Not to stir up any old debates or anything, but why is there both a NetEA and a Epic UK ruleset/listset?? Wouldn't it be better to have 1 ruleset that was played all over the world with similar lists?

Whats the Pros of having different lists?

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"You have a right to be offended" - Steve Hughes
"Your feelings are hurting my thoughts" - Aron Flam

Epic UK builds off NetEA.

NetEA is much slower, and will consider many more changes/ development ideas. EpicUK lists build off the work done by NetEA, incorporate the minimum work needed to get the list balanced and tourney ready - it's about getting lists good enough for play, as opposed to perfect and flavourful.

Since the NetEA's mandate is worldwide, they also have to take into account a wider (if you like) metagame of playing groups around the world.

There's no real enmity or anything - most guys involved in epicUK also hang out here and contribute to the NetEA process, they just wish it was quicker

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To add to the above, the rules used are the same there are just small differences in army lists.

Okay, thanks for the replies guys!

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"You have a right to be offended" - Steve Hughes
"Your feelings are hurting my thoughts" - Aron Flam

It's a shame there's the fragmentation, but Net-EA was developing lists online for years before Epic-UK started their own closed development.

There's pluses and minuses to both approaches and lists from either can be used against each other, they're mostly similar and small differences don't have much effect in epic (tactics and manuvering are more signifigant). I mostly use Net-EA lists for my armies, but in some cases prefer to go for the Epic-UK versions instead e.g. the Ulani IG tank list.

I always took the difference between NetEA and EpickUK to be more like the Star Trek discussion on the 'old' national flags.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Ah, I understand the allusion. Colors representing countries at a time when they competed with each other. Red, white and blue for the United States, whereas the French... more properly used the same colors in the order blue, white and red.

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It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

Don't forget F-ERC http://epic-fr.niceboard.com/f25-f-erc they have their own flavour of EpicA too

Just like all good open source solutions there are plenty of flavours.

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There are multiple 'versions' available out there. The difference between NetEA and EpicUK is really their focus. There are times when balance and flavour work at odds with each other.

EpicUK have a faster development process, closed, and designed to put out tournament focussed rules and lists where balance is a priority.

NetEA is a (much) slower development, far more inclusive to give members more ownership over the game and development, and the focuss is on flavour, theme and interesting, narrative games.

For example, NetEA is likely to have more varieties of types of tank, because the minis look cool and people want the differences in their armies. EpicUK are more likely to bracket several tanks or ommit some versions as balancing out points values at this level becomes difficult and the differences are often cosmetic.

Thats not to say that there are no cross-overs. Obviously, EpicUK want a fun game too, and while they deal largely with UK-centric tournaments, there are a lot more tournaments outside the UK that utilise the NetEA rules set, so balance is obviously critical there too.

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https://www.net-armageddon.org - The official NetEA (Epic Armageddon) site and resource.

Yes, it would be much better to have one unified set of rules that everyone plays to. It would make things much better for new players, or experienced players (like me) who found it extremely confusing to work out which set of rules to play to.

I personally don't like all the separation that goes on in terms of the rules, as I find it to be very divisive, but that's the system that exists, and I see no way of unifying all the disparate camps.

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preface: This is all personal opinion, it is not meant as an attack on any group, individual or development system

it would certainly be nice to have a unified set of lists to play to, we all use the same rules, perhaps occasionally with different interpretations....

However the way I see it is that the NetEA process as it stands is too slow, and overly democratic to be really productive, people are developing this stuff on their own time and have their own stuff going on in real life, when development is open like this, too often discussion stagnates into arguments from opinion, and it'd frequently over stuff like what stuff to playtest for changes, and the ACs (in my opinion) don't seem to put their feet down as much as they should, because when they do, people are inevitably upset and mooch off to play with other lists or develop their own variant list, which doesn't drive development forwards....

I was very reserved about the EUK process until I started playing regularly, I happened to be playing with a good portion of the EUK development team, and was amazed that new lists came out on a pretty regular basis, and that my comments (as a complete n00b) and results from playtesting were listened to

The EUK lists aren't perfect (for example I think tyranids have one really effective build, and many of their iconic units are sub-optimal as a result) but due to everyone agreeing that someone on high has authority on what is tested and goes in or out, really makes it a productive way of working, there are now 27 lists which are being tweaked on a rolling basis, and a pretty strong tournament scene here in the UK

Personally I don't think it's very confusing to anyone with a bit of sense, and the fact that there are links to both EUK and Epic-FR (as well as epic-DE and possibly others) on the Net-Armageddon site shows that everything can co-exist happily

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Just some guy

My hobby/painting threads

Army Forge List Co-ordinator

All that the NetEA seems to have achieved as regards list development in the last two or so years is the downgrading of one of the lists (Titan Legions) from "Approved" back to "In Development". You can't blame that on democracy, because we used to get lists finished all the time ~5 years ago.

Sad to say but it's been years since half or more of the appointed NetEA list developers did any actual list developing. In addition some of the few who are active are not seemingly-capable of actually getting lists to finished states (no track record of doing so).

The NetEA "process" produced a lot of great lists in the past, a bunch of which I prefer to the EUK lists (the converse is also the case in some instances), but relatively little gets done these days.

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

I think that 'generation' of list builders have all finished university now, and without INCOMING drawing new people in (like me) there's no new young and enthusiastic fools to take up the mantle.

On the other hand, the forum is now very good at producing new miniature lines...

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That may be true, I'm only speaking from experience over the last 2 years....

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Just some guy

My hobby/painting threads

Army Forge List Co-ordinator

As one of the new blood of champs, the main difficulty for me is to get feedback from other players. I play less epic than I like, but I could probably get in a bunch of Necron games over the summer if thought it would help. However, there's exactly one other poster that plays Necrons and gives feedback (Tiny Tim). And one of the criteria in NetEA for Approved status is that a list is played in at least 3 independent gaming groups.

For myself I'd be happy to use the new LM rules and call it a day before focusing on the Tomb World list, but without more external feedback I'm loathe to spend the time it takes with little chance of changes and new lists getting the Approved stamp.

Is one of the problems for this players saying "these guys have an approved list, I would rather use that than try and reinvent what has already been done"?.

I can understand people being keen to test an army that has no approved list but once there is one I would imagine people would 'just want to play' rather than grinding for months (years?) trying to put together a variant list.

Just my thoughts.

Actually I posted a couple of years ago about having list development priorities with a nominated list that everyone worked on to the exclusion of all others to get people actually working for the betterment of the community to get lists completed quickly instead of people working on their own projects. Unfortunately its hard to get people to do what they might not want to do (test a nominated list) rather than what they want to do (their own list) even if that would mean that their list got pushed up the development list (and get more assistance from other players once their list became the 'nominated' test list).