Ratius wrote:Im strongly thinking of picking up
Apoc as I have fairly large/fleshed out armies and fancy trying out units in
Apoc that suck in
40k (plus a new ruleset to play).
Can anyone who has played a few games give some pros / cons / advice?
Pros:
-Highly engaging, due to alternating activation and the highly sped up damage resolution. There is almost no downtime in
apoc. A whole detachment activates, moves, and attacks in a matter of 3-5 minutes if both players know what they're doing, and you quickly move along to the next thing that's happening.
-In general, the game seems less hyper combo-driven. There has been theoretical discussion on building your army around spending something like 70PL on units that do NOTHING but enable you to draw cards, drawing up the whole deck and discarding down to exactly the 10 cards you want, just to get you on the strategic footing you're always on in normal
40k, where you have your stratagems and command points all the time and can spend them at will. 70PL, even in a game like
apoc, is an enormous investment. A freaking warlord titan costs twice that much. And that is with units that are effectively useless, it's like a single wound guard squad from Forgeworld and a guard officer (Who do literally nothing but draw cards and have no other game impact). I anticipate most strategies that will be successful in the long term will be more balanced, normal armies that simply accept the randomness of cards and don't build their strategy around necessarily having a particular hand of 10.
-Less deadly overall, and melee is more of a thing you can do to deal damage rather than something the game has to keep you from at all costs because if you get in it everything you touch dies instantly and the game is over. I like this change a lot. in 8th, melee can feel like a lottery, where you jump through flaming hoops just to get there and get the privilege of using your units, and when you do, hoo doggy do entire opposing armies explode in a single turn. In
apoc, melee units just deal slightly less damage overall than shooting units and can stop shooters from shooting. But because of the new terrain rules and turn structure, they get rid of a TON of the obstacles to actually getting in to melee - you can deep strike, turn 1, and charge, guaranteed with almost all melee deep strikers. You just flat out double your movement when charging, rather than having to roll. There is no overwatch, at all. The other thing that's nice about the decreased deadliness is, games actually are won and lost by objectives almost all the time. I've never not had more than 20% of my army left bottom of turn 5.
Cons:
-Customization is not just reduced, it's basically gone. Most units have only one choice: How big of a unit is it. Other units have choices, but there is a lot of very obvious imbalance because the cost system is streamlined to "power level" level and weapons shared by multiple units always share the same profile. As an example, the "Twin Phosphor Blaster" that the Kastelan Robots have has its profile balanced around kastelan robots. However, the Onager Dunecrawler also has a choice to take that weapon. Unfortunately, the TFB is worse than basically every other weapon the Onager Dunecrawler has. Not by a lot, but you look at the two next to each other and you go "Wait, what the feth? it's the same as this one with less range and a tiny bit less damage..." Part of it just gets massively diluted by the sheer scale of
apoc, like, at the end of the day if your one dreadnought is ~10% inefficient taking the Plasma Cannon compared to the Twin Lascannon does it matter THAT much when the dreadnought is 1% of your points budget? but it's still a Thing What Feels Bad (
tm).
-Characters...if you're a fan of them, you're likely not going to be as big a fan of
apoc. Characters are vital strategic pieces in the game, but they die. Fast. There's no "super plot armor" that prevents everyong from shooting characters, only a -1 to hit for Light (i.e., not tanks or monsters) characters. And on top of that, since the game is based around damage to SQUADS, the question you're asking is "how likely is this space marine captain to be able to singlehandedly kill 10 orks" and the answer is, usually...not very. Most characters fight worse than most units. They still provide auras, and they're the key to your card draw, but the game surrounding them is more protecting them, hiding them, and using them to supplement, not replace, a unit's power in combat. No smash captain will ever ever ever ever ever kill a knight in
apoc. Just simply impossible unless he deals the final wound to finish him off.
