40K Friday - New Allies

We haven't been playing much 40K lately but work has continued:

•  With the release of a new Dark Angels codex I have been reassessing my force in development to figure out how I need to adjust - more on that in another post. 
• The Eldar armies (Blaster's and mine) have been getting some attention. 
• I took my orks out for their first 7th edition scrap a while back - more on that later too. 

The most recent development has been the acquisition of a small Dark Eldar force. The thinking was as follows:

1. We have two Eldar armies in the house
2. Eldar and Dark Eldar are battle-brothers
3. Dark Eldar have a piece of wargear called a webway portal which allows the user and his unit to deep strike without deviation
4. Wraithguard have short-ranged D-class weapons

Now we are not the first to discover this nifty combo but after playing around with various Deathwing and marine drop-pod armies I can say that safe deep-striking is a really really nice thing to have. With marines it's typically done with melta weapons or heavy flamers. Being able to do it with D-weapons is really nasty. It will only work with the one squad but it's a truly vicious squad. With a huskblade and a shadowfield he also gives the undead eldar some close combat punch that makes charging them a much less attractive proposition.  

Now to enable this the minimum Dark Eldar force is an ally detachment, so 1 HQ and 1 troop unit. 

Digging out my old never-built 3rd edition Dark Eldar warriors I put together a squad and eBay provided a reasonably priced Raider for them to ride in. This gives me a nice mobile unit that is not terribly expensive and dishes out some decent poisoned weapon fire which is something the normal Eldar army does not feature. With splinter racks on the raider, they will be scoring a lot of hits up close. Of course, with armor 10 on the raider they'd better take those shots while they can. They will most likely be starting in reserve.

Not much paint yet but they will get there

The total ally force looks like this:

1 Archon (HQ) @ 165 Pts

     Infantry (Character); Fleet; Independent Character; Night Vision; Power from Pain; #Plasma Grenades; Haywire Grenades; Webway Portal; Shadow Field; Kabalite Armour; Splinter Pistol; Huskblade; Warlord

10 Kabalite Warriors (Troops) @ 165 Pts

     Infantry; Fleet; Night Vision; Power from Pain; Kabalite Armour; Close Combat Weapon; Splinter Rifle (x9); Splinter Cannon

     1 Raider @ [70] Pts

          Splinter Racks; Disintegrator Cannon

Models in Army: 12

Total Army Cost: 330

Now granted, I could make this a lot cheaper. 5 Kabalite Warriors is 40 points, so I could strip this down to a 205 point boost, even less if I went with a less-geared-up Archon, but in a larger game of 1500+ points I like the capabilities this force brings to a typical Craftworld Eldar army.

For the future, I admit I like the Dark Eldar look, probably enough to expand them beyond "minimal ally force". If I can scrape together the rest of my old Warriors from the 3rd edition box that would give me a second squad (or two minimum squads) and at that point they have the core of a full army. From an ally standpoint, Fire Dragons on a Venom seem to be a popular option as do minimum warriors or Trueborn on Venoms for objective seizing, so a Venom or two seems like a good idea. A second Raider seems like an obvious choice, and a Ravager would add a Heavy Support option. Scourges and maybe some Incubi look like fun as well. There's not a lot of urgency here, just an interest and the potential to mix and match 3 different armies together in different ways.