Dazzling, magnificent, spectacular! Dwarf flying circus.

That's not a bad idea and it's something I've toyed with. 

I could remove the miners and reduce both LBs and warriors to include 3 runes (plus other combination to make them unique), but then the army would really feel like it were lacking any real body. 
But definitely something to consider, let's see what I can fit.

Looks good Luigino!
What's the dragon Slayer for? He looks a bit lost on his own, can't join any of your units & might be a waste of points.. I'd drop him & vanguard another 2 of your gyros, and add a couple of rank & file bodies.
Looking forward to seeing how this performs- I've not used an 'airforce' type list before so I'm intrigued to see.. hopefully you don't come up against anything too heavily-armoured, like an Empire cavalry 1+ list!

Simon, thank you for asking.

The list (and the tournament) was a lot of fun.

I lost more often than not. And while there was a game where I played really well but just could do nothing about his army; most of it was due to my opponents being really good players and me being very careless or very unlucky.

Having said that, after playing the list here’s my main thoughts.

1) The list is FUN. Like… obscenely so. You actually get to do something and for once, after years spent being defensive and reactive, you’re the one taking the initiative and forcing your opponent to react. Even when I lost badly, I was having a great time. I have not had so much fun with the game or enjoyed losing so much in a very long time.

2) The list is mobile and versatile. Incredibly so. Especially with the 3 vanguard copters you have so much freedom of movement that it opens up a lot of strategies.
Want to go and hunt artillery? Bam! Right onto their cannon. Enemy chaff on the prowl? Boom! You’re chaffier than they are.
Want to redirect charges? Screen other units? Harass big blocks of troops? You’re basically an armoured mosquito and no one can stop you. Especially when there are 8 total flying machines to keep track of.


3) The list is surprising. No one expects dwarfs to be mobile. Actually no one expects any army to be THIS mobile. Which means it often leads to people not knowing how to deal with it. But in contrast, I also didn’t really know how to use it.

4) The list has a LOT of deployments. And since most of them are flying copters you can counter deploy extremely well.

5) The list lacks punch. This is the main issue with the list. Yes, you do have hammerers and warriors and miners. But their relatively high strength is reactive. Anything with T4 or higher or sporting a really good armour save becomes hard to deal with.

As the list stands right now regular infantry and any sort of light cavalry makes for a perfect target, but you will struggle against armoured enemies, monsters and any sort of heavily armoured cavalry.

6) The list has absolutely no Magic resistance. This was very deliberate on my end as I wanted to try something different with my dwarfs. In the end this is a major weakness. Not so much because of big scary spells but because you’ll have a hard time dispelling all those goddam augmentations that increase toughness or give regeneration or WS against shooting…


7) The list lacks any sort of artillery. Much like for magic resistance, this too was very deliberate, as I wanted a tactical challenge as well as a list that would force a different approach. In the end this is a very risky move. You do need something to either target lone threats (Steam tanks, dragons, giants) or deal with ranks of tough enemies.

8) The list has a lot of potential to be extremely competitive and extremely powerful.
While it’s remain a fun list to play against though… I’m not so sure



This is a just a general overlook and if you are not already bored by the long explanation I’ll go into more specific details for each unit as well as how the list could be modified. There’s two directions the list can go: combat oriented or shooting oriented.

Let’s look at the characters first.

The lack of lords is absolutely not a problem: the general is absolutely able to stand his ground. At most you could give him and extra wound and toughness tweaking his runes a bit. But his role is to not die. He did that pretty well.

The BSB… I took one mostly because I wanted to use the model and the banner I prepared for the tournament. So I kitted him out to be resilient and the banner was just a regular (albeit massive) banner.
If I were to redo him I’d take the Master Rune of Valaya.

The runesmith. I’m not sure why I even took him since he has basically no runes .
Take him, but give him 1 or two runes of spell breaking. Even better if you take 2 of them each with their own rune of spell breaking.

The dragon slayer. Don’t take this guy. Just don’t. Replace him with a master engineer.

if you decide to go shooting heavy you can probably try and replace one of the thanes with another master engineer.


Core.

The core I had I found to be very solid. The warriors are cheap enough but still constitute somewhat of a threat, especially when charging at strength 6.
The longbeards with shields are both fluffy and excellent. They also sport an immunity to panic and will let you re-roll panic for the surrounding units. Absolute great choice.

I might be tempted to replace the warriors with 2 units of 10-12 thunderers (you really want that AP) with shields and full command.

Special.

I’m keeping the 6 gyros. This is what makes this list unique. They are absolutely great. # vanguards might be overkill but they are rather useful to really put pressure onto your opponent.

The 10 miners are theoretically really good. Them showing up and you charging with copters and miners to collapse the rear of an army.
in practice it doesn’t really work. Either you commit more to this strategy or you don’t use it all.
I’d remove them in favour of either a grudge thrower or a cannon

The hammerers. They’re good. They’re always good. They’re also stubborn, so they’re twice as good. But they just die so easily or are so easily avoided.

I’d either replace with a unit of Ironbreakers made stubborn or reduce them/replace them with more artillery.

Rare

I like the gyrobombers. They’re not as cheap as the gyrocopters and cannot vanguard. But I discovered very quickly that just the idea of a large template is enough to scare any opponent, even when they really shouldn’t worry (it’s only S3 AP, after all). They’re easily a great example of a perceived threat.
I’ve had multiple occasions with the enemy focusing all of its shooting and magic to take down a bomber which then allowed me to just simply charge with the copter in the back of his army.
Oh, also, don’t be like me. Don’t forget that your bombs bounce if they explode.

it’s easy to be tempted and remove one or 2 to replace them with an organ gun, but I can’t stress enough how versatile 8 flying machines are.

finding the points for an organ gun or a flame cannon though is definitely worth trying.

Sounds like a lot of fun & definitely a list I'll be trying soon! I like the idea of switching the Miners for a cannon as I feel that high-strength threat to monsters / high toughness / high armour save is needed, but otherwise this could be a competitive list. Gyros are definitely a tad undercosted in 8th

At the end this is the final version of the list I played with

---- Heroes ----
Thane (General) 146
Master Rune of Gromril, Rune of Warding x3, Great Weapon

Thane (BSB) 148
Rune of Fortitude x2, Rune of Stone, Battle Standard Bearer, Shield

Dragon Slayer 70

Runesmith 68
Rune of Stone, Shield

----- Core -----

29 Dwarf Warriors 320
Full command, Great weapons

30 Longbeards 420
Full command, Shields

----- Special ------

Gyrocopter 100
Steam Gun, Vanguard

Gyrocopter 100
Steam Gun, Vanguard

Gyrocopter 100
Steam Gun, Vanguard

Gyrocopter 80
Steam Gun

Gyrocopter 80
Steam Gun

Gyrocopter 80
Steam Gun

25 Hammerers 405
Full command, Shields

10 Miners 130
Full command, Standard Bearer

----- Rare -----

Gyrobomber 125

Gyrobomber 125


Total 2497

uh... I like it.
but why a lord?
you could probably do with a thane and with the saved points could get command and stubborn rune for your core


ETA: looking at it again thorpyuk this is a very strong list, actually. the main weakness being blood and glory or the scenario with staggered deployment.

I might replace an organ gun with the flaming cannon, but that's just because I like the idea of a flaming cannon, the double organ gun is obviously much more powerful.



If you do play with it (and please do) post a battle report and take tons of pictures I'm curious to see how it performs.

ETAA: also with 2 master engineers yould easily remove 2 runes of forging, replacing them with something else or use the points elsewhere.