Tuesday - October 16, 2007
Warhammer 40,000 : Apocalypse
So, this weekend was the Warhammer 40,000 : Apocalypse release party. There was merriment, there were sighs of frustration, and there was orbital bombardment.
Over all, I'd say I'm pretty impressed with the expansion. Indulge me, if you will, as I play amateur reviewer and speak my mind on my experience so far.
Apocalypse is an expansion set of rules designed to supplement - not replace - the standard Warhammer 40,000 gameplay. With a point minimum of 3,000 per side, the battles start huge and get bigger. The expansion is designed to emulate that epic form of battle with countless throngs of troops on either side slamming into one another in a wave of death and lead and plasma. I think it does this very well.
I will admit that I pre-judged Apocalypse when it was announced. I rolled my eyes at it, and didn't truly feel like giving it a second look until Arica told me a bit more about it and its strategic nature. I thought to myself, "Great - another GW gimmick to get us to buy hundreds of dollars worth of new models." I mean, who has 3,000 points minimum of models just sitting around? Let alone more?!
However, Arica did good to assuage my doubts by telling me more. First off, it's not designed to be played by 2 people (1 on either side). It's designed to be played by multiple people, a few to a side. So, you might only have 1,000 points of Space Marines, but if your buddy has 1,000 of Imperial Guard, and your other buddy has 1,000 points of Battle Sisters, guess what - You've got an Apocalypse sized army. The book features a nice little chart that shows who, according to standing story and lore, can team up freely with other armies, who will 'tolerate' one another on the basis of fighting a more threatening enemy, and who will need a damned fine explanation as to why they're allies that battle. Also, force organization charts have been tossed out the window. If you have 2,000 points in tanks alone, but haven't had more than 3 Heavy Support slots to field them all in, today is your lucky day! So, a lot of the tedium and expense of hosting such massive games is minimized through these rules. This makes Apocalypse far more open to the average gamer, rather than simply catering to the hardcore (and rich) gaming crowd.
My other major fear when hearing about Apocalypse was the length of game-play. I feel I have an appreciation for how quick or slow a large-scale tabletop strategy game can be from back in my Battletech days - we'd start at roughly 10 a.m., and by 10 p.m., we were still trying to polish off the last of our enemies in a 12 v. 12 game. Mind you, Warhammer 40,000 is (in my opinion) a far smoother system than Battletech, but my point stands - the larger you scale the game, the slower it's going to be. Keeping track of what's going on becomes far more difficult, moving models becomes more tedious, and multiple combats become more time-consuming. Starting at 3,000 points for an Apocalypse game just sounded ridiculous. All that fell to the wayside when I began to learn about the new game mechanics that go along with such a large setting. Apocalypse makes things 10x deadlier on the battlefield.
For instance, there are certain stratagems you can purchase for your army to make it perform a special sort of function: Mine fields, ambushes, flank marches, etc. These cost points to help ease the cost of your troops, but they also serve to make the game more deadly. If I'm reading some of these right, you can actually destroy reserve units before they enter the field of battle.
Other stratagems allow for such things as Vortex Grenades that kill everything they touch - no die rolls necessary. Orbital bombardment uses a new 10" template (that's roughly the size of an old-style large record) that does a new type of damage. Strength-D... as in "dead". There's no toughness check. If it hits, you die (unless you've got an invulnerability save. Then you're alright.)
So, with all these things causing massive amounts of death, 3,000 points really doesn't stretch very far. In a normal game, there's nothing that can cause that sort of destruction, but Apocalypse does a good job of shortening the game by shortening life-spans. When 2,000 points of guys can go *poof* in one toss of the dice, game length really ceases to be an issue.
Apocalypse has done quite a bit to give a strategic, army-command feeling, rather than focus on the carnal power-gamer impulse of focusing on "More guns! MORE GUNS!!" They accomplish this by offering special abilities to armies if you have the correct formations. For instance, in the October issue of White Dwarf magazine, they report:
| "These came about almost by accident," says [Game Designer Jervis Johnson]. "andy Hoare, being a mad tread-head, owns an entire Leman Russ Company and he wanted to use them in a game of Apocalypse. We all thought that was very cool. When you're fielding an entire company, then there should be something special about that; it's not like you're just fielding a squadron. Battle formations were created so that, should you field a certain number of models of a certain type, like a Leman Russ Tank Company, an Ork Dred Mob, or even a Necron Monolith Phalanx, then you get a special rule attached to that formation." |
On top of rewarding players for having special formations, they have removed victory points as a game mechanic - not only would it be nearly impossible to keep track of who's killed what in such a large and deadly game, but it also took the emphasis off of trying to wipe your enemy off the table, and put it back on holding objectives. When killing becomes less of a winning technique and more of a form of crowd control, the game becomes far more akin to chess and far less akin to Counterstrike.
Apocalypse, however, is not without its down-sides. They may have made it easy to team up a few friends and play a huge battle as such, but we ARE still talking about huge battles, and that means lots of models... and that means lots of money and time spent assembling / converting / painting these models. There are also more costs involved than that - $50 for the Apocalypse book (which is coffee-table sized, and won't fit on your bookshelf), $25 for the templates, and half of the larger, "Apocalypse-only" models such as the Baneblade Super Heavy Tank go for as much as $95. Other larger models, such as the various titans, can only be special ordered from Forge World, a UK based website.
So, take Apocalypse for what it is, but I'm pleasantly surprised by it, and had a lot of fun at the Games Workshop store in Novi this past Sunday trying it out.
Now, if we could just get less 12-year-olds who don't know how to play the game, and more mature adults who have read the rulebook and their respective codex, I'd like it even better.