Do or Don't: Necrons

in the past of almost every fantasy or sci-fi setting there's always some sort of ancient precursor civilization a culture that set the stage for everything that was to come and indirectly or directly guided the civilizations of the modern day to their current form this video is not about those guys this video is about the stone cold bastards that murdered the precursors through being dicks and then woke up millions of years later to do it to everyone else a faction of androids hell-bent on conquering its slaving and murdering the lesser races of the galaxy that dare to trespass on their property which is everything do you like robots wielding enough firepower to make sarah connor cry because if so then this is the army for you [Music] 65 million years ago there lived the necron tear and boy did their lives suck short and brutal because they lived on one of those planets in stellaris with nothing but negative modifiers so they asked the old ones for help with becoming immortal or at least not having their body mass be 50 cancer cells and the old one's response suck a fat one necron tear real nice guys those old ones in response the necrons here created gods called the catan out of space thus they found floating around and those catan preceded us semi unwillingly turned them into soulless egyptian space terminators and then they murdered the old ones after that the catan decided to eat each other for more power because a clown told them to as revenge for devouring all their souls the now renamed necrons shattered their gods into tiny tiny pieces unfortunately it took a lot out of them to do this and this was still at the point of the galactic timeline were the orcs were the size of parking garages and the other could politely ask kane if he wouldn't mind deleting that massive necron army over there so they took a nap for 65 million years now they're back ready to reclaim the galaxy maybe get their organic bodies back and definitely beat the [ __ ] out of everyone in a 50 000 light year radius for those of you not versed in astronomy that's the galaxy because the necrons are going to win 40k and there's nothing you can do to stop it there's of course as always plenty more but for the background of the lore that's what you need to know so why go for the tin man's murderous extended family if you want a faction that just screams ancient power then more than anything you want the necrons now you might be saying hang on a minute what about the yorks or the eldar i sent for like a desperate high schooler trying to get laid for the first time or even the imperium with all its stuff being thousands of years old well first of all look at the orcs i understand they were technically around to fight the necrons when the old ones created the green lands but would you really call the shitbox one of them threw together in five minutes an asian work of wonder yeah me neither and while the elder are just as old as necrons they don't have that ancient feeling the necrons give off i look at the eldar and i think space elf which certainly carries connotations of being old but not in the same way the ancient egyptian mecca pyramid that unleashes sleeping terminator zombies does as for the imperium well six thousand years old is pretty old but 65 million years old has that beat by a fair margin but just because they're old as [ __ ] doesn't mean they're not gonna kick ass along with the orcs and tyranids if they weren't constantly shown to be losing the necrons are one of the most likely factions to win warhammer if that would ever happen i mean come on ancient technology more advanced than anything else uncountable legions of incredibly strong unyielding warriors unsurpassed drip i love my elves but man the necrons are sitting pretty oh and they can shut down chaos too sure the pylons arcadia got destroyed but unlike other factions they can build more of their cool stuff once the right people wake up they made a death star once they have something that can destroy any star in the galaxy at the touch of a fingertip sure they don't use it because it might trigger a cascade of supernovas galaxy wide but imagine if they started losing sure would be a shame if someone's robotic fingers slipped on the button that destroys the solar system and cooks the emperor now it's a great way to describe how fighting the necrons goes i can't die it is impossible that about sums it up when a necron dies it usually doesn't sometimes they just stand right back up after they get filled with lead sometimes they just teleport away sometimes they self-destruct but the thing is their self-destruction looks just like they're teleporting so in the lore no one can ever say for certain if they've truly been destroyed and on the tabletop if you lose you can just say no they all teleported away how do you know they didn't there's also untold billions of necrons in the galaxy so you're not exactly sure of numbers to throw at the enemy they're just taking an apostol waiting for a tech priest to come diddle the wrong piece of tech and wake them up as for in my opinion one of the biggest pros they're the only faction that's 100 no [ __ ] robots not even the mechanic is that because they have to at least have a little bit of an arm or brain in their bodies to say it isn't tech heresy but the necrons straight up alien robots and they look robotic too as opposed to some of the mechanical stuff that looks like leonardo da vinci got bored and started dueling in his notebook when he was painting a church ceiling and speaking of being robotic they've got the most advanced tech in the setting you know what i'm just saying it i don't care about little timmy the imperium fanboy's insistence that the dark age of technology totally had better stuff than the necrons guys the necrons have the best tech everyone else is lagging behind i mean they're quote-unquote gods are beings inherently connected to the physical laws of reality how could they not have the best attack so if high-tech robots are your thing you want the necrons it's as simple as that and yet despite all being killer robots they still got a lot of variation in their lore the dynasties of the necrons can have some pretty varied motivations do forgive me while i try and pronounce these names you've got the empire of the separate necrons whose programming got a bit [ __ ] from radiation and now they all fall under the command of the tomb world's main ai to enslave and kill the living you've got the tsarnaev dynasty who are a bunch of pirate space robots which god that's [ __ ] cool you've got the classic proud warrior guys with the novak dynasty and their special characters are just as varied as the dynasties are there's treys in the infinite who just wants to make a really big museum filled with living dioramas from across time and space nemosaur zondrick is a schizophrenic monty python character in space who's just determined to have fun with his new status as a mortal soulless robot good for him i say and who could forget good ol illuminator saras the robot who seeks to become god by performing live vivisections on people he kidnaps no i don't understand how that's supposed to work and to be honest with you i don't think he does either so all in all a lot of variety and if none of that works for you just make your own one up say your dynasty was in an isolated sector of the galaxy and only just woke up and presto unlimited room to make whatever homebrew lure you want relatedly they can be as evil or as good as you want them to be the silent king supposedly respects cinquinius and is mainly focused on killing the tyranids it may only be because the necrons can't transplant themselves back into flesh and blood bodies if everyone gets bored but that's still pretty good by 40k standards meanwhile the average necron warrior unflinchingly murders children because they're not necrons see plenty of options for you to choose from on the 40k morality spectrum everyone is a bad guy but some are slightly less bad guys funny enough the necrons are the most likely faction to save the galaxy from chaos they have no souls to feed the gods with and their tech shuts down the war humanity had to create a god just to have a chance and the god proceeded to [ __ ] it all up the necrons just flipped the chaos begone switch and they're laughing as the demons scream that's not fair before they get sucked back to hell where they belong necron models are also absolutely gorgeous sure some like the nightbringer shard look a little outdated but he's still looking alright and since 9th edition revamped a lot of the models and brought some new ones with it i don't honestly think there's a single necron model available to buy that looks bad some are resin yeah but most are plastic and overall they look exactly like they should i don't have anything funny to say here they just look good if the model's name ends with mancer it's gonna look especially cool finally the necrons are by far the easiest army to paint at least in my opinion sorry space marines even easier than you you know when you need to paint them you need four paints some primer a metallic color a wash like no oil and green that's it and if you want you can substitute green for another color that looks suitably like an led light bulb if you really want to get into it add some black or gray to the weapon so what is in all metal just use those colors and congratulations your necron army is decently painted now how about the rules what's in their favor first off reanimation protocols how can i describe them i can't die it is impossible i'll use that joke as often as i want thank you very much long story short when you take casualties you roll some dice equal to the amount of wounds that the units you lost had when you roll a five or a six on a die it's now a valid die take all your valid dice when you're done rolling that many wounds worth of models are getting back up and giving your enemy the finger so if you roll well you can go from a squad of necron worries with one model left to a squad of necron warriors with all but one model still left and maybe your release take a bit of a pounding as well well at least a few of them are going to be standing back up too see you in hell everybody else sure for the most part it's only on a five or a six they're coming back but it's a free way to undo casualties what's there to complain about my free revive option isn't 100 reliable [ __ ] you no one else has that just because second necron units are basically unroutable with leadership 10 across the board for reference primaries space marines generally have a leadership of seven with sometimes up to nine for the real big boys like captains yeah they shall know no fear my ass so while in theory you can still take casualties from morale penalties in practice yeah the robots aren't going to be going anywhere reanimation protocols don't work on units loss from morale penalties unfortunately but again you likely won't be taking huge losses from this necron units are also generally very hard to kill as well even ignoring reanimation protocols necron units are still pretty tough nuts to crack they're reasonably powerful same toughness as space marines if not higher and honestly in terms of cost efficiency are probably the best troops in the game period at least when it comes to their durability anyway if all you want from your army is something that'll stay on the board and stubbornly refuse to die then they're in the perfect sweet spot between cheap and effective they're not as cheap as the humble guardsmen of course but they're infinitely more powerful on the other end of the spectrum they're not quite as strong as space marines but they're also cheaper also did you know they kind of have magic it's weird but necrons do indeed have wizard units called cryptics wizard like anyway essentially they use super advanced tech that's indistinguishable from magic to do their funky [ __ ] they come in several different flavors for their not magic depending on your wants and needs i believe they do their thing in the movement phase if i'm not mistaken and if i am mistaken then undoubtedly someone will let me know in the comments they've got command protocols as well which are cool basically they're buffs that you pick the order you want them to go in and then as each turn passes you activate another one assuming you aren't gimped immediately to the match the necrons actually can get stronger as the game progresses though with some caveats i'll get into i mean i guess if half your armies wiped out turn one including your warlord they're not that helpful but in that case not receiving a buff to your movement speed is far from the biggest of your worries normally you can't change the order they activate in but if you use the silent king once a battle you can switch on one you prefer instead of the one that was slotted to go first the necrons are also solid in both melee and shooting phases a wall of necron warriors is going to melt things in front of them if you pick your targets right and as for melee i mean look at the scorpek destroyers would you want to be anywhere near one of these things i sure as hell don't lastly as with all warhammer armies that are undead in one way or another when you properly use your character units your mainline troops are getting buffed to high hell for making reanimation protocols easier to buffing their movement necron leaders can turn an already scary force into a goddamn nightmare have you ever seen a unit of 20 nekron warriors get brought down to 5 in a single go only to bounce back right to 15 warriors because some [ __ ] held a magic orb near them to let them phone life alert to pick them back up that's the kind of [ __ ] real life leadership checks are made out of but for their cons they have plenty to match the pros for one the necrons are kind of the ultimate proof that gw will switch around decades of lore at the drop of a hat did you know the necrons were originally chaos androids isn't that [ __ ] funny to hear about nowadays kadia would have turned out a lot differently if that was the case blown the hell of a lot sooner but beyond that they went from being soulless personality-less androids being tomb kings in space now personally i like the changes because it gives more room for the necrons to have actual character-driven stories the mindless robot isn't exactly something i'm gonna give a [ __ ] about i gotta be honest with you but if you like the old necrons well you're probably still bitching about the changes and even if you didn't like them be aware that gw can change everything you like about them as it suits them this goes for every faction of the game of course but the necrons seem particularly vulnerable to it we may wake up one day and find out that trezen is just metal sly cooper as for in-universe flaws while the necrons certainly aren't a small force and have the backing of all of their old tech unlike literally everyone else believe it or not the amount of them in the galaxy is very much finite they don't make more of themselves so everyone destroyed is another permanent loss double for their katan shards granted destroying one of them is damn near impossible but if it does somehow blow up that's a permanent loss something to keep in mind about the necrons if you imagine them as complete terminators in space there's no necron factory making them anywhere now this one might just be a weird personal preference of mine but when i get into a fictional universe i like to imagine that everyone has a soul even if that sort of thing isn't explicitly a part of the setting i'm not getting into theology here so please keep your reddit atheism to yourself it's just nice to think that the characters i get attached to have a happy ending even in death now with that in mind 40k is a setting where the afterlife explicitly exists granted usually sucks balls for most people but it is a thing but the necrons don't have souls nothing not a zip when one of a ghost could put that's a nothing after death but sweet sweet nothing arguably given what the necrons go through many of their leaders desperately miss the days of being flesh and blood this is a positive but if you like to imagine that your guys get to go to the great pc hard drive in the sky after their death or even the purgatory of an elder soul stone then i'm sorry but there's nothing for you here with the necrons the average necron also has zero personality again nothing not as if you get the idea so if you like to imagine that each of your models has something going on with their lives beyond becoming a casualty in your war game you are once again out of luck only the tyranids have less individual personality than you and yes i'm including the orcs in this who all love the same things fighting and winning at least individual greens can want something in their life even if that something is always just more fighting more winning and more things to fight and win with they also have defeat as part of their backstory which is kinda lame and by defeat i don't mean a massive cataclysm like the eldar giving birth to slaanesh or mankind losing other technology they lost the war in heaven you can argue whose fault it was but at the end of the day they had to go to bed for millions of years and the elder got to have so much kinky sex they created a god of it so yeah defeat is inherently part of the necrons also sometimes they wake up with robotic dementia because as it turns out even super advanced computers decorate after several thousand millennia of zero maintenance what other nitpicks do i have for their non-rule stuff ah yes if you don't like metal colors you don't like the necrons you see all this all of this is metal the models themselves are very distinct and creative but the coloration for them not so much you can vary it up a bit with some rust and different glowy colors but at the end of the day all these guys are going to look like they're just marched out of the same toyota dealership ready to kill i also think they're about middle of the pack price wise certainly not the cheapest ones on the block for what you need to make a comprehensive army but they aren't like the guard of the tyranids where you need to put off a mortgage payment to own one of these guys so you'll be spending a fair amount of money in the necrons but it could be worse i guess and with that lukewarm point here we go for the rules downsides the necrons are slow buffing their movement with command protocols and leader aurors only helps so much at best you're getting brought up to everyone else's average movement speed and if anything happens to the thing buffing your army you're gonna go right back to moving in a snail's pace the neckrounds may be a wall of death and destruction but the funny thing about walls is that they generally don't move very fast the necrons as of late have also had some trouble dealing damage against either armored targets or ones with a lot of wounds and with the armor of contempt thing that got added it only got worse they used to cut through armor like it was rotten butter now they have some issues you aren't completely defenseless against it so don't have a panic attack the moment someone sets down a lehman russ onto the game board but be aware that you may have a bit of a difficulty cutting it down as an undead army well like i said their leaders buff the [ __ ] out of their units and in general are very good for what you pay for them the problem here is that if you hear characters die your army is going to [ __ ] it's even worse than usual for the necrons because command protocols need a model with a noble keyword to be in charge and alive for them to actually happen if that model dies you don't get buffs anymore turns out an army of 99 mindless drones can't do much thinking on their own what a shocker speaking of command protocols just aren't that good they're certainly helpful and they don't hurt you but they aren't exactly stealing the show away from other faction special abilities adding a little bit of armor penetration of your roll of six is nice but i'm not exactly gushing com out of every hole i have over it your centerpiece units also aren't as great as you might think they are now don't get me wrong anyone who doesn't have a plan and the ability to defeat a katan shard is going to get their [ __ ] pushed so far up their [ __ ] it'll be coming out of their mouth but the thing is just about every army in the game has something that's able to deal with that shard even if it's just running away from it because they're faster than it is i'm not an expert at balancing by any means but even to my limited knowledge it seems like the necron heavy hitters either need a stat increase or a price decrease to make them truly shine again they aren't bad just not as good as you might hope for what you're paying for lastly while you do technically have magic powers that's exactly what they are technically magic you don't have any actual magic your psychic face is essentially going to involve hoping your enemy rolls perils of the warp and if they don't hoping that the magic missile they send your way rolls poorly for damage turns out the elder didn't win the war in heaven by asking the necrons for a time out they want it by waving their hands and turning the necrons into frogs and other elf [ __ ] and there you go more or less the essentials for the necrons to decide if you want to go for them or not one less positive to end on however is that the necrons have probably the best non-imperium books in the game i'm adding this at the end instead of near the beginning because there's a lot i didn't cover for the necrons that more than any other faction i think deserves attention the infinite of the divine twice dead king the necrons have a lot of interesting lore that really can't be done justice in a single video so even if you don't end up purchasing a necron army grab some of their books you won't regret it thank you of course to my channel members you are the reanimation protocols to my necron warrior unit ensuring i always come back to live another day consider becoming one or subscribing because i want to reach the funny number and then get the funny silver plaque though perhaps i'm a little bit too hopeful on that second one thank you for watching and take care out there okay now this is completely unrelated to anything about the necrons but here's a scenario for you you're in the climax of some novel or movie or whatever and your arch nemesis last rival slash ex lover whatever and you are about to throw down their theme song starts playing what song do you not want to hear personally i'm gonna say i don't want to hear holding out for a hero because not only am i about to get my ass kicked i'm not even the good guy in this scenario now also you are now thinking of the shrek 2 finale

Channel: PancreasNoWork

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Id: V7tBKn2XdFk

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022