Well I'll continue to play and fill gaps with use of the excellent 'counts as' rule.

But as ever DWWFY.

Ignoring everything else, I'll just echo Steve's sentiment that this isn't anything more than a return to how things were a couple years ago. GW still sell their extant epic long on their website, forgeworld actually do quite a lot of good epic scale vehicles, eBay still carries loads of epic listings at any one time and there's more and more other 6mm ranges available than ever before.

Jervis being quoted as saying epic will never return is sad news. He was my great hope. I have a number of their old boxed board games, man o war and early iterations of blood bowl. I buy it and it usually will be dropped or replaced. Maybe i should choose one of their main 28mm lines and see how long it lasts !! No, I think i will just change to Dystopian Wars.

Ha, ha, I thought I was the only one who when I would buy into a game it went under.

I'm stuck on the 40k fluff, and don't care about the latest and the greatest. Most new games won't be around forever either, have no fluff appeal, and some have even less players then Epic.

In the past year GW (in it's various guises) also said FW wasn't doing the Horus Heresy or any new Necron minis. So who knows, I think they could do something, but it might not be something we would like. I know I think most of their recent designs are terrible and not even worthy of scale reduction. I really wouldn't care to see how they would over complicate and randomize the rule set, there is more than enough d6 rolling as it is right now.

I think the present design studio would butcher Epic (but then again I like 3rd Edition and the whole streamlined style, even in the big game(3rd 4th))

On the bright side more and more Epic scale infantry is available, the core armor is all over Ebay, and the creativity of personal scratch builds will increase now that people won't be always waiting for the unofficial new releases.

Elsmore - an M113 variant with side hatches and armour ridges either side of them IS IDENTICAL to a rhino, espcially at 6mm scale.

And I know for sure, there's a helluva lot of things that fit the 40K aesthetic that are ip free.

EDIT: and all we need is a sketch or a model that predates a GW version to nullify their IP claims. One of the reasons GW went after Chapterhouse so hard, and one of the reasons they've started including lots more units in codexes, even if there's no model for them yet.

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My shifting projects

or to put it another way, this is what is called a step backwards.

unless i am drastically missunderstanding what has happened here i would go so far as to say that this action has done more to set back the development and selling point of epic than any recent actions with compendiums, AC musical chairs, and site redesigns has done to promote it.

boo.

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~Every Tool Is A Weapon, If You Hold It Right~

Just to pick up on a couple of points....



To a point, believe it or not, I agree with you. However, the lack of support and the feeling of minis being generic is simply because of a lack of familiarity.

At the end of the day, this is simply how it is. Each individual has a simple choice - They can either walk away from Epic because it is unsupported, or they can acknowledge that it is a great system with a limited miniature range and either only use units which have GW minis, find suitable minis from elsewhere which look different, or convert/scratch build their own. This is not a new situation. This is not even the worst thing that the Epic community has been through. People can still convert their own minis and they can still play games and talk about rules and all the other things that we always used to do.

We can either completely disregard GWs IP and simply wait for serious problems, which I am not prepared to do, or we can pack up turn off the lights and give up on Epic, which I am also not prepared to do, or we can adjust to the situation and make the best of it.

I agree that it is a real shame that GW doesn't support Epic. Thats not new.
I agree that more minis would be good, and I am worried about the future of the mini range. Thats not new.
At the end of the day, moral or not, GW are exercising a legal right and requirement, and as much as we may agree or disagree with it, or the background to it, it is what it is.



Exactly.

The number of people who relied on this avenue was tiny compared to even the player base of Epic. There are loads of people managing to play and enjoy the game who had never heard of the output of some people here.

I am honestly considering creating a new Marine Chapter army and replacing all Rhinos with DRM Intruder tanks or something similar, and for my own use calling them Viridian Pattern Rhinos. In fact, I am very tempted to start stockpiling infantry sprues and not worrying about vehicles at all, as they are far easier to find alternatives for. Lets not forget that we have more options for miniatiures, better organisation, more control over the game and a better environment and tournament scene than we have ever had in Epics past of all editions.



But no-one is taking that background away. A Rhino is still a Rhino and it is still available from GW or on eBay (in the hundreds). If you dont want to use proxy models then I can totally see where you are coming from and you dont have to. You may have to limit the races/units you use, but the same can be said for even 40K - GWs largest game. I want to work on a Tyranid force with a Parasite of Mortrex and swarms of winged Rippers.



Yes, the situation sucks. I wish that GW would either give the game the support that (I feel) it deserves and which would be good for GW themselves, or it opened up and let people support it in GWs absence. But, I am sure that there are all sorts of legal issues about designs produced in CAD where scale is no longer an issue and ramifications for 40K minis simultaneously. Its not going to happen. And, while I would love Jervis to drop my these boards and say he wanted our help for fifth edition, thats looking less likely too.

I hate this situation as much as anyone (and probably more than most people), but thats the way it is, and I am not going to stop enjoying the game and running the site because of this, which - and lets be fair - GW has a legal right to do.

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https://www.cybershadow.ninja - A brief look into my twisted world, including wargames and beyond.
https://www.net-armageddon.org - The official NetEA (Epic Armageddon) site and resource.

Yes, it is undoubtably a step backwards, but I wouldn't say that it has done more bad than the recent activities here have done good. It's just that this is at the front of everyones mind and came out of nowhere. Give it a week or two and I am sure that things will settle down and we will deal with it, move on and be back to arguing over whether a unit should have FF4+ or FF5+ for seven pages.

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https://www.cybershadow.ninja - A brief look into my twisted world, including wargames and beyond.
https://www.net-armageddon.org - The official NetEA (Epic Armageddon) site and resource.

Parasite is due to be released soon, and winged Rippers are already available from FW. :-)

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

You get my point.

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https://www.cybershadow.ninja - A brief look into my twisted world, including wargames and beyond.
https://www.net-armageddon.org - The official NetEA (Epic Armageddon) site and resource.

Only seven? How things have deteriorated in my semi-absence.

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http://www.troublemakergames.co.uk/
Epic: Hive Development Thread

shameless but well deserved plug. It's in the overall schedule, just gotta get more of Zee Germans [effects accent] produced!


It is lamentable and I will admit that it's a wee bit easier for a guard player to pick up 3rd party proxies and IMO feel satisfied than for marine players as everything that makes them feel awesome is the iconic look of their vehicles but grandma wendy does still make and sell a strong set of core vehicles to play with, albeit without the wonderfulness of variant Land Raiders. But as I posted earlier .

We still have a kick ass community, great players, some of the best and inspiring painters I've ever seen (head nod over to Vaasish), and many fantastic 3rd party systems that were it not for TacComs I would never have come across (another tip of the hat to the dynamic duo at Troublemaker, Spartan games, and Hawk Wargames) that I will be getting into.



Well this treads very close to giving away the recipe for the secret sauce, so to speak and therefore am loath to phrase it as such, but I personally would love to see more of a "interested in creating 6mm models but were afraid to ask" set of threads as a starter point for people interested in starting to play around with designs.

And while I am at it, there's nothing IP infringing whatsoever in producing components that happen to be a particular size that happen to fit a production model provided the following is met:
-no reproduction of iconography (e.g. Menstruating Cherubs symbol) is on the part
-it is not a "de-bigerized" version of an existing component (e.g. simply shrinking a flamestorm cannon as is, isn't kosher).
-it is not marketed as direct use for a product that belongs to someone else's IP

All that being said, it doesn't mean it is kosher for it to be posted and sold here at TacComs (as I'd like to say, "[Cybershadow] reserves the right to refuse service"). And before anyone holds up the whole Chapter House Studios fiasco note that A. ultimately GW probably will only prevail due to direct copying of GW IP as opposed to existing precedence allowing compatible components (I should point out the entire goal of filing suit is not to win but to drain $ and force settlement- look no further than Paulson for example) and B. they failed on the 3rd point I outlined above. Most likely the area they ran afoul of the GW IP Hoplites of Doom was NOT the StormRaven TruScale kit but the fact they sell models effectively indistinguishable from 40k Space Marines.

The entire point however is not to advocate nor condone any course of action but just to point out that "oh noezzzz the sky is falling ARRGGRGGGG!!!" isn't needed or warranted. 6mm gaming is NOT going away. Hell after the current GW slit your own throat tactics it actually makes me want to spend some time and $$$ to fund and invest in a good unique dystopian sci-fi IP just to give the finger to you know who on principle. For instance look at Mantic games Warpath product line. In the above link they have a sci-fi space dwarves line, human space infantry, space rats, and green xeno aliens and they who shall not be named know that they don't have a leg to stand on to screw with them as all 4 concepts have numerous prior art. Just saying it's all in how you do it.

Considering the heavy handed tactics they're employing it wouldn't surprise me if someone soon doesn't set up a blind corporation in HK, hosted on servers in the PRC, leveraging something like bitcoin and producing whatever they want. Ultimately the tactics are self defeating as it doesn't stem the flow of products and just pushes it down to the underground. Now that I've said this, it wouldn't surprise me if I couldn't find a CAD file somewhere that could be sent to a 3D printing house and create a 28mm Baneblade kit from with little effort on my part (again I am not advocating this, just stating a what I expect I would find in reality). Basically the genie is out of the bottle and we live in "interesting times".

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He's a lawyer and a super-villian. That's like having a shark with a bazooka!

-I HAVE NO POINT
-Penal Legion-Fan list
-Help me make Whitescars not suck!

So I feel I should ask... I have painting threads that shows many of these models, with many more squirreled away for future projects, enough to last me a good while. Should I sweep these under the carpet now and paint them in private or is it ok for me to continue?

I've actually wondered this for a while, now seems an appropriate time to ask.

It is probably best that these items are not advertised or promoted in any way.
Thanks.

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https://www.cybershadow.ninja - A brief look into my twisted world, including wargames and beyond.
https://www.net-armageddon.org - The official NetEA (Epic Armageddon) site and resource.