Does this exist? I am under the impression that online play forums only support 100/6; am I wrong about that?
It seems from this thread https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/268855-how-much-epic-do-you-actually-play/
that people can't play as much as they want to. Is this because their is no online virtual play capability?
Edited by Darth Meanie
Vassal works pretty well for Epic. I've played most of my Epic games that way!
It is a bit hard to find an ad-hoc Epic game on Vassal, but if you can find the player(s), Vassal works pretty good!
The auto-spawn feature doesn't work for Epic ships, but it will still spawn the small and large ships from your 300 point list automatically (a major life saver)
So yes, EPIC is very playable on Vassal, we just need to find a good way to arrange the games, and we're good to go (forums, reddit, slack, ... )
Once EPIC gets a bit more traction, we can ask @Mu0n729 and the crew to help with auto-provisioning and other fancy features for EPIC ships.
As esteemed player @vladamex has correctly written, epic mode is more than playable on vassal, just lower your expectations with automated features. 3x6 and 6x3 maps have been useable in the module since 2014, as well as their accompanying grids.
-Spawn the epic ships from the Pieces Window rather than autospawn. The 2 pilot card per huge ships (cr90, raider) just crashes autospawn iirc. Doing it the old fashioned way won't be long since you're limited to 2 ships in the official epic rules
-Autorange won't work with any huge ship arcs/turrets/TL, I just haven't programmed it and it would take a huge amount of effort to put them in, even though parts of that effort would inspire itself from previous complicated arcs (like the front arc + front aux arcs of the YV-666), there's a LOT of lines that must be checked and 80% of the push would be testing and debugging
-Autobump won't work and there's actually no consensus on how to resolve a huge ship bank movement that crashes into another huge ship
-Obstacle detection upon moving, or just the cursory check with alt-c (check if a ship is currently on something) won't work either
I've played 2 games with @Ihavebadluck on Vassal, and we had a blast. In fact, that reminds me that he contacted me to see if I would be up for it again. Alas, I am pretty busy right now.
@Mu0n729 did a lot of work fixing the firing arcs of the huge ships, which used to cause game lag after a few rounds. So big thanks for all your work - we appreciate it!
the arcs weren't the cause of the lag, but rather the heavy nested structures of the huge ship properties. Once I removed the text stats on the ships themselves (and all the associated crap), it got instantly solved.