After spending the last couple of weeks reading through the E40K rules, I thought I would offer my impressions, what I like and dislike, and how they compare with what I have come from with 2nd Ed/NetEpic. Now I haven't had the chance to read through all the FAQ entries to see if what has been tweaked, so some of my concerns may have already been answered.

No unit coherency! Wow, that is a big change from all the versions. I guess you could say that coherency is 30cm with the HQ, but it gives units a lot more room to maneuver, and given the HQ status keeps working down the ranks as they die, it is very unlikely you would be without an HQ, unless things have gone really badly (might have to make some banners to place next to units to be able to mark them as the HQ).

The combat system seems like it will run quite smoothly, adding up all that FP to create a volume of fire rather dealing with specific shots, though they have managed to provide some detail and alternative ways of shooting with AT, disrupt, barrage, and all the super heavies.

On the subject of barrage, seeing as a I don't have the box set, how big is the barrage template? I couldn't find its dimensions in the rules. Is it the same size as the old ones (6cm)?

Likewise combat is about the overall melee (with units not in combat actually being able to support) rather than singular one on one.

I like that close combat only lasts a turn, and you get a winner and loser after one round unlike in NeEpic were they could just drag on and on until everyone died.

Unless I am reading something wrong, you can't actually break anyone by just long range shooting? You can load them with blast makers and kill units, but not force them to break. You have to get in close for a fire fight or combat to break a unit. Interesting. Will have to see how it plays.

I must say I was completely oblivious as to the scoring/winning mechanisms in E40K and playing to reduce the morale and combat effectiveness of the opposing force as opposed to trying to get the most points is quite a unique and interesting way of doing things. The fact that you can pull back troops or give them orders to try and remove blast markers and thereby bring yourself back in to the fight is nice and I love that causing War Engines to go pop gives your guys a morale boost.

Although I haven't fully read through the battles and scenarios parts yet. I love games that provide a variable scenario option and different ways to deploy to make each game slightly different and E40K seems to have some of that to a degree.

The flexible way of building detachments is something I love and have been trying to do something similar in NetEpic. The way it works allows people with mismatched collections or odd numbers of models to actually play with their models. I can actually use that single stand of Warp Spiders I have in my Eldar army rather than having to mess about with proxies to make up a full detachment of 4 stands. And the way the system works means the options are wide enough so that I could field a whole company of marines, but small enough that I could field a few squadrons of vehicles. The way armies are built in Armageddon feels a bit odd to me, and something that puts me off that system, but the E40K systems seems right up my street.

I have also been looking through the stats and it is good to see that new units have been embraced, Toco has done a good job bringing them into the game, but I still have a few queries.
I think I can understand why they have tried to base everything on a single profile and then just apply some special rules to tweak the stats, but I think I would much rather just see the tables filled with the correct stats rather than multiple lines of "As Orks" + Whatever rule, but that may just be my opinion.
Terminators being no better than normal marines in regards to Assault and Firepower? This seems a bit odd. I think they should be a point better in each due to being almost twice as effective as a normal marine squad.

Marine bikes not being cavalry? It even states in the unit types at the beginning of the rules that cavalry includes bikes. And only a 4+ Armour value? That makes them as easy to take out as a unit of rough riders :/

The Helios is a Land Raider that also has a Whirlwind launcher on top. The stats for them in Armies2 seems to forgo that fact that it still has the quad lascannons, it should still maintain the AT capability as well as being able to fire barrages. I know that the game has tried to distill the capabilities of units into a single stat line, but I think for some units with two distinct weapon systems that might not be possible. So can some normal (non superheavies) be stated with two weapons profiles? I think they can as long as it doesn't go over the top.

I see they have tried to stick with the single costs for titans, but allow variable load outs. This was always a bit busted in 2nd Ed as you always took the best weapons anyway, would this still be the case even with the limited options? I think this is one area that could be expanded, we already have upgrade costs for single units, so I don't see why you couldn't cost the titan weapons and open up the option of making rules for all those other weapon choices these are the big center pieces of the game, so a few more cool rules shouldn't slow down the game to much.

As an aside, I was working on a location based DC style system for War Engines in NetEpic but that might be something that is better off here. Something more to keep me occupied
I like making up stats and rules for things, so I might be spending a lot of time creating and tweaking stats for my own games so they feel right for me.

Okay, I think that about covers everything so far

Matt

Hi mattman,

Like you I have recently discovered (or rediscovered) Epic40k. I pretty much agree with everything you mentioned in your post, especially the stat lines, whenworking out armies I have made up my own table's on excell with all the stats for different units, so none of the "as space marine + assault" or whatever. There just assault marines...

The main bug bear of mine is that all the modifications, clarifications and amendments for the game are scattered amongst old white dwarf articles, the old firepower magazine and the equally old epic 40k mag. What Moredakka and myself attempted to do last year was get all this stuff in one place, written into the main text of the core rules. Unfortunately it has stalled, but its something I think about alot still and I will return to it once real life decides to give me a break!

Anyway, hope you have fun with it.

Steve

_________________
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Given the game was only a love for 6 months or so, it doesn't surprise me that information is scattered about, but at least it is only half a dozen documents.

When I am done playing with all the new x-wing ships I will have to get some games in and really get my teeth into it.

I to have started making some excel tables, including making my own stats for some units

Life does have a habit of getting in the way, but will keep my eyes peeled for when things pick up.

Matt

I always filled out my stat sheets with the actual stats the units would use, having all that "as space marines plus assault" and such was just being lazy. I realise it was to show how the generic special abilities were applied but still they could have done the altered stats somewhere in the armies book.

Glad to see someone else taking a fresh look at E40k it really is a great rules set sadly shunned by most gamers. Having read through your post above and yorkies reply i must agree with most of what has been said and yes the system is very flexible and easy to learn. The rules can easily adapt to small changes made by the players without busting the rules so if there's an aspect of the rules you don't like just try changing them and see how it goes. This applies to unit stats too if you don't agree with the stats tweak them to your satisfaction.

If you want a rules set that firmly places you in the roll of a general and allows for really big games to be played out in a reasonable time then this is the game to try.

Cheers

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Link, http://vanguardminiatures.co.uk/

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I've just been reading Epic: 40,000 as well, but more as a new player who has never played a game in any edition.



That's my reading of it too. Technically you could have units from the same detachment up to 60cm apart, although this probably happens seldom in practice since most players would want their HQ up front and in the action, instead of holding the geometric center of a widely dispersed detachment. The "out of cohesion" rules are particularly brutal—you cannot move or act, but can only react (snap fire, or participate in assaults and firefights if an enemy opts to come close enough and engage). Plus, out of cohesion units are automatically destroyed if they break. It is actually a clever way to model "passive" garrison forces or detachment remnants that just need to be mopped up. There could be some fun scenarios where the defender has units in fixed and fortified locations but no HQ for these line units.

It should be noted that the other implicit coherency in the rules is a strategic one. You elect one detachment to shoot at a time and fire with all the units in that detachment, regardless of where they are or who they are shooting at (again, except for those farther than 30cm from the HQ). You could have a detachment spread out thinly, attacking different targets, in theory. Nevertheless, the most strategically useful approach is to have your detachment close together, able to hit the same enemy target eith overlapping fields of fire (by concentrating your fire, you can hit an enemy so hard that they cannot effectively respond on their turn, due to suppression and casualties). Even so, you'll probably have on infantry in the front and artillery in the rear in a detachment, so you can give supporting fire from safely behind the frontline.

That's the real genius, I find, of Epic 40k: mixed formations. You can create all manner of task forces with stands to provide transport, melee, ranged and supporting fire roles. And they don't need to all be bunched together or even doing the same thing on the battlefield, although there is obviously an advantage if you coordinate the units of a detachment on the battlefield. For example, if an enemy is racing to outflank your detachment, you could dispatch the attack bikes in the detachment to go intercept, while your infantry presses forward to the objective.



I feel a little ambivalent about how decisive close combat is. On the one hand, a detachment will rarely fight in both an assault and a firefight, since the assault has a 100% chance of breaking either the attacker or the defender, and broken units that cannot flee further than 15cm from the enemy (the distance required for firefights) are automatically destroyed. That means firefights play a decidedly secondary role to assaults, unless the attacker chooses to avoid the assault and engage in a firefight instead. On the other hand, firefights also seem extremely decisive. They cause fewer direct casualties (only 1), but still automatically break the loser (who is still cut down if they cannot flee more than 15cm from the enemy).

I think I prefer how Epic: Armageddon handles this, as assaults and firefights are much better integrated (instead of being different and theoretically, if not always actually, sequential events).



This and the victory conditions in Epic 40k are the best approaches to the importance of battlefield discipline in any edition of Epic, as far as I can see. It reminds me of historical wargames, actually.



I am with you 100% on this issue. In fact, it's the only way to make sense of the plastic army sprues for Epic. Why else would they give you a single stand of Terminators, if you couldn't field it in a mixed detachment with other loose ends? It also let's you have one basic army, but mix it up every single game—one time putting all the bikes together, another mixing them in with Whirlwinds and Assault Marines. I haven't decided on an edition yet, but if I play any other edition, I am definitely going to house rule the Epic 40k detachment composition rules into it.



Maybe it would help to think of it as representing the lower numbers in a Bike squadron? I mean, Rough Rider units represent five or six horses, whereas a stand of Bikes represents only three Marines on Bikes. That way, the lower armour just means they take the same volume of enemy fire to destroy as a larger unit of horsemen.

Thanks for your comments and insights so far! You've made some very interesting observations and I find I am largely in agreement with what you have said. I actually really like Epic 40k. The lack of detail in unit stats is made up for by the deep micro-management game of detachment composition, I feel. The only real sticky point for me is close assaults. Deciding everything with a single D6 roll seems a little swingy to me (and not in line with the fairly gradiated shooting rules). I would love to figure out a house rule that integrates assaults and firefights in a manner similar to Epic: Armageddon. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Wow I can't believe I am seeing this. I love talking about Epic 40k, and for a long time on this site, I was the only one who ever was willing to.



The box set came with some small HQ counters for the Orks and Marines to use. Even after all these years, I am not sure how I feel about the 30cm coherency thing. I mean, you can have a detachment of 2 land raiders and they could sit 30cm apart. Not that would help much in most cases, but it just seems rather odd. But it also allows you to take more advantage of cover for example, where buildings might sit some distance apart but you could spread all of the infantry stands in them. But in the end, the biggest problem I had with Epic 40k was that detachments could end up looking like unruly mobs, rather than specialized fighting groups.



The biggest problem with this system is the math, tallying up firepower and referencing the charts. I have actually over the years decided that I really dislike it. Yes it accounts for the suppression of firepower, but when I play AT/SM1 or SM2/TL, do I find myself caring that that element isnt in the game? Never. It really makes me appreciate Land Raiders and their 2 AT weapons each.

I know I sound really critical here. I do think the mechanics are creative, just better suited for a PC game where a computer could calculate all this rather than have me do it.



Yes.



Yes, very cool feature.



Well, I dont mind assaults, but I hate firefights. Makes no sense to me that 2 20+ unit strong detachments could have a firefight, and then one runs away because one unit got killed. Probably the worst mechanic in all of GW games ever.



Yeah and I think thats the point of Epic 40k. As odd as it is. Units should buckle and run if saturated with so much firepower it doesnt matter how far away they are being shot from.



Yeah but it can be a pain in the ass too. Its just like shooting. You need this time to sort of figure out what has happened, how much its worth, and then track the score. Thats why they released that tracker in White Dwarf to help out. I cant play without it. Some interesting things can happen, but honestly the only people who I see really appreciating elements like this, are the more hardcore players who dont mind sitting around and discussing things like this. The average player, in my opinion, is happier with something like the point system in SM2/TL.



One of the biggest problems I have with Epic 40k is not so much the flexibility of the detachment building, but the size that some detachments can be. And what is worse, it takes a player time to figure out what works and what doesnt, and Chambers and Jervis did a terrible job showing examples. What examples they did provide in the scenerios or battle reports, consisted of very few detachments on each side that acted like mobs. My 3 mobs versus your 3 mobs. Terrible.

However, what I did love was the ability to use leftovers in your bitz box. Got an extra dreadnought or battlewagon? There is a place for it. I love that. I cant tell you how many detachments I have made with leftover minis I couldnt use in the other editions becuse I didnt have enough of them to make the specified detachment count. And given how hard it can be to get certain minis today, I do love this. Its just that I think some more structure should have been applied for some armies, and better examples on how some of the detachments should be built.

I actually build my armies close to their SM2/TL counterparts at one point and thought it worked rather well, but how a new player, who didnt have that game, would decide what to use and where, well, I just think they would be more disappointed how a detachment performed than it not.


Not really. 5 Stormbolters = 10 bolters in my opinion. Throw in a Cyclone versus Missile Launcher and Plasma Gun and its the same thing to me in that scale. What really sets them apart is the protection. The Terminator armor is superior to the standard.



If there is anything I really love with Epic 40k, its the rules for Titans. They did a wonderful job streamlining them, yet giving them just enough detail too. And all the info is laid out on one side of one card. I grew up with AT/SM1, so I understand what you mean by variety, but for this system, the idea is the level of firepower a weapon can bring is more important than the details of what it actually does. And the damage tables are just right too. As much as I love SM2/TL, I hate the Titan hit charts. Its like playing a whole other game within a game. Epic 40k did them better than the other three Epic games.

AT/SM1 was the first tabletop game I ever got into, and no other series of games has grabbed my imagination like Epic has. All four versions have their own flavor, pros, and cons. Epic 40k gets a lot of trash thrown at it, but its by and far the most complete game box ever released for Epic. Whereas you need expansion sets or a host of White Dwarf articles to expand the other versions of the game, Epic 40k has all of it (well, officially at least), in its 3 books. You'll never see that from GW again. Is it my favorite system? No. Probably my third favorite, but I still have great appreciation for it.

And of course, the minis where amazing too.

I agree with and disagree with parts of KTG's analysis. For example, I personally love the "no coherence thing" and it feeds directly into many of the strategic choices in E40k. It may LOOK with a unruly mob in a quick glance, but when you are playing you know exactly why the cavalry is running around the flanks, the jet packs are in the rear, the tanks are up front and the infantry is following close behind.

For example, here are just some of the strategic choices made possible by a 30cm command radius and mixed detachments:

1) Use infiltrators (or cavalry) to area control the flanks by expanding your snapfire zones (20cm diameter each!). This also generally allows you to counter almost all of the strategies below. Infiltrtors are sort of "key" strategic units in this game as they maximize the ever important "area control."
2) Flank wide with infiltrators before assaulting an enemy. This allows you to either catch them when the enemy flees or force a certain fleeing direction, as desired.
3) Flank with infiltrators to direct fire to the soft rear of the enemy formation (casualties are taken from closest targets, and flanking infiltrators in close allows you more control about where you take shooting casualties from).
3) Place jump troops or cavalry behind infantry, assault with infantry to disable close combat control zones, deep strike with jump troops/cavalry deep into enemy formation to have greater control of which units you hit in melee (heavy weapons, HQ's, psykers).
4) When facing an enemy you cannot beat in melee (Aspect Warriors or Daemonettes vs Imperial Guard infantry), overlap two detachments with one set slightly back. The enemy will charge the first formation and rout them and the second formation will immediately drive off the attacker with a firefight while your first detachment rallies. This is called "defense in depth" in real world warfare.
5) Use cavalry to "bait" enemy melee detachments. Move away in the first move and move back in for a firefight in the assault move.
6) Use the assault move to scatter against enemy air attacks and then reform afterwards in the same turn.
7) Use cheap units to shield expensive units (the Gretchin/Stompa formation) or hard units to shield destructive units (Predator/Devestator or Terminator/Attack Bikes). This only works with the E40k Magazine tweak to hit allocation (an official rule change).

That's just off the top of my head, but all those things are a direct result of 30cm command distance and mixed detachments.

Right, but why would you have all these different elements in a detachment? I know its creative and adds fun to developing army lists, but honestly, why slow down cavalry by assigning them to the same detachment as infiltrators? This is where I mention unruly mobs. You'll find that the more flexibility you try to give to a detachment, the more it becomes good at nothing and mediocre at everything.

That's why I recommend building detachments to do specific things. Will they get caught doing things they weren't meant to handle? Sure.

Trying to find the right balance can be pretty tricky in Epic 40k. Large detachments? Small? Specialized? Flexible? It allows for a lot of creativity, but at the same time, it can be frustrating if you aren't paying attention to what the units all are meant to do when assigning them to a detachment.

I think there are definitely two schools of thought possible in E40k. The "build detachments to do one thing on the battlefield and do it well" is definitely the easiest, safest approach. It is very easy to conceptualize at any moment during the game as you can just conceptualize each detachment as a cog in your machine or a tool for a specific job and manuever the formation as appropriate. This approach was explicitly recommended in some fan-submitted tactica articles in Firepower.

The other approach is to think of detachments like micro-armies, with each element coordinating in visually impressive and tactically interesting combined warfare. This is the more difficult path to take—like real world warfare, there is only one way to "win" E40k and that is to bring the greatest concentration of firepower to bear at the critical location in the enemy line. In this way, one big formation will always drive off smaller detachments (as you can see in the first White Dwarf battle report... Is it #209?). Nevertheless, although is far more risky, a unit that combines two or even three different troop choices can handle a homogenous enemy formation very well.

Maybe a third school of thought is possible: build 80% of a detachment to do one thing well and add in 20% of troops of another type to compliment. A tank detachment with jump pack assault marines, a Rough Rider unit with Basilisks. I don't think the movement limitation is ultimately too damning though... Almost all infantry have transport choices, and the 30cm command radius means even slow and fast units can work together in interesting ways (for example, the worst case might be landspeeders and dreadnoughts in the same formation, but if your HQ is a landspeeder then you can swing the rest of the landspeeders up to 60cm from the dreadnoughts if you need them to play "fire brigade" on another part of the battlefield... When they need to work together, they can instantly swing back and support the dreadnoughts and hide behind gheir armour).

I also had a thought about your two complaints: big formations are "unruly mobs" and counting up firepower is annoying and time consuming. Would you consider playing with half-sized detachments (i.e. max 5 troop choices for Space Marines, max 3 for Eldar), or support choices are taken out of your troop choice maximum? I would love to hear how that house rule played out, as it would make detachments much smaller and firepowe-counting easier (although I would point out, counting 2's for Devestator squads and counting 2's for Land Raiders is not fundamentally different, so I suspect your real complaint is the use of a firepower chart in the first place).

Yeah but how big of a playing area are you playing on? Do you have enough room on a table to spread multiple detachments out across 60cm? And if one piece of that formation is hit in an assualt and loses, the whole detachment loses regardless of how big it is.

As far as the design of your detachments, that is the secret fun of Epic 40k. . . the endless variations and tinkering you can do. I am just saying that GW did a terrible job explaining how to really design detachments as opposed to designing what look like are armies. I mean, look at what I could stick into a legal Space Marine Armored Detachment:

1 Captain
1 Librarian
21 Land Raiders (7 squadrons of 3 each)
6 Predators (2 squadrons of 3 each)
3 Vindicators (1 squadron of 3)
5 Terminator Squads
5 Devastator Squads

47 units in a single detachment, hanging out in a 60cm radius. Not that I expect many people attempted this, but who knows? Its just unruly. Based on the scenario, it might be reasonable to try too, I dont know. But who would want to play against this? I wouldnt bother.

Would you want to play a game involving 3 detachments on each side, or a game with 7-10? I can assure you the one involving 7-10 is going to be a lot more interesting.

And think of this, the largest formation in SM2/TL for marines were marine companies. 1 HQ, and 18 stands, plus 10 rhinos, but broken up into 1 HQ unit, and 3 seperate marine/rhino detachments of 9 units each.



I never had a house rule for detachment sizes personally. I just looked at the point value for the game and tried to figure out how many decent detachments I could get out of it. I am not sure what the answer is as far as those lists go, I just try to be reasonable and logical. I just wish GW spent a few pages in the rules giving better examples than the ones they provided. I think Space Marines and Eldar should be on the small side, Imperial Guard and Chaos on the medium side, and Ork and Tyranid on the larger. But I know there is a trade-off between size, firepower, flexibility, and so on. So much that you can spend too much time trying to figure it all out, and thats another problem: selecting an army from scratch is time-consuming to do before a game.

Epic 40k really kind of went too overboard.

As far as the chart goes, do you feel more satisfied rolling 6 dice because you have 6 units firing? Or rolling 5 dice? And if you add another unit, happy that you are still rolling 5 dice instead of 7? If feels like you are being robbed sometimes. Nevermind I always have to consult it to look up what I get to roll.

Anyway, I think the more options you have, the better time you will have. Some think limiting is better but I am rabidly against that notion. So to me, using up all your points on large formations limits your options.

I am on the fence about specialized detachments. As an ork player, primarily, I think an army composition of generalists + one or two specialized are ideal and I think the game developers felt the same way. I have a Bad Moon detachment that is all Nobz for close combat and Big Gunz for support that I use with drop pods that is modeled after one Andy Chambers wrote about in a magazine. My opponent loves specialized detachments and regularly sets big blocks of Tactical Space Marines supported by Whirlwinds for me to smash against before counter attacking with assault marines.



As an aside, this was also a big part of the argument against the rules by the Epic card player community that the game allowed players to cheat with a ton of Land Raiders at two anti-tank shots each. What they didn't realize was that a Chaos player could launch a unit of 25 Bloodthirsters at it, an Eldar player could shut it down with blast markers from Night Spinners before dumping a full Harlequin detachment into it or an ork player had nobz, etc.

I think from the beginning, the developers tried to stress that it wasn't necessary to build huge planetkiller detachments and that each side had an equivalent if players wanted to devolve into slugging matches.

Unfortunately I see a lot of examples in the rulebooks and scenarios where they show large detachments. Take the one example for Space Marines in the armies book (pg 40):

Librarian + Rhino (Wow I forgot to add these to my list above lol)
Captain
Tact Squad + Rhino
Tact Squad + Rhino
Tact Squad + Rhino
Devastator Squad + Rhino
Devastator Squad + Rhino
3 Bikes
3 Land Speeders
2 Dreadnoughts
2 Predators

What the what.

So not saying there wouldnt be real world reasons for this selection of troops, but more of part of several detachments than all in one. And the refight lists dont help things either.

I forgot to add about the firepower chart thing... I tend to find myself doing things with models I wouldnt do in other games. Like cramming models together to line up on a target to make sure the firepower rating is increased, where in other systems I might be ok with 3 vehicles targeting one group and another couple targeting another. Its hard to explain without drawing a picture. Lets say I have 2 enemy detachments A and B, and some of my detachment can see A but not B, and vice versa. If the firepower rating of who can see what is just below the next number of I would need to roll more dice, I'll shift some accordingly, somethings leading to a group of models packed together that looks ridiculous. However, in other versions, I am ok spreading them out because I know I'll at least get one shot with each model. I know its hard to explain but someone has to understand what I mean.

I will agree with you there- they didn't do a good job of showing the positive possibilities of flexible detachment building and instead focused more on how to make an epic army mirror 40K.

Very true, especially if your one, huge, planet-killer detachment takes five or more blast markers each turn and is effectively pinned in position and vulerable to be eaten up piecemeal by little firefights just barely 15cm away from the outermost units. It's kind of ironic that your army morale suffers much more from one massive formation simply because you are cutting your blast marker removing ability down 8 or 9 times. So much for "strength in numbers!" By a similar token, overly small detachments get punished for being easy to "wipe out" and thus deduct any standing blast markers from army morale before they can be removed (worth an average of 125 points towards the depletion of your army's value—especially terrible if the unit itself was worth less than that amount!).

I agree though that the three little books are generally very poorly layed out and clarified (why are fate cards explained in the battles book? Why are the five different morale systems—blast markers, leadership tests, detachment break points, routing and army morale—scattered all about the rulebook?). The addition of designer notes in the back of the Armies book and an FAQ in the back of the Battles book was a good start, but also just goes to show that the authors realized the rules were not perfectly clear. Knowing Andy Chambers, who became the lead designer after Jervis was rotated over to lead GW's storefront division, the vagueness in the rules is half intentional. Chambers always hated being overly prescriptive when writing game systems (go figure).

As for designing an Epic 40k force, I agree that it is half the fun of the game but potentially very time consuming. The designers intended players to have fixed detachment lists which could then be slotted in modularly (hence the detachment sheet pad in the boxed game). Thus, when you're friend wanted to play, you'd simply choose between a few preset detachment cards that reached the total points of the game. I honestly think a better way to go about it is to just know how many points of models you own, put those in a separate carrying case for your usual game night, and then just throw those down on the table when it comes time to play. You can arrange them in formations right on the spot (just keep in mind a maximum of 10 troop choices and 10 support choices... Easy enough). That works fine for friendly games where each player loves to experiment with unique detachment builds.