GlynG wrote:
Hey there, I vaguely recognise your old username from old threads.
Hey GlynG yeah you sound familiar too.
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You've missed quite a lot and things have waxed and waned but Epic Armageddon is still going strong. I'll give you an eclectic catch-up on what you've missed. The community has well and truly taken over developing Epic and the
2013 Tournament Pack was released recently and the
2012 Compendium includes a wide range of developed armies, some of which may be less tested.
A large group of tournament players went their own separate way and produced
their own version of army lists on their site, mostly based on the Net-EA ones but with some things tweaked and some all new lists. I'm not sure if you're in the UK or not, but there's roughly 10 or so
Epic Armageddon tournaments run by them in the UK every year.
There was a golden age of fan made Epic models, using CAD and matter printing which produced much higher quality models than the GW ones, but a cease and desist but a stop to that.
Evil and Chaos from the forums ran a successful (over 5 times the amount asked for) Indiegogo fundraising campaign to produce 6mm plastic and metal armies that would make good proxies for epic -
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/6mm-scale-armiesOnslaught minis have great expanding ranges that could be proxies for epic -
http://www.onslaughtmini.com/ Exodus Wars also -
http://www.exoduswars.com/Someone from the forum has developed
Tabletop, it's in the early stages at the moment, but provides everything players need to play a game - table, models, dice, ranges, ect but online. I'm in Australia and I have a game of Epic Armageddon going on against someone in the US.
There's a yearly Epic painting competition - see
here for last year's entries. Some nice models in there.
Cybershadow has the site be open to many games but 80-80% of the discussion and post are Epic related.
Wow quite a lot to catch up on... will check it all out.
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Why did you give up on Epic exactly? You were right on it not selling that well (though it initially did a lot better than they estimated) but that doesn't make any difference to how good a game it is. Epic is the only game I play these days, having sold off my other models years ago.
Give up on Epic? Hmm. . . well, it kind of had to do with gaming in general I guess. I grew out of it and took up other interests. I used to have a huge collection of games, but my favorite ones really were no longer supported and hard to find players for. I started selling off the least favorite ones, and before long my collection just contained my absolute favorites, to be tucked away in the closet. I was so excited when jervis started the playtesters forum, I couldnt believe I could just email the guy responsible for hours and hours of the time I spent playing the games he created. I couldnt believe I was going to be able to influence the game that got me into gaming (Adpetus Titanicus/Space Marine was my first table-top wargame), but when I could see it wasnt going to be what I hoped, it was kind of the nail in my gaming coffin.
Part of the problem was the lack of resources Jervis had with Specialist Games. I wasnt sitting in his seat, and didnt have to deal with budgets and so forth, but he just seemed too ambitious and all over the place and I think he should have been a lot more conservative. By this I mean, rather than spending limited resources on new Space Marine and Ork infantry sprues, just use the existing brilliant ones from Epic 40k. Those sprues really didnt work with the army formations? Well then change the army formations. What do you mean I have to buy metal Terminators now? How many of those could they have sold anyway? Eventually when the resources got cut further he had to resort to re-using the Chaos and Eldar sprues anyway. Which was fine. They are excellent sprues. And backed up my point.
Everyone was excited about new miniatures, but I didnt think many of the new ones were good enough to use limited resources on, meaning someone had to be paid to sculpt them, and energy into producing them. Junka Trucks? Anything from the Baran Seige Masters? Not to say these were all terrible, but honestly the Epic 40k miniatures were awesome and existing armies should have been built around existing models, this way more could be 'reproduced' quicker for players waiting for their armies. I really wasnt happy with recycling Armageddon again, which I see GW is doing again in 2014, and to me, it left out some important armies. After the first rulebook went out, what comes in the next supplement? Essentially more Orks and Imperial Guard. Tyranids? Chaos? Titans? These were all there. How about spending time on new TAU and NECRON miniatures. It pissed me off, and I lost interest in waiting.
And Titans... I screamed on that playtestor forum to give more emphasis on titans. I would have rather had seen a re-tooled plastic Warlord titan than a re-tooled Space Marine sprue. Plastic gargant versus re-tooled ork sprue and things like Ork Landas and metal characters. To me at least, what made Epic so epic was the mix of these massive warmachines supplemented with infantry and tanks. Now most games might see a single titan, if any at all, and to me, it just wasnt Epic anymore, just another miniature wargame. And what does Jervis do? Develops the Epic air combat game no one needed. :/ I dont know if Titans could have save Epic A, but I know the air combat game didnt help. Just a lost in focus to me.
So with that, I realized than Epic A was mostly going to be a hobby for myself, and not one I could just walk into a brick and mortar store and find a bunch of people playing like I see with 40k or Warhammer. Browse through Epic miniatures when I had money burning a hole in my pocket. I would have to privide all the minis to a curious player in hopes he would get into it enought to buy his own. I already had that with AT/SM1, SM2/TL, and Epic 40k. It didnt really have to do with the rules, cause I will be honest, there are things I like and dont like about all three of the previous ones. Heck, the least favorite of mine is the one that was hands down the most successful: SM2/TL. So no matter how great the rules are, there needs to be more to it, from its presentation, artwork, fluff, atmosphere, etc. And while Epic A sucked in the hardcore Epic fans, it didnt even really raise much of the attention of regular 40k players, and to me, it really had to. That is what it did before.
Really sucks how things turned out. I really hope one day, maybe one of the year mystery games will be Epic in some form. I mean they redid Space Hulk, Man O' War inspired Dreadfleet, and I hear Inquisitor has inspired this year's game. GW only has so many it can go thru before they eventually hit the idea of Epic again, even if in 10 years from now, and when they do, I put my money on it being more like Adeptus Titanicus than Epic A. It wont have the support or range it did in previous years, but I bet it would get more attention than Epic A did.
New box set with 6-8 titans? Yeah sign me up.
).
"We don't need no stink'n GW !!!" 
"Death to the oppressors!" 
