Want to start Epic but utterly confused by rulesets

[Stormwind]

Adeptus Titanicus / Space Marine / Titan Legions / Epic 40k / Epic Armageddon / Net Epic

Phew.  I am utterly confused.

I have finally started painting my space wolves, and tentatively basecoating some Eldar - but now I need to pick some rules to print out and take to the club at some point if I am to get my friends to dig out their old armies from the 90s to play with me!

I'm looking at the stuff on the GW website and finding it a little unclear.  Everything has to pass an action test or they get a blast marker?  I only ever played Epic 40k twice before so I'm really coming into this blind.

Which ruleset do you use and why?  And is the E:A rulebook on the GW site hopelessly outdated?

[kyussinchains]

The latest version is Epic:Armageddon, and yes failing an action gives a blast marker, blast markers reflect disruption to communication and command as well as morale damage, it's a very abstract, yet clever, mechanism, give it a try, seriously

the rulebook on GW's site is the current edition of the rules, the rules haven't changed much, there are FAQs and some rulings by the Epic Rules committee (ERC) who are made up of many of the original fan-playtesters of epic armageddon.

If you head over to the tactical command forum, or the Net-Armageddon sites (both in my sig... I think) you can download all of the latest 'official' army lists for epic armageddon, there are a *shedload* and more currently in development

NetEpic is a branching off from the second edition (space marine + titan legions) by some fans who disliked the playstyle of epic40k and E:A they have done great work and there is a good community of players, developing lists and tweaking the rules

I was an avid SM/TL player and turned my nose up at epic40k, although now I can see it for the real leap it was, I got back into epic with E:A about 2 years ago and I can honestly say I think it's leagues ahead of SM, it's still pretty abstract, but that streamlines the game and leads you to think about tactics more than special rules

There is currently an intro post being developed on the tactical command forums which explains this in a lot of detail

hope this helps

[Dave]

There's some more info of EA here:

http://www.net-armageddon.org/

Those are the rules that see the most play now-a-days. The tournament pack is the most up-to-date version of the rules, it's on that site.

[Irisado]

It is very confusing, but the diagram in this post might make things clearer.

The main thing to decide is whether you want to play a modified version of second edition Epic (which is what your friends would have most likely played in the 1990s), in which case you opt for NetEpic, or whether you want to play EA (the current rules available via GW's website, or via NetEA over at Taccomms).

Once you've made that choice, you can think about looking for the right set of rules for you.

[Stormwind]

Thank you very much for your answers!  I think I definitely want to play Epic:Armageddon, but my friends might want toregress back to Space Marine!

[CyberShadow]

I would recommend that you download, print and read through the main EA rules from the GW web site, and try ot persuade your friends to give that a couple of games first. Worst case scenario is that they dont like it, and want to go back to Space Marine, but even then the minis all 'work' and you are out the cost of printing only.

In general there are two main schools for Epic;
- Epic Armageddon; including the official GW rules, the NetEA compendium update, NetEA force lists and the EpicUK tournament lists
- NetEpic; splintered from second edition and developed from them, now in its fifth 'gold' edition and pretty stable