Tech Trumps All: A Comparison of Eldar and Tau

Somehow, our group had ignored the Eldar for a long time; I was naturally a little familiar with the lore and idea beyond the Space-Elves, and I had glanced through their codex, but been put off with their standard troop choice wielding S4 AP5 18" weapons (coming as a Tau player, this seems inexcusably bad for a shooty army).

However, it had been quite a while since I had tried out a new army, and a discussion with Max reminded me how they were supposed to be a shooty army, and thus I decided to give the Elfdar another chance and give the codex a full and close reading. As you can suspect from me writing an entire blog post on this, I was happily surprised.
First of all, Eldar and Tau get compared a lot both in terms of fluff and crunch, so it's worth comparing the ways they are similar (for there are a lot). Starting with similarities in fluff, both

• Have a very small number population compared to the galaxy at large
• Rely on powerful technology to compensate for physical weakness
• Put the group's goals ahead of individuality
• Have a rigid caste-based society with clearly-defined roles
• In general would prefer to shoot rather than engage in close combat

The main difference can be summed down in that the Eldar are trying to survive, while the Tau are trying to expand. The Eldar are haughty and aloof and have perfected their technology, while the Tau try to incorporate new races when possible and are constantly adding to and improving their technology. The Eldar are trying to conserve what little they have left while the Tau are hungrily adding to their domain. Although I don't know of any official fluff involving both Eldar and Tau, I suspect the two would get along better than pretty much any other pairing of the 40k races (not to say there wouldn't be bloodshed, but they would at least understand each other better than other races).

In terms of gameplay style, they are again pretty similar. I think in this case it's easier to do a upsides/downsides comparison for both races.

Tau

+Incredibly strong weaponry

+Long range

+Very mobile

+Relatively cheap units

+Easily modifiable to the situation

+Awesome vehicles

-Relatively weak compared to other races

-No close combat ability

-Relatively low leadership

-Mostly rapid-fire weapons

Eldar

+Powerful weaponry, all of it assualt

+High mobility

+Strong, specialized units

+Option of close combat units

+Great psychic powers

-Short range

-Very fragile

-Small number of units per squad

As you can see, they share a number of qualities but have a few key differences. I made an army for Eldar though, and last Thursday was able to test it against Jesse's army, who was also trying out a new race, namely Chaos Daemons. I'm happy to say that the Eldar army performed almost exactly as I had expected and hoped it would, and I managed a rather resounding victory (although partially to what Jesse acknowledges was an initially poor tactical choice). Although I'm not about to give up on my Tau list (I also just played with it again last night) if I had to rank armies right now, Eldar would be either tied or close to tied with Tau in terms of fitting my play-style. 

The idea fluff-wise behind Eldar is that they are specialized and need to work together to survive, and must minimize casualties because there are so few of them, preferring to wipe out the enemy in a single blow if possible. In fact that translates almost exactly in how you have to play them, and how I did. My strategy essentially involves a strong, centralized firebase with mobile mechanized arms of specialists. The idea is that the fire base can weaken and/or destroy entire squads with massed fire, assisted with tank and walker support, and the mobile arms (including a couple squads of close combat specialists) can both clean-up whatever the fire teams leave behind and also intercept troops who attempt to assault the fire line. This kind of mixed troop/mechanized list is usually referred to as a "hammer and anvil" approach. 

In fact the game ended up working out exactly that way, since Daemons have no real choice but assault. Because of the staticness and pure volume of fire being put up by the gunline, they focused there since everything was all together, and then the mobile arm pincered in behind them. While I did take some major causalities when the Daemons did manage to get into close combat, the pincer movement worked out quite well, and the assaulters were severely underpowered due to the high number of causalities the fire base provided. I think their highlight was taking out 3 Daemon Princes in a single turn of shooting, as well as some other miscellaneous causalities. It also helps that the average Dire Avenger is not as pathetic at close combat as the average Fire Warrior is; DAs can actually hold out decently well in CC, whereas FWs normally just get mauled.

I think the really nice thing about Eldar is that the intense specialization means they work incredibly synergistically together. You don't really have to decide too much about what each squad should be doing, in a certain sense; because each squad has such clearly defined roles, you kind of already "know" what they should be doing, and it becomes merely a matter of making sure they do that. 

The biggest downside of the army really is their range and relative weakness-- the range wasn't as much as issue this past game since I knew the enemy would come to me, but it I were to play my own Tau list I'd have problems being outranged and outgunned. The additional fact that everything is T3 means the likelihood of hero units being instant death'd is quite high, although again that didn't come up this past game. There are of course ways to get around this, but I'm going to have to try this list out a couple more times before I start tinkering with it. It's a strong base, and I look forward to seeing how it fares against other armies. 

In conclusion, both the armies are strong and personally really fit my playstyle, and despite their numerous similarities have some very big key differences, making them both very fun to play. I don't think at the moment either looks necessarily better than the other, and I won't be surprised if instead of one default army, I now have two. I might publish an extended version of the battle report of the last game if there's interest, but otherwise that's about all I have to say at the moment.

-HTMC