40K Friday - Eldar Expansion

While building this new army I have tried to take a modular approach. By that I mean this: acquiring, building, and painting specific chunks of an army small enough to get painted in a reasonable amount of time and that make up a single unit or formation. In the end it's all stuff that goes into the mix but it feels more organized for now.

For example I started with a farseer, some dire avengers, and some rangers - the basic HQ + 2 Troops that everyone loves for the core of a combined arms detachment. Next up was the wraith host which is also a separate formation so I could play one or the other or both or add some of the pieces of the host in as elites and heavy support to the CAD. A Falcon and a squad of fire dragons adds more options under the CAD, together or separately. A squad of striking scorpions, some swooping hawks,  and some more dire avengers open up some additional options beyond their normal CAD role via the Aspect Host or Dire Avenger Shrine formations. For Apprentice Blaster I tried to stick to the same concept in helping him get his Eldar going by making sure he had a pair of jetbike squadrons and a jetbike farseer to form a new core of his force. It's not just picking up a squad here or a vehicle there, it's trying to add a discrete element of the army as a whole piece. This is my attempt to follow an orderly approach.

A fair amount of this stuff is already painted so I can field a decent looking force, but I am always thinking about the next set of units to add. The triple dark reaper squads are present but unpainted and are high on the to-be-painted list because I plan on using them a lot. The swoops are up there too as I like to take at least one squad in most battles. I did recently realize that I had been heavily focused on aspect warriors and wraith units (I knew about those) but I really had not come up with a plan for the guardian units - defender squads, vypers, war walkers, etc. I have a bunch of them but I haven't done any work on them. This is supposed to be an Iyanden force as far as themes go but I would also like it to be my "everything eldar" army so building a Guardian Host formation makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure how much I will field it (I'm more a fan of the wraiths+ aspects right now) but for those really big battles it's a nice option to have.

After deciding to plan this out the one unit I did not have that the formation requires was a support battery. This is partly because in prior editions I didn't care for them all that much and lately they've been hard to find and expensive when you do. Eventually I found a full set of the prior metal models at a price I could stand and bit the bullet. They are the mini's in the picture at the top. I think they should be fairly quick to paint and I'll probably field them as a heavy support option in the CAD before I ever field a Guardian Host. I'm going to build them with the vibro cannon barrels as shown above because I think they look the coolest but I'll be fielding them as D-Cannons because I like those the best in-play. Eldar can be tricky you know. People do seem to be having some success with them and if I'm not fielding the wraith units for some reason it's another way to get some d-weapons on the table. They only have a 24" range but that's a 24" box where no one really wants to be. I'm pretty sure I'm going to give them a warlock babysitter as well to try and keep them around a little longer.

Up next for painting as of late April: Wraithknight, Dark Reapers, Swooping Hawks, and gun batteries

Building as of late April: Vypers, War Walkers, Dark Eldar (more on that next week)

Ah, the good old days

So what's next? Vehicles, namely transports.  I have one painted falcon and two unpainted wave serpents. I'm fine with my eventual guardian host being ground pounders, while the dragons ride in the falcon, the scorpions infiltrate, and the reapers are foot units for sure. I'd like the wraithguard to have rides and my two current wave serpents are probably destined for that duty. Beyond that I do have a vision of a fully-manned, fully-mechanized Avenger Shrine with 30 of them in 3 serpents zooming across the board, disembarking, and unleashing massive shuriken death on some unfortunate souls. It would probably have to be instead of the reapers or the wraith host in any normal-sized battle but a man can dream. After that and once the massed guardians are finished, I think the army is done except for some fine tuning.

Next week: progress on the Dark Eldar allies.