Epic in 2022: Horus Heresy &c.

[Primarch]

Yeah, no mention of what the rules will be like is a bit disappointing, but I doubt the preview show has the time to really go into it. Will it be similar to old epic, 40K Apocalypse, some new system entirely? Guess we have to wait and see.
One thing that gets me is that old school Space Marine and AT were HH focused to save on sprue costs. One set of figures for two sides allowed them to keep costs down. But here they have included Solar Aux in the set. They could have put in Orks, Eldar or any other xenos faction instead.
The models do look cool, but for an epic game there seem to be lots of small units (no pun intended) which makes me wonder how units will be packaged and how many you will need to fill up the starter box to a full size army.
And the big question after the starter box, resin or plastic?
Hopefully WarCom will have the answers.


Not happy that plastic heresy assault marines aren't available in 28mm yet.

[The Other Dave]

The early rumors (which turned out to be true in broad strokes) said it was going to be based on Epic Armageddon, which would suit me just fine - heck even Apocalypse was broadly based on EA and worked well (at least if did when karantu and I played it with epic miniatures a bit back). I'm going to go ahead and try and be optimistic. The rumors also suggested plastic moving forward, and having dealt with FW epic infantry kits I'd certainly hope that was true.

Horus Heresy is a choice, but I kind of suspect the idea is to limit expectations. Setting it in HH means they have to produce, what, 3 or 4 armies (marines, auxilia, mechanicum, they already have knights) and they'll have most of what's out there, but if they set it in 40K everyone would immediately want "their" army and there's scores of them. I'd rather have 3 or 4 armies done very deeply than every 40k army with one kind of infantry and one kind of tank, you know?

Unit sizes look OK to my eye actually - the only thing that looks smallish is tanks and terminators 2 to a unit, but if they go with a more Apocalype-y granular damage ratings, with vehicles having more than one damage capacity, that too would probably be fine.

[The Other Dave]

An article with some maddeningly-vague discussion of how the new edition works: https://www.warhammer-community.com/202 ... mperialis/

BUT, a few points suggest a return to some aspects of older editions of Epic, namely:
*Flexible formation design a la Epic 40,000 - which explains the formations pictured on the box with a mix of tactical marines and terminators.
*Secret order selection harkening all the way back to Space Marine / Titan Legions days.
*On the other hand alternating activation is still in so at least there's that!
*They also mention extreme deadliness which, together with the hidden-orders thing and the flexible formation design, makes me think it may draw heavily from Apocalypse which, again based on my experiences with it, is fine by me.

[Primarch]

I'm all in favour of alternating activations, but for me the big news is the orders coming back. I really enjoyed that aspect of Space Marine 1st and 2nd ed.
I wonder how flexible the new formations will be. Free choice from every possible unit like E:A or pre-built core choices with optional upgrades like SM 2nd ed.

[The Other Dave]

Totally free choice seems like a bad-for-new-players nightmare TBH. Armageddon had semi-free detachment building too (most formations have only 3 or 4 upgrades to choose from), it's just that with alternating activations it was almost always purely a better choice to get more formations rather than bulk up ones you already had. But really the bit on army building in the article basically boils down to "you can make a bunch of different kinds of specialized formations!" which tells us absolutely nothing useful.

[Primarch]

I wonder how big tables will be/how fast units will move. There are no rhinos, land raiders or dracosans in the starting box. No terrain either.

[The Other Dave]

No transports is certainly a choice! The starter set not being representative of the game as she is played is generally not optimal, but I'm sure they'll magnanimously have boxes of transports available to buy soon after launch.

No terrain is less surprising (and I have scads, of course) and if it keeps the box cost down to AT starter box levels instead of Leviathan levels, so much the better.

[me_in_japan]

Seems to me like a golden opportunity to make terrain with card and plastic components, like the old space marine box terrain. That said, I dunno if they have the wherewithal to print thick card stock. It's not something you see in their products these days. Still, woulda been natsukashi, and also practical and keep costs down.

[Balloonacorn]

I like the scale and the fact you can take titanic units with ease ( I remember have epic scale greater daemons a long time ago) but how do the rules distinguish themselves from 40k or HH? Is it the same game on a different scale or are there tangible differences.

BTW, I love the starter box

[The Other Dave]

They haven't had much to say in detail about the rules yet, but their WarCom vaguepost suggests it'll draw heavily on various older versions of Epic, plus maybe Apocalypse. Some of what tends to make then quite different from 40K are:

-The big thing that the scale allows you to do, and previous editions have all done well, is use all that table space you suddenly have. Shrinking models down to 25% linearly means you're down to 1.5% volume in model size! In 40K and most skirmish games, you tend to get stuck in pretty quickly, and much of the table will be "full" of units. In Epic (and 6mm-ish-scale gaming in general) the size of the board means that you can have meaningfully-separated flanks, reserves, rapid redeployment and so on. You'll often see units actually getting back in their transports so they can leg it to the other end of the field, for example.
-The other thing the scale lets you do is bring a very wide range of kinds of units without breaking the game or filling the table up. If you bring even just a Warhound to a 40K game it'll basically just stand in one place just because its footprint is such a big part of the table, but at Epic scale even a Warlord has such a small table presence that it's not going to be overwhelming, for the stuff on the other side of the table anyway. A company of 10 tanks or 3 superheavies is trivially represented, has plenty of room to move around the board, and still has a pretty limited area of influence.

More generically rules-wise there's things like:
-A focus on "command and control" and giving different orders to different formations to achieve your goals (often radically altering what they can do), sometimes also including "battlefield friction" and things like coming under fire making your units less reliable as they try to keep their heads down. (This is my favorite thing about Epic Armageddon but there's still no news about how much it's still going to be in LI.)
-Combined arms being important. The latest version of Epic, and also Apocalypse, have different to-hit stats for anti-personnel and anti-tank, so (like the WarCom article says) a lascannon is basically useless against a unit of 50 infantry but will make a tank's day very bad, and vice versa for a heavy bolter.

Obviously it's still all up in the air, but Epic has never really been a game where "it's just 40K but smaller".