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This question occured to me after playing a game with my friend the other day. He was playing 'nids and I was playing Necrons. He was mainly using little bugs so immortals and destroyers cleaned all the warriors and gene stealers off the table by about turn 2. By turn 3 there was litterally nothing left of his save one carnifex. With T7 and a 2+ save and 5 wounds I was still pretty confident I could kill it so turn 4 begin to focus my entire army on it. This included (only listing things that can shoot):

6 immortals

40 warriors (20 in range at this point)

3 destroyers

1 monolith

Fired everything I could = 52+d6 shots hitting on 3+ wounding on 6's and 9 shots hiting on 3+ and wounding on 5+.

I got 7 wounds pity about that 2+ save no lasting damage.

At this point the carnifex is trying to blow up my monolith and having no luck.

Turn 5 I move my out of range squads closer and then portal one and begin to shoot again ths time its 72+d6 shots hitting on 3+ wounding on 6's and 9 shots hiting on 3+ and wounding on 5+.

This time round I also got 7 wounds of which my friend failed one. Leaving the 'fex on 4 wounds left.

The fex' once again tries to grab some last minute points attacking the monolith still nothing.

Turn six I portal the last squad in fire everything 92+d6 shots hitting on 3+ wounding on 6's and 9 shots hiting on 3+ and wounding on 5+.

This time (thank god) I got about 15-20 wounds and four beautiful 1's showed up killing the big bug at last.

It was an absolute massicre in my favour (I lost one warrior) but my friend is planning to get a few more carnifex's and definatly will be running a Tyrant really soon and I just wonder if I have so much trouble killing one what this will be like for me. Any suggestions from players that have seen this kind of match up before would be greatly apprieciated.

Smoof

Carnifexes are a real backbone of resilience for a tyranid army.  See the Carnifex guide on this site for more details.

That one Carnifex could spit out 10 shots a round as a dakkafex, or be a CC brute, or shoot 2 big guns at your necrons dropping a pie plate or few.  He could have 6 in a given army assuming you play 1500+ points.

I would ignore them till the end like you did unless you can focus on one that is raining death upon you.  Beware the long ranged ones in cover, or any that regenerate.

The truth is necrons do not have a great deal of options.  Assuming you are not using Ctan which would do the trick quite well, then gauss cannons are your best bet.

They can't really hurt you, so leave them for last. Necrons just have a hard time against high toughness high save critters, part of the army's weakness.

you can try and get a c'tan into HtH, or take heavy destroyers, but other than that, you dont have much. we had a good thread going a while back about trying to take down Nidzilla with Crons, and it didnt look like a promising proposition.

But then again most fexec cant really do much damage to a necron army either. Call it an even match.

Fexes are really hard to kill, but you can ultimately get them by volume of fire. I haven't found an answer for a CC tyrant with wings though, one round is not enough time to shoot him down, and then he's all up in your units.

The simple fact is that Necron armies need to start taking multiple Heavy Destroyer units.

The other thing I'd suggest is that you guys start playing stock army lists that have to face all-comers. A Tyranid player who puts T7 and a 2+ save on all his Carnifexes is going to drain so many points out of his army and he's going to get really hammered by any enemy with Lascannons.

A few games like that and he'll probably start to pull the T7 and 2+ save off.