Dark Eldar qualifying as a faction.

[stormblade]

Race doesn't mean much in of itself, word faction seems more fitting as the Tau aren't one race and, argubly, neither are the DE nor the Imperium.
Tyranids defy such classifications alltogather.

[eldargal]

Fair point, I would still argue that the Cabal are not a galactic power as they are a single organisation that exists for a sole purpose as opposed to a faction/race that exists regardless of its goals. That and the fact the ydon't seem to exist anymore.

[LordLucan]

If so then the Cabal is a galactic power as well.

We don't know the extent of the cabal's organisation yet*, but I'd regard them as a power of galactic influence. A secret society of ancient aliens, which their tendrils in both the Imperium, eldar and who knows how many other alien civilisations.


*(Also, we do not know if they have survived until 40K either, so potentially they aren't a 40K faction simply due to being destroyed or overthrown)

[insectum7]

It really isn't hard to figure out: Does a race has the capacity to project their power accross the galxy? If yes, they are a galactic power, if no they are not. How often they choose to do so is irrelevent, how many of them there are is irrelevent and their goals are irrelevent.

Numbers and goals are entirely relevant.

If the entire nation of Guam used air travel to burglarize homes, towns and even the occasional city, but did so without any purpose other than having more burglarized loot than their neighbor, Guam would still not be considered a world power. The rest of the world would think that Guam was a giant nuisance and probably shut it down rather violently. But world power? No.

The DE are a giant pain in the neck. But they ain't a player.

[Stonerhino]

so basically the space marines were winning, until they weren't? That's not really an argument.

The Germans were winning WW2 but still lost. Things are not always as cut and dry as this side lost. Especially when there is a clear turning point in the fighting.

[madd0ct0r]

yeah. agreed. But i fail to understand your argument.

why does space marines losing to DE mean that DE are weaker?. By exactly the same analogy - it's pretty obvious Germany was weaker. that's why they lost.

[Stonerhino]

In the right situation ants or bees can kill a human. But that does not make them stronger races then then humans. Numbers count for a lot. Especially when it's potentually 500 vs 800,000 billion. When the smaller force cause such disproptionent damage. Its hardly something to be proud of.

Eldargal bringing up the IoM and it's attempts to save people is no different then current emergency personel saving people from natural disasters. True every live saved is important but in the bigger picture has little if any affect on the human race as a whole. Even the tsunami from a few years back. It kill thousands but didn't change anything.

[eldargal]

No but if Guam did that and wiped entire cities of the face of the map with little chance of defence or retaliation they would be.

Dark Eldar are a galactic player, auite objectively so. If the yaren't then neitehr are Craftworld Eldar, Orks, Necrons or indeed anyone but the IoM and tyranids.

Numbers and goals are entirely relevant.

If the entire nation of Guam used air travel to burglarize homes, towns and even the occasional city, but did so without any purpose other than having more burglarized loot than their neighbor, Guam would still not be considered a world power. The rest of the world would think that Guam was a giant nuisance and probably shut it down rather violently. But world power? No.

The DE are a giant pain in the neck. But they ain't a player.

Stonerhino, you can't argue that the IoM doesn't care about its population when the Dark Eldar are raiding but then are willing to expend considerable resources defending them and saving them in other situations. Well you can, and do, but it doesn't help your argument.

[Poseidal]

In the right situation ants or bees can kill a human. But that does not make them stronger races then then humans. Numbers count for a lot. Especially when it's potentually 500 vs 800,000 billion. When the smaller force cause such disproptionent damage. Its hardly something to be proud of.

Eldargal bringing up the IoM and it's attempts to save people is no different then current emergency personel saving people from natural disasters. True every live saved is important but in the bigger picture has little if any affect on the human race as a whole. Even the tsunami from a few years back. It kill thousands but didn't change anything.

The point of the section is that despite the damage they caused, they were never a threat. It was a move to eliminate some of the rivals; they brought on the entertainment sector (Wyches) while they were there to make a good show/give trophies. When the job was done, Vect had them removed as fast as they arrived.

[LordLucan]

If the entire nation of Guam used air travel to burglarize homes, towns and even the occasional city, but did so without any purpose other than having more burglarized loot than their neighbor, Guam would still not be considered a world power. The rest of the world would think that Guam was a giant nuisance and probably shut it down rather violently. But world power? No.

That's a flawed analogy.


If Guam had the ability to project their power to every nation on the planet, and were known to completely kill several minor nations and depopulate cities in whichever country they liked, then they would be considered a world power; a vast terrorist organisation threatening every nation. A definite player on the national stage.

Then, and only then, would Guam be an apt analogy for the Dark Eldar.

[solkan]

Honestly, the entire question is wrong. The Imperium of Man isn't a galactic player, and the other races aren't competing against it. The Imperium of Man is the playground.

The Orks are running around kicking up the sand in the playground because it's fun.
The Tyranids are grazing their way through the playground because they're hungry.
The Dark Eldar waltz in, pick up some tasty bits and move some stuff around, then go home and watch TV.
Chaos is running about, waiting for the playground to get closed down.
The Necrons are a bit sleepy, wondering where everyone else came from and why someone else moved into their playground.
The Tau are a few kids off in one corner of the playground that bump into the other kids occasionally.

What has any of the bits of the Imperium done to change that? Nothing. Therefor the Imperium isn't a player worthy of the designation. The Imperium of Man hasn't been a galactic player since Horus Heresy ended galactic crusades.

Remember all of those stories about the Emperor sending out the space marine legions to wipe out other alien civilizations, reunite with lost human worlds, etc., etc., etc. before the Heresy? You don't hear about any of that any more because the Imperium of Man isn't a player any more.

It's like the end of dynastic China. When everyone else is invading you and taking your territory over, or killing your people and taking your resources, you're not a world player any more, you're the playground.

[MvS]

We're essentially discussing a qualitative matter as if it was an objectively quantitative measure. It isn't.

For example, whether a group/nation could be considered a 'world power' is a highly problematic discussion from the word go because the terms are so indistinct. It's easy enough to say that the USA is a world power because of its size, wealth, military might and its ability and political willingness to project its power and influence across the globe. But this doesn't mean that all other world powers need to be (or should be) judged by these same criteria.

We could say that any group that has the ability to exert coercive power (or cause harm or force political change) to a State or nation is a world player, regardless of whether that group is another State, an intergovernmental organisation (like the UN, NATO, EU etc), another quasi-independent international / inter-state organisation (like the World Trade Organisation or the International Court of Justice), or a banking conglomerate, or credit rating agencies, or non-state terrorist organisations, or sub-state pirates hitting important shipping lanes, or religious groups and so on and on.

Any of these could be considered world players in some contexts if we were to judge by how much they can effect governmental policies, political stability of home constituencies, interstate economic stability and so on, it's just that very few of them have a profound effect in every conceivable context. So one specific group or type of group may have a game-changing effect on an individual State or the systems by which States interact but negligible effects in other contexts, but does this specificity mean that the group in question can't be considered a world player? The terms are too inexact and too value laden to come up with a truly objective answer.

To bring this around to the Dark Eldar, trying to compare them to the Tyranids or Orks or the taint of Chaos teeters upon being a fool's errand. It proves little that they don't excite the Imperium to mobilise the same forces with the same urgency as it might against a Hivefleet, because the threats manifest in such different ways. The Imperium can see a Hivefleet coming and has time to respond (having lost numerous planets in the interim). Dark Eldar offer no such time-lapse or steady progression for the Imperium to react to, so we can't judge the Dark Eldar's relevance by the Imperium's response - the context is too different.

Then we could attempt to measure relevance by the totality of the devastation. Yes, we could say, the Dark Eldar can ravage worlds (so are a genuine player), but then we could also say that human lives are cheap and plentiful in the Imperium, so the loss of a few billion human lives isn't really indicative of a genuine threat to the Imperium. But even this logic is flawed because it looks at each Dark Eldar raid as if they exist in a vacuum. They don't.

The Dark Eldar exist alongside the servants of Chaos, and the Tyranids, Orks, Necrons, Craftworld Eldar and Tau. Their threats are not judged in isolation of each other, to do so would be both illogical and grossly incompetent on the part of the Imperium's strategists. The threats they pose are taken in conjunction with each other. So the loss of one Hive World to the Dark Eldar isn't just a limited measure of expendable human lives - although frankly I think it is often underplayed how important lives are to the Imperium ultimately - it is also a measure of how that loss impacts upon the Imperium's resources in relation to all the other threats and considerations that weigh it down.

So how much is lost and for how long in terms of financial tithes, recruits for Imperial organisations and physical materiel through the effective loss of a planetary population to a Dark Eldar Cabal's slave run? What about the knock-on drain of resources and time involved in transporting and repopulating that planet, orientating the new citizens and rebooting its industrial capacity (or whatever) back to normal levels? Add this to the fact that all these considerations take place alongside a backdrop of other problems, such as the endemic nature of heretics, Chaotic cults, alien incursions (etc) in that same region. Perhaps a largely depopulated world would also be a choice gem for other factions to descend upon, making the Imperium's re-population program even more hazardous and expensive (in terms of lives and materiel). What about the effect upon Imperial morale as word gets out that several billion people were stolen away in the night by a force of alien witches that the Imperium can't protect you against? Would this cause panic and/or unrest? Would this help the cause of anti-Imperial movements (Chaotic, xeno and others) in terms of ideological traction and recruitment? How important would this be to Imperial authorities?

Anyway, to summarise my point here, any group/faction that can cause planetary-scale harm to the Imperium on a consistent basis is most certainly a major player in the 40K setting, because the setting itself is one of holistic threat. If the problem was either/or, with the choice being between the Tyranids and the Dark Eldar, then we could probably say that the Tyranids are a greater, more total or more immediate threat. But that isn't the setting. The Dark Eldar exist alongside the Tyranids and all the other galactic threats, and as one succeeds in decimating a planet and draining Imperial resources, the others are doing the same thing at the same time, and the ripples from one have consequences with others. All the effects are ultimately cumulative and interconnected.

The predators are all very visibly circling the wounded beast at the same time, and the beast doesn't just ignore or shrug off one circling predator because another seems closer or bigger. If it does it will surely die all the more quickly as the ignored predator darts in and bites away chunks of muscle - muscle that the beast needed to fight off the other predators. Or to stretch and diversify my analogies a bit further (apologies!), one doesn't simply say that gangrene in our toes doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things because we're currently trying to overcome a brain tumour, heart disease and sclerosis of the liver. The harm caused by any of these will affect how well we cope with the harm caused by the others, and if we ignore the seemingly minor touch of gangrene altogether, if we really want to live, we will still end up with septicaemia and probably death - even if we manage to overcome our other ailments.

This is why I think that separating the Dark Eldar (or even Tau) out as 'less of a threat' is a flawed discussion from the outset. The threat they pose is not a measure solely of their numbers, the deaths they cause directly or the Imperium's response to their actions in isolation of everything else.

[Dylius]

^ What he said.

[Stonerhino]

Stonerhino, you can't argue that the IoM doesn't care about its population when the Dark Eldar are raiding but then are willing to expend considerable resources defending them and saving them in other situations. Well you can, and do, but it doesn't help your argument.

Human life is always important to humans. But to the IoM as a whole its of little value. There are many stories of armies making heroic last stands to save a small amount of people. Be it a Necron uprising (Kellenport), a Tyranid invasion (Montberg Spaceport), ect but it doesn't change the fact that to the IoM as a whole. The loss doesn't matter. Does the IoM care yes, does it change anything no.

The point of the section is that despite the damage they caused, they were never a threat.

Except that they were a threat. They were the catalyst that forever changed Comorragh. Were they a threat to the existance of the DE, no. They really stood no chance. The weight of numbers of the DE would eventually win out. As it did in the codex. Remember that the death of the DE was not their objective, it was a rescue mission.

[MvS]

does it change anything no.

But of course it does. How can it not? The measure of threat or possibility of changing Imperial policy isn't simply about a head count.

As I said in my last post, no threat to the Imperium exists in isolation. It isn't "the Imperium vs. the Orks; the Imperium vs. Tyranids; the Imperium vs. Dark Eldar, etc".

It's "the Imperium vs. Orks, Tyranids, Dark Eldar, Craftworld Eldar, Necrons, Chaos, Tau" all at once on hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of fronts across an entire galaxy.

Any massive genocide or planetary loss will have profound knock-on effects to the Imperium in terms of expenditure and resource redeployment, prevention and prosecution of organised criminal profiteering, prevention and countering of xeno / Chaotic predation of the vulnerable target, and the problems of a wider dip in Imperial morale that can create fertile ground for divergent anti-establishment (and even outright heretical) movements, all existing in an environment where there are thousands of other simultaneous issues and threats that take time to counter, burn resources, damage morale and end lives.

The Dark Eldar are certainly a different threat than Orks or Tyranids, but they are also certainly no less of a threat if we look beyond simple measures of "who can we see coming the longest and who kills more in each battle". Notions like 'threat' and 'security' are much more complex than that.

Look at the effect the al-Qaeda franchise has had on US policy over the last 11 years. The physical threat they posed in terms of ability to existentially damage the USA is minimal beyond their initial 'prestige' hit, but because of the uncertain nature of the threat and the nature of the government that sought to counter it, al-Qaeda and the threat of terrorism fundamentally changed US foreign policy, put a superpower onto an open-ended war footing, prompted the government to change laws and infringe existing liberties of the citizenry it presided over and caused the formation of new and exceedingly powerful government agencies.

The threat the Dark Eldar pose to the Imperium is much, much greater than that of al-Qaeda in relation to the USA (al-Qaeda couldn't depopulate massive US cities at will, for instance, or engage the US military in conventional warfare), so it's fair to draw some parallels and suggest that the Dark Eldar would concern Imperial authorities and strategists at least as much as al-Qaeda did US authorities and strategists, and probably much, much more so (because of the scale and multiplicity of threats the Imperium is facing).

It would be more like 9/11 where al-Qaeda also possessed weapons systems that were on a par with US military technology (or even much more advanced) and with legions of fanatical and elite special forces but no identifiable home base that the US could target, at the same time as the height of the Cold War with an extremely belligerent USSR, at the same time as the height of Nazi Germany's and Imperial Japan's expansionism, at the same time as the Vietnam war, at the same time as the Korean war, at the same time the Iraq war; the fear and backstabbing of McCarthy 'witch hunts'; the Wall Street Crash; the out of control organised criminality and gangster warfare of Prohibition; a massive growth in armed, home-grown anti-government, 'Patriot' militias and 'Unabomber' style attacks; a massive growth of Christian extremism in US politics, all in a USA where pretty much every episode of the X Files and the Outer Limits are carbon copies of real-life events, and so on and on.

Transpose this back to the Imperium, even if the Imperium refused to acknowledge the Dark Eldar as a big problem, the Dark Eldar would still have a huge and tangible effect on Imperial security and chances of continued survival.

[Stonerhino]

Look at the effect the al-Qaeda franchise has had on US policy over the last 11 years. The physical threat they posed in terms of ability to existentially damage the USA is minimal beyond their initial 'prestige' hit, but because of the uncertain nature of the threat and the nature of the government that sought to counter it, al-Qaeda and the threat of terrorism fundamentally changed US foreign policy, put a superpower onto an open-ended war footing, prompted the government to change laws and infringe existing liberties of the citizenry it presided over and caused the formation of new and exceedingly powerful government agencies.

This is actually my point. Al-Qaeda existed for more then 10 yeas prier to 9/11. Largely as they did after 9/11. Hell, 9/11 was not even al-Qaeda's first attack on the Twin Towers. It was not untill they actually did something meaningfull, did they have an impact on the world. The Dark Eldar, despite being far more lethal then modern al-Qaeda; Have not done anything that has impacted the galaxy, reguardless of their capabilities.

[ManOfRust]

I your posts so much MvS!

Stonerhino, it's a fundamental part of the background that your average Imperial Citizen is terrified at the thought of being kidnapped in the night by pointy-eared night terrors and spirited away to a fate worse than death.

Whatever the reality of that fear (hah!), Dark Eldar have made that impact on the Galaxy. They may only completely ravage one world a century, but every single one of all other worlds knows the fear of it happening to them!

[Stonerhino]

So their only contribution to the 40k setting is to be in it. Sounds like they are surely one of the movers and shapers of the setting.

[ManOfRust]

You want to shape the setting? How about a little thing called the Eye of Terror? Depravity to the point of creating a new Chaos Power? Mortal survivors of the War in Heaven? The Eldar are an important part of making 40K what it is. Exodites don't have Spaceships or a galactic wide policy of enslaving/interfering with other races, Craftworld and Dark Eldar do.

The Emperor defines the Imperium but he hasn't done much in the last 10,000 years except turn down the dimmer switch on the Astronomican and pointedly not respond to Abaddon's Father's Day cards. Does he also fail to contribute to the setting or would you rather he showed a bit more energy?

[Stonerhino]

You want to shape the setting? How about a little thing called the Eye of Terror? Depravity to the point of creating a new Chaos Power? Mortal survivors of the War in Heaven? The Eldar are an important part of making 40K what it is.

You can't come up with anything that the DE have done so you try and claim the credit for something the prefall Eldar empire did. Nice.