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Hey guys I'm a new 40k player and trying to start a army I'm on the fence between DE, Eldar, and Nidz.
I love all 3 armies because they just look awesome. I know they all take finesse, but I don't plan on being competitive for a while.
Just wondering about each army a little. Which is going to be the best in the long run.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you

May I applaud your fine taste in armies first off

Firstly, pick your army based on which you like best as if you're not interested in building a tourney build then everything is fair game. You'll be investing a lot of time painting and playing and money building the force to any significant size, make sure it's the one your most passionate about.

Nids and DE have had their dexs "recently" by GW's standards with Eldar *hopefully* getting theirs soon as they are one of the older dexes.

I think DE and Nids have the most variety of builds of the 3 armies at the moment as the Eldar troops choices can be a little underwhelming at the currently and in 6th they are the armies beating heart.

DE haven't adapted to 6th as well as some but are still nice, Nids got a huge boost from the psi rules and Eldar got very much the same with Divination psi buffs but holo-field nerfs.

None of them will punch at the Necrons flying circus cheese level but they can all put together very fun and solid armies for other games and will very rarely find themselves in a truely hideous matchup.

Thats a bummer Eldar was the one I liked the most. They seemed to have the most variety.

Eldar are a particularly difficult army to start out with. An eldar army is like a set of surgical tools, each has their own specific use, and very little use outside of its specialty. Dark Eldar, not so much, just get in and attack a lot. Nids are probably just as hard as Eldar, especially since they have a lot of cool big guys who are still vulnerable to instant death, and assaulting with nids hurts. Bad..

I feel that Tyranids have the best aesthetics between the three. However, Dark Eldar is the stronger army of the three.

Thx1138 wrote:
Thats a bummer Eldar was the one I liked the most. They seemed to have the most variety.

I'm gonna say to go for it. Eldar will get a new dex soon, and you can take your time building them waiting for the next codex. If you're worried about being more competitive, just ally in DE, and then you can get the best of both. When Eldar become the next great thing, you'll already be there with the framework of a good force.

Eldar look great, some day in the next year or so they'll play that way too.

Brief analysis:

Dark Eldar: Reasonably competitive; easy access to flyers and plastic models for almost everything; the Dark Eldar rely on speed to a significant degree. They're more expensive to make than some other armies because they essentially require Raiders for all their infantry units (meaning that you're paying $70-some for a 200-ish point Troops unit, compare to $66 for a 300+pt Troops unit in a Purifiers army, or $40 for a 200-ish point SM Tactical squad), but if you can get over that hurdle they're a staggeringly maneuverable list with access to some marvelous units and a ridiculous amount of firepower at the cost of being about as durable as an army of kites. They require a greater level of finesse than most lists, but they can be very powerful if you know how to use them.

Eldar: Moderately competitive; little access to plastic miniatures; the first step to understanding the Eldar is to understand that every single unit is ridiculously specialized. DIre Avengers are ridiculously good at shooting medium-light infantry in quantity, Howling Banshees are absurdly good at chopping up heavily-armored infantry in melee, et cetera; but every single unit is less effective or useless outside its area of specialization. The key to building an effective Eldar list is not (as some people will tell you) to load up Fire Dragons in Wave Serpents and rush the enemy, it lies in understanding exactly how every unit works and it's optimal targets, then picking a broad selection of units that complement each other.

Tyranids: Rather underpowered; two great strengths are powerful giant monsters and cheap swarms; the prime issue with the Tyranids is their utter inability to take on anything that can move faster than they can. Anyone with a large portion of skimmers or flyers in their list can run rings around the poor 'Nids, and unlike normal armies, they have little to no access to anything that can shoot said ridiculously fast units down.

Dark Eldar are probably your best bet starting out, since the Eldar codex is loaded with overpriced units and they're in line for a new one, and the Tyranids are ridiculously underpowered given the current state of the game.

Eldar are still awesome. Take Eldrad and Tau allies, and you've got a pretty beasty list.

I would vote Tyranid because they are the coolest imo but Eldar are due for a codex soon and that is always fun. Plus I'd like to see some Eldar batreps and what not, man are those rare. So, I will overlook their conehead hats and vote Eldar.

Dark Eldar is probably the most powerful of the three armies you listed. Although certain elements of their codex were weakened by the change from 5th edition to 6th (the biggest examples I can think of are small assault units and the webway portal), other elements are still quite good. GW has also shown SOME willingness to FAQ certain rules or models to address some of the changes made, the big one I can think of was in the 1.1 FAQ, where they changed the weapons for Incubii from AP3 to AP2, making the unit relevant again. DE are also masters of one of the most important phases in the game, movement. Very few armies are as fast as DE, and although the movement phase can be difficult to master, once you do the results you can achieve are nothing short of amazing.

The current Tyranid codex is considered to be the most underwhelming codex released since 5th Edition (the only codex I can think of that was less well received in the history of the game was the 4th edition CSM codex). There is a lot of inbalance within the codex, and a ton of their models are extremely vulnerable to instant death, since they have a lot of mutli-wound models with only T 4, meaning that meltaguns and missile launchers, the most common special and heavy weapon, respectively, invalidate that second wound. However, it is not all doom and gloom. They are able to bring a ton of models to the field, and can take advantage of the new rulebook powers better than any other codex due to their high number of psykers. Tervigon's are also considered one of the best units in the codex, as they can reliably spit out nearly 20 "free" Termagaunts a game (if I remember the math correctly) and can be made to be a troops choice.

Eldar are currently either the weakest or second weakest codex in the game (depending on how they compare with Black Templars). They suffer mainly from being an extremely old codex, with outdated costs and units that haven't properly adjusted to the changes in rules. Even in their books prime, they were a difficult army to play well. Eldar are unique in that they are the only codex without much in the way of a general purpose tool, almost every eldar unit is (or was for 4th edition) fine tuned for a particular task, and generally failed to preform outside of that task. For example, Howling Banshees were the premier killer of small, elite units. Their power weapons (up until 6th) cut through all types of armour with ease, and their high initiative allowed them to often to kill or cripple a unit before they got to swing back. However, the suffered against larger units of enemies who could survive the initial onslaught and strike back, or units that could avoid combat with them and just shoot them to death. Striking Scorpions, on the other hand, exceeded against those larger units, thanks to their better armour and higher strength allowing them to reliably force enemies to take more armour saves (for comparison, Striking Scorpion squads would likely score 0.25 wounds per attack against WS4 and T4, whereas Banshees would score about 0.17 wounds per attack against WS 4 T4), in addition to being more durable (I believe it was a 3+ save vs a 4+ save). However, because of their lack of an AP value in close combat, they suffered against models with a high armour save, who were able to simply shrug off their attacks (scoring 0.08 unsaved wounds per attack against a space marine in power armour, opposed to 0.17 wounds per attack for the Howling Banshees against the same target).

The biggest weakness of the Eldar codex, however, is that a lot of their units don't even deal with the threats that they were designed to answer particularly well anymore. Look at Howling Banshees, for example. In the past, they were the premier Terminator killer. Then, 5th came along and game Codex Marines the ridiculous (this is coming from a fan of the SM codex) 40 point TH/SS termies, effectively taking away the Banshee's edge by giving them a permanent 3++ (although they used to have either a 3++ or 4++ in close combat only, giving them it permanently made them much more appealing than they used to be, thus making it into lists more frequently). 6th made this problem worse by making their power swords AP3, meaning that they can't do squat against even tactical terminators or MANZ. Other units have also aged poorly, but Banshees have probably aged the worst.

In short, this extreme specialization meant that Eldar were an extremely taxing army from a strategic standpoint for three reasons.
1) You had to know exactly what unit to apply to what role. This wasn't always apparent. For example, against 4th edition SM scouts (who used to be WS4 BS4) the choice between Banshees and Scorpions to address the unit was not always clear, and you often had to consider which unit could best be delivered to the target, and whether the unit in question could better be applied elsewhere. In short, there were a lot of decisions with no clear answer that had to be made in the application of your units.
2) In relation to the first point, you had to be aware of the best way to apply your chosen unit against its target. For example, you might put your Fire Dragons in a transport to have them pop that land raider, however, you now have the question as to whether or not it is better to have the transport go back to redeploy another unit and have the Fire Dragons move into cover, or to have it pick them up again and move them elsewhere.
3) List building for Eldar can be exceptionally difficult. It is not like most other armies where your best choice is to either spam a unit until you have maxed out your FOC (such as Longfangs in SW), an Eldar army which spams a certain unit will suffer unless the local metagame is extremely warped to whatever than unit counters (for example, spamming fire dragons against mech, etc). You have to figure out not only what you want to take, but how many of that thing you want to take, and consider how able you will be to address all different types of threats. Somebody once told me that with Eldar, it was extremely easy to tailor to defeat one specific list, but extremely difficult to build a list that can take on anything.

Out of those 3, the most I've had trouble with are the Eldar, and usually only against Farseer armies, which really mess with Psykers.

Best forum title ever

Why thank you. I agree. Does anyone know an expected date on the new Eldar codex release?

If the rumors are correct, at least Dark Angels and Tau are due out before, so I wouldn't expect the codex to be updated for at least 6 months, if not longer.