Wow, looks like there was a big update at Paolo's site today! And we now have stats for the rest of units announced in Operation Icarus!
As expected, the Allied planes cost a bit more than the Axis ones and are a bit better armed. Still, they will have to get pretty lucky to take out a Horten or an SSU helicopter in a single attack, which means that the SSU Striker is still the king of dog fighting (which seems kind of ironic…).
Since both planes have VERY limited ammo, it seems like you're really going to want to have a unit of corps officers in your Allied army so you can reload. Which could make for a bit of a dilemma if you're also fond of fielding a Steel Rain.
I have to say, though, I'm not really seeing a reason to take the Diving Dotty over the Bellowing Bertie. In many situations, the Bertie is going to do as much or more damage than the Dotty, and having the extra range that the Bertie's rockets give would seem to be hard to pass up.
The other allied units which had stats revealed today were the three new heavy walkers. Frankly, these guys will probably never see any playtime on my table. The main problem is that they take up four squares, making them impossible to use in most published scenarios and (perhaps worse) in tournaments. Combine their difficult-to-hide bulk with (relatively) weak armor, low health, and fairly high AP cost, and you can pretty much expect them to be a pile of scrap at the end of turn two.
The biggest "WTF?" moment, though, comes when you realize that the crappily armed Mobile HQ has the Air Alert skill but the Skysweeper (you know, the DEDICATED ANTI-AIR UNIT?) does not.
On the SSU side, things don't seem much better. Let's start with our first Armor 2 vehicles…which cost more than Armor 3 vehicles?! Sure, the Red Fury and Red Rain have some pretty good weaponry, and they would have seemed pretty awesome back in 2011, but this is 2013 and we've got aircraft prowling the skies now. A Fledermaus III will just shred either of these units in a single round. And you really don't want to think about what would happen should a unit of Heavy Flak Grenadiers get the drop on them…
If you were hoping that the new multiple-comrades-on-a-base type 2 infantry would be better than the Armor 2 vehicles…well, you're probably going to be disappointed. The Hailstorm mortar team isn't terrible, but it's hard not to look at the Allied Leathernecks and wonder why you have to pay 6 more points for the SSU team. (Okay, you're paying 6 more points because the SSU team is armor 2 instead of armor 1, but do you really care how well your indirect fire team is armored? Let's face it, they're going to be sitting behind a rock somewhere for the whole game.)
The Red Lightning might be a little better. The range 6 tesla gun they carry could be devastating if you can catch multiple enemy units in its path. With only armor 2 and three health, this is a pretty fragile unit, though.
Other than the new Allied aircraft, I can't say I'm too impressed with the new units.
But maybe that's not such a bad thing. When I saw the stats of the Allied planes, I was beginning to get worried that all of new units were going to be so good as to make various older units obsolete. It's nice to see that was more the exception than the rule.