All new rules for 40k Apocalypse announced : https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/03/28/breaking-news-dark-power-unleashed/

Epic at 28mm anyone?

that KoS is really well done. I kinda want that crazy globe thing from Sigmar for some type of AT terrain.

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Yeah - not too sure how I feel about the new Apocalypse.

For massed battles, I'm a bit biased towards Titanicus. I don't have the time, money, or space for 28mm at that scale.

I can't think of anything more horrible

fairly certain the point of it isn't to attract 28mm gamers vs allowing those heavily invested in 30k/40k to be able to use everything they already own at once

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For sure - its aimed at 40k players with large existing collections. What intrigues me is “all new ruleset”. Does this mean a heavy adaptation of 8th ed or completely new mechanics? My expectation is the former as surely it will have to piggy back off all the existing codexes?

Though if it was all new, and (the big IF) if it was a fair game, then i can see more people picking up 6mm models to play big games as an alternative to 28mm. People are already doing this to play regular 40k.

It is also the confirmation of why there will not be infantry etc in AT. Most apocalypse games were about the size of a EA army anyway!

I am also intrigued by what will be new about these rules! I always liked the idea of using Epic 40K (i.e. 3E Epic) mechanics for damage resolution (and possibly turns). Lots of the previous iterations slowly migrated across to standard 40K, so it will be interesting to see if they streamline things more or not.

Although I’ve been sorely tempted to use 6 mm miniatures for 40K (and only really stopped by the twin tyrannies of time and money poverty), I think it’s only a tiny portion of the people who’ll use the rules. 28 mm is just so much fun for modelling!

I do very much like the design choices they made with the Keeper. I think it’s one of the best depictions of Slaaneshi they’ve done. I did have a chuckle when I saw the first Keeper compared with the new one—how the artistic medium has changed!

wonder if it has similarities and to be a counter to the warpath mass combat rules?

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Some rules previews have been posted for the new Apocalypse and it seems like it is basically a new version of the epic rule set. It uses 28 mm scale models, but infantry are on multi-model bases that act as a single unit, it uses AT and AP shooting profiles, and blast markers are somehow involved.

I plan on picking up the rule set and seeing how hard it will be to use with epic scale stuff. There is a remote chance that they’ve come up with fixes to long-standing E:A rules annoyances. At the very least their will be rules for the latest fluff and stuff that’s come out since E:A was published.

Very interesting!

If this is a 32mm-scale Epic, then it should be fairly easy to adapt to 6 or 8mm.

I thought that elements of their rules preview looked familiar...

Sounds like overall it will play quite differently to EA from what ive read, but thats not to say it will be a bad game. Blast markers seem to be a mechanic for wound tracking which get saved and applied all in the end phase. Suspect it will double down on the big tanks and war engines and heroic characters wading through swathes of chaff.

And yes, I can’t see it will be hard to convert to 6mm.

Aha! As I’ve secretly hoped they’d do over the many years of Apocalypse existing (some of them concurrent with Epic). Though it sounds like no firepower chart, alack

It would be a little ironic (and perhaps facetious of me to suggest it) if Neo-Apocalypse fixes to the EA engine were adopted wide-scale by the EA community….

I just wish some others on here were as keen to tinker-to-improve the EA engine as I was (comparing Dropfleet Commander and BFC has got me thinking in that direction again)! Time to nostalgically go read the rules suggestion thread again… after I read the GW preview!

The more I read about the rules for this new version of Apocalypse, the more I wonder what effect it will have on the perceptions of the current crop of 40k gamers as well as on Epic players.

It's been 15 years (give or take) since Epic has had support from GW (E:A), and even longer since it was given an appreciable level of marketing (E:40k - briefly). Most current 40k gamers and game store owners have little or no knowledge of Epic. Usually, when I try to explain the 'old game' called Epic to a person familiar with 40k, they often assume I'm talking about Apocalypse, which is understandable given the similarity of the words Armageddon and Apocalypse, the scale of the combat involved in both, and also the fact that both are from the distant past in the minds of many current 40k gamers.

Convincing a 40k player to try a game of Epic Armageddon (or any other game that isn't 40k) is all but impossible for anything beyond a single quick game. And as 40k has 'progressed' further from where it was 15 years ago, it's harder to attract a 40k gamer's attention. The mismatch between the style and statlines of the models is a big hurdle to overcome, which is compounded by the vastly different rulesets.

But now, it sounds like Apocalypse will have about the same level of abstraction as the various versions of Epic had. Sure, it may have more granularity than E:A or even E:SM/TL, but the it's definitely in the same ballpark.

Here's what I know for sure:
Infantry models will be grouped together into units that have a combined statline where the number of attacks and wounds has no relationship to the number of models in the group.
Units will be grouped into detachments. Players will take turns activating their detachments.
Many 40k players will want to play Apocalypse, but most won't be able to do so because they do not own enough models. And players that have enough 'small stuff' will want to play with the 'big' stuff that they likewise do not own.

So what are all of these poor guys to do? Well, I will be sure to point out a simple and cheap solution - play with smaller models! Find some cheap models on ebay, or some expensive models from the gray market, or some free models from some graybeard's collection. Buy an AT titan or five. Take the distances for ranges and movement given in the Apocalyse rules and divide them by 4 or 5 (or divide by two and use cm instead of inches) and play with the Apocalypse rules as-is.

I think once a player gets a taste of the wonders of playing a game using epic scaled minis, then you can get them on the hook to try similar but 'better' rule sets

We'll see how it goes. It will be interesting if GW treats this as it's own game, like they have with the latest iteration of Kill Team, or if this will just be some one-shot 40k variant like Urban Conquest.

So, Apocalypse has been out for a little while now: has anyone here played it yet?

From the discussion on Dakka Dakka, it seems people find the rules superior to ordinary WH40K (perhaps little surprise to fans of Epic), though there seems to be a gap for games below about 1000 40K-points but above 200-300 pts (which is Kill Team 2018 territory). That encourages me to realize my conversion of Epic Armageddon rules to 40K idea—and perhaps the detachment system might be a useful one to steal for things like squads in KT?

Epic is still being mentioned there, too!