Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Recently I played a 1000 point game against a hybrid guard list played by a friend of mine with a DE/E list like this:

Dark Eldar (primary)

Archon with Shadow field and venom blade
95

Wyches x5 with haywires in a raider with disintegrator
Wyches x5 with haywires in a raider with disintegrator
Wyches x5 with haywires in a raider with disintegrator
Wyches x5 with haywires in a raider with disintegrator
480

Eldar (allies)

Farseer with runes of witnessing, runes of warding, spirit stones, guide and fortune
150

Guardians x10 with a scatterlaser and a warlock with conceal
155

Warwalker x2 with 2 scatterlasers each
120

Total: 1000.

His IG Army was something like (not exact):

Imperial Guard

Company command squad with 4 plasma guns

Infantry platoon 1:
Platoon command squad
Infantry squad armed with a flamer
Infantry squad armed with a grenade launcher

Infantry platoon 2:
Platoon command squad
Infantry squad armed with a flamer
Infantry squad armed with a grenade launcher

Veteran squad

Leman russ with autocannons on top
Leman russ with autocannons on top

Hydra x2

Scout Sentinel x2 (perhaps with autocannons?)

Total: 1000

----------------------

Story of the game
Deployment was short table edges. Mission was 4 objectives. Night fighting on the first turn. I went first and pushed everything half way up the board. Took two mysterious objectives with my guardians at the back (one allowed them to skyfire, the other gave them re-rolls on rolls of 1 to-hit - both useless to me). I shot with one of the raiders and put a wound on his company commander. Nothing else had line of sight to anything. On his first turn the shooting phase was devastating. Things that were killed on my team included:
- 3 raiders (1 was out of LOS; that's why it survived)
- 5 wyches (one group was left stranded in no mans land, another was back towards my end)
- both war walkers

On my second turn I had pretty much nothing left to shoot with. One group of wyches were in range to charge his front line, but they had flamers and some head-maths told me that a combination of 18 lasgun shots plus the flamer was going to murder enough wyches on overwatch that the charge was going to either fail or I'd get 2ish into combat. Another group of wyches wrecked a hydra and put a dent in the other - but that left them relatively exposed. I forfeited half way through his shooting phase with 4 wcyhes left alive hiding behind his destroyed hydra, my archon having failed the second re-rollable shadowfield save he attempted. He agreed that the game was over.

Conclusions and lessons:
- 5 man wyche squads are good, but only useful against tanks (whereas in fifth they could multi-charge two guardsmen squads and buy time for the rest of the army)
- Still unsure about disintegrators. My raiders usually turbo-boost on the first turn and have a relatively short life expectancy thereafter. The way I figured it for this game was that the wyches would deal with AV12+, so i could lay the smackdown on AV10 with 12 Str5 AP2 shots. I was also half-planning to deal with terminators. I think next time it will be back to DLs
- Sitting that many points in the back field does not work for DE. I need to engage part of their army with my whole army. Splitting my forces means I lose.

The new list:
Baron Sathonyx 105

Beastmaster x2, Kymerae x5, razorwing x2
114

Reaver x3 with cluster caltrops
86

Reaver x3 with cluster caltrops
86

Ravager x 2

Wyches x5 with haywires in a raider with aethersails
Wyches x5 with haywires in a raider with aethersails
Wyches x6 with haywires in a raider with aethersails

New Tactic

Run everything up the field as usual, ignoring objectives at my end because killing stuff is more fun. If there is infantry at the front the beasts go in first. If there are tanks at the front the wyches go in first. I'm not sure about the ravagers. They'll essentially be sitting at the back out of range of much of the bad stuff which doesn't fit with the "my whole army vs part of his" rule. That 200-ish points could be used to buy a bigger beast squad or more wyche squads, or other things. I've never played with reavers, so any advice helps. (Can my cluster caltrops only be used in my 12" move during the movement phase?)

Next game

My opponent will be bringing a more balanced list - something that can also deal with land raiders. I need some advice on how to go about this.

Help me Dakka, you're my only hope!

Sorcererbob wrote:
ignoring objectives at my end because killing stuff is more fun

This is why you're losing.

 Griddlelol wrote:

Sorcererbob wrote:
ignoring objectives at my end because killing stuff is more fun

This is why you're losing.

Sometimes, on the internet, you see something so elegantly simple, but so pure and full of win, that you can't help but get all misty.

Bravo!

Turn your 470 points in wasted Eldar allies into 2 x reaver jetbikes with 2x caltrops and 2 x heat lances.

If I am reading this correctly he is playing on foot guard.
So if your reavers can overflight the guard, let's see how well the guard does taking 2d6 S6 and 4d3 S4 hits. That should be 20 dead guardsmen, two pain tokens and 4 heat lances threatening the rear of his lehman russes. (Which of course he is free to turn and expose his rear to the dark lances of the raiders...)

The other suggestion would be a unit or two of trueborne in venoms or raiders. Sure they may die but also that is going to expose him to the wyches..

no venoms . trying to do hth in a shoting edition , when your made out of paper. no flyers . wierd ally , not outflanking warwalkers and taking 2 0_o .Rare is the time when one sees such a bad build army.

Shift your witches into 2x10 w/ raiders and get bikes. Bikes zooming around is stupid fun and causes havoc.

Makumba wrote:
no venoms . trying to do hth in a shoting edition , when your made out of paper. no flyers . wierd ally , not outflanking warwalkers and taking 2 0_o .Rare is the time when one sees such a bad build army.

So if I understand, you are spending 400+ points to get to scatter laser walkers out there?

Go cheap -

Farseer with guide- you only want him to make the walkers accurate.
5 Dire avengers - 60 pts it is the cheapest troop choice you can take and beats the heck out of the almost 140 you are spending to get the guardians.
3 War Walkers with scatter lasers 180 points.

Now I would posit as far as anti- infantry you could do alot better with dark eldar.
20 kalabites with 2 splinter cannons can do more damage to any troop choice at 24" even moving. 26 shots, 18 hits, 9 wounds versus your 3 walkers that If they get the guide will get 24 shots 18 hits and 14 hits 12 wounds... all that for a mere 200 points versus 250 +. If you add a naked haemonculus, you have 20 FNP boys out there.
Plus you are not forced into purchasing worthless guardians to field it.





Automatically Appended Next Post:
First off, if I am DE I hope he brings mulitple landraiders!!!
Blasters and dark lances love shooting up 250 points of pure victory. Remember he fields 1 land raider, you field 2 ravagers. That sounds like dead landraider to me.

Your build does not deal with troops real well, 5-man wyches are too small and dark lance spam does not do it well.

Lets start with your premise of fast hitting with anti-tank build up...

1 HQ Archon
3 Kalabite warriors w splinter cannon in raider
3 5 wych squads in venoms
2 6 reaver units with caltrops and heat lance.
2 razorwings. ( almost as good at anti-tank as a ravager, they are harder to hit and provide great anti-infantry with the missiles)

If his infantry steps out in the open it is dead, you have 8 splinter cannons opening up on them. Anti vehicle you have 3 raiders. The razorwings and the reavers are your ace in the hole.


To answer your question, reavers can only do the blade attack if they turbo boost. Thus you cannon fire the turn you do this. What I like to do is pick a target that both can boost over. That ensures it will die or - almost better- a kalabite warrior has an easy pain token to get in the fire phase.

Do you guys intentionally tailor against one another? Because if not, holy crap does that guy love autocannons. That list seems to be tailor made to fight eldar/spikey eldar. He doesn't have anything that can kill something AV 14 or higher, and for guard lists that is very bizarre. 2 hydras, 2 exterminators (those are the autocannon russes) and 2 sentinels with autocannons is pretty much as big of a middle finger as you could give eldar, unless you pulled off a couple plasma guns and gave every infantry squad autocannons as well

It's not a strong list though. He doesn't have nearly enough infantry for staying power, and all his points are in vehicles that can't really be protected by the infantry since he has so few of them. His infantry also have REALLY crappy weapons, and I'm guessing he only has them there because of a troops requirement. If you can kill off his troops (which should be very easy) you can cripple him, and then just play the mission and beat him easily. The tanks/hydras will be a problem on big guns never tire, but the sentinels are a joke, even your little eldar AV 10 scatter laser walkers are tougher than them. Just watch out for them because he'll likely outflank with them. His army should also be very slow, if not almost static, so you'll have free roam of the board if you can keep out of his firing lanes.

For the love of god though, don't try and get in a shooting match with him. He WILL win, every single time.

So yeah, kill his troops, play the mission, and keep out maneuvering him to get side/rear shots. You'll also probably need to focus down the russes 1 at a time as well, since you can't really stunlock them into submission anymore, but that's about it. Hope that helps a bit OP.

Also, I wouldn't worry so much about him bringing stuff to kill landraiders. Your vehicles are paper anyways, and the more high powered weapons just mean less shots, which means more pens/glances that will be stopped by jink/cover saves. If anything, it's probably good news for you, instead of "FIRE ALL THE AUTOCANNONS" like his last list was.

Firstly, I agree with the above.

Secondly, as you correctly discovered, get those eldar the hell out of there. They're only choking off points just to give you S6 spam - something you can already achieve with one of the best units in your codex - venoms.

Thirdly, while your opponent's list isn't very balanced, neither is yours. With the exception of a box full of haywire grenades, you're not bringing any anti-AV14... in an army that usually eats AV14 for breakfast. You don't have any blasterborne. You don't have any dark lances, for crying out loud! Switch half (read: all) the disintegrators for dark lances, and throw in a couple of 3x dark lance ravagers, or a couple of 5x blasterborne in venoms, or a couple of small dark lance trueborn squads and you'll do much, much better.

Because trust me, with warriors with splinter guns and the ability to make them twin-linked, and between even just a couple of wych/wracks squads, or even just a couple of venoms with splinter cannons, and you are going to have your opponent's infantry units wiped off the table. All you need to do is survive for a whole frigging turn to be able to do so. Throw in... well, any anti-vehicle whatseover, and you'll have a much easier time of things.

As well as what everyone has said.

IMO, you have too many HWG wyches on raiders, if they're on venoms, then you'd have a better setup. They're singular purpose at the moment, the entire unit including transport. 5 HWG wyches with no hekatrix means they'll have trouble doing anything other than AT, let's say your opponent is all about metal boxes, you easily destroyed their metal boxes, then what? You've got 1 suboptimal size beastmaster unit, 2 harassment-size reavers units, and 2 ravagers(which I assume will be AT) to deal with the troops inside. Raider is a fantastic transport if you're going over 5 models, but as a secondary offensive tool, it's pathetic, a single DL only has 2/3 of a chance of hitting per turn, that is not to say it's useless, but you just gotta remember a single shot that can miss during to hit, to wound or armour penetration isn't really all that great; dissie on the other hand can take out 1 or 2 infantry models per turn, but still isn't something to rely on; raiders are transports, if their weapon is intact, then good, fire away, if it's not, no big loss, they hopefully have done their job before then.

Reavers in 3 is mainly for harassment purposes, even with their new improved life, they're still not gonna be able to take the onslaught of enemy fires with only 3 models, or if assaulted... Offensively speaking, without the heat lance/blaster, their shooting side is pathetic, bladevanes + cluster caltrops on the other hand, yes, great AI weapon, if you roll the highest possible amount of hits, against MEQ, you can do, on average, 9 AP- wounds, and they're usually out of harm's way after the boost.

Also, I gotta repeat what some has said, don't ignore the objective, if you meant "I go for annihilation, but I still care for objectives some" that's fine, but don't completely ignore it. Your primary HQ will be a victory point, he will get fired on a lot, your weakest unit will be fired on because of first blood, and if you want to win, don't ignore the primary objectives either. That is not to say you have to camp objectives, I don't do camping either, I go full on offense as well, but I always have my eyes on the objective markers, I go against my opponent's scoring units as soon as I took out the high threat units, I don't usually go after objective markers with (if I have any left) scoring units until the last turn, because I don't field my scoring units in big numbers, they're all MSU, so I need to weaken the amount of attacks I'll be taking in earlier turn, while my army is still alive. Many games I have won by doing a very DE thing, I raid and I take the objective from my opponent, since most tougher armies would have the objectives near their line!

OP here.

Thanks heaps for your replies, Dakka. It really helps a newbie! His list was somewhat tailored to crush me. He knew I'd be bringing DE and I did point out the imbalance presented by his list. When next we play he'll be throwing in some las cannons to deal with the AV14 weakness.

I had forgotten that mechanised infantry can no longer hold objectives and the fact that I can mow down infantry in droves with splinter cannons. Next game I'll run a much shootier list that targets infantry more such as to cripple his core. And I'll play the mission. I always get so wrapped up in killing things that I forget the mission.

I haven't really thought heavily about specific units that will accomplish those goals, but I'll spend some time reading the Army Lists forum for guidance.

Again Dakka, thank you for your guidance!

Hi Guys,

So we had a follow-up game after the defeat discussed in the original post, and I won! Here is how it went down:

1000 point IG Army:
Company Command Squad
50

Platoon Command Squad with a bolt pistol
32
Infantry Squad with flamer and las cannon
75
Infantry Squad with flamer and las cannon
75

Platoon Command Squad with a bolt pistol
32
Infantry Squad with flamer and las cannon
75
Infantry Squad with flamer and las cannon
75

Veterans in a chimera with 3 flamers
140

Scout Sentinel with autocannon
40

Leman Russ Exterminator (the one with the autocannons) with las cannon
165

Leman Russ Exterminator (the one with the autocannons) with las cannon
165

Hydra 75

TOTAL: 999

1000 point Dark Eldar army:

3x blasterborn venom with 3 blasterborn in each and splinter cannon upgrades
146x3 = 438

3x raider with splinter racks, 10 kabalite warriors with a splinter cannon

1x haemconulus

TOTAL: 998

The gameplan was:
- murder troops choices
- play the mission
- don't flatout everything at him
- single out small portions of his army
- deny his shooting with positioning

Story of the Game:
We rolled 6 objectives and dawn of war deployment. Night fighting was in effect on the first turn. I went first and deployed centrally and aggressively with my venoms in some cover in front of the raiders. I misunderstood the rules and thought that embarked troops had to fire snap shots if my skimmers moved 6"-12". So I moved the venoms 6" forwards and went flatout with everything else. My opponent had made a mistake during deployment which allowed me to single out a couple of infantry platoons and his hydra. I did serious damage to some infantry but didn't wipe any squads (1 guy survived in one squad) and did a hull point on the hydra. In the return fire I lost a venom and two of the trueborn that were in it.

On my second turn I consolidated my power on the left hand side of the board, hiding in cover. By the end of this turn his sentinel was dead, his hydra was dead, half of his infantry were dead and his chimera was immobilised. For the rest of the game I controlled the board and set my entire army against individual elements of the IG force.

At the end of the fifth turn I was holding a 4-point and a 1-point objective. He had a 2-point. We contested a 3-point. One 2-point was untouched. And I was blocking his infantry from approaching the last 3-point objective with my only remaining venom. We had both slayed the warlord. He had first blood. I had linebreaker. I had 7 points, he had 4. He conceded due to my strong position. He had both leman russ tanks and one depleted infantry squad remaining. His LR tanks only got to shoot once each through the whole game. I had a squad of 5 kabalite warriors approaching the 4-point objective, a squad of 6 holding the 1-point in cover near my deployment zone, 3 trueborn on foot at his end of the board, and a venom with 3 trueborn getting in the face of his remaining infantry, and a single trueborn wandering around in no man's land.

Net DE loses were 3 raiders, and 2 venoms and the haemonculus. Some infantry was killed but none of my squads were completely wiped.

Thoughts
- the blasterborns were rather epic. I've avoided taking them for a long time simply because it's the norm. Now I understand why people take them.
- Splinter racks were amazing. With BS4 and re-roll misses I was taking 18 splinter shots and missing 2ish. Plus the cannon shooting 4 most turns
- the Haemonculus was a bit wasted. But what else can one do? I need a HQ and none of them are really shooty...

I think next time he'll mech up. But such is life, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Again, thanks Dakka!

Just started playing DE and I run 4 trueborn with blasters in a venom. In the two games I have played them they have been amazing. As the venoms are so small for some reason people don't seem to see them as a threat. This changes when I take out their prized tanks. Both of my opponents hadn't really played dark eldar before so I think they're gonna be taken out pretty early on next time. Think I'll have to take 3 lots.

I find wyches a bit hit and miss. They are great against tanks with the haywire grenades but they're pretty much one use only as after taking out the tank they die to shooting. In combat they are ok but seem to really suffer from overwatch fire.

Reavers seem interesting can't wait to try them out.

Good to hear OP, glad to hear that you got a win!