Following on from previous years, I ran another set of multiplayer Epic games instead of having a birthday party.
This year we went for a Heresy-themed event, with the games set a short time after the Heresy, centring on a world where Chaos forces are trying to summon Angron. Several Chapters of Space Marines, with Auxilia and Guard allies, are assaulting the main city to disrupt the summoning ritual.
City Battle
Table one (the urban half of the big table, up to the central river) has Chaos Cultists conducting the ritual with Traitor Marine and Titan support, while Loyalist Dark Angels and Death Guard assault the city. If the Cultists hold the summoning plaza for long enough or there is enough bloodshed, Angron will appear. Secondary objectives for the Loyalist forces are to destroy the two power generators, which are providing power to…
Spaceport Battle
Table two has a Traitor-held spaceport and an array of defence laser installations. Taking the spaceport will allow Loyalist Salamander reinforcements to arrive without having to face the defence lasers. All flyers, drop pod and teleport arrivals have to roll over the number of enemy-held defence lasers.
Status and Support
There are several status trackers for summoning, control of defence lasers, and spaceport.
All artillery and flyers were kept on separate tables, with both games able to call on them as needed.
Early Stages
Mid-game
End-game
Epilogue
The summoning track ended up two spaces short of summoning Angron, leading to a Loyalist victory, even without the Salamanders, and with a large chunk of the final Dark Angels wave still in orbit.
The Chaos forces now have to regroup and plan what to do next…
Gameplay Feedback
Game size. Each player had a 3,000 point force using the Epic 40,000 and Epic Remastered army lists, or roughly 6,000 points in 2nd edition or Epic Armageddon. As this is a lot of models, we sped up the game by having each player start with a third of their force on the table, with the other thirds coming in on turn 2 and 3. This worked well.
Having ‘artillery and flyer support’ tables worked well as a concept, with each detachment having a timer saying when they could be used again. Flyers and artillery could also be used to attack the opposing artillery batteries, which did happen a few times. However we had too much artillery in too-large detachments, so each time one fired it caused massive casualties and usually wiped out whatever it fired at. This was partly because the artillery counted as being on Overwatch orders (reroll misses) if the target was in 60 cm and line of sight of an HQ. For the third turn, I reduced the remaining detachments to 6 Barrage or 3 Heavy Barrage which helped a lot. For future games I’ll try a similar approach but with fewer smaller detachments and no Overwatch. I’ll also put them on tables with mats and scenery to improve the visual appearance.
Fate cards were manually chosen and handed out to each force on each table, starting off with 2-3 in turn 1 and more in later turns. This worked well.
The defence laser installations gave a binary ‘can arrive/can’t arrive this turn’ result for each flyer, drop pod, or teleport detachment to keep things simple. With the limited number of turns this didn’t work that well, and it would have been better to have each defence laser getting free shots as each of those detachments arrived.
In a similar manner, the Salamanders reinforcements would only start arriving if the Loyalist forces controlled the spaceport at the end of a turn. I think this would have worked better if they would arrive anyway, but in greater numbers if the spaceport was held.
The summoning tracker could also have done with interim effects being added, although I had two Bloodthirsters arrive at the end to represent it being so close. A future version may have smaller daemons arriving during the game.
Objective positions and reinforcements. On the city table, the summoning plaza was too far from the Loyalist side of the table, meaning that any Loyalist forces arriving in turns 2 and 3 struggled to get there, while Chaos forces were in the right place as soon as they arrived. The plaza either needed to be more central, or the Loyalist forces get extra movement when arriving, or a combination of the two.
On the spaceport table the objectives were symmetrical, and reinforcements got a free 20 cm move when moving on from the table edge, which worked well.
