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Hello there dakka dakka community! I recently joined and have decided to build a dark elder army. My problem is, I have no idea what I'm doing. I understand the force organization chart, I understand how many units of each I can have. What I don't understand is... How do I tell what's optimal vs what's not? The codex makes everything sound good(as I'm sure it is intended too) so I find myself questioning lists a lot. All I know is, I love incubi, I want lots of boats, venoms, ravagers, raiders, and that scourge are a staple. What else should I know about the fast and aesthetic dark eldar!

Have a dark eldar force my self that I am expanding at the moment start with the core of your force for me it was 2 squads of 20 warriors with 1 archon and 1 haemonculus each with the new warp gate 40 warriors showing up where you want is fantastic for mauling troops or monsters or even impossible objectives.

From there went with 2*10 warriors in raiders
And 2*5 true born (2darklance, 2 blasters in each) in venoms
Gives you things to start with as the rest is held off board
Then 4*5 scourges armed with 4 of each of the anti armour weapons blasters/darklance/haywire/heatlance
And a nice little jet fighter

I am expanding to include 2 groups of pain engines and 2 more warrior squads in raiders to me its a solid force with enough anti tank weapons and feet on the ground for those objective points don't expect much if any of your force to last long but concentrate on the objective points total annihilation of your enemy won't work well for you unless its tanks


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If you want survivable units take a look at mandrakes 4+ cover in open and 2+ in light cover

First, Welcome to Dakka.

I don’t play DE, so can’t offer unit advice. What I would suggest is heading over to the battle report and army list sections and poke around. See what other people are doing. Then try to put a list together on your own and put it up asking for advice.

Some generic army building advice:

40k is an objective based game. You need a way to get units to where they need to be and keep them alive there for as long as necessary. In maelstrom games, that might be for the turn, other games you need to have a boot there when the final turn ends.

You need a plan for horde armies. Green tide of orcs, swarms of tyranid bugs, or blobs of guard troopers. Templates, large blasts, or just high volumes of small arms fire are the generic answers.

Smaller, elite troops. Like marine and terminators and their equivalents (often referred to as MEQ and TEQ) Your basic T4, 3+ or 2+ save footsloger. Marines, or guys who take fire just like them, are very common. Have a plan on how to kill them. In general, the better the armor save, the fewer you need to kill.

How are you going to kill hard targets? AV14 can show up in a few places, and can be rough to deal with. Lance and Haywire are the DE way to take it down IIRC (I use melta, but play marines)

Medium and light vehicles. These might get spammed, so you should have a larger number of guns that can deal with them. Reasonable volume of mid-weight (S6-8) fire is a popular way to take them down.

Monstrous creatures can be dealt with in a similar fashion, but there are differences. There are a number of non-vehicle, high toughness things out there. What’s you plan when you find one?

Flyers. These don’t show up all the time, but they are out there. Luckily they tend to arrive late, and can have a hard time pointing in the right direction due to movement restrictions. Still, they tend to pack a lot of guns and have some nasty tricks.

Wow! Thank you both for the advice Nd the warm welcome! Also you broke that down perfectly and very well thank you