Necrons Tactics Against Assault Armies

My Necrons tend to fare very well against assault armies. For the most part, this is because they have to come towards me or I will shoot them up. Coming towards me means they have to go through the Deceiver, something very few units can do. Being an assault-based army means they do not have the capability to do a high amount of significant damage in the shooting phase. Of course, most assault armies still have some shooting, but generally it's not going to make a big difference.

Whether I want first turn or not depends on my opponent's army. If I am worried that they have enough fast, hard assaulty units or the primary is Kill Points then I will take first turn for the alpha strike. Usually I will take second turn so I can react to their deployment and refuse a flank. Having second is great for last turn portalling warriors onto objectives.

So let's start with deployment. I will want to place the Deceiver and Monoliths as far forward as possible so they can get into the action ASAP. These units are not really worried about shooting. The scarabs will go behind them for the cover save. I put my warriors in a place where they will be useful later in the game, so basically on an objective or somewhere safe. I place my Destroyers somewhere safe where they will be able to get good lines of sight to priority enemy units.

One more thing to mention regarding deployment. When you set up warriors (or any static shooty unit for that matter) you don't want to set up like this:

X is one squad, O is another.

XXXXX OOOOO
XXXXX OOOOO

This leaves you vulnerable to multi-assaults. It's better to set up like this:

OOOOOOOOO
XXXXXXXXXX

This way they can only assault one squad at a time, meaning it essentially takes them twice as long to kill my guys. While it may not seem like much, this one-turn delay can completely change a game.

When the game starts my opponent will most likely move his models forward. On my turn I turbo-boost my scarabs forward to tarpit a unit that I know I will not be able to kill this turn. This tactic is less effective against flying units like jump pack marines but it still works (more tactics on this later). Monoliths and Deceiver move forward. Getting charged is a non-issue for the Deceiver because he can just leave combat if he wants to. Monoliths, destroyers and maybe warriors shoot at whatever needs to be shot.

Second turn my opponent is likely to charge the scarabs, deceiver and/or monoliths. If he had any units capable of killing the monoliths then I would have wrapped my scarabs around my monoliths to block the charge. When considering if the deceiver should leave combat, sometimes it's not about whether the deceiver can beat the unit, but how long he'll take to beat it. You want to be moving around to use the deceiver for maximum efficiency. In my turn I will shoot some more, then I charge the Deceiver into whatever target seems the most threatening. There are some units which the golden boy needs to avoid (seer council, massed poisoned weapons, etc). These will need to be delayed or taken out using shooting.

At this point, I'm either doing clean-up duty, or I'm trying to get as many bonus points as possible or maybe pull out a draw, and everywhere in between. A note about phase out: assault armies should never phase me out because 1/3rd of my Necrons are destroyers, and they are too fast to be assaulted by almost any assault unit. So even if I lose all my warriors (which should only happen in Annihilation), I can still avoid phase out. This is obviously something I'd like to avoid if possible, but sometimes I don't have a choice.

Next up: Necrons vs. Shooty Armies