Flyer Interactions

[Nabterayl]

Hey guys,

I have a question I'd like to run by the Apocalypse gurus. I game primarily with a circle of friends, and none of us have any experience with Apocalypse flyers. This is because we don't own any Apocalypse flyers. However, several of us come from a military history geek/wargaming background, and we've always been interested in the idea of more integrated gaming.

One idea we've been kicking around is matching games of Aeronautica Imperialis with games of 40K, and allowing ground attacks in AI to cross over onto the 40K board (and vice versa). It seems to me, based on the Apocalypse rules for shooting at flyers, that it would not be a problem to use AI models on a 40K board to represent the flyer's position when called for (the flyer models would presumably trade off between the 40K board and the AI board). Does anybody with more experience interacting with Apocalypse flyers see any potential pitfalls with this, or situations that we would need to cover with house rules beforehand?

EDIT: Yes, yes, I know "it's Apocalypse, make stuff up." What I'm looking for is advice on issues that might arise, if any, so that we can make stuff up beforehand :p

[Denzark]

TLOS. Much easier to hide a AI thunderhawk behind say a factory chimney than a 40k one. I would say no to this personally, just as a scale issue.

However I say yes to anything of a decent size - the last thunderhawk I played against was built from an ebayed Y-Wing...

[Nabterayl]

Uh, this is going to sound dumb, but doesn't page 94 of the Apocalypse rules say "When determining line of sight and cover to flyers, always ignore all intervening terrain and models?" For AI units that can also be skimmers, such as Valkyries and Vultures, we'd obviously use 40K-scale models, at least when they were behaving as skimmers. And of course we couldn't have any of our drop ships actually land using this system.

One issue I can see arising is hull size - obviously the hull size of an AI-scale flyer is smaller than the hull size of an Apocalypse-scale flyer, and thus the effective range to the target will be greater by a couple of inches. This one, I think, I'm okay with - the idea of the hull size of a flyer affecting whether or not it is in range seems silly to me. If the model is assumed to be so high up that units always have line of sight to it, it seems better to me measure to the stem of the base anyway, like in BFG.

[Denzark]

OK my bad what about when Thawk lands then (which I believe it can).

Still, not keen personally. Why not come up with a load of epic basilisks for an entire artillery company, or run 10 epic baneblades? Or just write 'Emperor titan' on a bank note and play that?

But as Monsieur le buffo would probably say if you're all adults and having fun then what the hell why not?

[Nabterayl]

It's definitely true that, we'd be unable to have any drop ships land.

As for our motivation, in case you're curious, mainly it's because we think the Apocalypse flyer rules don't sound very fun. From our perspective, they have the following deficiencies:
Only one or two flyers tend to be involved per side (at least from what I can gather), because they tend to be expensive monetarily and in-game. Oftentimes, this strikes us as just plain silly - what, a single Marauder bomber is making a bombing run?
Variety of flyers is very difficult to achieve, thanks to the monetary expense of the models themselves. All of us like a strong narrative running through our games, even if the games themselves aren't formally linked through a campaign rules structure, and we feel like this limits our stories unnecessarily. The models are cool, to be sure, but unlike all the other models in 40K, they're actually irrelevant. The rules completely ignore the dimensions of the flyer models themselves, except for purposes of measuring range, and the idea that a Thunderhawk is in range because it's 24" to the edge of its fuselage but a slightly smaller Marauder is out of range because its fuselage is a tiny bit smaller offends our suspension of disbelief more when it comes to flyers than it does when it comes to land units.
Flyers are very difficult to shoot down in Apocalypse, unless you have brought specialized anti-air ground units - and, indeed, most specialized anti-air ground units have an easier job of shooting down flyers in Apocalypse than do actual interceptors. In short, Apocalypse doesn't really contemplate air cover, which ought to be the best defense against hostile flyers (and, in most cases, more common than specialized anti-air ground units).

The theory is that using AI-scale models doesn't really lose us much in terms of gameplay (whereas using Epic-scale models would radically alter the ground war), since flyers more than any other unit can be approximated as a dimensionless point on the battlefield. Landing is a real loss, to be sure. But what we gain (again, in theory) is the ability to field more realistic numbers of aircraft for all players, with better rules for air-to-air interactions.

[Denzark]

Yeah I would agree the flyers can be awkward my normal gambit is ignore them (we play old objective taking with anything as per Apoc reloaded - we follow 4th ed scoring unit.)

[Culven]

The only problem that I can think of that may actually affect the games is the fact that you are using two different game systems. They use different scales, which would require running the games in parallel while trying to ensure that the model positions would need to be tracked very carefully, and you will probably need to just use duplicate models on the two tables, which I would personally find too annoying. Also, the interaction between the 40K vehicles and AI Flyers would be ackward. Which rules do you use for bombing runs, shooting from ground to air and air to ground, etc.?

I would suggest two options:
1) Play Epic so you can run your squadrons of aircraft.
2) Play 40K Apocalypse with AI models on tall sticks to represent the aircraft up high (yes it would be an odd perspective from top down, but should feel right considering that you are commanding ground forces looking up to see airborn threats). Then just use the normal Apocalypse rules for the Flyers. As you already said, the size of the models isn't really an issue. Just measure everything to the base and add 12" to the range. You could even use larger bases to represent Super-Heavy aircraft and smaller bases for regular aircraft.

[Lerra]

Sounds like a lot of fun :)

Which version of the flyer rules are you planing to use? I believe the most recent version is in Imperial Amour 7, but the standard Apoc rules seem to work fine, too.

[Nabterayl]

We'd definitely use the AI rules in some fashion. We haven't played any AI, so this is all theory at the moment, but the whole idea is to be able to integrate aircraft in a way that makes them more than a sideshow, which is what the Apocalypse rules do. Our ideal scenario would be to play an AI game in tandem with a 40K game, and every time a unit on the AI board made an attack against a ground target, resolve it on the 40K board using 40K/Apocalypse rules. The hope is that this way we could allow for more realistic numbers of attack craft without seriously unbalancing the 40K board - so for instance, yes, an IG player could field enough Marauders to flatten the 40K board, but his ork opponent would be able to defend with fightaz, so he wouldn't be helpless even if he didn't bring a million flak wagons.

The big questions for this are (i) how many times in an AI game does an aircraft get to attack a ground target, and (ii) how many AI turns equal one 40K turn, or vice versa? Depending on the answers to those questions (which we really just need to run some AI test games to answer), we might have to come up with a different way to integrate the two games.