I give up necron hard campaign

[Doragor]

I'm around turn 40
3k Invasions popping everywhere, Cairn battleship doesn't have any significant ranged weaponry nor bombers/boarders and I'm not talking about scripted invasions.
Tyranids board my ships faster than I can move them around.

Constantly recalling my ships around so I can take care of invasions, that makes me only able to move Amarkun and another admiral around to claim systems and do objetives while I'm forced to sit and wait for repairs to finish and troops to replenish to an acceptable amount.

Necron ships lack variety and utility to a ridiculous degree, my most viable strategy so far is using admirals with the long range energy orb to snipe enemy escorts and waiting inside gas clouds/asteroid fields so I can at least get them in range because Necron ships are almost melee when it comes to efficient range.

It's incredibly tedious and doesn't offer any replay value when it comes to cruiser clash, it's always the same bs if you want to advance, I can only think of that point domination thing if you really want to beat this campaign on hard and I hate that crap.

Had no problem beating Imperium campaign hard in cruiser clash and I'm currently steamrolling as chaos with their OP bombers and sniper lances, probes do wonders.


Just give necrons some good ships with better weapons, they have like 2 different weapons for their ships, either that short range garbage arc battery or the gauss thing that does mediocre damage to ships and ignores shields. And their squadrons are MUCH weaker compared to any other faction and also lack variety, they have one fcking job of being the best patrol squad and fail hard at that.
Not to mention I can only deploy 2 Cairn battleships in most of the cases, guess I get to deploy 3 around rank 14 or something, but I just can't take the grind anymore, those ships take almost 500 points and aren't even good at killing things compared to the battleships from other factions.

[Dominator131]

EZ mode on every faction, and for Necrons on this occasion:
1. Park your ships inside a gas cloud (or some occasions inside an asteroid field) close to each others
2. Scout with an escort / doom fighters / probe so you can see the enemy (and fire on them), so that you can target their deck and then engines / weapons
3. Put your lightning arc ships on the "shoot at multiple targets" stance (especially Cairn)
4. If you take damage on your ships systems, put the pyramidrepair thing on or the scarabs skill if you have it when you get much health damage

When using this tactic:
The enemy can't chip away at you if they don't see you.
You should move your ships only if there are bombs or some other AOE hazards. Necron teleport is OP when doing this as you can teleport away from hazards and then move slowly back to the gas cloud.
You'll get boarded but the AI usually boards the closest ship, so you can "guide" the enemy doing this to board specific ships.
Use your Starpulse wave sparingly if there are multiple enemy fighters / bombers.

And they never fixed the Necron bug when using the "resurrect crew" stance; if you are running low on crew, you can put the stance on while deploying. Then click the "fast forward time" -button and wait for a minute and all of your ships are full of crew (for example if you have 1/12 crew on green, you put the stance on and fast forward, then you'll get 12/12 crew on green).

So I think you can manage this and kill them all.

[Doragor]

Originally posted by Dominator131:

EZ mode on every faction, and for Necrons on this occasion:
1. Park your ships inside a gas cloud (or some occasions inside an asteroid field) close to each others
2. Scout with an escort / doom fighters / probe so you can see the enemy (and fire on them), so that you can target their deck and then engines / weapons
3. Put your lightning arc ships on the "shoot at multiple targets" stance (especially Cairn)
4. If you take damage on your ships systems, put the pyramidrepair thing on or the scarabs skill if you have it when you get much health damage

When using this tactic:
The enemy can't chip away at you if they don't see you.
You should move your ships only if there are bombs or some other AOE hazards. Necron teleport is OP when doing this as you can teleport away from hazards and then move slowly back to the gas cloud.
You'll get boarded but the AI usually boards the closest ship, so you can "guide" the enemy doing this to board specific ships.
Use your Starpulse wave sparingly if there are multiple enemy fighters / bombers.

And they never fixed the Necron bug when using the "resurrect crew" stance; if you are running low on crew, you can put the stance on while deploying. Then click the "fast forward time" -button and wait for a minute and all of your ships are full of crew (for example if you have 1/12 crew on green, you put the stance on and fast forward, then you'll get 12/12 crew on green).

So I think you can manage this and kill them all.

Please notice that I'm playing on hard as I've emphasized many times already, conventional strategies do not work as well as they do in normal. For instance:

Cauterizing stance might work for the first 3 minutes to replenish troops, but it doesnt recover the status like red yellow green, only end turn repair fixes that. After 3 mins, it becomes useless as I need reload stance to keep me moving between clouds and fields since tyranid fleets spam rush on hard and easily outrun my teleports. Arc dispersion stance is incredibly useless as reload is much better for prioritizing targets and breaking morale as it makes firing faster.

The undected strategy (gas cloud/asteroid field) doesn't work because all the ships will travel in unison and with a healthy amount of escorts, so they WILL keep me revealed unless I destroy all 6 escorts they usually bring in a 3k fleet and the escorts usually stick behind enemy ships. That's why I usually have the energy ball skill that allows me to snipe escorts before they close in, but it is quite difficult to hit since I need to predict the exact pathing the enemy will take.

Pyramid repair has a very long cooldown and I usually use call to arms instead, since boarding is much easier agaisnt necrons ships, enemies just spam lightning strike once they have a visual from escorts who know exactly where you are on hard even if you are undetected and hiding on a cloud or field.

But I think you didn't get how much of hassle hard is around 30, as the enemies will start invading with everything they have (3k fleets) and in any sector as long as they have a 2 in agression (sometimes even a 1 is dangerous) and it doesnt matter if you end that faction, the game just prioritizes invasions by another faction instead, invasion frequency doesn't change if you terminate a faction, it just switches to another one until you end them all, something I learned in Imperium Hard campaign.

[Ashardalon]

hard doesnt matter
ai is still braindead, it just ads a few ships to the enemy, wich just means they will ram themselves to death more

-you dont go in cauterizing with your main ships
use an escort hidden in the back to replenish with itself then teleport crew into the big ships once they are empty
its not like the crew loss really matters, its a few crits you can repair
-dont move, you dont need to move
stand in that cloud with disperced stance and kill their escorts
ai is so bad they will ram themselves to death on you for an even easier win
-arc dispersion lets you kill those escorts spotting you
only focusfire if you spotted the synapse, but better to kill it with skills and fire boarding anyway
keeping all enemy ships shields down also reduces their damage to pitiful levels

they will keep you spotted for a while, but escorts die
and then they need to get into scarab range to fight you
they melt fast at scarab range

using call to arms is probably why your damage is so low
its a useless waste of time necrons should never use
keep pyramid ready on your admiral, spot their escorts with your fighters with the rest
never cripple your ships for no reason by setting them in call to arms as the worst boarding does is cause a crit thats easily repaired

you have battleplans
why are you even still fighting, you get something like 12 per turn at that point so thats 2.5 invasions dismissed every turn
do the story missions and leave

tho i can understand the boredom and frustration of the necron campaign leading you in those mistakes

[Dominator131]

Yes, cauterizing does not recover the status from red to yellow or from yellow to green, but for example if you have a ship half way on yellow crew status you can exploit the cauterizing bug during the deployment phase. So at least you have full yellow crew status before the battle even begins and that way you can have more longevity on your ships.

Then after the "healing phase during deployment" as the battle begins you can switch to whatever stance suits you. I go for the arc dispersion as in the first stages of battle there are so many targets for your guns. Then as the battle goes on the reload stance is good, if there arent many targets for your arc lightning.

When using the undetected tactic you should reveal like half of the enemy fleet. Usually the AI is dumb with them and they boost away the revealed ones, so that the enemy fleet comes one to a few ships at a time at you, while the other half of the fleet travels slowly towards you.
Using this tactic I played through all of the campaigns and only lost a total of two ships (a battleship in the Imperium campaign while fighting the Ancient one and a Chaos grand cruiser while being ambushed by the Imperium with unlimited reinforcements). Sure, those were modded campaigns, but still the enemy AI is braindead compared to a human.

Yes, pyramid repair has a long cooldown, but if you have three admiral ships you can get three of them and it is an AOE skill. So it should be fairly easy to balance the cooldown with it so that you have one always available if needed.

With two Cairns and a Harvester or a Reaper (all leveled up to max) and many of the campaign upgrades you can defeat quite many fleets.
And yes, Necrons do suffer when faced with the boarding focused factions, while the Tyranids being the hardest to combat against.

Regarding the AI invasions, all of the systems are not needed to be controlled at all times. Remember you can exploit the AI behaviour; if the AI does 3k invasions it does them when they do not control any systems in the sector. The faction does not invade a sector when they control at least one system. So if there is a pesky faction that you struggle with you can let it control one system, so at least they are contained until you finish up the annihilation arc of that faction.

[Doragor]

Did any of you finish or at least try necron hard campaign? You know hard right? +1 to agression in all sectors, which means at least 1 invasion per turn even if you have full control of the sector +20% more fleet points and leadership for enemy AI. Staying stationary is a death sentence.

It's nothing like normal, if you don't get rid of tyranids early they destroy the game, necron ships are incredibly garbage agaisnt tyranids as they drain the ships of all troops if you keep your battleships stationary, since you can't destroy boarder torpedoes with starpulse on melee range reliably and are a pain to move around even with teleport.

Battleplans are scarce and the AI will prioritize recovering them and leaving the battlefield in data recovery missions, they are also essential for getting full sector control, which means I used at least 20 before turn 30 to get full control of 4 systems, not to mention the attacks I had to delay and some I had to cancel as my forces were spread thin.

Necron hard campaign is also filled with mini events like the warp anomaly I got on Scelus, which I only got in the end of Imperium hard campaign at Eidolon which PERMATENTLY increases chaos agression and the godamn Phalanx spawning in a system as a guard fleet for the imperium in Belis Corona. Not expanding early absolutely wrecks the game later on. And it's all done in a hurry so the emergency bar wont rise above 1 as that would increase all agression in all sectors to 2 since it's hard and it gives an innate 1.

Guess the necrons were more OP during launch, shouldve done hard back then

[Ashardalon]

yes all except chaos completed on hard, not worth spending money on that one
wasnt any different from other difficultys, just had to use plans a little more sparingly instead of delaying an invasion for 80 turns for the lolz

you dont need to care about troops as necrons
you have an infinite supply of troops in an escort hidden behind your fleet
and pulse is perfectly capable of getting rid of boarding torps or assault boats even better then interceptors, tho honestly they are no treat for any faction as nid ordnance is a joke for any non ai
but use the slow time thing if timing the pulse is hard for you

necrons get heaps of battleplans
literally delaying invasions for 40+ turns for the lolz is possible
but now things are easier and you can just delete them for 5 instead

and the phalanx is slower then you, just discoball it to death, you dont even need to give it a fight and pretend it means anything
its the only big ship that can compete with the ancient one for being the most pathetic

you realize completing a mission sets the emergency meter all the way down to 0 right?
take it slow in the first few systems, let it build up to a turn before the end to build up and farm invasions for easy kills
then unlock next mission and take it slow again
there is never a reason to end things quick as a necron, the longer things take the easier it gets
you are making a lot of incorrect assumptions, like agression 2 being anything meaningfull
its just more invasions that dont mean anything except a battleplan to victory

necrons are still plenty strong
just also plenty boring

[Doragor]

Originally posted by Ashardalon:

yes all except chaos completed on hard, not worth spending money on that one
wasnt any different from other difficultys, just had to use plans a little more sparingly instead of delaying an invasion for 80 turns for the lolz

you dont need to care about troops as necrons
you have an infinite supply of troops in an escort hidden behind your fleet
and pulse is perfectly capable of getting rid of boarding torps or assault boats even better then interceptors, tho honestly they are no treat for any faction as nid ordnance is a joke for any non ai
but use the slow time thing if timing the pulse is hard for you

necrons get heaps of battleplans
literally delaying invasions for 40+ turns for the lolz is possible
but now things are easier and you can just delete them for 5 instead

and the phalanx is slower then you, just discoball it to death, you dont even need to give it a fight and pretend it means anything
its the only big ship that can compete with the ancient one for being the most pathetic

you realize completing a mission sets the emergency meter all the way down to 0 right?
take it slow in the first few systems, let it build up to a turn before the end to build up and farm invasions for easy kills
then unlock next mission and take it slow again
there is never a reason to end things quick as a necron, the longer things take the easier it gets
you are making a lot of incorrect assumptions, like agression 2 being anything meaningfull
its just more invasions that dont mean anything except a battleplan to victory

necrons are still plenty strong
just also plenty boring

Yes I do realize I can get up to low urgency before finishing another priority assignment, but in my experience it increases invasions exponentially when it gets to 2.
Might get the escort spam strategy done, but you misundestand.
Tyranids WILL ram your ship, so their boarding torpedoes are much easier for the AI to hit, at melee range, unless I fight through the entire thing with slow motion active (which is quite boring) I prefer to keep moving around to avoid their boarding actions, which is quite effective if the map spawns with convenient asteroid fields, quite tired of reloading battles so I can get the best map for me.

The discoball strat on the Phalanx wasn't going to work for me, the map didnt give me a single asteroid field on my side and I was to pissed already to reload as I never had to deal with the Phalanx before the priority assignment.

In short I just want better ships and abilities for Necrons
Imperium has long range lances, nova cannons, rad tempests and ok bombers.
Chaos has the best lances with lock on stance and the best bombers in the game
Havent done Tyranids at hard yet, but I guess their bio infestation battleship is still pretty damn good for crippling engines and dealing with escorts before dealing with the main fleet.

But Necrons are just plain garbage, I can think of no fun or creative ways of beating that campaign besides staying in the godamn gas cloud vs all factions besides tyranids.
Weren't they adding a new ship for necrons or something?

[Ashardalon]

tyranids have the lowest hp of any faction, necrons have high hp
they also have medium armor, necrons have heavy armor
and the ai doesnt brace before it rams
every nid that rams you is you winning, not them
its just them committing suicide against your hull, repair the scratches and move on
unless its a jaw ship
and boarding torpedoes, just like every torpedo type have an arming range
there is a minimum distance they need to travel or they dont do anything, there is time to pulse them gone
i know nids look scary but they are a worthless faction, they have nothing except a little intimidation, they are a ramming faction that cant ram, a boarding faction that cant benefit from boarding and a close range faction that barely has half the dps of other factions if it actually survives to get into range
stop being scared and they die
im also not saying escort spam, just have 1 or 2 in the back line to refill any ship that gets hulked, thats it, boarding now means nothing to your faction anymore
its a few meaningless crits

cairns are some of the strongest ships in the game
alongside necrons getting some of the best campaign upgrades
and necron skills are among the strongest in the game allowing you to kill most of a fleet before the fight even starts if you have a few admirals in the fight
or basically rebuild your ships while killing the enemy after the fight has been going on for a little while

Originally posted by Doragor:

But Necrons are just plain garbage, I can think of no fun or creative ways of beating that

no they are not garbage, yes they are absolutely boring
dont try to find something fun, that doesnt happen in this game
stand still in a gascloud with your extra regen, have dispersed stance and go watch a movie then come back to put new crew in your ships every now and then
its a very very boring autowin

they did add new necron ships
a cruiser with all macros but no pulse making it a necron version of the slaughter, a ship thats close to op if the cairn wasnt just better at everything
a battlecruiser thats just lances to piss people off in mp with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ crits
and a battleship thats a carrier
because necrons have the best interceptors in the game
nids having 8 half models was too good and needed nerfing but necrons having 7 full models is just fine
especially when they do hull damage
lucky the rest of the ship is hot garbage and doesnt have a pulse either
so the cairn is just better again
because whoever did the balancing for this peace of trash is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥

[Doragor]

Originally posted by Ashardalon:

and boarding torpedoes, just like every torpedo type have an arming range

I mean the infestation "torpedoes"
They don't need arming range, they just fly until they get to you

[Ashardalon]

thats just a boarding action
same as every other faction
ignore it
get hulked
recrew
repair
continue on as if nothing happened because nothing did
its just fluff

[Doragor]

Originally posted by Ashardalon:

thats just a boarding action
same as every other faction
ignore it
get hulked
recrew
repair
continue on as if nothing happened because nothing did
its just fluff

Guess that isn't a problem as long as you have escorts
Meh I'll settle for normal, this grind aint worth the achievment.

[Realhollow]

Originally posted by Doragor:

Originally posted by Dominator131:

EZ mode on every faction, and for Necrons on this occasion:
1. Park your ships inside a gas cloud (or some occasions inside an asteroid field) close to each others
2. Scout with an escort / doom fighters / probe so you can see the enemy (and fire on them), so that you can target their deck and then engines / weapons
3. Put your lightning arc ships on the "shoot at multiple targets" stance (especially Cairn)
4. If you take damage on your ships systems, put the pyramidrepair thing on or the scarabs skill if you have it when you get much health damage

When using this tactic:
The enemy can't chip away at you if they don't see you.
You should move your ships only if there are bombs or some other AOE hazards. Necron teleport is OP when doing this as you can teleport away from hazards and then move slowly back to the gas cloud.
You'll get boarded but the AI usually boards the closest ship, so you can "guide" the enemy doing this to board specific ships.
Use your Starpulse wave sparingly if there are multiple enemy fighters / bombers.

And they never fixed the Necron bug when using the "resurrect crew" stance; if you are running low on crew, you can put the stance on while deploying. Then click the "fast forward time" -button and wait for a minute and all of your ships are full of crew (for example if you have 1/12 crew on green, you put the stance on and fast forward, then you'll get 12/12 crew on green).

So I think you can manage this and kill them all.

Please notice that I'm playing on hard as I've emphasized many times already, conventional strategies do not work as well as they do in normal. For instance:

Cauterizing stance might work for the first 3 minutes to replenish troops, but it doesnt recover the status like red yellow green, only end turn repair fixes that. After 3 mins, it becomes useless as I need reload stance to keep me moving between clouds and fields since tyranid fleets spam rush on hard and easily outrun my teleports. Arc dispersion stance is incredibly useless as reload is much better for prioritizing targets and breaking morale as it makes firing faster.

The undected strategy (gas cloud/asteroid field) doesn't work because all the ships will travel in unison and with a healthy amount of escorts, so they WILL keep me revealed unless I destroy all 6 escorts they usually bring in a 3k fleet and the escorts usually stick behind enemy ships. That's why I usually have the energy ball skill that allows me to snipe escorts before they close in, but it is quite difficult to hit since I need to predict the exact pathing the enemy will take.

Pyramid repair has a very long cooldown and I usually use call to arms instead, since boarding is much easier agaisnt necrons ships, enemies just spam lightning strike once they have a visual from escorts who know exactly where you are on hard even if you are undetected and hiding on a cloud or field.

But I think you didn't get how much of hassle hard is around 30, as the enemies will start invading with everything they have (3k fleets) and in any sector as long as they have a 2 in agression (sometimes even a 1 is dangerous) and it doesnt matter if you end that faction, the game just prioritizes invasions by another faction instead, invasion frequency doesn't change if you terminate a faction, it just switches to another one until you end them all, something I learned in Imperium Hard campaign.

Try doing this on 200% fleets i gave up as necron ship yards are crap there starting system is so dumb that have a bulding that gives + to con points to connect systems yet they have none connected to it XD

[Realhollow]

Originally posted by Ashardalon:

yes all except chaos completed on hard, not worth spending money on that one
wasnt any different from other difficultys, just had to use plans a little more sparingly instead of delaying an invasion for 80 turns for the lolz

you dont need to care about troops as necrons
you have an infinite supply of troops in an escort hidden behind your fleet
and pulse is perfectly capable of getting rid of boarding torps or assault boats even better then interceptors, tho honestly they are no treat for any faction as nid ordnance is a joke for any non ai
but use the slow time thing if timing the pulse is hard for you

necrons get heaps of battleplans
literally delaying invasions for 40+ turns for the lolz is possible
but now things are easier and you can just delete them for 5 instead

and the phalanx is slower then you, just discoball it to death, you dont even need to give it a fight and pretend it means anything
its the only big ship that can compete with the ancient one for being the most pathetic

you realize completing a mission sets the emergency meter all the way down to 0 right?
take it slow in the first few systems, let it build up to a turn before the end to build up and farm invasions for easy kills
then unlock next mission and take it slow again
there is never a reason to end things quick as a necron, the longer things take the easier it gets
you are making a lot of incorrect assumptions, like agression 2 being anything meaningfull
its just more invasions that dont mean anything except a battleplan to victory

necrons are still plenty strong
just also plenty boring

Chaos has the best campaign tbh Imps are good but end game missions are a joke Nids just cheese it all and you only ever have to do the story missions as hulks will cap planets for you as for Necrons there ships bulding fuction is meh tbh and as much as i love the Faction i mean i played them both in the TT versions of 40k and BFG but in this they are such a let down

But as you said they are very boring but ye Nids Vs Necrons is a bad match up yes you can jump out of there way but nids will catch you agian in no time as they can do 2 dashes in 5 sec were as your one is much longer cd once they on you its pretty much game over iv jsut finished IMPs on hard with 200% fleets and nids were the hardest (even if the most dull) to face as they either ram you to death or hulk you in seconds even with call to arms cant do much with 40 bording actions on you XD