Playing Aeronautica Imperialis

This is getting crazy, I got to play again! :O

Last weekend my pal Hetairoi (I never get tired of recommending his Instagram) was kind enough to set a game of Aeronautica Imperialis for another pal and myself.

Weee! Little planes and pew pew!

He has a quite formidable Lamenters fleet, but he was looking forward to testing some Tyranids he just got 3D printed. I'm not 100% sure where the Tyranid profiles did come from, but some place online, for sure. If any of you are interested, I can ask.

Anyway. Test game. A couple of Space Marines Xyphon fighters against a Tyranid Harpy and a Crone:

The board is not great for taking pics, but you get an idea

If you are familiar with the game, you will notice we aren't using regular bases. My pal covered the original base and replaced the plastic piece with a RC extendable antenna, so the height is absolutely visual on the game, there's no need of checking. It's not my place to elaborate, please check his work!

I'll be playing with these beauties (the Crone model is still unfinished!)

This will be my rival's force:

No more delay, let me tell you a few words on the game. It plays on alternate activation, pretty much as every other game nowadays. At the beginning of the turn, each player has to decide what their planes will do in advance. It of course reminds of X-Wing, Wings of Glory and games of the like. Here you have the catalog of actions allowed:

So you set a token with the number of your movement of choice next to each plane and then both players roll for initiative. The winner decides who will move first. All the planes move alternately and then shoot alternately.

So the battle begins

Tyranids have little to almost nothing firepower, so they depend almost exclusively on hunting the enemy. It's not enough to cross your paths at the same time... but at the same height!

I'm at height level 1, my rival is at height level 2. Nope, cannot hit him

I'm coming for youuuu

At the beginning of each turn you must decide your height and speed (this one meaning the number of tiles you can move), being able to go 1 unit up or down. The Xyphon can go up to speed 6; the Tyranids cannot go further than level 4, but can remain stationay if they want. Spoiler: I went full speed the whole game, couldn't be bothered with such weird concepts as planning or whatever. The hive mind is hungry and wants to satiate the animal instinct.

The game soon turned into a dogfight

Firing, once again, resembles X-Wing in some manner. You have short/medium/long range and will make more harm the closest you are frome the enemy. Being a Warhammer game, this of course means you roll more dice. In this case, the Xyphon shot on my Crone and inflicted two wounds:

And took it down!!

Ouch

But not only that! In the next turn, the other Xyphon shot a missile on my Harpy and...

Seriously?

Ouch! The game ended abruptly in just a second! We got the impression that taking out two wounds is just too easy, and that it's quite difficult to engage an enemy plane in hand to hand combat, which can only happen if your path crosses the tile your enemy is on just at that moment. Besides, you have to be at the same height or one level above.

As it had been so quick, we decided to run a second game!

This is just a promotional pic between games. Keep scrolling

This time we decided to have a Harpy and two Crones against a Xyphon and a Stormeagle:

This is the display...

And these are the rivals:

We made some other improvements and decided to play to capture an objective, a Rhino. The Space Marines would try to rescue their brothers and the Tyranids would try to have some canned food for lunch:

Strange manoeuvres!

You can go up or down at the end of your turn if, by any reason, you hadn't done it at the beginning. But if you don't reduce speed, you may suffer a wound...

...just like happened to me with this absurd diving!

The Tyranids are stalking their prey

A Crone tries a hard diving. Just as we rehearsed it!

The Harpy hits the Stormeagle, causing some damage, but it still flies!

Same thing, but from another angle

The Stormeagle takes the Crone down, just when it was on the edge of hitting the Rhino

The other Crone goes for the Rhino. Will the Xyphon avoid it?

The brave pilot takes the other beast down!

So it is! Victory for the Lamenters! The Tyranids will remain hungry for a little bit more...

A brief conclusion: The game is really quick paced, pretty easy to get (at least the essentials, I guess there will be special rules and stuff, but we didn't get into them this time) and most important, enormously fun. The comparison with Wings of Glory and specially with X-Wing is inevitable, and I'd say they are different versions of a core idea. Areonautica Imperialis looks more easy to develop and to learn. It gets really automatic after a couple of turns, and the tiles system makes it quite easy to get distances, fire arcs and stuff. There's no confusion and no discussion, and it so makes it all faster.

Regarding the Tyranids mod rules, I honestly believe they need to be harder to beat (maybe 3 wounds instead of 2) and would definitely benefit of some more firepower, even if it's short ranged. Hitting enemy vessels in flight becomes really difficult to achieve. So these are the lessons identified! We certainly will need to run some more test games to see if we are right about them!

PS: My pal Hetairoi just gave me away a sprue with two Xyphons he didn't want. Oh, dammit, I'm doomed...