Good news is that the railing isn't as necessary in N4 at least, since just being elevated gives you cover. Normal scatter and terrain can be used on roofs instead of basically requiring a massive rail to make going up there feasible. A lot of tables will need a redesign, but Superjump can still be fine.
Id be down for the super jumo nerf if i can keep cover when jumping. No reason i cant pop my head over a wall to get a shot and not get cover.
Well, ship has sailed on that. Jotum behind a lamp post - Cover. Seraph jumping 1" high only poking his head out - no Cover.
I'm okay with this even if it sounds weird because at least now it is really easy to discern when to get cover. Ease of play > logic At least for me
Well, still feels strange to me. Sure, most of the time it would be a S2 model hiding behing that lamppost or fire hydrant - and I'm okay with that, having taken cover behing relatively thin trees myself in airsoft games. Not thick enough to actually fully cover you, but sill make a much less of you available to enemy fire. But taking it to the extreme and having S7 or S8 hise behind such a small terrain piece... not my favourite solution. Since we're going black-or-white, binary solutions this edition (and I do indeed appreciate it), maybe some models (namely, large ones - we could argue where the border should run, and whether all of models in a given size should be affected) should be simply slapped on with "can't cover" trait in their profile? We already had something like that in N3, affecting all Impetous models. I could see, eg. Maghariba (let's keep to the extremes) being conisdered to be too big to effectively take cover from being hit with man-portable weaponary (we don't really have non-man-portable weaponary in Infinity - like tank guns, conventional artillery etc. Even if some weapons are "big guns" like HMRC or MultiHMG, they tend to have Burst high enough to represent a virtual hail of bullets). Still, the ship has sailed away anyway.
Seems easy enough to just not use fire hydrants or lampposts unless both sides just agree they are never cover. I think there's an issue where plenty of trashcans appear, or planters, don't see many things as small as the hydrant. Folks also like to present it as cover=invisible, rather than "target mod". It's not like the range mods are accurate either, so doesn't bug me.
I think at least the jumping portion is logical within the abstraction of the game. Just because the silhouette is peeking out it doesn't represent just how high something has to jump to clear an obstacle with its weapon system for long enough to fire their full burst on target with the same accuracy as they would with both feet on the ground.
The lamp post thing can easily be fixed by designating small scenery items like that as "decorative element" - stuff that literally doesn't have any gameplay value.
But that's again agreeing stuff before the game. What counts as "decorative-only-element" and what does not? The N3 system was better in the way of it calling "1/3rd or more of a miniature covered". This was, at least, somewhat measurable. Yes, it could bring a disagreement whether that model, behind that piece of terrain, form that exact angle, had 1/3rd of itself obscured, so I understeand why CB went the way they did. But this, in turn, brings on extremes that make suspension-of-disbelief somewhat difficult. Because - it I understeand it right - rules-as-written mean that this big Maghariba behind that tiny fire hydrant is in Cover...
I'd love it if your Maggy stands behind a lamppost in cover. It means you cannot gain full cover and I can blast you with my AP weapon of choice.
I'm not happy with the changes to Superjump, but I definitely am happy with jumping without cover. I remember playing back in N2 against some jumping Exrah with MSV2 and HMG, Vector IIRC - not funny, especially against a specific type of adversary ;) And the new cover may be funny but it depends on us - we just have to adjust our tablecreating to the new rules. And don't tell me, that there were many hydrants on your tables ;) I don't see the new rules making much problem to my terrains. PozdRawiam / Greetings
It's not easy to remember the rules for cover if 1% obscured (hydrant for Maggie) gives you cover, but 99.9% obscured (anything jumping up to see with minimum of silhouette) does not. It's counterintuitive and forces you to remember abstract rules instead of relying on natural understanding of what's being represented on the table. It's poor design. If "any cover = partial cover", then 99.9% obscured for jumpers should give cover. I don't argue that no cover for jump shenanigans is the wrong game result, just how we arrive at it is poorly executed.
"Okay, so we treat any holes in scenery that an S1 can't fit through as opaque, you can fire into or out of but not through buildings, the bushes are Difficult Terrain (Jungle, Low Vis, Saturation), the pond's Difficult Terrain (Aqautic), the gaps in the fences count as Narrow Gates that can't be closed, the lips on the edges of the building roofs are Partial Cover for troopers against them despite barely covering a base, you can move as a Short Skill from these doors to these ladders, anything else we missed? Oh yeah, the fences are Saturation Zones too." Paraphrased from an actual game at a tournament about one of the best constructed tables there. Since I have never heard of anyone actually filling out the goddamn terrain profile sheet (it's a thing, check the wiki) despite spending hundreds of dollars and hours of time on their table terrain I think it's safe to say that "agreeing on things before the game" isn't going away anytime soon, so may as well get rid of an aspect of play that makes people spend minutes at a time on millimeter-precise judgements in Moves or checking LoF with a laser and Silhouette. What's abstract about it? I always took the old 1/3rd requirement as having enough space to properly use that railing or sandwich board as cover. Soldiers don't stand behind waist-high road barriers and call it a day. And it's tricky to keep up even that minor degree of precision when you're executing a one-story standing Jump!
The obvious solution to cover disputes would be to release better silhouettes, with additional lines dividing it into thirds. I'm not happy about that change, though - as usual - I plan to wait and see how it'll work in practice, and with all other things taken into accounts.
It does lead to some... "interesting" situations, but again, just like with "Jump = No Cover, period", it is far more straightforward. Are you in contact and any part of your Silhouette is obscured? Cover. And perhaps outside of agreeing before a game, we simply adjust our tables, knowing that any piece of scenery will provide cover to any unit that enters B2B with it.
