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The latest Eldar release, and the rumored Aeronautica/Titanicus unified game got me thinking:

Aeronautica Imperialis is the right place for flyers, they work better at that scale that in 40K, where they are a burden to the gameplay.

What's your opinion ?

The only issue I have is not all armies have access to flyers.

Flyers have always been an issue in the game, im not against hovering gun ship like vehicles but flyers always felt super off in 40k.

Yes, the game designed specifically around aircraft is naturally the better choice than one that isnt.

I'll still keep them in 40k tho.

Sure?
This has been an obvious problem for multiple editions and over a decade now.

To pull out a tired old meme: Obvious statement is obvious.

 deviantduck wrote:
The only issue I have is not all armies have access to flyers.

Pretty sure every faction has fliers. Sisters of Battle are the only one coming to mind right now that don't, however "lore wise" they'd have access through other forces of the Imperium and I suspect that their lack of a flyer is more because at the time aircraft were "the" thing, SoB were in their long dormant stage without many if any updates. A dedicated aircraft is just the kind of thing that I'd expect will turn up at some stage for Sob.


After that there's Tyranids who do have flying aircraft, but there's some debate on if they'd actually work in AN since they have wings and are likely closer ot helicopters in performance than jet aircraft (which most of the other races are comparable to).

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

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

uhhhh 110% yes please.

If the rumors are true about a unified aronautica, and titanicus game, this it would make perfect sense to bring back epic in that scale as well. I for one would absolutely love it.

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

And/or just keep Apocalypse around as a flagship product. There'd probably be less heartburn about excluding flyers (or superheavies, for that matter) from 40K if there was an officially supported ruleset where existing 40K models were usable.

 catbarf wrote:

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

And/or just keep Apocalypse around as a flagship product. There'd probably be less heartburn about excluding flyers (or superheavies, for that matter) from 40K if there was an officially supported ruleset where existing 40K models were usable.

Apocalypse 2nd Ed please, preferably with a plastic Warhound launch.

 Platuan4th wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

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

And/or just keep Apocalypse around as a flagship product. There'd probably be less heartburn about excluding flyers (or superheavies, for that matter) from 40K if there was an officially supported ruleset where existing 40K models were usable.

Apocalypse 2nd Ed please, preferably with a plastic Warhound launch.

I want this so badly. So so badly.

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.

When flyers first started showing up in W40K there was initially a game compendium that was required to use them called Death from the Skies. This compendium provided official rules to be added to the core rules, but initially (reasoning aside) players treated it as an optional expansion (Super Heavies and Fortifications were introduced in the same way with Escalation and Stronghold Assault respectively) where both players would first agree to play with the added rules.

Flyers could reasonably be pushed into an optional game expansion.

 oni wrote:
When flyers first started showing up in W40K there was initially a game compendium that was required to use them called Death from the Skies.

When they first started showing up in 40K, there was a game compendium called Imperial Armour Vol. 1 that was required to play them and they basically made strafing runs by entering and leaving the table.

 oni wrote:
When flyers first started showing up in W40K there was initially a game compendium that was required to use them called Death from the Skies. This compendium provided official rules to be added to the core rules, but initially (reasoning aside) players treated it as an optional expansion (Super Heavies and Fortifications were introduced in the same way with Escalation and Stronghold Assault respectively) where both players would first agree to play with the added rules.

Flyers could reasonably be pushed into an optional game expansion.

Death from the Skies was an alternate game mode expansion to give extra mechanics to Flyers in 6th. It was never required to use them; the rules were in the 6e core book and most factions that got a 6e book either got one of the 5e fast-skimmer pseudo-flyers updated to the flyer type or a new flyer.

Of all the issues people have with flyers, I notice they never pop up on something like DE aircraft or necrons. All the complaints have been about stuff like Dakkajets and wazbomms, then also the admech flappy ones. I think it’s really a problem of in game balance, not really flyers themselves.

 oni wrote:
When flyers first started showing up in W40K there was initially a game compendium that was required to use them called Death from the Skies. This compendium provided official rules to be added to the core rules, but initially (reasoning aside) players treated it as an optional expansion (Super Heavies and Fortifications were introduced in the same way with Escalation and Stronghold Assault respectively) where both players would first agree to play with the added rules.

Flyers could reasonably be pushed into an optional game expansion.

This is not true at all, Death from the skys showed up in 7th, fliers were introduced in 6th ed if i recall correctly.
Guard had the valkyre before that but it was not a "flyer" until 6th.
Im having vague PTSD flashbacks of necron air force now.

 Backspacehacker wrote:

 oni wrote:
When flyers first started showing up in W40K there was initially a game compendium that was required to use them called Death from the Skies. This compendium provided official rules to be added to the core rules, but initially (reasoning aside) players treated it as an optional expansion (Super Heavies and Fortifications were introduced in the same way with Escalation and Stronghold Assault respectively) where both players would first agree to play with the added rules.

Flyers could reasonably be pushed into an optional game expansion.

This is not true at all, Death from the skys showed up in 7th, fliers were introduced in 6th ed if i recall correctly.
Guard had the valkyre before that but it was not a "flyer" until 6th.
Im having vague PTSD flashbacks of necron air force now.

Fliers have been in the game since 3rd.

Yeah im saying they did not get the special super duper fly mechanics until 6th ed, like zooming and hard to hit, and snap shooting and needing to have AA to deal with them.
I dont have experience in 3rd i dont know if they had those mechanics back then.

Kind of a meaningless poll, obviously yes they are better suited to AI, but the genie is out of the bottle, too many people have put too much money into their large-sized flier minis for GW to squat them and remove them from the game. Thats the kind of thing they could get away with 20+ years ago, but doing so today would cause a huge amount of blowback from the community given the massive increases in cost of minis combined with the currency (as in how current the minis are) of the models themselves.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
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.

Ehhhhh. Team Yankee fliers have problems. If one army shows up with fliers and the other doesn't bring dedicated AA to the table (those pintle MGs really *don't* cut it), then the fliers can and will run the board. If on the other hand, a player invests heavily into air and goes into a match against a list with decent AA capability, then the air assets are basically wasted points (and if they don't show up with air assets and the opponent does show up with AA assets then those AA assets are kinda wasted points). In essence it becomes a big case of meta-chicken in terms of how many points one invests into it and the results you're going to get out of it and has resulted in lots of complaints and discussion in the TY community. Another big source of feelsbadman there is that you have a 50/50 chance of getting your strike aircraft on table any given turn, but it costs you the same to have them regardless of whether they ever show up, and in relative terms to the capabilities of other units, you don't really get much of a cost discount despite the fact that things like tanks, infantry, and even helos get to spend the entire game on the board.

The issue that GW cares about though is that the flyer rules don't really give any reason for the existence of a model. You roll the dice, place the flyer mini as a marker, roll your attacks/saves, and then remove the mini basically immediately after. Lots of players forgo buying flyer minis for TY as a result of this, because they are only on the table for the barest fraction of the game. Naturally GW needs a more convincing reason why people should spend the money, so that type of system won't fly.

chaos0xomega wrote:
...Ehhhhh. Team Yankee fliers have problems. If one army shows up with fliers and the other doesn't bring dedicated AA to the table (those pintle MGs really *don't* cut it), then the fliers can and will run the board. If on the other hand, a player invests heavily into air and goes into a match against a list with decent AA capability, then the air assets are basically wasted points (and if they don't show up with air assets and the opponent does show up with AA assets then those AA assets are kinda wasted points). In essence it becomes a big case of meta-chicken in terms of how many points one invests into it and the results you're going to get out of it and has resulted in lots of complaints and discussion in the TY community. Another big source of feelsbadman there is that you have a 50/50 chance of getting your strike aircraft on table any given turn, but it costs you the same to have them regardless of whether they ever show up, and in relative terms to the capabilities of other units, you don't really get much of a cost discount despite the fact that things like tanks, infantry, and even helos get to spend the entire game on the board.

The issue that GW cares about though is that the flyer rules don't really give any reason for the existence of a model. You roll the dice, place the flyer mini as a marker, roll your attacks/saves, and then remove the mini basically immediately after. Lots of players forgo buying flyer minis for TY as a result of this, because they are only on the table for the barest fraction of the game. Naturally GW needs a more convincing reason why people should spend the money, so that type of system won't fly.

Yup. It's its own system. It has its own problems. But it has very different problems from 40k's, and even if the list-building is inflexible and tends to force people into skew builds it manages to make aircraft feel integrated into the experience. FW tried and sort of succeeded with the Apocalypse rules, GW tried and mostly failed with 6th/7th, and they seem to have given up in 8th/9th and gone to presenting flyers as directly competing in function with ground units in a way that makes them screwy, feel wrong, and lead to "wait, why are flyers in this game again, they're broken" polls like this any time a flyer's strong enough to outperform ground units.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Kind of a meaningless poll, obviously yes they are better suited to AI, but the genie is out of the bottle, too many people have put too much money into their large-sized flier minis for GW to squat them and remove them from the game. Thats the kind of thing they could get away with 20+ years ago, but doing so today would cause a huge amount of blowback from the community given the massive increases in cost of minis combined with the currency (as in how current the minis are) of the models themselves.

They can't be squatted, but they can be :

- officially forbidden under 2000 pts in 40K
- repurposed into an apocalypse-only unit
- or become part of a truescale Aeronautica imperialis-style game

Siegfriedfr wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Kind of a meaningless poll, obviously yes they are better suited to AI, but the genie is out of the bottle, too many people have put too much money into their large-sized flier minis for GW to squat them and remove them from the game. Thats the kind of thing they could get away with 20+ years ago, but doing so today would cause a huge amount of blowback from the community given the massive increases in cost of minis combined with the currency (as in how current the minis are) of the models themselves.

They can't be squatted, but they can be :

- officially forbidden under 2000 pts in 40K
- repurposed into an apocalypse-only unit
- or become part of a truescale Aeronautica imperialis-style game

At that point, the standard game size 2000 points, or do you mean 2000 and below?
Repurposing to apocalyse would be the same as soft squatting them, the popularity of apoc now is lower then even the old version of apoc.
They did have that already, Thats waht death from the skys was, it was a set of rules to do dog fighting with flyers and also incorporate it into 40k games if you wanted, problem is, no one bit.

I hardly play anymore so just like th models - big and small

 Overread wrote:

 deviantduck wrote:
The only issue I have is not all armies have access to flyers.

Pretty sure every faction has fliers. Sisters of Battle are the only one coming to mind right now that don't, however "lore wise" they'd have access through other forces of the Imperium and I suspect that their lack of a flyer is more because at the time aircraft were "the" thing, SoB were in their long dormant stage without many if any updates. A dedicated aircraft is just the kind of thing that I'd expect will turn up at some stage for Sob.


After that there's Tyranids who do have flying aircraft, but there's some debate on if they'd actually work in AN since they have wings and are likely closer ot helicopters in performance than jet aircraft (which most of the other races are comparable to).

SoB used to have access to the Avenger Strike Fighter, but that disappeared in 8th

Armies without Flyers:
SoB
GSC
Nids (No vehicles, but have Harpy/Crone so this one is moot.)
Demons
Death Guard

Am I missing any?

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.

They just have fly, but not a flyer like the fighters that a lot of the other factions have.

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.

 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?