Apocalypse lessons learnt

NowI've actually played a game of Apocalypse, I thought I blog a little about some thing I'd try and do if I were running an Apocalypse game. There's a From the Warp collaborative post about Apocalypse which I would refer you to for more on this topic.

So, some things I picked up on:

1- Know who is playing in advance: If you knows who going to turn up, what they're playing and how much stuff they've got in advance, you can decide how to split your teams up, or split into multiple tables.

2- Keep it equal: From the game last weekend, one of the Imperial players had 8000 points of Marines, which was more than his three other teammates put together. This meant he was constantly in-demand in different parts of the board as his army was being shot at, assaulted etc which slowed things down a bit. Conversely, one young player had only a small 1500-2000 point Marine army so alot of times he was left with little to do. If all the players have roughly the same amount of points, everyone sees the same amount of action.

3- Formations and superheavies: Having a 40K army and turning up with it will put you at a disadvantage against someone who has taken time to build formations, or who has super heavies. I thought my 35 Plague Marines would be pretty handy in a fight, until a single destroyer strength template landed and killed 14 of them. On the other hand, facing of against the Imperial army who had two Masters of the Chapter formations (giving them 8 additional strategic assests) put up at a serious handicap. If you can build some formation up, then do it. Similarly try and balance super heavies on both sides if you can. We didn't have any titans on either side in our game, but I suspect these would be quite unbalancing.

4- Enjoy the carnage: Don't get hung up on rules disputes or arguements, just dice off to decide, or let a third party decide. Remember Apocalypse is about having massive battles, having fun and blowing up loads of stuff.