with/against them, painted and collected them. Is this accurate, and I should be looking elsewhere?

IG can do anything they like list wise , airborne , Heavy Infantry , wall of AV 14 ,mass foot army's , Siege army's - Guard pretty much had the most variety IMHO , not to mention guard is also competitive ( in some builds ) not to mention in points cost they are incredibly cheap - example -
For about the cost of a ten man marine bolter squad

I can get a vet squad with 3 plasma guns in a chimera

Imperial Guard excell at combine arms and they variety they have to do so with is impressive

I love my guard for the sole purpose of how much.fun they are. When competing at a tourney, I bring daemons. However with guard, they are ao much fun to play

Yeah, that information is outdated and heavily biased.
Necron Warriors are basically Tactical Marines that suck in combat, are better against AP1-3 and worse against AP4-6.
So the tactic is not to "keep ressing and you'll kill something eventually" because that is not going to work, their survivability is heavily tainted by people with bad experiences.

I would have to disagree with the 'lack of unit variety' as Necrons are one of the few armies who actually have the units to decently make different armies.
"Just throw random units together and you'll perform okay" is something I often hear and it's 'quite accurate'.
In reality you will always have to keep a tactic and try to build a list around that tactic, but fact is that Necrons have many tactics that are viable options.

The fluff is a big point of discussion.
Some people prefer the new fluff, some the older.
I personally prefer the new one.

IG have the potential for the most varied army in the game, especially with Imperial Armour units/armies. what's likely limited is one's opponents and their resources with which to build armies.

IG is by far one of the most flavourful armies in 40k from a painting/modelling perspective.

There are many different camo/paint jobs you can apply as well as all the weathering potential. The vehicles can also very easily be numbered and depending on your freehand skills you can paint on your own slogans and such used by the tank crews.

IG also have one of the most supported ranges in terms of models. Using only legal GW models alone.... you can buy cadian, catachan, steel legion, vostroyan, mordian, and tallarn guardsmen. This is further expanded using forgeworld and their ranges of tallarn, DKoK, elysians, and extreme weather cadians (not to mention all the forgeworld vehicles/bits that are available).

Necrons I can understand how they can appear a bit bland. However, that is just most players falling into the trap of buying models for spammed netlists and airbrushing the entire army bolt gun with green/blue glows. Some of the best necrons I've seen are painted in a mix of ancient looking metallic blends with bits of moss and such on parts of the units. This gives you a force that appears as though they had just awaken - combine that with a balanced list not inspired by the internet and you will have yourself something quite interesting.

But going back to IG .... by far one of the most customizable armies out there.

Yeah, people who say guard are boring to paint are much, much more likely saying "I'm sick of having painted 100 guardsman and I'm still only half way there" and not "guard models lack detail and space for creative input".

And though the power level of the guard codex is getting somewhat thin (though that doesn't seem to matter to you), there's still a staggering number of ways to run a guard army.

I spent the first year of 6th ed trying out different things with guard (you can see the escapades here), and I managed to pack in six different playstyles, with at least two (leafblower and air-cav) that I still hadn't managed to try out. And that's in a whole year of playing everything from mass send-in-the-next-wave conscripts to a hellhound+chimera highland charge.

As others have mentioned, the modelling opportunities are hugely open-ended, so long as they're human (mostly), and there are a lot of potential play styles.

For necron, I can't say very much. I know there are a couple of ways to run them (flierspam, wraithwing... umm... ark spam?) and that most people put very little effort into painting them. Just a quick spray of steel-colored spray paint or spraying black and drybrushing boltgun and that's the end of it. Moreover, while I've heard dozens of people talking about guard fluff over the years, I've never heard people really talk about necron. It tends to be much more "oh, this is the army I play, I don't care about the background". That could just be my experiences, though, rather than a critique of the fluff itself.

Ah, thank you all! This is why its smarter to ask on forums first.
Im now leaning heavily towards crons, as they seem to be a somewhat rare army choice. Also the model count slightly lower.

I kinda feel that the Necrons are a bit "stale" as you put it. Their lists seem to contain pretty much all the same core elements all the time (How often do you see a Necron list without a Monolith and a Ressurection Orb for example). Crons are easier to paint though, that's for sure.

Imperial Guard however have a massive amount of choices and can be played in quite a few ways from massed infantry, massed tanks, few strong tanks, balanced between all of these things. Mix in some artillery and the best flyers in the game and you get Their codex is old however, and there's really no guesses out there as far as I've heard about when a new codex is popping up.

There are lots of good options in each book for different playstyles and tactics. Sadly the WAAC crowd makes you think the books only have 1-2 ways to play, because those are the lists you hear about more often.

You won't hear about my 85 nercon warriors and 9 spiders coming across the field, you will hear about nercon air spam.

Same thing for IG, you won't hear about my 120 guardsmen and 3 deathstrike missiles winning games, you will hear about armored guard, mech guard and air spam.

Isbjornen wrote:
I kinda feel that the Necrons are a bit "stale" as you put it. Their lists seem to contain pretty much all the same core elements all the time (How often do you see a Necron list without a Monolith and a Ressurection Orb for example). Crons are easier to paint though, that's for sure.

Very Often? Monoliths are considered to be a sup-par choice by many necron players. They prefer to field annihilation barges and scythes.

Necron are "somewhat rare?" That's a new one on me. There are probably fewer necron players than guard players, but I'd hardly consider them rare. The flying bakery (and greycrons, among other things) made them too popular for long enough to be considered rare.

If you want rare, don't pick a top-tier army like necron, or a popular army like guard.

You can still go for a rare build, no matter what army.