So a comment made by a CB employee (I think Bostria) was passed along to me via a chat group I'm part of, that terrain rules are as important as Fireteams in terms of rules that make the game work. On the surface, I agree - those are abilities that troops pay points for, they should get use of them otherwise it's just profile bloat. But then you'll see missions like Rescue where the *entire board* is crossed by a terrain zone, which turns the game into a "gear check" did you bring (or are you capable of bringing) the right dudes with the right terrain skills to be able to ignore the situation? And I've played in plenty of events where the Rescue Saturation/Difficult Terrain zone is the only terrain rule that's come up. The penalty to 4-2 medium infantry is pretty severe, along with the nonsensical Super Jump situation. ("You can't jump over this pond. Which is somehow infinitely high.") A more interesting, imo, use of terrain is if part of the board was covered by it, but the lines demarcating it ran perpendicular to the players' board edges, not parallel. So in a mission like Power Pack where there's consoles along the middle, making an effort to have 1-2 of them be primarily accessible through a terrain zone seems more interesting than, say, just saying "this board is terrain type x." That's primarily what I've seen at tournaments, is most boards have no terrain and then there's 1 or 2 where the TO goes "and this one is a terrain zone hellhole, the entire board is a terrain type and Sat zone everywhere." And someone can tank a game because their army just isn't prepared for that kind of thing. So my thought is, try to make sure every board has terrain zones (and that they're relevant to the objectives), but don't have a "feast or famine" approach with it. Do you guys agree? Alternative ideas?
Hecation, for once, I agree with your comment. :D I'm also of the thought that perpendicular zones would work better (or at least, included sometimes), and would love to see zone in general included much more often by TOs. One of the problems I often encounter is creating clearly delineated zones - either they are forgotten, or they are too unclear / require measuring all the time. Alternatively, some terrain works best with zones but is often either too allowing of LoF or otherwise avoided. I plan to have smaller cloth patches to denote zones more easily and clearly; my hope is this makes it easier to use and thus used more often.
Agreed on all points with you guys (also surprised by that :) ). Smaller areas of terrain are wonderful, especially if they affect access to some (but not all) of the objectives, making choice of deployment more important. I do wish there was an "urban" terrain type though.
Finding good terrain for it can be tough. Here's an example of 3d printed stuff I made with 100% free files. If you have access to a 3d printer you can make some alien jungle stuff in whatever scale pretty easy. This way you can include some without saying "imagine it on this strip".
Rock rubble is "Desert" terrain, but afaik uban rubble (or destroyed Armory doors) are a "typeless" difficult terrain that nobody has the ability to circumvent.
Another thing I've seen is terrain zones making certain buildings impossible to get on top of if you don't have a terrain skill. If you're playing rescue and the terrain zone intersects a building a half inch away from the edge, it's impossible to climb that wall or use a ladder and get on top of it unless you have a terrain skill, because you have to stop once you touch the terrain zone and you don't have room to stop once you're up there. I'd be interested in a tweak to terrain zones described in missions like that one mission in TAGline where they don't include the tops or insides of buildings.
I want to see more terrain effects and weather effects across different tables at events, and just seeing more general acceptance in games. We've been getting a lot more foliage type terrain on our tables lately, and having that different sort of cover (we generally play it as Low Vis + Saturation) really just changes some dynamics in a good way. Terrain affecting movement is something we're really not seeing much of though. I think there needs to be more nuance around this, but other than that its just something that TOs need to push more.
What do you mean by "urban terrain"? Judging by the tables I've played on and that I see in pictures of tournaments, almost every table qualifies for that. I could see it being a terrain type for the Paradiso campaign, or missions set there. Urban terrain is pretty easy to traverse, even in a "moderately" war torn city. The biggest tactical issue to deal with is protecting your squad from the multitude of attack vectors. But when you start getting into cities that have been leveled, I could see it being a type of difficult terrain.
I've always run piles of rubble as mountain terrain, if you can navigate a scree slope you can manage some rubble.
I imagine they mean urban difficult terrain which slows you as you walk through it. Piles of rubble or scrap, that kind of thing.
Terrain zones are tricky, because you have to make them big enough to have a meaningful impact on the game, but not so large that they utterly dominate it. The very uneven distribution of terrain skill types also means that a given board will have a disproportionate impact on different armies. For example, Haqq has more units with desert terrain, Nomads have more with Zero-G, and some armies like Combined heavily feature the Multiterrain skill, which the player can elect to stand in for any one type of terrain in a particular game. Given the high penalties for entering and moving through terrain, even of the lower difficulty, it's frequently better to spend an extra order or two to go around it if you do not possess the relevant skill. Making all/most of the board be of the terrain type negates that, at least, and forces people to deal with it. The couple of times that I've implemented large scale terrain for tables, I've used big pieces of felt to mark out an area covering ~25% of the table. This is big enough that it will include objectives and can't be bypassed, but also still leaves other parts of the table open for troops that really don't want to deal with terrain. More recent missions have flipped terrain around and given a movement bonus to troops with the relevant skill, while having no effect on others. This is overall a better experience, since everyone likes bonuses more than penalties, but doesn't really make a lot of sense. Why would a trooper be able to move faster through a terrain zone than open ground? While you can always come up with justifications based on their gear or abilities, it's still a little strange. And that brings me to my final thought, which is that you can always define terrain to be what you want it to be. There's a terrain table in the book, but it's only a guideline and is by no means exhaustive. You can come up with alternate rules such as the movement bonus, and if you run into weird issues (like tall ponds), the game gives you license to adjust them as you see fit. So let me turn it around - what is the ideal terrain zone set up you would like to see on an Infinity table?
One of the things my group came up with was to treat roads as some flavor of Dangerous Terrain (as per Paradiso rules). If you stood on the lines between lanes, you were OK, but moving into the lanes requires a PH or WIP roll (I forget which). Fail the roll and you don't move into the lane. Hit the Dangerous Terrain number and you mis-timed your move, car hits you. Same would apply to light rail tracks. We'd have two big roads cutting across the table, usually side to side but sometimes on a diagonal. I'd like to do an elevated track and an elevated road, but don't have the terrain for that yet.
Just for the record, "Mountain terrain" should probably be read as "cold terrain." So snowbanks, ice, tundra, that kind of thing. If you look at the examples in the corebook, rocky stuff like gravel pits, sand, and so on is coded under "desert."
Wasn't there some official mission put out by CB in N2 where if you were standing on the train tracks at the end of a round and a train ran through you were just dead?
It could be terrain type dependant: Aquatic and Jungle: One way Low Vis (hiding) (plays like Albedo, only they see it) Desert and Mountain: Always in Cover (using crags/divots) Zero-G: +2/2 MOV (Skimming along with jets) You could also have vines that could be used as ladders only to Jungle Terrain. Underwater tunnels that can be quickly traversed like a teleporter. Rocks could be climbed like you have climbing + with desert/mountain. Scifi generators that could create a 0-G area when shot or hacked. Just some ideas. Edit: Forklifts or cars could be used to generate 0-G areas when shot/hacked as well. It's a bit cheesy to be able to shoot it but I'd want it to be useful. Edit2: because they would use that technology to lift things or hover.
^ this here. I wish the terrain had options like this written in. Cause I love all of those ideas. Its just a pain to get everyone in our gaming group to go in on new house rules
If we can agree on things we could turn it in to a PDF catalogue so groups can print it. That would be a lot easier than trying to explain it in person. We would need some people, esp. Warcors that have experience with placing terrain, to keep an eye and be mean when something would be too complicated to implement or too powerful.
