Um, the 'homebrew' lists were just a joke though weren't they? One of the referees came over at the start of the first game and said to use the standard NetEpic tournament pack version of the unit stats, and as far as i'm aware everyone was for the tournament (certainly the Nid and Tau players along with myself). I was going on the assumption that any mention after that about things like Gorgons was just a bit of good natured 'hazing' from the hosts.
Anyway, my thoughts on the event itself:
It was a bit skewed for me due to not sleeping over the entire weekend, and as anyone else that occasionally suffers from insomnia will tell you, you start feeling a bit 'strange' once you get past the 30 hour or so mark without sleep, and it doesn't get any better from there on in. This does make it hard to enjoy things, as all you really want to do is to sleep!
First off, on the positive it was great to meet new players from around Europe, and to find that overall we have a lot in common
A big thanks to all the german guys who helped run the event as well, it ran pretty smoothly and as far as i'm aware there were no major issues overall.
On the format itself, i'm not sure about having 'individual' awards in a team competition, primarily because i think the focus should be on the team element, and secondly because for me individual placings are invalid when it's just 'random' draws rather than swiss. Due to some quirk of the matchmaking system for instance, Brumbaer and myself played exactly the same set of opponents barring the round where the UK players all played German players, and ended up 1st and 2nd.
On other mechanics, i've gone through my thoughts on the scoring system on another thread, so i'm not going to regurgitate all of that here, but additionally i think it would have been a good idea to have a more clearly defined and consistently enforced timeout rule (In the UK it's dice down and the result is counted as a straight draw for instance). Talking of time, and for me there was plenty of time for the games, and i'd have probably had shorter breaks between games (especially as there was no need for admin time for matchup purposes), but that's just personal preference - i was spending quite a while kicking around between games afterall, but then i tend to find that in most tournaments due to the fact i play pretty fast.
Other than that after using them for an event I can't say i'm a big fan of a lot of the NetEA lists. I do like some of the elements of the Minervan Tank Co over the Ulani one for instance, but lists like the Nid one, despite not having to play any over the weekend was getting a fair bit of grumbling from what i heard and i can understand why - any list that has units auto-marshalling with no-one in 30cm is a bit silly, as is not having a unit cap for the bringing back brood. The Necron rules for Living Metal aren't much better imo (although at least with necrons you can just break them all turn 3 and they count as being dead). Before anyone takes offense at this, i would stress this is my opinion based on just 1 tournament so is hardly gospel or anything, but for me they didn't feel like they had been tested robustly enough under tournament conditions.
Other than that though, the Venue and other bits were fine, although it was a shame there weren't more food options in the area - i fully understand though that getting a venue in itself can be struggle enough, and i appreciate the efforts that were made to ensure everyone had some options for lunch at the venue.
As to whether i'd do another Epic Team Championship event? not sure. As i said at the start a lot of the fun of the event was lost on me due to not being fully with it over the weekend thanks to not sleeping, and that just kept getting worse by the game. So apologies if i came across as boorish to anyone, especially during games themselves.
