What do you think?
Rate this book
Warhammer 40,000: 7th Edition #Codex
Codex: Eldar Craftworlds
War Elevated To Artform.
Though they once ruled the stars, the Eldar brought about a terrible curse that shattered their empire forever. Crossing the galaxy on their vast world-ships, lead by the most powerful psykers in the universe, they rage hard against the dying of the light. Under the leadership of Farseers, psychics capable of planning thousands of years into the future with patience and confidence unmatched by any race, the Eldar wish to see their empire burn brightly once more, illuminated by the glory of total war, before fate consigns them to dark oblivion.
This 160-page, full-colour hardback book contains:
- detailed backgrounds and stories of the fall of the Eldar, with full descriptions of those who survived the cataclysmic manifesting of Slaanesh;
- materials, colour schemes and heraldry for various different craftworlds and Aspect Warrior shrines, with stunning photography showcasing quality Citadel miniatures;
- datasheets, Formations, Warlord Traits and Relics, plus two psychic disciplines and a unique Detachment – the Craftworld Warhost;
- backgrounds and rules for the full range of Eldar miniatures* including the Autarch, Windriders, Warlock Skyrunner and Farseer Skyrunner.
*this does not include Harlequins, who are covered in Codex: Eldar Harlequins.
Though they once ruled the stars, the Eldar brought about a terrible curse that shattered their empire forever. Crossing the galaxy on their vast world-ships, lead by the most powerful psykers in the universe, they rage hard against the dying of the light. Under the leadership of Farseers, psychics capable of planning thousands of years into the future with patience and confidence unmatched by any race, the Eldar wish to see their empire burn brightly once more, illuminated by the glory of total war, before fate consigns them to dark oblivion.
This 160-page, full-colour hardback book contains:
- detailed backgrounds and stories of the fall of the Eldar, with full descriptions of those who survived the cataclysmic manifesting of Slaanesh;
- materials, colour schemes and heraldry for various different craftworlds and Aspect Warrior shrines, with stunning photography showcasing quality Citadel miniatures;
- datasheets, Formations, Warlord Traits and Relics, plus two psychic disciplines and a unique Detachment – the Craftworld Warhost;
- backgrounds and rules for the full range of Eldar miniatures* including the Autarch, Windriders, Warlock Skyrunner and Farseer Skyrunner.
*this does not include Harlequins, who are covered in Codex: Eldar Harlequins.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2015
1 person is currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Games Workshop
1,017 books109 followersGames Workshop Group PLC (often abbreviated as GW) is a British miniature wargaming manufacturing company. Games Workshop is best known as developer and publisher of the tabletop wargames Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000 and The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 3, 2015
You really have to wonder what goes through the heads of Games Workshop writers some days. On some occasions they've produced fantastic, outstanding work which shows just why Warhammer 40,000 is the granddaddy of all tabletop wargaming. Then you have monuments, staggering monolithic works raised above all else which all but scream "There was a point, we bloody well missed it!" Guess which one this is.
This codex is not good. Not bad, certainly broken in quite a few ways. but it isn't the Clan Raukaan some people were dreading. That said, it's quite the accomplishment to name your codex after some single part of the universe, promising to focus upon it far more than ever before, even sticking a long underutilized faction on the front, then do bugger all with it. Perhaps the worst crime of all is that the codex is actually a sham, a misnomer, a pointless re-naming to get fan interest when this is little more than the next Codex: Eldar. Honestly, remove the cover and you'd never be able to tell that this was supposedly Eldar: Codex Craftworlds over the common or garden armybook.
Right off of the bat, let's get the first point established shall we? There's no expansions to prior lore. Unlike what people had hoped for, the writers do little to nothing with the craftworlds and we learn no new details about them. Nothing which past books didn't tell, no new revelations about their society or their nature, nor even a little more to the big name ones themselves.
Just about every craftworld here is stuck, yet again, with about two or three paragraphs to flesh them out, just about all of which emphasise upon nothing but the militarized side of things. Beil-Tan is still the Fascist state of the eldar race, Saim-Hann is still woefully underdeveloped, Alaitoc is Ranger town once more (with a tacked on Necron Dynasty vendetta), nothing of importance happened to Iyanden prior to Kraken apparently, and Ulthwé has little else to it beyond "Chaos is coming, look busy!"
Even the minor craftworlds, those rarely seen, remain woefully underrepresented and lack much to help truly define them. Given even less space than the major craftworlds, each effectively boils down to one or two sections or ideas with little room to develop or help represent their way of life. Of those there, only Lugganath and Mymeara remain relatively well rounded, with the others focusing far too much upon a single recent, defining event or their warhost. Few even bother to go so far as to actually account for any battles, victories or the mass slaughters their kind are so frequently subjugated to thanks to lazy writing, and we're just stuck with the same cookie-cutter descriptions as last time.
The thing which really damns the book as a whole is that, ultimately, so much of this is effectively recycled from the last edition. Little to nothing new is actually added here, and the few parts which aren't borderline copy-paste jobs only exist to announce "yo dawg, these guys are good at what they do!" It follows the same format as Khorne Daemonkin did, yet at the same time the writers there seem to have failed to understand why that worked but it doesn't here. One was a full army and a religious cult, the other is a diverse fragmentary race of beings who are the last of their kind and venerate a lost homeland. You can't tell that by focusing entirely upon the military or just outlining what each unit does. Hell, if anything their new approach has actually made things all the worse in this regard. Khorne Daemonkin focused upon telling tales of massive battles and victories, while here the book instead focuses purely upon fragmentary eye-witness bits of conflicts first and foremost.
So many subtle elements or essential parts of the race's mythos are either overlooked, underutilised or barely commented upon at all. To give one quick example, the Rhana Dandra isn't mentioned at all in the book beyond a brief comparison by Nightspear. Atop of this, so many crucial ideas such as the fact Autarchs and Exarchs are accursed as much as blessed (trapped on their Path and ultimately at a dead end) is completely overlooked, as is any real relationship between the craftworlds and Exodite colonies. The many opportunities to do so are squandered so badly it's astounding to think that Games Workshop thought the book deserved this price tag. The actual lore, on the whole, is so bare bones that were you to remove the obvious padding and relentlessly repeated information, it would barely make up a third of its overall page count - and that's before getting to the actual damn padding!
In the codex's middle, from page fifty-seven to ninety-three, the entire damn armybook suddenly diverges to immediately spam images of model upon model. With pointless close-ups of armies over and over again, some of the worst painted minitures ever to bear the 'Eavy Metal logo (honestly, I know casual painters who could have produced a masterpiece compared to Yriel here) and some quite obvious photoshopped efforts to make certain units look imposing. Oh, but that's only after the book opts to repeat all the details and information about the craftworlds and Aspect Shrines it just showed the reader right before this section. This would be like reading the same chapter twice over in a novel, only for the characters to be wearing hats the second time around. Repeating information to pad out their books has long been a sin Games Workshop has wholeheartedly embraced, but this is just getting ridiculous by this point!
Consider for a moment what, rather than pointless spam, essential parts could have been added which the codex otherwise skipped:
An examination of the psychic power of the eldar.
Descriptions on how the eldar manipulate other races and alter fate to ensure their own survival.
How the craftworlds have drifted apart.
Why the craftworlds have drifted apart and how some distrust others.
Lengthy campaigns and wars against their foes.
The race's role on the galactic stage and how they have participated in major wars.
How Craftworld and Dark Eldar interact with one another.
The various ruins, vaults and seals left by their race all over the galaxy, desperately trying to hold Chaos at bay.
Victories.
No, sadly that last one is not an exaggeration. Go through this book and you'll find few to no actual wins made by any eldar army. Or any actual damn battles described involving the eldar army. "Show don't tell" is supposed to be one of the basic rules when it comes to showing off anything, from events to character abilities, so how the hell does Games Workshop keep getting this so utterly wrong? It's been bad enough on some previous books where they've gutted any actual stories of battles or campaigns, but now it seems even giving the army a player might be interested in a genuine win is utterly out of the question.
The writers' determination to utterly deny the eldar any kind of victory or glory moment can be best seen in the book's timeline. As if the title "The Doom of the Eldar" wasn't damning enough, what follows is a veritable plague of retreats, draws and losses without end.
The entire opening section completely skips over anything of significant detail surrounding the Empire, and just opts to detail the bare basics of how it fell, then starts skipping forwards a few millennia, coveringly only a few known tibbits from the Horus Heresy. Then the real defeats start.
764.M34 is titled the Shattering of Lugganath, and contains the following:
"The Emperor's Children ravage Craftworld Lugganath in Slannesh's name, killing thousands of Eldar before the are repelled."
514.M38 has this lovely bit to it:
"The Eldar of Ulthwé and the Jade Knife Kabal of Commorragh battle for dominance within the shattered spars of the webway. An uneasy truce is called only when the death toll becomes unbearable."
794.M41 contains Khorne's pets running wild on a craftworld:
"Caelec the Wanderer breaches a sealed runic portal, only to find it leads of Khorne's realm. A warband of hound-headed fiends slays Caelec and follows his scent to Yme-Loc, causing utter carnage before it is finally banished to the ether."
Oh, and we can't go without the Imperium getting involved in 801.M41 with a lovely side dish of character assassination:
"When Craftworld Yme-Loc refuses to yield its secrets to an Adeptus Mechanicus war fleet, battle breaks out within the armouries of Vaul. Millions die before the Tech-Priests sieze enough Eldar technology to sate their predatory curiosity."
... You know, you'd be forgiven for thinking someone on the writing team might not be the biggest fan of this army.
The only things the eldar actually get as victories are stuff lifted wholesale from the most recent codices and Valedor, which even then seem to emphasise as much on eldar losses as possible. That and also open up some very big questions such as noting that certain craftworlds (Iyanden going from what the timeline suggests) set up multiple planetary colonies away from their mobile fortress planets. That and the fact said mobile fortress cities of psychic bone and raw firepower can easily be plundered by anyone looking to have a bit of fun at the space elves' expense. That or someone read the praise given to the past few codices willingness not to coddle armies and show them losing once in a while and used this as an excuse to go curb stomp some eldar in their own bloody book!
Perhaps the single worst thing though is how the codex utterly abandons any opportunity to detail lengthy conflicts, campaigns or even major battles for a few pages. Every shred of info here is delivered piecemeal and without any degree of lengthy explanation, and for all the conflicts it alludes to we see absolutely none of this. So, as a result even the very angle the book is going for in trying to only focus upon the eldar as an army is still woefully underrepresented and astoundingly shallow when it comes to any depictions of war.
So, is there anything good here? Yes and no. While the writers here might have heavily botched a great deal of lore when it comes to presenting the race, it didn't actually ruin any lore. There's no attempt to bulldoze their way through old ideas or cripple previous concepts, and even Codex: Iyanden itself seems to have been almost entirely ignored. The only actual bit referenced stems from the novel Valedor which, equally, seemed to utterly ignore the very codex it was supposed to promote. Atop of this there are a few minute gems of half good ideas and interesting elements flung about here and there. Some details surrounding the Aspect Shrines do try to present them as individual dojos of a kind, with their own traditions and histories. Each is given a paragraph to better flesh out certain bits of their style or history, and it genuinely does give the impression of a very individualistic army of specialist groups without going nuts. Atop of this the artwork, what little new stuff we get, is actually quite nice.
On the lore front Codex: Eldar Craftworlds is more a massive missed opportunity. It fails to expand upon anything we previously knew, fails to actually give any substantial focus to any of the major craftworlds, fails to account for even a fraction of the army's history or concepts, and fails to expand upon the basic army itself. With Codex: Space Marines showing how a book could be divided up to best represent several sub-factions and Codex: Tau Empire building a real society while still focusing primarily upon its army, there were no excuses here. While it might not be the gibbering realm of madness which was the last Supplement, this was just unimpressive as an effort. Honestly, you'd really do better just to save your money if you're in it for the background history and lore.
Still, that's only half the codex. Next time we delve into the rules. Oh sweet Emperor, the rules.
Rules:
So with the rather flawed and generally lacking lore out of the way, now we can move onto the rules. Let's be blunt with this one from the outset:
Games Workshop has officially shit the bed. Not in quite the way you might expect but it certainly left a stink.
This is not something so instantaneously obvious as Codex: Grey Knights, yet by the time you lay eyes on the Wraithguard you'll be wondering just what the QA testers were smoking that particular day. Perhaps most damning of all, the exact way the game designers went about this completely contradicts the most basic gaming ideology behind the eldar.
Before we really get into the rules, i'd like to really discuss where I personally think this went wrong and how it fell to bits. Most of it can come down to three things: A lack of respect for any veteran gamers of any kind, a value of money over mechanical balance, and Unbound Armies. The last one in particular is likely the biggest point as the other two substantially contributed to its creation, and it's very likely this codex was designed with that system in mind first and foremost, to try and push new units.
Unbound armies, for those who have (understandably) stopped keeping up with new Editions, is a system which dispensed with the old force organisation chart. It effectively boiled down to allowing anyone to take any unit they want and had White Dwarf authors gushing over an all Broadside and all Riptide list for the Tau Empire. With this, tactics truly went down the drain and it has been an addition which has been both heavily derided and directly opposed for crippling the tournament scene and even damaging building the skills of new players.
While the old style of armies can still be taken, in any outright battle or direct fight it's at a substantial disadvantage. Without that chart, there was far less of a structure to forces, far less of a need to balance things out, and less limitations on what could be taken where. It meant min-maxed forces could be taken en mass. This meant that there was going to be less of a need to build certain units which would need to have failings made up for by others. As such the ultra-specialised Aspect Warriors seem to have been written to be far far less the glass cannons of yesteryear. Rather than truly balancing them though, unfortunately it seems they took the Grey Knights route of just removing weaknesses and buffing just about everything possible.
The end result of approaching a problem like by adding effectively giving the army steroids is that it effectively removes any potential shortcomings and need for strategy. As such, even as some players are praising the fact Banshees are viable for the first time in living memory and there are some genuinely good ideas in here, they're missing the fact that this is ultimately turning the army into something which can be used to crush the enemy no matter which way you put it together. Unless you intentionally go in there and screw up the list beyond repair, you're going to have a fighting chance most of the time.
Such a screw up would be bad enough on its own, but the absolute blithering obtuseness on display here is staggering. Why? Well, it's actually focusing upon an army's most criticised points and promptly using them as suggestions for the new one. Think of it for a second, one of the biggest failings of the previous Codex: Eldar was how spammy it could be with Wave Serpents, Wraithknights and even a few other forces. This was already bad, but by making each and every unit here vastly stronger overall, it only opens the floodgates for this to increase tenfold. As a result, while the codex might appear sound on a mechanical level to play-testers, on a tactical and social level it is utterly abhorrent. It's a codex which makes the army strong with little to no thought - and we've seen how well that goes down in previous books, eh Blood Angels players? - and means players can get away with taking the easy option and still win.
Still, the design decisions and overarching problems with the book's structure are only the start of this codex's big failings. Time to get into the real cluster-fuck without end, starting with another staggeringly bad decision: Hand-held Strength D weapons.
No, sadly this isn't a joke. You can now legitimately outfit entire armies with mini-Volcano Cannons and it's perfectly rules legal!
Want to know the dumbest part though? Along with all Wraithcannon variants, apparently all D-cannons also count under this. Yep, your Guardian squads can now have a fifty-five point Titan-killing weapon attached to them via a small weapons platform. The cannon fodder of this army are now more dangerous and combat effective against expensive troop transports, vehicles and artillery pieces, than most elite specialist units in other armies.
Even trying to charge some of these units to take them down in close combat is tantamount to suicide now, thanks to the new D-Scythes which are exactly what you'd think they are. Sure, they top out at Strength 4 when it comes to Instant Death calculations, but that hardly makes these things any less stupidly powerful. You know, the review could just end here as this one part honestly wrecks the entire codex and any semblance of balance, even internally, yet there's still more sins yet to be seen.
Brace yourselves folks, the staggering paint fume huffing stupidity of this creative team is about to strike again!
Foremost among these is the Falcon Grav-Tank, long ignored and overshadowed by its APC cousin, this thing can now effectively pull a Storm Raven. Capable of Deep Striking and not scattering, these can be deployed in trios within four inches of one another. Yeah, on the second turn of both games you can probably expect half the enemy army to suddenly drop behind your lines and kill most of your big bloody units in a single strike, especially those expensive tanks with appetizingly weak rear armour. As if several bleak years of multiple space marine armies doing this exact damn stunt wasn't enough, apparently someone thought it'd be a great idea to bring it back in full force.
A few of the other speedily killy units in the Craftworlds' arsenal has similarly become insanely overblown to the point of being downright broken. The already fairly reputable Swooping Hawks are first on this list, with a staggering power boost which would make the Dark Eldar white with envy. Along with suddenly being able to move at 18" in movement which can lead to them leapfrogging across the table and crashing into enemy units before they have the time to fire back, all of them can now be equipped with Haywire grenades for four points per model. This works on fliers as well when they move over their position, meaning all of a sudden any expensive airborne skimmer is suddenly running the risk of being cut down by flocks of winged grenade lobbing elves. Along with retaining Skyleap, the unit also ignores scattering whilst Deep Striking when they are accompanied by an Exarch.
Striking Scorpions notably suddenly gain the ability to potentially kill Wraithlords on the turn they charge. No, seriously, their chainswords might not be able to hurt them but Mandiblasters now can. Upgraded so that they auto-wound on 4+, so anything over Toughness 3 is suddenly far easier to seriously hurt, meaning there's a chance the unit can run in and kill something they would otherwise be unable to harm at all.
Click the links to read in full.
This codex is not good. Not bad, certainly broken in quite a few ways. but it isn't the Clan Raukaan some people were dreading. That said, it's quite the accomplishment to name your codex after some single part of the universe, promising to focus upon it far more than ever before, even sticking a long underutilized faction on the front, then do bugger all with it. Perhaps the worst crime of all is that the codex is actually a sham, a misnomer, a pointless re-naming to get fan interest when this is little more than the next Codex: Eldar. Honestly, remove the cover and you'd never be able to tell that this was supposedly Eldar: Codex Craftworlds over the common or garden armybook.
Right off of the bat, let's get the first point established shall we? There's no expansions to prior lore. Unlike what people had hoped for, the writers do little to nothing with the craftworlds and we learn no new details about them. Nothing which past books didn't tell, no new revelations about their society or their nature, nor even a little more to the big name ones themselves.
Just about every craftworld here is stuck, yet again, with about two or three paragraphs to flesh them out, just about all of which emphasise upon nothing but the militarized side of things. Beil-Tan is still the Fascist state of the eldar race, Saim-Hann is still woefully underdeveloped, Alaitoc is Ranger town once more (with a tacked on Necron Dynasty vendetta), nothing of importance happened to Iyanden prior to Kraken apparently, and Ulthwé has little else to it beyond "Chaos is coming, look busy!"
Even the minor craftworlds, those rarely seen, remain woefully underrepresented and lack much to help truly define them. Given even less space than the major craftworlds, each effectively boils down to one or two sections or ideas with little room to develop or help represent their way of life. Of those there, only Lugganath and Mymeara remain relatively well rounded, with the others focusing far too much upon a single recent, defining event or their warhost. Few even bother to go so far as to actually account for any battles, victories or the mass slaughters their kind are so frequently subjugated to thanks to lazy writing, and we're just stuck with the same cookie-cutter descriptions as last time.
The thing which really damns the book as a whole is that, ultimately, so much of this is effectively recycled from the last edition. Little to nothing new is actually added here, and the few parts which aren't borderline copy-paste jobs only exist to announce "yo dawg, these guys are good at what they do!" It follows the same format as Khorne Daemonkin did, yet at the same time the writers there seem to have failed to understand why that worked but it doesn't here. One was a full army and a religious cult, the other is a diverse fragmentary race of beings who are the last of their kind and venerate a lost homeland. You can't tell that by focusing entirely upon the military or just outlining what each unit does. Hell, if anything their new approach has actually made things all the worse in this regard. Khorne Daemonkin focused upon telling tales of massive battles and victories, while here the book instead focuses purely upon fragmentary eye-witness bits of conflicts first and foremost.
So many subtle elements or essential parts of the race's mythos are either overlooked, underutilised or barely commented upon at all. To give one quick example, the Rhana Dandra isn't mentioned at all in the book beyond a brief comparison by Nightspear. Atop of this, so many crucial ideas such as the fact Autarchs and Exarchs are accursed as much as blessed (trapped on their Path and ultimately at a dead end) is completely overlooked, as is any real relationship between the craftworlds and Exodite colonies. The many opportunities to do so are squandered so badly it's astounding to think that Games Workshop thought the book deserved this price tag. The actual lore, on the whole, is so bare bones that were you to remove the obvious padding and relentlessly repeated information, it would barely make up a third of its overall page count - and that's before getting to the actual damn padding!
In the codex's middle, from page fifty-seven to ninety-three, the entire damn armybook suddenly diverges to immediately spam images of model upon model. With pointless close-ups of armies over and over again, some of the worst painted minitures ever to bear the 'Eavy Metal logo (honestly, I know casual painters who could have produced a masterpiece compared to Yriel here) and some quite obvious photoshopped efforts to make certain units look imposing. Oh, but that's only after the book opts to repeat all the details and information about the craftworlds and Aspect Shrines it just showed the reader right before this section. This would be like reading the same chapter twice over in a novel, only for the characters to be wearing hats the second time around. Repeating information to pad out their books has long been a sin Games Workshop has wholeheartedly embraced, but this is just getting ridiculous by this point!
Consider for a moment what, rather than pointless spam, essential parts could have been added which the codex otherwise skipped:
An examination of the psychic power of the eldar.
Descriptions on how the eldar manipulate other races and alter fate to ensure their own survival.
How the craftworlds have drifted apart.
Why the craftworlds have drifted apart and how some distrust others.
Lengthy campaigns and wars against their foes.
The race's role on the galactic stage and how they have participated in major wars.
How Craftworld and Dark Eldar interact with one another.
The various ruins, vaults and seals left by their race all over the galaxy, desperately trying to hold Chaos at bay.
Victories.
No, sadly that last one is not an exaggeration. Go through this book and you'll find few to no actual wins made by any eldar army. Or any actual damn battles described involving the eldar army. "Show don't tell" is supposed to be one of the basic rules when it comes to showing off anything, from events to character abilities, so how the hell does Games Workshop keep getting this so utterly wrong? It's been bad enough on some previous books where they've gutted any actual stories of battles or campaigns, but now it seems even giving the army a player might be interested in a genuine win is utterly out of the question.
The writers' determination to utterly deny the eldar any kind of victory or glory moment can be best seen in the book's timeline. As if the title "The Doom of the Eldar" wasn't damning enough, what follows is a veritable plague of retreats, draws and losses without end.
The entire opening section completely skips over anything of significant detail surrounding the Empire, and just opts to detail the bare basics of how it fell, then starts skipping forwards a few millennia, coveringly only a few known tibbits from the Horus Heresy. Then the real defeats start.
764.M34 is titled the Shattering of Lugganath, and contains the following:
"The Emperor's Children ravage Craftworld Lugganath in Slannesh's name, killing thousands of Eldar before the are repelled."
514.M38 has this lovely bit to it:
"The Eldar of Ulthwé and the Jade Knife Kabal of Commorragh battle for dominance within the shattered spars of the webway. An uneasy truce is called only when the death toll becomes unbearable."
794.M41 contains Khorne's pets running wild on a craftworld:
"Caelec the Wanderer breaches a sealed runic portal, only to find it leads of Khorne's realm. A warband of hound-headed fiends slays Caelec and follows his scent to Yme-Loc, causing utter carnage before it is finally banished to the ether."
Oh, and we can't go without the Imperium getting involved in 801.M41 with a lovely side dish of character assassination:
"When Craftworld Yme-Loc refuses to yield its secrets to an Adeptus Mechanicus war fleet, battle breaks out within the armouries of Vaul. Millions die before the Tech-Priests sieze enough Eldar technology to sate their predatory curiosity."
... You know, you'd be forgiven for thinking someone on the writing team might not be the biggest fan of this army.
The only things the eldar actually get as victories are stuff lifted wholesale from the most recent codices and Valedor, which even then seem to emphasise as much on eldar losses as possible. That and also open up some very big questions such as noting that certain craftworlds (Iyanden going from what the timeline suggests) set up multiple planetary colonies away from their mobile fortress planets. That and the fact said mobile fortress cities of psychic bone and raw firepower can easily be plundered by anyone looking to have a bit of fun at the space elves' expense. That or someone read the praise given to the past few codices willingness not to coddle armies and show them losing once in a while and used this as an excuse to go curb stomp some eldar in their own bloody book!
Perhaps the single worst thing though is how the codex utterly abandons any opportunity to detail lengthy conflicts, campaigns or even major battles for a few pages. Every shred of info here is delivered piecemeal and without any degree of lengthy explanation, and for all the conflicts it alludes to we see absolutely none of this. So, as a result even the very angle the book is going for in trying to only focus upon the eldar as an army is still woefully underrepresented and astoundingly shallow when it comes to any depictions of war.
So, is there anything good here? Yes and no. While the writers here might have heavily botched a great deal of lore when it comes to presenting the race, it didn't actually ruin any lore. There's no attempt to bulldoze their way through old ideas or cripple previous concepts, and even Codex: Iyanden itself seems to have been almost entirely ignored. The only actual bit referenced stems from the novel Valedor which, equally, seemed to utterly ignore the very codex it was supposed to promote. Atop of this there are a few minute gems of half good ideas and interesting elements flung about here and there. Some details surrounding the Aspect Shrines do try to present them as individual dojos of a kind, with their own traditions and histories. Each is given a paragraph to better flesh out certain bits of their style or history, and it genuinely does give the impression of a very individualistic army of specialist groups without going nuts. Atop of this the artwork, what little new stuff we get, is actually quite nice.
On the lore front Codex: Eldar Craftworlds is more a massive missed opportunity. It fails to expand upon anything we previously knew, fails to actually give any substantial focus to any of the major craftworlds, fails to account for even a fraction of the army's history or concepts, and fails to expand upon the basic army itself. With Codex: Space Marines showing how a book could be divided up to best represent several sub-factions and Codex: Tau Empire building a real society while still focusing primarily upon its army, there were no excuses here. While it might not be the gibbering realm of madness which was the last Supplement, this was just unimpressive as an effort. Honestly, you'd really do better just to save your money if you're in it for the background history and lore.
Still, that's only half the codex. Next time we delve into the rules. Oh sweet Emperor, the rules.
Rules:
So with the rather flawed and generally lacking lore out of the way, now we can move onto the rules. Let's be blunt with this one from the outset:
Games Workshop has officially shit the bed. Not in quite the way you might expect but it certainly left a stink.
This is not something so instantaneously obvious as Codex: Grey Knights, yet by the time you lay eyes on the Wraithguard you'll be wondering just what the QA testers were smoking that particular day. Perhaps most damning of all, the exact way the game designers went about this completely contradicts the most basic gaming ideology behind the eldar.
Before we really get into the rules, i'd like to really discuss where I personally think this went wrong and how it fell to bits. Most of it can come down to three things: A lack of respect for any veteran gamers of any kind, a value of money over mechanical balance, and Unbound Armies. The last one in particular is likely the biggest point as the other two substantially contributed to its creation, and it's very likely this codex was designed with that system in mind first and foremost, to try and push new units.
Unbound armies, for those who have (understandably) stopped keeping up with new Editions, is a system which dispensed with the old force organisation chart. It effectively boiled down to allowing anyone to take any unit they want and had White Dwarf authors gushing over an all Broadside and all Riptide list for the Tau Empire. With this, tactics truly went down the drain and it has been an addition which has been both heavily derided and directly opposed for crippling the tournament scene and even damaging building the skills of new players.
While the old style of armies can still be taken, in any outright battle or direct fight it's at a substantial disadvantage. Without that chart, there was far less of a structure to forces, far less of a need to balance things out, and less limitations on what could be taken where. It meant min-maxed forces could be taken en mass. This meant that there was going to be less of a need to build certain units which would need to have failings made up for by others. As such the ultra-specialised Aspect Warriors seem to have been written to be far far less the glass cannons of yesteryear. Rather than truly balancing them though, unfortunately it seems they took the Grey Knights route of just removing weaknesses and buffing just about everything possible.
The end result of approaching a problem like by adding effectively giving the army steroids is that it effectively removes any potential shortcomings and need for strategy. As such, even as some players are praising the fact Banshees are viable for the first time in living memory and there are some genuinely good ideas in here, they're missing the fact that this is ultimately turning the army into something which can be used to crush the enemy no matter which way you put it together. Unless you intentionally go in there and screw up the list beyond repair, you're going to have a fighting chance most of the time.
Such a screw up would be bad enough on its own, but the absolute blithering obtuseness on display here is staggering. Why? Well, it's actually focusing upon an army's most criticised points and promptly using them as suggestions for the new one. Think of it for a second, one of the biggest failings of the previous Codex: Eldar was how spammy it could be with Wave Serpents, Wraithknights and even a few other forces. This was already bad, but by making each and every unit here vastly stronger overall, it only opens the floodgates for this to increase tenfold. As a result, while the codex might appear sound on a mechanical level to play-testers, on a tactical and social level it is utterly abhorrent. It's a codex which makes the army strong with little to no thought - and we've seen how well that goes down in previous books, eh Blood Angels players? - and means players can get away with taking the easy option and still win.
Still, the design decisions and overarching problems with the book's structure are only the start of this codex's big failings. Time to get into the real cluster-fuck without end, starting with another staggeringly bad decision: Hand-held Strength D weapons.
No, sadly this isn't a joke. You can now legitimately outfit entire armies with mini-Volcano Cannons and it's perfectly rules legal!
Want to know the dumbest part though? Along with all Wraithcannon variants, apparently all D-cannons also count under this. Yep, your Guardian squads can now have a fifty-five point Titan-killing weapon attached to them via a small weapons platform. The cannon fodder of this army are now more dangerous and combat effective against expensive troop transports, vehicles and artillery pieces, than most elite specialist units in other armies.
Even trying to charge some of these units to take them down in close combat is tantamount to suicide now, thanks to the new D-Scythes which are exactly what you'd think they are. Sure, they top out at Strength 4 when it comes to Instant Death calculations, but that hardly makes these things any less stupidly powerful. You know, the review could just end here as this one part honestly wrecks the entire codex and any semblance of balance, even internally, yet there's still more sins yet to be seen.
Brace yourselves folks, the staggering paint fume huffing stupidity of this creative team is about to strike again!
Foremost among these is the Falcon Grav-Tank, long ignored and overshadowed by its APC cousin, this thing can now effectively pull a Storm Raven. Capable of Deep Striking and not scattering, these can be deployed in trios within four inches of one another. Yeah, on the second turn of both games you can probably expect half the enemy army to suddenly drop behind your lines and kill most of your big bloody units in a single strike, especially those expensive tanks with appetizingly weak rear armour. As if several bleak years of multiple space marine armies doing this exact damn stunt wasn't enough, apparently someone thought it'd be a great idea to bring it back in full force.
A few of the other speedily killy units in the Craftworlds' arsenal has similarly become insanely overblown to the point of being downright broken. The already fairly reputable Swooping Hawks are first on this list, with a staggering power boost which would make the Dark Eldar white with envy. Along with suddenly being able to move at 18" in movement which can lead to them leapfrogging across the table and crashing into enemy units before they have the time to fire back, all of them can now be equipped with Haywire grenades for four points per model. This works on fliers as well when they move over their position, meaning all of a sudden any expensive airborne skimmer is suddenly running the risk of being cut down by flocks of winged grenade lobbing elves. Along with retaining Skyleap, the unit also ignores scattering whilst Deep Striking when they are accompanied by an Exarch.
Striking Scorpions notably suddenly gain the ability to potentially kill Wraithlords on the turn they charge. No, seriously, their chainswords might not be able to hurt them but Mandiblasters now can. Upgraded so that they auto-wound on 4+, so anything over Toughness 3 is suddenly far easier to seriously hurt, meaning there's a chance the unit can run in and kill something they would otherwise be unable to harm at all.
Click the links to read in full.
Displaying 1 of 1 review