Aeronautica Imperialis: review

After some time of chasing and locating this rulebook I have succeeded. Despite being made in now long gone 2006 and not supported any more by GW, it still an interesting game. Aeronautica Imperialis have in many ways influenced many of following “hits” of gaming industry. X-wing is one of them. How to summarize the overall impression if this game in brief sentence?

Peculiar dogfight.

Lets try to break it down in smaller points and elaborate on high and low point of this definitely interesting game.

1. Stand alone game.
2. Dogfight
3. Peculiar details
4. Juicy extras and balance

Stand alone game.

Aeronautica Imperialis is a Warhammer 40k spin-off specifically dedicated to aerial dogfights. Period. It ignores the huge amount of 40k inconsistencies and “holy bolter” of its game system WS and BS. It simply puts us in the sky and gives some flying lessons in style of World War 2. As it was written prior to modern Storm Talons and Sunsharks it has relatively small, but balanced amount of aircraft for each race, but our main workhorse/opponent is Imperial Navy Thunderbolt. Fighters and Bombers are the only types, but these classes have small influence on the gameplay. Flyers characteristics are much more important. Addition of Advanced rules makes for more in-depth games, but at the same time makes it even slower. Things like limited ammo, pilots skill, weather, terrain do affect combat, but if you mastered this relatively complicated game it will make it more tactically challenging.

Dogfight.

Well... put it this way, Imperium of Man is dying and backwards, just for the sake of Space Marines being cool dudes of entire setting. In case of Aeronautica Imperialis this put an emphasize onto close aerial fighting, without Space marines on a main roles. Instead Imperial players fly with Navy. On a technical side, in time of Imperium, Thunderbolt fighters can fly to the orbit of the planet but they have no radar and heat-seeking missiles have less firepower than autocannon. So pilots main activity is to get on enemy's tail and pepper it with bullets. All other missions like Bombing raids, troop insertion, Air patrols are added on top that sweet adrenaline of “dakka-dakka”.

Peculiar details.

The sweet sound of “dakka-dakka” comes at a price. Main idea of game is to predict position of enemy's aircraft, put your plane into firing range and roll 5+ or 6+ if you are higher or lower than target. To do so, you change following: Speed, Altitude, Thrust, then you play Manoeuvre cards to do Barrel rolls, High-g turns, Dives, Climbs and Turns. For each plane! Then you have 3 set ranges for weapons with variable effect on firepower. Book states that game with 2 planes may take an hour to complete and game with up to 12 planes several hours. In my small experience dogfight of 2 vs 2 planes took approximately 40 minutes.

Luckily we were not using advanced rules, but still some small things like overshooting enemy because your speed is higher than his, firing loads of shots and not scoring anything because you needed 6+, hitting but not damaging plane (similar to roll to wound), makes Aeronautica Imperialis a very detailed game. This in my opinion is both strong and weak point of it.

On a strong side: it really delivers a shot-by-shot dogfight experience.

On the other side: the very complexity of it slows it down.

Game system written by Games Workshop veteran Warwick Kindrade is as simple as it gets for a aerial combat simulator (though book insists that it is not a simulator). But to make it's gameplay faster and even more easier to grasp and master it would have to lose many of its detail which make it so rich. For example 4 vs 4 game of X-wing takes an hour to complete, Axis and Allies: Wings of Victory is similar in speed.

Juicy extras

On top of well-tested and balanced game book contains colour schemes for all aircraft, technical specifications, fluffy descriptions, in-game data sheets, “historical” missions, campaign rules (which are easy and based on 3 tables), some special rules, couple of pages dedicated to painting and terrain.

Overall book is high quality hard back with typical Forgeworld glossy paper. Currently sold together with supplement for 40k games for £30. Probably while stock lasts. Since GW discontinued its Specialist games in 2012, this book would be a collectors, not gamers buy. For now there are much faster and more competitive games on a market. But of coarse, they are not in Warhammer 40000 universe.