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All weapons now have their range reduced by 12" when firing at fliers, except for weapons that natively have skyfire. (For instance, Icarus Lascannons or any weapons on a flier.) This is to prevent things like pistols are grenades being able to target fliers, because that's a little ridiculous. (Note that Torrent Template Weapons can now target fliers, though.)

Blast weapons can now target fliers-however, in order to do so, they have to both roll a 6 and score a direct hit. (Unless they have Skyfire, such as from a Skyfire Nexus, in which case they must hit on their normal BS.) If it misses on the scatter die, scatter it normally. If it rolls a direct hit, but misses on the BS roll, scatter it anyway (using the little marker on the direct hit). The exception to this is Bombs, which cannot be used to target other fliers.

Why do flyers need a buff again?

Because I find it positively silly you can throw a grenade at a flyer?

This change is more for verisimilitude than balance, but if you think it'd flarp with the balance, then what do you think could be done to make the game more balanced?

40k is not a simulation of real life

 CrownAxe wrote:
40k is not a simulation of real life

It is in some ways. Such as with Imperial Guardsmen. Who are regular humans. Who can hit an aircraft with a thrown grenade.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 CrownAxe wrote:
40k is not a simulation of real life

It is in some ways. Such as with Imperial Guardsmen. Who are regular humans. Who can hit an aircraft with a thrown grenade.

What makes you think the aircraft isn't low to the ground?

 CrownAxe wrote:
What makes you think the aircraft isn't low to the ground?

The fact that any aircraft low enough to be hit by a thrown grenade would have already crashed and exploded.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Because I find it positively silly you can throw a grenade at a flyer?

This change is more for verisimilitude than balance, but if you think it'd flarp with the balance, then what do you think could be done to make the game more balanced?

So, none of this - even though 40K's rules are based on cinematic play?




If you follow the original rules, grenades can't hurt aircraft because you can only fire Snap Shots, and with Snap Shots, you can't use blast weapons. Seems kind of silly to complain about it because by changing the rules, you've let it happen.

If you do allow blasts to affect aircraft (much like WWII Flak guns), if the shot scatters ANY, it shouldn't affect anything - especially on the ground.

As for pistols, if they can beat the aircraft's armor, why add 12" to the range? 40K's weapons in reality probably have ranges of several hundred - if not thousands - of yards (With maybe the exception of meltaweapons...). The game ranges are abstractions to deal with the small board size.

Generally speaking, 40K handles fliers very poorly. They really shouldn't be in the game at all. The game could include VTOL/Helicopter craft, but actual flying craft should only be, at best, a marker to conduct the attack and then removed, with some method for the opponent to respond to a strafing or bombing run.

@Stormonu: Krak grenades aren't blast weapons and as such can be snap shot at flyers in normal 40k.

 Matt.Kingsley wrote:
@Stormonu: Krak grenades aren't blast weapons and as such can be snap shot at flyers in normal 40k.

haha - I'd forgotten that, I thought they had Blast, Frag had Large Blast and Meltabombs were melee-only.

That means you can also blind flyers with Tau Photon grenades, can't you? <Edit: Nevermind - I see they have Blast>

EDIT: just checked and no, you can't as they have Blast. Confused them with EMP grenades.

 Peregrine wrote:

 CrownAxe wrote:
What makes you think the aircraft isn't low to the ground?

The fact that any aircraft low enough to be hit by a thrown grenade would have already crashed and exploded.

Flyers are flying low enough to the ground to get a cover save from many of the terrain pieces regularly used by my gaming group, and flying MCs can swoop down to claw guys up. I tend to picture 40k flyers on the tabletop as making a cinematic, low-to-the-ground strafing run.

Tossing a grenade at a flyer is a bit silly, but it's also a pretty unnecessary change. Any unit desperate enough to take down a flyer to be relying on snapshooting a single grenade per unit is probably already struggling to interact with (read: shoot at) that flyer in the first place. So this change, despite being realistic in a world with space magic and hyper-violent fungus monsters, is basically saying, "Hey. Instead of having almost no hope of hurting that flyer as it shoots up unit after unit, let's make you have literally no hope against that flyer instead."

Also, most units that would be tossing krak grenades (tac marines, maybe assault marines, probably not sternguard because they have access to better guns) are generally considered to be pretty bad when not being spammed ork style anyway, so you disincentivize them even further.

Your proposed flyer buff is realistic but unnecessary, and it aggravates existing balance problems.

EDIT: Honestly, flyers always felt like a poor fit in 40k to me. They really belong in either apocolypse or something like stormcloud assault where the rules fit/focus on them better. Flyers versus a fortified base with anti-air weapons can be cool. Facing a unit that you can't really shoot at efficiently (because your shots would be more effective killing something on the ground) thus making it non-interactive isn't so cool.

Yeah, I did some thinking about how it interacted with things like Vector Strike. While it's certainly a touch more realistic, it's also certainly going to be less fun, so it's a bad addition.

Edit: The one thing I think should be kept is allowing Blasts and Torrents to target fliers.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Yeah, I did some thinking about how it interacted with things like Vector Strike. While it's certainly a touch more realistic, it's also certainly going to be less fun, so it's a bad addition.

Edit: The one thing I think should be kept is allowing Blasts and Torrents to target fliers.

They can, if a Blast or Template weapon has Skyfire it can target flyers. My gaming group always played it this way as it was fairly obviously supposed to be the case since Dark Eldar missiles described as anti-air had Large Blast, and the recent FAQs confirmed it.