Arcanacon, Game 3: vs Necrons

So, a mere seven months after I played the game, here's a battle report featuring my Dark Eldar's first outing against the new Necrons :)

First, a caveat; my memory is slipping a little, so a few details are probably off, despite my notes. But  the ebb and flow of the game I think is still accurate, and moreover I think I ultimately learned a lot from it. without further ado, the game!

How destructive are Tesla Destructors?

We know about Tesla Destructors, and we know that they can be spammed (by my count you can fit 9 into 1500 points, although you start to look a bit unbalanced...). But how destructive are they really? Can you rely on them to break a wall of Rhinos, Razorbacks or Chimeras?

Scarabs II - moving vehicles

In a previous installment we looked at how many scarabs it takes to destroy a stationary vehicle. Now, lets look at the effect of increasing the target speed and the hit roll required.



Two things are immediately clear: scarabs still do nasty things to vehicles while needing a 4+ to hit, but equally, requiring a 6 to hit starts to really slow them down.

How many Scarabs does it take to destroy a vehicle?

Less than 42, for sure :)

So, in the chart above, 'destroyed' includes both the wrecked and explodes! results. The vehicle is assumed to be stationary, thus hit automatically; I'll be getting to do run the numbers on moving vehicles a bit later, same with stunned, immobilised etc.

AV 10 will be most vehicles, as most have rear AV 10; some Leman Russes and other Necrons will be showing off AV 11, Monoliths and Land Raiders naturally have AV 14 all around. I can't think of anything with rear AV 12 or 13 at the moment, and dreads using their front armour won't be hit automatically, voiding the results above... but I've included them for completeness. Never know what crazy stuff will be in the next codex hey ;)

You can see that a mere 3 charging scarabs is enough to wreck most stationary vehicles in the game (95.56% and 88.62% respectively)! Entropic Strike really is that good, at least while applying the AV reduction before the roll to penetrate! At least that's how I read it, we'll see if the FAQ tones things down a bit... even AV14 vehicles can be comfortably handled by 5 charging scarabs (95.54% chance of destroying it), although using only 3 is a bit more touch-and-go, but still within the realms of possibility (43.56%).

For comparison, a BS4 melta-gun has a 32.41% chance of destroying an AV 10 vehicle. A squad of four such guns has a 79.13% chance of destroying an AV 10 vehicle.

Pretty good, eh?

It's clear, armour is no defence against scarab swarms. How useful going faster (or hell, moving at all) will be in protecting yourself, we'll examine next installment.