Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hey there, here is just a quick question about playing apocalypse at competitive level, any one else intrested as I am? I have made a house rule set that brings a little bit more challenge to players, but keeps the game still fun to play. After all, apocalypse has a whole new set of rules and brings totally new level to gameplay.

Apoc is for fun

i don't even like playing with models that costs more than 250-300 points. The only positive thing about apocalypse is its fun approach.

Apoc games are way to big and take way to long to be competitive.

 The Grumpy Eldar wrote:
Apoc games are way to big and take way to long to be competitive.

Give and take... were I am we do regular Apoc events you get about 2, 5k pt games in during the day... but then again there are small apoc games

Does it make any difference if there would be a gaming event from friday to sunday with a game each day, based on a storyline and scenarios each diffrent to each other. Games could also include in-game objectives and addittional commander roles (retaining warmaster) that affect gameplay.

 Spreelock wrote:
Does it make any difference if there would be a gaming event from friday to sunday with a game each day, based on a storyline and scenarios each diffrent to each other. Games could also include in-game objectives and addittional commander roles (retaining warmaster) that affect gameplay.

I don't see anything wrong with a narrative event with some special rules and objectives that can add to the fluff of the game(s). I think a full weekend of gaming might be too much to ask of some people (it would be for me, however much I would want to!), but if others can handle it, more power to them!

To me, Apocalypse should be entirely about fun and narrative, leaving the cheese and shenanigans out of it for more enjoyment by all involved. And to me, 7th edition, with its allowing of Super-heavies and Gargantuan Creatures in normal games, is how Apocalypse should be handled: take a standard army and add in some big centerpiece models that look cool.

I just don't think it should be "competitive", but it really depends on what you mean by that phrase. Are there prizes? If so, then it is competitive, and players will bring all the shenanigans they can in order to win those prizes. This should be avoided for an Apocalypse game. But if there are other reasons to have a victory over a loss for any reason, that can bring out the cheese as well. Be careful!

I think there's nothing inherently wrong with competetive apocalypse. Once it might have made the game utterly unbalanced but now the core game is as well so who cares. Other then that most people see apoc as a way to be able to field their entire collections, but it's really just lager scaled games. The one issue I can see is logistics. It can really be a handfull with longer games, transporting models, fewer unpainted models and so on. Probably a good idea to do it over a gaming weekend like you said.

Personally I find apoc very tiring. After such a big game with so much in my head I like to do other stuff and relax but that's just me. So you might want to expect players to get a bit exhausted and thus having coffee and food sorted might be a good idea.

Lastly, just going to point out that apocalypse is not really new. It's been around since 4th ed and is actually the origins of formations.

Eh, it's much too cumbersome for competitive play. It also turns into a pay to win format, with titans being so expensive (money wise).

Please god no. Nobody wants to play a "competitive" 9-hour-long clusterfeth. There's too much random and weird in Apoc to serve as an effective competitive medium.

'Competitive Apocalypse' doesn't work very well if you're using most of the rules in the Apocalypse book. If you wanted to do it you'd need to burn the 'unnatural disasters' chapter, heavily revise/rebalance Strategic Assets and Apocalypse formations (my 3,000pts: two full Dreamwalker Squadrons! (10 Wraithknights moving 17"/turn and charging +5", for those who don't know why that'd be dumb)), introduce actual list-building restrictions, and insist on playing team games (four-on-four 2,000pts/player, say) so you can actually finish a game in a reasonable timeframe.

You also need to keep an eye on the really big units; there isn't really any way to make a Reaver function in any kind of competitive way unless the game is big enough that you need to ban Guardsmen to keep the time it takes to run a game under a week.

I've played nearly a dozen Apoc games, all during 5th edition. They were part of narrative campaigns between my friends, like the end of a campaign round and you got a bonus for the next round by winning. That, or it was the culmination of a narrative campaign. Some were 30k points per side games with nearly a dozen super heavies and titans.

Those were some of the most fun games I've ever had.

All of that said, I would never play in a "competitive" Apoc event. If I didn't know everyone there, it would never interest me. It's about the spectacle of it, not the outcome!

Apocalypse isn't made to be competitive whatsoever. It's the first game type that I can recall where they mentioned playing it without a points limit. There's just too much stuff to factor for balance, and 40k is already an easily unbalanced mess at regular point levels.

40k is *better* at balancing very large games now than it has been in 5th or 6th, since most detachments now scale with size, but... Large games alone aren't Apocalypse.
Have you READ the Apocalypse rules? They are some of the worst balanced things that GW has ever pumped out. The formations vary from 'Useless' to 'Ungodly levels of good', the Strategic Assets are often vastly overpowered for some armies and weak for others, 'Finest Hour's are insane, and the missions themselves are... Shall we say... A clusterFun! of terrible game design.
This isn't even considering that someone might bring a Warlord Battle Titan, AKA a terrible awful no-good poorly balanced undercosted gamebreaker.

And have you seen the disasters table? My favourite is where you remove a whole tile from the board and everything on it.

 Ashiraya wrote:
And have you seen the disasters table? My favourite is where you remove a whole tile from the board and everything on it.

That happened to a person in one of our cross-store Apoc games. Lost his whole army. Poor guy. Pretty much reason one why I dislike Apoc.