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I've taken a bit of a hiatus from 40K for around 4 or 5 years, so I'm not up on the current meta & fluff changes. I was living in South America, & the closest 40K players were in Quito, a 9 hour drive by car through the Andes mountains, from coastal Ecuador. A non-starter...

During the interim I did read the Twice Born King series, & The Infinite & the Divine, to keep my toe in the setting.

One thing the former stressed a lot was that the Necron race was a finite number; every combat had the chance of losing warriors, even when teleporting out for extensive repairs, due to errors in the computer system. If you had to return 1000 warriors, for example, you'd always risk losing 1 or 2 due to glitches in the system, backup power not kicking in on time, EM interference with the signal, etc. So, it was always a race between force preservation & accomplishing whatever military goal the Necrons need to achieve.

Since Biotransferrence was basically a scheme by the C'tan to eat souls, so Necrons are in fact soul-less automatons. Since social rank dictated how much (if any_ personality & self-awareness was preserved, why couldn't the Necrons round up a bunch of humans, & biotransfer them into new Necron constructs. Or, even, make a copy of the AI in current Necron Warriors to replace losses in combat, or attrition from age?

Damon.

Lars Porsenna wrote:
Since Biotransferrence was basically a scheme by the C'tan to eat souls, so Necrons are in fact soul-less automatons. Since social rank dictated how much (if any_ personality & self-awareness was preserved, why couldn't the Necrons round up a bunch of humans, & biotransfer them into new Necron constructs. Or, even, make a copy of the AI in current Necron Warriors to replace losses in combat, or attrition from age?

Damon.

Technicalle there is a bunch of cryptic, especially Illuminor Szeras, who are working on transfering the necrons back to organic bodies and others do work on the attrition problem. For example, a regular Necron Warrior is barely more than an AI so it would not be surprising to see AI necron warrior be created at some point should their casualties become too large, but the Necrons are legions in numbers with most of them still in stasis so attrition is not exactly such a problem.

Hell, Eldars can and do have children, but are both far less numerous and much more heavily affected by attrition.

It’s not at all clear if the Necron retain their biotransference technology.

If they do, I guess it would be possible to “convert” other species into replacement Warriors, shackled by the limited operating system. If it is possible, then like the ancient Necrontyr, the candidates needn’t be combat troops. The Necron Warriors were just…people. The actual soldiery became Immortals and higher ranks.

But would they be willing to do so? That may vary depending on who you ask within their ranks.

Plus if they need to make up numbers? They can always create new Canoptek creepy crawlies.

As for their underlying numbers? Impossible to say, but it could number in the trillions.

Lars Porsenna wrote:
I've taken a bit of a hiatus from 40K for around 4 or 5 years, so I'm not up on the current meta & fluff changes. I was living in South America, & the closest 40K players were in Quito, a 9 hour drive by car through the Andes mountains, from coastal Ecuador. A non-starter...

During the interim I did read the Twice Born King series, & The Infinite & the Divine, to keep my toe in the setting.

One thing the former stressed a lot was that the Necron race was a finite number; every combat had the chance of losing warriors, even when teleporting out for extensive repairs, due to errors in the computer system. If you had to return 1000 warriors, for example, you'd always risk losing 1 or 2 due to glitches in the system, backup power not kicking in on time, EM interference with the signal, etc. So, it was always a race between force preservation & accomplishing whatever military goal the Necrons need to achieve.

Since Biotransferrence was basically a scheme by the C'tan to eat souls, so Necrons are in fact soul-less automatons. Since social rank dictated how much (if any_ personality & self-awareness was preserved, why couldn't the Necrons round up a bunch of humans, & biotransfer them into new Necron constructs. Or, even, make a copy of the AI in current Necron Warriors to replace losses in combat, or attrition from age?

Damon.

Look up the Sarkoni Emperor. It was the AI master program on the tomb world of Sarkon and took over after all the Necron engrams were wiped by radiation storms. Then it set out to conquer other worlds. It could do so because it seems to have taken over the bodies of the Necrons. It seems to have conquered 3 other tomb worlds, though it is not clear if it also wiped the engrams of those Necrons or allowed them to serve as vassals.

So one could play that faction like Skynet and the Terminators.

I actually really like the dynamic where Necrons seeem to be numberless legions of self-repairing automatons to their foes, but from their own perspective are carefully husbanding finite resources where a 0.0001% attrition rate is unacceptable. "Our forces will run dry in a mere 3 million years!" It highlights that the Necrons view things on a timescale incomprehensible to all save maybe the Eldar.

 Haighus wrote:
I actually really like the dynamic where Necrons seeem to be numberless legions of self-repairing automatons to their foes, but from their own perspective are carefully husbanding finite resources where a 0.0001% attrition rate is unacceptable. "Our forces will run dry in a mere 3 million years!" It highlights that the Necrons view things on a timescale incomprehensible to all save maybe the Eldar.

BFG rules tried to use this logic as a form of balancing the overpowered Necron fleet rules. Basically crippling or destroying Necron ships yielded more victory points to the enemy than the standard value. However it was not enough to really balance, and it didn't really help the gameplay experience. It was no fun to win on points but to have been effectively wiped from the table.

The necrontyr were a gaxaly spanning empire, so I expect they existed in their trillions like 40K humans. How many necron bodies exist - I think no one knows and it’s shrouded in myth and bad memories.

Most of the necrons are still asleep I think and I think GW have set it up so that no one knows really and any planet, even Terra, could have a necron tomb on it.

It’s the same with most races to be fair - there are still undiscovered human civilisations out there

 Haighus wrote:
I actually really like the dynamic where Necrons seeem to be numberless legions of self-repairing automatons to their foes, but from their own perspective are carefully husbanding finite resources where a 0.0001% attrition rate is unacceptable. "Our forces will run dry in a mere 3 million years!" It highlights that the Necrons view things on a timescale incomprehensible to all save maybe the Eldar.

I agree, I like this take as well.

I started Necrons back in the hoary days of 3e, back when they were a Lovecraftian horror out of space & time faction. However, I enjoy them MORE now, that they are a faction of squabbling pseudo-Egyptian pastiche of undead robots (of course the Imperium can still see them as Lovecraftian horror bots out of time & space, even if within the power dynamics of the Necron species they are petty bureaucrats or royalty mimicking what they did in life).

But while the Necrons in general are legion, individual Phaeronships may be concerned with where they will be in a few million years, or their numbers are severely attired due to stasis failures, rampant Flayer or Destroyer meme-infections, or simply one of their tomb worlds was blown up by Imperial Cyclonic torpedoes, because it also happened to be infested with Tyrranids or Orks. Thus, my thought on the problem.

Damon.