Blip wrote:
Glad to help.
Looks quite interesting. Presumably this was written between the Epic40k debacle and the start of EA ? Must confess I'm an unrepentant fan of E40k (despite its premature birth) and though i have grown to love EA i still find some of it a little "gamey." I like the way you have kept the simplicity of the stat lines while introducing a lot of special abilities. The assaults seem to have some of the E40k feel too with tables and supporting fire etc. which i always liked. The progressive penalties for suppression and command structure bonuses i like a lot.
Are you planning to do some more work on it ?
Hi!
I started to write this 1 years after the Net Epic project began, so that is around 1998. It was already apparent that Epic40k wasn't going to last (it finally went out of print in April 1999). It was completed before E:A came out. Of course, there are those whom thought out then that I based it on E:A, but Heresy predates it by several years. The final update was in 2005, mostly the army lists.
It is well known I didn't like epic40k (that's putting it mildly..
), but a lot of people didn't realize that I base the bare-bone skeleton on precisely that game.
The objection to epic40k and later incarnations was that for those whom liked epic back then, it was the draw of recreating all the "quirky" things of the 40k universe in the actual game experience is what made it endearing to us (still does).
In simpler terms, we like the fact that a titan has a volcano cannon, or vortex missile or anything else, with its own rules. Condensing everything down to "macro weapons" or other generic terms, kills the flavor and the thus the experience for many of us. In short, I want pulsa rokkit "kabooms", dragsta fields, Mortarions death wind, eldritch storm and the whole host that gave the game its FEEL. That was the draw and GW failed to realize this and thus epic never recovered back to its second edition golden age.
From an objective perspective I consider both epic40k and E:A BETTER DESIGNED games. I really do. But I don't play epic for that type of experience. There's a whole market out there of rules for that sort of play style, for GW epic I wanted mechanics that made the 40k universe come alive on the board.
So I thought, how to meld the two? I think a simple skeleton for the rules is VERY appealing, so I looked at epic40k's core (and several other games available) and basically made a simple activation sequence, eliminated orders altogether (alternating activations were new to design back then and becoming more popular), made a simple direct stat-line and codified the most basic concepts most people like for this scale (light vehicles versus heavy, anti-personnel versus anti-tank, etc).
Into this add a morale and suppression scheme (also a very popular and modern design concept) and you get a pretty decent core. Which we tested quite extensively and it seem to work and yielded reasonable results.
For the "feel" part all we did is make a list of skills/attributes that when assigned to a unit made it behave in a favorable way but still in the context of the simplified core. Thus you get a more streamlined battle system AND units with abilities that make them behave like you would envision that certain type of unit work in the 40k universe.
To be frank I was very surprised that people actually downloaded the rule set and played it quite a bit back then. As it turns out by the several requests I got, people still do. Perhaps it did not reach more people since I "dropped off the grid" for 8 years....
As I read through them again, right off the bat I'd drop the pre-measuring restriction. It more modern times its kind of silly.
I'm also looking at the several systems like artillery activation and the damage resolution system to see if I can streamline it some more.
Who knows I may get "frisky" and layout a book for it.
Primarch
