Hi all,

A few weeks ago a few longtime games and I picked up epic (again) and we were wondering/adding up how much we could field.

Staggering amounts really. (including my Emperor Titan I could easily get to 5K in Titans alone, that is Imperial only! I also have Orks and Eldar. Note that one of my buddies has ab out twice my forces)

The question now is; if we would try and play 10K (or even more) per side; what makes it unbalanced?*
Assuming it is the warmachines/Titans we could easily impose a 'maximum'.

What would you recommend?


(*=it is said epic is balanced between 3k and 5k)

I would suggest that the 0-1 type restrictions apply to every 5000 points or part thereof (so a 15k game you can have three deathstrikes, three supcoms, etc) or allowing multiple forces (so a 10k game consists of two seperate 5k armies working together, which has the same effect but with a few more restrictions, but allows 5k of titans and 10k of imperial guard, for instance)
the other concern is mostly objectives/victory conditions. they break down fairly quickly (They Shall Not Pass is bloody hard at 5k, at 15k you're likely to find it even moreso, while with more and more firepower on the table, BTS will become easier the more points you have) I suggest doubling everything at or around the 15k point (so 2 blitz, 4 objectives on each side, need both blitzes for the victory condition etc. probably want BTS to be "two most expensive" and probably allow 1 unbroken formation for TSNP) if you want to do a 10k game, tweak the numbers a bit, or play a special scenario
Table size would also need to be increased (wider, deeper you have game length concerns. That said, I'd suggest you allow an extra turn before the two turns where conditions start to be claimed for every 5k aswell)

Basically, the game starts to break down in some areas right away, but with a few changes to scenario and force selection, (or atleast a willingness to say "yeah we'll just ignore that, lets do this instead") you can play fairly comfortably as big as you have time and space for.

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+1

You can always invent scenarios too, we did some huge games at our campaign weekend and usually do a huge christmas megabattle, special scenarios work well (attack/defend is quite good) we found that more than 2 players per side can really slow things down though so I'd recomment keeping to 2v2 unless you're not time limited

Also keep the activation count down, at 10k you could have dozens of activations which slows things down, in a big game its better to have fewer formations with max upgrades to keep things moving

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Some of the special rules start to become more or less important (e.g. Eldar triple retain is less effective when there are three times the number of activations on the table). Some armies who rely on being able to strike without reprisal will start to suffer too. Most of these things can be mitigated though, for example play on a proportionally wider table (like 10' x 4'). You may also find that the focus moves away from a "lots of activations" meta, both because there are more targets in turn 1 (less need to stall) and the impact and loss of each individual formation is less important. And people tend to want to bring the bigger more expensive stuff out anyway.

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My group worked out a scenario for large games.
http://www.tacticalwargames.net/taccmd/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=23082
More playtesting's always welcome – it'd be great to hear some feedback from outside our group

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