Autarch's, Swooping Hawks and Vypers

It's been a while since I updated the blog - rest assured the time was not spend idle and I've been building/fixing and converting eldar at a hell of a rate. Today I wanna talk about some units that I need to put together and I'm wondering how I am going to use them.

Since I have a veritable ton of Swooping hawk and Spiders I thought the best place to start with my Autarch would be with a unit of them. Accordingly here's my idea for the two Exarchs to lead my Spiders and Hawks Respectively. Now the first thing we realize when looking at the Autarch is that he has lots of attacks, high WS and I. Since his shooting options arn't fantastic the best bet would be to stick him in for melee power. Between Swooping hawks and Spiders, the Warp Spiders have a much better Bet in CC with 3+ armor saves and a exarch that can pack power blades right out the box. In addition to this warp spiders often find themselves in assault so that they can avoid getting shot at by enemy force. (It's better to assault a enemy unit that's already been weakened rather than take a entire force's shooting). So augmenting melee power is definately a option.

Option one - the Jumping spider of DOOOOM!
This one is easy, Power Weapon, Warp jump generator, mandiblaster. Since you are a piddly little elf with girly wrists you are only S3, hence you need all the attacks you can get. With this build you get 6 attacks on the charge 3+ 1 for mandiblaster + 1 CCW/pistol + 1 charging. Even with your massive amounts of attacks you will still only inflicts 1-2 wounds on average against most targets of the T4 variety.

Pretty basic really - Keep them with your Warpspiders to benefit from the Exarch's withdraw power and to augment their Melee prowess. This setup will also allow you to use them a bit more aggressively as you are not to afraid of getting hit by small enemy units trying to bog you down.

The downside of course is that you can't really keep him seperately for fear of rolling double's and him going off to have a extended stay with slaanesh. On the upside you do get the benefits of the Master Strategist +1 reserves if you are inclined to deepstriking.

Option two - The Swoopy Exarch of Swoopiness.
Pretty basic again - Swooping Hawk Wings, Reaper launcher. In this case he's purely there to provide bonuses to reserve rolls and to take pot shots at the enemy with the reaper launcher. If you have 2 Autarchs in your force you can deepstrike back on a 2+ so that you can drop another pie on the enemy. While not fantastic this option while atleast help you to bring gaunts and the like down in number, especially if the squad Exarch is armed with a sunrifle. The can do all this from a cool 24" away.

So which do you guys prefer and why ?

As for the Vypers, I'm torn on how to equip these little guys. They are fragile and expensive, so tacking on a even more expensive weapon doesn't appeal to me. In addition to this they have low BS (3) so singleshot weapons arn't a great idea either. Vehicle upgrades are probably also a no-no since a 10/10/10 vehicle ins't going to rock house no matter how many survivability upgrades you tack on.

It's between 2 weapons - the Shuriken cannon and the Multilaser.

The Shuriken cannon is nice, it's cheap at 5 points, fires 3 Shots and is AP5. Not bad at all. The main problem is the 24" range. This means that your AV10 little vehicle will regularly be in range of every squad weapon in the game. Put it this way. A Space marine combat squad spots your little vyper. They are packing a plasma gun. 2 S7 shots and 4 S4 shots doesn't end well for it.

The Second option is the Scatter laser. Triple the cost with a Extra shot thrown in. The main advantage here is that we go up too 36". Now mister Vyper can happily stay out of range of squad weapons (Tau included) and annoy the crap out of your opponent. He now has to dedicate his longer range Antitank firepower to kill it since he's likely not in range to hit it with anything else.

I'd Like Any opinions on these units you guys have to give.