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All my Chaos Space Marines players out there help me out! Tell me, how do you crush your Eldar opponents?

Currently, I'm trying to run Ahriman for Biomancy and Master of Deception and Typhus for a ton of Plague Zombies. The idea here being, swarm them, assault them, wear them down with brute martial force and numbers.

Here are things I have given up on:

1. Blood for the Blood God has become mostly my own Blood for the Blood God. Kharn, Khorne Berzerkers, Bloodthirster, and Bloodletters have all been retired. :(
2. Trying to make a shooty list to try and outgun them (because assault is nerfed in this edition). Fact: I cannot outgun an Eldar army.
3. I have two Defilers that I have decided to shelf. For 195 points they are a walking pile of garbage. Why? Because they suck by definition.
4. Terminators. I've ran them as three man combi-melta deep strike squads. Ineffective versus waveserpent jink save. Ineffective versus toughness 8 wraithknight and wraithlords. Always die before assault. If I put them in a Land Raider, it dies, then they die, and I lose a quarter of my army. In general I find they are extremely cost inefficient versus eldar.
5. Ten man squads of vanilla chaos space marines with two meltas or two plasmas. Not enough firepower, never get into assault, never get their points back.

What works for you?

What Eldar units tend to give you the most trouble?

Depends on an eldar list. Plague zombies are not offensive. You're never gona get in assault with them. Especially vs eldar that are too quick and shooty. Zombies are just to camp objectives.

Lord/Sorc with nurgle spawns work.
Heldrakes work if not vs wraithknights.
Maulerfiends are not bad to threaten Wave serpents but are somewhere near mediocre due to massed s6-7 glancing them out. Will die horribly to wraithknights. But with some luck, you're gona be fine and draw some fire for a turn or two.


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Basically, you don't have any good shooting vs wave serpents in your codex at all.

The stuff that gives me the most trouble is wave serpents and wraithlords. I can't seem to find a way to efficiently counter them.

I do actually get plague zombies into combat with Ahriman's D3 infiltrate. And there is just so many of them and they just keep moving forward. The squads have never really died to shooting yet, and since i keep the squads spread out, they take up most of the board, they are really hard to avoid...

Wraithknights you mean. Those with 6 wounds and stupidly fast and with s10 ranged weapons.

Basically, you're fighting an eldar power-list with CSM. Not much you can do really. Sorc/Lord + Spawns - i'd prefer sorc with bio to get fnp and some mellee buffs to handle knights. A couple of drakes to vector-strike and rear-shoot with flamers. You'll still loose like 80% of the time but it's best you can get vs power-eldar. Just ask your opponent to tone his list down or swap armies for fun. It's a game after all.

Are you using 6 ed book or 7 ed?

Step one:
Stop taking Chaos Space Marine units i.e anything in Power Armour. All of them are hideously inefficient at pretty much anything and Eldar will just enjoy getting more from their shots. Sadly this applies against everyone, not just Eldar - you will do far better if you stick to units with 2+ saves, T-shirt saves or vehicles.

Step two:
Don't waste points on sub par options and don't rely on a single phase (i.e shooting or assault) to win you the game. You need some form of shooting otherwise Eldar will happily just sit on their back edge and remove you from the board, force him to react and give him the opportunity to make mistakes. In short this means you need Oblits (Nurgle obviously to get T5), they are durable enough that they won't get torrented off the board instantly and can either Deep Strike in to force him to redirect or snipe away from range.

Step three:
Take Heldrakes. Without them the Eldar player has to player incredibly badly in order to lose to Chaos because he can zoom onto objectives Turn 5 and win. Chaos have no real way to project threat over the entire table, against Eldar you should expect to lose most of your fire support by the time you get to late game and your assualt threats can't be everywhere at once. Heldrakes are your answer to this as they can chase down Jetbikes and other small scoring units. They have been nerfed somewhat but in this role they still do pretty well.

Step four:
Play well. Ignoring all this advice, Chaos really aren't a good matchup for Eldar and there isn't really any way around this.

Tarpit them with cultists or maybe zombies (you will need lot and lots, if so), then assault with Maulerfiends. Hellturkies aren't as effective anymore with their new FAQ. Can't shoot flames from his butt anymore.

All my losses came from 6th edition.. I'm hoping that 7th edition will be better for me. Thanks for the advice.

More Spawns than. Really, nurgle spawns with indeps are quite strong. If you're lucky with powers and get them FNP, I don't know what's gona be able to kill enough of them before they hit like a truck and wreck everything. Let's count!

A single wave serpent has 4 tl s6 shots that don't ignore cover and armor (you might get 4+ armor), d6 +1 tl s7 shots that ignore cover.
1,78 wounds that don't ignore cover, 2.67 wounds that ignore cover (i take 4.5 statistical ammount of shots). Means 1.5 dead spawns in the open. If you get 4+ armor, it's gona be even better. If you tank wounds with a lord for a turn or two, it's gona be...0.5 wounds to lord per serpent. Not critical. If you get a sorc with fnp, same. You'll need 2-3 turns to get there. So, i think that 2 full squads of nurgle spawns with indeps will do. And run another full squad alongside.

You'll need something else to down knights to at least 2-3 wounds not to get stuck in them. Remember, spawns are super-cheap for what they do. And in this specific case, you could bring 15 spawns. s5 attacks will likely breat a serpent if you get there. Not all is lost theoretically. But eldar are SUPER fast. If they want, they can cover on their table edge and than jump actoss the board and you won't get them again. Good thing, spawns are scoring now. But so are wave serpents.

You'll still need some decent shooting. No idea where to get that other than semi-optimal laz preds, havoks and good - but not in this case - oblits.

Thus, max spawns with biker lords/sorcs + shooty support.

For your info: I manage to beat that kid of eldar lists with orkses from time to time. Multiple nob biker units with biker bosses work good. But nob bikers are super-durable vs wave serpents. Note that i have way more problems vs warp spiders rather than knights and serpents.

thanks for the advice koooaei. I'm picking up my first three spawns from a guy tomorrow. If they work well for me, I'll try collecting more. But to buy from the local store, they are 50 bucks canadian for two models... so I can't afford to buy them straight up.

Proxy them. That's all. Note that you need target priority to make mellee work. 1 squad of spawns won't do a thing. 2 are gona be mediocre but passable. 3 will work.


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IIRC they have same bases with termies. I hope your opponent won't mind. You'll sure need biker indeps also.

I've got a nice idea for a proxy! Take a thin rope, make it sticky. Roll it into a lump. Place on a base. Viola! You've got a spawn.

I don't have a lot of experience with Eldar/CSM matchup, but is MoN Spawn that efficient against an army that has pseudo-rending on almost everything?

I think maulerfiends could be decent. 7 shots from a guided/prescienced serpent shield are knocking off ~1.3 hullpoints a turn. That's with the maximum amount of shots.

With a ~16'' move, three of them are going to put a lot of pressure on an Eldar army at 1500 points, which could be enough of a distraction to allow you to get some of your other, more beaty close-combat units. At 125 points a pop, they're cheap enough to toss at the enemy and say "deal with this".

Take Forgefiends and arm accordingly.

Lots of Wraiths? Triple EPC is the way to go.
SerpentSpam? Hades Autocannons, backed up with EPC in the face is good.

7th ed is for spamming Forgefiends.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
I don't have a lot of experience with Eldar/CSM matchup, but is MoN Spawn that efficient against an army that has pseudo-rending on almost everything?

Actually, fiends have no armor by default that's why they don't care bout rending at all. Sure, they can get 4+ armor on one of rolls of d3 but it doesn't matter that much. You're paying 36 pts for 3 t6 fearless wounds that are fast and hit relatively good. For 180 pts you get 15 t6 wounds on a beast platform. What's not to like.

If they're accompanied with forgefiends, they can perform a frightening fast mellee wave. Maulerfiends have a glaring weakness against wraithknights in mellee and are way easier to gun down with s10 ap1 shots. They're clearly an auto-wrecked serpent if you get there. But spawns are also good with s5 and have d6+1 attack on the charge.