Warhammer 40K: Against the C’tan – How To Beat Necron Star-Gods
Goatboy here and the new C’tan have hit the tabletop. They are tough, do a ton of damage, but can be beaten. Here’s how!
Today I want to talk about how armies can deal with it utilizing some of the current game rules they have access too. Let’s get to brewing a bit and discuss how we can kill this giant Necron jerks of the table top. First let’s talk about why they are rough. Let’s check these stats – Toughness 11, 16 Wounds, 3+ Armor save, a 4+ Invulnerable save, a 5+ Feel No Pain save, and finally -1 damage to all attacks hitting them. This is a ton of stuff to try and chew through. To give you an idea – it would take 48 1 Damage wounds that are AP -1 to kill this giant jerk. That is a ton of wounds to throw out at someone moving close to you and trying to wreck your stuff.
What is an army to do? What kind rules are available to help kill this giant monster? What choices do you have?
Lethal Hits
Let’s look at the first rule we can use. Lethal hits is a way for an army to skip the “wounding” stage of the attack sequence and cause a direct wound to the monster. There are a ton of options for armies but I wanted to list a few here to see what might actually stick. You normally need a pile of attacks to chew thru and sometimes a little luck to hit those 6’s. If your unit has rerolls to hit it also helps but it can be a hard thing to find in a lot of armies.
On the close combat side you could see things like a Big Berzerker Brick from World Eaters with the Lethal Hits blessing up as a method to chew thru a pile of wounds. I think the math says you need something else to help chip off those last few wounds but it is a method to remove one of the giant monsters. You could also do the same thing with other large 20 man units like Crusader Squads with Character help and Blood Claws.
You could also look at some shooting options with Lethal hits but a lot of those units don’t nearly have enough shots in a single volley. A few units together could do this and again you are looking at some of the Marine output available as well as things like Thousand Sons (Sorceror in Termy Armor with a unit of Scarab Occult) and Death Guard that get access to Lethal Hits on their shooting. It feels like a bit of a trap to go this direction too as while the shooting helps – it takes a lot of units to concentrate down one of these broken star gods.
Anti-Monster Keyword
The next option to use would be lovely keyword – Anti-Monster. There are a few of these things out there with some close combat option and then a decent amount of shooting. The shooting aspects go hard in the Leagues of Votann with the Brokhyr Thunderkyn. Their Graviton Blast Cannon is both Anti-Monster and Anti-Vehicle 3+ which seems pretty good on a damage 3 gun. This lets you go to Damage 2 against these monsters and it does give you a shot to chip things away.
On the close combat front the beat sticks you see with Anti-Monster would be the Exalted Eightbound with their ability to go back to Damage 2 as well as having a Slaughterbound that normally comes in with damage 3 with an Enhancement. That seems to be pretty good and while it probably won’t kill them with a small group it is enough to usually keep the giant monster honest on the table top. I think Orks have the most Anti-Monster tech available with the Beast Boyz, Beast Boss, Squighog Boyz, and Breaka Boyz. All of those things start off at Damage 3 for most of their attacks so coming in they can easily cheap off wounds at a discounted price.
Ignore It (If You Can)
The final thing I think players need to think about is just seeing if they can ignore the monster. There are only so many places these guys can be so if you ignore it and kill the scoring bits the player has you can win the game. Let them control an expanse objective and scoot around them. I know the Nightbringer can move pretty fast but again it can’t be everywhere at once. If they are taking so many big monsters on the table they do not have nearly that much scoring potential. If you go hard after the C’Tan’s Necron friends they can suddenly be on the backfoot pretty quickly.
High Damage Weapons
What other things have keywords that can help remove on of these? I know you can just utilize some high damage weapons to try and chew through them pretty quickly. There are a ton of tanks on the table top we see like Vindicators and Gladiators. You also have things like Lascannon and weapons that are equivalent to them. You could just hope you hit and cause a failed wound to blast 5+ damage into these guys and see if you can chew thru them and their Feel No Pain.
This updated data sheets are here to stay and knowing how to remove them will be important in the coming months as the C’Tan spring is upon us.
Good Hunting!
