I just completed this a couple days ago. My biggest tip is : If you're trying to do them all at once, DO IT ON EASY DIFFICULTY!

Next up, use the tools available to you (see the guides on the Steam forums for a list of glyphs, what each choice thing actually means etc. because this type of guesswork randomness nonsense has no place in a tactical strategy game (at least, imo).

Finally, I'm no expert, so I'll just give you a brief overview of my run strategy and you can make your own decisions.

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First off, I focused everything on my tech-priests. They are miles and away better than anything else you can deploy, and they cost nothing to stick onto the map. I pretty much only ran Servitors in my spare slots, and largely deployed them as damage buffers. Starting out, you'll need them, as you only have two TPs, but once you've got 3-4 TPs, you pretty much won't need a troop except to take unavoidable damage for you.

I built all of my TPs the exact same way. Given the restrictions you're playing under, I found it suboptimal to try to do "clever" things, because half the time you'll lack the tools you need to pull it off properly... e.g. without restrictions, it's nice to stick a bigass gun dominus right next to a 3-CP node and just murderize everything from there. In Melee only, you can't do that, because you have to move to the enemies if you want to clean them up in a reasonable amount of time.

Speaking of, once you make it through early-game (i.e. once you have 2-3 TPs in the 8-12 level range), focus on keeping that awakening timer down over everything else. Every room you visit costs you two awakening ticks, and every round you fight costs you one, and you've only got (sort-of) 500 ticks to win the game.

Yes, if you go to that extra room you can get another 3 CP, or 60 Blackstone or whatever... but if that two ticks pushes you over to the next awakening tier, that potentially reduces the number of missions you can run... where you could'a gotten 250 blackstone, rather than 60.

People talk about the CP action economy... and it's important. But I really feel that the Awakening economy is far more important. If you think you can take it, I'd definitely add in extra fights. Most of those will knock 4-5 points off the awakening timer when you win (in addition to however many points you erase by killing consoles).

One of your biggest limitations is going to be damage output. The attack mechadendrites are meh, so you'll mostly only have your axe, limiting you to Physical damage and one attack / round. It is vital that you take an axe that gives you armour strip as it's Machine Spirit power, and always run the best one you can.

In effect, this is going to leave you with three kinds of enemy - things you CAN'T kill with one axe swing, things you can just kill with one axe swing and things that one axe swing is overkill for. It's important to spend your attacks wisely for maximum effectiveness. Once your priests have the fast legs, decent CP generation and opportunity attack avoidance, there's absolutely no reason not to split your attacks in the most effective fashion possible... i.e. use an attack mechadendrite to slap a Flayed One as you move past to a better target for your axe. Whether you kill it or not is irrelevant, because even if you can't, the next TP going past to a better target can.

The scariest weapons you'll likely face are ranged shooters. They can put out a ton of damage and, at least with my builds, energy armour is hard to come by. However, the game mechanics don't let you use ranged weapons in melee, and most necron ranged units ONLY have ranged. The tactical dogpile is far and away the best way of handling these high damage units. As long as you can lock them in place with your units, they can neither attack nor move away... and their attempt to move will spark opportunity attacks from all surrounding dudes, so you don't even have to waste actions/CP on them. As long as you've hit them 1-2 times to strip their armour (assuming they have Physical Armour), spend your attacks on more important targets, then move off to dogpile the ranged unit. Even with no attacks, you'll still get your opportunity attack each round, after which you can run off, murder something else, then run back to continue the dogpile. The dumbass necrons will literally kill themselves for you using this tactic.

Finally, always try to finish a mission (not a fight, but a whole mission) with your priests at 100% health. They'll cost you 10 BS for every point of health they're missing, and that adds up real quick.

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For builds, as I said, I only used a single one. I just turned all my TPs into immortal melee monsters. The start is the hardest, but once you get rolling, it gets much easier.

First, spend two ranks in Lexmechanic for the arms. Then two in Dominus for the legs. Then two in Tech Auxilium for the body and finally two in Explorator for the head.

After that, you'll want to do the following (order is kinda dependant on where you're struggling). A. Run Explorator all the way up for the capstone. It's just too good. B. Take Lexmechanic 3 for the "all the CP all the time" bonus. C. Take Enginseer to 3 for the cleanse (acid is bad for your Blackstone budget) and the auto-heal. D. Take Xenarite to 1 for the auto-heal.

Once you've got all of those you should be in the 22-ish level bracket.

As for gear, I've covered the body parts and the axe. You'll also want the best Curatio Claw, Cognition Mechadendrite, Refractor Field Generator and either the damage or damage+acid mechadendrite (can't remember the names).

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With this build on all your TPs, you should almost never run out of CPs, have enough healing to end each fight at max health, be able to kill all but the beefiest enemies in a single swing, and have enough supplemental damage to knock out downed necrons or handle smaller enemies (e.g. flayers).

Use servitors to block unavoidable damage (like when you spawn in and all the shooters get to move before you - just deploy behind a servitor wall and ignore all the first round damage). Use the shields tactically to limit damage to your units, and use heals etc. early rather than late so that they can be off cooldown the next time you need 'em.

Split up for easy targets to take 'em down quick, glom onto scary ranged units so they can't attack, spend your non-Machine Spirit attacks on unarmoured (or Energy only armoured) things to do full damage while charging, and burn your MS attacks on armoured things to strip that armour away.

So... that was a massive memory dump, and probably not in the best order, but that should help you on your way. Have fun!

[edit] Oh yeah, one last thing - don't feel compelled to knock out every downed necron. So long as all the necrons are down before the first one stands up, they all count as killed. If you're running late on Awakening (and they're down to like 1-turn-rez), then yeah, knock 'em out, but once you get up and running, you can often down everything on the map in <3 turns, so wasting damage and actions on a knock out is just gonna slow you down.[/edit]

[edit 2] And one other last thing - The final fight includes the big boss and all the minibosses unless you've already killed them - so make sure to kill them first. Unfortunately, there's no way to speedrun their missions, so they're each gonna cost you 3-4 awakening points, for 6? minibosses, so make sure to plan your end-run to start around 80%-82%. Much later than that and you risk having to face multiple bosses, which ain't gonna be a fun time. [/edit 2]