Not a lot to report this week so I thought I would give a nod to Apocalypse, the rules expansion of ridiculously huge battles.
I'm not a big apocalypse guy - I played Epic for about 10 years straight and those are far bigger battles than you're likely to see in an Apoc game, even some of the multi-day craziness*. I think the biggest game I ever ran was a con game in Dallas back in the 90's where I believe we had six players per side, Imperials vs. Orks, and everybody had at least one titan, usually more, plus superheavies etc. It was a big fight - we ran it on a 6x12 board, half city, half country. The turning point I recall was that about turn 3 the more agressive Emperor titan player rolled boxcars for his plasma counters, moved right out to the center of the board and unleashed everything - he blew up a mega-gargant, a great gargant, and a mekboy gargant, plus he tore up a slasher. I think we gave him an award for wrecking one of each type of gargant in one firing phase - it's like hitting for the cycle in baseball!
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| Waiting and watching ... |
Anyway GW lost interest in the Epic games in the early 2000s and the closest thing to it that is actually supported is Apocalypse, which lets you use all of your 40K scale mini's. plus a bunch of stuff from Forgeworld and other places that can't really participate in a normal skirmish. It's the no-limits version of 40K where models come off the table by the handful and going second means that a bunch of stuff you packed up and brought to the battle will never get a chance to do anything.
The Apoc book originally came out for 4th edition, there was an update book for 5th edition, and now there is a brand new shiny version for 6th edition. No I don't own it and I may never own it. When I get the urge to go ridiculous I'd rather route that energy into dusting off the Epic stuff and giving that a go. I may change my mind but the Apprentices are still building their armies up for regular 40K so it's not like we have a crushing need to go even bigger.
Anyway, since I don't have any battles of my own to share here are some links to some guys who do. Crazy Canadians...
2010 - 80,000 points
2011 - 250,000 points
2012 - 500,000 points
2013 - ? It just happened last weekend, no big report yet. Here's the intro.
*Before someone starts telling me about their awesome armorcast titan force, for Epic I can drop four Emperor titans on the board just for starters, and on an Epic scale board you have enough room to see how truly devastating they can be. Plus at least a dozen painted Warlord titans, etc. etc. Remeber, in Epic the formation cards include things like 3 Phantom Titans. Apoc is cool, but Epic games are still an entirely different scale of fight, and they don't take a 3-day weekend to settle.
Those Apocalypticon battles--holy crap. I recently read a tongue-in-cheek comment that I think is nonetheless spot on: GW stopped supporting Epic when they realized there were enough 40K players out there who were stupid enough to drop sufficient monies to game the same size battles at 28mm. Cha-ching!
ReplyDeleteI too am an Epic fan from way back and have recently started collecting the classic models again. Such a great scale. Great story about the Emperor titan "hitting for the cycle".