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Between the rumor engine pics and the lack of attention from today's points adjustments, I find myself cautiously hoping that craftworlders might be in for a complete overhaul next year. Which got me thinking: how should a craftworld army actually behave on the table?

For years, I've heard people say that they should be glass cannons, but that feels a bit weird for a technologically advanced species that puts a lot of value on the lives of their remaining population. Plus, other space elves are already doing the glass cannon thing, and making them all compete for that same role means that you're likely to make at least one faction basically worse at the job than the others. Some people say they're meant to be a mobile, shooty army, but that's theoretically the tau niche. When I first started playing, they were an elite force equipped with more-powerful-than-normal wargear that made them specialists with an edge over their counterparts... But primaris marines are kind of filling that niche now, and it feels inappropriate to one-up marines at the "individually powerful" game by making eldar tech absurdly strong.

So how, in the abstract, should a craftworld army behave? How should their future playstyle be described?

Personally, I'd be inclined to make them a fast, tanky army that gets defensive bonuses when they move quickly. Aspect warriors should probably have comparable offensive output to primaris marines, but less durability once they stop moving and start shooting/stabbing.

While no expert on the Craftworld Eldar, I'd sum up their play style with one word: Shenanigans.

The Craftworlders are all about confounding their enemy. Be it weapons far too effective for their appearance, the knowledge to be where they need to be when they need to be, and their ability to avoid what certainly should have been a fatal blow. It's all shenanigans.

Craftworlders used to be about synergy and setting up to make efficient use of your buffs, but that was before the whole game turned into that. Foresight, but the "foresight" dice-fixing mechanic got used for Tzeentch, and then for Sisters, and I don't think they'll want to use it on another book. Speed, but speed is sort of irrelevant on the shrunken table, plus they were never faster than Harlequins/DE. Specialized units, but they've pivoted the game into making all things more generalist, so that's gone.

8e/9e sort of shut down all the things Craftworlders are supposed to do as mechanics, yeah.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Craftworlders used to be about synergy and setting up to make efficient use of your buffs, but that was before the whole game turned into that. Foresight, but the "foresight" dice-fixing mechanic got used for Tzeentch, and then for Sisters, and I don't think they'll want to use it on another book. Speed, but speed is sort of irrelevant on the shrunken table, plus they were never faster than Harlequins/DE. Specialized units, but they've pivoted the game into making all things more generalist, so that's gone.

8e/9e sort of shut down all the things Craftworlders are supposed to do as mechanics, yeah.

Yeah. That's sort of been my frustration with them of late. I don't want them to get a raw power boost the way drukhari did, but the current game doesn't seem to really support the things they're meant to be good at. Thus why my mind kind of goes to emphasizing speed-as-defense and making them a little tanky. They'd basically be durable as they rush onto objectives and killy once they got there, but bad at being both at the same time.

What I really want them to do is kite/whittle the enemy down with guerilla warfare and then collapse in for a finishing blow, but games are too short for that to really be viable. Especially with how primary objectives work.

The one thing they could play into is "ancient and powerful technology" by just giving everything a boost.

But that's lame.

It is indeed going to be very interesting as so many units in the codex fail miserably ay what they do. aspect warriors and guardians are just swept off the table with the current amount of firepower. What kind of defensive buffs will GW add to improve the basic Eldar resilience on the table? I guess the reliance on wave serpents/falcons could still be a thing and that the occupants just get buffed offesnively so that they at least kill what they target, but don't last long after.

I really don't know how they're going to do it, but if we're seeing new plastic scorpions, warp spiders etc, they better have a plan in place.

the craftworld identity should be:

1) fast, versatile infantry that can either be durable, or deadly, but not both (the guardian core of the army as well as IMO the vehicles)

2) hyper-hyper-specialized elite infantry that SHRED one unit type and are purposefully made ineffective against other unit types (Aspects)

3) extremely durable but slow and reliant on support heavy infantry/walkers (the wraiths).

Those are the three aspects of the eldar design ethos I think they have to go for.

Lets say for example you were trying to design aspects: Their statlines should choose one target archetype that they excel at bringing down, and purposefully manipulate their statline to make them ineffective at targeting things outside that realm.

Lets look for example at Warp Spiders. Lets say you want warp spiders to be just THE BEST at countering slow, tough, melee-oriented infantry or monstrous targets.

Strength 7, Ap-, Dd3 with a special ability that subtracts -2" from movement and halves the results of charge rolls if all models in the unit target the same enemy unit and cause at least 1 unsaved wound would allow them to entangle and impede lumbering melee enemies, but the strength and low AP value would mean turning them against MEQs or VEQs would be less efficient, while having the move reduction be flat -2 would mean a fast opponent like a biker squad could still just move directly up to them and have a decent chance of charging them.


Every aspect type should have a designated "prey" type unit in mind, as well as an achilles heel.

Dire Avengers:

Prey: elite infantry at close range that they can ambush and blow away with shuriken weaponry

Achilles Heel: Relatively expensive unit with little melee capability and no ability to harm Vehicle equivalent

Howling Banshees

Prey: Disabling and de-powering powerful enemy melee units or ranged units that rely on Overwatch to defend themselves

Heel: Not enough raw power to be efficient at just flinging at any enemy unit - actually probably should struggle fighting regular gun-toting troops units due to low volume of attacks themselves

Shining Spears

Prey: Long ranged enemy elite infantry and heroes where they can jump over their protections and cut them down with their lances

Heel: Low strength should make it so they cannot harm vehicles or other T7+ targets effectively and low volume of attacks should make low-value 1W infantry not worth their time

Hawks

Prey: light 1W infantry, should have special tricks to disable/debuff large hordes even when they cant kill them

Heel: Low Ap and low S to make other targets not worthwhile

Reapers

Prey: Fast targets, light vehicles, bikers etc

Heel: Should not be able to effectively harm medium or larger vehicles.

Design ideas: S6, ignoring hit modifiers, and with an ability to force rerolls of invulnerable saves, but with lower ROF than currently to make it so theyre less effective just pounding elite infantry

Crimson Hunters

Prey: if theyre going to be an aspect type, specialize them against Fly type enemies and Aircraft both offensively and defensively, similar to what they did with the Heldrake

Heel: Should NOT be as effective against ground vehicles as the Wraithfighter is

Fire Dragons

Prey: vehicles, monsters, stuff with lots of wounds

Heel: low ROF should make them ineffective against elite infantry. This one is the most obvious and straightforward

Scorpions

Prey: Light, low quality infantry and enemy units trying to secure objectives. Scopions should be creeping through enemy backlines, VERY difficult to target while they chop up the kind of light units that cower out of LOS raising banners doing actions and holding objectives

Heel: in a straight up fight against a melee-capable enemy scorpions should lose due to low S and low AP.

Looong time eldar player here.

I think the fundamental idea of the eldar army should be "right tool, right place." Which is to say that most units should have a highly specialized role to play and serve as a "hard counter" to enemies within that role, but should then struggle to perform outside of that role.

How you actually achieve that I'm not terribly sure.

Eldar lore also always emphasizes their strategic insight, foresight, and flexibility. I think that if the individual models are stronger per se, they can make up for it here. Eldar, more than anyone else, should have rules that give then advantages or the initiative during deployment, setup, etc.

Heck, what if Eldar aspect units came in a fixed cost, and before deployment you would actually choose what specific aspect warriors you brought the to the table. Something that let you tailor your force on-the-fly to your opponent's list and the objective. This way, even if your forces were "weaker", at least you'd be able to bring the right specialists to the table each game.

And of course, Eldar should dominant the psychic phase.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Looong time eldar player here.

I think the fundamental idea of the eldar army should be "right tool, right place." Which is to say that most units should have a highly specialized role to play and serve as a "hard counter" to enemies within that role, but should then struggle to perform outside of that role.

How you actually achieve that I'm not terribly sure.

Eldar lore also always emphasizes their strategic insight, foresight, and flexibility. I think that if the individual models are stronger per se, they can make up for it here. Eldar, more than anyone else, should have rules that give then advantages or the initiative during deployment, setup, etc.

Heck, what if Eldar aspect units came in a fixed cost, and before deployment you would actually choose what specific aspect warriors you brought the to the table. Something that let you tailor your force on-the-fly to your opponent's list and the objective. This way, even if your forces were "weaker", at least you'd be able to bring the right specialists to the table each game.

And of course, Eldar should dominant the psychic phase.

Exalted, love the idea of fixed cost aspect warriors, treating it similarly to the assassin stratagem for Imperial armies, but without the CP cost, as it would be their special ability.

Not sure really.

On paper yes - the old idea was that units should be highly specialised. So you get a big advantage if they go into the right stuff, but a big disadvantage versus the wrong stuff. While ye olde Tactical squad with flamer and missile launcher could have a go at anything.

But this was rubbish then - and it would be even more rubbish now. It might have made sense if "putting units into the right thing" was hard - and therefore indicative of skill. But in practice its easy (or the unit is generally bad), so you just get all armies deleting each other. If say Fire Dragons, Striking Scorpions etc are only worth taking versus 3 units in the game and otherwise rubbish, you just don't play them. If say Shining Spears end up good versus most things, you do.

Ruthlessly the problem is that, possibly as a result of having been top army for so much of the game's existence, most armies have enjoyed "Eldarification".

I.e. - Eldar should be fast.
Modern 40k: All armies are fast.

Eldar should lean more into damage than resilience.
Modern 40k: Almost all armies barring DG and DA Terminators lean into damage rather than resilience (and those 2 can still put out a punch with certain combos).

Eldar should have psychic powers.
Modern 40k: Most factions have psychic powers, okay some of them won't usually bother which is a points thing.

Etc Etc.

Boringly ofcourse this leads to a sort of generification if applied the otherway. I.E. you just turn them into Marines.

A big problem for CWE is they’re the army with the least change since Rogue Trader.

In those days, armies were pretty small, perhaps a couple of dozen models, certainly well under 100.

In that, well, meta I suppose, you could afford to heavily specialise. Not only were there rather limited options for building your army, the pool of units was quite small. So a CWE force was less likely to end up fighting something it didn’t have some kind of specialist unit to counter with.

Of course, the game has grown and expanded. Lots and lots of units, whole new armies, and a greater availability of tanks and flyers. CWE have to my mind never quite kept up with those changes.

In particular, the Aspects are just nowhere near what they once were in terms of being a scary prospect. In 2nd Ed, Howling Banshees and Warp Spiders in particular were horrific to fight. I won’t go into the exact mechanics, but suffice to say both absolutely excelled in their specialist sphere. If Banshees got into combat, they’d have to fail pretty hard not to simply delete the victim of their attentions, and Warp Spiders would regularly turn their targets to soup, before running off like the cowards they are.

This I feel is best reflected that whilst CWE have usually been a force to be reckoned with into the modern day, it’s often been due to beardy spam lists, rather than the whole of the thing being viable. Please note I am not having a go at anyone who fields or fielded such armies.

There are a few things they could do with recovering rules wise.

First, make Aspects utterly deadly again. If I as your opponent fail to deal with them (such as shooting Banshees to death) then they should spank me like a red headed stepchild.

Second, greater interaction with Psychic Powers. Allowing Guardian Squads to take a Warlock as a unit leader is a decent start there.

Third? Bring Back Pop Up Attacks. These were ace. Basically you parked your Grav tank behind some terrain, and in your turn it could levitate to take its shot, before returning to safety. It could be frustrating for an opponent, but as with many of their former strengths, it required me as the opponent to be more aggressive and try to control and dictate the flow of the battle.

Make them a frustrating foe. Make them an encounter where the opponent must seize the initiative or be run rings around. Keep them relatively fragile, so when we can land a blow it feels satisfying. But man the opponent should need to really sing for their supper when facing a skilled CWE player.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Spoiler:

A big problem for CWE is they’re the army with the least change since Rogue Trader.

In those days, armies were pretty small, perhaps a couple of dozen models, certainly well under 100.

In that, well, meta I suppose, you could afford to heavily specialise. Not only were there rather limited options for building your army, the pool of units was quite small. So a CWE force was less likely to end up fighting something it didn’t have some kind of specialist unit to counter with.

Of course, the game has grown and expanded. Lots and lots of units, whole new armies, and a greater availability of tanks and flyers. CWE have to my mind never quite kept up with those changes.

In particular, the Aspects are just nowhere near what they once were in terms of being a scary prospect. In 2nd Ed, Howling Banshees and Warp Spiders in particular were horrific to fight. I won’t go into the exact mechanics, but suffice to say both absolutely excelled in their specialist sphere. If Banshees got into combat, they’d have to fail pretty hard not to simply delete the victim of their attentions, and Warp Spiders would regularly turn their targets to soup, before running off like the cowards they are.

This I feel is best reflected that whilst CWE have usually been a force to be reckoned with into the modern day, it’s often been due to beardy spam lists, rather than the whole of the thing being viable. Please note I am not having a go at anyone who fields or fielded such armies.

There are a few things they could do with recovering rules wise.

First, make Aspects utterly deadly again. If I as your opponent fail to deal with them (such as shooting Banshees to death) then they should spank me like a red headed stepchild.

Second, greater interaction with Psychic Powers. Allowing Guardian Squads to take a Warlock as a unit leader is a decent start there.

Third? Bring Back Pop Up Attacks. These were ace. Basically you parked your Grav tank behind some terrain, and in your turn it could levitate to take its shot, before returning to safety. It could be frustrating for an opponent, but as with many of their former strengths, it required me as the opponent to be more aggressive and try to control and dictate the flow of the battle.

Make them a frustrating foe. Make them an encounter where the opponent must seize the initiative or be run rings around. Keep them relatively fragile, so when we can land a blow it feels satisfying. But man the opponent should need to really sing for their supper when facing a skilled CWE player.

Exalted, but especially this:
"First, make Aspects utterly deadly again."

In particular, if a CC Aspect makes it into contact with Marines, the Marines should get trounced.

Oh yeah.

De-wuss the Avatar. Now. Right now this very instant.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
A wild suggestion for Monofilament weapons? Given that stuff sticks around, introduce the risk of Mortal Wounds being inflicted if the targeted unit moves in its next movement phase. Not only is it pretty thematic, it’s a nice option for increasing board control opportunities.

Hell, you could go really wild and allow Warp Spiders to web up terrain pieces, with much the same threat.

But whatever rules the Aspects end up with, as your opponent I should be thinking “uh oh…..better deal with that Aspect which is really good against me before all my dudes end up dead”.

Please note. I am not a CWE player. So this isn’t some Wishlist stuff.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and to see what happens when I properly shake out my brains on CWE?

Here’s an older thread in a similar vein should you wish to have a read.

you know, honestly, i'd rather my craftworld eldar NOT be a frustrating miserable experience for my opponent.

I dont need them to be good at everything always all the time, or for them to have tons of frustrating mechanics. What I do want from them is:

1) powerful psychically, but in a 'psychic stuff is infused throughout the army' more so than a 'AND THEY HAVE THE BEST STRONGEST PSYCHERS EVAR'. CWE psykers should be the shepards that move the army along and make it work nice and smoothly, with only the Warlock Conclave acting as the more traditional 'psychic battering ram' type unit

If I was going to characterize how CWE psychic stuff should operate, it'd be: Reliable, technical, used to buff or debuff rather than directly attack, and able to spread it out among many units rather than always just having 1-2 dedicated psykers

2) having an option for higher speed, but without fully embracing the glass cannon nature like DE do.

CWE should shift between being a faster army and being able to present durability to the foe with vehicles and wraiths, and I actually think the design for them should present the players with a sort of optimization triangle: You can be fast, you can be highly damaging, you can be durable, and you get to pick 2 at any given time.

if you had me redesign Battle Focus as an actually interesting core mechanic to design CWE around, I'd go with something like:

-Eldar units that advance can choose to either gain a defensive bonus, like an invulnerable save, or to be treated as if they stayed stationary for the purpose of shooting and charging

-Eldar units that stay stationary gain an offensive bonus, possibly to Wound rolls and Weapon Range in order to make shuriken weaponry more capable of harming elite targets (and then purposefully ensure that most eldar ranged weaponry is shorter base range than baseline imperial weaponry of corresponding types, like how currently shuricats are 12" and shuricannons are 24" while boltguns work out to 24" and heavy bolters to 36")

Allow eldar units to choose between fast and hard to hurt, fast and deadly, or deadly and hunkered down in advantageous positions, but carefully design it to ensure that if they try to exclusively do any of those things, they'll struggle against an enemy that doesnt have the choice.

A CWE army that exclusively goes with 'fast and deadly' should be slightly slower and slightly less deadly than a drukhari force. A CWE army that hunkers down and shoots should still lose a shoot-out with an imperial guard army. etc. As an Eldar player, you should have to choose the tactics that hit an opponent's weakness, rather than being able to just skew your list into one particular strength and beat out opponents who also have that as their fixed shtick.

Wyldhunt wrote:
How *Should* Craftworld Armies Play?

The 'classic' ideal style of Eldar would have them using mobility and positioning to gain local superiority with specialised units, while being outmatched in a straight up army vs army slugfest.

But the current game moves too quickly, units shoot too far and with too much weight of fire, things are a lot less binary in terms of what they are and are not vulnerable to compared to earlier editions. It's hard to make an army themed around mobility and defeat in detail when games are about being engaged/holding a position immediately rather than playing to put your opponent three turns of play away from victory with only two turns left to get there.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
A big problem for CWE is they’re the army with the least change since Rogue Trader.
.

troo story and game has changed and fluffly the CWE haven't

I'm honestly not sure how to fix it, nearly every faction having re-rolls, the smaller tables putting a damper on excessive speed and playing keep away whilst trying to hold objectives, and all psyker armies having Smite tsunamis rendering most non-smite mind bullets a bit mehh, suspect any fix will be more like Dark Kin, more shoots and nowt else

Perhaps some kind of Move-Shoot-Move could be introduced.

But, rather than an additional move, you can sort of store a part of your movement. Brace yourself, a ham fisted explanation follows.

Let’s say purely for argument’s sake and Nice Round Numbers, your unit has a 10” move.

In your movement phase, the unit moves 5”. It then lets rip in the Shooting Phase. Then, in your Assault phase, instead of assaulting, the unit can then use up the rest of its movement.

Include a caveat or something to stop them running in and out of the same part of cover (in my head, it’s a graceful single manoeuvre as they scuttle between pieces of cover.)

That’s the best I can think of getting it to work in the current 40K turn structure. And I’ve probably got that bit wrong

 Turnip Jedi wrote:
troo story and game has changed and fluffly the CWE haven't

They had a fairly big change in 6th, gaining an across the board increase to durability and general purpose firepower making them less specialised.

From a unit standpoint though they were one of (if not the most) broad ranges early on so were mostly treading water while other factions caught up (or lost units and then regained them - across the editions Eldar have generally managed to hold on to everything unlike Orks for example).

A.T. wrote:

 Turnip Jedi wrote:
troo story and game has changed and fluffly the CWE haven't

They had a fairly big change in 6th, gaining an across the board increase to durability and general purpose firepower making them less specialised.

From a unit standpoint though they were one of (if not the most) broad ranges early on so were mostly treading water while other factions caught up (or lost units and then regained them - across the editions Eldar have generally managed to hold on to everything unlike Orks for example).

Yeah, it also doesnt help that the 'advanced tech' factions (Tau, Necrons, Eldar) have all basically had their advanced tech one-upped by the 'backwards, decaying, ignorant empire' factions (Marines, Custodes, Admech, heck now even some SoB units like the warsuits...)

Devastating necron deathrays are D6 shots, 4+BS, D6 damage levels of unreliable while admech is rocking like 2+ to hit D3+3 weapons with fixed shot numbers.

Wyldhunt wrote:
For years, I've heard people say that they should be glass cannons, but that feels a bit weird for a technologically advanced species that puts a lot of value on the lives of their remaining population. Plus, other space elves are already doing the glass cannon thing, and making them all compete for that same role means that you're likely to make at least one faction basically worse at the job than the others. Some people say they're meant to be a mobile, shooty army, but that's theoretically the tau niche. When I first started playing, they were an elite force equipped with more-powerful-than-normal wargear that made them specialists with an edge over their counterparts... But primaris marines are kind of filling that niche now, and it feels inappropriate to one-up marines at the "individually powerful" game by making eldar tech absurdly strong.

So how, in the abstract, should a craftworld army behave? How should their future playstyle be described?

Eldar should be a fast and coordinated force that can, operationally, run rings around more plodding opposition. They should rely not just on speed for defense, but on never presenting an optimal target, only hard counters to the current threat. Their defense doesn't come from killing you first (Drukhari) or taking a hit while dishing it back out (Primaris), it comes from a combination of speed, deception, and other tricks to ensure they're never where you want them to be. Eldar should be the faction that plays a cat-and-mouse game of advantageous trades until the enemy is whittled down and defeated in detail (or simply abandoned, as the Eldar achieve whatever inscrutable objective they came for), and bringing force to bear against them should be like trying to eat jello with chopsticks.

That's the fluff, at least. Lacking any sort of mechanics to represent operational flexibility or even just speed as a defense, I think the best you can do under the current design paradigm is hand out invuln saves like candy and lean hard into stratagems that allow them to manipulate the battlespace. But since this is a game where it is very difficult to be out of sight, out of range, or out of reach, I don't expect any implementation to live up to that fluff.

Mad Doc Grotsnik's idea of move-shoot-move is a fun one that hearkens back to how they functioned in Battlefleet Gothic (though there they just got two movement phases, basically, with zero-to-full movement both times), and that mechanic absolutely nailed the cat-and-mouse feel I described above. But it also seems like it might be a bit too much bookkeeping for the current incarnation of the game, and 40K isn't nearly as maneuver-restricted as BFG was, so I don't know if it would be impactful. I could definitely see a simpler version- forgo movement in the movement phase, get to move in the charge phase instead- as either a stratagem or army-wide rule.

 catbarf wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
For years, I've heard people say that they should be glass cannons, but that feels a bit weird for a technologically advanced species that puts a lot of value on the lives of their remaining population. Plus, other space elves are already doing the glass cannon thing, and making them all compete for that same role means that you're likely to make at least one faction basically worse at the job than the others. Some people say they're meant to be a mobile, shooty army, but that's theoretically the tau niche. When I first started playing, they were an elite force equipped with more-powerful-than-normal wargear that made them specialists with an edge over their counterparts... But primaris marines are kind of filling that niche now, and it feels inappropriate to one-up marines at the "individually powerful" game by making eldar tech absurdly strong.

So how, in the abstract, should a craftworld army behave? How should their future playstyle be described?

Eldar should be a fast and coordinated force that can, operationally, run rings around more plodding opposition. They should rely not just on speed for defense, but on never presenting an optimal target, only hard counters to the current threat. Their defense doesn't come from killing you first (Drukhari) or taking a hit while dishing it back out (Primaris), it comes from a combination of speed, deception, and other tricks to ensure they're never where you want them to be. Eldar should be the faction that plays a cat-and-mouse game of advantageous trades until the enemy is whittled down and defeated in detail (or simply abandoned, as the Eldar achieve whatever inscrutable objective they came for), and bringing force to bear against them should be like trying to eat jello with chopsticks.

That's the fluff, at least. Lacking any sort of mechanics to represent operational flexibility or even just speed as a defense, I think the best you can do under the current design paradigm is hand out invuln saves like candy and lean hard into stratagems that allow them to manipulate the battlespace. But since this is a game where it is very difficult to be out of sight, out of range, or out of reach, I don't expect any implementation to live up to that fluff.

Mad Doc Grotsnik's idea of move-shoot-move is a fun one that hearkens back to how they functioned in Battlefleet Gothic (though there they just got two movement phases, basically, with zero-to-full movement both times), and that mechanic absolutely nailed the cat-and-mouse feel I described above. But it also seems like it might be a bit too much bookkeeping for the current incarnation of the game, and 40K isn't nearly as maneuver-restricted as BFG was, so I don't know if it would be impactful. I could definitely see a simpler version- forgo movement in the movement phase, get to move in the charge phase instead- as either a stratagem or army-wide rule.

Yeah, its not like they can maneuver behind enemy units, or out of their range, lol.

"Aha, I have cunningly maneuvered to the rear of your clumsy monkeigh tank!"

"Ok. GUNNER! FIRE ALL CANNONS OUT OF THE EXHAUST PORTS!"

Bring back pop-up attacks. These where attacks where you put your flying tank taller then what everyouwhere hiding behind, shot your guns, and went back down again. Just hive your falkons behind ruins, kite and shoot. Hope you kill enough so that you can go out and claim points after some turns of shooting.

 Niiai wrote:
Bring back pop-up attacks. These where attacks where you put your flying tank taller then what everyouwhere hiding behind, shot your guns, and went back down again. Just hive your falkons behind ruins, kite and shoot. Hope you kill enough so that you can go out and claim points after some turns of shooting.

I'd imagine the difficulty in that was always going to giving it correspondingly lower firepower when you don't know what kind of cover any given group of players will have.
Perhaps less of an issue with the higher pace of the game now, safer deepstriking, etc.

 Niiai wrote:
Bring back pop-up attacks. These where attacks where you put your flying tank taller then what everyouwhere hiding behind, shot your guns, and went back down again. Just hive your falkons behind ruins, kite and shoot. Hope you kill enough so that you can go out and claim points after some turns of shooting.

No. That was a miserable play experience.

Its also frankly incompatible with the current terrain rules. The next 'quarterly update' needs to be a terrain overhaul before any faction can interact with the terrain in an 'advanced' way.


---
Baseline, eldar need real guns again. No more 'dying race running their lemmings into melee range to shoot off a volley of shurikens' before dying.
I still can't believe the shuriken catapult nerf has haunted the game for this long.

It was mostly meant as a joke. It was a horrible mechaic.

It should be metioned that warp spiders had a move after shooting. So you could shoot, and pop behind terain and not be seen. Eldar had a lot of that stuff back in the day.

The problem you underlined ilustraights one of the problems with it. The other is that there is small or no counterplay. Fire and fade, and the tau double jump suits plays around with the same mechanics.

Eldar beeing higly specialised (aspects warriors go down this path already). All eldar armies so far are quite fragile, but pushesh over their weight class. Drukhari and Harlequins lean into this. I have no idea how you balace it. Perhaps give each aspect warrior group a very unique rule. Make them good, fragile and specialised. Make wraight units though, like a different sub theme. Give them psyker buffs.

Eldar are supposed to rely on having units that are specific counters to the enemy, and the foresight to know what to bring with them.

This is hard to represent at the tactical level of 40k.

Therefore, let eldar players either choose an army in full knowledge of the enemy, or permit swapping out units during deployment. therefore, eldar players can get use out of specific units and don't have to rely on spamming one unit type that is just less bad at dealing with the enemies who are not their speific prey.

This will have the secondary benefit to GW that Eldar players will therefore need multiple units of EVERYTHING! just to allow counters to enemy armies

If Overwatch was an action that let you fire at units that move/are set up until the action was interrupted (which would usually be by firing the actual Overwatch attack), Move-Shoot-Move/pop-up firing mechanics/playstyles could work.

Eldar fail to convey the elven fantasy of superiority they are trying to replicate as a concept.


In 40k Eldar as a species are really not better than half the races, physically, including marines When you have a 400 year old eldar VS a 250 year old marine It doesnt sits as a 2000 year old lotr elf VS a human..
Technologically the are one of the advanced races, but arent really more advanced than necrons or the best dark age human relics.

The only thing they have going for them IS being a RACE of psychic sentient beings but theres other races of full Magic armies.

Dark Eldar never ever are seen as this mega elite army and they are also elfs. The only expectation people has with Dark eldar IS that they need to be fast.

Craftworld are a failed replication of the high elf idea, just like the fantasy of dwarves in 40k IS mostly stolen by marines as a sturdier and shootier with good meele of humans.

 Flinty wrote:
Eldar are supposed to rely on having units that are specific counters to the enemy, and the foresight to know what to bring with them.

This is hard to represent at the tactical level of 40k.

Especially because that's not how it's supposed to work. They deal in prophecy and skeins of fate. Their visions are fairly accurate compared to humans, but the interpretations can be wrong.

They're not time-travelers. They don't have 20/20 hindsight. They can be wrong about why their visions are pointing them towards something since a Farseer still has to interpret it.
An interesting way to handle this would be to allow for you to get to declare a specific objective of your own at the outset of the game if you've got a Farseer in your army. Whether it be taking out a specific character, sealing a Webway Portal via a ritual, whatever. An extra objective that you get to pick and choose for yourself.


I am 100% on board with the idea of Aspects being similar to Assassins for how they can be taken though...but if they do so, Aspects need to be their own thing 100%. They should be treated like Scions, where taking them as part of the army doesn't break the army's special rules but taking non-Aspect things can wreck the Aspects' bonuses if you were taking them as a pure faction. Give each Aspect its own bonus of some sort and let Autarchs pick and choose from Aspects on the field for which bonus they have active at a time.

If the concept is super specialised aspects that are great against a narrow range of opponents and rubbish against everything else, then does being able to choose an additional objective balance the likelihood of being kerb stomped by bad match ups? In the context off all the fluff I agree that eldar foresight isn’t perfect, but it at least gives a hook to hang some fancy last minute force change shenanigans from. Marines in the game do not match up exactly with the fluff based capabilities either, but the concept is there.