Struggling with "Counts As"

Most of you have probably seen the basic Dark Eldar list I posted a little over a week ago. As stated previously, I intend to run my Craftworld Eldar army to "Count As" their darker brethren. I've tweaked the list since then, but the units are pretty much the same.

In my playtesting so far (just a few quick games to get used to the units) some of my opponents have been irked by the presence of Wave Serpents representing Raiders. The two arguments I've heard are fairly reasonable, and I expect many others like myself will face similar arguments. Let's take a look at what my opponents had to say:

Works In Progress: Wave Serpent

As promised, I have an image of the first Wave Serpent with the base coat completed. I have some very minor edge highlights on some of the black areas that will be refined and then extreme highlighted on top of that.

There is a lot of work left to do on this, and I am going to get it completely finished before moving on to painting the Fire Prisms/Ravagers. This is one of two wave serpents to get this light color that I will be working on, though with the amount of time it took to get that base coat ready, I think the other one will be the last serpent to get painted.

The rest of my wave serpents will follow the prisms and falcons and will be primarily black with the white supplementary, as is the standard for Ulthwé. The two white ones are going to be perfect for the seer council/wyches in the upcoming DE list.

Dusting off the Eldar: Going Dark

Having had a chance to go over most of the stuff in the upcoming Codex: Dark Eldar, I am thinking I'll be able to break out my Eldar and get them to work with the new codex. I'm gonna throw some ideas around for counts-as and start working on the conversions for the missing pieces soon.

My Eldar army is pure Ulthwé, with the heavy focus on seer councils. Support from Black Guardians and a small splash of aspect warriors makes the list super-fluffy while still being really good, at least when we look at the options we have available in Dark Eldar. Try doing that with the Eldar codex and your grand total of 7 units will get blasted off the table in no time.

Here is the list I am looking at starting with. It's really straightforward, and probably on the weaker side of what can be done with Dark Eldar. Testing with this list will give me a really good idea about the core units of the force though, and I can branch out from there. I will explain the conversions & counts as after the list.

Eldar Strike Force taking shape

Last night I did a good bit of work modeling up some jetbikes. As mentioned before, I got my hands on some Jetbike Seer Council conversion bits from Chapterhouse Studios. Each kit comes with a rider (the farseer kit has two torsos to choose from), new handlebars, witchblade and spear, and some bits for spicing up the jetbike itself. Last night I built up 8 warlocks (4 with witchblades 4 with spears) and my autarch. I had pieced together the farseer on Sunday to familiarize myself with the kit.

I went ahead and pinned everything so the superglue would have more surface area for holding the models together. I have the riders just sitting loose on the bikes right now. after I get them painted up I'll secure them, probably with a tiny amount of superglue, as some of these sit very loose on the bikes.

Here are some images of a few.

Playing Eldar: Ulthwe Night Spinner Support List

Now that I've done a whole month's worth of Dark Angels gaming, I'm taking a step back towards my Eldar army. I have several new units to try out, and it looks like it's going to be a fun ride. I ordered some conversion kits from Chapterhouse Studios a while back, and the models just came in this weekend. I now have the stuff to build up a farseer and 12 warlocks on jetbikes without having to carve up a bunch of metal, and for a little less than the normal price. Double-win in my book. I also have a couple of Fire Prism/Night Spinner kits I'm working on. I've got one magnetized, and will be working on the second one soon. The following is a list I've developed to get the most out of these models:

Playing Eldar: My Experiences so far.

I've been messing around with Eldar for a couple of months now, but have been splitting me efforts enough to not have too many games in with them just yet. I'd say maybe somewhere around 7 or 8, almost all in the 1850-2000 point range.

My lists have been mostly similar, though I have been tweaking here and there to really get some ideas about the various upgrades. Here are the basic elements I've been using in most of my games recently:

Playing Eldar: Results of the First Outing

Lucas came to the game with Ghazkull, some bikers, lootas, a large Nobz squad, and several boyz squads mounted up in trukks. He informed me that he only brought 1500 points, so I did some manipulation to the list to trim it down. I removed the harlequins, falcon, and one of the guardian jetbike units. I used the points I had left over to increase the number of jetbikes in the remaining unit.


The main goal with the list is to stay maneuverable, reserve the jetbikes to keep them safe and let them do some harassment and objective capturing late game.

We ended up with table quarters and annihilation for our mission. Lucas won the rolloff and gave his lootas the protection of the top floor of a building and deployed the rest of his forces forward. I managed to get a good bit of cover in my corner as well and kept the grav-tanks mostly out of line of sight.

Playing Eldar: The First Outing

In the Rocket City, we have a pretty good group of 40k gamers. A lot of us play in our little clusters most of the time (such as the handful that join me at my apartment). The local club, HAAWGS, has been setting up game nights for the last few months in an attempt to get everyone out and mingle a little more. Tonight is one such night, and my Eldar are going to take their first trip away from home.

Playing Eldar: Starting from the beginning

While I have only been playing 40k for about two and a half years, my interest in the hobby goes back to my days in high school, when I played many different CCGs to pass the time on the weekends.  Almost every weekend while I was playing, I would get to see a glimpse of the 40k universe as numerous RTTs were run at the store.  Many times I was tempted to pick up this game, and one army stood out among the others with their hovering ships and and sleek, elegant lines.