Hi all, my name's Patrick and I'm new to the forum. I'm massing loads of epic stuff including nids, IG, SM and Orks with the intention of playing some large games of EA, just like I used to with SM 2nd Ed. The rules seem so much better than SM 2nd Ed, with more detail, and what appears to be way more tactics/strategy. I say appears as I haven't actually got around to having a game just yet. But what I wanted to know was, how well does the game scale up to massive (say 10,000) point armies? The reason I ask is that everyone seems to play with a paltry 3000 points. I always thought the whole point of epic is EPIC battles. Anyway, any opinions are greatly appreciated.

Krieg

Well 3k is enough to field multiple companies of infantry, so they are epic in scale....

The lists are generally balanced up to around 5k, after that things tend to become less even with activation spam and loads of titans stomping around

We played a 14k per side big game at xmas with 4 per team which was fun but pretty one sided overall.....

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As long as you pick lists with a fun game in mind you'll be fine at whatever points, by the time you get to 10k a side people are generally taking their whole collections anyway. We used to play 6k a side regularily with no issues, above 5/6k you do need a bigger table though

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Thanks for the replies. I get the impression that titans are a bit OP in this version of epic. In SM 2nd Ed. you coulld bring down a titan fairly easily and tbh, they were bullet magnets. Steve54, when you say activation spam, what exactly do you mean? Surely you can only activate a maximum of two times (retaining the initiative) regardless of points. Am i missing something?

kyussinchains, I see what you're saying, but in reality, a company of say IG, is only 12 models. They might have 5 little guys per stand, but the only have one stat to represent them, so in essence, they are no different from a single IG in 40k. I like the idea of having crazy numbers of units and the battle lasting a couple of days. The battles that had to be left in place until whilst you played over a week or two were always good fun in SM 2nd Ed.

Krieg

I meant activation spam as in you can take loads of cheap units and hugely out activate your opponents, leaving your big stuff to run amok....

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Good to have you with us, I too loved SM 2nd ed back in the day, but I think the current edition is much better game.


One advantage of out activating your opponent is you can have formations left to activate after your opponent has run out of activations, meaning they have no way this turn to counter them (bar overwatch). It's built into the rules and tactics and balances out powerfull, low activation, armies such as Titan Legions.

Patrick, welcome to our little corner of the Int@rw3bs where grown men and women still play with little toy soldiers!

Here's another thread currently going specifically around designing rules to support larger games in a reasonable manner. You might be interested in subbing it!
http://www.tacticalwargames.net/taccmd/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=21046

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Thanks Glyn, I understand it better now. Saving all the best units until after your oponent has activated all his/hers.



I'm 32 and still can't kick the habit of playing with toy soldiers. My missus can't get her head around it. I don't care though!

I'll take a look at that thread when I get back from my hols in a week, thanks for the heads up!

I tend to find that out-activating your opponent in very big games is less useful than in smaller ones as the damage you can cause without your opponent being able to reply tend to be proportionally smaller than in smaller games.

Friends and I have played 28k sized games before:

http://warforge.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=829

and an 18k game:

http://warforge.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=654&st=38

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I think titana and war engines ("super heavies" in 2nd edition) hold up much better in this version of the game. In 2nd edition a single failed armor save woul kill a SHT, now they all take multiple hits. In 2nd edition you could scatter off of the titan hit template, but every hit you got past armor did something to debilitate the titan. Now titans take a lot of hits, but their combat effectiveness isn't really reduced until they are killed. (Anythng can be suppressed with enough blast markers though.)

-Allen

As Steve54 has said we used to play 6K games regularly, I've played quite a few 10 and 12K all day games too.
I always found that when playing big games the result didn't matter. It was more about having a lot of fun playing a great game with even greater friends.
I wouldn't worry too much either about wether the lists or games are fully balanced over a certain points value.
Mainly because I doubt anyone would want to go to so much effort and spend so much time on a game if they didn't already know they were playing against a nice opponent who was as like minded as they are.

Just remember to take photos of the action and post it on here, we like to see others models and games especially from big games.

Apologies for the late reply, I've been on holiday in Italy. Well, it's good to know that it play ok at larger scales. I had read somewhere that large games seemed to end in draws, so just wanted to know if there was any point in painting up the masses of IG stuff that I have. If it didn;t, i would have picked the minis to be painted carefully in order to give an adaptive 3k army. But now that i know it's not a problem, I can just paint up the lot. I reckon i must have way over 10k of IG, plus loads of titans to paint as well.

novemberrain, those links you provided seem to be broken, so i couldn't see those large games.