Chung and I played this one on Sunday's London Gaming Day just gone and it did turn out to be a good one but with several issues raised via playtesting.  Alas (and this counts for my other Total War reports also) due to real life things that need doing at the moment i don't have time to post a battle report but will do my best to provide an overview.

First off then, some questions I have that remain unanswered after after reading through this post. (We now know that you get the full amount of concealment markers allowed by your ARMY not CONTINGENTS) However i would say that all of this does need to be explained more fully and clearly come the final version; currently the writing style can be a little muddied or long winded at times which hampers understanding of how the game works.  Not a dig as i suspect this will improve with time :-)

Questions:
1: Are contingents that the players choose kept secret from each other? As the defender do i know which two contingents i'll be facing and as the attacker do i get to see the two contingents before choosing one? This needs to be made clear or be left to players choice but noted also.  We played with both secreat as we felt it added to the suprise element of the game :-)

2: Road marches...so, must the defenders formations make a FULL three moves +5cm per move Thus forcing (for example) a land raider formation to move 75cm straight ahead when it arrives? If so this can cause intermingling automatically and makes for a very predicatable area where the enemy will be.  Or have i misunderstood and a formation is allowed to take a singe, double OR March action with the madnatory +5cm but must stay on the road.  I presume that they must use their full move regardless else it is possible for them to declare that they will move 6cm and nothing more for example!

3: Once all of the automatic road marches have taken place are initiative checks required to move on? Is it possible for, say, an ork formation that wishes to single and then fail it's initiative check to not appear that turn or must it move on? (if that makes sense?)

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It occurs to me that WE and other stuff that cannot be concealed should be able to start off-table. To do this, either thier counter (and perhaps some dummies) must start on the edge of the table in their deployment zone, or alternatively they activate to arrive somewhere on the table edge / march in, for use in the following turn.

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Sir Hemry Newbolt

Since EPIC tends to be an "open information" game, for most scenarios both players know what is in their opponent's contingents.  In the Ambush scenario it specifies that the Attacker "secretly" selects two of their own contingents to be the ambushers, so the Defender know what's in the enemy contingents, but doesn't know which two of the three will be showing up.

The Attacker also know which contingent they'll be ambushing, and what's in it.  This is to encourage the creation of "balanced" contingents by the Defender.

Of course, you can play with "fully secret" contingents as EPIC: Total War encourages such alterations and it can definitely add to the fun.

2: Road marches...so, must the defenders formations make a FULL three moves +5cm per move Thus forcing (for example) a land raider formation to move 75cm straight ahead when it arrives? If so this can cause intermingling automatically and makes for a very predicatable area where the enemy will be.  Or have i misunderstood and a formation is allowed to take a singe, double OR March action with the madnatory +5cm but must stay on the road.  I presume that they must use their full move regardless else it is possible for them to declare that they will move 6cm and nothing more for example!

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With war engines, the Attacker has two options:

1) Put them in the contingent that they're *not* using and leave them behind

OR

2) Deploy them in a position where they can't been seen from the road: "Any unconcealed formations must be placed out of line of sight of the road."

What do you feel allowing them to start "off-table" would improve, Ginger?

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Our understanding was the the presence of the WE would be a "revealed" formation irrespective of whether it was deployed out of LoS of the road, so allowing the defender to move off-road automatically. The other thought is that on a 6' x 4' table, the road is only 2' (~60cm) from either edge, so is pretty close to such "off-table" forces anyway.

In practice this means the attacker can either deploy "concealed" on-table or "Off-table" forces including these formations with the usual spacecraft and aircraft reserves, and perhaps restricting them to be delayed a turn?

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Sir Hemry Newbolt

Some notes from the Bristol Winter War games:

The scenario seems to be in the attacker's favour. 5 out of the 7 winners were attackers.

Other than the forced Road March there is no incentive for the defender to actually move along the road. Likewise, there is no incentive for the attacker to spread out his concealment markers. These two combined led to a sitation where all the games took place entirely in the first third of the table. Several possible suggestions were made to counter this, such as giving a victory points incentive for the defender to reach an "end zone" or objective at the far end of the road, (thus sort of turning the scenario into Epic Blood Bowl), or forcing the attacker to spread out the concealment markers along the road. This seemed to be the main concern about the scenario; it was effectively played on a 2' x 4' board for all the games.

There was much confusion about the language of the scenario, and suggestions that it was perhaps overwritten and could do with being clarified and rewritten in tighter language in order to cut down the text.

It seemed very odd that the defender could move forces on top of concealment markers without revealing them. I really don't think a leman russ company can hide that well against an enemy that is literally standing on top of them. ZOC for concealment markers would help.

Having War Engines unable to conceal meant that the forced Road March part of the game didn't come up at all for most of the games; the defenders were able to move freely from the start.

Victory Points wise, the attacker having less formations on the board is actually in his favour. It's pretty easy for the attacker to kill one or two hugely pointed formations in the targeted group, after which the defender simply can't claim enough points from killing the attackers to win the game. The attackers could be completely wiped out and still win big.

Overall this scenario suffered from the "Complicated vs Complex" problem; the rules were certainly complicated, with loads of exceptions of clauses, new tables of modifiers to learn etc etc, but the results were not Complex, they were tactically fairly simple.

Often the simple, clear rules with few exceptions such as the Epic ruleset lead to Complex and interesting emergent results, whereas complicated rules like 40k lead to simplistic results.

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On deployment, I would agree with others that the defender ought to get some incentive for moving forwards. Perhaps gaining the value of formations that survived the gauntlet and got within 30cm of the other table edge? To counter the obvious, perhaps the Attacker should be allowed to deploy in a "U" shape, so can also deploy within 30cm of the far edge of the table, and scouts within 60cm??

Scoring seems to be a vexed question and strikes at the heart of the 'balance' of this scenario. The value of the on-table forces can be wildly disproportionate caused by the make-up of the army lists and the way the contingents are chosen, even allowing formations over 500 points to count as two formations. The problem is that the the game skews rapidly towards the attacker as value of the defending army increases and the value of the attackers army decreases. Effectively this means that the Attacker may only have to concentrate on destroying a limited number of 'high' value enemy formations to win even at the cost of his entire army.

Would it be better just to count the number of formations destroyed rather than their value? This would effectively make the game odds more like what I believe you intend. Note I also think that this can also be significantly affected by the initial deployment and the number of concealed markers allowed.

Take my Eldar army fighting itself as an example :-

425 Guardians + WL + WG(2)
400 Aspects + AU + EX
350 Guardians + WS(4)
300 Night Wings
250 Storm Serpent
250 Storm Serpent
250 Void Spinner
250 Falcons inc FS(2)
200 Jet Bikes inc Vyper(1)
125 Rangers(5)
100 Rangers(4)
100 Rangers(4)

Total 12 activations

The Attacker has to drop 1/3 of the formations, so taking the two extreme positions, I can drop the four most expensive or least expensive formations making the remaining armies 1525 and 2475 respectively.

Fighting against the same army, split into asymetric halves (1975 and 1025), the Defender army values could be 4462 or 3027, because is doubled and those in the 2nd contingent are halved.

So in the extreme cases the two on-table forces could be as 'even' as 3027(D) vs 2475(A) or as much as 4462(D) Vs 1525(A).

Using the alternative suggestion, the Defender will always count as 15, while the attacker will have 8 irrespective of the actual strength of the relative formations - though the attacker still has to concentrate on killing the initial contingent which the Defender is trying to preserve.

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Sir Hemry Newbolt

Is there a link for this scenario? I can't find one.

thanks!