Dark Eldar are dumb

>DE can't make tanks because one worker broke his arm

If they were going to war, this would be true. However dark eldar don't go to war, the go raiding which is like doing to a football game. If they rolled up with impervious super tanks it would be no fun.

Dark Eldar do it for the lulz.

dumbass space elves

Blacks are brown.

Mogadishu would be:
Rangers = Imperial Guardsmen
Delta = Scions/Space Marines
Somalis = Chaos Cultists

If there would be that many Dark Eldars whatever resistance would be fucked.

If all the major cities, military instilations near those cities, factories where weapons were made, and central forms of government in the US were destroyed, yes, you'd lose a lot of tech. Especially when you're stuck with people who were in the middle of a road trip in their RV, people on cruises and in small resort towns, and people who are living simple farming lifestyles.

Yeah, they might be able to gather the details on how to make a tank or a jet just fine, but actually doing so is a whole other other matter that requires facilities they don't have and manpower they cant afford.

For all intents and purposes, it may as well be lost, and complaining about that choice of words is the highest form of nitpicking.

99% of the time a Dark Eldar raid descends on a vulnerable populace, slaughters the surprised and out-numbered defenders, and make off with the civilians all in a few hours, long before any possible counter-attack can be made. Their weapons are designed to strike lightning-fast and then retreat, and presume the enemy will be too busy drowning in their own blood to shoot back properly in either case.

1% of the time they are forced (or choose for the novelty of it) to fight a prepared and equal enemy. These are the battles you actually play on the tabletop.

Commoragh survived. A lot of the Eldar's infrastructure was located in the webway.

>small resort towns
Certainly not. It was a conglomerate of a major leisure city, the biggest commercial hub of the eldar empire, the place to be for all the intelligentsia, and it certainly had a lot of R&D going on because of its lack of taxes and ethics (as illustrated by the homonculus).
An apter comparison would be the death of the entire rural population of the US except the survivalists, while the urban centers are swimming in cocaine.

Only the prequel star wars movies survived into the 41st millenium.

you're wrong, 90% of all eldar lived outside of the webway and were eaten alive by slaanesh when the eye of terror happened.

the only people in the webway were the 1% and their scores of slaves and labourers, and though central commoragh was the most important port city in the eldar civilisation thats all it was.

it was a port city, it didn't manufacture any of its stuff it just received it from the material realm.

commoragh as also not always been united, indeed it used to be a series of multiple different cities that warred for their independence until only commoragh remained.

>A lot

Where does it say that? I know it's a big place, but most certainly there was more stuff in real space than in the webway.

Wasn't Commorragh more of a port town for loading and unloading of goods and people to and from the empire, and a good hiding place for all the lowlives? I always found the place to be more of a hiding place for criminals and people with questionable ethics (even by Imperial Eldar standards), rather than some luxurious resort where all the high and mighty rubbed shoulders.

The comparison in that case would,be every city except Vegas blowing up. Sure, it's a major city, but it's major in ways that aren't related to military technology.

Do the Dark Eldar have cities scattered around the Webway all around the galaxy, or do they all live in Comorragh?

They've got at least some non-Commoragh webway cities, at least according to the FFG Rogue Trader RPG. Your PCs visit (and, if they play their cards right, possibly conquer) one during the Soul Reaver adventure.

> rangers equal guardmens
You fucking what? Are you serious

>Be Eldar 30k
>Young Asdrubael is still a kid living at home with parents
>"MOM, can you get me a super black hole weapon for Khainesmas?!"
>"No dear, we all know what you'll do with it".
>"BUT MOM! ALL THE KIDS HAVE ACCESS TO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION BUT MEEEEEE!!!1"
>"We'll see, dear"
>Asdrubael looks out his window on Khainesmas morning to see unbelievably huge missile in backyard decorated with blinking lights and sparkly ornaments
>He runs downstairs and hugs mom and dad
>Several neighboring solar systems get destroyed before lunchtime
>GNN (Galactic News Network) comes on later that night with headline: "Do everyday Eldar really need access to super weapons"?

And this is pretty much what Eldar civilization was like. Every Eldar had access to the greatest pieces of technology the Empire had to offer, even the people living on the fringes of Eldar society, because we all know the only thing stopping a bad guy with a black hole weapon is a good guy with a black hole weapon.

deldar are literally rich assholes on safari

What you dont seem to realize is they're all so decadent they dont give a fuck. What you're seeing is not a military force, its a bunch of bored aliens with, yeah, millions of years of advanced technology. Id say the fact that they can go toe to toe with the military of the largest swinging-dick galactic empire with shit they have laying around because they are bored/high and have nothing better to do is a testament to their tech.

That's one of the few 40k models I actually like.

>mad that guardsmen get compared to rangers
>perfectly fine with space marines being equal to deltas

I think you misunderstood what user was saying.

I think it was fairly established that the Dark Eldar war tech is inferior to other races. They couldn't defeat a single group of suits.

>811999.M41 - The Trials of Ghoroi V

>Third Sphere Expansion coalition is engaged by Eldar raiders over the quagmire world of Ghoroi V. The vast majority of the Tau fleet is crippled or destroyed. The only survivors to reach the planet’s acidic swamps are the three Firebase Support Cadres intended to reinforce a far more numerous army. Though they are at first assailed by the same Eldar slavers that decimated their comrades in orbit, the Tau drive them off with a combination of shared targeting data and relentless missile bombardment.

>Though the Eldar raiders sustain such heavy casualties that they abandon the fight, the trials of the Tau stranded there have only just begun. When the surviving battlesuit cadres are finally evacuated from Ghoroi, their members have bonded together with an impromptu ta’lissera ritual. Their rescuers are surprised to see the foetid mangrove swamplands around them choked with the scaled and segmented bodies of several hundred mega-predators whose appetite proved stronger than their wits.

That's basically what happened with the Salamander's strike cruiser.

>Slavers give up after potential slaves turn out to be equipped with jetpacks and smart missiles, fighting a guerilla war in a swamp

There's easier sources of slaves, you have to bear in mind DEldar want an easy win with zero risk to themselves, and their souls start to leech away the longer they're in realspace. That account doesn't neccesarily mean they couldn't have eventually hunted those suits down and captured them, just that they didn't consider it worthwhile.

To survive the Dark Eldar, you only have to recognise that the longer they're in realspace, the more suffering they need to top their souls back up when they get back home, so all you have to do isn't utterly defeat them, just make it so the time/effort required to capture you (and your delicious soul) isn't worth the accumilated soul-loss to them.

So FO:NV?

>Umbopo!
>Fetch the big peasant shooting gun!

It's sorta of a running theme with the Dark Eldar. The moment they encounter a technologically superior foe, they break and run. Take for example this system wide invasion force of Dark Eldar unexpectedly meeting an old friend.

>799.M41 THE CULL CURTAILED

>A huge raiding party of Dark Eldar descends upon the Bardric System to cull its Ork inhabitants, only to find the greenskins gone – slaughtered by awakened legions belonging to the Charnovokh Dynasty. The Necrons provide the Dark Eldar with unexpectedly deadly sport, leaving the survivors to limp back to Commorragh.

IT KEEPS HAPPENING.

>991.M41 THE PLUNDERED FLESH OF PECH

>After capturing not only countless Tau upon Vigos but also the mercenaries with which they bolster their cadres, the Prophets of Flesh find out that the Kroot are able to learn and even evolve purely by selectively devouring the fallen. To appropriate such an ability would be seen as a coup even amongst the Haemonculi.

>Before long, the Prophets of Flesh have opened up a webway gate upon the Kroot home world: the humid jungle planet of Pech. Hovering through the mists upon Raiders lined with barbed rails, the Haemonculi begin a lengthy scouring of the planet’s tribal centres. The Kroot respond in force, loosing packs of Kroot Hounds that leap from bough and bole to bear Covenites into the leafy mulch below. Krootox-borne gunners blast apart Venoms and Ravagers in the gloom, though in truth the skimmers in the jungle canopy are little more than distractions. The true prize is seized by the Pain Engines of the Haemonculi, each Corpsethief Claw rendering down as many Kroot Shapers as they can catch.

>The Tau, fiercely defensive of their empire’s mercenary allies, counter-invade in force by mobilising twelve Hunter Cadres to scour the jungle clean. The unfolding battle ends abruptly when the Prophets of Flesh withdraw, their Raiders straining to the point of collapse under the weight of the Kroot corpses they have stolen. Though the Tau propaganda machine celebrates a great victory, the Dark Eldar have what they came for. They leave a message behind, spelt out in the bloody corpses of their victims. It is loosely translated by the Water caste as the phrase ‘Welcome to the Feast’.

The Dark Eldar helped the AdMech to fix the Golden Throne because it was to complicated for the AdMech.

Dark Eldar is not about going to war, their entire military structure is based around raiding civilian population.

>Raiders don't like fair fights

Who'd have thunk?!

>AdMech buys tech support with souls

Has the Imperium ever considered giving the Dark Eldar a couple of hive worlds, just to collapse their economy via devaluation? The Imperium could afford it and Commorragh would collapse into (even more) anarchy.

How would that hurt the DE? It just seems like they'd use it for greater excesses, they're always going to have a use for more slaves.

Now on the other hand it might make them get lazy and stick to their farm planet instead of raiding other random places, but there enough thrillseekers and bored sadists in Commorragh that they'd still probably do that too.

So where in this entire article does it state that the Dark Eldar force numbered more then a dozen kabalite warriors? Where is any kind of description of the force at all?

the dark city constantly needs new slaves, that which hungers in the warp is never ending,

giving them what they need to survive is really not a good way to kill them,

would you destroy a hive-fleet by feeding it?

Their guns are some of the most powerful in the galaxy, they favour speed over armour, and basically get rid of all armour for that purpose. They also regain sustenance of their soul not just by torturing slaves but by the sheer thrill of a raid, knowing that any moment they could be vaporised and be forever in the grasp of Slaanesh.

So what else could they possibly need? It's effectively a supersonic gun platform that can dematerialise anything it points and clicks at.

also

>manually aimed guns

Even Necrons have manually piloted vehicles and guns, so I guess in the 40k universe AI autoaiming just isn't that good. There is nothing saying that the Dark Eldar guns don't have some sort of computer assisted aimbot either.

This is because complicated AI tends to break out into chaos randomly. The only race to currently fuck with true AI is the Tau, and it's always mentioned ominously. Necron pilots are the AI, they link to their warmachines directly. That being said even imperial ships have targeting programs and simple virtual Intelligences as well as linked computers to handle heavy calculations, just nothing autonomous.

I would be like giving a massive supply of aid to Africans, it just causes the population to explode and you end up with more hungry mouths (souls) to deal with.

>Dark Eldar force strong enough to defeat a Tau fleet, a few dozen kabalites

DUDE

They used to. however, Commoragh, as it grew inside the webway absorbed or destroyed alot of them. The one encountered in Soul Reaver is a satellite city of the main Commoragh. Vect wanted to absorb as many as possible to prevent rival power bases forming.

>>The Eldar as a whole have lost a lot of tech.
>No. Find me a single source that support that.
For Dark Eldar its a bit different.
Eldar tech pre-fall and Craftworld is largely based on psychic control, and DE have a no-psyker ever rule, so they cannot mold wraithbone or operate the good eldar stuff.

Dark Eldar actually have better tech than Craftworlders, as Craftworlders were literally super luddites who eschewed the hypertechnology of the old empire and left to bunker up against the oncoming apocalypse.

ALL Eldar have indeed lost loads of tech, but to these are the degrees of loss:

1. Exodites. Literally gave up everything to chill with dinosaurs on garden planets.

3. Craftworlders: Space Amish. They got rid of all the technology that they saw as having made the Eldar indolent and unfocused. Pre-Fall tech looks absolutely nothing like Craftworlder tech because Craftworlder tech is intentionally shit in comparison.

3. Dark Eldar. These guys were rich assholes living in luxury space mansions. Their military technology is mostly reverse engineered from pre-Fall civilian tech. As such, it's pretty much second only to Necrons in terms of bullshit but it's still a pale imitation of what pre-Fall Eldar were capable of.

Harlequins are a wildcard, we don't know how much knowledge and technology they've lost as they never show their full hand.

Commoragh started that way. It then exploded into a huge major city, rivaling the largest realspace cities in terms of wealth, population etc.

Your example is the vanguard of a Dark eldar raid getting shelled into oblivion, to which the Dark Eldar said Fuck this shit, we have plenty of slaves from the fleet, lets go guys. Saying their war-tech is inferior is dumb, since they regularly employ man-portable, assault weapon style anti-matter guns that stop things from existing.

>This is because complicated AI tends to break out into chaos randomly

Actually, it generally needs a daemon to latch on to it through some other medium. The reason Tau are mostly safe is because they have zero psykers and pretty much zero daemonic events within their territory.

Even then, there are ways of proofing technology against daemonic infestation that both Eldar and the Imperium have shown competence with, even if the Imperium refuses to acknowledge many of them because they're technically classed as sorcery.

The real reason stuff in 40K has manual firepower is it looks more interesting on a model. And that's fine.

I think its more likely that the first vanguard/scouts of the invasion looked at what 200 tau in the middle of a swamp, bunkered down, and said, we have tens of thousands of slaves from our fleet raid, we are good lets go home.

On the other hand, a single haemonculi coven easily depopulated an entire Tau world and its military presence on a whim, simply because the Tau didn't hand over an Ethereal for 'cultural exchange'.

Who gets to be badass is entirely depended on who is writing the fluff.

They did steal a bunch of kroot until the tau army arrived.

I think the Dark Eldar's big weakness is when they are taken by surprise by an enemy or something they didn't expect.

The Dark Eldar plan every execution of a raid to most minutiae detail, the masterplan of an alien consciousness infinitely more devious and extensive in its strategies than a human. Having to survive in a society that plans to murder you all the time you must have to be many steps ahead of everyone else but in their towering arrogance, when something goes wrong they kind of fall to pieces.

This explains why if everything goes to plan they can be utterly devastating to a world like in the case of the Tau world in . Haemonculi are ancient among a race of ancient beings and are even more clever in their strategies, they don't play fair either they treat a raid like a trap and ensure they take out all defences and means to communicate for help then just send in their cannon fodder flesh constructs to overwhelm the remaining enemy.

I think it was Gav Thorpe that said the Eldar don't see the point of armour that their weapons can penetrate.

Reminder that Dark Eldar literally were pulling entire stars into Commorragh for use as rave lighting.

Dark Eldar are literally a bunch of rich, slave owning assholes who ride around and torture people for fun. The similarities to Jabba the Hutt are not pure coincidence...

DE are also not a true territorial faction that has territory to defend. They just have Commoragh and maybe a couple moons where they store extra slaves for later torture. They have no need to keep up an Imperial Guard sized army because they just need raiding parties for slaves to keep their maximum decadency going.

That being said, I remember some story where an Imperial ship accidentally entered the webway and came out in Commoragh airspace. Because the DE all jerk themselves off about being the scariest mofos in the Galaxy, reading about them collectively shitting their pants because their super secret evil city got found out was the funniest 40k thing I've read in a while.

Speaking about "assault weapon style anti-matter guns that stop things from existing", in a short story called "Mistress Maeda's Gift", Dark Eldar invade a tomb world looking for treasure.

The whole Kabal end up dying to a man except the Archon. They didn't stand a chance. The Necrons made mince meat out f them. If a Space Marine were in their place that wouldn't have happened.

Face it. The Dark Eldar wartech is inferior. It might have advanced technology in it but its still not suited for warfare.

>Got poison weapons
>Fight machine zombie dudes
mfw I need more poison

the funny part is i'm pretty sure on TT DEldar poison weapons DO work on Necrons

They totally do. Also against Tau Battle suits and Eldar Wraith guard
>Spirit in wraithbone
>Get poisoned

There would literally no downside for the Dark Eldar society besides maybe a couple of civil wars between the cabals, which would happen anyway.

The Haemonculy covens and other researchers can also do whatever the fuck they want as long as it doesn't involve some kind of Chaos fuckery that might endanger Commorragh. So there is no actual ethics or pretentions that prevents scientific advancement in Commorragh.

Just think of it like acid or nanomachines in those instances.

I used to really like DE aesthetically and conceptually but I realised they dont really need to exist. CWE already encompass their theme off fast lightly armoured and high tech.
Also aesthetically I used to think they looked good but now I think too many things clash. The sleek armour doesn't suit the flintstones bones and flesh ornaments. They would look better with more alien looking armour that exaggerated the sleek and sharp look.

The current aesthetic was a huge upgrade from their 3'rd edition look, though.

Wouldn't necron cranoptek constructs count as AI? I don't think they were ever alive like in the necrons case

Yes I liked both and was thrilled by the new look but yeah years later it just isn't as good.
If they wanted to express Eldar arrogance and superiority why would they lower Dark Eldar to outward displays of barbarity and primitive ornaments.
It would be visually more cohesive if they had armour and gear that was exaggerated versions of CWE gear. Something like the incubi armour worn by the named character Druchii*

If battle suits shouldn't get poisoned, then Marines shouldn't get poisoned either.

I think Codex: Catachan noted something along those lines. That they use various poisons and acids, depending on the target.

>That they use various poisons and acids, depending on the target.

This.

I always just assumed that their poison is also corrosive so it damages machinery and melts through power armour.

The dark eldar obviously use intelligent high tech poisons. I think venoms are just natural nanomachines sons in real life. So its not hard to imagine an advanced alien race uses polymorphing venoms and poisons that could crawl into armour or change their function.

It's mostly not even wartech, for maximum stylepoints.
CWE get special gear, DE ARE special gear. It's straight up part of their bodies.

If you think about it DE don't have the tech to fight necrons.
Necrons were fought with Wraithbone warriors and psykers.
Which is kind of strange that the CWE use ancient technology for Eldar

If we're going to quote fluff examples we could probably justify anything.

In any case if fluff is what we're using as a benchmark than yeah for sure Necrons should tear apart DE; both factions get talked up as having some of the most destructive weaponry around, but Necron are also supposed to be near unkillable. Naturally the Dark Eldar are going to get wiped out if they go tomb raiding instead of trying some hit and run bullshit.

>Dark Eldar
>Armored Fighting Vehicle

RAVAGER, IN HEAVY CARDBOARD CLAD!

Seriously user; everything about the Dark Eldar is for enjoyment.

>Our vehicles look great
>Are probably great to drive
>Are probably great fun to shoot
>With no barrier between you and the battlefield you can enjoy more of it.

Dark Eldar vehicles and equipment is designed for the enjoyment of the user; rather than practicality or effectiveness.

That's the best explanation of Dark Eldar fluff I've ever read. Thanks user.

>Who'd have thunk?!

It's like people actually expect lightly equipped pirates and slavers to want to fight heavy mechanized regular forces in standup head-on battles.

Also players are so unimaginative and afraid to do anything other than a stand up head on open field massacre with equally matched points that they forgot the game allows them to make up scenarios suitable for pirates and raiders.

This. Dark Eldar could make some sort of floating land raider, they have the tech, but it'd be so slow and boring to fly that kabalites would rather kill themselves than be condemned to pilot it.

as a sign of the archons displeasure, you are chosen to pilot the slow boring hover-tank,

you know those are targeted first,,,
also they are no fun to ride

Looks like the perfect vehicle to take on ony raid to me.

I see that you're under the delusion that 40k is not all about style over substance.

>And they are all too busy using the stump to masturbate with