Alternative rulesets to LI & compatibility w/ LI models

[Deschenus Maximus]

The thread about the collective frustration w/ LI's rules as they stand made me want to look into alternatives.

 

What are the options, how are they better than LI and and how well do the LI models work with them?

[Black Cohort]

A friend of mine has published a 6-8mm ruleset that covers "modern" combat, called Battle Captains.  https://www.wargamevault.com/product/510777/Battle-Captains

 

It has official supplements so far for WW2 Western Front, Yom Kippur War and a post 2020 NATO vs Russia alt-history.

 

The game is designed around having a core company, that depending on a bunch of factors (mainly the value of the two core companies and scenario) you bolt on additional forces either fully formed platoons or individual units) along with artillery and air support.  The standard unit of the game is either a squad or a vehicle (basically most units in 30k/40k games would be 1 stand in Battle Captains); these are then grouped together into platoons.  The rules can probably accommodate up to a warhound Titan as the largest unit.

 

Mechanically the game works with alternating activations, with each activation usually impacting one platoon.  Each side has a pool of dice of different colours, white for command actions, black for platoon actions, grey for moving multiple platoons, yellow for morale, blue for reactions, green for shooting.  As the game goes on and bad things happen (platoons fail morale checks, not holding objectives, losing commanders or entire platoons), red dice get added to your pool; red dice are bad, and generally do nothing but take up space in your hand.  At any point in time you have a hand of 5 dice to chose from for your next activation.  In addition to the standard actions that everyone can do, every faction has a handful of unique options that help reinforce the feel of how various armies fight.

 

I intend to design an unofficial supplement for it for the Horus Heresy (my friend gave me access to the calculations he uses to determine points values).  A lot of the work is done, but I haven't painted enough LI stuff to play so finishing the supplement hasn't been a priority.

 

In Horus Heresy, terms the basic core company for a space marine Legion would be a fairly standard demi-company (as shown in Betrayal) with 3 platoons that are each a command squad, 2 tactical squads and a support squad.  Though Battle Captains is designed so that a faction generally has more than one core company, so other options could be various veteran, recon, assault, fast attack or armoured companies.

 

Solar Auxillia's standard company would probably be mostly just lasgun Tericos, but would be significantly cheaper than the legion demi-company so is going to have a lot more bolted on for each game.  Like with the legions, there could also be other companies as an option as well.

 

I am happy to go into more detail if people are interested.

 

[Pacific81]

@Deschenus Maximus - if you want the closest 1:1 with your collection your best bet is probably the Epic Heresy AU rules. These are a community adaptation of the basic Epic Armageddon rules with knobs on for heresy-era units.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201112013556/http://epicau.com/mw/index.php/Legion_Astartes

 

It will depend on where you are based but in the UK Epic Armageddon is probably the most commonly played. If you want to play in events with others take a look at the Epic GT site. They don't have Heresy-specific army lists yet for use in the tournaments yet though so you would need to play them as 40k equivalents

https://epic-uk.co.uk/wp/

 

There are other options but I don't want to oversaturate you and I'm sure other posters will reply here. I did write a thread over on the Dakka forum about them, but you will need to sit down with a cup of tea/coffee to read through 

Epic 40k new player's guide

 

[Deschenus Maximus]

6 hours ago, Pacific81 said:

@Deschenus Maximus - if you want the closest 1:1 with your collection your best bet is probably the Epic Heresy AU rules. These are a community adaptation of the basic Epic Armageddon rules with knobs on for heresy-era units.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201112013556/http://epicau.com/mw/index.php/Legion_Astartes

 

It will depend on where you are based but in the UK Epic Armageddon is probably the most commonly played. If you want to play in events with others take a look at the Epic GT site. They don't have Heresy-specific army lists yet for use in the tournaments yet though so you would need to play them as 40k equivalents

https://epic-uk.co.uk/wp/

 

There are other options but I don't want to oversaturate you and I'm sure other posters will reply here. I did write a thread over on the Dakka forum about them, but you will need to sit down with a cup of tea/coffee to read through 

Epic 40k new player's guide

 

 

So Epic Heresy just uses the same base rules as Epic Armaggeddon with different lists?

[Crablezworth]

I think it's worth looking at other rule sets. If anything just to compare and contrast li to them. 

 

Same time, without an established community it's an even more uphill battle I feel to get others to want to play that rule set, even if one is raving about how awesome it is. The sunk cost is real in terms of li, at least for myself. I'd rather stuffer it or try and improve it than learn a whole new ruleset. Would rather try and extract the good from the other ruleset or sets and use that to help improve li. 

 

The relevance problem is real, example, today warcom finally dropped some info on the mechanicum tank release. Is this something that'd be relevant to an old school epic group/epic armageddon group? They've likely had files for those tanks for years. Not that everything must revolve around "current thing", I myself have had karacnos as you know for a while now as well, but like, I'm not sure what there is to discuss about them in some group where they're old news I guess. I think it'd be a lot easier to get into epic armageddon in the uk where there's a big following. 

 

Other consideration is stuff like stalkers/dark mech not having rules. 

[Pacific81]

6 hours ago, Deschenus Maximus said:

 

So Epic Heresy just uses the same base rules as Epic Armaggeddon with different lists?

 

Yep that's it exactly 

[Sherrypie]

Epic: Armageddon gets my vote, being an all-round great game with much sharper design and some actual teeth as a wargame about command and control in a battalion level operation. There's great overlap with much of the current model lineup and where there isn't, it's very common in the community to use sensible counts-as rules for all sorts of stuff. My friend runs the Dark Mech Stalkers with Iron Warriors' daemon engines rules, as an example.

 

As for relevance, nice models are nice models. People tend to acquire more models they think are neat. I have printed Triarii and Krioses in my existing Mech force for the Aussies' 30k EA lists, yet I'm sure I'll get some of those hulls anyway to fiddle with. GW plastic is a nice material for conversions and there's always another army project in the works anyway.