a difficult terrain zone that's skinned to look like rubble or other debris already do this. People generally, are just too averse to using terrain rules or making sleek clean sci-fi city messy. Though it wouldn't surprise me if this aversion is due to missions/touenaments and other things where a terrain rule is applied table wide and just makes the entire thing uninteresting and awful, as opposed to individual pieces or smaller zones that add strategic and tactical depth at the turn by turn decision making level. However given the crusade people are on for increased simplicity probably means that such things if not axed will just be ignored like they currently are.
"This wall is Very Difficult Terrain: Jungle, the vines are Ladders" 4-4 troops still Climb at 4" per Order (although do get a second Short Skill, so it's strictly easier to climb than a blank wall). Edit: point I'm making is there's already a lot of creative things you can do with the terrain rules we have if you're willing to.
Not quite sure what you're getting at. Infinity is often played in urban settings because it makes for easy to sell and easy to make terrain, plus you get well defined walls for cover. However, while there are some units that are explicitly urban fighters (Celestial Guard for instance), there are no rules that actually illustrate this the way that Zero-G illustrates that we're dealing with a literal space marine (as defined by a soldier on a space ship that is used for atmospheric insertion operations - not the oversized pauldrons). In general I think the rules should encourage use of terrain rules by making rules available through examples, instead of how it sort of treats those rules now with a bit of a haphazard "here's what you can do if you want to make life difficult for you" and then makes sure to recommend you don't use the rules for the single most common terrain item in their terrain partners' stock (talking about Holo-ads here). I don't think people like terrain because it slows units down. Infinity is all about order economics, as illustrated even by the small decrease in actual speed by Medium Infantry, anything that slows you down players will have an aversion to. There's also the fact that the movement-ending mechanic is kind of annoying to deal with. I don't think this has anything to do with simplifications . You can do that for literally any terrain piece. Nice lake. Mountain terrain. Doesn't make it a good thematic idea, though. -- They should take a good look at the terrain rules, though. There's too many of them in my opinion, with too much detail. It's the kind of detail that you get in an RPG and I think it's ill suited for a tabletop wargame that is over in 60 orders or less. I'd be much happier if there was one level of difficult terrain (with examples) and one kind of hazardous terrain. Particularly I think terrain skills should have the potential to open new paths. Why should vines on a cliff face make it a ladder for everyone? That's just a good way to dilute the Climb+ skill and to avoid having to use the Climb skill.
Sure, it's a ladder for everyone and that makes C+ less of an advantage on that wall. But you're forgetting the other parts of the rule. For troops without Jungle terrain their movement stops when they hit the bottom of the ladder, and stops again at the top of the ladder. So from a movement POV it's no better than climbing and strictly worse for X-2 Move troops. C+ is really cheap for what you get out of it. So long as you don't do that for every wall, you still get good use from it. The point of Terrain rules is that it changes up the usual value of units. I've played that table with the green highlighted areas as "Jungle Terrain, slopes are Ladders". C+ is still extremely useful because of the other type of hills. But it makes troops with Jungle terrain feel cool because they get to use their skill for real benefit. You're absolutely correct with the terrain rules being overly detailed. Would moving to simply generic Difficult Terrain types lose to much? I'd probably go with just Difficult Terrain, Very Difficult Terrain and Zero G Terrain. Zero G functioning the same way as other terrain zones has always felt weird: I'd almost go "troops with Zero G get +1“ to any Move declared while in a Zero G Zone". I think Low Vis and Sat Zones actually work quite well when used on small well defined zones on a table (as in that example) and are very effective at changing up the power dynamics of certain units.
So in my local meta we've been really pushing this for the last year or so, especially with large holo ads being low vis, large amounts of forest that are either saturation and low vis or heavy saturation and poor vis, and the occasional nimbus zone. It has changed the calculus a lot on what is a useful unit/ equipment/skills (MSV-1, Multiterrain, also reigns in fireteams a fair bit) and what is an efficient or advantageous way to go about engaging the enemy or completing the mission.
I don't like the stop on entering terrain part. I still think that most terrains should give an advantage to troops with the matching skill instead of a penalty to those that lack it. That would make it easier to introduce to a meta.
One of the easiest ways to do that is allow troops with the skill to automatically gain cover while they're within the zone. This also makes adding the zones easier to add to tables, because it's quite easy to end up with large open zones that have no cover: this results in troops who have the appropriate skill still avoiding the killing ground. This works for all terrestrial terrain, but doesn't work for Zero-G. I do think that difficult terrain is useful as a penalty though. So I would probably keep it.
Movement stops when you enter difficult terrain but it doesn't stop when you leave it. Climb is also an Entire Movement skill and doesn't allow you to declare other skills as part of it. Not that I think we've had an answer on whether you can shoot while on a ladder, as far as I can remember, but I think you can. Of course it's strictly worse for X-2 MOV troopers than a ladder. That's the entire point of difficult terrain rules as they are currently designed - to arbitrarily punish specific troops that are otherwise mobile and to be barely an inconvenience for most other troops. But I still don't quite get the complete aversion to having a thematic terrain type to a very real type of combat zone that soldiers specifically train to deal with in real life.
Just have terrain half movement thru it, like....most evry other competent game? stopping up as you reach the zone that slows you, often lacks cover, and leaves you an easy target is a bum deal for obvious reasons.
And it would also be consistent with Prone movement, and easier to remember than the current version.
Hi, I would recommend to review the Actions "Change Facing", "Dodge" and "Engage". I recently started understanding the Close Combat and found it hard to understand how these Actions work. For me the are basically Dodges in different flavors. "Change Facing" is a Dodge when not seeing the attacker but in ZoC and therefore just rotating and not moving is allowed. Engage is introduced to avoid that a character A that is that is attacked by B is moving into CC with C. But is that a big problem? I think extending dodge a little bit would make the rules a lot easier to understand and not reduce the tactical options. Also the separation of CC and Engaged State was difficult for me to understand. It took me some time to identify that the Engaged State is where my informations are found and not in CC.
idea for (probably 2021 or later): roll out Sygmaa Trihedron - for example a box of Maakrep that has head (loyal artichoke or CA Hornybois) and arm (HMG, Boarding Shottie, Combi+LSG) swaps to a: give us more options for Maakrep, and b: a potential new unit for spiral or a revived Tohaa. Then some more Sygmaa with different profiles but similar swapping parts for artichoke / CA.
Yeah, the Sygmaa were a missed oportunity to realease unith both for CA and Tohaa (and now even Spiral Corps). Hope they release at least the Greif Operator.
I personally hate counting inches and half inches in cases where I have partial movement rough rough terrain and open ground. I love the way Kings of War deals with it (a binary "you can't run in it") and I don't terribly mind the way Infinity deals with it.
From Mayacast we now know that crits with normal ammo cause a second wound roll. Special ammo has it's own additional interactions which we'll find out later.
