Victory Pointless

This was a rematch against the same Dark Angels force as before. For the sake of variety I decided to swap out a few of my peripheral units for a few new things I wanted to try out. This meant setting aside my beloved Doomsday Ark and vaguely-liked Skorpekhs, instead testing out a Doomstalker, Lokhust Heavy Destroyer and Flayed Ones.

The mission was Kicking The Nest – a fairly traditional objective-taking mission with some minor twists. Seeking revenge for their previous defeat, the Dark Angels mount an assault on a Necron tomb-complex…

What went well:

• The Flayed Ones made me some early points by infiltrating and lurking out of sight near the centre objective. When the enemy got close they raced out of cover and managed to take out half an Assault squad and tie up two units for a turn before inevitably being cut down.
• The Doomstalker, while not quite as devastating as the Doomsday Ark, is still pretty good especially considering it’s a lot cheaper. It got into an argument with a squad of Terminators which it ended up winning – almost wiping out the squad while only going down to half wounds itself. Most importantly it was a good ‘Distraction Carnifex‘ – a big, visible, tough unit that my opponent focused fire on to no good end when there was lots of much squishier stuff around that they could have quite easily wiped off the board instead.
• My Overlord on his Command Barge, who spent all of the last game running away, regained some of his honour this game by bravely charging into the enemy lines by himself, scything through a bunch of Intercessors with Tank Shock and cutting down the rest with his sharp stick. Then he ran away.
• My Scarab swarms did no damage all game, but they managed to keep my opponent off the central objective purely by virtue of getting in the way. They got shot to pieces immediately, but the shooting phase is after the movement phase… so mission accomplished. I still feel I’m not using these as effectively as I could, but they’re easily worth the 40 points just as an annoyance.

What didn’t go well:

• My big expensive 20-man warrior blob got bogged down in melee with a small unit of Reivers. They could regenerate faster than the marines could cut them down, so they were never in any real danger, but they were stuck in place and being so bad in combat meant it took several turns to chip through the marines’ armour until I eventually fell back with the warriors and let another unit finish off the Reivers with shooting. In retrospect I should have done that much earlier and continued to push up the board with the warriors.
• I sneakily hid my brand new Lokhust Heavy Destroyer in some ruins in my deployment zone… so well hidden in fact that I forgot it was there myself until turn 2.
• The Spyder was a bit meh. It has a bit of shooting, a bit of melee, some interesting aura buffs and the ability to bring back Scarabs… but it’s so slow it’s hard to get it to where it needs to be to capitalise on those things.

We had to call it at the end of turn four for time reasons, but by that point I had racked up an unassailable 75VP to the Dark Angels’ 25VP. Another victory to the spooky robot boys! I think in large part the lead came down to establishing early control over the central objective thanks to the Flayed Ones, although my hold over it was really quite flimsy all game – if my opponent had pushed more agressively at that point it could easily have flipped the other way.

In the post-game the Flayed Ones failed their out-of-action test and ended up Disgraced. I thought they did OK for themselves, personally, but I guess Necron society is a bit prejudiced towards those carrying the Flayer Virus.