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Reimagining the normal units and vehicles from Epic was fine. It's Flyers and now Superheavies/Titans that have no place in 40k because 40k was meant to be a platoon/company scale game not a game with huge armies. I'd much rather the core game be on the scale of a Bolt Action and not Flames of War with 28mm, to give a WW2 game analogy.

Basically: Adding things like Night Spinners, Vindicators, etc. is fine and great (I'd maybe go so far as to say the Baneblade but likely not the Shadowsword which is a "Titan-killer" and thus doesn't belong in 40k games). Adding Titans and making Flyers actual units versus something like an orbital bombardment type of thing is bad.

The heaviest thing that should have been fieldable in 40k should have been a superheavy tank (with balanced rules, of course and no D-Weapons), not a Titan. Flyers shouldn't be in the game as anything other than possibly bombing units that let you use X many strafing runs, and Titans don't belong at all since they are basically nukes. This is why they needed to keep BFG and Epic, so you could have ship/flying games, huge armies battling for an entire planet and company level games.

EPic is awesome.
-Clear rules
-Simple rules
-Complex turn sequence
-More appropriately sized battle field

40K has none of these things.

I would say 40k is becoming more like Warmachine: There seems to be a load of special rules hiding behind every model, so its rarely wysiwyg.

Its true that GW is releasing many large kits, but their insistence that 40k can be played on a 6x4 table is counter to 40k becoming a larger scale Epic. In Epic you would have your armies spread over a huge area, with your Knight Titans and Super Heavies exchanging fire over a distance far larger then the typically sized 40k board.

Something no one seems to be bringing up about all this is the carriering cases that a 28mm epic game requires. These models will require a box all to themselves. I know my Cygnar Storwalls do.
Anouther thing I wonder is how long till they drop the Escalation middle ground and just say Apocalypse is the new 40k. They are already doing data slates which if I remember right were an APOC thing originally.

Data slate is just a groovy "40K-ish" name for a mini-codex list.

Perhaps we could play Epic as the new 40K. There are some nice ranges of 10mm and 6mm SF on the market now.

I may not have used the best words to explain my thoughts earlier.
40K has its roots in skirmish level game systems, but was morphed into a company level (30-50+ models) battle game. Now GW is trying to turn it into a mass battle game with newer and bigger releases. So, GW has now given us some sort of bastard step child abomination of a massed company skirmish game.

I do not believe 40K works as a skirmish level game. It lacks the depth for it.
I do not believe 40K works as a company level game. It lacks the tactics for it, and bogs itself down in obsolete skirmish style elements.
I do not believe 40K works as a mass battle game. It lacks the streamlined rules and proper scale for it.

GW really needs to pick one of these to focus on for 40K, and stick with it. Preferably not skirmish, as there are already many (and better) options for that.

 xttz wrote:

 DarthSpader wrote:
been thinking about this, and ive noticed that alot of the new 40k kits are stuff that existed way back in epic, and is now getting new 40k size kits. i mean, the imperial baneblades, russ, deathstrike missile, even the sm hunter, and now knights. even the rules are starting to sort of mirror a sense of how epic was played. so...good or bad? agree or not?

It's not that they're trying to turn 40k into Epic, so much as they have zero creativity left in the design department. It seems GW are only capable of throwing out 2 kinds of model these days:

1) Generic army equivalent of a unit every other race gets, such as a flyer or huge walker.
2) Epic units from 20 years ago re-imagined in 28mm scale.

Don't get me wrong, the design for most of these kits is really good, and you get tons of options these days. It's just a pity the originality has dried up. Gone are the days where you'd see entirely new unit concepts out of nowhere. Even Forge world, who would throw out some of the craziest ideas previously, are stuck in a cycle of releasing marine armour variant #324 each week. The AdMech range seems to be the last vestiges of creativity trickling out of GW.

what are you talking about they came up with those amazing space marine inside a space marine.

Tannhauser42 wrote:I do not believe 40K works as a skirmish level game. It lacks the depth for it.

I'd disagree with this. 40k does skirmish level pretty well, still, especially in 6th ed.

6th ed 40k (at the appropriate points level) is where you have a hand full of models that all have their own statlines and gear (some of which upgrades), that are loosely arranged into units, and you roll dice to see what happens. If you play with the "suicide squads" special rule, then you can even ignore the part about the units.

I mean, it's not AS deep as some other games, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, malifaux is crazy deep, but it also makes games take a long time as people cross-reference rules and look things up on cheat sheets model by model. Meanwhile, you can slam out a 250 point game of 40k on the battleforce recon mission with suicide squads in 45 minutes if you want to, which is nice.

In the end I fear that Pandora's box has been opened and there is no going back, only going forward and getting ever more crazy.

Well, 40k was a simple game until Dec. 2013 when Escalation and Stronghold were released.

Now its a mess. Now you have to clarify prior to a game what rules, dataslates, and supplements to use. The tournament scene might also become more heterogeneous as some might use restricted rule sets and others not.

wuestenfux wrote:The tournament scene might also become more heterogeneous as some might use restricted rule sets and others not.

Yeah, I'm actually really curious to see what happens with this.

I mean, they were already slightly heterogeneous (some using forgeworld, and some no, while BAO used BAO missions and NOVA used NOVA missions, etc.), and were, sort of on their own, slowly working towards some vague "tournament" standard... kind of. It will be interesting to see if 40k splits into several different 40ks, or if the whole thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing happens at the tournament level.

 Ailaros wrote:

wuestenfux wrote:The tournament scene might also become more heterogeneous as some might use restricted rule sets and others not.

Yeah, I'm actually really curious to see what happens with this.

I mean, they were already slightly heterogeneous (some using forgeworld, and some no, while BAO used BAO missions and NOVA used NOVA missions, etc.), and were, sort of on their own, slowly working towards some vague "tournament" standard... kind of. It will be interesting to see if 40k splits into several different 40ks, or if the whole thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing happens at the tournament level.

GW will not care about the tournament scene since they seem to promote only the cineastic fun games between hobby players.

Besides superheavies and strongholds, the Knights are a sub-escalation unit. As a bimonthly tournament organizer, its not clear how to deal with this situation.

Well, GW hasn't cared about tournaments for while now. If they did, they wouldn't have ended 'Ard Boyz and wouldn't have written 6th ed the way they did.

I'm more curious about what all the TOs will do. As you say, there isn't "official" guidance (not that there really was any), but merely more material for TOs to disagree about including.