Welcome to the latest faction catch-up, taking us to mid-way through our look at each faction’s current state.
As a quick aside, I received some feedback that these catch-ups aren’t terribly useful because they’re posted every other week and are using data from a couple of months ago. With that in mind, the next time I run a catch-up I may try making it an overview of all eight factions in a single post, but I’m still going to finish this series because while the data might be a little out of date I don’t think any faction has changed so fundamentally in the last month that these posts are no longer relevant.
So let’s shake our robotic fists at these damn kids messing up our galactic neighbourhood and take a look at the Necrons. But rather than run through the usual topics, I’m going to focus on one key area:
Popularity
Decks with Necron Warlords have a low pick rate of 8%, and this could be caused by a couple of things:
First, they have the least cards of any faction – including just one Epic card – which limits their flexibility.
Second, the Necron faction is the most expensive in terms of points cost (the average Necron card costs 29.9 points), another factor which limits their deck building.
But I wonder if the biggest issue is their playstyle. With no psychic cards and Warlord special rules that encourage long, slow battles, the Necrons win by grinding their opponents down over time. While this is thematically appropriate it does mean that using a Necron deck takes patience.
To reinforce this, Necron decks Ready more than any other faction (36% of the time) and choose to make psychic attacks 21% of the time even though their psychic damage output comes to 0%.
However
All of the above means that players don’t tend to choose Necron decks unless the Campaign or their daily Objectives require them to.
That said, when they are used Necron decks have a decent win rate of 55%, and a pretty good split between damage types (51% of their attack damage is from melee and 49% from ranged). This means we can’t blame them being ineffective for their low popularity.
Future
So what should we do with the Necrons going forward, because while their slow, inevitable grind to victory fits the lore, no-one wants a boring faction in the game.
Unfortunately it’s not as easy as simply giving them some fast, high damage cards – the Necrons have some extremely cool miniatures and units but they’re definitely not one of the largest Warhammer 40,000 armies. Obviously we haven’t yet included every option they have, but Necrons aren’t like the Space Marine, Servants of the Emperor or Chaos factions where the game will break before we run out of new cards to add!
At the moment I’m thinking we go back to the Necron’s ‘basic’ choice and add more copies of Warriors and Immortals, with each coming from a different Dynasty so having slightly different stats and traits. While this may not be as cool as adding loads of varied cards, it will drive the faction’s average points cost down and let players field big decks of troops under an overlord, which is at least thematically cool.
I’d be interested in hearing from you, the players. Would you rather the faction stayed small and elite, slowly growing as we add new Necron cards? Or have the faction’s size bolstered with several Warriors and Immortals, expanding the faction at the cost of variety?
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Thanks,
Stu
I think it’d be cool to add a few thematic warriors or immortals, but mainly maintain the elite feeling of the deck or a warlord with a different approach.
Please increase deck points further, decrease cost of all cards, and add deck slots more cards per battle
We have discussed those sort of actions but they of course affect every faction, not just the Necrons, and we need to be careful because they can cause big changes to the game. For example, letting people take more bodyguards might need us to redesign how you create decks, more points might mean cheaper cards are no longer of interest, and more points might also cause battles to take longer. Not to say that any of those are insurmountable problems but they’re beyond the scope of looking at the Necron faction.
It`s a great idea ^_^
And someone like Nightbringer as a new warlord
The Nightbringer would make for an interesting (if expensive) Warlord, but we have a couple of other characters lined up as the next Warlords so will get those in first.
Are you allowed to hint at what the next Necron Warlords might shape up to be?
The Diviner? The Varguard? The Flayer King?
I’ve generally stopped hinting at the next set of Warlords because implementing them has been held up by the behind the scenes work going on to upgrade the battle system. This will fix all the small trait + special rule issues and unlock new Warlords, but as I don’t have a firm ETA for it I don’t want people to get fed up waiting for a specific Warlord to be released. All that said, unless anything changes the next Necron Warlord is planned to be one of the named characters from the Codex.
I think you’re right about the average cost being a bit of an issue especially with Imotekh being the more popular warlord. With the current warrior being the cheapest at 6 they really are struggling for cheaper cards, more so then any other faction. I think part of this is some of their cheaper cards are overcosted now compared to other available equivalents. The Flayed One, Wraith, Deathmark Assasin and Tomb Blade Scout could all have their cost dropped by 2 before coming into line with other cards of similar stats.
Also if you’re looking to speed up the battle having a few poison cards wouldn’t hurt as it would help accelerate their passive damage which they do well with, although I’m not sure where that would fit thematically.
Another issue is that overall the Necron cards really don’t do that much damage. If you have a front line of three cards, all of which are doing around or less than 20 damage, which is most of the non-expensive cards until high level, is makes sense just to hit the psychic button as you take no damage (90% of the time) and deal the same or more damage, when using Imotekh. If there were higher damage dealers in the deck, even at the cost of being more fragile, it would give the player more of a dilemma when choosing to ready with Imotekh as they would have to sacrifice a fair amount of damage output to benefit from reading, making it less of a no-brainer.
Finally, the ability to charge your attacks and either heal/deal damage is really valuable as it means when you do attack you are in a strong position to 1HKO a lot of opponent cards as you have been building up you ready meter while doing so. That’s always going to be attractive, especially as the AI stands at the moment where if presented with several shields it will get stuck in the ‘ready loop’. Abusing this ready loop is a big part of the current Necron play-style and why the games tend to drag on so long, as you can use it to beat opponents at a much higher level. Although obviously a much wider thing to address, until the player is no longer able to force the AI into the ‘ready loop’ its going to be hard to change the current Necron play-style.
Hope this is useful!
Thanks for the feedback – some interesting points there.
After our recent balance pass for the Warlords we’re working on balancing the bodyguards, which will include point cost changes for over or underpowered cards. I’m not handling the data gathering on which cards need adjusting, so it will be interesting to see the proposed changes. Look for a blog post on this soon!
While you’re right that giving Necron cards the poison trait would increase their damage, it doesn’t fit their lore at all so isn’t something we’re likely to do. However, we have plans for the next 10 traits (just waiting for the battle system to finish getting reworked first) so the Necron cards will be changing traits as we go along.
Finally, we do intend to adjust the AI, both in terms of how it builds decks and how it uses them. This is taking a while because it’s a delicate task (any changes here fundamentally affect how the game plays), but we should have news in this area soon.
So basically ‘yep, we’re trying to address several of those areas!’
A bit late to the party but this post intrigues me a lot seeing as my primary motivator to get into this game was the ability to play my favorite faction from the table-top; The Undying metallic scourge. I just want to mention a few points and thoughts I have so far.
I’d love to have different flavors of the same basic Warrior and Immortal, from the golden boys of Nephrek to the Bloodsoaked units of the Novokh.
The Necron’s most cathartic formation, the Silver Tide, is just fielding a tide of warriors to grind down the opponent. While not mechanically feasible it tugs at my heartstrings to thing about being able to field a lot of basic Warriors and Immortals, even if their colours don’t match.
I myself hope we also get different breeds of Flayed Ones as they’re pretty cool as far as undead cannibals go, with the entirety of the Novokh dynasty being centered around melee weaponry and blood-rites.
While poison isn’t falvorfully inherent to the Necron as a faction, I’d make the argument that the Flayed one ‘Virus Carrier’ or a different version of a Flayed one could just as easily be Poisonous as they’re embroiled in filth and cadavers on a visual level but also have lore-encounters with teh Ferric Plague and the Tyranids which both I feel are reasonable excuses to slap poison on one of them.
On the topic of traits I also feel like our dear beloved Eternal Protector (Lychguard w/Shield) or another Lychguard should you be interested in having different varieties of the same units, have the Taunt trait instead of Shield. While I agree that it makes sense for a cinderblock of a unit to be as tanky as they could be, the Lychguard’s job on the table was ultimately to protect the Warlord from harm with its Guardian Protocols, not outlive him.
As a newer player I do not possess Imotek at the moment so I can’t speak for his usage, but while the Corpselord is hilariously fun with how his Reanimation Protocols can bring back dead Necrons from a retaliation strike, his numbers isn’t satisfactory once you stop meeting opponents with level 2-3 units.
While trying a fair bit to make a grinding-wheel list with whatever meager resources I have, I keep getting matched with opponents who have heavy hitters hitting for up to 30-50 damage every turn coupled with smaller hitters that do 25-35 damage.
Setting aside your turn for a low-damage counterattack with 30 points of damage reduction just feels bad once the base cards gets strong enough to outperform you if not one-shot your troops.
On a closing note; “Would you rather the faction stayed small and elite, slowly growing as we add new Necron cards? Or have the faction’s size bolstered with several Warriors and Immortals, expanding the faction at the cost of variety?” That is a tricky question.
Being ‘Elite’ have a few inherent assumptions to it; namely being few and strong.
My problem here is that I don’t know the distribution of rewards or how that works. Does every card flipped have a 12.5% chance of being from any one of the 8 factions? Because that would ensure that the faction with the least cards would grow faster than the others giving them the strong but few feeling. If any given reward has its %-chance of appearing directly proportional to the pool-size then Necron cards will be few and far between giving them anything but the elite feeling, in which case I’d wholeheartedly vouch for increasing their card-pool size as soon as possible given that my objective in this game is to play Necrons.
All in all, thanks for developing this game. I enjoy it for now and I hope I’ll keep doing so in the future, with the plans on dropping some money on packs when the Necron Campaign finally happens and lastly thank you for sharing views and stats on a public blog to keep the users updated. It is greatly appreciated.
Thanks for the in-depth feedback.
We do have a Necron Campaign lined up for next month, it just takes us a while to work through all of the factions.
It’s very likely we’ll update the wording and numbers in Warlord special rules and traits, but before that we’re updating the system that drives battles. That will allow us to fix several small bugs and give us the confidence to add new rules (and therefore new Warlords) and run a balance pass on the existing ones.
Re. getting cards from packs, the game can give you any card you’ve already unlocked or cards from your Rank or below (unless it’s a Rank unlocked pack, which can give you cards from other Ranks too as long as they’re in the general card pool). As the cards you can potentially gain depends on what Rank you are it means you don’t have an even chance of getting ones from faction X, because new cards unlock each Rank. Hopefully that makes sense, but basically it has an equal chance of giving cards from any you can get irrespective of which faction they are, it’s just the ones you can get skew the results.
I’d like to point out that Necrons lack cheap cards that offer tactical traits to make up for their low stats.
While the new Scout and Fear traits and the unlocking of the previous Campaign rewards cards answered that problem, Necrons still only have 1 Shield card at 12 points, but the 2 Medicae are at 20 points, other Shields are above 30, and the only Taunt clocks at 80 points.
I’m fine with Necrons being an elite and small faction, but I think being able to have a few low-cost cards that can support the aforementioned elite cards would give Necrons the flexibility they need right now.
Fair point, and we’ll try to add some more low point options for them (though I can’t guarantee they’ll have the shield trait).