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So, I was thinking: "The Warhammer 40k franchise has ground combat covered, but what about Air and Space?" I know a few names in the Air and Space field for the Imperium of Man, that is, but what about The Orks? Or The Tau? What about The Necrons? Or Chaos? I don't know how they get to these different worlds, minus the Ork Roks and Kroozas, and the Eldar Webways. So that got me thinking. "What if Relic made a Warhammer 40k Game centered around Space Combat? What about a game centered around Air combat? Or better yet, what if Relic combined all three? Space, Air, and Ground combat all in one game.

Tell me what ya think.

There was Aeronautica Imperialis and Battlefleet Gothic (but both are now discontinued).

What the guy above me said. I really liked Battlefleet Gothic. There aren't too many spaceship combat games out there, so I try to find everything I can get. I can't comment about how balanced the rules were since I didn't get to play it all that often, except that Necrons were completely over the top broken.

It was a lot like classic sailing ship battles only in space (like most all space combat games honestly), which fit the setting of massive ponderous ships quite well. Ships move the direction they're pointing, most ships had powerful broadside armaments and not many weapons ahead or to stern, front mounted torpedoes to make opponents turn away... all the classic naval ship stuff (the Eldar ships even had "solar sails" with variable moment speed depending on which direction they are facing relative to the star). I had the physical paper rulebook at one point, but I sold it at a yard sale long ago for about $5. That was a bad move. Don't even know if the guy who bought it knew what it was...

Have also heard good things about AI, but never played it or owned the rules.

I am thinking of picking up some of the BFG fleets for my armies, could be a neat aspect of a narrative campaign to actually have space combat.

I've been hoping that with the influx of GW licensed games lately we will end up with a BFG video game, although I don't know how they could do it to make a game that would sell. Spaceships aren't really that popular, and it doesn't really work well with the traditional RTS style of gameplay.

Spacefaring by race (everyone made it into Battlefleet Gothic eventually):

Imperium of Man: The Imperial Navy, the Inquisition, and Space Marine Chapters maintain independent combat fleets. The Navy tends to handle large-scale engagements, Space Marine ships are rigged towards planetary assaults and the Inquisition's various ships exist to get people from point A to point B in a hurry and on occasion to perform Exterminatus. Merchant shipping is some mixture of independent operators outside the normal chain of command (Rogue Traders, the freighter captain from Eisenhorn) and ships ferrying stuff around for the government but these vary more by sector than the centrally-controlled combat fleets. FTL is straight-up Warp engines.

The Eldar/Dark Eldar: Each Craftworld is an independent spacefaring city with a battlefleet primarily to defend the Craftworld, occasionally used for offensive deployment in small numbers. There are on top of this Corsair fleets that operate both within and outside the Webway, they are self-contained entities outside the structure of the Craftworlds and serve as the primary contact between Craftworlds and to Comorragh. The Dark Eldar maintain raiding fleets that pop out of the Webway, blow some stuff up, and vanish, similarly to how their armies function. FTL comes primarily from Webway travel; they tend to stick to the network, but the Eldar will deploy cruisers with portable Webway portals to deal with problems on planets not connected to the network (Dark Crusade).

Tau: The Tau fleet is primarily an exploration/cargo fleet maintaining some hastily-retrofitted warships. Some of their client races (most notably the Kroot) have their own ships that don't always operate with the Tau. They don't have Warp travel, they do have a weird complicated-technobabble drive that (short version) tries to enter the Warp and gets forced out at high velocity because Tau are all blanks, reverse-engineered from Imperial Warp engines. The Kroot presumably have their own Warp drives.

Necrons: They have the most powerful fleet around; it was staggeringly overpowered in Battlefleet Gothic as a warning story to tell anyone who wants something in the game to accurately reflect the fluff. Lorewise five Necron frigates once entered the Sol system and landed on Mars despite the efforts of the entire Battlefleet Sol and all the guns defending the Imperium's most important Forge World to destroy them. They have the only actual FTL drives in the setting since they don't use the Warp for anything.

Chaos: They have a lot of old Imperial ships dating back to the Heresy and newer ones built within the Eye or acquired from newer Imperial ships that got lost in the Warp. They have slightly more reliable Warp travel than the Imperium since daemons are better at navigating the Warp than human psykers, but most of their weapons tech is similar.

Orks: Cobbled-together hunks of junk not unlike their tanks with unreliable Warp drives that seldom take them where they were trying to go. What you'd expect of Orks. They tend to infest and take over Space Hulks (blobs made of spacecraft and asteroids collecting into a mass, usually within the Warp) and field them in combat, giving them the record for largest warships in the setting.

Tyranids: The Hive Fleets are literally giant spacefaring krakens that grab other ships with their tentacles and eat them. They tend to move slowly but in great numbers by comparison to the ships of other races; I don't know that they have FTL at all but given the timescale and the maps of Tyranid infestations they can at the very least move from system to system very quickly in realspace.


As to air combat the introduction of Flyers in 6e means we've already gone a ways past where Aeronautica Imperialis had the air forces; the only things AI had that 40k doesn't are Ork Bommers (big whale-shaped planes) and the Chaos Harbinger (which would be excessively impractical since it's bigger than a Manta). I'd totally go back and put rules for some of the new flyers in AI if I could find a reliable/inexpensive source for the bases (without them tracking altitude/speed is complex).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 dementedwombat wrote:
I've been hoping that with the influx of GW licensed games lately we will end up with a BFG video game, although I don't know how they could do it to make a game that would sell. Spaceships aren't really that popular, and it doesn't really work well with the traditional RTS style of gameplay.

Sins of a Solar Empire.

I don't think space and air combat is well represented on the tabletop. These are three dimensional spaces, and the third dimension is critical. Wrath of Khan, remember?

It seems like it would massively complicate with little added gameplay a tabletop game to try and add a 3D element to it. While it could be interesting I don't think it would be adding any real improvement to the game in the end.

 TheAvengingKnee wrote:
It seems like it would massively complicate a tabletop game to try and add a 3D element to it while adding very little actual value to the game.

Dig up the rules to Aeronautica Imperialis if you have a chance. They made a very simple ruleset that included 3d movement and resulted in a fairly complex game.

Battlefleet Gothic elected to declare that the models weren't actually physical representations of where the ships actually are to avoid having to play on a football field, and the battle was actually taking place in a rectangular slice of space, not on a plane.

I simply play space combat as a Zone Mortalis game.
Why risk destroying a priceless spaceship (or wasting expensive nova cannon ammo) when your Space Marines can just board it and pillage it like a Space Hulk?

We even use the Daemon World rules from Crusade of Fire as Chaos-tainted warships.

 Talon of Anathrax wrote:
I simply play space combat as a Zone Mortalis game.
Why risk destroying a priceless spaceship (or wasting expensive nova cannon ammo) when your Space Marines can just board it and pillage it like a Space Hulk?

We even use the Daemon World rules from Crusade of Fire as Chaos-tainted warships.

Because the Thunderhawks used to board the enemy ship would be shot to pieces.

Talys wrote:
I don't think space and air combat is well represented on the tabletop. These are three dimensional spaces, and the third dimension is critical. Wrath of Khan, remember?

There is actually a spaceship game called Squadron Strike that does 3d spaceship combat at whatever realism level you want; from 1 to about 7 out of 10. If you want 8 or 9 of 10 you need to buy the other game by the same publisher . The system runs surprisingly well, but it takes some work to wrap your mind around. It also has an incredibly robust spaceship design aspect. I actually kicked around a recreation of some BFG ships at one point, and ended up with something that played very similar but in 3D.

Moral of the story, they do exist, but you probably don't want to play them unless you're an aerospace engineer who likes that kind of stuff.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Tyranids: The Hive Fleets are literally giant spacefaring krakens that grab other ships with their tentacles and eat them. They tend to move slowly but in great numbers by comparison to the ships of other races; I don't know that they have FTL at all but given the timescale and the maps of Tyranid infestations they can at the very least move from system to system very quickly in realspace.

They have some kind of "gravity pull" transportation drive where a specialized hive-ship can use gravity manipulation to rapidly pull the fleet towards large gravitational sources (i.e. stars). Once they hit some distance limit they have to slow down and drift in-system very slowly even compared to other race's ships. I really don't know much more about it, except it is even more technobabble than the Tau drive.

NikitaDimitriev wrote:

 Talon of Anathrax wrote:
I simply play space combat as a Zone Mortalis game.
Why risk destroying a priceless spaceship (or wasting expensive nova cannon ammo) when your Space Marines can just board it and pillage it like a Space Hulk?

We even use the Daemon World rules from Crusade of Fire as Chaos-tainted warships.

Because the Thunderhawks used to board the enemy ship would be shot to pieces.

Read the HH IA books, or the Salamaders books Nocturne. They board by teleporting, or with boarding torpedoes that camouflage among the other ones (and they even use the debris of other ones as cover, kinda like those guys in Starship troopers you know?). the thunderhawks only come to rescue them once that the ship itself has been crippled and cannot shoot them.