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The Imperial Navy is its own thing, and often ferries all sorts of armies (not just Imperial Guard) to various battlegrounds. I think they should have a mini-codex that can be used in conjunction with Astra Militarum, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adepta Sororitas and Imperial Knights, without making them lose any of their faction abilities. They can transport models from any army they can ally with. Due to their force org limitations (no HQ or Troops), they cannot be fielded on their own in matched play: they have to be part of another army.

GW would be able to develop new flyer models that are usable by several factions at a time. I would certainly like some non-Forgeworld models other than the Valkyrie.

Maybe also some ground models. We already have the Officer of the Fleet, but there could be more.


Stratagem examples:
--Bomb Payload: Usable on Valkyries. Causes mortal wounds when you move over an enemy unit.
--Satellite Triangulation: For the duration of a shooting phase, a target enemy unit gets no cover save against any of your units (of any allied faction, not just Navy) within 6 inches of an Officer of the Fleet.
--Air Tactics: Select two Navy flyers and a target enemy flyer. Your second flyer to shoot gets +1 to hit, so long as it targets the same model as the first. (This represents one flyer trying to herd/"box in" an enemy flyer into its wingman's sights.)
--Clear the Drop Zone: Use in the shooting phase, after a friendly unit has disembarked from a Navy flying transport such as a Valkyrie. The transport may re-roll hit rolls against any enemy units within 12 inches of the disembarked unit.

.

This seems like something Forge World would tackle. You're talking some BIG models and low volume of sales.

 John Prins wrote:
This seems like something Forge World would tackle. You're talking some BIG models and low volume of sales.

Chicken/egg. Do they not have decent rules because they don't sell well, or do they not sell well because they don't have decent rules?

Flyer detachment of Valkyries. Hey presto, a Navy detachment that can be legally taken alongside any other Imperium army.

You could have space navy weapons for all races, and they can share the same rules:

Bombardment: Remove the opposing army from the battlefield.

Sterling191 wrote:
Flyer detachment of Valkyries. Hey presto, a Navy detachment that can be legally taken alongside any other Imperium army.

I think you miss the whole point of the thread. A mini-codex. I could honestly see these things, if implemented, added to each book. An Imperial Navy section with stratagems for bombing runs with Valks, Orks getting some scrappy suicide bombers, Tyranids getting a big ol feeding tube that gives them command points each turn.

Sterling191 wrote:
Flyer detachment of Valkyries. Hey presto, a Navy detachment that can be legally taken alongside any other Imperium army.

1. Valkyries that can't transport your other imperial units, which is just weird given the OPs reference to the navy pretty much ferrying everybody
2. It looks like the trend is to give rules that keep you mono-faction. I think Sisters are the only real win in the power side of things there (it's actually a choice), but OP might be thinking that this trend will continue

 Apple Peel wrote:

I think you miss the whole point of the thread. A mini-codex. I could honestly see these things, if implemented, added to each book. An Imperial Navy section with stratagems for bombing runs with Valks, Orks getting some scrappy suicide bombers, Tyranids getting a big ol feeding tube that gives them command points each turn.

I've missed nothing. I simply find it exquisitely pointless to fandex a highly convoluted system when a functional one already exists.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Lemondish wrote:


1. Valkyries that can't transport your other imperial units, which is just weird given the OPs reference to the navy pretty much ferrying everybody
2. It looks like the trend is to give rules that keep you mono-faction. I think Sisters are the only real win in the power side of things there (it's actually a choice), but OP might be thinking that this trend will continue

1) Other Imperial armies come with their own transports (and in most cases from their fluff, naval assets).
2) That's the price you pay for bringing in allies. Either bite the bullet and go mono-codex, or accept that you're making a sacrifice to bring in alternative functionality.

Lemondish wrote:

Sterling191 wrote:
Flyer detachment of Valkyries. Hey presto, a Navy detachment that can be legally taken alongside any other Imperium army.

1. Valkyries that can't transport your other imperial units, which is just weird given the OPs reference to the navy pretty much ferrying everybody
2. It looks like the trend is to give rules that keep you mono-faction. I think Sisters are the only real win in the power side of things there (it's actually a choice), but OP might be thinking that this trend will continue

If the intent of things like Doctrines and Rites is to make mono-faction a viable alternative to soup, wouldn't making soup not mess with Doctrines/Rites be rather missing the point?

I can see making limited exceptions for a single Inquisitor, Priest or Assassin, but a wing of Navy aircraft would be pushing it.

 Daba wrote:
You could have space navy weapons for all races, and they can share the same rules:

Bombardment: Remove the opposing army from the battlefield.

I'd add a single random die roll to that. It may not be re-rolled.
Once deployment is done;
1-3: Remove deployed opposing army from play
4-5: Remove your deployed army from play (the front lines are pretty close together on a standard table you know....)
6: Nothing happens.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
This seems like something Forge World would tackle. You're talking some BIG models and low volume of sales.

Chicken/egg. Do they not have decent rules because they don't sell well, or do they not sell well because they don't have decent rules?

Most armies have fliers already - including Astra Militarum. More fliers, especially stuff transporting other stuff, would generally be much larger. Larger kits are more expensive, both in currency and points, and become more difficult to transport and assemble. So fewer people buy them or field them, regardless of how good their rules might be. The Baneblade seems to be the practical limit for ground units (along with a few other kits). Now imagine stuff that can transport full sized tanks - you get the Thunderhawk and Manta vehicles, which while available from Forge World, they're basically display pieces with rules.

At some point things become unwieldy in practical terms - stuff like large imperial bombers or landers don't make the economic case for cutting multiple plastic molds. I'm frankly amazed the Tesseract Vault/Obelisk got made in plastic, but that was thanks to a perfectly symmetrical design choice that minimized the number of molds.

Decent rules won't sell $700-2000 models. People throwing that kind of money either want to paint one and don't care about the cost, or want to show off their money and don't care about the cost.

ccs wrote:

 Daba wrote:
You could have space navy weapons for all races, and they can share the same rules:

Bombardment: Remove the opposing army from the battlefield.

I'd add a single random die roll to that. It may not be re-rolled.
Once deployment is done;
1-3: Remove deployed opposing army from play
4-5: Remove your deployed army from play (the front lines are pretty close together on a standard table you know....)
6: Nothing happens.

I would add a result that removes both armies from play too. Maybe as the 6 result, with 4 being 'nothing happens' and 5 being hitting your own.

I demand an army consisting entirely of orbital bombardments!

 Abadabadoobaddon wrote:
I demand an army consisting entirely of orbital bombardments!

Imperial Fists with an Inquisitor can drop four bombardments turn 1. It takes 7 CP plus a WL trait to pull of though.

Hopefully it will never happen. BFG is the place for the Navy and we already have some units that fit perfectly with the Imperial Soup / Guard rn.

@ the orbital bombardment comments:

You can make a pretty ridiculous number of bombardments a turn as Space Marines using the Rhino Primaris, the Impulsor, the Stratagem, and a few soupy characters.




As for the more practical level, the idea of a space siege is pretty silly if you stop to actually think about it: the objective of a siege is to wear down the enemy by attrition, denying them food and munitions until they are forced to surrender.

A city can be put to siege, since it relies on the outlying land to supply food and raw materials. A planet, unless its like a new colony, is mostly self sufficient, the place that produces food and raw material, it won't run out of them because your space ships are in orbit blocking access to all the nothing that is space around it and to trade from other planets.

In fact, a space siege would be a problem for the orbiting fleet, because if the planet is unfriendly then the ships can't resupply and will eventually deplete their own supplies and starve, with the planet producing and holding to itself the supplied they need.

Deploying a planet-cracking warhead isn't usually an option, since if you've come all this way to take the planet, you want it for yourself.

Therefore, it makes the most sense to have ground armies secure the planet and as quickly as possible, since the fleet has a finite endurance while the planet has nearly infinite ability to wait it out. That's not to say ships can't help, since they can provide strategic mobility for the invading troops and bombard enemy logistics assets. I would argue that tube artillery is probably better than spacecraft for in-battle artillery support, since a battery of guns can service a target much faster than an orbiting starfleet, counting for both the time on orbit to actually get to firing position and the time it takes for the shells to arrive.

Depends on the planet. What about city planets that rely on inbound shipments of food?

 JNAProductions wrote:
Depends on the planet. What about city planets that rely on inbound shipments of food?

I think it would actually be the other way around: the most vulnerable worlds would be those that are newly established, not those thriving long enough to have incredibly large cities and the infrastructure to be self-sufficient. It's basically impossible to import a planet's worth of food, which is staggeringly large, especially so in the world of 40k where FTL travel is sometimes disrupted and most of the planets were self sufficient before being recontacted.

I actually really like this idea, but that's because I'm all about narrative campaign play. Something like this might really imbalance the tournament scene.

But yeah, fluff wise, so many imperial factions rely on the Navy, that a battle brothers exemptions is fairly fluffy. A bespoke rule laying out exactly which Imperial factions they can work with might be even better.

Still wish our sisters had received a generic flier. We did get Junith + Zephyrim, so I can't complain.