Is there anyway of getting around deathstar units? You know the kind... They max out troop and support choices and have firepower totals in the upper 50's and 60's? It might be half their army, but there is still no way to beat it in a firefight or assault. I personally prefer my detachments very small, like the example in the rulebook... Maybe only 9 or 10 stands total. But these little guys always get swatted like flies when a deathstar rolls around!

Can you concentrate enough firepower from many detachments to weigh in? The problem is that the big detachment gets to shoot first (you might get one in before). But you have the potential to do more blast markers, I think. You'd have to really keep it up, because BMs do melt away.

andy

Hammer it with blastmarkers (Night Spinners, Pulsa Rockets, etc) so that any movement/assault is going to be difficult and then use smaller fast-moving units to zip in and break it by firefighting. It's easy to cut out and firefight a small portion of his force. The only way to fight this tactic is by ranking up like a Napoleonic division or game of Apocalypse- then the unit is an easy target for barrage weapons. Using the Eldar, I've held back a 2,000 point force of Chaos with 500 points of Aspects and Jetbikes this way in a fog-of-war game. Unfortunately, you'll need the initiative during the assault phase, but fortune favors the brave.

Those do seem to be the best options. Deathstar detachments really get bogged down by blast markers, not just because they are easy targets for barrage weapons, but because they shed blast markers much more slowly. For example, if the player had broken the deathstar detachment up into three or four smaller detachments, they would be losing three to four times more blast markers in each rally phase. Just allocating a few long-range units to the problem can surpress deathstar detachments indefinitely, pinning them to the battlefield to either be ignored or carved up. The immobile deathstar detachment is even more vulnerable to precision firefights and assaults, where you focus a few, powerful units to engage a weak flank of the deathstar, winning the small firefight or assault, and then forcing the larger detachment to flee (possibly into an encirclement, thus destroying the entire deathstar in one go). It takes a little time to set up (piling on the blast markers and circling around the enemy's flank), but it seems to be rather fool proof (you can easily net a +3 combat bonus that is nearly impossible to beat).

You have to remember 15+ units get a +1 to their command tests, but otherwise there are no real benefits to clumping everyone into one big unit. I'll do it with Chaos cultists because 20-30 infantry (something around 250-300 points)slogging across the field tends to distract my opponent from faster units hitting the flanks, especially when any disruptions he manages on it aren't affecting my Rhinos.

I have always agreed with this. Makes no sense why the makers would allow players to create a detachment that could single handedlly contain one Captain, one Librarian, 10 Tactical units, and 10 Land Raiders all in the same group.

And don't get me started on what you can do with the Orks.

Truthfully, I have never played anyone who would do that, and I wouldnt, but I have seen complaints like your's where people seem to have.

Worst thing they screwed up in Epic 40k.

That was one of the huge complaints (alongside the bases) by Second Edition players- they felt that since it was possible to have a unit of 20 Land Raiders that it would become normalized in play. They didn't realize that one side taking 20 LRs and the other taking artillery to fire at the bunched up armor or lay blast markers would get old and boring.

I think the only game-breaking massed detachment can be fielded by Chaos- up to 25 major demons at once, but per the FLUFF if you are facing 25 Bloodthirsters then your battle is important enough to have several units of grey knights/aspect warriors/nobz.

Oh you could do a lot worse than that, even with Space Marines. The max for that formation would actually be 20 Tactical units, not 10 (since two units was one choice on the list). So that's a captain, a librarian, 20 Tactical units and 10 Landraiders (32 units total). If you also wanted to give Rhinos for all the infantry, you're up to 44 units in the detachment. If you went with Bike squads instead of Tactical Squads, and Land Speeders instead of Land Raiders, you could have up to 62 units in one detachment.

Strangely, the smallest detachments in the game, aside from Eldar, were Imperial Guard Infantry (go figure). Chaos Space Marines were also relatively small, in comparison to Space Marines and others (which is to say, Chaos Space Marines were still way too big... Just smaller in comparison). Tyranid Swarms could be as many as 98 units in a single detachment (no joke). Orks were actually... Pretty much in the middle, so to speak.

The designers pretty much got hung up on the idea of one army element representing an entire company. Of course, they got this from Space Marine 2nd Edition and Titan Legions, where one card could be a company. The problem was, even SM/TL treated such cards as three separate detachments.

The sensible thing might be to say you have 10 choices from both the main force list and the support list combined, and you couldn't take more support than main force choices. That would limit players from padding their ranks with support choices. Of course, you still have the problem of 40+ Ork units and 50+ Tyranids.

You know, the most obvious solution just slapped me in the face.

Since Epic 40k is explicit that each detachment represents a single Warhammer 40k army, and each assault represents a single game of Warhammer 40k, why not just set a point limit for detachments? A typical game of Warhammer 40k 2nd Edition (the version of the game at that time, and the best edition of 40k evaaaar) is 2,000 points. Epic 40k units are one tenth the point cost of their 40k 2e equivalent, so you could set the detachment size limit at 200 points (or, if you want to play with a different size, 150 or 250 points). All the other limitations for main and support choices remain the same (i.e. max 10 main force choices etc.). Of course, this limitation wouldn't apply to War Engines, which are not normally found in Warhammer 40k games (even though Inquisitor magazine had rules for them!).

This makes a lot of sense for the intended scale of the game, is actually much more in line with what the designers meant, and accomplishes all of the things we need it to. After all, that huge Space Marine tactical detachment was worth 6,000 or more points in Warhammer 40k 2nd Edition... I don't know anyone who played games that large. I can only imagine what that 98 unit Tyranid army was worth (I am guessing in the 10,000 point range, though).