40k Simulation Center – Triage 40k: Necrons in an Age of Golden Men

40k Simulation Center is back with a brand new series: Triage 40k! This series will seek to help the diehard fans of codices that just may not be hanging on as well as they would like. Hopefully, I can illuminate some of your options and highlight where they can be useful when designing your lists!

DISCLAIMER: The original article had a glaring set of mistakes. This has been addressed with this update! On top of this, I found a bug in the reroll wounds portion of my script which is also fixed for this article (no effect to other articles to my knowledge!) My apologies for those who read the original article, but thank you for pointing out my mistake. In the end it’s the community that drives me to do fun analyses that are hopefully insightful and interesting to 40k fans!

Guest Writer: Dan Meyer

While playing test games is the best way to understand your options, it’s hard to get in enough games to understand all the variables at play and arrive at a reasonable set of expectations. Have no fear though! I am here to help by giving you an in depth look at what you should really expect out of a unit or piece of wargear.

My Shtick

I will look at a unit and their wargear options and help you understand what is the best choice for a given situation or at least help you figure out what you can truly expect from your units. I achieve this by simulating 1,000,000 iterations of that unit attacking a set of common targets that are representative of things you will see in the meta and get a true sample population so we can not only understand the mean of the expected outcome, but also how the variance shapes the outcome distribution. This will give you a much better appreciation for the variability in your game. If you have any questions on my process, ask away!

Do Necrons have any hope in dealing with Custodes?

As part of this new series, I will take a look at codices that are struggling and help you find your diamonds in the rough or simply help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of units that seem to be your only hope. First up in the series we will take a look at Necrons. While I’m certainly not a Necron player, I can’t help but love the model range and lore behind them! Unfortunately, they just aren’t holding up as they suffer from first codex problem for the edition. Recent point drops and increases in Core have certainly helped, but we haven’t seen them topping any big tournies as far as I know. 

One of the units I find fascinating in the Necron codex is the Lokhust Heavy Destroyer (LHD). LHDs are interesting to me for several reasons: they carry a big gun, built in reroll 1s and move and shoot heavy weapons without penalty, can benefit from My Will Be Done (+1 to hit), and finally have access Extermination Protocols (reroll wounds for 2 CP). While the Chapter Approved 2022 Missions are still be figured out, we can focus on some of the main styles of targets we have been seeing in the end of the 2021 season: Redemptors (or similar -1 damage medium units), Vertus Praetors, and Vertus Praetors with Arcane Genetic Alchemy (Transhuman stratagem). You will likely face units like these currently and a unit like the Lokhust Heavy Destroyer might actually be able to help you take them down. I particularly like the look of the Gauss Destructor with its beautiful stat line for taking down these tough units while hopefully you figured out how to capture a lot of objectives:

Weapon	Shots	Strength	AP	Dmg
Gauss Destructor	1	10	4	3D3

The main drawback obviously is that it is a single shot on a 55 point model that isn’t overly durable. I’ve chosen to look at the full three man squad to see what kind of output we can get out of 165 points. Kind of reminds me of a Drukhari Ravager, but with different tradeoffs in capabilities.

Let the Simulation Begin…

To start let’s take a look at how we fair against the Redemptor Dreadnought (T7, 3+, -1 dmg). Here we lay out baseline 3 guys shooting vs. 3 guys shooting while under the effects of both MWBD and Exterminator Protocols.

Figure 1: Lokhust Heavy Destroyers vs. Redemptor Dreadnought or Equivalent

As we can see, we can do some major damage with a chance of being able to take it out in one turn unbuffed. Once you put some resources into the squad, you would kill a Redemptor >50% of the time. I really like the shape of the distribution on the buffed unit vs the unbuffed unit. The unbuffed is an ugly mess of uncertainty, but once buffed it becomes a clean slightly skewed left (the tail goes to the left) distribution with high probability of doing lethal damage. To keep this all in perspective, let’s recall that 3 Vertus Praetors could deal 6.67-9.56 damage on average depending on buffed state with shooting while GSC Ridgerunners with Heavy Mining Lasers could deal 4.4-7.4 damage on average depending on buffed state. So clearly, LHDs are in the mix of reasonability if not pretty good offensively compared to what we’ve examined in other articles for their shooting output against a medium vehicle/monster target with -1 damage.

Now let’s examine how LHDs do against other tough units with invulnerables and FNP such as Vertus Praetors (T6, 2+, 4++, 6+++)!  For these results, we will examine models destroyed rather than just damage dealt. When I simulate this, I actually take order of damage into account, so it’s not always the optimal assortment of damage to chew through models, but rather accounts for the concepts of over and under killing a model. This is something that is harder to determine the probability for, but where the simulation methodology shines in helping to shed light on the values. As a result there is also the possibility partially wounded models to be left over. For simplicity I made no distinction between 1 dead guy and 1.33 dead guys, preferring to only account for fully destroyed models.

Figure 2: Lokhust Heavy Destroyers vs. Vertus Praetors

Given the ability to do solid damage to medium vehicles, it is incredibly frightening that these guys can only sort of reliably drop at least a single model completely when fully buffed. Thanks to a great invulnerable save, 6+++ FNP for giggles, and having a lot of wounds, Vertus Praetors are just crazy tough cookies to crack. Given the high level firepower being used here, I can’t imagine much else out there well positioned to drop Vertus Praetors with ease…except maybe three railguns?! Ha! What’s even crazier is that Vertus Praetors have access to their own form of transhuman physiology…and that just makes it more depressing. 

Figure 3: Lokhust Heavy Destroyers vs. Vertus Praetors with Arcane Genetic Alchemy

Well then, we already had bad odds to drop 1 Vertus Praetor model…but once transhuman is triggered the odds drop to below 35% to kill a model and I didn’t even detect a lucky blow of all three models killed out of 1,000,000 iterations of rolling it out. The fully buffed version of the LHDs manages to bring the output back up close to one model dead on average, but be wary when you need to target such a unit!

Well there you have it Necron players! Hopefully this edition of Triage 40k helped you understand the ability of Lokhust Heavy Destroyers. I didn’t explore any other synergies in the book, so there is probably more meat on the bone to do more damage or make them more worthwhile perhaps. They have solid performance against medium vehicles, but not necessarily the best avenue when dealing with the hardiest Custodes unit. While not a Necron player, I know I would like to have a loadout like this in other armies I play. Only question will be is if they fit with your army, playstyle or if this will even be helpful as the new meta emerges! 

Let me know if you have any questions, comments or concerns with any of the results you have seen here! And of course, I welcome all suggestions for future simulations!

The Emperor Protects,

Dan

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