Tuesday Tips – Kings of War – Dealing with Fliers
15th Feb 2022
Jonny Mann
Hello and Welcome to Tuesday tips!
This is the number one place to find the tips and tricks to master your favourite Mantic system. Hopefully over the coming weeks you will learn how to deal with that one pesky unit that has been giving you trouble or find some insight into better ways to play and enjoy your most loved game.
Today Kyle looks at how to take down those pesky Flying units!
It’s turn 2. You’ve advanced your units beyond the 12” line and are poised for some juicy turn 3 charges. Your chaff is covering your hammers and as you stare down your opponent’s battle line, you know they’re going to take the bait. You tap the chess clock with a smile, ready for success. Unfortunately, you missed something critical. You watch in horror as your opponent measures carefully and flies a dragon over their own units, lands clear of all your arcs, and pivots to face your flank or rear. You’re completely pinned in now with no way to stop the monstrosity from steamrolling through your units.
What do you do now?
This is a situation that catches a lot of new players out. Even more experienced ones can end up letting a single flier dictate their entire battle plan based on PTSD from the one time this happened to them. ‘They’re too strong!’, ‘Fliers are broken!’ While these cries are faint in 3rd edition, flying units are still prevalent and have a great place on the battlefield. It’s important for you to understand what you have in your toolkit that can mitigate their effect. It starts with a proper understanding of what fliers can and can’t do.
How Fliers Work
Fliers primarily ignore terrain and units as part of their movement. When imagining what they do, you can assume they start their movement off the ground and end their movement on the ground. This means they can pivot through (above) units and move through them as if they were not there. This includes terrain, such as a forest or obstacle. This allows them to move “through” units or terrain without penalty. What is critical though, is how they land. They must still follow the normal rules of movement when they land. For example, if they end their move in a forest, they are still hindered. They cannot land within 1” of enemy units unless charging. They cannot land with their base inside the footprint of another friendly unit. These restrictions are meant as tools to allow you to defend against them.
Spacing Out
When looking purely at movement defense, not giving a flier the space to land is high on the list of defenses. One of the best ways to do this is layering your units. In a recent post from the King of Monsters tournament in the US, handsome everyman Tom Annis shared this photo of what looks to be an early turn of his game against some fliers.
Tom is an expert player and I like this deployment in general but the key thing to notice here is that he is not giving those flying units a whole lot to work with. His Undead units are layered and spaced in a way that the enemy fliers can’t easily land, even if they had a flank to do so. By understanding the base size of the unit threatening you, you can spread your units in ways that don’t allow them to fit. By layering the units one in front of the other, it makes it significantly harder for the flier to land behind a unit and not be immediately threatened by doing so.
Remembering Line of Sight and Arcs
Most people think of flying monster types when fliers are mentioned but the more prevalent units you will come across are core units outside of the hero or monster slots such as Riverguard or Needlefangs. A disadvantage of these units is they usually come with lower Height values; especially the Swarm, Infantry, Heavy Infantry, and Large Infantry types. These units still require Line of Sight to make a charge and being Height 3 or lower means hiding behind certain Blocking Terrain or Hills can be a viable strategy to defending a facing on a unit. Forcing fliers to skirt around these terrain features can buy key time to reposition your units in order to deal with them.
Perhaps most importantly is keeping a flying unit in your front arc. This requires a bit of forethought on your part to know that when a flier lands, whether it is part of its movement or a charge, it will still be in the front facing of the units it is threatening. Thankfully, Kings of War allows you to measure ranges at any time. Don’t be afraid to check the distances opposing flying units have to know where they may be in a turn or more of movement. Tom was kind enough to share another photo from his last tournament where he was forced to mount a defense against an entire wing of Dustin Howard’s Soulflayers. Here, Tom has used layering, chaff, and proper angles to try and cut down the threat risk of Dustin’s charges. Tom has made it so the majority of these charges are in the front and that a single unit can engage one at a time, if it can engage at all. Were Dustin to grow impatient this entire attack could fall apart.
Come Fly with Me
Tom’s list also takes advantage of another excellent tool to deal with fliers: other fliers. At the end of the day, one of the simplest forms of defense against fliers are units that can do roughly the same thing. By taking units you’re comfortable using to intercept, you can screen, charge, or otherwise chaff up opposing fliers. If you’re using cheaper units like Gargoyles and trying to stop Elohi, be aware that this may not buy much time. Sometimes one turn is all you need though!
Causing Disorder
Speaking of buying a turn, a built-in disadvantage of fliers is being Disordered. If you are able to inflict a single wound in melee against a flier it will become Disordered and lose Fly and Nimble if it had the rule. This means their ability to Disengage and fly off into another combat is a long-lost notion of 2nd Edition. This makes combat, and especially mounted, Individuals an incredible defense against flying units. Every once in a while, the 80 point Elven Prince with a mount shines as its meager 3 attacks inflict a single wound on the 345 point Scudku-z'luk forcing it to ground movement only. There are some other fringe abilities that inflict Disorder as well…if you’re lucky enough to have them. Disclaimer: Mighty is an important rule.
Situational Tools
Beyond the sort of options that every player has access to, there are a variety of additional tactics that can be used help defend against fliers. Arguably the most impactful is Surge. A number of Shambling units across the game can be targeted by the spell Surge. Normally, players are thinking of clever ways to surge into a flank or use this ability offensively. It has a critical role in defense as well.
By giving a Shambling unit a movement order that allows it to change facing or turn to cover an arc that a flier thinks it has landed safely in, these units can then be surged to engage the opponent and stop it from attacking your other units in a following turn. Even if a flier lands completely in your rear arc, a Shambling unit can turn around and then be moved by the Surge spell to either block or ‘charge’ the assaulting flier.
Spells such a Windblast can be used to push a flier out of range of landing safely or from a flank arc into a front. The nature of a flier needing to threaten a turn ahead oftentimes gives you the ability to counter it before they can commit.
There are even some unique units available to stop fliers in key situations. Keris in the Forces of Nature has access to the Solar Staff which is a once per game chance to Disorder a unit. The Manifestation of Ba’el in Forces of the Abyss can use it’s once per game ability, ‘From the Pit I Curse Thee!’ to Disorder units. The Naiad Centurion has an optional upgrade, Trident of the Drowned Sea, that can Disorder units that take damage from its ranged attacks.
Armed and Ready
By now you should see that there are so many ways to deal with fliers and feel a bit more comfortable. I think the best practice is to get good at defending against them with movement and use the fringe tools as a supplement. Kings of War is a game won and lost in the movement phase and this is exactly the kind of thing that makes fliers so powerful. Thankfully, the game has given you multiple ways to mount your defense against them. What tools and strategies you use are entirely up to you. Try to have fun with the ways you can make yourself more difficult to play against. Kings of War players love the challenge of solving these micro-dilemmas in game and it’s the heart of what makes new opponents and more games so addicting.
Good luck and don’t be afraid to share your successes on the battlefield!
