1st EPIC Newsletter from Jervis
Hello and welcome to the very first Epic newsletter. Until we get Epic Magazine back in print at the end of next year I'll be sending out this newsletter instead. You can subscribe to the newsletter by visiting the Epic website at www.epic40000.com. Alternatively you can send a large SSAE to Fanatic, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS and we'll send you the next newsletter in the post.
The aim of the newsletter is to keep Epic players in the loop with regards the development of the new Epic game system, and also any other Epic related activity that is going on in the Fanatic office. If you have missed out on any of my reports about what is going on with Epic at the moment, then I recommend visiting the Epic website at www.epic40000.com, where you'll find files you can download explaining what is happening with the game system and why these things are going on.
The newsletter is split into three sections. The first section is called Armageddon Update, and gives an overview of what is happening with the Epic Armageddon rules system. Secondly there is In Production, which lets you know about any new models we are planning to bring out to coincide with the new rules. And thirdly there is Feedback, and chance for me to print some of the emails I've had about Epic along with my replies.
Armageddon Update
At the time of writing I am just putting the finishing touches to a major update of the Epic Armageddon rules. Every time I do an update I change the version number on the file, and the new version will be version 9.0. Amongst the Armageddon playtesters the version number is often used to describe the game, for example, we might say "I had a game of v9.0 last night", so that is what I'll call it below.
Anyway, v9.0 includes a number of changes compared to the version of the rules that are currently up in the Epic Armageddon playtesters vault (you can find out how to get into the vault at the Epic website). The two most important changes affect the way that assaults work and the way that flyers are used, and as both are likely to have quite profound effects on the way that the game plays I'll explain why I have made the changes below. In addition to these two major changes, I have also made a number of minor changes that are listed below. I should warn readers that are not members of the Epic Armageddon playtesters vault that quite a few of these changes refer to things not found in the demo rules that appear on our website or in Epic Magazine 10. For those that find this annoying all I can do is apologise and recommend signing up for the vault asap!
I've put in a new action called Sustained Fire action that allows a formation to shoot with a +1 to hit modifier but at the cost of all of its movement. For the record, I'm very much against allowing a 5cm move with this option, as I think it will make it too powerful.
Initiative tests have been split into two types: action tests, that are taken when you roll to see if a formation can carry out an action, and rally tests, that are taken when a formation rallies. There are two new modifiers that apply to only to rally tests: a -1 if you are broken, and a -1 modifier if there are any enemy within 30cm. These are designed to make Broken formations back off from the enemy, while at the same time stopping them rallying too quickly.
I have done away with the rule that said an unbroken formation with one or more blast markers can remove one in the end phase, and have instead said that they must take a rally test. If a formation passes a rally test it removes half of its blast markers, rather than just one. This keeps unbroken formations in line with broken ones (as a broken formation that rallies gets to remove half its blast markers), and does away with some odd situation where it was better for a formation to be broken than not!
I've changed the rules for barrage templates so that you roll to hit what's under the template, rather than just using the number of units under the template to determine the number of to hit dice rolled (which I the way it was before). The new method is slightly slower, but is much more intuitive.
I've included rules for Supreme Commander units (very high level command units). I was going to add Psykers but ran out of time. I'll try to add them in next time round. I've added Supreme Commander options to all three armies.
I've added a 'reinforced armour' special rule, which basically means a vehicle counts as a war engine for its saves. This allows me to make some large vehicles like Space Marine Land Raiders and Ork Battlewagons rather tougher, without actually having to turn them into war engines.
Speaking of war engine saves, I've changed the rules so that now a war engine gets its normal save against macro-weapon hits (as before), but gets to re-roll it's save against anti-tank hits. I think the re-roll works better than the +2 modifier, and also means that I can give war engines a save that works on the same scale as other units.
I've also gone for a new way of dealing with war engine weapon fire arcs (try saying that ten times fast!),that is rather more flexible and requires less charts. In a nutshell, the new rule says "Simply see if the weapon could point at the target, and if it can it can shoot!"
I've modified the war engine critical damage tables so that criticals cause a bit more damage.
I've overhauled the GT Scenario to make the victory conditions simpler and hopefully make games rather longer. I've also moved the WYSIWYG rule here rather than with the core game mechanics, and added rules for using models to 'count as' something else from the army list.
I've done a bit of work on the costs in the Marine army list, which play-testing has shown to trifle on the high side. I've addressed this problem in two ways; first of all by giving most Marine infantry formations low cost Rhinos that are factored into the detachment cost and therefore come 'for free', and secondly by lowering the cost of most detachments by _at_25 points. Lest people think I've gone all soft on the Marines, where I have given a 25 point discount on the one hand, I have taken back with the other by saying that if you take more than one detachment of the same type they cost +25 points extra for any taken after the first (for example, the second and subsequent tactical detachments you take will cost an extra 25 points each). This should encourage players to take quite diverse Marine armies with a wide variety of unit types, which I think is good, and should knock down the cost of Marine armies by a bit, which is also good. I've also included the option for teleporting Terminators and using Drop Pods, both of which may prove scary for an unprepared opponent!
I've changed the way extras units work on the Ork list, so you now get several units for a flat cost of +100 points. This has allowed me to pull some things from the special units section into the extras section.
I've merged Guntrukks and Gunwagons into a single category. Battlewagons and Stompers now count as armoured vehicles with the 'reinforced armour' special rule.
Gargants and Great Gargants come as single formations now, rather than as Gargant Big Mobs, mainly 'cause Big Mobs didn't work with the war engine rules!
And that just leaves the two major changes to tell you about! The first of these revolves around the way that assaults work in Epic Armageddon. Now, if there is one area of the Epic Armageddon rules that has raised the most questions, it has to be the assault rules. Although on the whole players seem to rather like them, I have had many, many emails asking me to clarify exactly how the assault rules work, or to confirm certain aspects of them. This has been worrying me, as it means that the rules are difficult to grasp the first time they are read. I don't like this kind of thing at all - to me the best rules can be easily understood after reading the first few lines of a rules section.
So, I sat down and had a good hard think about what seemed to be wrong with the assault rules. In the end I decided it boiled down to three things. First of all, although the action that allows an assault to take place is called a Charge action, you don't actually have to charge an enemy formation at all, which feels wrong and gives the assault rules a very abstract feel. Secondly, only the defender gets to call on support from friendly formations that are nearby, which a lot of players feel is unfair. And thirdly the roll to see who won the combat needs something that rewards the level of the victory in terms of the difference between the two sides dice scores, i.e. an assault where you win by a score of 9 to 3 should have more effect than one where you win by 9 to 8.
After trying a number of alternative methods of dealing with these problems, all of which proved to be dead-ends for one reason or another, I hit on the idea of simply saying that when you declared a charge action you had to pick an enemy formation as the target of the charge, and the assault was fought just your formation and this enemy. However, other formations from both sides that had units within 15cms of the assault could lend 'supporting fire' by shooting with their firefight values.
This simple change meant that a formation that declared a charge now has to pick a target formation and 'go for them', which just felt right to me, while units from both sides that were close by could lend support, which felt right too. All that was needed were some rules allowing an attacker to treat situations where units from two or more different formations are all 'mixed together' and intermingled as a single opponent, and the bulk of the problems associated with the assault rules were tided up. I've played several games with these new rules now, and I think they work very well, so I plan to stick with them.
However, I have made one further change to assaults that I am less sure about. I have decided that the losing formation in an assault suffers one extra casualty (no save allowed) for each point it loses the assault by. Returning to our examples above, in this would mean that if you beat an opponent by a score of 9 to 3 then they would lose an extra six units. Yes, I know, OUCH! However, it really does seem to me that the result scores should have some kind of game effect other than simply determining who wins and who loses, and I also feel that the winner deserves more of a reward for winning the combat. Last but by no means least it makes an assault more likely to be a decisive event, which I think is a good thing. Still, this rule will need careful testing, as it will make good assault troops much more effective.
And that just leaves one last 'big change', which is a truly major revision of the rules for flyers. One the complaints about the Epic 40,000 flyer rules was that flyer models "didn't get used all that much - you plonk them down on the table, they make an attack, then they vanish back off the table". The same criticism has been made of the Epic Armageddon flyer rules too. On the other hand I am very firmly against a return the flyer rules used in older versions of Epic (which basically treated flyer models as a form of skimmer) as I think they made the flyers feel more like slow WW1 biplanes than fast jet aircraft! I was pondering this recently as I cycled into work, when it occurred to me that it might be possible to deal with both these problems if we broke a flyer action down into a number of separate segments. The flyer would move and then shoot in each segment (flak could fire in each segment too), and this would carry on until all the flyers exited the table or get shot down. Only once the flyer had left would the flyer's action be completed and play return to normal. This would allow me to give flyers things like a move and turn rate, and more importantly it would get a lot more use out of the flyer models, which would actually get to fly an manoeuvre round the table. On the other hand the fact that he flyer could do all this within a single action would maintain the impression of sheer speed that wanted to achieve.
As you have probably guessed, I have decided to go ahead and write up these new flyer rules for v9 update and give them a trail run. However, I am very much aware that they could slow the game down A LOT, so I'm going to keep a close eye on things, and if they slow the game too much I will simply return to the older version of the rules. I rather like the way that the new rules look on the page though, and the first couple of games we've had with the new rules have proved rather a lot of fun. Anyway, v9 will be going up in the vault at the same time as this newsletter goes out, and I await feedback on the changes with eager anticipation.
In Production
At present we hope to be able to get the Epic Armageddon rules ready for release in November next year. I know, it's a long way off, but it at least gives us time to thoroughly test the new rules! However, even though the game won't be out for just over a year yet, work has already started on some of the new Epic scale miniatures that will come out with it. Before I let you know what we're working on, I'd first just like to underline that we are not planning to remake the whole range, and that anybody with an existing Epic scale army will be able to use it with the new rules. All we plan to do is replace the old plastic models with metal ones, and then bring out new models to complement and expand the existing range. You can find out more about why we have decided to stop using plastics by visiting the Epic website at www.epic40000.com. Also see the Feedback section of the newsletter below.
Anyway, work has already started on the metal replacements for the old Epic scale plastic miniatures. If you visit our website you can see the first test metal infantry strips. Since this strip was made Mark Bedford has produced several more test strips, all of which are about to be moulded (we'll get pic's up on our website as soon as we can). One thing we're experimenting with is making the base of the infantry strips rather narrower than that used for the first strip. We've found that reducing the width of the base from 10mm to 5mm reduces the weight of the strip by something like 25%, which means we'll be able to give you 25% more strips in a blister pack for the same amount of money. The new test strips will all be on the narrower bases, and I will be interested to hear what people think of them.
Work is also underway on a new metal Rhino based on the new 40K plastic kit. I've seen the master model, by trainee Citadel designer Martin Footit and it looks very nice indeed I must say. We're going to have the master model moulded, and then we can get conversions made for things like Razorbacks, Predators and a new Marine AA vehicle called the Hunter. Martin is also going to make us a new metal Land Raider, and (probably) some new Land Speeders.
Meanwhile freelance miniature designer Shane Hoyle has just delivered a very nice Ork trukk model to us. At present the Epic Ork range has a very '2nd edition40K' look to it, so we're planning to bring it bang up to date with several new models based closely on the type of thing featured in the latest 3rd edition Ork Codex. We've also commissioned ace BFG designer John Manders to make me some new Ork Gargants and 'soopa-guns' in order to give more variety and depth to the range of Ork war engines we produce.
All in all, then, we have quite a lot of new Epic miniatures underway already. At this really is just the tip of the iceberg. Trust me, you're going to love some of the new models we're planning to bring out to coincide with the release of the game.
Received on Thu Oct 17 2002 - 16:12:04 UTC
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