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 Mr Morden wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Don't those Nurgle bloat flies and Tzeentch screamers count as flying or are they both hover/glider types? Otherwise yes Chaos would lack a flying force.

Tyranids have the Harpy and the Crone and harridane - their only issue is they some how need to basically release some kind of jet fuel effect organic so that they can move fast enough to keep up with the rest of the flying forces. Otherwise their air tactic is just to fill the skies with spores and spore mines.

Genestealer Cults don't have one, but they can likely steal an Imperial Guard one until/if GW gives them their own flying unit.

Chaos should all have access to various flyers - from the deamon engines to fighters. Don't they still have the FW ones as well?

Yes. CSM, Death Guard, and Thousand Sons can all use the FW Chaos flyers. So, Hell Blade, Hell Talon, Xiphon, Storm Eagle, and Fire Raptor. Throw the Thunderhawk and Sokar pattern Stormbird in there and you have everything from a 135 PPM fighter to a 1000 PPM super heavy.

Fliers are naturally better suited to dedicated games and Epic Scale.

The former because it focuses on what fliers do and how they fight.

Epic, because whilst not the stars of the show, the literal scale of the game means they make more sense.

However. I don’t think they should be removed from 40k, if only because I really like the flier models.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Don't those Nurgle bloat flies and Tzeentch screamers count as flying or are they both hover/glider types? Otherwise yes Chaos would lack a flying force.

Tyranids have the Harpy and the Crone and harridane - their only issue is they some how need to basically release some kind of jet fuel effect organic so that they can move fast enough to keep up with the rest of the flying forces. Otherwise their air tactic is just to fill the skies with spores and spore mines.

Genestealer Cults don't have one, but they can likely steal an Imperial Guard one until/if GW gives them their own flying unit.

Chaos should all have access to various flyers - from the deamon engines to fighters. Don't they still have the FW ones as well?

Yes. CSM, Death Guard, and Thousand Sons can all use the FW Chaos flyers. So, Hell Blade, Hell Talon, Xiphon, Storm Eagle, and Fire Raptor. Throw the Thunderhawk and Sokar pattern Stormbird in there and you have everything from a 135 PPM fighter to a 1000 PPM super heavy.

and the Helldrake?

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Flyers aren't a burden to 40k. GW choosing to give flyers the statline of tanks, restricting "anti-aircraft" weapons to things that can't efficiently damage tanks, and then throwing their hands up at the whole degenerate paradigm they've created and making flyers into tanks you just get -1 to hit against is the problem. Flyers would have been fine if GW had chosen to a) limited Flyers to larger game sizes, b) didn't give Flyers similar/better durability to most factions' main battle tanks, c) gave anti-aircraft options to more existing units instead of trying to sell entirely new AA units, and d) assigned stats such that armor could exist on the table without alternate defenses (to-hit penalties, Invulnerable saves, damage mitigation, etc.) so flyers didn't end up being a valid replacement for ground units. For a better implementation of aircraft, including transport helicopters that serve the same functions as some 40k flyers, I'd suggest looking at Team Yankee; the flyers are significantly squishier than ground units, have a time-over-target limitation that requires they pop back off the table to reload periodically instead of just floating in circles around the middle of the board shooting every turn, require specific AA weapons to shoot but "specific AA weapons" includes "the pintle MG on almost every tank", and require you to effectively suppress or destroy most of your opponent's dedicated AA before bringing them on if you don't want them to just die to reaction fire. They're a meaningful alternate unit type that extends the tactical wheel, rather than just being really fast tanks with a built-in to-hit penalty.

This is where I fall on this subject.

 deviantduck wrote:

Spoiler:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Don't those Nurgle bloat flies and Tzeentch screamers count as flying or are they both hover/glider types? Otherwise yes Chaos would lack a flying force.

Tyranids have the Harpy and the Crone and harridane - their only issue is they some how need to basically release some kind of jet fuel effect organic so that they can move fast enough to keep up with the rest of the flying forces. Otherwise their air tactic is just to fill the skies with spores and spore mines.

Genestealer Cults don't have one, but they can likely steal an Imperial Guard one until/if GW gives them their own flying unit.

Chaos should all have access to various flyers - from the deamon engines to fighters. Don't they still have the FW ones as well?

Yes. CSM, Death Guard, and Thousand Sons can all use the FW Chaos flyers. So, Hell Blade, Hell Talon, Xiphon, Storm Eagle, and Fire Raptor. Throw the Thunderhawk and Sokar pattern Stormbird in there and you have everything from a 135 PPM fighter to a 1000 PPM super heavy.

and the Helldrake?

That one is CSM and Thousand Sons only, Death Guard don't get it. Because of "Reasons", I guess?

 oni wrote:
GW should bring back Epic 40,000. This would be the best scale and game system for flyers.

So true.
Weird thing is tables got smaller, units got faster, and jets just float around.

Given that 40k games present a small pub corner brawl over a single neighbourhood and Epic scale games give us proper maneouvre space... duh? Anything bigger than a close air support helicopter should not hang around in the 40k game area longer than a blink of an eye.

Heck, even in Epic the fliers can cross the whole table, make their attack runs and sod off afterwards to return again from another spot. Only in Aeronautica, a dedicated dogfighting skirmish, should they chill around longer than that.

I own a couple of fliers but agree they shouldn't be in the game. That being said attack helicopters and close air support are a thing in real life, so they don't entirely ruin the narrative for me. I just feel it would have been perfectly fine for them to be a one turn stratagem like orbital bombardment without the need for models

Or GW could have done them like Endless Spells - a one turn event but which can put down a medium term impact. Eg a scattering of fire-markers showing where the aircraft dropped napalm in a strip creating a firewall.

Eh most of the endless spells are floating around. Some get removed if they do extra good effect.

With the new Necron content, I finally have a reason to take a serious look at it. But since I have zero interest in Imperials, or the bigger Xenos (Kroot FTW), I haven't really had any options.

PenitentJake wrote:
Because I'm a narrative player, for whom story and spectacle matter more than balance, I love flyers; they look great, and they enable rapid deployment between multiple battlefields to be represented on the table. The provide a link between scales- so for example you play a massive dogfight in AI and only a few surviving aircraft remain to take part in a subsequent 40k game. taking place in the same theatre of war.

Their rules in 40k aren't perfect, but they contribute so much to the worlds and background, and they provide so many moments of genuine cinematic value, that the game is better for their inclusion, despite being rough around the edges from a rules/ balance perspective.

An interesting perspective, considering I feel the same way but the flyer rules from 3rd and 4th make way more sense from a story and spectacle perspective.

The flyer approaches at a high speed, both sides becoming aware of it a turn before the attack run starts (flyer is placed at the board edge).

1 turn later, the flyer makes its run - but only after the defender gets to take a shot with his air defense weapons!

The attack run ends, and the flyer departs to make another pass...

I actually quite liked the aircraft rules in 7th. They were hard to hit for ground units and were very dangerous if left alone, however a single icarus lascanon, or aa autocanon could bring one down in a single shot. The probelm with them was really that not everone had access to AA, or complained about them because they wanted to take an all melee list against aircraft instead of a combined arms list.

8th edition completely borked flyers.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

PenitentJake wrote:
Because I'm a narrative player, for whom story and spectacle matter more than balance, I love flyers; they look great, and they enable rapid deployment between multiple battlefields to be represented on the table. The provide a link between scales- so for example you play a massive dogfight in AI and only a few surviving aircraft remain to take part in a subsequent 40k game. taking place in the same theatre of war.

Their rules in 40k aren't perfect, but they contribute so much to the worlds and background, and they provide so many moments of genuine cinematic value, that the game is better for their inclusion, despite being rough around the edges from a rules/ balance perspective.

An interesting perspective, considering I feel the same way but the flyer rules from 3rd and 4th make way more sense from a story and spectacle perspective.

The flyer approaches at a high speed, both sides becoming aware of it a turn before the attack run starts (flyer is placed at the board edge).

1 turn later, the flyer makes its run - but only after the defender gets to take a shot with his air defense weapons!

The attack run ends, and the flyer departs to make another pass...

I did like those rules too; if I remember correctly, when they debuted, they were Apocalypse only, and my crew liked them so much we started using them in 2k games. The only thing is, they don't allow for airborne transport. I remember a WD battle report where the entire Guard force deployed via Valkyrie. Cool report.

(Truth is I forget whether fliers in previous editions had hover mode- they might have)

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I actually quite liked the aircraft rules in 7th. They were hard to hit for ground units and were very dangerous if left alone, however a single icarus lascanon, or aa autocanon could bring one down in a single shot. The probelm with them was really that not everone had access to AA, or complained about them because they wanted to take an all melee list against aircraft instead of a combined arms list.

8th edition completely borked flyers.

That's... Really not how countering flyers actually worked.

Firing an Icarus took an entire unit entry. For some armies this could be extremely problematic, as they simply didn't have the units to spare. Grey Knights are a good example, who lacked the vanilla SM tools (which weren't even that great) and were generally more expensive. Meaning that, including the cost of the actual ADL, you could be dedicating more than 10% of your points to sit in one spot and take pot shots at flyers when they eventually arrived.

In a similar vein, some armies just didn't have acceptable AA solutions. The general solution to flyers was a high saturation of medium strength weaponry due to how Hull Points worked, however several armies were saddled with only low-shot high-strength weapons. Which was awful because anti-air guns didn't shoot ground well, and also because Jink (and various other rules) meant that flyers could often times be sporting 4+ cover saves while only suffering a minimal loss of output. This could be heavily compounded by the actual platform of said AA weapons. Ork AA were crewed by Gretchin, meaning that just about any losses sustained would cause a route (ld5) and insta-kill all of the guns.

While some armies had a high volume of cover ignoring high-strength shots with which to saturate the skies (Tau), there were numerous armies in 7th which didn't have a viable way to counter flyers. They could either invest a non-neglible amount of points to annoy (but rarely actually kill / cripple) a single flyer in the enemy list, but would be absolutely fethed if their adversaries ran more than one. Or even an actual good flyers. And most lists that ran flyers ran multiple flyers, because if you had multiple it was generally cake to neutralize even a heavy investment into AA before it was anywhere close to knee-capping air supiority.

TLDR: "Hurr-durr, not everyone wanted to take an Icarus cuz melee blob!" is a pretty ignorant thing to say. Many armies lacked viable anti-air assets to handle even a single flyer without massively over-committing and thereby making the flyer pay for itself by virtue of existing, and also being unable to compete with actual flyer heavy lists. So their best bet was to pretend flyers didn't exist during list building.

Flyers have such unique rules that should be limited as much as named characters. Then they work fine, as they currently do.

Aeronatica is a better place for fliers but I do not them removed from base game WH40k. Opinion is other.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Aeronatica is a better place for fliers but I do not them removed from base game WH40k. Opinion is other.

Ironically, the least problematic flyer rules were those which represented fliers in the worst possible way - in 5th edition all fliers were just fast skimmers just like eldar tanks.

 Jidmah wrote:
Ironically, the least problematic flyer rules were those which represented fliers in the worst possible way - in 5th edition all fliers were just fast skimmers just like eldar tanks.

I think my ideal rendition of flyer rules would be to have helicopter-analogues stay on the board, but have airplane-analogues function more like the 3rd/4th Ed strafing run concept. Vehicles that split the difference (eg Valkyries/Vultures) could function in either mode.

It mostly just seems odd to me that actual attack jets are moving merely twice as fast as an MBT, endlessly circling on a fairly small battlefield. It'd be nice also for aircraft in general to be a lot more fragile- and thus actually vulnerable to anti-air weapons that are meant to combat them. As it stands aircraft aren't attack assets that can only inflict so much damage before they need to refuel, nor are they glass hammers that are very hard to hit but vulnerable to AA; instead they're literally flying tanks.

I don't really mind aircraft in 40K; it's just the implementation that causes problems.

Just as planes are big flying tanks, tanks are now just big fast infantry with multiple weapons. It’s almost like 40k profiles are all just converging towards one thing.

Well, aircraft in 41st millennium aren't necessarily subject to the same limitations as aircraft of the real world in the present day. Based on the technologies at work here, I am inclined to think that 40k aircraft have substantially longer loiter times than their real world counterparts along with significantly greater armor and protection.

Simply put theres no real good way to do aircraft in a game the scale of 40k other than to exclude them entirely outside of the "helicopter" analogues. A tactical strike fighter swooping in to drop a load of bombs or pop a few cannon shots into a tank is something that should be represented by off-table support (i.e. a strategem along the lines of an orbital bombardment) rather than by a model that is omnipresent on the table over the duration of a game.

 oni wrote:
GW should bring back Epic 40,000. This would be the best scale and game system for flyers.

From your lips to GW's ears. Sadly I doubt that will happen, as GW continue to port over up scaled Epic stuff to 40k, the chances of Epic coming back diminish. Shame asit remains a great wargame.

 Sherrypie wrote:
Given that 40k games present a small pub corner brawl over a single neighbourhood and Epic scale games give us proper maneouvre space... duh? Anything bigger than a close air support helicopter should not hang around in the 40k game area longer than a blink of an eye.

Heck, even in Epic the fliers can cross the whole table, make their attack runs and sod off afterwards to return again from another spot. Only in Aeronautica, a dedicated dogfighting skirmish, should they chill around longer than that.

Spot on. Hover craft, Winged beasts, helicopters, etc sure no problem. Hyper sonic attack jets... not so much.

There was a time before 6th editions where flyers were part of the game from FW and were mostly ok.

A combination of the old FW flyer rules and the 6th/7th ed flyer rules are the best way to go for normal games of 40K. we use them in our retro 5th ed games and they work just fine.

Keep in mind prior to them trying to shoehorn flyers in as fast skimmer (see the valkyrie) in 5th ed with a higher than normal AV almost all flyers in the game including superheavies were only AV 10 or 11 with a couple exceptions. making all of the dedicated AA units quite capable of killing them (hydra's, sky rays, eldar firestorms, hyperios launchers etc..) along with jump capable units being able to assault them. especially given the FW flyer rules where vector lock was not a thing. an immobilized flyer died the same way it did when you just wrecked it or blew it up.


So my vote is disagree, but then i play 5th ed or epic scale when using flyers in 40K not 9th so it is a very different game setting,