As Neal said though, all sensible players throw the thunderhawk into base contact to use its superior save.

Who throws an air assault in if they think it's in doubt? Maybe it's just me, but this seems like the most likely situation is "it all went straight to hell," where the defender won against some long odds. Salvaging a hit or two out of total disaster doesn't seem like much of a boost to me.

There's also the possibility the transport is damaged on the way in. I've kept Thawks and Landas back because I didn't want to risk them after they took flak damage. A loss of unit count because the WE dies might be as bad as the extra kill if the assault really is going to be close. If you win, having an aircraft formation and a beaten up ground formation is WAY better than 1-2 extra ground units and no aircraft formation.

correct me if im wrong, but are you sure the "a/c is destroyed when losing an assault" applies to Thunderhawks? I thought being fearless prevented this from happening.

cheers sanjuro

Thunderhawks are not fearless. Landing craft are.

ah, thanks, mephiston. That actually explains a lot

FWIW we played a big game this past weekend and MattB's Landa was used to 'absorb' hackdowns as the rest of the formation withdrew. Good to know we were playing it correctly!

that's odd - I always thought the aircraft was destroyed automatically as it couldn't withdraw (having a move of 0cm when landed), so applying hackdown hits to it when you know it's going to be destroyed seems odd. I guess it's no different to daemons, as Dave pointed out, just seems wrong to me.

I know what you mean, I find it helps if you go through the stages of the assault. So you get to the position where one side starts to lose (Marines here) and start to run away.

If the Transport is at the front of the assault, it gets overwhelmed by the victors as they go through killing nearby combatants (suffering the hack downs), whilst if it is at the rear of the assault it gets abandoned by the retreating marines (destroyed by losing the combat).

A while ago I had a related situation where one formation broke and withdrew in front of another, and the two formations were declared intermingled, assaulted and I lost again. Here the hackdowns were applied to the already broken formation before it was destroyed for being twice broken. The same reasoning applies - by being at the front of the assault it was overwhelmed by the victors (suffering hackdowns) before it disintegrated (by being twice broken).