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.

I played a quick game today. First match testing the new rules. We quickly built lists using power and only the weapon options available on the dataslates. We did not want to use anything in the FLGS that would take away from sales so even though we have the leaked indexes we only used the basic mission they released on the community site and only the dataslates that we know will be released for free.

Nids

Hive Tyrant, Wings, Double Scything Talons
Tervigon

Termagant Brood. 30 models 15 devourers 15 flesh borers
Termagant Brood. 30 models 15 devourers 15 flesh borers
Hormagaunt Brood 30 Models Venom Sacks and Adrenal Glands
Warrior Brood 6 models Scy Talons and Devourers with the Flesh Hooks.

Zoanthropes Brood 3 models 1 a Neurothrope


Necrons

Overlord Staff of Light, Res Orb
Cryptek
Cryptek

Warriors 10 models
Warriors 10 models
Immortals 10 models
Ghost Ark
Ghost Ark

Deatharks 5 models
Lychguard 5 models sword and board

The mission we rolled was the artifact one.

Some things to note. Reanimation protocols are awesome, but weak to units stuck in melee. Or more specifically your own turn in melee. Crypteks handing out the +1 along with the beginning of your turn and end of your rp rolls from the ghost arks can keep bringing units back very quickly. But if on your turn you suffer losses in melee, and then you loose more models on your opponents turn. It just starts to add up before the RP get a chance to kick in. More then ever Necrons want to avoid Melee because of it.

Overlords with lychguard are immortal.

Deathmarks are incredibly potent. Their gun dropping an extra mortal wound on a 6 can be very powerful. I weep for characters with 6 or less wounds who face a deathmark unit.

Ghost arks are very weak to large amounts of small arms. I don't think very many armies or units will be able to bring it to bear the way Nids and probably orks can. But I had killed one ghost ark in 2 turns with the 2 units of Termagants focusing on it. It was a LOT of shots to bring it down but it did go down and quantum shielding never got a chance to kick in. That being said, Quantum shielding against any attack that does 4 or more wounds is going to be amazing. Don't send knights or other super powerful heavy hitters after Necron vehicles You will waste all their potential. Even agaisnt 3 dmg attacks it's still pretty decent.

Nids got amazing. I think bringing 3 units of termagants with 10 dev and 20 flesh supported by 2 tervigons is going to be incredibly powerful. It's a lot of shots rerolling 1s to hit and to wound. It's so good. Just the volume of shot coupled with the tervigons bringing back up to 10 models to a unit each turn.

Hive tyrants getting into melee is neat. But the durability has definitely dropped due to the flying rules changing. It's going to take some getting used to to find their best use. I did end up loosing my HT trying to bring down his lychguard and overlord. It did not go well for me, but the HT did take a huge chunk out of a few other things first.

Hormagaunts are vicious!

The reduced range from the zoanthropes really hurts their effectiveness. Smite is a great power, but zoanthropes are slow and as a result they had trouble keeping up with my hordes as a synapse support unit and didn't get to fire off their warp blast for a couple turns. I think I need to rethink how I deploy them if I am going to keep using them.

Warriors didn't really get a chance to see much action. Not only did I not have a chance to spec them better with all the gear actually available to them but mostly because my massive hoards of everything else were keeping the necrons busy so the warriors just went off and grabbed the artifact unmolested.


Overall, 8th was a much more enjoyable experience. We checked 0 books to look at charts or rules or units types. It all just worked and it was a huge increase in efficiency and time to have it that way. Great time. I will say it still sucks that it's IGOUGO with an entire army shooting before the other guy gets to respond. With how much more likely things are to die getting to shoot your entire army first can be a massive advantage and it's still kind of a dull long downtime while you watch the other player do their entire turn. I think the game would really benefit from alternating unit activation.

My opponent and me discussed next Sunday getting together and testing it out.

So far we think it would work fine with only a couple little changes. First, if you activate a unit within 3" of a character the character can activate at the same time allowing the character to move forward with the unit and keep their area buffs going. Second is the way melee works. If, when you activate a unit it is locked in combat, you can either fall back or do your attacks. A unit that gets charged does not get to do it's attacks until it activates. This DOES make it possible that a unit could charge and attack at the end of one turn and then activate first and attack again in the next. I dunno. Well test and see how it goes.

Back to the basic 8th ed game play. Great. Huge improvements all around. Really enjoying both necrons and nids and cannot wait to get more in depth into the list building and get some more games in.

Thanks!

I really enjoy summaries of what worked and what didn't work in the particular battle.
This is something that is missing from many youtube battle reposts.

Great insights sir, thanks for sharing!