NetEpic Armeggedon learning game. Marines vs Guard

 On Friday I finally got a chance to try Epic warhammer (technically the netepic rules, which are living rule updates of the epic armeggedon ruleset with is....4th edition of epic?). I have wanted to play this for a long time, and owned the rules at one point, but couldn't quite understand how to set up and win a game. Turns out I'm not an idiot, it wasn't really in the base rulebook and came out later with a tournament back. 

Graham hosted an intro game for Nick, Peter and myself. I took one side and Nick and Paul took the other side. Each sides was two 1000 pt forces, so it worked out well. A 'normal' game is 3 or 4k, and Graham intentionally omitted the more advance things (like indirect fire, and airplanes, teleportation, etc).

I had space marines (blood angels in red and ultramarines in blue). In hindsight my troops were a bit mobility challenged as the infantry blobs had smaller stomp walkers(dreadnoughts) that couldn't go as fast as their transports. Definitely a frustration for me during the game. Opposing force was imperial guard which get lots and lots of tanks, big tanks, and mechanized infantry. And super long range  tank killers. 

 

 

It's a bit hard to describe a play by play as it runs with alternating activations. You often only play to the end of turn 3 and the victory conditions give a clear winner. Victory points are based around control of objectives (placed by both sides in the beginning), as well as breaking your opponents most potent/expensive unit, and racing to seize the objective on the opponents baseline.

 

 

My tanks (landraiders) were able to rush forward and seriously mess up Petes mech infantry advance (note to self, always debuss the infantry). Unfortunately Pete's highly effective and long range tank killer unit then proceeded to remove 2 of my 4 tanks. My rolling was pretty abysmal, so even 3+ and 4+ saves weren't doing much for me. In that I had good company as Nick and Pete suffered from bad rolls most of the game as well. 

 

Nick was able to aggressively rush some of my high mobility, short range land speeders (skimmer units) and almost destroy them. This pretty much removed any chance I had at scooping his objectives in the back field. 

I suspect I eked out the win largely based on my objective placement and close attention to controlling them. I played flames of war for a while and it's all objectives so perhaps I was a bit more attuned to the principles. I remember in May running an adeptus titanicus game where the losing side pretty much forgot to contest an objective....it was a bit surprising but probably shouldn't be. If you aren't used to living and dying (winning and losing) base on objectives and are more attuned to blasting your opponent off the table and can see how it could happen.