NI25 warm up game - Guard Vs Necrons

 The next warm up game I played was against my son's friend and his Necrons army. This was going to be a relatively easy game,due to the lack of experience from my opponent. This would be his first Pariah Nexus game, his first competitive 40k game and about his 3rd full 2000 point game. As such it was going to be a learning game for him and very much an experimental game for me. 

After the failure of the Inquisitorial Agents last game, I had switched them out for sisters, to see if the extra firepower and power armour would make a difference. The Necrons are a different kettle of fish then the WE but it would still test the new list and it's options. 

My opponent has quite a horde style list, with two big squads of warriors, with supporting characters, a overlord and chronomancer in one and plasmancer with the others. He also had a 6 "man" squad of skorpekhs with lord,  three wraiths with technomancer, a squad of flayed ones, a squad of death marks, two Lokhust heavy destroyers, a canoptek reanimator, canoptek spider with two squads of scarabs, a hexmark destroyer and finally a C'Tan shard of the Nightbringer. I'll go through the Necrons list in more detail in a later post 

This was a reasonable army for a first fully painted 2000 point list and tournament and these games were designed to give him so time playing, but also to give him some advice and get him use to the cards and they scoring system. Using the Tabletop Battles app also really helped with this, as it gives a nice step by step guide.

Deployment

I decided to deploy with the guard on one flank and the marines and sisters on the other, with the knights in the centre ready to move either way depending upon where they were needed. My opponent split his forces pretty equally across the board with a warrior squad to each side supported by a combat unit, wraiths on his right, skorpekhs on his left. Lastly he placed the Nightbringer on his far left ready to sweep in to my guard.

As well as teaching my opponent, I wanted to test my list and so the sisters went straight for the kill on the left and while they did a good job, they were not quite as good as I would have liked. Their firepower was good, putting down a lot of warriors but still being T3, the return fire was murderous.

The guard on the right did what they do, as just kept trudging forward.

The knights didn't have massive amounts to shoot at this game, so it was hard to really tell if they were doing well od not. 

However, when it came to close combat, they definitely didn't do well. It took 4 fight phases to kill a 5 man deathmark squad, granted they kept coming back but it didn't manage to kill more than 4 in a single fight. In the end some Deathwatch had to come back and help.

Talking of the deathwatch, they spend.most of the game slapping the wraiths, who were quite content slapping back. It took several turns for the wraiths to be destroyed, while chewing through a fair few marines in the process, not enough however to stop them smashing the overlord and chronomancer afterwards. 

Necrons thin on the ground.

By the end of turn 4, it was pretty clear that the guard had dominated the game, however, there was still one unit o. The table that I was very concerned about!

The Nightbringer 

The C'tan Shard of the Nightbringer is not the biggest model around but it's a right pain. A 4+ invulnerable plus a 5+ FNP at T11, halving damage and Reanimation protocols on top of that, is very hard to kill. I put quite a bit of firepower in to him, but it was my lasguns that ended up doing the most amount of damage. He spent most of the time on my right hand side but he destroyed everything he touched. Had he started him in the middle of the table he could have done some serious damage to my forces there and held the centre quite happily while the rwt of the army did it's stuff.

The game was a solid guard victory at the end, with a sizable guard force still on the table at the end of the game. The Necrons had done well but they were just not able to hold back the flood of guardsmen.

The game itself was a lot closer than the 92 to 54 score line might suggest. Secondary points were close, with 40 to 32, a couple of different cards and it could have been a lot closer. On primary points however, things were quite different , at 42 to 12 the Necrons just didn't have the ability to hold on to many objectives.

Overall, another good game, possibly a little to easy a game to really stress test the list but that's fine by me, as I'm not to worried about that. It did give me some more information on my units, namely that the sisters, while having good firepower, are just not resilient enough for their points in an agents attachment. This means that the only other option I have is the scions. Additionally the Armigers just didn't show themselves again and I had some reservations about taking them but I didn't have many other options at this point. 

I had one more game lined up against my son's Tau, but that would occur after the deadline for list submissions, so I had to just take a punt of the scions and stick my final list in.