Necrons' weakness in Dawn of War IV is greed: their strength lies in expansion
In Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV, the Necrons are traditionally considered the hardest nuts to crack. Each soldier is a soul trapped in a living metal body, practically immortal thanks to the faction's reanimation technology. Like a clothes moth infestation, once they've made their home on a planet, they're virtually impossible to get rid of, lending themselves to wars of attrition.
However, this very trait has become their Achilles heel. Developers at King Art Games found a vulnerability in the faction's core nature: greed. Their strength is an insatiable drive to expand territory, while their weakness is the risk taken for that expansion without adequate protection.
The Power Matrix and the cost of expansion
The Necrons' key resource is Dominion. Unlike other factions that gain resources from captured outposts, Necrons harvest it by spreading a network of wires and artificial turf called the Power Matrix across the map. This structure serves as both an aesthetic and a farm/shield hybrid. Its area directly influences the amount of Dominion gathered and boosts out-of-combat healing and armor stats for units on their home ground.
To expand their empire, Necrons must build specialized structures called Convergence of Dominion. These allow rapid spreading of the matrix but are inherently vulnerable: they lack weapons, have low durability, and their sole purpose is expansion. If a player focuses entirely on aggressive expansion, they may not have time to build fortifications or turrets to protect these fragile nodes.
"If you spend all that time focusing on aggressive expansion, you haven't built any fortifications, you haven't built any turrets to protect those structures, it is trivial for the other factions to have some fast moving units come in, destroy the structure, and move out again," explains senior game designer Elliott Verbiest. Conversely, playing conservatively and building an impregnable base leaves room for opponents to do whatever they want on the rest of the map, limiting your resources.
The ideology of arrogant aliens
The faction's design reflects its canonical nature from the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game. Necrons existed in the galaxy long before other races and consider all planets their own. Other factions are simply trespassers to them. They don't care about resource stations; they want territory at any cost.
This arrogance manifests mechanically: "Extremely arrogant aliens that feel like they cannot die," Verbiest says. Consequently, they do not benefit from cover and cannot use it like other factions. Additionally, Necrons cannot occupy garrisons—a key tactic for most other factions in ranged battles.
Leveling the playing field
In earlier games by Relic, there was a morale mechanic where Necron machines felt no fear and could not be suppressed. In Dawn of War IV, this system has been removed, making all factions equally vulnerable to suppression.
"When we were starting pre-production, we looked at these different status effects. One of our primary goals is to make a Dawn of War game that is authentic to the Warhammer universe, so we had to take a critical look at all of these and not just through a gameplay lens, but also through a fantasy lens," Verbiest notes.
Developers believe that even without the suppression mechanic, other aspects of gameplay and fantasy context are sufficient to convey the Necron character. However, this can only be confirmed when the game launches later than planned—on December 3.
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