Today a couple of friends and I had a 3 way game of AI (would have been 4, 2 aside, but one person was at work and couldn't make it).
The learning curve isn't too high on this game - it didn't take long to pick up the basic rules, and the maneouvre cards along with the combat record sheet make it easy to keep track of what you're doing. We played with 60pts of fighters only each:
Skid had 5 Chaos Hell Blades
Lloyd had 2 Eldar Nightwings
I had 2 Imperial Thunderbolts and 1 Lightning with skystrike missiles
The Initiative rolls make the game tactically challenging. While it's better to be going first if you have any of your aircraft tailing an enemy, you'll often want to roll lower than other players so you can move after they have.
A lot of the game is spent try to anticipate what your opponent is going to do with their aircraft, and try to position yourself so that (a) you have a shot on the enemy, and (b) you're out of the fire arcs of the enemy. Even with just a few aircraft each, it still took a few hours to play given that we kept having to circle each other trying to line up shots.
Shooting is pretty simplistic and easy to keep track of, although having photocopies of the aircraft datasheets would have helped so that we didn't have to keep refering to the book. Hitting on only 5+ or 6 results in a lot of misses, and actually inflicting damage proves quite difficult.
On the whole the game was fun, and I'm looking forward to playing using a wider range of aircraft and some of the objective rules, and later using the advanced rules for ammo and Aces. In our small game Skid found that the Hell Blades were quick, but fragile - with only 1 hit they die quickly. The Thunderbolts were quite good, being able to take 2 hits and having a saving throw if more than 1 hit is inflicted. The Eldar were tough, only 1 damaging was hit inflicted (which was down to an afternoon of bad dice rolling) which was saved. Unfortunately I never got to find out what the Lightning was like as a mistake in a move resulted in it's speed dropping to 1 and so it was removed as destroyed from stalling
I'm confident that we'll be playing this game for some time to come - confident enough for me to have Tau and Eldar aircraft on order as well as few more Imperials, and Skid has ordered a Chaos squadron. Next time we'll use a battlemat on the table and
FW aircraft throughtout and I'll take pictures - I didn't bother with this game as all the non-Imperials were proxied by SW Micro Machines (3 X-Wings and 2 A-Wings for Chaos, and a TIE Interceptor and TIE Fighter for the Eldar
) using cardboard hex bases. All the aircraft on order should arrive before our next game.