Yeah and back when Epic A was in development, and Jervis announced he was opening up feedback and playtesting over the web, I actually took a shot and emailed him about all the pros and cons I felt were in the previous editions. It was one long crazy email and I was stunned when he emailed me back excited to be talking about epic. His exact words were like "Long emails are okay I love talking about Epic!" I mean, here was the guy who single handedly was responsible for me spending 1000s of hours painting and playing with little soldiers, and I was now sending emails back and forth. I am still surprised.
I also got in contact with Andy Chambers for a bit after he left GW, but we didnt talk for long. I let him know how disappointed I was that they never updated the Eldar in AT/SM1 for aspect warriors. Had they done so, I probably would never had moved on to SM2/TL.
Anyway, one of the things I brought up and recommended that went into Epic A was how to select armies, making the same point above, that it just took too long to set up armies on short notice, but that I still loved the flexibility to use random minis. So I suggested having set detachments with the ability to upgrade them with adding characters, an additional vehicle, etc. I lay to claim that part about Epic A. However, he didn't quite do it as I intended, and actually, there was a lot of debate about what units should be upgraded with what. He was initially really restrictive, whereas I was recommending to be more open. He eventually bent because people wanted to do things like upgrade a devastator detachment with land raiders or something, and there was a lot of arguing over that. But in my mind, I wanted any formation to be given whatever the player wanted. So at the basic level, a tactical detachment would look like its SM2/TL counterparts, but I would have the freedom to add whatever I wanted to it, up to a certain point. So Predator, dreadnought, whatever. That way there was some structure to the army list, something for players to easy choose armies with, and some freedom to customize your army with random minis in your bitz box.
Also, its one thing to look at organizational charts of military units and see X number of tanks in a company for example, and real world situations where units are unavailable due to breakdowns, loss of crew, whatever, and units get mashed together to fullfill an objective all the time. I dont think any upgrade would make or break a game, just add some flavor to the detachments.
Don't get me wrong, I love that Epic 40k tried to do what it did, and gave values for individual units, but I just found in some cases it took so long to set up a game that it kinda burned out the excitement. Somewhere in the middle, or closer to what Epic A has done is in my opinion, better. It just doesn't go as far as I wanted.
Last edited by KTG17 on Thu Oct 22, 2015 1:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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