Hi everyone. I've always liked the Dark Realm Miniatures ranges and the initial fluff produced for them, and thought it was a shame no-one did Epic Armageddon army lists for them. After waiting around lazily for someone else to do it without success, I thought I would give it a go myself, starting with the Andrayada who are probably my personal favourites.
So what is the design brief I was aiming for with these? Well first off and most importantly at this stage I focused upon expanding the back story for the Andrayada, providing a bit more detail about who they are, their history, philosophy, psychology and uniqueness so people can get bit more of a feel for them (and in a way that can be dovetailed into the 40k background if I detail further the relationship of the Pax Arcadia to the Imperium, there's already some hints in there). There are many mechanoid tropes in science fiction of course, but Andrayada are not generic "toasters" or mindless droids, nor a hivemind. Rather they are sentient self-aware, self-determining individual Android AI's. At the same time they ARE Androids, so that means they operate differently to other races, and their history then further explains why they fight the way they do.
Secondly, I roughly ported the existing Seeds of War list into EA terms as a starting point for unit stats. However this can't be done in a straight forward fashion as there are differences in systems. Rather the idea is to get the theme of the SOW list and translate that into a fun and distinctive list for epic. It also needs to play in a significantly different way to existing lists rather than being a minor variant of something that already exists if it is to appeal in my view. There are several ways it does this already, but the major addition here is the idea for the "AI Adaptation" special rule, whereby the Android tactics start off a bit unimaginative but improve and then rapidly surpass their opponents. (E.g. Think of the recent Google AI's that start off hopeless at video games but learn and start improving until they are acting in spooky superhuman ways, unconstrained by human limitations as they are).
So if you're interested take a look. Unit stats and points all pretty rough guesses at this stage, but hopefully shouldn't be too horrendously off the mark (someone will no doubt point out many blindingly obvious mistakes now I've said that of course).
For reference these are the Andrayada miniatures:
http://www.darkrealmminiatures.co.uk/st ... .php?cat=5And here's the link to the Pax Arcadian list:
viewtopic.php?f=86&t=30490and Kraytonian list:
viewtopic.php?f=86&t=30505Any feedback gratefully received!
UPDATED 18.11.2015
Mega-Walkers stats corrected (Malignant, Mordent, Majestic).