Eldar - No Path of innovation/invention?

[Denzark]

Don't the bone singers do this?

[Charon]

They are building... don't know if they are "inventing" too.

[StingrayP226]

Well to be honest they could be inventing things... just nothing that really "impacts" the table top game. As a dying race I would think many of their inventors are working on things that helps prevent said dying. Yes better weapons to protect yourself does help, but they could be focusing more on medical technologies, better ways to use Spirit stones (give them range, make ones that are back ups to the main one so the Eldar can remotely get souls in the case they lose a battle), or "inventing" ways to keep their Craftwords operational despite heavy damage and no spare parts.

Yes they have a lot of technology and giant spaceship worlds, but they lack real worlds to harvest raw material from so their resources are likely very limited compared to most of the other races out there. Thus their inventions could be less inventing a whole new weapon, but how to make the same weapon with less materials/inferior materials with the same effectiveness/more durable/etc.

[-Tom-]

I don't think it's an issue of lack of raw materials. They have plenty of wraithbone and you could assume that it is the ultimately recyclable material. Finished with using it for food packaging? Just sing it into a new use.

As has been said earlier in the thread, the appearance of Slaanesh pretty much 'bombed them back to the stone age'. Not literally the 'stone age' as clearly they're not using weapons made from flint and sticks, but in the same sense as we would use the phrase as humans metaphorically (which we do). Imagine if there was a nuclear holocaust right now, or a zombie apocalypse. A lot of the things we take for granted have become pretty refined beyond what we know as a 'gist' of how they work. Most of us have a general idea of how an internal combustion engine works, and some of us could probably even build a fairly uneconomical / inefficient one from scratch if said apocalypse happened. It would be a far cry from a modern car which nowadays need more than mechanical knowledge to fix, because often a computer chip controls a lot of things in the vehicle, and you have to be able to talk to that too.

In that apocalypse scenario, you're also going to be having to spend quite a while just sorting out getting food and shelter, before you can start to get onto thinking how to rebuild energy supplies and manufacturing facilities. If we assume that the craftworlds were originally sent out configured as lifeboats, it may take hundreds of years to create any sort of significant progress in getting the bone singers out to sing workshops into creation, once they are past the point of just 'weathering the storm'. That's just to be able to rebuild things they already know about, and create equipment for laboratories to be able to start undertaking research.

We maybe could then assume that they HAVE managed some sort of research. They have developed better ammo for the shuriken weaponry - it is better against SM armour for example, than it was in the previous codex now that they have Bladestorm.

I think the real issue though is totally outside of anything that you can explain with fluff. The issue is the stagnation in the game universe as a whole, combined with the demand (or perceived demand) from the players - i.e. the Imperium is supposed to be really stagnant, with huge distrust for any sort of development that doesn't come from finding a new STC. And yet, we SEE lots of new stuff for them, partly in all the variants for things that Forgeworld put out (correct me if I'm wrong in this, and they're all 30k things, but I think they have 40k allowability too?). If we had as many variants for Eldar stuff from FW as the Imperials do, they would seem a lot more innovative I think.

(I say perceived demand, as I think that some element of it comes from a bit of a cyclic process. If you decide that such and such a faction is more popular, and so make a bigger range for them, then chances are that range will carry on being more popular and selling more, because people like new shinies. I'm similarly sceptical about the Freeview advert currently on TV claiming that it has something like 90% of the most watched TV. I think that is not the claim to fame they think it is... it's not saying that is the best TV, but as it is freely available, it seems obvious that it can be watched by more people).