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Hi all! I've been lurking here for a while and thought I'd finally post! Hope this doesn't become a typical newbie whinge; having read the new rules and army lists I can tell you don't lie when you say a huge amount of work and playtesting has gone into them. Congrats, and thanks so much for keeping my favourite game alive!
Me and a few mates recently ressurected our Epic playing a couple of years ago, and since we've not played all that many games yet we've yet to try full-blown NetEpic. We're open to experimentation though, particularly (small) new units which have less potential to unbalance the game, and since we've been doing the alternate movement thing from "back in the day" I personally can't see anything in NetEpic that would seriously change the game for us and we'll surely be giving it a shot eventually. The allies alteration might be tough for some of us though (all of us have collected one army each, and as far as we could tell you used to be able to freely mix your points between Imperial armies leaving some of us with pretty unbalanced choices in the new system with what we've collected. Doh!)
Personally, I collect Imperials and my Space Marine chapter of choice is the Blood Angels. I generally have major bad luck with the old Death Company rules, rolling 5+ only for Termies and Land Speeders in several games, so I'm glad that this has been changed to both exclude speeders/bikes and give more consistant number in the DC. I also think it's fair to pay points for the privilege of using it. I'm a bit anxious about every single detachment losing a stand though! Coupled with the Black Rage "auto-charge" rule this will shred my infantry to pieces without some serious getting used to. Perhaps I could ask our little group if I can round up to a third or a half of my detatchments and randomise which lose stands if I get slaughtered the first few games, but I'd feel like a cheat doing it. Losing a stand from every single Terminator detachment of four before the game seems a little extreme though, especially if I'm already paying points for the DC. Anybody had any success with the new rules? Do they add enough flavour that I should bite the bullet and use them?
Another question; sorry about this! If I take TL allies with my Blood Angels, and use a Corvus, would the payload in the Corvus count as BA and therefore lose a stand as well? If the Warlord was a special card for the BAs instead of allied, would they lose a stand then?
I'm sat here with three Predators in need of a nosejob and a handful of the old Sentinels ready to die for the Emperor by my craft knife. Looking at the stats for Baals though, they seem pretty underpowered. In my experience light tanks tend to either avoid CC or get swamped, making the CAF largely irrelevent, and in every other respect the tanks are worse than the normal Preddies. I'll convert this detachment anyways out of the spirit of variety (they've got to look cool with those assault cannon!) but would a 4+ to hit instead of a 5+ (same as the Sentinel the guns are from in fact) be more of a trade-off and less of a downgrade for the Baal? Using a point calculator (which admittedly isn't the same as playtesting, I know) a 5+ gives a unit value of 150, whilst a 4+ still puts them below the cost of the original Predator they're being charged at and well below the White Scars' version at the same cost. Looking at it the Vulkan looks a little underpowered or overpriced too. Have these units been tested and if so should I stop complaining? As I said I'll be making some anyways and it'll be cool to use them!
Has anybody experimented with tweaking the objective rewards and VP conditions for larger games? Theoretically the larger the game the more insignificant the objectives become. Nobody will commit 15 VPs worth of troops claiming an objective worth 5 if they could yield better VPs elsewhere, and in a large game this frequently seems to happen. We experimented with using 10VP objectives in a fairly large game (8k points IIRC) and it seemed to bring them back into the game a little. The original tables seem to assume breaking half the oponent and claiming five objectives as a reasonable victory condition, with each 100 points of opponent assumed to be 1VP. They also seem scaled so the objectives are around equal importance to breaking units. I've proposed a little system for our group.
x = points / 200
each objective = (x / 5) rounded up to nearest 5
total VP needed = (5*objective) + x
This gives the same results for up to 5000 points inclusive. 6000 points now has a VP requirement of 80 and an objective score of 10, and 10k points has a VP requirement of 100 with an objective score of 10.
Has anyone tried a similar system or can see any obvious reasons why it might end in disaster? If not we might give it a spin in a larger game if we ever get time, and I'll let you know how it went! : )
Another thing (sorry for the huge post!) is those cool new GW biker marine character minis. We spotted the Ravenwing rules for special cards and we're thinking about trying them as an option for any SM character, as an excuse to use them. Does anyone think this could be unbalancing? I doubt an extra 5cm is gonna matter an awful lot when losing the infantry movement advantages and the rhino save. I'm usually wrong about stuff like this though! : )
Sorry for all the questions, especially those that could be solved by a little playtesting. We all have busy lives and, lamentably, little opportunity to play as I'm sure you all do too, and I was wondering with the wealth of experience here if anyone could give me a quick answer to anything. If not, I'll give them a shot and let you know what happens ; )
Thanks for reading!
(Happy birthday plm! Should have guessed you were here dude. Sorry I didn't get back to you about those titan weapons - by the time I got round to checking that board again it had disappeared. If you're still interested (I'm not sure which ones I still have and if they're any use to you, I gave a few away to friends) pm me a mailing address and consider them a birthday pressie. Sorry again!)
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