[SilverTalon]

Got some decent time in with the two new races last night.

The Tau are hugely specialized units. Seriously. If you don't like combined arms, avoid this race like the plague. However, a Kroot assault followed up by Fire Warriors and Crisis suits is devastatingly effective. I kind of dislike the fact that you can't take Crisis suits unless you go with the Mont'ka structure (Tau bases can have the Kauyon or the Mont'ka philosophy, not both). They're such an iconic part of the Tau army on the tabletop that it just feels wrong. However, they're also brutally effective when you've got them out, so it's not like you're getting jipped that heavily.

The Necrons play radically different from the other races. They earn no requisition, instead capturing strategic points boosts the speed at which they build and research. All their stuff requires power and only power. Many of their basic units require no power to build, so you can toss out an army pretty quickly if you want to. The have a unit similar to the WC3 Meatwagon, the Tomb Spyder, that will travel around the battlefield harvesting Necron corpses and will actually spawn new units if you want it to once it has collected enough. The whole emphasis of the Necron playstyle is restoring the Monolith, your HQ, to full power at which point it becomes a pretty badass (if somewhat slow) fortress. I brought one online and sent it into a formation of about 5 squads of Imperial Guard and it pretty much devastated the lot of them. Going against one as the Marines I needed a Land Raider (the marine "super unit") and a pair of Predators backed by a few missile launcher squads (i.e. - insanely nasty).

The biggest problem in the context of the game with the Necrons is the Destroyers (Necron "vehicles") have horrible pathfinding. They're so much faster than the rest of the Necron units (who's pace can be described as "stately") that it seems to screw up the Destroyers and they'll poke along behind the units instead of going around. You see this a bit with the Tau too, but not quite as bad since their units aren't so painfully slow. My biggest beef with the Necrons as a table top player is how horrid the Immortals are. They made them anti-vehicle infantry, which makes a sort of sense given the lack of good anti-vehicle troops other than Heavy Destroyers, but they completely gimped them against other infantry stating "They're only good in melee". I run a squad of Immortals in my Necron army and they are the perfect anti-infantry troops. I understand that if they made the Immortals like they should by tabletop standards, they'd be horribly broken and nobody would take Warriors, but it still grates to see a unit that badly translated. Oh well...one out of 40 or 50 isn't that bad...

Oh...and when the Space Marines say they're holding a line...they mean they're holding a line...and the other picture is just to show how cuddly the Necrons are.