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Hello Dakka!

Some of you might have read my thread in General Discussion, where I pondered the decision: Should I buy IG or Eldar as my first real army?

Well, I just playtested some Eldar against a friend of mine and thought it would be a nice occasion to write my first battle report.

Eldar (me)

HQ
Farseer (Doom, Fortune)
105

Troops
10x Dire Avengers (Exarch, double shuriken catapults, Wave Serpent with TL Starcannon)
262

10x Guardians (EML)
100

Heavy Support
1x Shadowweaver artillery platform
30

=502pts total.

Tau (opponent)

HQ
XV8 commander (iridum armour, missile pods, burst cannon, stim-injector, fire-all-weapons-stuff)
?

Elite
3x XV8 suits (missile pods, burst cannons, fire-all-weapons-stuff)

Troops
12x Firewarriors

16-18x Kroot (not sure about upgrades)

- - -

Luckily, I have this NICE map of how our playtable looked!



This is at the end of our battle.
We rolled for mission and deployment and got Seize Ground and Spearhead. We decided to only take three objectives due to troop shortage at 500 points. He placed one objective in the wall of the building on the right lower side (with the guardian on it, more about that later), I placed mine next to the tank wreck in the left upper corner, he placed the last in the rough terrain in the southwest.

I won the roll to deploy and go first and did exactly that. Guardians were deployed into the AV12 building with the nice firepoints, artillery took cover behind the pipe, WS was where the street once was, ready to dash for the left objective.
He deployed his Kroot in open terrain on the war west side and scouted 6" south to the objective (orange dot-line marks kroot path!). Fire warriors took cover in ruin terrain next to the tank-wreck in the north, XV8 team was somewhere near the sand sacks you can see on the left half.

Turn 1, Eldar
Movement: The WS with the DAs and the farseer dashed 6" forward, aiming for the objective but first trying to get into firing position to the XV8s. Guardians and Cannon stayed.
Shooting: The Shadowweaver fired on the kroots, who were NOT in cover! It was a clean shot that hit and wounded 9 kroot, killing a great chunk of his one troop choice. That was quite a lucky shot! The WS tried to plasma-fry the suits but failed to succeed. I think the EML in the building tried shooting at the XV8s too, but they were too resilient.
Assault: Nothing.

Turn 1, Tau
Movement: XV8s get into position in front of sandsacks to launch missiles at the WS. Kroot dash for cover in the southern cover terrain. FWs stay where they are.
Shooting: XV8s shoot at WS, eight missiles that only manage to shake it, no serious damage. FWs have no target, Kroot run to make sure they are in cover.
Assault: XV8s move back behind barricades.

Turn 2, Eldar
Movement: WS advances 12" and drops the passengers (that's were the turquoise line starts!). Doom on the XV8s.
Shooting: Shadowweaver lands a clear hit on the XV8s, maybe it was able to score one wound, dont remeber. However, the EML from the building gets a lucky shot and insta-kills a XV8 suit! The DAs and the farseer open fire on the kroot, killing a handful.

Turn 2, Tau
Movement: Suits move into position, Kroot get near the DAs, he thinks about assaulting.
Shooting: XV8s shoot at WS, no damage taken. Kroot decide to rapid-fire at the DAs and kill two of them. Additional plasma rifle fire from the FWs only scores ONE wound that goes on the farseer.
Assault: He moves behind the towery thingy near the sandsacks to keep his XV8 out of LOS from the starcannon on the WS.

Turn 3, Eldar
Movement: The WS moves 12" so it gets LOS to the suits, who get no cover from this angle. DAs get into firing position next to the Kroot. Fortune on the DAs.
Shooting: WS fires its TL starcannon, puts a wound on the commaner and kills a wounded suit. the DAs finish off all but one Kroot and try to assault, but are one inch short. EML fails to do anything, Shadowweaver scatters somewhere else.
Assault: Nothing.

Turn 3, Tau
Movement: The one kroot moves into assaulting position to the rear of the WS, trying to get lucky. Suits dance around, trying to get away from the WS. FWs stay where they are.
Shooting: plasma rifle fire kills two more DAs. Suits manage to stun the WS. No serious damage, again.
Assault: Suits dance around, get into cover. Kroot assaults the WS, fails to score a glance.

Turn 4, Eldar:
Movement: DAs move into cover, planning on hitting the ground later to avoid further casualties by plasma rifle fire and hold out till the end of the game.
Shooting: DAs easily finish off the last Kroot. And now the big shot: While the shadowweaver scatters off the FWs, the EML hits home with a plasma missile, killing three FWs. They need to make a LD test due to 25% casulaties and break, running 4" to the table edge.
Assault: Nothing.

Turn 4, Tau:
Movement: His FWs fail to re-organize and run 10" off the table. A whole unit of FWs scored as a casualty by a single plasma missile fired from a guardian launcher! Nice job!
Shooting: Desperately, the XV8 suits try to kill the WS but fail to do anything to it. We call it a game from here, no scoring units on Tau side left, I secured two of three objectives and he does not have the firepower to change that.

Clear win for Eldar! Yay!

I really liked to play Eldar in this game. Fast WS was fun, messing around with psyker powers was nice, too, and the shadowweaver was more useful than I thought. I think the AV12 building gave me a huge advantage, but he set up the map, so I didn't ponder too much about that.

Comments? Critique? How was my list? I built it in 5mins because we started to play on short notice.

Thanks for reading!

Where did you get that 2d board and pieces

tau_etheral wrote:Where did you get that 2d board and pieces

It's a piece of software that I forget the name of. I've seen it used before though.

But hey, neat battle report, your opponent did make a massive mistake (that you picked up on) by not deploying his kroot in cover or behind something. It didn't seem like your support platform did all that much though.

Thanks for your comments!
@tau_ethereal: I, too, forgot how it is called, but if you're interested write me a PM, maybe it'll recur to me later.

@starbomber109: Aye, his Kroot were very much in the open, considering that I had first turn and he a rather slim chance of stealing the initative. I think his second mistake was the very tight deployment of the fire warriors - it's not that visible in the map, but they were standing shoulder to shoulder where I had two blast weapons on the table. I think with a more spread-out deployment they may have been able to survive longer and the suits could have contested the third point, leading to a possible draw.

The Shadowweaver with it's small blast radius and BS3 gunners is not that great, I agree - Kroot out of cover were just the ideal target. However, it was 30 points cheap and I had place to fill, and for a place-filler it worked well.
The plasma rifle long-range fire by the FWs was harsher than I thought, but not as bad as I feared. I think I should have fortuned the DAs where I doomed the Suits - since I shot at them with weapons S6+, I would have wounded on 2+ anyway...might have saved some DAs with that reroll!

Sounds like a fun game, i prefer reading 500pt battle reports as they are less long-winded. True the Tau player made some stupid mistakes but it was obviously down to the amazingness of the eldar!!

Movement: WS advances 12" and drops the passengers (that's were the turquoise line starts!). Doom on the XV8s.
Shooting: Shadowweaver lands a clear hit on the XV8s, maybe it was able to score one wound, dont remeber. However, the EML from the building gets a lucky shot and insta-kills a XV8 suit! The DAs and the farseer open fire on the kroot, killing a handful.

If you doom the XV8's then the DA's should have shot them.

Assault: He moves behind the towery thingy near the sandsacks to keep his XV8 out of LOS from the starcannon on the WS.

The XV8's have to test for dangerous terrain if they move into difficult terrain in the assault phase.

Well, a mech Eldar list rules in small point games due to Lanchester's square law. With respect to mech Eldar it basically says that if you have X skimmers the enemy needs X^2 heavy guns that are able to take them down.

The DAs were not in range to fire at the suits, that was a problem So I chose the Kroot as their target, in the hope that the EML and Shadowweaver are able to score some hits.

His movement was in one or two occasions a bit shady, but in general quite correct, he jumped just over the sandsacks - the difficult terrain - without landing on it, so there was no problem with that.

And, yeah, this one WS was really useful, if only to keep all the heavy suit fire away from my troops. It's rather lucky that it survived THAT long, though...

The DAs were not in range to fire at the suits, that was a problem So I chose the Kroot as their target, in the hope that the EML and Shadowweaver are able to score some hits.

Synergy is key if you play Eldar.
All units must work together to achieve the goals.
This makes Eldar an army that is difficult to play.