Greetings With 1.1, the FAQ introduced the need to "pay" for the movement to flip on top of a building. This creates an issue for slow, wide model such as Andromeda. If a obstacle is between ]46.6mm and 55mm[, Andromeda cannot climb the obstacle at all regardless of if the obstacle has a ladder or not. This issue happens if a model's first MOV value is less than twice the widht of their silhouette, and if they width is bigger than their height. The profiles affected by this change are S4 Baggage REM, Voronin, Alpha and Andromeda. Extra explanation Purple height: She can vault since she's taller than the obstacle. Green height: Her movement is more than the height of the obstacle + width of her base. Red height: Her movement is less than the height of the obstacle + width of her base, so she can't do it in 4" movement, AND her base is wider than the side of the obstacle, so she can't hang on the side. Blue height: Her movement base is wide enough that she can hang on the side of the wall on the first movement and then clear the top on the second movement.
This isn’t a situation created by the FAQ, the only thing the FAQ does is move the “red zone” into existing models.
The "red zone" didn't exist for any models pre-FAQ if we followed the wording of this part of climb. The wording pre-FAQ was... "A Trooper that is in contact with an obstacle declares the Climb Skill. The obstacle is measured and is 4 inches tall, the same as the Trooper’s first MOV Attribute value, therefore they climb up and are placed on the upper surface." The wording post-FAQ is... "A Trooper that is in contact with an obstacle declares the Climb Skill. When measuring, the first MOV value of the Trooper (4 inches) is enough to climb the 3 inch tall obstacle and move onto the upper surface."
So... basically (edited)climb is almost in a similar state of being messed up as Super Jump, then? For what it's worth, I'm not entirely sure that miniatures with wider bases than the building they are trying to climb is tall are actually able to climb said building and follow the rules as the rules are laid out. The issue being that it basically becomes impossible to adequately represent the miniature where they are climbing because part of the miniature's silhouette will be either physically inside the table or overhanging the edge, neither of which is allowed and one which is impossible.
The FAQ doesn't change Climb+ (or ladders), it just changes Climb to be measured the same way that Climb+ and ladders were already measured. I'm not sure it's that big a deal - I can't recall having seen Andromeda doing a lot of Climbing before the FAQ - but I think @Diphoration is correct about the effect it has.
The main issue isn't so much about climb, but that this issue also arise with ladders. So if you have a table with a bunch of containers that in the critical range, she won't even be able to get on top of them with the ladder. It ended up being a very big deal in a game yesterday, because Andromeda was stuck on ground level, unable to reach anywhere.
The free snap movement was one of the few reasonable changes climb skill received from previous iterations of the rules. Going back to the "paid" snap is a terrible idea both for possible interactions (like the one mentioned above), but even more for helping a more cinematic feel of the game as this almost completely kills the climb skill. Which was already in a pretty bad place. I understand they probably did it in order to have a "better written rule", since the free snap was a kind of exception to all the other cases of the game, but then a different adjustament would have been in need, aimed at letting the climb skill being playable in a reasonable number of cases. In the vast majority of games, both climb and jump do exist only in their "super" versions as their "standard" counterparts enter the game only once in a blue moon. A similar thing happens with jump and its (poor!) interaction with the so common parapets. I believe one of the salient features of designing common skills, expecially movement ones, is not just having them "realistically describe", through the rules language, the specific action the dude is taking, but also design them in a way that they, statistically, pop up as possible choices in a sufficient number of occasions to be felt being "part of the game". After 1.1, climb is almost out of the table, and jump is still dangerously next to it. And that, I believe, is a real missed opportunity. Back to the specific 5cm-base 4"-4" move models, prefaq there was quite the odd situtations where they could not climb the red heights you point out with superclimb or with ladders, but they could with regular climb. I agree that was quite a weird outcome already and arguably in need of a fix. Honestly, I don't think this specific one can be easily solved, as it's part of the broader situations where the shapes of the terrain do not allow movement or placing for a specific model (like S8 models unable to enter a zone since the base does not entirely fit inside its movement range). It feels odder for the climb situation, but alas! You can always take it into account while creating the board, creating vault-sequences alternatives or the like. Sorry if I went a bit off-topic with all the more general climb thing, but I was thinking about this recently and this thread just triggered it all out :)
Right, but she could never do it using the ladder in N4. Maybe you mean that the FAQ creates a problem (Andromeda being unable to get up scenery of a certain height), and the base N4 rules prevent the table-maker from working around the problem by placing ladders on buildings of that height? Fair enough. In any case, I do appreciate the work you're doing identifying the various implications of the FAQs, whether or not we agree on how serious any particular implication is. This one still doesn't seem like that big a problem to me, but it's definitely worth knowing. Can you elaborate on this? In my experience, the Climb skill is used almost exclusively to get up single-story buildings. It doesn't come up all that often, simply because most troopers that deploy on the ground typically want to stay on the ground. But when it does come up, it does exactly what it's supposed to do - move the trooper onto the building in one whole order. Why was it in a bad place pre-FAQ? Pre-FAQ, for most troopers Climb worked on buildings up to 4" high. Now, it works on buildings up to 3" high. Why does that almost completely kill the Climb skill? I think most single-story Infinity terrain is actually right around 3" high, so I don't think the change will have much effect at all (except on the large-base 4-4 models Diphoration is talking about). What am I missing?
This has never been the case, as can be seen in the example images of the rulebook (p. 41), the size of the base on the horizontal surface has to be within the movement value.
Sure! I'll try to elaborate :) There are always two aim when designing any feature of a game: 1 - translate the situation I am representing using the "language" of the game in a way that it increases the story-telling part of the game. 2 - create a rule which fits nicely inside the rest of the system and works "efficently" towards building a robust set of rules. The first point contributes to the game realism, its instinctive understanding (and, as a consequence, remembering). The second point is more complex as it addresses more points, among which: - balance of the rule - coherence with the rest of the rules for similar situations - complexity (skill requirement, learning curve) - game relevance The latter is my point for climb/jump. A good way to recap it could be: enter in play as to provide players with meaningful choices enough times during a game (or even set of games) to justify its existence. We could also call this "saliency", or something like that. There should be instances where the player goes like: - "Ok, I could walk around that block, o climb that crate and surprise my opponent behind. Mhh, hard choice!" enough times for those option to feel good choices. Alas, the climb/jump choice is 99% of the times the bad choice. Actually, most of the times they enter play, the game experience is more like: - "Crap! I have to climb to get there! What a bummer!!" And, in turn, this also reflects on point1 above, since, by almost never entering play, they diminish the cinematic effect the game could better achive with them being more game efficient. One shorter (and maybe better) way to explain it otherwise is: I don't care how well tuned a rule is towards the rest of the game and how descriptive and realistic, if it does not contribute to the game experience and I only use it when forced to. Rules should create meaningful choices. Normal climb and normal jump almost never do (jump "a bit" better). One could say: "Yes, but in real combat situations people very rarely climb and jump around!". They very rarely shoot plasma rifles either. Actually, I don't care about how good aim 1 above is hit, if aim 2 is completely missed. Again, this of course depends on my own experience as player, so you all may totally have a different one (but also on mines as game-designer and gamification consultant, I worked a lot on "building rules" in the last 10-15 years or so). In fact, I said to me the skill was already in a very bad place, this is the nail on the coffin. After all, it reduced its efficiency by around 25%. That's not a small loss! Expecially if it started as below decency already.
Read the text under the image, which I also quoted earlier. Text allowed snapping, image showed paying. It could be argued either way pre-FAQ, but when an image and rule text contradicted, I believe text took priority. FAQ came to confirm that you need to pay for the extra move and that the image was correct.
Free snapping seems so reasonable. Climbing something is already so order intensive (the climb schematic in the rule is one of the biggest meme ever, 5 orders to climb over a building, good thing they could pay for the move on top, because Andromeda would need 7), and having to waste a bunch of movement if you can't snap to a position is very annoying for the flow of the game imo. Having to cancel a move because you have 50mm of move and it's not enough because you need to have 55mm to complete, making you lose all of the movement makes the whole interaction even more tedious.
I guess? I don't often Climb up buildings, but I feel like that's more because my troopers on the ground rarely want to be on top of buildings. I don't think I've much experienced the scenario you're describing of "tactically I'd like this guy to go up this building, but it would be too inefficient so I'll make a different play." I disagree with your math here. If the building is 3" high, the skill is still at 100% efficiency. If the building is 4" high, the skill is at 50% efficiency since it now takes two orders to climb the building. The actual efficiency loss from the FAQ depends on what proportion of Infinity terrain is 3" high vs. 4" high. Since I think that 3" high terrain is much more common than 4" high terrain, I think the efficiency loss from the FAQ is much lower than 25%.
Yes of course, you can always understand what you want when you read a rule, especially when you ignore other rules to do it: (Rulebook P. 36): When moving Troopers around the battlefield, players must measure the complete route (including, for example, any detour to avoid obstacles) and must always use the same part of the base for their measurements. Every move, and Climb is a move, is governed by that rule. And in Climb it is not explicitly indicated that the General Movement Rules do not apply and that you have the extra movement to put the miniature on the horizontal surface (and no, assuming that a text means something, does not make it say it).
Well, sure, it depends on what you are comparing, I was comparing old and new climb distances, but both maths work. Anyhow, no need to split hairs here, let's just say a 1" loss on an average 4" movement is not an irrelevant change at all! And with other base sizes it just gets worse. Tactically, I find myself quite often in a situation where I would like to climb up or down a building but I end up doing something else entirely because climb is such a terrible skill in order efficency. It's like having a weapon alternative that is never going to be the right choice. There is something not working as it should when this happens. And with climb it definitely happens, post faq even more.
That image was also physically impossible if you took a real ruler to it ... which i did in another thread: Here you can see that by using the figure's base to measure the height of the building, it's actually 5" high. In fact we don't even really need to measure it to know this, because the same climb that takes a single 4" move on one side all-of-a-sudden takes 7" of move to get down on the other side... that's an extra 3" somehow even though the height moved at the top to hop up on the low wall clearly low-enough to allow a vaulting move and visually can't be higher than an inch. If the point that the figure starts to climb down from is full 6" off the ground, it makes sense that a 7" move would be necessary to climb down and move one base-width forward (assuming no form of snapping on either end is allowed and it's just purely the math of the measurement)... but which is correct? The left side of the image or the right?
Actually, there's even a shorter way to explain my issue with climb: That's my games 99% of the times.
This is my experience as well. Models often either start on buildings and stay there, or start on the ground and stay there, unless they absolutely must get up somewhere. I brought a bunch of ladders for my terrain to try alleviate this issue somewhat.
