Saturday 27 April 2013

Flyers


There is a lot of vitriol on the internet at the moment it seems towards flyers under 6th edition. The general opinion that I keep seeing is that flyers break the game because if one player has an aircraft or a flying monstrous creature and the opponent has no means to counter that in their list (no interceptors or skyfire) then the flyer will win the game.

I disagree with that statement but I do see a concern there. Flyers have been a nice addition to the official rulebook and have certainly added a new dimension to the game. However due to Games Workshop's crawl of codex releases, even though they have sped up since the release of 6th edition, there are plenty of armies that either don't have a flyer or a viable means of dealing with them outside of fortifications.

Everyone needs a flyer of some kind and that brings me to the other concern of mine. I have a fear that Games Workshop is going to over do the amount of skyfire weapons that can be found in each codex. Chaos Space Marines recieved flakk missiles purely for Havocs. Then Dark Angels came along and four or five units then had access to flakk missiles. Tau are phenomenally good at shooting flyers down. My concern is that as more codexes get released and more units get access to flakk missiles or skyfire options it will become less and less likely that anyone will bother taking flyers. Except maybe Chaos Marines as their Helldrake is far far too good not to include.

Games Workshop needs to give serious consideration here I think to how they handle it as more books get released. I'd like to see flyers remain as a useful addition in an army list which they won't be if everyone gets more than a fair share of anti-air weapons and/or units.

2 comments:

  1. Call me a cynic,but I'm pretty sure GW is going to nerf flyers into oblivion before too long, simply because they've made the money they want to off them (that and cleared their backlog of unsold Aegis Defence Lines), now they're going to push another unit type

    I've found that it's not flyers that breaks the game, it's Guard and Necron flyer spam that does that. If both players have only one or two each, then it actually adds quite a fun element to the game, hell even if one player leaves the dedictaed anti-flyer at home, as long as he doesn't get spammed, it's fine

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't think they will nerf them, or at least not too much, but I do fear that anti-air is going to become far too common. I know what we think of GW at times but I can't seem them wasting potential money on losing Flyers. They just need to balance the need for flyers to flurish and some anti-air on the ground.

      Thankfully I haven't seen Necron flyer spam, though I hear that Mike has a nasty list for that, but I see a lot of IG flyer spam about.

      Delete