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Hi All,

I am a fairly new Eldar player and play mostly against Marines at the moment.

I was wondering what specific tactics you guys use for FDs. Obviousley they can popout of a WS and take down pretty much any tin can, but do you have any tactics to stop themgetting torn apart by whatever is inside?

Thanks

Not Really. They are fire and forget. Because of this, most people use a min squad of 5 and treat them as disposable.

You could run them with a WS with Dire Avengers, but that gets really expensive and is usually not worth it. Hopefully, the mass amount of St 6 shooting the rest of the army has kills what was in the transport.

The only way to try preserving them is in angling your transport hatch in such a way that you *might* avoid an assault, and you might get cover when fired at. Those are both mights.

Fire Dragons only get to fire at more than 1 vehicle if you either manage to pick off a relatively isolated unit and completely annihilate it (Dragons kill the vehicle then you torrent the unit inside to death) or if you manage to screen them off completely with a couple of Serpents (physically blocks assaults but puts the Serpents at risk). Against stuff like Nids you can more easily pull this off as you don't need to be withing 6" to shoot the MCs effectively.

You can also get very lucky and end up with units getting pinned when their transport dies, or even rarer stuff like vehicles exploding nearby causing them to lose a couple of guys so they run off in their own phase (but above half so they can still rally).

You can try to give them a shot at survival by dropping them in cover and going to ground when needed. But really that is more about making your foe put a bit more effort into killing them.

Used them quite well against dreads before. Any value in sending them round the board to take out not transport vehicles first do you think?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also what about including a character with the squad to them a bit more bite in CC?

I routinely use a "fish of fury" with fire dragons to increase their survivability. It's an old Tau tactic from last edition; seems to catch many of my opponents buy surprise.

1. Fly two or three wave serpents moving 7" or more up to the target and make a wall of wave serpents turned sideways between yourself and the enemy. Gaps between serpents should be less than 1"

2. Get your fire dragons out behind the serpents, so that the wall of transports is between you and the target. Because the serpents are on flying stands, you can see under them.

3. Shoot the target under/between the serpents. The wall of transports prevents anybody from assaulting your fire dragons without shooting down the serpents first. The serpents provide cover against shooting. It's possible to assault the serpents, but the opponent needs 6s to hit them because they moved fast.

4. If your fire dragons survive (and the odds are better than if you just left them out in the open to die) they can get back in their transports and fly away next turn.

Well I generally get them into a position where I'll be able to shoot down tanks without getting too much backfire. Generally they do get shot at, but if a 200 point marine squad is shooting my fire dragons, they won't be shooting anything else.

Ah good point. Is that viable then that friendly troops can effectively shoot through skimmers but you can't be assaulted through them? Also can enemy troops shoot under skimmers?

I guess the downside is that FD are unlikely to be able to do that still be with the 6" melta range

Anybody can shoot at anything that s/he can see, so the dragons can shoot under, and can be shot by anything that can see them underneath the skimmer.

The rule that keeps enemy units away is the one that says nobody can come within 1" of an enemy model in the movement phase, and can't assault through a gap narrower than the width of their base. So as long as any gaps in your line are narrow enough, they can't charge between the skimmers.

If you're really good at positioning and your target is a vehicle, you can position your wall of skimmers with gaps between (still narrower than 1") but have enough of your unit able to see the target such that they can deny the target a cover save, but still get cover saves themselves from counterfire.

A wave serpent is only about 4" side-to-side, so you can park it sidways 1" away from the target vehicle, disembark, and still be within 6" for the melta shot. But the tactic works better when you can stand off a little further--like if your target is AR12 or less (which will die even without the extra melta d6), or is a MC or a unit of FNP guys or whatever.

For instance, a couple of weeks ago I took out a big unit of Death Company using this tactic, then turned around and killed off a unit of sanguinary guard that had deepstruck behind my serpent wall, all the while using the serpent wall to hold off Dante and his SG unit from assaulting from the other direction. Then the dragons hopped back in and flew away. Killed two big expensive units of BAs and didn't lose a single fire dragon. They don't have to be suicide troops.

Very interesting to read the advice above - sometimes FDs do need to make a suicidal attack against a high-value target. Against some enemies though it is possible to use them more carefully. Even using minimum squads of 5, I sometimes have 1-2 survive shooting and climb back in their ride, where they can do a lot of good. I do think that it helps if your opponent's army is not too fast/shooty, and it really really helps if your opponent makes a mistake and exposes a juicy target.

A word on the unit size etc. I have moved to 5 with no upgrades, from 6 with an exarch (sometimes with the HF). This works well, especially when duty calls for suicide. I am going to try them more cautiously with 8-10. There doesn't seem to be much point taking 6-7 as you are over the minimum level but not quite big enough for general use.

I generally use 3 units of 5. But I try to add the 6th guy whenever I have the points because it puts you on the happy side of a statistical break point for BS4 models.

If tank hunter weren't so overpriced, it would be a really good thing to have--specifically because 5 or 6 str9 AP1 guns are a plausible threat to anything without necessarily needing to close to melta range.