We had our first game with flyers yesterday. In addition to the 27 other tactical and rules screwups we had, I'm not positive we handled the flyers correctly either.

Opponent had Thunderbolts on CAP.
I successfully activated my Marauders for Ground Attack on his Whirlwinds.
Made my Approach Move, using the relevant turn modifiers.
He moved his Thunderbolts into position.

Now, how we resolved the shooting, was as follows.
1) My Flak attacks from Hydra (no bonus/penalty as hadn't moved)
2) My Flak attacks from Marauders against his TBolts (is there any bonus/penalty applied here?)
3) His CAP attacks against my Marauders (we forgot the +1 to hit for that)
4) His Flak attacks from two Hunters (one at -1 for moving, the other not).
5) My ground attack run.

Is that right? Did we mess something up?

Morgan Vening

For what it is worth, while Hena's process will produce the same result, I believe the official process works on a kind of 'last-in-first-out' principle. So resolve everything to do with the Fighter's CAP mission before resolving everything to do with the Bomber's ground attack mission. In each case you resolve 'enemy' AA before completing the relevant A/c mission:- So the process becomes . . .

Fighters
1) Resolve any Bomber defensive fire and ground AA attacks against the Fighters (ground AA gets no modifiers here).
2) Resolve any remaining Fighter attacks against the Bombers (with +1 modifier for CAP)
Bombers
3) Resolve ground AA against the Bombers (again no modifiers)
4) Resolve any remaining Bombers against the ground target.

As Hena says, Ground AA that moves before the air assault takes place is not modified, but if Ground AA moves later on in the turn and then fires on the a/c as they disengage it receives a -1 modifier.

If you follow this 'last-in-first-out' principle, it is then fairly easy to house rule that you can use fighters on CAP to act as an escort to friendly bombers by 'CAPing' enemy fighters. However, be warned that this can produce additional complexities even if you rigourously follow the process.

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Sir Hemry Newbolt

I really wanted to CAP the CAPers yet we just played with the standard rules.

An escort for the bombers sounds more plausible to me and I think I will try and get Morgan to agree to this rule for our next game.

Afterall, how complex could it possibly get?    

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Oh the bliss of ignorance . . .  

Try having two formations of Fighters facing off head-to-head against a transport being escorted by some fighters, and work out who can shoot what and when - and good luck  

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Sir Hemry Newbolt

The plane rules really do need a complete rewrite.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

I thought you could only CAP with one formation.......

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Heh.  For extra fun, do it inside the flak umbrella of both sides...



That's correct.  Ginger was just responding to your "how complex could it get" question.  The answer is... very.

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Neal

I did that (from a draft Jervis wrote) using an immediate disengagement paradigm to avoid many of the problems in the book rules.  It also rewrote the planetfall rules, breaking them out into ballistic planetfall (Drop Pods, Roks, etc.) and aircraft planetfall (Thawks, Vampires, etc.), which had a section devoted to drop pods and which gave the aircraft bonuses so that the player had a reason to actually use planetfalling aircraft.

Everyone that tested it thought the rules worked great.  However, the system was, obviously, more abstract and the models stayed off-board almost the entire time.  Ergo, the general response was that they were bland.

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Neal

Neal, are your air rules still online somewhere? I really liked them and will use them in local play if I can get them again.

Meph:  I left them up on the SG boards.  AFAIK, they will still be on there when/if CS and sundry get all the technical kinks worked out.

I have the last version I worked on before posting, but it still has my notes and highlighting and stuff.  I'll try to get it cleaned up and posted to the wikiwikiwar.

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Neal

If that fails, would waybackmachine help find the posting from the site?

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