Having difficulty playing Necrons Thread - Ultimate Apocalypse Mod (DOW SS) for Dawn of War

Basically the title says it all. As a long time fan of Necrons I was pretty hyped for yet another mod that changed them, it was hard finding a mod that didn't break Necrons more then they already were, and UA:THB seemed like it would be my next mod to try to find balance for them and I feel like I finally found it.

This mod turns Necrons into a late game race that must be focused to make sure they don't make it there, because if they do everyone's in for a world of hurt, I thought this sounded pretty sweet honestly, the problem with other Mods or even vanilla, is Necrons got to be as fast as other races while being tanky and tough at the same time making them grossly powerful, this mod really slows them down giving clear weakness in rushing them, and that's my problem. I'm getting rushed so early that teching up is a issue, I feel as if I just fall farther and farther as I am continuously assaulted and often that's the case. Suddenly I'm finding that my opponent is now tier 2 and bringing in vehicles and I'm still stuck at tier 1 with no real answer. Most of my games are ending in about 8-12 mins. This all leaves me scratching my head wondering what I'm doing wrong, why am I not able to survive when I'm playing completely defensively. Turrets in droves? Check. Warriors upgraded and unlife 1? Check. Actually building up my economy? Check. The list of strategys I've tried goes on.

If anyone could point out some tips or what i'm doing wrong it'd really help.

TLDR: noob needs help, actually read what he posted you lazy person.

Edited by: ScorpionZM

You follow the same general principle that was present in the vanilla game! Build the Necron lord and just stall the enemy with him. Warriors are very slow and can't overcome most defenses until T2 upgrades, so you need to rely on the fact that you have one of the toughest hero units. He's only 200 requisition and he gets stronger as he goes along upgrading.

The main trouble for the Necrons in UA early on is the auto-repair function. It makes it so it's VERY hard to apply pressure in the early game, so you'll need to target enemy builder units to prevent them from erecting the buildings in the first place. Since your only real attack unit is the Lord for a little bit, you should be able to upgrade to T2 fairly early on. That's the stage at which attacks become viable - although you'll be kited by many equivalent tier units because Necrons don't have much reach.

Stuff like this is why people advise playing so defensively. You don't really have a lot going for you until T3, and then you wind up entering steamroller mode. Until then, use the Necron lord, use the teleport ability, upgrade him as much as you can. A heavily upgraded Lord takes an eon to kill at T1 and he's really your only non-defensive unit for a while.

I recommend making better use of the attack scarabs. Build a squad of them either as your first or second unit from the monolith and use them to go harass enemy builders. I'd recommend building a second one quickly as well. As long as you watch them and don't let them get killed too quickly they will slow down the enemy a lot by killing/harassing builders and they can hold their own against HQ squads reasonably well. Keep up the pressure early with wraiths/necron lord once they're available and you should be able to do pretty well at least in a 1v1 scenario.

Also something I've never seen used well, at least in my opinion is the Wraith. 1 or 2 wraiths early game are even better at harassing than scaravbs as they have good speed, can phase shift when in danger and jump to move around even quicker. Plus their tier 1 upgrade is cheap as well, making them viable against all but heavy infantry, where they will need support to kill them.

Yeah I use wraiths to harass point capping units early and again against builders. They're pretty cheap and the amount of slowing down the enemy buildup they do makes a very big difference

Woah....Didn't see the part where you said wraiths. xD My bad, but yeah they're really useful early game...

1st Thing to note is my expereince only comes from playing agasint the ai on hard with standard resoruces both starting and in rate of gain with rabit speed tacked on for better or worse at the start i usually run 4 builders have 2 sets cappin points 1 on amp gen and 1building the 1st core after the 1st core is done u can task them with a 2nd mono or upgrade ur starting 1. if u double up grab the wraith buff and unlife from the core and spam wraiths like they go out of fashion and just have a vague ghostly wall of them hanging around the buff gives the 2nd defense blue marker and increases their hp regen and their max hp(by 400) having the 1st core also allows immortals which are the go to anti vhicle snipers due to their range to buy time for steam roller mode, this generaly works agasint most factions and is also what the necron ai tends to do to u. if u are facing csm or sm or anything with disruptive or tough melee as their starter u may with to simply upgrade your starting mono while spending spare resources on wraiths as before then hold out for the 250 required for the greater core which will give u ascess to standard and heavy destroyers and the tombspyder which if u dont upgrade to a ranged weapon are not only really good at boggin down things like raptors also have a 2 handed slam atk thats effectivly a weak grenade continue teching up bui8lding amp gens and pgens and u should reasonbly get to where u need to be, i will point out agasint eldar and deldar and sm they have early acess to anti armor to put a dent in if its eldar then immortals due to falcon spam deldar has to a mix focusing on screening the immos or just getting into scourges melee with wraiths this tends to work aswell for sm csm sob all about screening with wraiths and spyders and picking up destros of both types as and when u need while having immo's snipe the fatser u get to the tesla carbines the better all the while ofc keeping up with improving said uints.

Its not perfect and i'll be the 1st to abmit im a bad player but it generally gives me my foot in the door. either way i hope this helps and i apologise for any spelling/ grammer or if youve already tried this =)

Alright, I just figured out how to play necrons too. Are you remembering to build amplification generators next to your turrets? I'm not sure if Amplification generators stack, I read in one of the other threads that they did in fact stack but I don't really seem to notice much. I've noticed that only one generator seems to do anything, the rest just sorta sit there looking pretty.... maybe they contribute to regen? either way, an amplification generator is cheap but it provides a great health and regen boost to your turrets and can also act as manually activated mine fields (the explosion is very large and knocks enemies very far away, so activate the explosion when you want to send your scarabs into the turret line for repairs/new turrets).

So when you start the game, you want to take as many points as you can (within reason, as the enemy will likely rush you). Then build an obelisk at a choke point region and start chucking down turrets followed by amplification generators (don't build too many early tier turrets). If you like, you can attack scarab rush their base (the necron AI can be insta-killed by this) and kill their builders first followed by infantry production buildings. If the rush fails don't worry don't much. If the rush succeeds then it'll be easier for you to tech up.

Meanwhile you should be building regular generators in your base (even if they're far more expensive than amp generators. As amp generators are needed on the frontline and not in your main base. Tech up (you can get necron lord if you want... but I skip him) by building the summoning core and get the wraith or warrior upgrade if you want. Once at tier 1, you may wish to get some wraiths out as they will smash any ranged infantry trying to demolish your turrets and melee infantry will get shredded by your turret line. Drop down some heavy gauss turrets (again don't build too many but don't pick regular Gauss over the heavy version) try to get your greater summoning core and tech up to tier 2. Note the keyword being try as this is the part where your skill with necrons matters most.

Even if you do get to tier 2, your units still suck and the units you could produce at the new tier still suck. Thus you still need to delay the enemy until tier 3. There are several ways to do this

1. Get the secondary commander, upgrade his level until his fourth upgrade shows up (at level 6 commander level). Buy that fourth upgrade. Congrats, your general is now a walking resurrection node and he also allows free necron warrior production (meaning spamming necron warriors is valid tactic, especially since he can just walk into their corpses and they're all resurrected)

2. Really amp up that turret line. Get a lot of amp generators there and don't skimp on the heavy turrets. Get those turret upgrades ASAP and use wraiths to kill anyone who tries to snipe the turrets. Pump out two or three necron warriors (and reinforce them) and use them as mobile defence to help hold the line.

3. Really micro all the commander units you have. Necron lord can kill quite a lot and survive quite a bit with his abilities. The secondary commander is also quite useful with his lightning storm and IIRC the lord destroyer should be available and he is very durable thus allowing for resurrection to be used in dangerous circumstances.

It goes without saying that you might want a second monolith just to help with necron warrior spam as well as raising the number of generators you can build. While I've provided three general strategies, there's nothing stopping you from mixing the three or coming up with your own. Just be aware that necron vehicles are designed with the chance to resurrect in mind (therefore they tend to underperform, though annhilation barge is pretty good for how much it costs though I don't think it resurrects) and the same principle applies to its infantry, if you can't get the heros/structures to resurrect them, then you're going to have a bad time.

Once you've teched up to tier 3 you should have access to sentry pylons. Do not build sentry pylons from the tier 3 building. Use builder scarabs as the ones they build will have the quantum shield ability. Build a sentry pylon at your turret line and turn the shields on. Your turret wall should now be giving a tau shield wall a run for its money. Also don't do anything with your tier 3 building until you've reached tier 4 as doomsday monoliths can SPAWN siege monoliths (it costs the exact same amount as building one and it drops exactly where the doomsday monolith currently is and it can be done every other minute or so) so there's no real point to wasting time with the siege monolith. With the sentry pylon down, its pretty much inevitable that your Ascension to tier 4 is guaranteed. With that its time to spam monoliths and blow everything up. Build a heavy thermo generator just to really rub it in how screwed your opponent is.

Edited by: khoiman

Hi guys,

I also have some troubles while playing Necrons and actually in vanilla game they were my favorite race. Aaaand I decided to launch UA, which kicked my ass with Chaos Daemons on Easy. Well, I just restarted and did everything to take them and this time I succeeded. But on Standard... Well, actually every game that I played was lost.

I tried tactics from this forum and usually I can't even get to Tier II. When enemies starts to show up they're like neverending swarm of soldiers making me buy more and more units. Most of the time I'm just holding them in place until they get to vechicles and run over me killing like 10% of them.

Any tips how to improve economics (except Power Income update, I buy this every game)?

Hmmm. Depends on what you're doing, what enemies you're struggling against and what you're building. But a basic way to victory would be Relying on Turrets, Immortals and commanders. Immortals are the best unit necrons have available in all round ranged combat. Would be easier to discuss if you were on the discord group. Very active discussions and chats going on there.

All i can say is ambushing units with scarabs and an upgraded necron lord are your best friends in the early game. That and building as many amplifiers and obelisks as possible.