King Art put out another Dawn of War 4 battle report last week, and this one is the Necrons against the Adeptus Mechanicus. A recorded 1v1, creative director against one of the senior designers, no cinematic gloss on it, just a full match on a normal map. The Necrons spend the entire game shoving something called a Power Matrix up the board, eating losses, standing back up, and pushing again. The Mechanicus play a slower game. They pick a line, they fortify it, they reinforce, and they sit on ground until the other guy runs out of patience. I watched the thing twice and the second time it stopped reading like a balance video and started reading like a codex.
Those aren’t two arbitrary playstyles a studio bolted on to keep the factions feeling different. That’s what the Necrons and the Mechanicus actually are, rendered as a resource economy. The Necrons cannot be made to stay dead. The Mechanicus worship the technology they dug up and would rather die than change a bolt on it. Somebody at King Art read the lore and let the factions be what they are, which is rarer than it should be in a licensed game.
If you want the Blood Ravens end of Dawn of War 4, the campaign chapter and the release detail, I already wrote that up. This isn’t that. This is the two launch factions nobody’s talking about, and the specific reason a fight between them carries more weight than the box lets on.
The Necrons play like they can’t die
The whole Necron identity, on the tabletop and now in the RTS, is that killing them doesn’t take. They were once a race of flesh called the Necrontyr, and per White Dwarf #383’s What Is a Necron? they “long ago replaced their fragile bodies with sturdy frames of living-metal by the process of biotransference,” then went to sleep for sixty million years. Sixty million years is not a number a brain can actually hold. My house is a hundred and twenty years old and I file that under ancient. The Necrons were old before the animals I’d recognise had turned up.
So they wake up, and the thing that makes them a nightmare to fight is the reanimation. Shoot a Necron Warrior, it drops, and a moment later it stands back up and keeps walking. GW has renamed the mechanic about four times since I started playing, We’ll Be Back and Phase Out and Reanimation Protocols and whatever it’s called this week, but the promise underneath never changes. And it’s not just the rank and file. Imperial Armour Volume 12’s write-up of the Necron Exodermis describes an Overlord’s frame with “a phenomenal capacity for rapid self-repair,” a construction that is, and I love this line, “beyond the comprehension and lore of the Adeptus Mechanicus or the Ordo Xenos to understand.” The Imperium’s best machine-priests look at a Necron and cannot work out how it functions.
So the Necrons, right. You shoot them, they fall over, they get back up. That’s the bit. That’s been the bit since third edition. Kill them and they don’t stay killed. Do that to somebody across a table for three hours and see how you’re feeling by the end of it. I know how I feel by the end of it, and it isn’t sporting.
That “recover after losses, keep the pressure on” behaviour in the battle report is just that translated into an RTS. The Necron player throws bodies at a position, loses them, and the loss barely registers because the army’s whole point is that attrition doesn’t work on it the way it works on everyone else. Trading blows with an army that keeps reassembling itself is a loser’s game, which is why the answer on the board is to dig in and make it keep coming to you.
The Mechanicus digs in because holding on is the entire religion
Which is exactly what the Adeptus Mechanicus do in the video, and exactly what they are in the fiction. The Mechanicus don’t blitz you. They fortify, they entrench, they reinforce a line and dare you to break it. And a faction whose entire theology is “find the old thing, protect the old thing, never alter the old thing” was never going to play any other way.
Imperial Armour Volume 1’s essay on the Adeptus Mechanicus and their attitudes to technology lays it out plainly. They revere recovered tech “in a manner more akin to a religious artefact than a simple electric generator.” Their version of science “is now more akin to archaeological study.” They find an old pattern, confirm it’s a genuine Standard Template Construct, and then duplicate it “slavishly,” because understanding how it works is beside the point as long as it works. Innovation is heresy. Alien tech is “black technology and outlawed,” and dabbling in it gets you turned into a servitor. That’s not a faction that pushes the map. That’s a faction that builds a wall around what it’s already got and shoots anything that comes near, which is the whole ten-thousand-year STC hunt in one sentence.
I’ve got a soft spot for the Mechanicus that I’ve never once acted on properly. When the plastic Skitarii and Cult Mechanicus kits dropped back in 2015 I bought a box of Rangers on a whim, told myself and told Pete I was starting a little red-robed detachment to run alongside the Cadians, got as far as clipping about six of them off the sprue, and that box has been in the pile of shame ever since. Eleven years. Every so often I move it to get at something else and feel a small stab of guilt. So when I say I understand a faction that hoards things it will never use, I mean it more literally than I’d like.
Now, part of me wants to catch myself here. It’s a strategy game. King Art needs four factions that don’t play the same, and “defensive turtle” and “relentless attrition” are just two archetypes off a shelf every RTS has had since the nineties. Maybe I’m doing the fan thing, reading a novel’s worth of intention into a design decision that was mostly about matchmaking variety. Maybe. But then you look at who these two factions specifically are to each other, and the coincidence stops holding up.
Two priesthoods and one machine
The Mechanicus and the Necrons are the same project run twice, and the Necrons are the one that came out the other side. The Mechanicus are a priesthood that worships machines, believes every engine has a spirit, and dreams of a humanity that once commanded technology it can no longer replicate. The Necrons are a civilisation that actually did it. They mastered their machines so completely they poured their own minds into metal and walked out the far end of death still thinking. Every Necron court keeps its Crypteks, techno-sorcerers whose science, per White Dwarf #499, is so far beyond the younger races that “they appear as dark sorcery.” They are the thing a Tech-Priest only imitates. A Magos chants over a tank engine that Mars stopped understanding millennia ago. A Cryptek built his own body out of the same principles and can rewrite it on a whim.
And the Mechanicus knows. That’s the tell. White Dwarf #499 has a Cult Mechanicus dogma transmission that reads, in full binaric fury, “THERE ARE THOSE WHO WOULD DRAW FALSE COMPARISONS BETWEEN THE RIGHTEOUS TECH-MAGI OF THE ADEPTUS MECHANICUS AND THE PERVERSE XENOTECHNOLOGISTS OF THE NECRONS. THERE CAN BE NO MERCY FOR SUCH HERETICS.” You don’t make a comparison a punishable heresy unless the comparison stings. The Mechanicus has, on the record, criminalised the observation that it resembles its enemy.
That’s not old history either. White Dwarf #501 describes what it calls “the escalating arms race between the Necron Crypteks and the Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-Priests,” a live and current thing across the Pariah Nexus, Martian accretion fleets hunting blackstone and pylons while the dynasties disintegrate them for the effrontery. This has been going on the whole time. We saw it at Damnos, where a Magos seized the whole mining operation the instant Necron ruins turned up, hauled samples back for study, and then couldn’t get the tomb doors open.
GW has dangled one more idea for decades and never confirmed it: that the Machine God the Mechanicus worships might be a Necron star-god asleep under Mars. The Void Dragon, a C’tan shard, supposedly slumbering beneath the Red Planet, with an entire religion built on top of it that has no idea what it’s kneeling to. I genuinely don’t know where that sits after the last few years of Necron and Mechanicus books, because the setting has a habit of quietly walking its best hints back when it gets nervous. But it’s been on the table long enough that a Tech-Priest gunning down a Necron Warrior reads, if you let it, as a man taking a swing at the thing he goes home and prays to, and the setting has never once made him notice.
Put all that behind the battle report and the 1v1 stops being a demo of two playstyles. You’re watching a machine-cult wall itself off from the one enemy that happens to be living proof its whole dream is buildable, just not by anyone on Mars. The fortifying and the hoarding and the not-understanding are all the same reflex. So is the green tide that keeps standing back up and walking into it.
Dawn of War 4 is out on the 17th of September, both of these in the box at launch, with a fifth faction promised for spring next year alongside the Aftermath DLC. I’ll take the Mechanicus. Somebody has to hold the line, and I’ve got a box of Skitarii that says I’ve owed them a proper go since 2015.
