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I am facing a lot of Wave Serpents/Fire prisms with my poor necrons, and I currently have a hard time dealing with them. Mostly my problem comes down to mobility and range. Most of my guns hit hard at 24", but eldar has at least 36" range, and since he has just fast skimmers, he can always move 12" and shoot and make it hard for me to come within range before getting blown to pieces.

I have thought about trying out a variation of the overlord with royal court to try and get those pesky tanks down. I want them to be able to absort a good amount of firepower without dying (since the waveserpents dish out a gakload of high strength shots).

My preliminary court looks like this:

Overlord with sempiternal weave, Phase shifter, Tachyon arrow and res orb.
4 Harbringers of Destruction (One with solar pulse)
1 Harbringer of Eternity with Chronometron (To guide the arrow and lances, and on my opponents turn give my overload one reroll on his 2+/3++ save)

What do you think of this setup? Are there any way to make the royal court any more effective at doing their job at killing AV12 fast vehicles?

I'm considering running two of these units

Would Teks with Harps do a better job on wave serpents, seeing that they can turn pens into glances?

 Coyote81 wrote:
Would Teks with Harps do a better job on wave serpents, seeing that they can turn pens into glances?

I though about that as well, but basically each harp shot has a 50/50 chance of stripping some armour, but with 4 harp shots they could of course do a lot of damage.

The wave serpents usually fire their shields anyway, and when they do I guess the lance will be more of a threat. Also, the fire prism does not have a shield and is a proprity target for me since it usually takes out one of my vehicles every turn, and the serpents struggle against AV13.

He also usually field a Wraith knight (or lord or both), and the lances represent a real threat to those as well.

But I have not tried out the harps in practice, but on paper I feel the lances looks better. Anyone else want to give their thoughts about this?

Just so we are clear on the tactic btw, the main job for my overlord in this case is to fire the arrow (or staff of light if he ever gets close to something), and after that stand in front and tank every incoming shots to keep my harbringers alive to do their job with his extreme survivability.

Its worth trying. My old necron lists used to involve a ton of crypteks because I loved their wargear options. I had mixed success with them and eventually felt like I was spending too many points on too little return.

Now I usually run 2 with the lances and they usually do nothing all game. I actually get more use out of their small chances of reanimation when the squad wipes to stick around ironically.

However, dont forget about that haywire staff. I see some people using 4 of these guys and the 1 with the mantle to teleport around and pop vehicles. Against eldar that might work once and then they will just wipe the squad off the board. I believe the haywire staff is only 12 inch range.

Keep in mind though, that you could add one to some small warrior squads in nightscythes and drop them off near the tanks and increase the target saturation. If they shoot at 5 warriors with 1 cryptek to rid that haywire staff, thats just less shooting at your other more threatening units. If they ignore it, that haywire staff WILL glance things to death.

I play crons and have played the new eldar a few times. It is not an easy win for me, and I think my list is pretty refined. Infact I think im about 50/50 for a win/loss vs. the new eldar with my crons.

All of the eldar players i have played never run more than 3 serpents though. If you face a player with more than that I think youll have a hard time regardless of how many lances/haywires or anything else you bring.

Go with storm teks. 4 storm with a veiltek, ds and blast away. Even with the jinx save there will be enough glances to down one each turn. Put some lords with invuln saves for survivability. Afraid of the charge? Add the field for free wounds. Put on the swords and go to town.

one of the main reasons I like crypteks is that they can split off to other units.

When you leave them as a single unit, your giving your opponent an easy target. A big basket with all your eggs.

the crypteks will last much longer spread out.

If your going to run 2 royal courts, just put 2 crypteks in each troop unit.

I wouldn't go the cryptek route at all. The amount of fire they bring isn't enough against tanks you can't pen and get crazy cover saves. I'm running scarabs and wraiths in my lists just for that reason. They are fast enough to keep up with Eldar crap and will reduce any vehicle to rust in a single turn. I had a unit of wraiths lead by a destroyer lord tear through three wave serpents. By the end of it all only the destroyer lord remained standing but that unit took heat off of the rest of my army while they chewed through tanks. Granted the no-pen rule really dragged things out. The DLord with the night scythe normally could take out a tank a turn by itself but not if it had to rely strictly on glances.

In my experience playing against Eldar they tend to rely heavily on crazy cover saves through either tech or psykers. So when the scarabs, DLord+wraiths and my ally (either GK termies in a LR or meganobs in a trukk) show up Eldar players usually do a face palm.

I realize this isn't the answer you're looking for but if you want to reliably deal with Eldar (or Dark Eldar to a certain extent) vehicles fast moving cc is way to go and is usually completely unexpected.

The harps won't work as you only get one per court, the eldrich lance works pretty well aginst AV 12 or 2+ save models. The problem being survivability. The last game I had I did something similar it worked OK so long as whatever it tanking does not die if that happens they are all dead, the other thing is when something with precise shot is firing at your crypteks you only get 4+ look out sir on crypteks

I run 2 courts of 5 destrukteks, each in a ghost ark. I think its better than stormtteks or harpteks because they can take out MC's and any TEQ's you run into. 5 Destrukteks are definitely the most versatile, and in a ghost ark they're damn hard to take down.

Try this:

Royal Court: 165 points

VeilTek
2x StormTek
2x VanillaTek

double Overlords for double this court. Have great fun killing 2 tanks a turn

 BarBoBot wrote:
one of the main reasons I like crypteks is that they can split off to other units.

When you leave them as a single unit, your giving your opponent an easy target. A big basket with all your eggs.

the crypteks will last much longer spread out.

If your going to run 2 royal courts, just put 2 crypteks in each troop unit.

I have thought about this as well, but the problem I see here is that if I want my crypteks to fire at a serpent, the rest of my guys can't do anything basically (since the damn serpent is usually more than 24" away from my troops).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 IHateNids wrote:
Try this:

Royal Court: 165 points

VeilTek
2x StormTek
2x VanillaTek

double Overlords for double this court. Have great fun killing 2 tanks a turn

What is the advantage of the vanilla teks in this group?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Gravmyr wrote:
Go with storm teks. 4 storm with a veiltek, ds and blast away. Even with the jinx save there will be enough glances to down one each turn. Put some lords with invuln saves for survivability. Afraid of the charge? Add the field for free wounds. Put on the swords and go to town.

I tried stormteks with a veiltek last game, but on round 1 they scattered so they ended up 14" away from their target. Then they got obliterated in the opponents shooting phase. So it seems like an idea that is a bit fragile due to scatter and deep strike mishaps.

Also, a normal lord with invul save I'm not sure about. Thats a lot of extra points for a 3++ save on a 1 wound model.

codedaemon wrote:

 Coyote81 wrote:
Would Teks with Harps do a better job on wave serpents, seeing that they can turn pens into glances?

I though about that as well, but basically each harp shot has a 50/50 chance of stripping some armour, but with 4 harp shots they could of course do a lot of damage.

The wave serpents usually fire their shields anyway, and when they do I guess the lance will be more of a threat. Also, the fire prism does not have a shield and is a proprity target for me since it usually takes out one of my vehicles every turn, and the serpents struggle against AV13.

He also usually field a Wraith knight (or lord or both), and the lances represent a real threat to those as well.

But I have not tried out the harps in practice, but on paper I feel the lances looks better. Anyone else want to give their thoughts about this?

Just so we are clear on the tactic btw, the main job for my overlord in this case is to fire the arrow (or staff of light if he ever gets close to something), and after that stand in front and tank every incoming shots to keep my harbringers alive to do their job with his extreme survivability.

Crap, sorry I misspoke, I actually meant the haywire staff as one of the other guys mentioned. Thought the haywire one was called a hard, but then I looked it up. Sorry

CC is the best counter to Wave Serpents. Scarabs would be great if they didnt get ID`d by the Serpent on the way over. Wraiths will probably also be shot to bits unless they have a 2+ SV DLord to tank for them. The sheild that makes pens into glances wont work in CC as someone above seemed to suggest.

Tesla Destructors are also good against WSs, so Night Scythes and ABs. Haywire Cryptecs are good and so is good old fashioned Gauss. Warriors + Storm tecs in Night Scythes is probably your best bet.

codedaemon wrote:

 IHateNids wrote:
Try this:

Royal Court: 165 points

VeilTek
2x StormTek
2x VanillaTek

double Overlords for double this court. Have great fun killing 2 tanks a turn

What is the advantage of the vanilla teks in this group?

Adaptability. if you scatter beyond 12" away from your target tank, and into 12" of a squad of anything in the open or otherwise, they add a couple of kills

codedaemon wrote:
I am facing a lot of Wave Serpents/Fire prisms with my poor necrons, and I currently have a hard time dealing with them. Mostly my problem comes down to mobility and range. Most of my guns hit hard at 24", but eldar has at least 36" range, and since he has just fast skimmers, he can always move 12" and shoot and make it hard for me to come within range before getting blown to pieces.

I have thought about trying out a variation of the overlord with royal court to try and get those pesky tanks down. I want them to be able to absort a good amount of firepower without dying (since the waveserpents dish out a gakload of high strength shots).

My preliminary court looks like this:

Overlord with sempiternal weave, Phase shifter, Tachyon arrow and res orb.
4 Harbringers of Destruction (One with solar pulse)
1 Harbringer of Eternity with Chronometron (To guide the arrow and lances, and on my opponents turn give my overload one reroll on his 2+/3++ save)

What do you think of this setup? Are there any way to make the royal court any more effective at doing their job at killing AV12 fast vehicles?

I'm considering running two of these units

I would use Zhandrehk instead of the OL. He comes with the res orb, and the phase shifter, and sempiternal weave.... but also gives you the ability to use tank hunter on the squad as well.

I would agree with a lot of the posts above, for vehicle killing I usually run at least two night scythes with 5 warriors and a stormtek in each. One of those units should statistically bring down 4 hull points (before saves and such)

Royal court Wave serpent solutions: Less is more.

2 voltaic staffs jumping out of a scythe will strip an average of 4.44 hull points before jink. 5 rapid firing gauss will strip another 1.11 hull points before jink. Against foot targets it can unload 18 str 4 shots. Cost is 115 points of troops 2 of which have EL and a scythe.

Ghosts arks can take a ton of Eldar s6 s7 shooting. They can also advance 18" on the 1st turn which should get them close enough to broadside a pair of targets for 1.11 hp each. Also once in close enough they are open topped extending assault range of warriors to 12+2d6. 5 warriors + a lord with a scythe will wreck a wave serpent in cc. Cost is 105 points of troops 1 of which is EL + a ghost ark.

5 warriors and 2 stormteks also work as a good close range gunboat ark.