The last few weeks have been tough personally, making it difficult to make any headway on this project. However, we have tons of updates being announced today that will make up for this! Lets get started
First, all Khorne specific datasheets are compiled into Final Draft format ahead of schedule! They need testing but we hope to have it released with Chaos Undivided core book soon. We are heavily back logged on play testing. If anyone is interested in giving our core book a look over and assisting with this we can provide the much easier to read format! In addition to all of the Codexes present on our website (Custodes, Imperial Guard, Necrons, Tyranids, Orks, Space Marines) and their supplements, we can provide near finalized Codexes for Squats, Dark Eldar, Imperial Knights, and Chaos. All other Codexes exist in a Rough Draft format and need considerable more testing.
As usual we looked into Epic 40k as one of the editions for Datasheets to incorporate. Epic 40k provides an excellent source of Heavy Support and Lord of War choices. Many of them appear to have been consolidated over the years so we left those as upgrade options to avoid redundancy. The Banelord was a fun Datasheet to work on and I believe we have done it justice! Those particularly massive Titanic units are difficult to judge until the entirety of Alternate 40k Rules is complete, but we will fine tune them once we have enough units to face off. It is unknown if the formula plateaus that far out into such a massive spectrum of world ending Titans. The point formula was however made for low to mid range Titan units and has so far held true to the overall 200 or so man hours I sank into developing it. In theory any minor deviation (if any) may very well be swallowed up in the sheer scale of the game and the randomization of the dice. Time will tell!
Chaos still needs their Slaanesh, Tzeentch, Nurgle, Traitor Guard, and Chaos Knights (pending Imperial Knights) supplements Final Drafted, but they are next on my paperwork to do list!
Other big news, I did not realize many of the Kill Team kits were releasing new wargear that is lore accurate for armies to use. I went through them all, updating and merging datasheets as appropriate. It also came to my attention that Necromunda had a few relevant entries as well (particularly Squats), so what applied were also incorporated.
During this application because I had butchered the Imperial Guard Index and needed to fix it anyways, I went ahead and split their Regiments off into supplements like Space Marine Chapters. They did not have near the character or page quantity of the Marines, but due to the large amount of unit choices to pick from and the length of many Unique Character’s Command Squad upgrades it made sense to do it sooner or later. It only shaved about 20 pages off, but it does make it easier to navigate. Most of these incorporations fell under Veterans or Engineers (such as Navy Breachers, which are just space Engineers), but they are all present!
I also incorporated an accidently missed Rogue Trader unit for the Imperial Guard. The Assault Squad is a unit of Guardsmen equipped with Jump Packs, Laspistols, Chainswords and Frag Grenades. While not incredibly potent on their own, it does allow for a more heavy Infantry build using Fast Attack that can Deepstrike and navigate terrain heavy maps with ease. While not as defensive as Rough Riders, they are significantly cheaper and are more expendable. More importantly, it ensures all models ever produced can be used. If we are missing others please let me know and I will fix that!
Squats got the Ironheads League as an option, plus more wargear choices for Hearthkyn Warriors, a new Assault Hearthkyn unit (Jump Pack pistol wielding warriors), a Combat Walker, and a Prospector as an Advisor. The new announcements for their mining vehicle is very exciting! Once we can get our hands on one or a ludicrous amount of pictures next to other units to gauge what its statline should be we will incorporate it as well! We try to gauge everything the best we can in person, but getting physical access to every model is a difficult and expensive task. We do what we can!
Lastly, Necrons had a minor change on their Tesseract Ark, bumping the Front Armour from 12 to 13. This is mostly a visual correction as the game should be visually driven. We also moved the Crypto Thralls to an Advisor position. The boost in Wounds and in making them Independent Characters raised their point cost, but now they can Bodyguard models with the newly added Mancer keyword. They are formidable and tough, easily helping a unit take more punishment as they intercept additional Wounds for the various support Mancers that keep blocks of Necrons in the fight longer.
As always, we love to hear feedback, see your awesome conversions and paint jobs, and read through epic battle reports. Recently someone shared some fantastic Imperial Guard tank paint jobs to our Facebook page and it cheered me up immensely! There is nothing quite like a classic guard tank all painted up and ready to crush the enemy!
Alternate 40k Rules 