Epic in 2022: Horus Heresy &c.

[The Other Dave]

(Hopefully people are following the forum via "active topics" since I'm posting this in a subforum I haven't posted in in... gosh, 6 years?)

So, Epic! Remember Epic? I used to have semi-yearly Epic events, and just this past month or so I've been posting my painted models again? Well, that army is almost done, and I've discovered that a) thanks to the wonders of 3d printing it's easier than it's been in a very long time to get into the game*, b) Kondo-san at the club has expressed interest, and c) I may actually be doing a demo game in October, so I figured it might be time for a bit of an effort post for all y'all who might not know what's the deal with Epic.

The goal of the thread is mostly just to share, but if I can drum up interest in a demo game, that would be pretty cool too!

Part the First: Epic vs. Adeptus Titanicus
Because a couple people have asked recently. Short answer: Same scale, different focus.

Adeptus Titanicus 2018 (which is also a really cool game that you should play) is fundamentally a skirmish game, just it's skirmishes between titanic war engines. You have 4-6 models per side, and very granular rules for equipping, controlling, and moving your titans around the field. You manage turning and movement, void shield levels, reactor levels, damage and repair for all your titans individually. Also it's extremely "high powered" - the weakest unit in the game is a knight, and the game rules aren't really equipped to handle anything smaller than that very well - even the knights are edge-case-y IMO. Focus: Extremely detailed handling of battles between the biggest war engines on the field during the Horus Heresy. (Trivia note: The Horus Heresy was invented for AT1988, so they could have red-on-blue titan battles and not have to make any xenos models!)

Epic, on the other hand, is a game at the same scale that grew, way back when in the late 80's, out of wanting to field those units that Titanicus doesn't model very well** - infantry, tanks, that sort of thing. It was a pretty big deal for a while, and had a number of editions between 1989 and 2003, each with frankly pretty different rulesets. But the basic idea is that each player will have a roughly Company-sized force of infantry and tanks, maybe backed up by superheavies or larger war engines. When titans are fielded, they forego the super-granular rules you see in AT and are treated just as a war engine with a particularly large number of damage points and weapons systems. Focus: A generally rather more abstracted handling of battles between the sorts of forces you see in 40K, just lots more of them.

*Provided, I admit, that you want to collect Space Marines (although Guard / Solar Auxilia come in a close second since their tanks are well-represented, and infantry isn’t too hard to find), hence Epic 30K and the Heresy.
**And, another trivia point, wanting to compete with in-the-same-scale Battletech.

[The Other Dave]

Part the Second: Why Microarmor is Boss
I'm saying "microarmor" here instead of "6mm" because really everything between 6mm ("traditional" Epic scale), 8mm (Adeptus Titanicus / what most folks doing Epic 30K are printing their armies in), and 10mm (Dropzone Commander and Warmaster) is basically on the same page, scale-wise. But it's all good stuff.

The great thing about playing at microarmor scale is that you can have big, sweeping battles with lots of units on the table, that still has enough empty space on the table to allow for maneuver and tactics. Plus for 40K in particular it allows you to field not only lots of tanks but the superheavies and war engines that feature in the fiction so prominently but that are problematic to bring along to standard-sized games. A 10-tank Leman Russ tank company? Easy! A 3-tank Baneblade company? Likewise easy! Take both in a 3000-point list, why not! We’ve all seen pictures of 40K apocalypse games that look like this:

(pic from goonhammer)
Where all you can really see anyone doing is moving their units directly forward and rolling dice until someone is dead first. But in microarmor scale you get games more like this:

This was a 6mm Black Powder game me and Mike the Pike played a few years back, with lots of units on the table, but still (as you can see) plenty of space and table depth for things like actual factual reserves and redeployment and such. The 3000-point Death Guard army I’m building towards has:
20 terminators mounted in 2 spartans
40 tactical marines in rhinos
40 breachers in 4 land raiders (or maybe 20 teleporting Grave Warden terminators, I can’t decide)
5 sicaran tanks
5 javelin speeders
4 vindicators
2 fire raptor gunships
1 fellblade superheavy tank
And it will still have a nice reasonable footprint on the table.
(My Knights have a dozen Questoris knights of various configurations, 7 Cerastus Lancers, and 2 Porphyrions.)

Hobby-wise, it’s easy to paint! A wash and a drybrush and a bit of detail work will get you very far indeed, and even if you put a lot of time in, things go quickly and pretty easily. Like, these knights here:

Took me on the order of a couple days to paint, and that includes all the always-nervewracking edge detailing and all the likewise-always-nervewracking decal work. These tactical marines:

Took an evening and the better part of the next morning, and again most of the hard work was getting the texture paint on the bases.

Another reason I like the scale, which is highly relevant to “hobby space is limited to half of a 6-mat room in our little city apartment” me, is that it’s easy to collect and store. I have (looks in the cabinet nervously) eight Epic armies of varying degrees of largeness, and together they take up just a bit more space than my single not-so-large 40K army.

[The Other Dave]

Part the Third: Why Epic: Armageddon in Particular is The Bee's Knees
Meaning the last and latest official GW ruleset, 2003’s Epic: Armageddon. It’s not perfect, but it’s a really good rules system, one of GW’s best IMO. Why?

Simplicity: Units have pretty simple statlines, and special abilities are mediated by a relative handful of keyworded universal special rules. Army special rules are also minimal*, but all of this put together really allows for a great deal of distinction between different units and different armies. In all, there’s a couple dozen special rules for units, a dozen or so for weapons, and each army gets at most one or two simple army-wide rules. Like, Marines have essentially one special rule (with detailed ramifications): blast markers have half effect on them. That’s it, but the effect on the way they play is large, in part because of how important command and control is.

Which brings me to my second point: I love Armageddon’s command and control rules. Give me a game that models battlefield friction, the chance that your guys on the ground may decide to keep their heads down under fire rather than do exactly what you want, or just may misunderstand your orders or fail to receive them, and I’m a happy camper. These sorts of things are extremely relevant even in modern warfare, and 40K is decidedly not modern in many respects. Suppression, pinning, disruption, all of this stuff is in the game and very important – softening up infantry with artillery fire before assaulting them with bolters and bayonets is a very good idea, and you can easily throw some fire a formation’s way to lower their shooting effectiveness or just make it more likely they’ll keep their heads down. And again, small differences between armies have large knock-on effects in game terms. Marines will always do what you want until they start coming under fire, and then they are merely quite likely to, and they’re also very hard to suppress or break. Knights are sort of averagely-disciplined, unless you’re asking them to charge the enemy, in which case they’re all for it (and you can, if you want, recruit inexperienced knights with a lower command value at a discount). The automatons of the Mechanicum do not care if their fellow robots are destroyed, but have trouble following complex orders unless there’s a tech priest nearby.

*This does depend on who’s making the army list. Since it’s all fan-made at this point, it can be a bit hit or miss, but strongly-curated lists like those made by EpicUK (for 40K) or EpicAU (for Heresy) are generally doing a good job of honoring the original Armageddon designer’s goals of KISS. More designed-by-fan-committee lists like you see on the Tactical Command forums are a lot more variable, and can end up with a lot of fiddly rules cruft for (IMO) little gain.

[The Other Dave]

Part the Fourth: Epic 30K, or: Horus Heresy in 8mm
So lots of folks recently, including now me, have been carried along by the current Heresy excitement in 40K-land and started working on Horus Heresy armies to go along with our fancy Horus Heresy titans for Titanicus. Generally people are collecting at 8mm (1/4 of 40K scale), which makes infantry slightly bigger than old Epic minis (although there was a lot of scale creep in infantry over the game’s lifetime), and vehicles (which were always underscaled compared to the infantry in Epic, often by quite a lot) significantly bigger:

(Old marines and land raider on the left, new terminators and spartan on the right.)

(Er…)
But dang if it doesn’t look good, and allow you to field infantry and war engines that are in scale with each other. Plus as Jye has noted, most people who are deeply into Titanicus or Epic, when learning they have some reason to collect a new army, tend to react less with “oh no, I have to collect another army,” and more “oh boy, I get to collect another army”.

EpicAU, who has been developing the Heresy Epic lists, are currently having website troubles, BUT there’s an online army builder here to get the idea of what’s what, and I can hook you up with full pdfs of their Heresy rules as well. (Or if you’re still on the Facebooks there’s an “epic 30k” group you can join with all the files up too.) You can find the base Epic Armageddon rules here at EpicUK, as well as all the (IMO very good) EpicUK fan lists for the 40K era.

If you’re looking for stls, a good place to start is on Cults3d, where you can search for “galactic crusaders” for Marines, or a creator called “Woddish” for verra nice models of most tanks. Sadly (but it’s Heresy, so eh) finding anything but Marines and, to a much lesser extent, Guard / Solar Auxilia / Imperial Militia can be tricky, especially as most 3D modelers obfuscate unit names to avoid GW C&D attention – I’d love to collect a Mechanicum force, for example, but can’t find models for all their fancy robits. Most of this stuff is more or less at 8mm scale, but again as it’s all fan stuff you may have to poke around and fiddle a bit to find the scale you want. In fact, with 3D printing fully able to print out models at this scale at rather high fidelity, now is a great time to get into Epic just generally (with the caveat: if you have a printer or know someone who does, and you can find the stls you want).

So that’s my couple posts about how awesome Epic is. I realize it’s a bit of a forlorn hope to think anyone will want to get into it with me, but if you want a demo, hit me up! I honestly don’t mind too much if nobody else wants to get into the game, and I’m very used to providing both sides in Epic games. I have a full 3000-point Knights army, will have comfortably more than 3000 points of Death Guard by mid-September or so, and for comedy could even field a Legio Titanicus force, although for lots of game-objective-related reasons, they’re actually kind of a hard-mode army in Epic. (Also of course I have blood angels, tyranids, guard, necrons, eldar, and orks at old Epic scale, too, although as I say the vehicles in particular will look a bit odd next to each other.)

[Primarch]

Well, I'm certainly intrigued by the idea. I used to love Space Marine 1st and 2nd Editions, (i.e. Epic before it used that name in the title) and HH is very much my jam.

My two biggest question marks are over models and army lists.

Models?
I know you can use AT models and I guess AI models too for Titans, Knights and Flyers. You mention using stl's for the rest, but there are a million of them out there. Any chance you could post urls for the ones you used? Knowing which ones work and linking them prevents any potential cock-ups by inexperienced noobs. (Plus I am lazy) It would also be nice if you could get Jus to pop in and post up some rough prices. I'm going to assume that 3d printed epic minis are a little bit cheaper than their official GW/FW 28mm counterparts.

Army Lists?
Can you offer some guidelines about what an army must include? The online builder looks great, but I'm not sure what the minimums/maximums are for each section. What should we be looking to include? I.e. Are basic tactical marines necessary for holding objectives? Are all terminator armies viable? etc.

[The Other Dave]

Models:
The first place to start for infantry (and things like bikes and skimmers) is searching for "galactic crusaders" on your stl site of choice:
https://cults3d.com/en/search?q=galactic+crusaders
Some folks are modeling in 15mm, but the vast bulk is 6mm, which is fine even without upscaling - I didn't. (As for basing, the only rule in Armageddon is "the longest dimension of the base must be between 20mm and 40mm," so go hog wild. I'm doing 20mm x 40mm rectangles, but 30mm rounds work great too.)
For vehicles, there's a sculptor on Cults3d called Woddish:
https://cults3d.com/en/users/woddish/creations
Who's got pretty much everything covered, and if you do a search for "woddish" you'll get all the people remixing their designs for more specialized units too. I'll let jus speak to prices, but yeah, it's all been a lot less than I'm sure GW would charge for the same stuff, which is a low bar to clear I know. I think my whole 4000-point force (and that's a big force) will be less than 30,000 yen.

List building:
The only hard and fast rules (which the Munitorum list builder will enforce for you) are:
-Up to three Support detachments per Line detachment.
-Up to four unique Upgrades for each detachment (but see my first guideline below).
*Remember that Characters are added to a unit in the formation, so don't add a base - a 4-unit terminator detachment with a chaplain upgrade will be 3 regular units, plus one unit with a chaplain on.
-No more than 25% of your list on Lords of War and Allies combined.

As for guidelines:
-In general, it's better to have more detachments than to give a few detachments a lot of upgrades. 7 or 8 detachments in 3000 points is a pretty good place to aim for.
-All terminators is certainly viable - terminators are really good - but will quickly push you up into the elite range, with fewer activations than you might like, especially if you put them in transports (but OTOH you can balance that out with cheaper support formations).
-Practically, you'll also want to try to have a detachment or two that can garrison (meaning having no war engines and nothing with a speed greater than 15cm), so infantry leaving their transports at home or rapiers or something will be nice to have. Dreadnoughts too, but I haven't been able to find any Deredeo or Leviathan stls.
-Either a little bit of air support or some AA-capable ground units will also be helpful in the long run.
Like non-Heresy Epic, 3000 points is the "standard" game size, but it scales down as far as 2000 pretty well.

[The Other Dave]

Ah, I did find some Contemptors!

https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/game/6m ... -full-pack

(Oh, no! Now I have to get more stuff! )

[Primarch]

Thanks!

Next question.
How WYSIWYG are weapon loadouts on infantry, dreads and tanks?

#edit# It looks like the army builder answers that one for me. Some things (like dreads) are customisable, others (like infantry) are not.
I put together a quick list. Would something like this work okay?

[The Other Dave]

Broadly, it's pretty much like 40K - common sense rules. Since it's pretty hard to see what exactly anything is armed with at this scale from 3 feet away, it won't make much difference whether you give your heavy support squad, say, autocannons or missile launchers (and in fact you'll notice that for infantry you generally don't get to choose what weapons they're armed with anyway). It'll be good to be able to see at a glance whether an infantry squad has a character, or is armed with heavy or special weapons, but the particular loadout will only really be important if you're mixing weapons in a formation, which you can only really do with dreads, speeders, and a few kinds of tanks. Like, if you have 4 predators all armed differently but you're fielding them as armed identically nobody will bat an eyelash or probably even notice, but if you have 4 predators armed identically but you're fielding the formation with mixed armaments that'll be more of a problem.

But fundamentally, the game has a "counts-as phase" before game start, where you go over what represents what, and what's armed with what, baked into the rules, so flexibility is the order of the day.

[The Other Dave]

#edit# It looks like the army builder answers that one for me. Some things (like dreads) are customisable, others (like infantry) are not.
I put together a quick list. Would something like this work okay?

Fundamentally, yes! The only thing I might say is that a tactical formation with a single heavy weapon squad and a single rapier isn't particularly optimal, but that's sort of high-level feedback. Since tactical squads are full-on Heresy tactical squads with bolters only (which translates to no ranged fire in Epic - firefights only), you've got a pretty big formation whose job is to sit on objectives, with only a couple ranged weapons. Swapping it out for a 6-unit rapier formation, a chaplain for your assault squad, and, say, a 5th Contemptor will still give you a legal list and each unit will be a bit more focused on what they want to do.