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.

Bit of a necrobump - I saw Apoc 2019 mentioned elsewhere and got curious. The rules look really good! A great compromise between scale and simplicity. Did anyone else carry on playing it as a standalone game? There's still some "reasonably" priced copies of it (internationally for me sadly) online too.

There is a Facebook group called 6mm Apocalypse that plays the system with Epic scale minis.

I found it pretty neat for company+ level actions with a pretty good selection of mechanics potpourried from various editions of Epic. I would play more of it if I didn't have E:A for almost all the same needs.

-Guardsman- wrote:


I think the main problem is that it needed an entire boxed set with specialized dice, cards and markers,

This.
Local shop at the time got 1 copy in.
Everyone looked at it & just gave an apathetic shrug.
None of us saw any reason to invest that $ in what
A) we all knew GW would drop in short order.
B) Didn't offer us anything but "stuff" to play a version of what we could (and already were) doing on occasion. Thanks GW, but you were years late to the party on our end.
C) We also, thanks to there having been several editions of Epic by that point, had no use for it to run giant battles in 6mm scale....
So it was DOA.

I think the shop eventually EBayed it after a year of it collecting dust.

Apoc is certainly not a product every single customer needs to buy and is very much a "the club/store owns one copy. However if every group has a copy that's still a huge number of sales on its own.

Plus its one of those things that generates a lot of hype around it when it does happen. Sure its not regular; sure its not practical for most people; but when people put down 100Ks points of models; warlords and titans and all it generates a bunch of hype all on its own.

It also likely helps drive sales of titan scale models, which oddly are about the only things FW has retained sale of for the 40K factions whilst a lot of the more practical scale models have been steadily removed from the product line over the last few years (some replaced, some not).



eg Tyranids lost the malanthrope, heiroduels, stonecrusher conversion kit - but kept the Harridane and Hieorphant titan.

The former could work in any regular game of 40K (esp since they dropped the duels to point costs similar to regular heavy support models); the latter pretty much only work in apoc games and as collector models.

The first couple versions of Apocalypse were simply big games of 40k with no real modifications to the rules to allow for faster play. That was of course a silly idea as 40k is already bloated and just making the game bigger is a bad idea unless you have all day to play.

More recent versions have finally tried to match the mechanics to the larger size of the game. However, extra cards, expensive box set, etc, and an unwillingness to "support" the game worked against it succeeding.

GW needs an edition of apocalypse that is simply a rulebook that uses the existing statlines (maybe not every stat) and 40k codices with a ruleset that accommodates huge games smoothly. Expansions could be scenarios and such. But why should it be a product that really needs support? Maybe it would be ok for GW to be upfront about it potentially being a 1-off book just to provide a modified ruleset for bigger games.

Really though, I have a suspicion that most folks who want to put on an Apocalypse game would be happier just using the Grimdark Future rules. If what you want is a game that delivers a 40k'ish experience and can accommodate a HUGE amount of units in a reasonable amount of time then Grimdark delivers in spades.
https://www.chicagoskirmishwargames.com/blog/2024/05/aar-12000-point-grimdark-future-battle/

I got the box and actually liked that, for once, GW made it a one off with everything in the box (+ a small day 1DLC card Pack expansion). All your unit profiles were available online for free, the game tied in to the then current 8th edition and was playable out the box (if you had apoc sized armies of course).
The rules are also a nice match of simplicity, fluffiness and tactical depth, something they don’t really achieve in 40K proper.