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[CuddilyWuddily]

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[glythe]

Originally posted by RoboEmperor:

Ok, so Necron returned to being my favorite again, so I've been doing stuff with it. Mainly one city Ultra Hard and I succeeded. I've consistently beat 9 AIs on a TINY map as Necrons even when an AI is right next to me from turn 1.

Ok so lets talk about necron strategy. The above is my vehicle strategy. I want to try infantry strategy but infantries seem craptastic.

Destroyers are fragile and crappy unlike annihilation barges.
Warriors drop like flies early midgame.
Praetorians also drop like flies the moment they pop out and their damage is subpar compared to doomsday arks despite being in the same tier.

So how do you use a Necron Infantry build? Necron Lords are fun so i want to use them but man, Necron Infantry is CRAP.

Playing against the AI when they have 3 or 4 levels of loyalty bonuses kind of puts the game out of proportion. Why don't you try playing against 9 allied AIs with no loyalty advantage?


Necron Warriors are actually pretty damn good. If you rush to their tier 5 damage upgrade they can stay on the field way longer than you would expect. The armor upgrade is very much advised because it makes warriors very damage resilient when combined with high levels of the Necron Lord's defensive buff.

How to Necro infantry? The trick is to make good use of your defensive buff from the Lord. If you were playing on a bigger map I would advise sending 1 lord out with 3 warriors. That's usually enough to hit level 6 with the lord before you find your first K-bot. Your level 6 lord gets to summon a Praetorian - even if you don't have that tech researched.

Basically you just have everything blob around the lord (always buy movement module first to help with his positioning). Say you scouted a tower and are going to attack it with a low level lord and 2 warriors. Have both warriors touching the Lord just out or range of the tower. On the start of your next turn use your defensive boost. Move in Lord to take alpha - remembering to try and save the best terrain for the warriors. Move warriors to close range on the best defensive terrain available and attack. On its turn the tower will attack one warrior for minimal damage. Tower will die on your turn. Without stopping to heal your warrior will be full health in 1-2 turns (depending on research/ defensive buff strength/defensive terrain).

What if your units are not optimally arranged and you need to move into enemy units? As long as it isn't a wall of long range units move in the lord first. You can make him very tanky with two items to grant +3 armor. Move in warriors to point blank range to return fire. Once everything is in poistion around the Lord as much as possible activate the defensive buff. If this is the enemy player's main army summon the Praetorian adjacent to the Lord - even if you plan on moving it. Activate buff then move Praetorian.

Do not invest into the melee attack power of the Necron Lord until you have everything else. When leveling up my lord I always choose +pop, defense, repeat until 6 : Summon, finish defense then last 3 skills are worthless attack power.

How do you use destroyers? They can attack vehicles/armor at range 2 so keep this guy at the back of your formation. Remember it can stop/move on wire weed without penalty. It is actually harder to kill than a warrior - but comes out later so you might have level 4 warriors and a level 1 destroyer. Lord+destroyer+3 warriors = kill anything even remotely close to its tier for similar build cost. Once you get the summon you can punch even higher above your weight class. Do the strategy I outlined for the tower fight but move the summoned unit first (after defensive buff). Why let a real unit take the alpha?

I feel like your views on Necron Infantry are kind of insane because warriors can be way more damage resistant than Annihilation Barges. I don't know what tech build you are running but I seem to recall that the Annihilation Barge is a "side grade" in that you would be getting 3 techs in that tier. I can play all the way to at least tier 5 (maybe 6 but I can't remember without looking) without needing any side tech. Note I back track to get teleport to base ability somewhere before tier 5-6 when it is 1 turn of research.

[glythe]

I feel like the Stalker is in the wrong tier for good game balance. If you skip it you can go for Doomsday Arks instead on the next tier up. As much faith as I have in Necro infantry I never make that unit; I have tried several times to make an optimal build for it and I can't seem to get the Stalker to work.

Any advantage it would bring is cancelled out by the fact that you can't skip research in that tier so it becomes a 3rd required research which is a bad idea in my opinion. Ultimately it just means you have to wait longer to get your Monoliths out.

Originally posted by RoboEmperor:

What's the monolith good for in a vehicle build? Vehicles can't teleport to monoliths right? Doomsday Ark at least does 50% more damage than the Monolith against everything. I want to use Monoliths because in Dawn of War they were epic as **** but here, I just don't see a reason to ever build one.

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Triarch Stalker is the manifestation of worthlessness right? Way too fragile to do jack.

The Monolith is actually pretty amazing. It has high health, high armor and two attacks but low mobility. You get two Arks for the price of one Monolith so I can see why you might be questioning the Monolith. I am guessing you never paired the healer hero with one?

As I suspect you are aware most factions have a teleport option to reach the enemy base. Necros do this with a Monolith. It might take 10 turns to arrive but when it does your enemy is in trouble. You can take all the infantry you made during those 10 turns and teleport them to the Monolith (incrementally or in ambush fashion). Meanwhile the Doomsday arks can catch up due to their higher speed.

If you are using Necron Lords it can get somewhat risky to keep them as frontline tanks when tier 6-8 units start appearing. If you rush to Monoliths with no detours you can have them out before anything super dangerous to a Lord gets fielded in large numbers. The lord can sit behind a Monolith ready to use its summon ability or buff infantry that want to poke out for a shot with a massive defensive buff.

[Loir]

I also feel like necrons infantry is useless ; at least in hard or above difficulty against ai. Any reavens, lord or most decent unit will one shot warrior even with tech upgrade.

[glythe]

Originally posted by Loir:

I also feel like necrons infantry is useless ; at least in hard or above difficulty against ai.

What tier 1 infantry do you consider good then? Remember that the AI gets bonus levels to all its units when you increase difficulty (that was not the case previously).

[Jey]

Originally posted by RoboEmperor:

. Killa Kans murder warriors in one shot..

I mean they are specialized anti-infantry tool, so yeah no surprise here.

But I'm not convinced barges are more efficient than HD against killa kans.

[Corseth]

IMO the Barge vs Destroyer thing comes because the Barge is probably too well-rounded and mobile, which ends up making them very similar functionally to Heavy Destroyers (meaning one will be more cost effective in those overlapping cases which right now is the barge). I'd like to see it lose some measure of power from its gauss array, durability, and low power shot and move to the high power shot. Possibly even range 4, but that may require a cost increase too. Basically, more of a direct line of site basilisk than a main battle tank, which it kinda is now.

The big advantage of the Heavy Destroyer over other heavy weapons platforms is that they can move and fire without penalty, and they're good movers at that, with the downside of 2 range guns vs 3. Honestly, if we look at HD's vs other heavy weapon platforms (devastators, havocs, HWS, tankbustas etc) they're fine units - they have much more effective range on the offense, lose firepower more slowly, and are way more mobile in general in exchange for shorter range on defense. The problem I see is the Barge overlaps their role a great deal because its move and fire offense is just fine.

We could differentiate them better by pushing the Barge more towards being stationary artillery. It'd still be better vs the higher difficulty AI's, but that's because the AI is pathetically exploitable with artillery at chokepoints or other easily defended points, and I'm not sure that can be how things are balanced anyway.

[glythe]

The HD costs less production/upkeep than the barge and has similar damage output. When you think about game balance you have to consider how long that unit will last vs an enemy on equal footing (or one slightly ahead - perhaps because of better choices or simply RNG).

Once again I will mention that pairing the Lord with infantry makes both way stronger. Warriors alone will not win you the game as they suffer vs armor. When you start to see tier 3/4 units come out you will soon have the HD.

Nobody has mentioned teleportation either. You can't teleport a barge to a forward positioned city. On a medium or larger map you can teleport 2 HD long before you could get a barge in range. Having 2 HD in position to kill a tank in a single turn is better than having a Barge able to reduce the enemy tank to half health.

I'll ask the OP again to consider playing 9 allied enemies on the map size of his choice (no difficulty adjustments). What I have found is that cheap is sometimes better. One of the Necro unit strengths is that they can come back from the brink of death. When you play a game where you are attacked on all sides by the enemy and are extremely outnumbered you have to play a game that focuses on efficiency.

Bigger is not always better. It ends up being wasteful to defend with five units when you only needed three. This becomes a much larger problem when you try to defend against multiple enemies at choke points.

Originally posted by Corseth:

We could differentiate them better by pushing the Barge more towards being stationary artillery. It'd still be better vs the higher difficulty AI's

I'm not sure that can be how things are balanced anyway.

The balance of this game would go to hell in an instant if the standard measure was fighting extreme AI opponents.

Originally posted by glythe:

Originally posted by Loir:

I also feel like necrons infantry is useless ; at least in hard or above difficulty against ai.

What tier 1 infantry do you consider good then?

I'm still waiting for a relevant answer to this question.

[tewall716]

Guardsmen as a T1 infantry are very good as they do their job better than anyone else.

A Guardsman's job is to die for the Emperor.

But in reality Necron and Tyranid both have the ability to choose to never build infantry (or vehicles/monsters if they so choose) as they pay the same resource for all units so you can choose what you like and only build that without wasting tile bonuses (like food).

[Corseth]

Originally posted by glythe:

Originally posted by glythe:

What tier 1 infantry do you consider good then?

I'm still waiting for a relevant answer to this question.

I dunno on the OP, but my thoughts are...

Tyranids ('gaunts): Fine enough fodder, but I rarely make them when I can have their hero make them for free at a higher starting level. This is amplified because they really need the hero to actually do any damage, and if you have the hero you don't need to build them.
AM (Guardsmen): Probably the best of the starter infantry post-research. They use a different resource than tanks, they have the best overall grenade benefits and medpacks are great. Guard still want lots of tanks; you probably don't want to go heavy in food to make lots of them, but I never much regret putting any excess food into these guys or getting their grenades.
Necrons (Warriors): I like these guys but all for that, I rarely produce them. The overall issue that Necron infantry and vehicles using the same resources makes comparison too easy. Honestly they're probably the best turn 1-10 infantry because they can keep scouting while healing from wildlife damage, but I'm just never incentivized to make more of them unless I really have to fend off early pressure before I can get to the better options.
Chaos (Cultists? CM?): This is weird because cultists suck and aren't really your main starter infantry but CM require a research. I dislike both honestly; if I have a lot of early food I'd rather get Berserkers than vanilla CM, if I want to go Chaos infantry at all.
Tau (Fire Warriors): Fine enough though I prefer Pathfinders.
Orks (Boys): They sure hurt (for cost) if they can attack without taking any hits on the way in but holy heck they pop like flies if anything sneezes. With Kans and Tankbustas so readily available I tend not to make many.

I will say... ALL the basic infantry are fairly skippable though, because the first few tech levels come so fast and wildlife density makes it hard to punish skipping basic infantry.

[glythe]

Game settings sound like a consideration here. The AM are massively better if you play on very fast and absolutely terrible if you play on very slow. The same for decreasing wildlife and increasing it respectively.

I prefer to play on fast as it seems like a nice balance point (that makes my favorite faction just a little harder to play). To make games last longer and reward better tactics - or perhaps punish bad decisions I also tend to play with lots of wildlife. I really like extra wildlife as it help to dramatically cut down on a lot of the BS strategies you sometimes see people advertise.

Originally posted by Corseth:

AM (Guardsmen): Probably the best of the starter infantry post-research. They use a different resource than tanks, they have the best overall grenade benefits and medpacks are great.

I will say... ALL the basic infantry are fairly skippable though, because the first few tech levels come so fast and wildlife density makes it hard to punish skipping basic infantry.

How many research upgrades are you taking to make guardsmen great? If I remember correctly a number of their upgrades become a 3rd+ research requirement for that tier.

Originally posted by tewall716:

Guardsmen do their job better than anyone else.

A Guardsman's job is to die for the Emperor.

This is honestly more of what I see. In order to make guards good you dramatically slow down your tech. With a "standard" game as the Necros all you have to do is make your warriors last long enough to get to mid tier tech. This is easy to do with the available heroes coupled with two universal army upgrades.

[Corseth]

Honestly just grenades and medpacks. The morale upgrades never seemed worth it for me. The grenades make them punch above their cost because they throw so many and the relative power and thus opportunity cost of the attack (lasgun vs frag or krak, compared to bolter vs frag or krak) favors them too. But it super depends on how things are going. If I'm on an ore heavy start I probably won't. If I'm right next to an enemy faction... depends who they are. Heck, if I have castellen bots right on my doorstep at start, that is probably going to affect my build order.

I can't say there's many techs I absolutely always get in exactly the same order, because I don't reroll maps and such. If I have access to food bonuses but stuck with -20% ore everywhere, then, frankly I'm going to lean into infantry harder than I might otherwise, especially if I can't find a spot for a second city that rectifies that. I'd much rather be pushing out a flood of effective infantry with some vehicle support in that situation than try to make an all-tank no-infantry strat work with big maluses to vehicle resources. It's not even that rare to have happen.

There's certainly "ideal" techs in ideal conditions but conditions aren't always ideal. That's why factions like Necrons and 'nids have a bit more of a 'calcified' tech path honestly - there's less interaction with the available resources for them vs their unit types.

Edit: Probably worth clarifying I don't have a standard map size vs # of opponents either. Playing on a huge map with a small number of opponents produces a very different game than a tiny map with a dozen, which can be an amusing kick. This is just me, but I don't feel the game has enough variety in what the units can do (higher tech units are generally just better at everything) to give me enough gameplay variety to keep playing the same map conditions repeatedly, so me and my friends play with very different map settings each time and that tends to necessitate taking very different techs.

[glythe]

Originally posted by Corseth:

The morale upgrades never seemed worth it for me.

This is just me, but I don't feel the game has enough variety in what the units can do (higher tech units are generally just better at everything) to give me enough gameplay variety to keep playing the same map conditions repeatedly, so me and my friends play with very different map settings each time and that tends to necessitate taking very different techs.

I have seen the morale upgrades become important if you are playing against people. If you try to fill ranks with guardsmen without morale upgrades they tend to fold like wet paper. That can cause a chain rout.

Unfortunately you are right : high tier units tend to be completely OP and make low tier units almost completely irrelevant. It might be really interesting to see a mod that limits units to be more in line with tabletop rules. There is a mod that increases unit costs as you build more of a unit but I was thinking more like you get 1x of a tier 10 unit, 2x of a tier 9 unit... etc.

[glythe]

Originally posted by RoboEmperor:

If three AI attacks me I lose so no.

Maybe I wasn't clear but I personally found playing against 11 allied AI (with no cheats) way more fun than playing against X number of AI who all have insane cheat bonuses.

Originally posted by RoboEmperor:

And you got it backwards. Barges are efficient. Infantry is not.

What is efficiency? It's not losing a single unit while defending.

That is one definition of efficient. But when you look at large scale you can pretty easily realize that 10 warriors get more attacks, more total life, more effective live (due to each one regenerating), etc. than 7 barges or however the math works out for production/upkeep.

I knew the only way I was going to win a game while so vastly outnumbered was to spam cities. I killed off 1 enemy entirely and took out the main city of a second before they got organized. I went with a 3 main city build knowing that I would eventually branch into a 4th minor city (if nothing else for enhanced teleportation options).

Every city will need a few soldiers at first and you slowly ramp up more. Teleport comes in clutch if you guess wrong with what you will need to defend. I soon discovered that my southeast town was going to be fighting 5+ enemies at once but thankfully the spacing was off so that they did not all hit at the same time. It was more like 3 in the first wave followed by a retreat and then effectively 3 more ( new wave of units plus some that had retreated before).


Playing against lots of unified AI is interesting because you can't just spam one thing and be safe (I do make them all be the same or thematic factions SM+AM). I can't say if the AI does it on purpose but having lots of AI on the enemy team means they go for different tech (they will mostly all go for some of the tech - I assume that was programmed).

Originally posted by RoboEmperor:

My answer is none. No tier 1 infantry is good against Ultra Hard AI. Is why I posted this thread.

Your first post did mention you were playing on high difficulty, but you might want to include that in the title next time or maybe emphasize that a bit more. I thought you were not understanding how to play Necron Infantry in general. No worries!

[Lampros]

Originally posted by glythe:

Unfortunately you are right : high tier units tend to be completely OP and make low tier units almost completely irrelevant. It might be really interesting to see a mod that limits units to be more in line with tabletop rules. There is a mod that increases unit costs as you build more of a unit but I was thinking more like you get 1x of a tier 10 unit, 2x of a tier 9 unit... etc.

Yes, I'd like a mod that does this as well. I thought of putting "unique" tag on super heavies and gargantuans, but that turned out to be too limiting and balance-distorting, too.

[SumatranRatMonkey]

Yeah. the balance of low vs high tier units is one of the few things that bother me about this game as it is. Late game is almost exclusively high tier units slugging it out once low tier units died. Dawn of War had a solution for that (hard capped per-unit maximums of high tier units) but that wouldn't work for this game since map sizes are so varying, etc.

Correlated is that rushing tech with 2 techs/tier shouldn't be such a non-choice (objectively, strategic depth suffers).