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I while ago I played against dark eldar with my space marine army and a partner, and suffered a crushing defeat although there was a bit of cheating and underhanded play but that doesn't change the fact that we got crushed. So I was thinking how do you beat dark eldar with space marines? From what Ive learned a shooty army isn't very good against them.

That's not so easy - beating DE with SM. Several things are needed: fire power to take down the DE skimmers (heavy bolters and autocannons are your bet here, multi-shot and long range), mobility (Rhinos) to be able to reposition and pick the fight on your terms, and keeping cc specialists like a Beastmaster unit at arm's length.

I recently played against my friends DE army and also suffered a massive defeat, When I played him again I changed my set up completely. The units that won me the game

Land Raider Redeemer
Devastators with heavy bolters
Landspeeder with assault cannon and heavy bolter

Redeemer was loaded up with veterans, chaplain and a librarian the vets were all armed with power weapons the librarian was using force dome. liturgies from the chap let me sweep the floor with his beastmaster unit . you can also drop the librarian and equip the squad with stormshields and a lightning claw (same cost as a power weapon) for roughly the same cost but you loose +1A but gain re rolls to wound.

you do need to keep your army mobile aswell otherwise all your units will get bogged down in combat and then the beastmasters will be able to move in and wreck you.

Try pure ten man bolter squads in rhinos to move round and take out single units like skimmers as they are rather weak especially when not in cover and run away easily. Maybe try a flamer in the squad with the serg with a combi flamer so you can inflict as much damage as you possibly can when disembarking from your rhinos

You also need to make as much impact as quickly as possible before your enemy starts collecting pain tokens.

Lastly tank shock the beastmasters with a land raider and chase them with it, with flamers blazing

Well, a LR pattern tank is rather vulnerable vs. dark light shots. I'd let those tanks at home.

On the other hand, tank shocking is an issue for DE units. They are generally not fearless and have rather low leadership.

The short answer is, "Kill their mobility before it kills yours."

If they are mounted (and they likely will be) you need to "worry" about AV10 open topped skimmers. Those skimmers (should) all have a 5++ save, so getting penning shots is easy, making them stick is a little harder, but far from impossible. If you have a largely shooting force, concentrate on the transports for his CC and his Ravagers first. With his Wyches and Incubi needing to footslog, it gives you a bit of time to drop his Trueborn Venoms (if any).

His Trueborn need to get close to be effective, and that sometimes means being near charge range and more likely in flamer range, allowing you to flame the little guys easily and dig them out of whatever terrain they are trying to hug. With transports gone, every squad is easily wiped off the board with bolters, or simply charges from TAC squads if they are shooting units. Wyches can tarpit you for a long time, so don't let them.

If you still have transports, mount back up and go grab objectives.

Do not, and I can't stress this enough,
DO NOT

take Landraiders.

In my normal DE list (NOT spammed) I have 21 lances. They would make short work of a Landraider, and given that a rhino is only SLIGHTLY weaker against lances than a LR, I'll let you think about why taking 5 more rhinos would be better than one LR.

(Riflemen) Dreads, AC/LC Preds. Anything that brings a load of S6+ shooting for a reasonable price is fair game. It's enough to take down vehicles with and negates FnP, which runs rampant in DE assault lists.

Bring a Librarian with Null Zone. Both Wyches and vehicles rely mostly on Inv saves to keep them operating, so to deprive them of this is juice.

Wyches are but a nuisance, Incubi a holy terror for your basic guys. There's really no unit in the Codex worth engaging them with, so by all means keep them at arm's length. Doubly so if they're led by an Archon, but that speaks for itself.

Lots and lots of mid-Strength fire at medium/long range, heavy bolters and autocannons tend to do the trick. Focus on the transports, kill all the transports before going back and wiping out the contents. Land Speeders, Predators, and Dreadnaughts are your friends in this situation.

Avoid close combat, you can typically weather most DE shooting with power armor but if characters or Incubi make it into close combat you aren't going to be able to do much more than stall them.

You can pretend to be Black Templars or some other breed of space marines and have an easier time. I'd check out the BT Landspeeders, the cyclone missile launcher and heavy bolter on each of those things for just 70 points is just ludicrous vs DE. Long fangs can be ripping apart more than one transport a turn, or blasting warriors or wyches to craters once they are forcibly disembarked. FNP blood angels and their speedy transports are great at resisting volumes of poison shots and removing advantages of mobility.

One thing you want to do is to be able to divide your fire effectively and be able to make the most of your actions. DE have mobility, range and the ability to divide their fire in spades. Hes also banking on your wasting time trying to get your solutions to work (short range, assault, blocking or dividing your forces etc) and your solutions being wastefully directed (too many shots pointed at the same raider because of distribution, while he flies around with several more). DE players are very good at forcing you to find an answer to their tricks, and then making your solution feel inefficient.

A dakka predator is an interesting example. That thing is pretty sturdy, even to dark lances it will require firing a few of them to really take out of commission and dark lances aren't inexpensive where as a dakka pred costs only 25 points more than the cheapest unit that carries a darklance, the naked raider. It's 3 relevant weapons go a long way to keeping it relevant while it still stands, as does it's long range. Even on the move, an autocannon is still pretty darn effective at popping a 60+ point unit they have. There is the problem though, how many shots do you want to be sinking into downing one flying pirate ship? How hard is it going to be for your enemy to use mobility and his superior number of threats to minimize your countermeasures and largely ignore them while still getting aggressive with you. You're approach to beating him has to either not buy into games the dark eldar are good at playing (which there are an awful lot of) or they need to be very wholistic, having your whole army able to reliably keep him on the wrong foot.

While everyone here tells you how to tailor your SM list to deal with the DE, you would be much better off making your list a TAC list. This allows you to field the same army no matter who your playing and will make you a better general in the long run.

Target priority is key. Take down the skimmers and the army starts to crumble. you can do that without taking Dakka Preds etc... Just shoot the right things each turn based on threat etc...


If you spam STR 5-6 shots and win, you haven't accomplished anything. Unless you take that list and go kill everyone with it.

Thats me being me though...

as a dark eldar player, i offer the following:

- take as many tac squads as possible. load up on missiles. forget powerfists, or anything other then a power weapon on the srg. his bolter is enough. (reason being you can combat squad, and your bolter fire will work much better on DE infantry then CC weapons. if your in combat with warriors, you should win. anyting else your done anyway so save the 25 pts/unit and leave the fist home.

take riflemen dreads, or failing that, devs with missiles. again, combat squad them so you have as many missiles across as many units as possible.

stay together, if you spread out, it allows the DE to use speed to isolate your units and pick them off. staying together will force the DE to enter your superioir threat range of 48" to there 36" and anything entering range should drop nice and quick to missile/bolter fire. if you want to pack flamers on tac squads, its not bad so you can finish off the occupants of any vehicles you pop.

finally razerbacks with whatever weapon you can fit works awsome. hev bolters are decent, but i suggest either the assault cannon or twin laz if you have the points.

focus on ravagers and trueborn first, or any beast units getting close. then work on other venoms untill they get stunned or crash. - good luck

Well, DE infantry has trouble with Dreads as they have a hard time to come across AV 12 in cc.
Once I battled DE with my BA army including a Dread with blood talons. The Dread made it into cc and killed the Incubi, one Talos, and the Harlies.

As a DE player most marine armies don't scare me. With that said those that do don't normally scare other players. Big weapons that fire a single shot a turn aren't as scary as those that have a more middle range of strength but multiple shots. If you miss with the LC or simmilar or I pass the flicker then that is a lot wasted. Now things like assault cannons and autocannons are almost a deathsentence if spammed heavily. The new flyer can be a pain with the new missiles it has. Dreads alone aren't a fear since wyches can tarpit them into oblivion. Don't try and keep the DE from reaching you. With beasts, wyches, incubi, reavers, hellions, and scourges we will make it if we want. If you can remove the mech you are golden. Normally that is tough without getting out where the venoms love you to be.

That was the long answer. The short? S6+ spam with mass fire. Think about the armies that threaten them. Longfangs, mech guard, and eldar.

DE is handled best by volume of fire. Thankfully, you play marines. It's not just that you can get things like riflemen and assault cannons in various places, it's that your small arm is strong enough to blow up most DE vehicles, and also force your opponent's infantry into cover.

Plus, on the off-chance that you ever have the opportunity, your basic troops choice is better in close combat than your opponent's basic troops choice.

DE vs. SM is, in theory, a bad matchup for DE, as DE's mobility helps them with force concentration, but SM is already a force concentration army. DE also tend to struggle against armies that can bring to bear serious firepower, and, once again, you're marines, so that's not much of an issue. Play to SM's strengths, and you're likely already playing to your DE opponent's weaknesses.

Well, as a mech Eldar player with an S6 spam army, DE doesn't scare me - I feel sorry for the dark kin pointy ears.

A fast moving BA mech army could be an issue for DE, with 6 Predators (autocannons, heavy bolters, and assault cannons), some Razorbacks with heavy bolters or assault cannons, and some Dreads with tl autocannons. This would be an army, DE would have trouble with.

I played such an army vs. my DE buddy and tabled him.

Lucre wrote:Hes also banking on your wasting time trying to get your solutions to work (short range, assault, blocking or dividing your forces etc) and your solutions being wastefully directed (too many shots pointed at the same raider because of distribution, while he flies around with several more). DE players are very good at forcing you to find an answer to their tricks, and then making your solution feel inefficient.

And that neatly paraphrases my approach to this army. I throw a steaming pile of death in your face and force you to make a choice on what to kill first. Then I go, and you realize that no matter what you chose, it was probably wrong.

The best words of advice to anyone playing against an army like this (in any game) come from Douglas Adams.

Don't Panic.

back when deldar first came out I absolutely smashed them with a gakky space wolves list. I believe I had an empty land raider, a vindicator, thunderwolf cavalry, 1 squad of longfangs, and 2 droppods with a small number of grey hunters / motw / melta. The guy playing the deldar said "well that was a waste of money, buying these deldar, I'm going back to my blood angels"

Phragonist wrote:back when deldar first came out I absolutely smashed them with a gakky space wolves list. I believe I had an empty land raider, a vindicator, thunderwolf cavalry, 1 squad of longfangs, and 2 droppods with a small number of grey hunters / motw / melta. The guy playing the deldar said "well that was a waste of money, buying these deldar, I'm going back to my blood angels"

DE is certainly able to deal with this list: Ravagers destroy Landraider and Vindicator, Venoms kill the Long Fangs, TWC is tied up with Beastmaster units and Wyches.

Phragonist wrote:back when deldar first came out I absolutely smashed them with a gakky space wolves list. I believe I had an empty land raider, a vindicator, thunderwolf cavalry, 1 squad of longfangs, and 2 droppods with a small number of grey hunters / motw / melta. The guy playing the deldar said "well that was a waste of money, buying these deldar, I'm going back to my blood angels"

The obvious problem here being that DE and BA play very differently. It depends on the list, but one go is almost never enough for an accurate picture of what the army can do when trying it out.

I absolutely shredded a dark eldar army of raiders and the jet fighter looking things with Bikes and speeders.

Granted, I think 2 things helped with the massacre:
1. His fighter things he kept in reserve. They came in one at a time on turn 2, turn 3, and turn 4.
2. Poor play on his part.

He castled up relatively close to the middle of his deployment area (pitched battle). I went to a far corner and turbo boosted. Missiles from speeders took out ravagers while bikes cleaned up the rest.

Again, I am not sure if this was a good match up or just bad luck and poor play on his part.

Hmmm in my experiences a list with a few tactical squads with missile launcher and flamer do well, as bolters rip apart De like theres no tomorrow. also try and make them footsloog across the board.

As much fun as it is to line thier raiders up in a straight line and redeemer them, leave any form of land raider at home against them.
Effectively it now has 12/12/12 since nothing without lance will be shooting at it.


Basic dakkapreds (auto/Hbolter) are your friend.
They can reliably hunt down the gunboats and can do it at range.
Rifleman dreads again are the same as the preds here.

Long story short, anything that masses the following is worth taking: Assault cannon, autocannon, hevy bolter.


Now, im guessing you play normal marines?
If so, razorbacks are your friend here.
They are cheap, provide mobility and make a stable firing line for your army.

You beat Dark Eldar the same way you beat any other heavily mechanised army. Oh, except that Dark Eldar transports tend to be somewhat expensive and quite vulnerable.
So bring, Riflemen dreads, Predators ( cheap cheap, now with extra cheapness ), Razorbacks and whatever else you use against everyone else.

When I play against DE, I tower and form a line of razorbacks. TL heavy bolters wreck their transports and force them on foot where normal bolters kick in and they become easy pickins.