Morangias said:

The issue with this incident comes only from the very last line of the description, where it states that even if the Blood Angels had the strength and numbers to fight the Necrons after beating the Tyranids, they wouldn't because they found, "the idea of turning on those they had so recently fought alongside a distasteful one." The implication of this statement are that they didn't just fight next to one another, they fought with one another. Meaning even if the alliance was impromptu, Dante and the Silent King spoke to one another and reached this agreement, rather than both armies simply turning their guns on the bigger target. This rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and if this last sentance had been removed, this piece of fluff wouldn't have gotten half the flak that it recieved.

That said, I've been extremely happy with the Necron codex. From an RPG prospective, the players are almost never going to interact with the crazy Overlords. It's the lesser lords and nobles and crypteks that are running the show, and I feel the majority of them are perfectly capable of functioning just like the old necron lords if desired, or can have well thought out, intelligent plans for players to foil. What's more, the political maneuvers of lesser lords against one another within the same dynasty, all occurring right beneath the player's feet, could be the plot of an entire campaign.

I think people are reading way too much into that sentence.

I have to admit that I am in two minds about the new codex; there is a lot to like and a lot to dislike. Top of the dislike list is the way that the Necrons have lost their FTL travel abilities. Now it seems that they have to use Doman Gates to access bits of the webway to get anywhere fast, otherwise its thousands of years using "torch-ships". Apparently long before The War in Heaven they managed to build an empire so large that "much of the galaxy answered to their rule", and all without FTL This also rewrites a lot of what appeared in BFG as well.

It just amazes me that a race that can construct tesseract labyrinths to contain the Ctan shards cannot find a non-warp way for FTL.

DW

Traveller61 said:

Yeah thats sucks.

In all it seems they've lost a lot of there technological advantage.

Yeah, the FTL thing is a total brainfart.

While I'm not an expert on the settings or Necrons, it seems that they're bringing the Necrons back in line with the previously established setting. If they aren't of the warp, then why should they be able to move FTL? The Warp (or webway) in 40k is the means with which people zip around, right? So why should a given race be given some technological work-around that bypasses the danger of using Warp Travel?

If you've got that, then the Necrons become Chaos' biggest enemy, as if their FTL tech is replicated by other races, then no one needs to use the warp anymore, which I'd think would be a big deal.

Just my two cents, take it as such

I'm kinda with Charmander, here...now, I hate retconns and i abhor new material superseding old material; but.....as an immortal race of life-suckers, they don't need faster-than-light travel - they have all the time they need, they're in no rush...and if they are in a rush, then they break into the webway. It means they can attack you from virtually any quarter, which is nasty. And it means that there could be fleets in the deep void right now, en route, waiting....

Traveller61 said:

One thing worth considering - FTL is an inherently vague term, and not a concept that immediately solves all problems of interstellar travel. You could travel at twice the speed of light and it'd still take you years, decades, centuries or even millennia to get anywhere. The galaxy is, afterall, over a hundred thousand light years across, while "FTL" covers everything from "just slightly faster than the speed of light" to "can travel anywhere in the universe almost instantly".

I've chosen to view the situation as being very much like FTL in Mass Effect (where an individual ship is capable of crossing a dozen light years a day using their own engines, but longer-range travel requires external assistance from Mass Relays which allow near-instant travel over thousands of light years). Necron Inertialess Drives allow them to perform interstellar travel normally, but it pales in comparison to the speed and utility of the Webway for crossing vast distances.

Meh, some people will always drag their feet in the face of change, but I feel that the changes in the Necron codex are good ones. For one, the bit about the C'tan being behind everything kind of undermines the motivations and desires of other characters. It's sort of like in the Star Wars prequels. Both sides--the Republic and Confederacy--were secretly being run by the Sith. Once you realize that, you're kind of like... why exactly should I care who wins? All the various heroes and villains and their deeds lose meaning, and the old Necron fluff presented a similar problem, I think. That's been taken care of, though, and replaced with a much better story of betrayal, horror, and loss. It's actually kind of heartbreaking what the Necrons went through, even if they had it coming. The C'tan were also way underpowered on the tabletop compared to what they should have been able to do. I mean, you eat stars for lunch and all you can do on the battlefield is blow up a few tanks? What? But now that they're shards it makes more sense.

Charmander said:

The Tyranids can already bypass Warp Travel by using the gravity of a target system to create a sort of physics-distorting tunnel that they can travel through. It's perfectly safe--for them--but the disadvantage is that it's kind of slow. Still, I like to think that the Tyranids have such a strong and powerful psychic presence that if they did want to travel through the Warp, they could, and kick over all the Chaos Gods' sandcastles in passing. Then again, I play Tyranids so I may be *slightly* biased. Anyway, I think that might answer your question--the Imperium doesn't use alternatives to Warp travel mostly because they aren't as fast or are simply beyond their understanding. And at this point, with the Navigator Houses being as powerful as they are, it's really too late to switch. Also, it's not really the people traveling through the Warp that Chaos cares about so much as all the people in the galaxy continuing to feed it with their hate, lust, and despair.