Building an army

What follows is a bit of a mental ramble regarding how I should go about rebuilding my Epic armies. I could just pick the figures and models I like, but that would likely end up as a rather unsatisfying heap of unconnected ideas. Some structure is needed!

Epic Armageddon / NetEpic / EpicUK - it goes under various guises now, but it lives on in the UK (which is closest to me geographically) under the Epic UK banner. There it is typically played as a tournament game between armies of 3000 points. It therefore makes sense to impose the much-needed structure on my army building by using their tournament army lists as a basis.

It is unlikely that I will get to play against and opponent any time soon, so my armies are unlikely to be killers on the tournament scene. However I will strive for some approximation to tournament forces. To that end I'll follow some of the advice here (obligatory external link warning) on the Tactical Command forum. Jaldon454 seems to have drawn up some pretty sensible ideas, so I'll take them onboard.

That said, I very much doubt that I will be a slave to them (not that I suspect Jaldon would, or should, care one jot). The notional split of any army between Grunts, Fast Attack and Support makes perfect sense, but I suspect some Imperial guard armies will be short on Fast Attack, just as some Ork armies will be short on Support. But that will just add colour to any force, and colour is what I am interested in. Sure, to win a tournament game I might have had to capture some objectives in the enemy half of the table, but if my Imperial Guard army is built to sit behind fortifications, opting to grind out an attritional slugfest with an Eldar enemy, then that's OK by me. 

In fact it seems to me that the needs of a tournament scene have created a disconnect between what looks like a good army and what plays like a good tournament tool. Much of what I have read in the Tactical Command forum hammers home the need for a large number of "activations". This is a by-product of the rules, where you alternate actions with each player activating a command in turn. If Player B still has three commands left to move when Player A has exhausted his, then these can zip around freely without worrying too much about counter-moves from the enemy as their feet are now fixed in cement (until next turn anyway). There is therefore a significant short term advantage that can be gained by having a large number of small units on your side of the table. OK, that's the way the rules are written, but it's a nonsense and is too gamey for my purposes. So I'll need to prepare army lists, but I'll also expand the commands where I feel it looks better. I mean, would you call 10 Ork Nobz, 30 Ork Boyz and 10 Grotz a "warband"? Really?? 

EDIT: some more thoughts on the activation arms race on the D6 Addiction blog here.