As written in the rules, nearly any 4ft by 4ft surface is a valid table as long as both sides or the Tournament Organiser agree on it. If you want a table that gets the best use out of your army, bring the terrain to match and hash it out with your opponents. Outside of a tournament, if the table is so open that you cannot exit the DZ without the use of a specific, linked heavy weapon it is perfectly within your right to request a terrain fix, just as someone who can't even get a sniper rifle shot in its good band anywhere on the table would have a right to ask to take some buildings out. All that said, I do agree that listbuilding with MO feels very constrained at the moment at 300pts. I was tempted to get into it around the update along with IA, but the sheer difficulty of making anything notably different put me off both. There are powerful options, but they are few and horribly pervasive. I'd be horrified going against a good player and confident against a newcomer with MO, I feel they are competetive but relatively dull which is not the feeling one should get from robot space knights.
we had a discussion not so long time ago with our local players, and basically after playing on Tables in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland and Germany, we've come to a conclusion that you need to be ready to play on different tables, even if you consider them shitty. Suck it up, have your lists be prepared for different table layout and missions. Yeah, really cool if your local meta has table where you can forget about HMG/MSR/ML and be all comfy in Spitfire range to get out of DZ. But keep in mind that besides table layout, there are also troops with FD, so even if it's outside their DZ, they can still place a Sniper or ML there and lock you down in DZ, if setup correctly. You need to have options during list building to be able to address different tables
But they are wrong. :P MO is certainly built around mid to close range fighting. So having tables where such a force (which includes JSA) can't leave its DZ means the table is unbalanced. Sure JSA at least has an HMG LI link but still, such a table would be quite hard on the sectorial. The easiest fix for MO would be to give the OS an HMG option. AH forget it. Don't play MO.
Why is it that if I mention there should be some way for you whole DZ not to be locked down by long rage weapon that people jump to the conclusion that I advocate MO taking no long range weapons? At the very least, a Hospitler HMG and/or OS Snipers is a must for the faction. Nor am I advocating for tables so dense that HMG are useless. It is not like its only 2 choices, wide open tables or dense mazes. Yes there are ways an infiltrating sniper can mess with your DZ but such unit shouldn't be able to lock down the whole table. You should be able to maneuver around to get at them. It just might take more orders.
I should point out that we play at my house, and I have a crapton of terrain. We build tables to look like actual cities, which tends to mean a "Warband's Paradise" at ground level and a "Sniper's Happy Hunting Ground" across the rooftops (and occasionally reaching down to ground level). I have enough cars that I can put a multilane highway across the middle of the table (at least 2 lanes in each direction), but I need to get some elevated roads that can run above basic ground level without blocking a road going parallel to the highway at ground level (and maybe a second set to use as a Metro light-rail setup). This is more interesting to play on than even my 9+4+Scatter recommendation for new players, and gives Climbing+ and Superjump real utility.
For reference, I played MO at the Michigan GT in October. By no means a huge event (42ish players?) but we had some ... interesting terrain. First round was this gem of a table where we had to houserule that the forests that looked like walls were actually partial cover + saturation zone in order to make this table remotely playable. My opponent was running Morats and his only weapon with a rangeband better than 16” was a Q Drone HMG. I had the Hospitaller HMG linked and 4 Magister PFausts to play with. Second round was this lovely piece of catwalk hell where my TAK opponent was able to stack ARO pieces 3 levels vertically to ensure I couldn’t slice the pie. He killed 8/10 of my models in ARO before he even had a turn. Third round was this table that seemed to have been built for 16” deployment zones but we were playing Frostbyte on it. My opponent ran into the teeth of linked pfausts and regretted it. I ended up 2-2 for the day, placed 16th, and was quite happy. Lists and details on request.
I don't think that table looks all *that* bad, though I'd want a couple more pieces of jungle in the DZs to block the side-to-side shooting gallery. Gah, that's hideous!!! Where the hell is the cover from the catwalks?!? Yeah, that one needs a lot more terrain on it, too. It makes a nice shooting gallery, though! Congrats!
In order: 1) it ended up being serviceable with the partial cover ruling on the trees. We left a note for the other players on that table detailing our terrain considerations. 2) there is none. I checked. Do you know the feeling of your Hospitaller HMG getting ARO’d by 2 core-linked X-Visor T2 Rifles and an Autocannon at the same time? It’s not good. 0/10 would not recommend. 3) It was a good shootout for me, Vanilla Nomads forced into gun fighting with no tricks to give them the edge is bad times for them. 4) thanks!
I had a nightmare table at a small tourney. Couldn't break the Tohaa triad that was elevated about 18 inches up and had line of sight to every exit from my deployment zone. Missile crit my guys to death several times. Wasnt fun.
Thats exactly reason why smoke is amazing. Oh I got shitty table with no cover, luckily I brought my own total cover!
Oooof, someone needs to have a sit down with the TO and discuss how to set up a table because some of those are horrendous. Clearly set up for form over function.
We all know there are some very open tables at the Interplanetario, but then there are ones like these, where there is effectively no LoF between DZs at ground level:
I like that last table. Looks pretty decent. A bit too much cover but I always prefer that over too little cover.
Like how ? Ok, first one is extremaly crowded. But second one has a open line across the table plus some nice higher up points (excellent for linked snipers). 3rd table is especially good for long range ARO's with those nice sniper towers and towers springled around edge of DZ (or just close to it).
2017, so less than 70. And they were taken from the first 12-15 images I found. So no, definitely not just three tables out of 70.
This is just anecdotal based on very few games, but given the relatively high number of missions this season with either 16" deployment zones or an objective room, I really haven't had any issues with getting pinned hard in my DZ with MO. I've also found that having better haris and duo options helps create at least two attack vectors which helps if one gets pinned. The hospitaller HMG in a haris has been sufficient for me so far, the 5 man bonus is probably overkill in most cases. Against the really nasty ARO pieces (like linked kamau) it's usually worth just spending a coordinated order and sacrificing a piece to kill the ARO rather than risking your HMG against it (a knight actually survives that exchange with at least 1W ~42% of the time which isn't exactly unlikely).
