Necrons are "extremely arrogant aliens that feel like they cannot die," so their weakness in Dawn of War 4 is an obvious one: greed

Cracking turtles

Dawn of War 4's Necrons are the hard nuts of Warhammer 40,000. Each one of their soldiers 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. They lend themselves to wars of attrition, constantly expanding their borders while absorbing enemy attacks.

"Players love this type of playstyle," Dawn of War 4's senior game designer Elliott Verbiest tells me, "but it's something that isn't necessarily conducive to interesting multiplayer gameplay. It's kind of the same deal as rock, paper scissors where both players are just throwing rock over and over and over again."

To counter this, developers King Art Games have introduced a chink in the Necron's armour, and it's a very human impulse: greed.

The vulnerability is wrapped up in one of the faction's great strengths. Spreading out from your Necron HQ and covering all the territory you own is something called the Power Matrix. This wire-strewn astroturf isn't only an aesthetic - it's part farm and part shield for the Necrons. Rather than receive resources from captured outposts, as the other factions do, Necrons gain the Dominion resource from how much Power Matrix they're unfurled across the map. Their units also receive a boost to their out-of-combat healing powers and armour stats, making them much tougher to kill on their home ground. However, the Power Matrix is also vital for stretching out your empire, as many Necron structures can only be built on cybernetically-infused earth.

It's this drive to expand that opens up the mechanical Necrons to counterattacks from their fleshy foes, Verbiest explains. "The primary way the Necrons use to spread that power Matrix is through a structure called a Convergence of Dominion. It is the most cost efficient way for a Necron to spread their Dominion very, very quickly but these structures are inherently vulnerable. They're not armed or anything, they don't have a lot of durability and their sole purpose is to spread the Power Matrix." There are other, more functional ways to spread the wiry topsoil, but not as cheaply.

In the early game, where resources come in slowly, it can be tempting to spread out quickly because the rewards are immediate. "If you can spread this Power Matrix very quickly, you can have a lot of your forces that are durable and difficult to get rid of," Verbiest says. "But 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. That is something that Necrons struggle to deal with."

Alternatively, you can play conservatively, expanding slowly but laying down hard-to-destroy fortifications as you go, building a barnacle of a home base. However, as Verbiest points out, "You're giving your opponents a lot of room to do whatever they want on the rest of the map." And, with your Dominion resource tied to the surface area of your territory, you'll receive only limited resources while your enemy's economy may go gangbusters.

This design is also an expression of how the Necrons inhabit the world in the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game. They existed in the galaxy long before the other races that now populate the stars. Thus, they see all of the planets as their own, and every other faction as trespassers. They don't care for resource stations, they want the territory alone. This ideology feeds into other design choices for the faction, too, Verbiest says. "Being these extremely arrogant aliens that feel like they cannot die, one of the interactions they don't have compared to other factions is that they don't benefit from cover. They simply cannot use it." Nor can they enter garrisons, a key tactic to most factions, particularly when caught up in ranged battles.

Though, one aspect of the earlier Dawn of War games, back when Relic were leading the series, was morale – a system that King Art Games have scrapped. In the past, this was another of the Necrons' advantages, as the machines feel no fear and thus could not be suppressed. That's still the case in Dawn of War 4, but it's also true for all the other factions.

"When we were starting pre-production, we looked at these different status effects," Verbiest says. "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. Does it make sense for a Space Marine Terminator to be suppressed? Or should an Ork feel fear and run away? Or should a Necron be poisoned? None of it worked well for conveying fantasy that we wanted to have for that faction."

When I point out that this leveling-out of the factions is a loss for the Necrons, Verbiest disagrees. "We felt that there were definitely more than enough other aspects, both from a gameplay and a fantasy perspective, that convey that feeling for that faction well enough. Even without the suppression mechanic."

We can only know if that's the case when we get our hands on Dawn Of War 4 – which is coming out later than planned, now releasing on December 3. Personally, I enjoy sending snivelling orks into a rout. And, if our positions were reversed, and I had to face down one of the Necron's mega units, which are constructed around a barely contained shard of a surly star god, I'd be sprinting from the battlefield in a pair of brown trousers.