Blog dedicado al mundo de los juegos de "Estrategia" de 28mm

I managed to play a game and enjoyed it thoroughly.

It essentialy has the same mechanics as most games with a few changes..

you get "initiative rolls" essentially priority from lotr but the person with the most aircraft gets +1 and the phases are for both sides like in LOTR, ie. one guy moves then the otehr guy moves, then one guy shoots and the other guy shoots.

Movement is done on velocity and thrust. Your velocity is your speed in 2 inch incriments. so for example V 2 = 4". each plane has a minimum and maximum velocity. e.g thunderbolt is 2 and 6 respectivley. if you fall below your minimum velocity, your crash and die, simple as. and if because of a manuever you fall to 0 altitude you die too.

Thrust is the amount that you can increase and decrease your velocity per turn at the start of your movement phase.

With each plane before the start of the movement phase you write down your manuvers for each aircraft. There are 10 manuver cards. the first 4 for fighters and bommers, the second 4 for fighters, and the last 2 are specialist like bomming runs and other things, and yes there ARE vector thrust manuvers such as a side swipe. the manuvers are done at any point in your move and involve you putting the card infront of the hexaganal base and the moving the base to the point indicated on the card. The cards will take the form of plastic counters in official release. don't worry.

Different manuvers have different options on the card for change in altitude such as clime or dive, and others are spefically there for change in altitude e.g half loop and wing over. changes in altitude require changes in velocity at the end of your movement phase but the effects for example stalling (falling below you minimum velocity in mid climb) are immidiate.

Shooting is the same old routine, roll to hit, roll to wound. some weapons cause more damage points ( planes have structure points btw, average fighter has 2) if you roll a 5 or 6. The interesting thing is they have range bands so some weapons like autocannons and lascannons are better at mid range and tau weaponry has benifits at long range where as the orks like it up close and personal. There is also ammo. each weapon has a set amount of turns it can fire for. so auto cannos have 4 turns worth of ammo and lascanons have 3.
Altitude has modifiers. 1 above or one below and it's - 1 to hit. any more than that you can't shoot UNLESS it's a ground atttack and you have specific ground attaking weponry such as bombs. There are fire arcs so fixed weponry ant side weaponry and stuff like that. Another cool thing is that the tau drone mounted burst cannons for exaple can't face up, so can only fire at equal or lower altitude planes than themselves. others like the marauder dorsal turret is the opposite.

another note on shooting, there is a phase before the shooting phase called the taling phase. any aircraft on 'sombody's six' gets to fire before any others that arn't tailing.

ah and grot bombs. grot bombs are launched from a parent aircraft at the same speed and velocity and then have 3 manuvers before they run out of fuel. their shooting action is 'collide'

Aircraft can have upgrades such has skystrike misslies and tankbusta rokkits for a certain points cost. a typical game is around 120 points to 180. maximum size they reccomend is 12 aircraft a side. to put this into scale a thunder bolt is 20, an panzee pheonix is 60 and a manta is 96. mantas can infact be upgraded to be about 120 points. 1 manta against 6 thunderbolts

There are full rules in the book for troop drops from thunderhawks, TH transporters, Ork landas and valkaries. so it's completely posisble to combine the epic rules and have a set of valkaries set down and pile out osme storm troopers and provide coving fire while vultures protect both the valkaries and storm troopers from attacking aircraft. There is also full rules for AA weapons such as sabre platforms, hydras and flak waggonz, but they always hit on 6's.