Oly - Details?

[Oly]

How are the aircraft rules in the game? Do they list alot of aircraft? Anything on Carriers with distance or any rules for campaign game in WWII?

There are aircraft rules in the game.

All nations have ships that carry spotter aircraft. These are the same for all nations. They give a bonus to their ship (and no other) when they fire at a target that they are near. However they are very slow, a movement of 7" when compared to a Seafire that has 24" or a Swordfish that has 13".

All nations in the book other than Italy also have statistics for other aircraft. They come as fighters, bombers, dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers. If constructing a fleet for a battle then flights of aircraft can be bought on their own (land based or launched from a carrier away from the battle) or come when an aircraft carrier is deployed.

Basically planes work by either moving their counter next to another aircraft (a dogfight which stops both counters from moving) or next to a ship to attack.

Something that I do think is missing are stats for longer ranged maritime aircraft such as German Condors or British Sunderlands.

The counter sheets do come with counters to represent each model of aircraft, there's not a generic "bomber" counter though there are generic ones for ship based "Spotters".

 

[Soulmage]

Do ship mounted AA weapons get to fire before aircraft resolve their attacks, or is AA handled in the shooting phase as a normal weapon system?

 

[Oly]

Do ship mounted AA weapons get to fire before aircraft resolve their attacks, or is AA handled in the shooting phase as a normal weapon system?

AA fire happens at the beginning of the attack phase before any other attacks.

Ships have a certain number of AA dice that can be split between the targets that are within their range. Therefore you could swamp a ship and give it no chance to shoot down all of it's attackers. Given that Bismarck has 6 dice for it's AA weapons, for example, it'll take a lot of aircraft to do it though.