Let's talk: Aircraft and Spacecraft!


Analysis:


Space Marine Comparision:


Issues:


Likelyhood of any changes


Fun Fact

Yes it's meant to be blank, that's the joke.

Overlords, Gyrocopters and... nope, that's all I've got. Oh my!

now this is my kind of army development post.

solid work

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Haha!!

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Totally overpowered. I've never seen a squat aircraft even take a bm and I've never seen a squat spaceship miss a shot! They need hit with the nerf bat asap!!!!! ;-)

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Best Squat thread EVER...
Love your work guys and gals

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Originally I made this thread as a joke, but some serious thinking thought that maybe this is a worthwhile place to discuss the strategic impact that the lack of air/spacecraft has on the Squat list.

In a 'normal' list, what roles do the air/spacecraft fill and what can the Squat list as a whole do to compensate?


Spacecraft:

Orbital Bombardment: Massively high BP bombardments usually with the Macro Weapon ability. Great for clearing out the Blitz and shaking loose enemy artillery.
Squats fine without this, with such fun units like Goliaths and Doomsday Cannons they're easily able to place down big MW barrages more easily than most.

Pin-point Attacks: A single Titan-killer shot for targeting War Machines.
Squats are average-ish at compensating for this. Squats, like their Space Marine cousins, sometimes lack the Titan Killing ability with the lack of long ranged MW/TK fire. Unless you take a Cyclops then you've got Titan Killing overkill.


Aircraft:

Bombing runs: see Orbital Bombardment above

Ground Assault Insertions: Thunderhawks dropping in with a payload of close combat death.
Squats have their own alternative with the Tunneling mechanism, although without really dedicated CC troops like Terminators, then they are never going to be teleport/air assault specialists like Space Marines

Interception/CAP: Fighter aircraft intercepting enemy aircraft with AA fire
Arguably Squat's greatest weakness is the lack of mobile AA. Without a couple of handy CAP-able thunderbolts the Squat army is forced to rely heavily on its ground based AA, with the long term effect of forcing the army to clump together when under heavy aircraft fire.

Ground Assault Aircraft strafing ground units.
While not a dealbreaker, ground assault can be VERY useful for turning close games into wins. Especially in the 3rd or 4th turn when few units remain on the board, a late game thunderbolt strafe can be all you need to place that final Blast Marker breaking an enemy formation and cleaning the objective.

Squats really lack that late game speed and flexibility that can sometimes prevent them from capitalizing a game where they seem to be ahead into an actual objective-based win.


Discuss! what have I missed and what alternate tactics have you developed?

I think adding rhinos to thunderfires goes a long way towards fixing the biggest weaknesses here.
As far as pinging enemy formations to break them, Squats might not have t'bolts but they have a few other tools - indirect on mole mortars and thudd guns, popped up overlord and gyros and in a pinch I've doubled thunderfires 60cm, then with another 60cm range they can hit a lot of the table.

I'm fine with Squats having no aircraft but since they're a spacefaring race in the background, having no spacecraft in the list seems wrong.

Forge World even produced a couple of spacecraft models for their aliens that were basically a modernised version of Squats and could make good models to use/proxy for Squat spacecraft (whichever side of the Squats = Demiurg? background debate you choose).

When are we going to find out what happened to that zeppelin shaped elephant in the room?

I'm interested in this as well. If Overlords are the biggest issue in the list, wouldn't it make sense to tackle them first? Once they are more balanced, we might find that the rest of the list doesnt need much work at all.

This risks drifting off topic, and maybe deserving of it's own thread but if I remove my Overlords I'll probably replace at least some with Gyrocopters.
Any thoughts on how these will be updated? Are you thinking something along the lines of the E:UK list, which i will probably use until I hear otherwise.
(And at least this will give me a chance to get my Overlords painted)

Overlords:
I dislike having these as WE (same goes for goliaths)
They would be way nicer bobbing along behind the infantry supporting them all the way.
How to do this,
Make them a cross between a leman russ, a hydra, hellhound, and a silver tower. somewhere in the range of 70-100 pts. Also fieldable in formations of three

So for the role they need:
- AA,
- maybe up the speed slightly, maybe not
- reinterpret the bombs as ground support, i.e. ginve them a good - very good FF maybe EA
- they don't need battlecannons really (I know they had them in previous editions), give em decent FP though
- 4+ reinforced armour save (self sealing gas cells)

In other words, make it a supporting unit instead of competing with the LEviathan, colossus et al.

Space ships
Not necessary, add nothing to the list
- Squats have mines and tunnellers that do the work of rapid deployment
- If you feel you really need orbital bombardment, add that and call it massive sapping or something. Like the Brits did in WW1. Dig a tunnel fill it with a ridiculous amount of explosives and blow a new crater into the moon.

Gyrocopters
like them as skimmers, have nothing against them as flyers either, however losing them as skimmers will hurt the speed of the list. Now they can zip over to an objective which is good imho.

Radical idea: ability to land them and use them as skimmers the next turn (so can't grab objectives in the turn they land). So combined flyer/skimmer.

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