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.

So, from what I have heard, the IOM hasn’t been able to capture any necrons or their tech. Apparently it all teleports away to be repaired or something? Does that mean the Necron population is unchanging?

Indeed. The Necrontyr species is extinct and so the Necrons have nothing left to convert. The repair protocols also have a near perfect efficiency, so their numbers do not decline either. There are exceptions of course; pariahs being used to make a new form of Necron or stories where the Imperium manages to destroy a Necron tomb. But for the most part, they are static and undying.

From how I understand it they are static, undying but do take some losses; however you basically have to smash so much of the Necron up (or melt it down) that its basically impossible to rebuild.

So in theory they will run out of population at some point; however they were a vast species in their day and thus have countless Tomb Worlds to awaken more warriors from. So chances are they won't suffer a population issue for a long while even though they are involved in a lot of wars currently.


There's also reports that they are converting people into necrons (I was that just a Dawn of War thing?) so in theory they can still recover numbers from other species.

We have no idea. However, since the Necron ruled the galaxy for longer than any other species, they should have many times the number of Orks when their empire was still intact.

Currently, due to constant wars, betrayal among the C'tan as well as the Necron lords themselves and all the hazards of sleeping for 65 million years, the Necron population has been significantly reduced. I reckon they are not numerous as the Tau at the moment.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mr Nobody wrote:
Indeed. The Necrontyr species is extinct and so the Necrons have nothing left to convert. The repair protocols also have a near perfect efficiency, so their numbers do not decline either. There are exceptions of course; pariahs being used to make a new form of Necron or stories where the Imperium manages to destroy a Necron tomb. But for the most part, they are static and undying.

This is the old lore. The new lore never explains how the Necron repopulates, but the Necron can only recover their losses if they win. Even then, some Necrons might be irrecoverably damaged that repairs are impossible, as the Necron do not have access to unlimited Necrodemis knowledge ever since the C'tan went rogue. Destroyed Necrons can get back up one or two times, but they longer shift away if the battle is lost. Only relatively damaged ones are salvaged. The rest are left behind to be disposed of by the Necron enemies.

bibotot wrote:
We have no idea. However, since the Necron ruled the galaxy for longer than any other species, they should have many times the number of Orks when their empire was still intact.

Currently, due to constant wars, betrayal among the C'tan as well as the Necron lords themselves and all the hazards of sleeping for 65 million years, the Necron population has been significantly reduced. I reckon they are not numerous as the Tau at the moment.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mr Nobody wrote:
Indeed. The Necrontyr species is extinct and so the Necrons have nothing left to convert. The repair protocols also have a near perfect efficiency, so their numbers do not decline either. There are exceptions of course; pariahs being used to make a new form of Necron or stories where the Imperium manages to destroy a Necron tomb. But for the most part, they are static and undying.

This is the old lore. The new lore never explains how the Necron repopulates, but the Necron can only recover their losses if they win. Even then, some Necrons might be irrecoverably damaged that repairs are impossible, as the Necron do not have access to unlimited Necrodemis knowledge ever since the C'tan went rogue. Destroyed Necrons can get back up one or two times, but they longer shift away if the battle is lost. Only relatively damaged ones are salvaged. The rest are left behind to be disposed of by the Necron enemies.

Got a citation for that? Not saying I don’t believe you, but really really want to read it.

I'd say the population would be somewhere, currently, around that of the imperium of man, however if only counting those awake I'd say only slightly more than the tau. The reason they weren't ork levels is because after the war in heaven they couldn't make new ones so casualties taken then would be there forever

It's complicated. When they became Necrons only nobles were allowed to retain full sentience. Also at some point after they became Necrons there was a large scale cryptek(necron scientists) rebellion which led to the silent king (the necron monarch) placing heavy restrictions on what they can do without his permission. Then he went on some hopeless quest to try and get the necrons their souls back. Meaning essentially they can't ask for his permission. While some overlords do try and create new tech secretly, getting caught would bring about the wrath of the triarchs whose job it is to make sure the king's laws are upheld.

 BigbyWolf wrote:
It's complicated. When they became Necrons only nobles were allowed to retain full sentience. Also at some point after they became Necrons there was a large scale cryptek(necron scientists) rebellion which led to the silent king (the necron monarch) placing heavy restrictions on what they can do without his permission. Then he went on some hopeless quest to try and get the necrons their souls back. Meaning essentially they can't ask for his permission. While some overlords do try and create new tech secretly, getting caught would bring about the wrath of the triarchs whose job it is to make sure the king's laws are upheld.

Pretty much this. The Crypteks know how to do tons of stuff that they aren't supposed to do. Remember that the one named Cryptek is basically responsible for the mechanics of how the Necrontyr became the Necrons. He's still around and kicking. They're generally trying to reclaim their humanity (Necrontyranity?), but they definitely know how to fix or rebuild a Warrior from parts. Warriors are basically super complicated robots. They have no real free will. They can also definitely have a Night Scythe do a fly by and pick up damaged bodies, even during what will become a loss. We can safely assume that sort of thing happens in the same what that there is some process by which Space Marines get their Drop Pods back onto their ships. We just don't see it in game.

 Overread wrote:
From how I understand it they are static, undying but do take some losses; however you basically have to smash so much of the Necron up (or melt it down) that its basically impossible to rebuild.

So in theory they will run out of population at some point; however they were a vast species in their day and thus have countless Tomb Worlds to awaken more warriors from. So chances are they won't suffer a population issue for a long while even though they are involved in a lot of wars currently.


There's also reports that they are converting people into necrons (I was that just a Dawn of War thing?) so in theory they can still recover numbers from other species.

The Hellforged novel had them picking up humans to mess about with, but Hellforged as a novel sits in that vague period where GW was endeavouring to give the Necrons more character in their fiction, but had not yet brought them along to the current Necron Dynasties background.

The implication is that they were harvesting psychic nulls, and creating Necron Pariahs from them. The silver masks mentioned in the following segment are stylised human masks of necron tech, one of which is the plot hook for the Ad-mech expedition in the story.

Hellforged, by Ben Counter

Sarpedon wiped away the dust that had caked around his eyes. It was cramped inside the harvester, but he could move if he crouched down on his haunches. He pushed between a pair of humming power conduits and saw the chamber opening up before him.
Hundreds of humans, Raevenians, hung from racks on the walls of the cylindrical hull. Their faces were covered by silver masks, like stylised, expressionless faces. A walkway led between the racks of captives. Undying, bigger than the warriors with reinforced spines to take the weight of their enormous cannon, patrolled the interior to fend off boarders.
'Now?' asked Lygris behind him.
'Now we kill it,' said Sarpedon

Soul Drinkers were leaping down to what remained of the walkways. Sarpedon scuttled along the wall, pausing to examine one of the prisoners. Its face was obscured by the alien mask, and tubes snaked into its veins and under its skin. It was a man, in clothes suggesting it was a farmer or a hunter.
Ahead of the main chamber was a section crammed with machines that sorted out whatever was swallowed by the harvester's maw, and either added it to the prisoner racks with long articulated arms, or threw it into grinders to be spewed from the war engine's vents. There was nothing that way.

One way to look at it now, to harmonise the apparent absence of Pariahs from the Necron armies, might be Necron experimentation with human subjects for the purposes of investigating Bio-transference and its potential reversal, which is the modern Necron plot hook for their interest in humanity. The paramount Necron overlord in the story is also destroyer, so it might also be that he was nuts and doing something insane and bizarre or a combination of such.

A more recent short story from the Shield of Baal warzone fiction had "false necrons". Simulated versions of famous Necron nobility and their coteries from before the Necrontyr become the Necrons. If the Necrons can create such simulations, then its likely they can easily produce more operational intelligences to run most of the Necron order of battle, given Warriors are often effectively puppeteered and in the case of the Sarkoni Emperor, entire Necron dynastic armies are mind-wiped and subverted by a Necron Tomb World AI system.

Devourer by Joe Parrino.

The lesser chambers crowded towards the gate, the most easily accessed. Carved first, when the tomb world had still served as a necropolis to house the truly dead, these chambers lacked the impossible artistry of the others. They betrayed an earlier, cruder age. These were the tombs of the false necrons, the beings whose personalities had only been approximated with artificial intelligences, rather than converted. Advanced programs mimicked them as they were said to have been. Bodies had been constructed, made of the same living metal that Valnyr and the true necrons used for motive functions. But no real intelligence motivated them. Only artificiality acted behind the eyes.
They were the ones who had died during the Time of Flesh, whose mortality had prevented them from seeing the true glory of the necrons. These were the fallen leaders of necron society, those who gasped out their last as cancers destroyed their bodies, politicians assassinated in their prime and generals culled in the ages-long wars against the Old Ones and their servants. They were the ones deemed worthy of remembrance and reconstitution.
Nuensis, who had led the necrontyr in battle. Gevegrar, inventor of great and terrible technological marvels. Maantril, one of those who had opened negotiations with the c’tan. Names and beings she had heard stories of when she herself had walked Kehlrantyr in the flesh. Heroes. Luminaries. Now their simulacra would be awoken to advise the Dynasts.
But they were just complex machines, no better nor worse than the tomb constructs that the necrons created to serve their purposes. In such ways was the wisdom of ages preserved and brought to immortality. Valnyr could hear them already stirring, restless in their tombs, locked away behind curtains of rippling scarabs.

 Kriswall wrote:

 BigbyWolf wrote:
It's complicated. When they became Necrons only nobles were allowed to retain full sentience. Also at some point after they became Necrons there was a large scale cryptek(necron scientists) rebellion which led to the silent king (the necron monarch) placing heavy restrictions on what they can do without his permission. Then he went on some hopeless quest to try and get the necrons their souls back. Meaning essentially they can't ask for his permission. While some overlords do try and create new tech secretly, getting caught would bring about the wrath of the triarchs whose job it is to make sure the king's laws are upheld.

Pretty much this. The Crypteks know how to do tons of stuff that they aren't supposed to do. Remember that the one named Cryptek is basically responsible for the mechanics of how the Necrontyr became the Necrons. He's still around and kicking. They're generally trying to reclaim their humanity (Necrontyranity?), but they definitely know how to fix or rebuild a Warrior from parts. Warriors are basically super complicated robots. They have no real free will. They can also definitely have a Night Scythe do a fly by and pick up damaged bodies, even during what will become a loss. We can safely assume that sort of thing happens in the same what that there is some process by which Space Marines get their Drop Pods back onto their ships. We just don't see it in game.

Not to undermine the analogy, but we do know how at least one way they get drop-pods back on a ship. The thunderhawk transporter is described as having a "drop-pod recovery sling". I can't quite bring the source to mind immediately, but a recent novel also described the majority of a Drop-pod as basically expendable. The only bit worth keeping was the cogitator, and the Marines grabbed it and abandoned the rest of the pod.

I think the fact that Anrakyr basically tools around looking for other Necron armies to recruit suggests that there is some form of scarcity or control that prevents any Necron noble from ordering his Crypteks to convert the local planet into its own mass of Necron troops, but the only thing that really seems to make sense, is as you say, a hard coded obedience to some edict that they can't build new stuff or simply produce armies of new necrons. The Technomandrites were arms dealers, but its a reasonable extension that they might have also controlled the technology to create new bodies. There doesn't seem to be any objection to Canoptek constructs being produced though, which presumably is an option for the Necrons to deal with attrition. On further reflection Anrakyr isn't a problem to the idea of "new build", because he isn't there specifically to build a new army, he's looking to reunify the dynasties without the enforced peace of the Necron master command codes.

The Ghost ark attributes its current existence to the requirement to repair fallen necrons who are damaged beyond self-repair, or convert them to energy if not. Presumably they could also upload the recovered Necron consciousness, rudimentary as it might be, although that might actually be backed up anyway. If you can transfer such a thing, and we know the Necrons can easily do such, then you can likely copy it. It came up elsewhere in the thread about the Ghost arks being used on Tyranid worlds.

ince the coming of the Tyranid hive fleets
to the Eastern Fringe, the Charnovokh
Dynasty has fielded a great many Ghost
Arks. The Overlords of the scattered
Charnovokh holdings were swift to realise
that where the Tyranids consumed all
living tissue, much of the mineral bounty
of their prey worlds were left behind. This
knowledge was hard earned indeed; millions
of Necrons lay shattered or maimed beyond
self-recovery – or even phase parameters –
across the lands of the Charnovokh realm.
Instead of harnessing the mineral bounty of
the dead worlds in the path of each bio-fleet
to create new warriors, the Crypteks
and Canoptek constructs of the dynasty
built entire fleets of Ghost Arks from the
wreckage of worlds stripped of biomass
by the all-devouring swarms. Networks
of these craft then combed the lifeless
wastelands in exhaustive grid patterns,
picking up the disembodied remains of
fallen Necrons and reconstituting them
into humanoid form once more. Necessity
demanded that the Crypteks relax their
reunification parameters, given the violence
with which the swarms tore apart those who
stood against them. As a result the legions
of Necrons that lurch, reanimated, from
the Charnovokh armada are as likely to be
patchwork constructs as they are shining
warriors of one hue

The full quote has a couple of interesting additional points. Firstly that that self-repair and phasing out are still a thing. The Necrons subject to Ghost Ark recovery are clearly severely, massively damaged, perhaps scattered and compromised by the manner of their destruction. Tyranid "acid" is quite capable of damaging Necron technology it seems. Whilst Necrons have been described as repairing from puddles of molten metal, this is generally in the context of things like a Resurrection Orb, which is a catchall term for a bunch of bizarre super-tech, including local temporal distortions, which presumably is not within the capability of a Ghost Ark.

The Crypteks of the Charnovokh also could apparently have built new warriors, but instead construct Ghost Arks and Canoptek constructs, and then vacuum up the scatter Necron armies and repair them. Specific note is made of them relaxing their standards, resulting in patchwork monstrosities, specifically because the Nids tore stuff apart so thoroughly.

As an aside, I'd rationalise the mineral bounty and the fact that Nids are routinely described as incorporating exotic compounds and materials as armour, bones etc, as well as growing multi-kilometer critters that demand heavily reinforced "biology", with the fact that the Necrons have swarms of von neumann machines capable of matter/energy conversion, so even a Post-Tyranid world might offer significant resources.

The Codex describes millions of worlds, and at least billions of Immortals surviving from the "trillions" destroyed in the final days of the War in Heaven. Given that the Immortals are the elite of Necrontyr armies, the surviving potential yield of "peasants and plebs" now transformed into Warriors could be sufficient, combined with repair , new construction and uploading, to given the Necrons potentially orders of magnitude more than billions available.

Something I've never understood about newcrons is this - They want to return to having bodies and flesh and all that. But why can't they just grow them? Even the Imperium can do that.

pm713 wrote:
Something I've never understood about newcrons is this - They want to return to having bodies and flesh and all that. But why can't they just grow them? Even the Imperium can do that.

IoM has existing tissue samples to start with. Necrontry DNA is unlikely to have survived 65million years. It's why we can clone dinosaurs today, despite having the tech available

-

bibotot wrote:
I reckon they are not numerous as the Tau at the moment.

Yeah, about that:

'What the Imperium cannot know is that, should the Necrons ever fully wake and unite, they would face a foe as numerous as themselves.'
Codex: Necrons (7th ed.) 'The Awakening Empire'

Yeah, the Necrons are as populous as the Imperium and that's 100% military, their entire civilian population got turned into warriors. In the unlikely event that the Necrons fully awaken and are united under a single banner they would actually outnumber the Imperial Guard with soldiers as individually powerful as a space marine.

 Galef wrote:
IoM has existing tissue samples to start with. Necrontry DNA is unlikely to have survived 65million years. It's why we can clone dinosaurs today, despite having the tech available

The Necrons do have access to time travel though.

The device in Devourer is able to transport from the present day (999.M41) back to pre- biotransference, for example.

That creates a whole other series of questions, but getting a DNA sample isn't outside the realms of possibility.

To add:

"The Devistation of Baal" book mentioned that the secret library that Mephiston goes into has a Necron Overloard locked in stasis.

Then of course there is the old joke about the Tau using magnetic fields to prevent reanimation, but that was a trick by the Necrons to get into the Tau ship to attack.

But, over all, they gave up their bodies (C'tan ate their souls in the process) and were effectively downloaded into the bodies. (Movie Transcendence)

My mind canon has it working like the re-imagined Cyclons from the more recent Battlestar Galatica. Destroy the body to the point where it can no longer reanimate, the "mind" uploads to the nearest Tomb World mainframe to be put into another body. And destroying the Tomb World mainframe might actually destroy the "minds" on that planet, or at least cause it to upload to the nearest Tomb World as many of the "minds" as possible, with a higher priority being the Overlords and above royalty.

Since almost every single star system has at least one Tomb World, and many have more than one, the total number of Necrons would be quite numerous.

pm713 wrote:
Something I've never understood about newcrons is this - They want to return to having bodies and flesh and all that. But why can't they just grow them? Even the Imperium can do that.

There appears to have been some element of deliberate trickery in bio-transference. A short story and references in the codex describe bio-transference as consuming the physical forms of the Necrons. One might assume a certain degree of initial contempt for flesh and possible sabotage by the C'tan sorted out any genetic records.

There might also be the issue that Necrontyr bodies weren't exactly top-notch, and the drive is not to return to weak, inferior bodies after having spent millions of years as virtually unstoppable metallic paragons, but to superior flesh. For those of the Necrons who give a damn about it. According to the Codex, various dynasties strive for different things, and not all are seeking flesh.

Crypteks interested in Primaris marines for this purpose, as I recall. Transfers of Necron consciousness to other races generally goes poorly apparently.

pm713 wrote:
Something I've never understood about newcrons is this - They want to return to having bodies and flesh and all that. But why can't they just grow them? Even the Imperium can do that.

The problem there is that Necrons lost their souls when they became Necrons. Their new bodies just had their minds copied into these machines. As such your proposed solution might work for a noble but warriors (who are like 90% of all Necrons) lost everything that made them individuals in the process as such there is nothing to restore their identities once they became mortal again and then instead of having the majority of their population be effective military automatons, they would have most of it be a bunch of catatonic people...

Maybe just transfer the nobles and keep the Warriors and immornatal in their flesh metal shells? Would an interesting story...

Why would the nobles care about warriors if they're basically machines? They can just save themselves and keep a badass robot army. That's why Newcrons confuse me. They have the tech to make great new bodies for themselves and keep the top military in the galaxy. That's before taking into account that they have literal time travel so they could just return to Necrontyr times with a stockpile of bodies, take out the C'Tan again and be happy from day 1. They have no reason to be bothered about that altering the timeline.

I like to pretend that there is a Necron Flayed One sent back to the time of before the God Emperor of mankind was born. His mission is to kill Sarah Connor...er i mean Fate O'Konor, the mother of the God Emperor, John Conner...er i mean John O'Konor, humanity's last hope against Skynet...er I mean the Necrons.

Introducing the worlds most convoluted time line since Terminator: Genesys. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800...er I mean Flayed One. And that dragon chick from Game of Thrones as Fate O'Konor. And Christian Bale as John O'Konor for an action packed grim dark futuristic film. Coming this summer...

Necron: Reanimation Protocol

"Come with me if you want to Live..."