Victory Pointless

This was a 2000 point game bringing my Necrons out of their dusty tomb for a game vs Imperial Knights.

The Forces

Necrons/Starshatter Arsenal:  Catacomb Command Barge, Nightbringer, Hexmark, Skorpekh Lord + 6 Skorpekhs, Technomancer + 6 Wraiths, 5 Immortals, 3 x 3 Scarab Swarms, 5 Deathmarks, 5 Flayed Ones, 2 Heavy Lokhust Destroyers

Imperial Knights/Noble Lance: Cerastus Knight Atrapos, Knight Errant, 2 x Armiger Helverin, Acastus Knight Porphorion, Callidus Assassin, SoB Immolator, 10 x Battle Sisters

The Mission

UKTC mission 1: Terraform

The Battle

What went well:

• The Doomsday Arks rolled well, especially on number of shots and the combo with the Catacomb Command Barge with Dread Majesty made sure that a lot of those shots went through.
• I scored well on secondaries early on, pulling away to an early lead (not necessarily what you want to do with Challenger Cards in the mix).
• The Wraiths + Technomancer + Reanimator combo made them an unkillable brick.
• The Wraiths also killed the Callidus purely by moving over her, which is nice.
• I managed to keep my warlord Catacomb Command Barge alive until the end – good news since if the Knights had managed to kill it the whole army would’ve gotten buffed.

What didn’t go well:

• The Doomsday Arks were the only decent damage dealers.  The whole of the rest of the army essentially did no damage at all and was not really a credible threat to anything (besides the Wraiths and the Deathmarks dealing with the Battle Sisters).
• Even the Nightbringer rolled badly and failed to do enough damage to bring down the Atrapos, leaving it alive on a single wound and got blasted in return.
• I left my melee units too exposed – both the Flayed Ones and Skorpekhs got blasted to pieces before they could really do anything.  It was a mistake to try to run the Skorps up the left side – there wasn’t suitable cover to stage behind and I overestimated their durability.
• Also excluding the DDAs and the Wraiths, everything died *very* easily, not much surviving beyond a single knight’s shooting activation.  Not what Necrons want!
• The Porphyrian in particular was an absolute menace, deleting anything it so much as glanced at.  Despite being the least-scary profile on paper its Ironstorm Missile Pod was actually one of the biggest problems since indirect fire and D6+6 blast meant it could easily pick up one of my weaker units every time it fired from anywhere on the board, without me being able to do much about it.  Towards the end of the game it stomped straight into my backfield and did 32 wounds to the Reanimator I had holding my home objective.  Reanimators do not have 32 wounds.
• Ultimately I lost too many units outside of my key castles to be able to maintain board control and although I kept my scoring lead almost to the end of the game it wasn’t enough.

Lessons Learned

This was my first game against Knights and going in the two bits of knowledge I had is that they’re currently top of the meta and they have a reputation as a bit of a stat-check army.  Coming out the other side… Yes.  I can see why both of those are the case.

Still, it was a fun game and pretty close – I thought I could hang on right up until the final turn.

I was trying to avoid tailoring my list too much and, besides bringing a reasonable amount of anti-tank, tried to build a fairly well-balanced Starshatter Arsenal list.  Unfortunately while there would’ve been a ‘reasonable’ amount of anti-tank into most other armies, here it was ‘woefully inadequate’ and half my army might as well have not been there.  Even the two Knights that the DDAs killed were thanks to some lucky rolling.  I’m not sure even three DDAs would be enough to do this reliably with more average rolls.  The rest of the list could maybe have stood to be a bit bigger and chunkier – I had lots of small weak units nominally for scoring but they ended up being too easy to pick up.

List aside, I think my main misplays were:

• I should’ve tried to take out the Porphorian.  Defensively it’s a little better than the other knights but offensively it’s a lot better and it singlehandedly negated a lot of my scoring potential.  Either focussing fire or tying it up in combat early on would’ve been smarter.
• I should’ve sent the Skorpekhs up the middle of the board where there was more cover and a better potential for staging.  Although the wraiths did well there they could’ve probably handled one of the more exposed objectives better since they’re tough enough to stand in the open and take it.
• I shouldn’t have been tempted to move away from my home objective to attack the Atropos.  The Reanimator I left behind wasn’t enough to hold it and – even though I killed the Atropos – it didn’t achieve much in points terms since there was an Armiger just behind it to hold the objective anyway.