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I really love some of the Imperial Guard aircraft like the Valkyrie and the Avenger (and I've always wanted to get an Avenger and paint her up like an A-10 Warthog).

More to the point-I'm building a Scion heavy force and am planning on buying some Valkyries to cart my Scions around in, but everything I see online says to avoid Flyers like the proverbial plague.

What am I missing? The Valkyries seem like they would be just fine hovering around like land speeders...

People mostly don't like that most flyers not in hover mode have to start the game in reserve & then enter the board the same as Strategic Reserves.
So on the 2nd turn when the aircraft enters play it can't actually move anywhere.

Others will tell you that they're too expensive, too weak, etc etc etc.

Some people also don't understand how to use them once they're in play.

In addition to what ccs said, I'll add in that I just don't feel like flyers fit into the scale of 40k in general.

They're supposed to be super-sonic jets, and yet they're doing donuts around a single patch of ruins. The scale of 40k is wonky, so you can try to say that the battlefield is significantly bigger than the models/terrain make it appear, but that's still a weirdly small amount of space for flyers who have to move in circles (well, squares) all game if they want to keep shooting.

Flyers are cool, but they're just way more at-home in something like Aeronautica. If they're represented in 40k at all, it's probably better to represent them the way we used to represent orbital strikes.

I agree with Wyldhunt.

I love the models, and consider them some of GW’s best.

But they’re just entirely outside the scope of a 40K battle, and require a level of abstraction I just don’t find appealing.

Even if they were the killer unit for an army, or just the perfect support for my preferred list? I wouldn’t take them.

When they are bad they are bad. When they are good you get 3 storm ravens getting full re-rolls from G-man or eldar flyers blocking off objectives with their huge bases, while being impossible to hit for some armies. Very uninteractive. HUGE models hard to transport. And if they somehow become or are good, and you just use one, the world is using 3 and soon you get punished with nerfs, rules changes and point hikes, for combos your army can not perform.

In 10th specific with the wierd terrain rules, they feel as if they don't belong in the game. Now GW could make them "always hover", cut the point cost etc but then we run in to the problem that some flyers would become just better tanks. In fact we had that for a second with storm ravens this edition .

I think of Valkyries as closer to Helicopters than Jets...

(I kinda wish there was a Guard chopper.)

But I get the gist of what you are saying. In large apocalypse style games, jets could work. They just don't fit onto the smaller tables.

It's not that players are against them (some are, but not most) its that GW really does not seem to be interested in making them useful this edition. The hover rules don't really work with terrain at all, the non-hover rules really struggle to function at all, and even if you try to make them work, they're just not at all competitively priced for what they do.

It's mostly that they're disappointing in a lot of ways right now, so people aren't recommending them and trying to dissuade new players from making disappointing purchases.

 Quixote wrote:
I think of Valkyries as closer to Helicopters than Jets...

(I kinda wish there was a Guard chopper.)

But I get the gist of what you are saying. In large apocalypse style games, jets could work. They just don't fit onto the smaller tables.

I've found they tend to work out pretty poorly in the local shops Apocalypse games.
But that might be how we run those games.... The tables are typically set up to be 8'wide x 24'/30' long. Usually 12+ players, each with about 2500pts.
What with all the units & terrain It gets hard to place that big flying base + there's a helluva lot of enemy fire within range almost anywhere it stops moving. So unless you're just using some pass over bomb effect, your flyers likely not getting another turn....

Though if I had the Marauder Bombers to do it? I would field 3 of them in our upcoming APoc & just do turn 3/turn 5 strategic bombing runs.

I don't have my book to hand to check - does 10th have the hard limit on how many [FLYER] units you can field, or was that 9th?

 Dysartes wrote:
I don't have my book to hand to check - does 10th have the hard limit on how many [FLYER] units you can field, or was that 9th?

Core Rules, other than the Rule of 3, no .
BUT the Leviathan & Pariah packs limit the total # of units you can place in Reserve + Strat Reserve to A) no more than 1/2 your total units, B) no more than 1/2 your total pts.
Non-hovering Aircraft have to start in Reserve, so.... Yeah, there's a limit. & you reach it pretty quick.

It'd cost me 1035pts to have Marauder Bombers x3 + 3 units. Marauder Destroyers x3 would be 1125pts + 3 units.
I could, in theory, do 3 Marauders in our coming APoc game.
The down side is that I don't own any Marauders. :(

ccs wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:
I don't have my book to hand to check - does 10th have the hard limit on how many [FLYER] units you can field, or was that 9th?

Core Rules, other than the Rule of 3, no .
BUT the Leviathan & Pariah packs limit the total # of units you can place in Reserve + Strat Reserve to A) no more than 1/2 your total units, B) no more than 1/2 your total pts.
Non-hovering Aircraft have to start in Reserve, so.... Yeah, there's a limit. & you reach it pretty quick.

It'd cost me 1035pts to have Marauder Bombers x3 + 3 units. Marauder Destroyers x3 would be 1125pts + 3 units.
I could, in theory, do 3 Marauders in our coming APoc game.
The down side is that I don't own any Marauders. :(

Now I understand why the Avanced Augury Enhancement exists. It can allow me to pick up my Valkyries and put them into reserves with my Tempestus Aquilons.

I could literally have a null deployment with Astra Militarum (at 1500 points or lower).

me personally? I felt like they changed the game when they were introduced, and I feel like the game is better without them.

 Dysartes wrote:
I don't have my book to hand to check - does 10th have the hard limit on how many [FLYER] units you can field, or was that 9th?

That appears to be 9th. And I don't think it was a rule from the rulebook, but applied afterwards.

BanjoJohn wrote:
me personally? I felt like they changed the game when they were introduced, and I feel like the game is better without them.

They were introduced in 4th or 5th?

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
me personally? I felt like they changed the game when they were introduced, and I feel like the game is better without them.

They were introduced in 4th or 5th?

I believe, at the time of introduction, they were basically just skimmers. Not proper aircraft.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
me personally? I felt like they changed the game when they were introduced, and I feel like the game is better without them.

They were introduced in 4th or 5th?

I believe, at the time of introduction, they were basically just skimmers. Not proper aircraft.

Flyers were absolutely NOT "just skimmers".
The flyer rules were introduced in one of the early FW books.
They entered play on your opponents turn (end of their Movement iirc), moved in a straight line to whatever point you intended to shoot from, the opponent then got a chance to shoot at them (restrictions applied), then if they survived they shot, & either landed (for ex: a drop pod or a transport) or continued flying off the board. Flyers that left the board could return in future turns.
There's more details, but that's the gist of it.

When they were introduced into the Codexs in 6th(?), that's when we got the stupid crap that forms the basis of todays rules.
The FW rules were much better at depicting aircraft strafing/bombing the battlefield.

Ah, okay. I was wrong.

I think there were 3 levels.

The FW flyer rules
The pre-6th codex that had the few that existed (valks, stormravens, think I’m missing more) which were fast skimmers.
6th edition where flyer rules were added to the core rules.

Even in Epic scale, they don’t entirely work as we might expect.

Introduced in 2nd Ed Epic via White Dwarf, they were fast moving, packed a fairly decent but not overwhelming punch (the Marauder had a nose mounted Battle Cannon), and I think enemy arms needed Snap Fire to be able to target them - and every army got AA weapons around the same time.

3rd Ed they did bombing/strafing runs, and had rules about refuel/rearm/repair, so whilst I didn’t play much of that abomination of a game, weren’t available every turn, but were still useful for pinpoint attacks where your opponent perhaps didn’t expect it.

I forget what they did in Epic Armageddon entirely.

And in LI, they’re more or less back to their 2nd Ed rules.

 Nevelon wrote:
I think there were 3 levels.

The FW flyer rules
The pre-6th codex that had the few that existed (valks, stormravens, think I’m missing more) which were fast skimmers.
6th edition where flyer rules were added to the core rules.

6th was the flyer edition and GW really made some effort to sell the things and introduced them to most factions. Heldrake and the necron croissant I think were the more abusive flyers at the time.
At the tail end of 7th they released a pretty stupid flyer rules addon book that not even the tournament crowd used because in reality it just made flyers worse and more complicated.

Flyers, in their own way, are as awkward as large and powerful land units in 28mm system. Where a super-heavy tank or a Titan takes up a considerable part of the board, a flyer will move very fast making even a large board rather confined in possible movement. I would love to have a Hemlock Fighter for my Ulthwe army, but it would be a display piece at most.

Much like Adeptus Titanicus is the superior game for Titans, Aeronautica Imperialis is the superior game for aircraft and GW dropped the ball hard there. A single Heresy box like the previous ones was all they needed to win players over. Why on earth continue to produce the rule book and special bases if one can't even purchase a hexmap poster to even play the game on it?

A friggin freebie they can chuck in a copy of White Dwarf for goodness sake!

From what I recall of flyers:

5th - You had valkyries and storm ravens. They pretty much behaved like skimmers. This was fine but didn't feel much like airplanes.

6th - Introduced more flyers, and they had the straight line movement/go back into reserves rules. You basically weren't allowed to hurt them unless you invested in anti-flyer weapons. This sucked.

7th - I'm fuzzy on this. Pretty sure it was basically the same as 6th except snap-shooting was a thing and a few more flyers were available? So you either bought your own flyers or fished for 6s. This also sucked.

8th - No more fishing for 6s. Now it's just a -1 to-hit penalty. This kind of worked except that Alaitoc flyers specifically were annoying because of the stacking to-hit modifiers.

9th - I don't recall anything about flyers this edition except that the hive crone was briefly a thing?

10th - Flyers are boring/weird and overpriced.

So from 6th onward, they've been stuck doing weird donuts and flying off the table because the tabletop is too small for airplanes. In some editions, GW gives them rules to make them harder to hurt in an effort to represent their high-flying nature better, but this usually just results in them being really annoying/uninteractive.

No shade to anyone who owns a flyer (I have one myself), but they're just kind of a bad idea in the context of 40k. The only ones that really fit are the ones that can slow down/hover and basically behave like skimmers.

So, the main issue with flyers as a concept has to do with what they actually are. They are a high mobility model that almost exclusively interacts with the game via ranged damage. This is kind of a problem, because in 40k the main advantage of mobility is to get to melee or to hold objectives, which are two things flyers don't really do.

Instead you have a tank that either gets to attack and deal a bunch of damage without any real counter play, or that is trivially killed without accomplishing much. There's just not a lot of useful design space for the archetype as a whole.

The main reason GW has kind of given up on them, IMO, is just that they don't know what to do about the problem of having a model in the sky that still has to have a physical connection to the table. The base takes up space on the ground, but isn't supposed to be engaged with, and that really messes with a lot of things that are clearly not in line with what the model is supposed to represent and can't easily be designed around.

Couldn't there be a rule that will allow units to ignore the base for movement purposes, much like Titanic units ignore non-Titanic unit's bases?

Just had to enter the vault of ultimate knowledge and consult the holy bible itself. My memory still holds up; flyers were a thing in the original Rogue Trader, along with Vampires and Dinosaurs.

Strange but true.

 LunarSol wrote:
So, the main issue with flyers as a concept has to do with what they actually are. They are a high mobility model that almost exclusively interacts with the game via ranged damage. This is kind of a problem, because in 40k the main advantage of mobility is to get to melee or to hold objectives, which are two things flyers don't really do.

Instead you have a tank that either gets to attack and deal a bunch of damage without any real counter play, or that is trivially killed without accomplishing much. There's just not a lot of useful design space for the archetype as a whole.

The main reason GW has kind of given up on them, IMO, is just that they don't know what to do about the problem of having a model in the sky that still has to have a physical connection to the table. The base takes up space on the ground, but isn't supposed to be engaged with, and that really messes with a lot of things that are clearly not in line with what the model is supposed to represent and can't easily be designed around.

For me it really is they just don’t fit the scale.

Tyranid Flyers do get a pass though, as they’re biological creatures able to roost, so comparatively slow speed manoeuvres can work. Similarly, VTOL type things I can head canon my way round in a galaxy with anti-grav plating and that.

But anything described as hypersonic is just a No from me.

The weird thing is that GW had a highly portable set of rules for flyers in Epic Armageddon.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Couldn't there be a rule that will allow units to ignore the base for movement purposes, much like Titanic units ignore non-Titanic unit's bases?

There is. It's on P.54 of the Core Rules.

SamusDrake wrote:
Just had to enter the vault of ultimate knowledge and consult the holy bible itself. My memory still holds up; flyers were a thing in the original Rogue Trader, along with Vampires and Dinosaurs.

Strange but true.

Back the day of TRR and height levels. The Golden Age!

ccs wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Couldn't there be a rule that will allow units to ignore the base for movement purposes, much like Titanic units ignore non-Titanic unit's bases?

There is. It's on P.54 of the Core Rules.

Huh. This is what happens when you play with one army that doesn't have Flyers and never play against them - you just gloss over the rules.

I should probably go back a reread the entire rules again. Can't hurt, can it?