I know that for some reason the DoW 2 Retribution campaign isn't everyone's favorite, with many saying it's the worst of the 3 DoW 2 games.

I've played them all a long time ago - albeit I didnt finish Chaos Rising - and they were also fun, but to me, still less memorable.

People's criticism of the Retribution campaign is that it was less in-depth as the other two games and repetitive as all the races essentially went through the same story.

I disagree - as I think it deserves commending that they actually gave you the choice to play as all of the races in the campaign.

I've always been more of a xeno fan and it's super rare outside of the RTS games that you get a POV from them as the protagonists.

Each of the races get their own set of characters, with their own fully voiced lines and dialogue, unique abilities, wargear, and playstyle which makes each playthrough of the campaign refreshing and entertaining enough (I've played them all except Tyranids cause there's no characterisation there).

Sure the characters you play go through the same chapters and missions, but I think it's still cool to see their reactions to how the story unfolds and how they express their own goals. And leveling the characters and unlocking the abilities for each is also fun.

Honestly, I even prefer this style of campaign over the Dark Crusade conquest-style campaigns because there's a lot more story and feels like you're playing actual heroes like you would in a 40k Novel.

The conquest style campaigns are fun too but I hope they bring this RPG-lite style back in future games, even if its outside Dawn of War.

Mann maybe I just wanna play more W40K story games where you can play as the other races for once.

It's also the only game where you get to play as Kaptin Bluddflagg and his crew. I think that says more than enough.

How to beat Necrons: exploiting the T2 dead zone

Time to cover the second major weak spot for Necrons: T2.

If you want the background, read my earlier posts on the T1 weaknesses and the matchup data.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dawnofwar/comments/1vf1fyf/the_most_strongest_and_weakest_races_are/

https://www.reddit.com/r/dawnofwar/comments/1vn12yr/how_to_beat_necrons_in_dowde_1v1/

So, you didn't stick the landing at T1. That's fine. Map layout matters, some rushes are much better on particular maps, and a big enough skill difference can overcome most mechanical advantages. I also deliberately glossed over the exact T1 builds rather than explaining how to make each one land.

I'm going to do those separately, race by race and map by map. If anyone wants to help me record them, let me know. I need a second player because these will mostly be short clips demonstrating specific mechanics rather than normal games.

For now, the important thing is understanding why T2 is probably the easiest point in the game to kill Necrons.

Necrons reach T2, but their army doesn't

The key problem is that reaching T2 gives Necron Warriors no immediate T2 durability upgrade, units or improvements relevant to the normal flow of gameplay.

The Awakened Monolith itself costs 340 power and takes 70 seconds. Once that finishes, the Necron still needs to build the Greater Summoning Core, which has a 90-second base construction time, and then research Enhanced Disruption Field, which has a 55-second base research time.

So after actually reaching T2 there is another:

90s Greater Summoning Core + 55s Enhanced Disruption Field = 145 seconds of base tech time before Warriors get their second meaningful durability upgrade. Builder Scarabs can shorten the building stage and Obelisks reduce research time, so it won't literally take 145 seconds in every game. But the point remains: there is a large second tech chain after T2 before the Warrior army catches up. And DE deliberately made that gap worse.

Enhanced Disruption Field previously took Warriors to 870 HP. DE reduced that to 750 HP, then moved the missing durability into a new T3 upgrade, Superior Disruption Field, which takes another 80 seconds (plus reaching T4 and the additional power for the research itself) to research and eventually raises them to 925 HP. Relic explicitly described the change as making Warriors weaker in the earlier game and stronger later. Previously Necrons reached maximum strength with the upgrade, so it made sense to the upgrade locked behind vehicles, but now they've effectively doubled the cost of their final upgrade and locked it behind T3 so there is a huge window where Necrons are objectively too weak to have any meaningful survivability.

So the situation is:

You reach T2 and get T2 weapons.
Necrons reach T2 and start waiting for their T2 upgrade.
Then they need T3 to recover the durability they used to have at T2.
Necrons spend 425 power (previously 200) and progress from T1>T3 to match their previous T2 strength.

That is the window you want to exploit.

Most of what you're shooting is Heavy Infantry

Warriors, Flayed Ones, Wraiths and Immortals are Heavy Infantry, so at T2 you should be moving directly towards whatever your race uses to punish Heavy Infantry.

Some obvious examples:

Army	T2 pressure
Space Marines	Plasma Guns; Grey Knights
Chaos	Plasma Guns; Khorne Berzerkers
Imperial Guard	Guardsmen Plasma Guns; Psykers
Sisters	Battle Sister Heavy Bolters
Eldar	Continue massing Dark Reapers / ranged focus
Tau	Fire Warrior mass with T2 ranged upgrades
Dark Eldar	Mobile concentrated ranged pressure
Orks	Big Shootas backed by fast melee

The exact race builds will be separate posts, but several of the timings show how bad this gap is.

A Space Marine Plasma Gun takes only 15 seconds to fit once the Monastery and Armoury prerequisites exist.
Chaos Plasma Guns take 12 seconds each once the Unholy Monastery and Chaos Armoury are available.
IG Plasma Guns take 15 seconds each once Battle Command and the Tactica Control are available.
Battle Sister Heavy Bolters take 12 seconds each once the Cathedral and Pristine Sanctuary are available.
Compare those 12–15 second weapon upgrades with the Necron's Greater Summoning Core → Enhanced Disruption Field path.
You don't need to wait until your whole army is perfect. Get the appropriate weapons online and push while the Necron is still waiting to even reach T2.

You probably have the stronger economy as well

This is something that gets missed because Necrons display big power numbers.

A normal fully upgraded T2 Listening Post produces +24 requisition. Three of them produce +72, and a conventional HQ produces another +20, giving you about +92 requisition before global economy upgrades.

Compare that with Necrons.

A Necron generator produces +10 power, as does the Monolith. So nine generators + the Monolith = +100 power.

Numerically those look similar:

Economy remaining	Base income
3 × LP3 + HQ	+92 requisition
9 Necron generators + Monolith	+100 power

But getting nine Necron generators is enormously more expensive than the number suggests.

The first generator is free, then each successive generator costs another 25 power:

0 + 25 + 50 + 75 + 100 + 125 + 150 + 175 + 200 = 900 power.

Their build time also increases by 22% for every existing generator. Starting from 45 seconds, the nominal individual build times are roughly:

45 → 55 → 67 → 82 → 100 → 122 → 148 → 181 → 221 seconds.

Multiple Scarabs obviously build them in parallel, but that doesn't remove the cost or the escalating individual build time.

And unlike conventional Listening Posts, upgrading Necron Obelisks provides no additional resources at all; they only marginally improve defence and the Necron time bonus is almost always locked out of 100%. Obelisks are mostly about preventing you from getting an LP rather than being directly useful to Necrons.

Requisition and power aren't literally interchangeable currencies, but in practical army-production terms three LP3s can leave a conventional army in a better fighting position than a Necron economy built around nine generators. Your requisition is buying comparatively cheap squads and replacements while Necron power is simultaneously paying for units, reinforcement, buildings, tech, upgrades and now teleportation. Realistically, unit costs are roughly equal anyway, so more-or-less, 100 power for necrons = 100 Requisition for everyone else.

This matters when you think you're losing the map.

If you've been pushed back but still have three upgraded LPs, you are absolutely still in the game.

Get the right unit or weapon and attack. The Necron player may have more territory, but they're paying an enormous economic premium just to keep their army and tech moving.

The most important rule: if they teleport, chase them

This is probably the biggest mistake I see players make against Necrons. They win the engagement, the Necron army uses Summoning to retreat, and they stop and regroup.

Don't.

You can see where Necron units teleport to (most likely a bug). Summoning sends the squad to one of the Necron player's buildings, so watch the teleport and run directly towards where they reappear. Warriors have a 120-second Summoning cooldown. Flayed Ones have a shorter 75-second cooldown, but they're still committed once they've used it. That means a Warrior squad which just escaped cannot simply teleport away again when you arrive. You have roughly two minutes before that escape resets.

If the Necron player teleported because they were losing, you're now pursuing:

damaged units;
slow units;
units that are reinforcing;
an army spending power to recover;
an army still waiting for its T2 tech;
and Warriors which no longer have their escape available.

Follow them. It is T2, they're functionally weaker than you, you have the anti-Heavy weapons, go for the army wipe immediately.

The DE teleport changes make this even worse

There are also an undocumented DE change that make retreating much less reliable.

Summoning now costs 20 power per teleport.

There is also a reinforcement interaction where reinforcing creates a cooldown that can prevent a squad from teleporting. Together they create a ridiculous feedback loop:

take damage → reinforce → spend power → can't teleport → take more damage → reinforce again → still can't teleport.

It also means an army often can't teleport together. Some squads are ready, some are reinforcing, and the player either has to leave units behind or wait while the whole army continues taking damage. If some squads escape and others don't, kill the ones left behind first, then follow the teleport. This is one of the ways an apparently healthy Necron army can suddenly disappear completely.

Teleport doesn't even reliably escape damage

There is another interaction which is almost certainly a bug. Some attacks which have already begun continue to damage Necron units after they teleport away. Two particularly useful examples are:

Space Marine Orbital Bombardment and Imperial Guard Psyker abilities.

Orbital Bombardment has a 3.5-second setup, then drops its barrage over 30 seconds. If the attack has already committed as the Necron teleports, the teleport does not reliably give them a clean escape from the damage. This also applies to the Lord!

IG Psykers are even more useful. Strip Soul targets Infantry/Heavy Infantry and hits for 510 damage against Heavy Infantry, while Lightning Arc becomes available at Battle Command and hits the entire target squad. Both have 180-second cooldowns.

In DE, if these effects have already started when the Necron teleports, they can continue resolving on the unit after it disappears. Whether that's intended or not, use it. Even if the teleport saves the squad, it can arrive at the destination already badly damaged, which makes the second engagement considerably easier. So if you use a special ability and you see Necrons teleport to avoid it, they didn't avoid it and you should immediately pursue.

Solar Pulse is a white flag, so commit a war crime

Solar Pulse used to be one of the better ways Necrons could survive concentrated ranged fire. It has now been nerfed again from an 80-second to a 90-second cooldown. In practice its useful area is also small enough that a ranged army can reposition around it and shoot across it (this is from the previous nerf). Against a normal firing line it often buys the Necron player only 2–3 seconds of actual protection while you move your units to a position where they can fire from again.

Most players see Solar Pulse and retreat. If the Necron is using it defensively because they're losing, that's often the wrong response.

Move around the edge, move through it, or use those few seconds to get between the Necron army and where it wants to go. Cut them off, they're using it to stay alive while retreating (most of the time). Once it's gone, they don't have another Solar Pulse for 90 seconds. Another way to frame how cooked it is, the cooldown period is 7.5% of a 20 minute game for an action that causes no damage.

Don't shoot the bait

The Necron Lord can be very hard to kill at T2 if the player has invested in him. That doesn't mean he's the thing you should be shooting. If the Lord is standing in front of six Warriors trying to absorb your fire, he's bait. Kill the Warriors.

The latest patch actually reduced Phylactery's ranged damage reduction from 60% to 55%, but the Lord can still waste a huge amount of your time if you let him. This was a pointless nerf, the Necron Lord does such little damage on his own that he's best ignored anyway.

The same thing applies to Wraiths. If one uses Phase Shift, stop shooting it and retarget. This is just part of the micro against Necrons. Wraith Flight has also just been nerfed from 80% ranged damage reduction to 76%. In actual damage received, that's 20% → 24%, meaning an upgraded Wraith now takes 20% more ranged damage than before. This was an entirely unnecessary nerf, Wraiths can tie things up. They can't make you shoot them. They're only effective against Eldar and Tau in combat, but for every other army they're just a distraction based around Phase Shift.

Flayed Ones stop being scary if you kite them

Flayed Ones get +150 HP per model when the Monolith reaches T2, so they aren't literally unchanged but they're still the slowest unit, a Heavy Infantry squad trying to reach armies that have just gained T2 anti-Heavy-Infantry weapons. Don't stand there fighting them Kite and focus fire and they will last a few seconds at most. This is incredibly punishing for Necrons as they became more expensive in DE: squad cost increased from 120 → 130 power and reinforcement from 30 → 35 power. So killing them also hurts the Necron economy more than it used to and they're effectively dead weight at T2.

Dedicated T2 rushes can make the gap even worse

On larger maps the Necron's movement speed makes specialised fast-tech strategies particularly difficult to answer because the Necron player often needs to recognise what you're doing before the unit actually appears.

Two obvious examples:

Unit	Realistic dedicated rush
Khorne Berzerkers	~2:35–3:00
Grey Knights	~3:00–3:20

Berzerkers themselves only take 32 seconds to produce once Chaos has T2 and the Sacrificial Circle. Grey Knights take 30 seconds once the Monastery and Sacred Artifact prerequisites are met. The point isn't that these units are mathematically invincible against Necrons. The problem is what efficient answer the Necron can have ready when they arrive?

If the Necron has pursued the normal build path, they haven't even reached T2 before these units have engaged (minimum time is ~4:00, and that's a hard tech - you build nothing except generators and the Summoning Core). Even if they could get to T2, there are no units available that improve their survivability until after the Greater Summoning Core!

If they abandon that path to counter your rush, the Warrior upgrade gets pushed back even further. I've got a replay where a Chaos player rushed all the way to Possessed Ones while I was still T1. I won, but only because I recognised the player and already knew what he was going to do.

That's the problem with these builds against Necrons: the counter often needs to begin before the Necron actually knows what they're countering.

Vehicles are the next bottleneck

The Greater Summoning Core isn't just needed for Enhanced Disruption Field it also unlocks Destroyers and Tomb Spyders. The old Relic guide actually describes early Necron T2 as weak compared with other races for exactly this reason. Destroyers are the first useful mobile ranged answer to a lot of this pressure, and the only answer to Heavy Infantry.

But even they can be disrupted very cheaply. If you've got disposable infantry - Scouts, Cultists, etc.- put them into melee with the Destroyer. A vehicle being tied up by cheap infantry isn't contributing its ranged fire while your useful units keep killing Warriors.

Immortals don't solve the infantry problem either. They're primarily there to kill vehicles and buildings, not to replace the anti-infantry role of a Destroyer. They do no effective damage.

So again the Necron player is choosing: Do I spend my power and time making Warriors survive, or do I spend it diversifying into vehicles? Doing one delays the other.

Keep killing units even if the fight looks close

This is where the T1 production problem rolls straight into T2.

Every squad the Necron loses costs them power, replacement time and production capacity at exactly the point where they're also trying to fund:

the 340-power T2 upgrade;
a 250-power Greater Summoning Core;
Warrior upgrades;
vehicles;
reinforcement;
artifacts;
generators;
and 20-power teleports.

The latest DE changes also explicitly increased Flayed One costs and made it harder to bypass Warrior scaling through Tomb Spyder corpse production. So if you kill one squad, don't consolidate. keep pushing! One dead squad means less army protecting the next squad. More reinforcing means less power for tech. Less tech means the T2 dead zone lasts longer.

That is how the whole thing spirals out of control.

The actual strategy is simple

You don't need some secret anti-Necron build.

At T2:

Get your Heavy-Infantry counter online.
Push before Enhanced Disruption Field.
Focus Warriors.
Kite Flayed Ones.
Retarget Phase-Shifted Wraiths.
Don't waste your army shooting the Lord.
If Solar Pulse goes down, reposition instead of abandoning the fight.
If they teleport, WATCH WHERE THEY GO AND RUN STRAIGHT THERE. Their Warriors cannot teleport again for 120 seconds.
Use attacks like Orbital Bombardment and Psyker abilities before the retreat, because damage already in progress can follow them through the teleport.
And don't assume you've economically lost just because they've taken the map. Three LP3s still give you +72 requisition, +92 with your HQ, which is enough economy to produce the correct counter and keep fighting.

The main thing to understand is that Necron T2 isn't really a power spike. It's a dead zone between reaching T3 and finally getting the upgrades and vehicles that make T2 work.

Their economy is expensive, their core infantry is sitting in exactly the armour class your new weapons are designed to kill, they struggle to disengage, and DE has moved part of their old T2 durability into T3. They are the only army where a single weapon upgrade from an opponent presents complete death spiral. Because of the way things are timed, you have a lot of time to apply this pressure and push it.

r/dawnofwar

My Captain Cyrus of the Blood ravens finished!

Does anyone find MP a bit randomly toxic sometimes?

I might just never play multiplayer again

Dark Crusade Help

Gabriel Angelos

Wanted to write some appreciation for the DoW Retribution campaign

Is dawn of war 4 looking good ?

Am I missing DoW3 build orders, or was it so unpopular none exist?

Blood River Question.

Dawn of War Definitive Edition - A Great Remaster! (SapphireNation)

Eldar Stronghold conquered in the most braindead way possible. Would not have it any other way

No videos of DC Hard strength 8-10+ zones?

Soulstorm AI Don't Use Gateways?

DoW4 will be literally unplayable

Any chance Dawn of War 4 will run 4K upscaled on 2080 RTX?

One year ago, the battle began... again!💀

Important question

Help me find the lost media

How to Beat Necrons in DOW-DE [1v1] - T2