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Everyone knows that Necrons are fairly short ranged. That being said, you have to rush them if you want to win. In all my games I lose about half of my army just trying to get to them. So whenever I hear people wiping the floor with them it genuinely baffles me. So the question remains, how the hell do you win!?

Nightscythes, Wraiths, and Anihilation Barges.

Cron lords/<something>lords with res orbs is a start.
C'tan.
Doomscythes.
Destroyer Lord with those things that look like him. (I forget the name, sorry)
MSU warriors.
Lots of warriors with a res orb lord per unit, accompanied by ghost arks so you can regain D3 warriors..

Wait I think they actually mean how do you beat Necrons, if I am reading the way that's worded correct?

OP: Do you mean how to win playing Necrons, or how to win playing Against Necrons?

Necrons rely on a steadfast core of the toughest base infantry in the game, bar none. They have several "FAST" units that provide the punch that Necron armies need so their infantry can close to killing range.

Necrons are highly mobile, unless you run an entirely foot-slogging army, in which case I would understand why you lose so many dudes before getting to the enemy.

Night Scythes and Wraiths are plenty fast. Ghost Arks and Annihilation Barges not so much (but they're pretty durable), although you could cruise and then go flat out for a 4+ jink and 18" of movement whenever you need to.

Veils of Darkness essentially allow you to give most units the ability to deepstrike.

I really liked using Obyron with Lychguard in 5th edition (when it worked), because his Ghostwalk Mantle allowed him and his unit to jump out of a combat and then immediately deepstrike anywhere on the board at the beginning of the movement phase.

Another method (not the best) of helping you close with the enemy with fewer losses is manipulation of Night Fighting. Imotekh almost guarantees night fighting for the first three turn if you need it, but Imotekh is expensive. Solar pulses allow you to either turn night fighting on or off in either one of yours or the enemies turns, but only once.

Wraiths and Scarabs are my best units by far

 disdamn wrote:
Wraiths and Scarabs are my best units by far

Don't give him any ideas.
I ignored a unit of scarabs for a few turns. When they finally got into combat they had multiplied and were a bigger threat than I imagined! Holy gak!

More wraiths, more annihilation barges, maybe stalkers?

 disdamn wrote:
Wraiths and Scarabs are my best units by far

This. So much this.

Scarabs are horrifying in so many ways. They are Beasts who don't give a single care about terrain, they storm across the field scary-fast, have a buttload of wounds to chew through, tarpit like bosses, strip armour off MCs and will wreck any vehicle that they touch in moments. They are incredibly versatile.
Don't think that Scarabs are weak for their cost, because the simple fact that they are Beasts means so, so much for them. I've seen Land Raiders and Monoliths scrapped down in one turn no worries by bunches of Scarabs. Grab some Spyders (which I also think are vastly underrated) and poop out bases like crazy.

Wraith are just monsters. Everything is scared of Wraiths.

EDIT: ^ MW mentioned AnniBarges. They are also really, really good.

Night Scythes and Annihilation Barges are what does the killing IMO. The rest of my army kind of hangs back and advances once the above units have killed the things that hurt my blob squads. At minimum I take 2 x Barges and 3 x Flyers.

Wraiths are super good but IMO you can swap them out for flavor if you wanted.

 poppa G wrote:
Everyone knows that Necrons are fairly short ranged. That being said, you have to rush them if you want to win. In all my games I lose about half of my army just trying to get to them. So whenever I hear people wiping the floor with them it genuinely baffles me. So the question remains, how the hell do you win!?

Here's a thing or two I wrote on the subject:
Horrors From the Deep

And also:

Spyders....good gawd....the spyders...

I can say definitively that Necrons are damn good. Most people like the flyer/Barge spamalot, and Ive seen it with Chaos FMC allies just for kicks.

Hope the articles help.

 Jancoran wrote:

 poppa G wrote:
Everyone knows that Necrons are fairly short ranged. That being said, you have to rush them if you want to win. In all my games I lose about half of my army just trying to get to them. So whenever I hear people wiping the floor with them it genuinely baffles me. So the question remains, how the hell do you win!?

Here's a thing or two I wrote on the subject:
Horrors From the Deep

And also:

Spyders....good gawd....the spyders...

I can say definitively that Necrons are damn good. Most people like the flyer/Barge spamalot, and Ive seen it with Chaos FMC allies just for kicks.

Hope the articles help.

Thanks man, I'll check it out.

Having just a single unit of Wraiths w/ a D lord and a Full 3 Unit Squad of Spyders along with 10 Scarabs is pretty boss.

You have beatstick and tarpit, with the new rules Spyders are actually really worth their points.

If you want to footslog your Necrons, go with large bricks of warriors with ghost ark and resorb lord support and watch them never die to anything that can't wipe out their unit in one go.

D&D squads in your elites will also allow you to drop down and annihilate any single target that's giving you problems, while Solar Pulse using Crypteks ensure that you can advance under the cover of night and thus take the teeth out of the enemy's shooting ability.

None of the necron heavy support options are anything less than simply decent (the doomsday ark) and all can bring great durability and firepower for their points cost. The popular choices for heavy support slots are doom scythes and annihilation barges, but others can work as well.

In fast attack most people either go with scarabs if they have spyders or wraiths if they don't.

Perhaps the most threatening Necron list is called "maximum threat overload" where a Necron list is throwing so many dangerous threats with so much diversity that the enemy can't handle them. If they try focusing on the Warrior Bricks, they get smashed by the Doom Scythes, if they try fighting the doom scythes; they get swamped by wraiths, if they go for the wraiths; the D&D squads drop down and kill your valuables.

Others prefer spyders and scarabs, monoliths, Cronair, but the important thing is to give the enemy so many targets that can all ruin his day requiring so many different weapons to deal with them that they're liable to get steamrolled no matter what they do.

Well, to win with Necrons, you simply need to maximize their effectiveness in a good, balanced list.

The first thing you need to do, is take a look at your local meta. Have things like Imperial Knights been popping up a lot? How about Eldar or Tau? I've changed my list around to include an Overlord, CCB, and Stormteks now to help deal with Knights, and the resurgence of vehicles.

Do you have IA12? If not, I would suggest you pick that up. It has a lot of excellent new units for Necrons, and alternate list, the Dark Harvest.

As most of the Units from the vanilla codex have been covered, I'm going to suggest a few from IA12.


Ancanthrites- I personally prefer these over Wraiths, in my meta. Why? They are a lot more resistant to the volume of fire that you see today. They are T5, 3W with a 3+ save. They have no invul, but they do have stealth. They are also jump infantry, and come stock with a str 6 melta weapon and Void blades. These coupled with a Dlord, are an absolute nightmare, for anyone to deal with. They cut through troops and vehicles with ease, and take a massive amount firepower to kill. The only thing they do not do that well against, is smashing MCs.

Gauss Pylon- These are pretty absurd, and quite awesome. for 135 points you get a 120' Skyfire/interceptor STR 9 AP 2 weapon, on fairly durable platform. These things are pretty effective at blasting things from the sky, and putting wounds on MCs, which Necrons sometimes have a tough time dealing with.

Tesseract Ark- A super tank. Priced in the land Raider range, it is a QS AV 14 Front and Side vehicle, that can lob 3 plasma blasts at 48' range. It's very durable, and has several firing modes, and weapon options. It is a bit on the expensive side, but I enjoy fielding them.

You may also look at the Dark Harvest list. This list gives a lot of benefits to you, with the only drawback that Warriors And Flayed ones are 10 min, instead of 5. The Warlord table is almost worth taking, for it alone. It also allows you to ally with Necrons, for an extra AB and other goodies.

Overall, the strategy is fairly simple with Necrons. Use your excellent firepower, and excellent fast moving assault units to your advantage. You can often control the board with your movement phase. I'd say only Waveserpent spam Eldar, have a better movement phase than Necrons. Mastering optimal positioning is absolutely critical.

On the tesseract ark, it's tremor-firing mode is very much worth a "meh", giving out a line shot at S5 AP4 armorbane with some special effects.

Despite the armorbane tagline, it's not particularly good against any serious tanks and is more of an annoyance weapon, even if you get that warlord trait that lets you bump a single vehicle's weapon strength by one.

However, with said warlord trait, the S7 AP2 small blasts can now instant death T4 models. Deploy against your enemy's resident T4 multiwound ultra-expensive death star and laugh.

The Fleshbane AP3 flamer I'm a bit unsure on whether it has torrent or not. If not, then it suffers from Banewolf syndrome, if it does then it's pretty awesome.

The Ark does have some special rules that make assaulting it a bit of a chore, and when it dies it may just take the assaulters with it.

Be warned that it loses it's AV14 if penetrated so much as once. Av12 on a 200+ point ground pounding vehicle is not a particularly nice thing to have.

It can also take some extra guns like the ghost-ark if you want a little more shooting.

C'tan Shards look nice, but are hampered by only being able to take two special abilities out of their table (for a cost at that), slow movement, and compete with Tomb Stalkers and D&D squads.

Tomb Stalkers have pretty garbage shooting, but their special rule lets them laugh at poison, they are impervious to S3 and below, they handle themselves well in assault, and they can move surprisingly quickly even in terrain heavy maps.

Another variant in the HS slot has a pretty funky exile cannon but fewer attacks.

As for apocalypse options, the Necrons are still pretty short on apocalypse specific units and lords of war. As of yet, no straight Titan equivalent exists (I'm still waiting on my titan legion killing Medusa V Tomb Stalker, Aeonic Orb, Megaliths, and what-not), but we do get Superheavy pylons which do horrible things to other superheavies with 3 SD shots that can reach across the board and have skyfire and interceptor to boot (no blast though) Doomsday monoliths which put down big damn pie-plates, Tesseract Vaults which are akin to Super-Arks, and the widely complained about Transcendant C'tan and some pretty lulz worthy formations (the infamous monolith phalanx was nerfed I believe though).

The Necrons also remain the only non-Imperial faction with a race specific fortification in the ridiculously huge and hardy Tomb Citadel that gives Necrons on it some amusing bonuses. It is however; hard to place on any board not made for it because it is freaking enormous, and is one of the most expensive non lord-of war things you can plonk down in a game. In addition, with the majority of Necron shooting being bolter ranged, defensive play may not be the best idea.

Also as an aside; note that despite the fluff of that one tomb-cycle fast attack option painting it as an air superiority fighter, it does not have skyfire or weapons that are terribly reliable against aircraft. If you like them, just imagine them as being like Deffkoptas and pretend you never read anything about them being air superiority craft.

I'm personally hoping for more dataslates, supplements, and forgeworld loving in the future.

 Veteran of The Long War wrote:
Nightscythes, Wraiths, and Anihilation Barges.

+ Destroyer lords w/ weave/mss

I kind of feel the best beat stick in the army at this point is Necron Overlord w/ WS, Phylactery, Phase Shifter, MSS and a CCB.

With the new rules etc.. it's pretty hard to kill him before he can get into close combat, plus if you do he has the chance to pop back up with D3 wounds.

I mean he has 2 STR 6 hits from shooting, Then D6 ST 6 hits from Hammer of Wrath, Then he could possibly get 3 Sweep Attacks on the unit, Then depending on if it's a character he's attacking they could strike themselves for D3 hits, Then he gets his attacsk with a ST7 AP1 weapon.

I win with 2 Overlords jetting around on Command Barges, 3 Annihilation Barges, and minimal warrior squads in night scythes. Everything else in my army is just whatever I feel like playing that day.
An equally important question is how I lose with Necrons. That usually involves taking larger numbers of troops and plopping my overlords with them. I almost never have that work out well...

Its funny, necrons is supposed to be a slow army of undead robot skeletons, but they have the best fast attack of any army, the best mobile transports of any army and a host of ways to cross the table in a turn.

One of the ways to win with necrons is force your opponent to castle up or get tarpitted while you control the board with your mobile troops. Wraiths and scarabs do a great job at this. wraiths scare your opponent away and scarabs can tie down just about any non-dedicated combat squad. From there just let your necrons fly around, dropping on the objectives and winning.