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I won't be playing it. Why so many more rules? Why?? The concept is okay, but there are just so many more rules to remember in an already bloated ruleset.

O well. I had okayish hopes for the book.

Rules = Fun

Isn't the idea of more rules the whole point? What did you expect?

I had the chance to play a game of DftS yesterday and honestly the whole dog fight mechanic felt like a lot of motions for little to no actual benefit. It was a game that had DE with 2 razorwing jetfighters while my army had 3 dakkajets. We ended up doing a dogfight at every opportunity and didn't attempt to abort the air combat early (there are at least 2 opportunities to attempt to exit the dogfight early each turn with no penalty). End result was I took 2 HP on a jet fighter on turn 1 and the rest of the time nothing of note really happened in the dog fight phase. On the table the wing formations proved quite potent but once you enter the board it becomes extremely difficult to actually maintain a wing formation unless you have really high agility for those break turns (GW needs to lay off the Ork hate, why must my dakkajets be agility 2?). The dog fight subphases seem really clunky and in a lot of ways basically turn into rock paper scissors. There is a small advantage for attackers in certain choices but it basically is rock paper scissors.

Break turns are quite good, especially for supersonic flyers who can't drop into hover mode but the agility stat is so good which makes certain factions way better than others. We only had fighters in their air but I don't see how the different flyer roles adds much to the game. It might make dog fights more compelling as you target their bombers but honestly bombers are so bad in general that it doesn't really add anything to make them compelling (they become more of a liability if anything with DftS). -1 BS to ground targets is painful for fighters which is not something they needed while not having skyfire for many of the other flyers out there (especially most Imperium flyers) is really going to hurt the viability of using flyers. I don't think space wolves for example is going to want to bring 3-4 of the flying wolf bricks to try and salvage their stat line hit with the flyer wing formations. I know my dakkajets would of been fairly useless against an Imperium army but the plethora of skimmers and flyers from this game against Dark Eldar (we pre arranged this so this wasn't a pickup game) gave them plenty of targets for the wing formation bonuses and their flyboss upgrades to be worth a darn. One rather silly event that popped up was that on turn 2 my flyer formation came onto the board and then on the bottom of the turn his two flyers had air superiority because all 3 of mine came onto the board so he gets a free +1 to their reserves for no other reason than basically turn order. It makes going 2nd even better for flyer fights which is already the case with the current rules.

In summary I think some of the concepts of DftS are ok but the execution is really flawed and clunky. Dogfights are a waste of time mostly and it really punishes certain armies for no good reason. The flyer roles would possibly be an ok concept but the flyers weren't designed for this limited role mechanic so it basically neuters most flyers and makes them even more niche and impractical than they already were in 7th. Wing formations are a good addition but the role mechanic makes some of the options fairly useless (wings formations are basically useless for a fighter going against an army without skimmers and jetbikes).

I think it's a good dogfight campain book, I.E. we both have a 2k army of only fliers. Other than that, meh.