40,000 Points of Apocalypse: Pre Organization

Our FLGS, the lab, recently had a mega apocalypse game. This game was our third large scale apocalypse battle and I believe the largest yet we have done. An earlier event got pretty close to 40K points. This time we had 41,000 points spread on 3 tables and I hope everyone had fun. The biggest problems were probably at the side tables so I will do a post specific to them in the future.

The event went pretty smoothly except for a lag on the start time due to over 1 month of preplanning. I am in no way taking credit for the event since I was not the organizer, but want to talk about how it was arranged and set up to allow others in the future to build on it. The game was organized by the head of our local GW club, League Subterranea.

1. Poll your local community for interest. Using either a local forum, news group, or even bulletin board at the store to see who is interested in the event. Probably 2 months out even before a date is actually set. Make sure everyone knows this is an all day event.

2. About 1 month using the list of people interested start trying to find a good date and time. The first 2 times we played these battles they were on Sunday since there is free parking downtown but the store is only open 5-6 hours which really is not long enough for a really big game. This most recent one last 9 hours but I personally left after 6 since I was on a side table and neither my opponent or I had any scoring units left to hold the objective.

3. 2 Weeks finalize the players and assign teams. Since most players can only field a few armies at 3K points levels the teams are not usually done with a story in mind. 3K points per player is a good number. The player can get a good size force with several formations but it is not yet impossible to keep track off. We generally tried to balance Super Heavies and Flyers and made people say if they were bringing either. We seem to keep a race all on one side so the sides for this recent battle was Imperial (4 Space Marine Armies) + Eldar (2) + Orks (1) vs Tau (3) + Chaos SM (1) + Nids (2) + Necrons (1). It is helpful to find a backup player if someone has to drop out. This happened to us when a Chaos SM player dropped but luckily one of the Tau players knew someone interested in taking his space.

4. Once the teams are finalized it is up to the players to choose a captain and try to work out an rules issues with the other team and organize the strategy of the armies. It is helpful to gets list ahead of time to assign assets and try to work on making your combined army as nasty as possible. While cheesy is not the goal, raw destruction can be pretty fun. Nothing like running down 800 points of necron warriors with Pedro and Vanguard squad.

5. Lastly, make sure everyone knows exactly what special rules are in place for the game agreed upon by the organizer and the captains. Since Apoc is about fun, you can change any of the standard apoc rules if the organizers and captains agree.

How many objectives? 4, 6, 1 per player
How are the tables going to be laid out? Long line, Circle, Plus sign.
How are you doing the deployment? Bid, Fixed time with dice off for first turn.
If you are using side tables how exactly do they influence the main table? Objective for total, Bombardment, etc.
Are any rules getting changed?Necron Phaseout, Hits on Flyers glance or cover save, scoring units, army interactions.

This is the basic pre organization plan. In another posts, I will go into my observations about several of the issues I have seen while playing in big games.