Pre-fall Eldar

I got to wondering how a Pre-fall eldar army would look like, and how to field one.
Now, Dark Eldar are closer to Pre-Fall Eldar culturally, but the Craftworlders still have their psychic powers.

The Pre-Fall eldar apparently had near magical levels of technology so it stands to reason that they;d have vehicles and weapons just as powerful as our, but with a resilience as high as the Craftworlders stuff. Since they didn't have Slaanesh slowly draining their souls through their genitals, they didn't need to absorb souls, as such, as I don't think Power from Pain would apply.

With Khaine and the whole pantheon still up and running, there wouldn't be an avatar or Harlequins, in my opinion.

Overall, it seems like the best way to to this would be to make an army with all the good things of both Eldar armies and none of the bad.

I have this in General because I want to focus on conceptualization, not making rules per say. Lets put our thinking caps.

I would say run multiple FoC, 1 with Eldar and 1 with
Dark Kin.
I don't know Edar stuff too good, but You WANT Aspect Warriors, troop Bikers, War Walkers, Psyker(s) and Tanks, while DE pick infantry that NOT suck (well, I guess foot Warriors), Bikes, Bombers/Fighters and Archon (good Autarch).

Limit Yourself to 0-1 in each slot (with exception to HQ and Troops obviously), maybe pick more HS.


Then steamroll over poor Necrons and punt C'Tan :O

I think Local_Ork summed it up best. Maybe make some rules that combine raiders and wave serpents. You gotta model that awesome SOB though.

Im not sure if there where any aspects at all, eldar made them afther fall as path for anger.
Or I get it wrong?

GrenAcid wrote:

Im not sure if there where any aspects at all, eldar made them afther fall as path for anger.
Or I get it wrong?

I'm not sure about that.

The Path was established after the Fall, but the original Aspect Shrines where around before the Fall.

Well Eldar were far more numerous than they were before the fall. So, basically, you have the strengths of the Eldar and the Dark Eldar, while having the numbers of the Imperial Guard

Their Empire did cover the entirety of the galaxy... Probably was bigger than the Imperium.

I guess they were kinda... "generic Star Trek race". You know, one religion, one purpose... just exactly opposite to real cultures.

Dark Eldar already have the numbers of the Imperial Guard. Give me a minute and I'll find what I'm looking for.

Some serious number crunching. From a thread over on Dakka:

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:

Commoragh is a city that compares to the largest of Imperial hives as "a soaring mountain is to a mound of termites", leaving it at roughly the size of a solar system in volume, which meshes well with the whole "contains seven stars" and "is a conglomeration of every old Eldar webway city and estate, technically located across the entire galaxy" things.

To take the mountain/termite analogy way too literally, and waste about half an hour waiting for various wikipedia pages to load, in addition to gratuitously making up the numbers that those pages don't contain, for reasons amounting to "I think it would be funny": if we take the average large termite mound (something like three meters high, and one meter wide, for a very rough volume of 2.4 m^3, considering it to be a cylinder for simplicity's sake), and the volume of mount everest (because this is already ridiculous, so why not go all out?; 8,848 meters high, and we'll assume it's a cone with 45 degree slopes because it's 4am and I don't feel like coming up with something more accurate, giving us 181,252,390,836 m^3), we find that everest is roughly equivalent to 76,964,921,799 termite mounds. The largest Imperial hive is Terra, which has a surface area of 510,072,000 km^2; we have absolutely no information on how deep the hive is, so I'm going to make a guess of five kilometers, which I assume is grossly underestimating it; for simplicities sake, let's ignore the issue that it's a crust on an approximate sphere, and pretend it's a flat box, so we get 2,550,360,000 km^3. Now, to convert that based on the analogy: 196,288,257,959,297,640,000 km^3 (196 quintillion; for reference, the area of a disk with a radius equal to the average distance pluto is from the sun is 106,883,258,684,868,356,273 km^2 (107 quintillion), making the offhand "roughly the size of a solar system" comment not too inaccurate, if conceptualized as a thin disk).

I took some gross liberties in calculating this, and I wouldn't begin to suggest it's accurate, but it does give a nice frame of reference (namely, that mountains are quite a lot bigger than termite mounds), and if we took a more average mountain (I don't know, maybe a third of everest's volume? I confess I don't know the first thing about mountains), and made a wild guess as to the size of a more average hive (maybe the size of the US, about 2% of the Earth's surface?), decided Commoragh was 99.9% empty space for some reason, and gave what remained a population density similar to Alaska (.46 people per square kilometer), only made it per km^3 instead of per km^2, it would still have a massive population (601,950,657,741,846, which is a bit saner, but still patently ridiculous). My math may be off in places, not least of which because I flagrantly ignored significant figures and on account of it being 4 am when I started this, not to mention because I just made up numbers that sounded reasonable when I was doing this.


Of course, this really just goes to demonstrate the complete lack of scale that pops up in 40k fluff, with things like Cadia having a population less than that of the US, or Eldar living in a couple dozen planet sized ships, which notably provide significantly more living space than a thin layer covering a small portion of a planet, and yet being treated as though they had a total population barely larger than Cadia's...

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:

To try to make it more realistic, let's assume the "soaring mountain" in the analogy is actually just a big hill (say, 2,000 times the size of a termite mound), and the hive in question only covers a third of the surface of a planet roughly the size of Terra, we still get something around 1,683,237,600,000 km^3. If it were as sparsely populated as Idaho (and we decide that per km^2 should be per km^3, further reducing the density since people live in an effectively flat plain on the surface, less than a hundred meters high under most circumstances; 7.3 people per km^2, the seventh lowest in the US; for comparison, the most densely populated state, New Jersey, has a density of 462 people per km^2), it would still come to 12,287,634,480,000 (twelve trillion), in the same ballpark as estimations of the Guard's numbers.

Actually, I am pretty sure that Aspect Warriors are a product of the fall.

Remember, pre-fall Eldar means over ten thousand years from the current books. I'm not sure how much really solid fluff exists surrounding that period, at least not for the Eldar, but you have to preclude using Aspects, Incubi, and PfP (Harlies?) for certain. Possibly, you'd take out a lot more than that. I'm not sure how much the Eldar used Wraithbone pre-fall and I doubt they used Spirit Stones at all.

Basically, it is good you aren't planning on hammering out a useable codex right away, because I think most of it would involve things that both CWE and DE left behind ages ago.

Incubi would not yet exist in the pre-Fall timeline.

The Eldar shifted over to using robots and things of that nature long before the fall iirc. This is what caused everything to start going downhill. The Eldar had nothing to do with their time but to seek out ever more heinous forms of pleasure.

If you wanted a pre-fall army it would likely contain very few actual Eldar.

I think you would be better focusing on a time after the fall, but perhaps before the craftworld mindset really set in. A time when the aspects were just beginning to be formed for example.

Xelkireth wrote:

Incubi would not yet exist in the pre-Fall timeline.

Exactly.

I don't think there is enough fluff to flesh out a pre fall eldar army. i'd also have to agree with nvs that it would contain no eldar at all. As the eldar race mastered the galaxy they had robots doing all the work for them so they wouldn't need to fight for themselves.

Also, what about (Kr)Orks? If I'm correct, Eldar were Old Ones Grey Knights ("elite psyker force") while Orks were Imperial Guard (DA WAAARHAMMAAAGH!) during First War.

Thats a cool idea actually. Maybe move away form Pre-Fall to War in Heaven era. Elite Eldar psychic teams supported by masses of Krorks. Sounds like it could be fun.

Actually with swapping Beasts to Nobz and swapping Boyz troop entry with Wyches (could have grenades tho) AND Eldar Tanks as additional dedicated transports (replacement for Orkoids, maybe with 15 point jetbike bike option for them) this would be... playable.

Also, Incubi-but-not-Incubi would fit as Elite Swordsmen... Swordselves (UberBanshees?). Trueborn as Elite Gun...Elves, Scourges...

I think this needs to move to Rule Development.

Right. Sorry. There are also other races (like Joke-a-ero the space monkeys) that could be present during those events.

I also imagine how armanent of Old Ones armies would look? Probably not like Tomb Kings, since old Necrons looked like Pharaohs and that would be confusing.

My previous comment was intended as a compliment and as a nudge to Gobsmakked to move this thread.

Nvs wrote:

The Eldar shifted over to using robots and things of that nature long before the fall iirc. This is what caused everything to start going downhill. The Eldar had nothing to do with their time but to seek out ever more heinous forms of pleasure.

Exactly. You'd see lots of the largescale craftworld tech you see now (titans, engines of vaul) supported by LOTS of robots. Legions of wraithlords (those are pre-Fall tech, just without the soulstone stuff) supported by some titans and superheavy grav tanks. Most Eldar would be too busy having fun to fight a war.
And the Aspect shrines were most definitely a product of the Fall, even though they may have been founded before the fall, just like lots of craftworlds left a good time before the Fall actually occurred. The entire idea behind the paths is to control the Eldar psyche, to prevent the Eldar from going all pre-Fall wack again.

Nudge, nudge, say no moar!

Alright now that that's out of the way (thanks Gobsmakked), we can work on some crunch.
From what in getting we can have:
Robots (Wraitords, Wraithguard)
Engines of Vaul
Faster Eldar tanks
Ork auxiliaries
not-aspect warriors

Unfortunately its 3am here so I've got to sleep, more on this tomorrow.

I can imagine that as the robots that the pre-fall eldar used was not driven by spirit stones but by "magic" or what it now was that fuelled them, they should not have wraithsight. In any case, should this list be interesting the warriors should be coming from either when the eldar were conquering the galaxy or when the fall was close, as during the time when the eldar was decadent they barely had to battle. At least not by being warriors themselves.

You should also remember each Eldar warrior before the Fall would be on a totally different plane than either the Aspects or the Dark Eldar are right now. Mostly because they didn't have to finght their wars anymore, and the few individuals that decided to be soldiers full time would have ages to perfect their craft. Individuals like the Phoenix Lords are the kind of warriors I imagine pre-Fall Eldar would be like.
The Eldar would still use all of their psychic might, and be at a physical height only the DE can equal these days. So a mix between an Archon and an Autarch in terms of combat prowess, with slightly more civilized DE-like mindset and the powers of a Farseer.