How do you handle flying on a battle map?

[Concrete]

My group has always been very tactical players, relying on range, positioning, and such things to make the most out of their characters in battle. Because of this, we use a battlemat for every fight.
This worked quite well for quite a few levels. But now, they've reached higher levels, and pretty much all of them fly, which, in turn, means that their enemies fly as well.

My problem is that it's pretty damn hard to keep track of positions when a third dimension is added. For now, positioning in air battles are symbolized by a stack of poker ships placed under each players mini, using their values to denote their altitude, But this can be overly complex to read, which slows down battle, it leaves the mat cluttered up, and causes problems when one character or monster is positioned directly over the other.

How do you do it? Is there a commonly accepted proper way to do it? In any case, I'm grateful for any advice.

[gartius]

Chessex Dice Containers are extremely useful for this, they are roughly an inch by inch, allowing players to be on top of each other with a dice to the side denoting the height of the character.

http://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/elevate-your-game-tracking-airborne-minis/

the above site has a good reference for this

[Concrete]

Great ideas

Thanks. I really think I can make use of this. I am very grateful.

[Zaq]

I stick dice next to flying creatures, with the number side up indicating the number of squares they are above ground level. Someone standing on the ground or otherwise not high enough to change the square they're in has no die, someone 5 ft (1 square) above ground level has a 1, and so on. If you need the visual effect of "this mini is higher than the others around it," you can also stick the mini in question on another d6, though of course you want a separate one indicating altitude just to facilitate readability.

It works until creatures try to stack themselves vertically, but there's basically no good way to deal with that (short of having squares large enough to hold several minis and accompanying dice/tokens, but that has its own problems in that it makes 2D visualization a little bit less natural, and of course it takes more time to draw and erase your map. And monsters larger than Medium stop filling their entire map square, and so on) that I've ever found.

[Chronos]

In practice, just flying vs. not flying is usually enough information, unless one creature is flying so high that the others can't fly up to it. And in that cast, just do whatever you usually do to indicate flight, but do it twice.

[Coidzor]

We don't have much flight, but we make a note of their height on some scrap paper and have a soda ring of a color like white or green that denotes that a miniature is flying.

[Hiro Quester]

We often use a square clear dice container to lift the mini up. A die indicates number of squares high.

[Nevershutup]

My group usually just writes a subscript number for how many feet up the creature is, and erase it as the creature moves. I am definitely bringing your solutions up, next time we meet.

[Telonius]

We generally put the mini next to a d12. ("Yay! I'm useful!" - d12)
d12*5=height. Move to larger dice if necessary.

If somebody else is below them in the square, put the higher person on top of the d12.

[nedz]

I have some flying bases I use, but they're not perfect.

[PaucaTerrorem]

We used the plastic case dice come in. Then write the elevation on it in dry erase.