On the use of terrain zones in missions

Well they are incorrect.

 

That's a logical fallacy right there. Just because people are used to think of something as valid does not make it valid.

 

Agreed.

To elaborate: most of the community recognizes that Camo/Mimetism is a major bargain relative to its worth, and is beneficial against pretty much everybody. Visors less so, even factoring in the possibility of MSV2 smokeshoot (which not everyone can do.)

Visors become significantly better, and more appropriately balanced with their cost, if players can routinely use Visor wearers to benefit from firing through low-viz zones.

 

I think some of the low viz zones have to take the place of pieces of total cover. If you had had a building there instead of some bushes, the Myrmidons would have been even safer. If it's a low-viz zone, they are almost safe, unless the opponent has a visor or rolls a critical 1 or similar.

 

Agreed to a degree. I think the inherent nature of Infinity as a system of "soft counters" usually means that whether an opponent is -6 to hit or even -12 to hit, it generally doesn't matter because there are other ways to solve that problem. Even if you don't have a visor, pretty much everyone has some kind of access to direct template weapons, mines, Speculative Fire, CC badassess, link-busting Infowar like Jammers, etc. which all give you other ways to crack a link and hurt opponents that are otherwise very hard to kill with a conventional face-to-face roll.

Besides, if everyone grows accustomed to terrain, then everyone is trained in the notion that ultra-hard-to-hit Myrmidons might be a thing they encounter. This means that players will indeed bring those effective counters, and avoid the "gearcheck" phenomenon.

I'm pretty guilty of this... When I play NCA, I pretty much skip bringing Visors. I find I just don't need them. But if I regularly played Myrmidons running around in forests, then troops like Aquila, Deva MSV2, Black Friar become a lot better, and correspondingly I'd take them a lot more often.

 

The point was never about something being valid in theory. It's about convincing bunch of people to adapt an entirely new approach to table building when the old one is less effort and worked for them for years.

For the record, reports from last year's Interplanetario suggest that out of dozens of tables there was like one with foliage (no idea if it even counted as such rule-wise) and a single table, or even match with environmental effects (but it was something stupid like table-wise low vis zone).
I'm not sure if that is true (correct me if I'm wrong), but if it is, it's kind of hard to convince people that terrain zones are important when largest tournament hosted by people closest to "they can tell us how to play" category you can ever get was set up like that.

And seeing how CB keeps pushing for TAGs and low order count in general, to the point of making IP LI this year, I doubt they will build tables around gear checks that benefit toolboxy lists, with most of LI lists not being rife with either narrow specialist pieces or orders to work around corresponding problems.

I agree. Although benefits of optical mods and camo convinced some people that even a significant investment such as MSV1 links occasionally worth it.

 

It was around ten out of 58 which is still appallingly low, but the Interplanetary (like all big Infinity tournaments) is dependant on terrain supplied by other people. :-(

http://www.lead-rising.com/2017/08/interplanetary-2017-table-dump.html

 

Leaving terrain to the players is feanlly speaking a mistake.
Every meta/tournament will do their own thing or even worse - cook up horrible house rules.
There was thia one table that was just the interior of one giant building in game 3 of a tournamnet.... looked great, played not so great against 4 completely untouchable Mutts.

Personal oppinion is that there should be a secondary level of Mission composition that dictates enforced terrain.
Linking all terrain to specific missions would be terrible. But the thought of being able to prepare for a mission that is linked to a terrain template sounds great.

To elaborate there could be a second layer for ITS missions. A set of predefined Zones, terrain pieces and types to attach to Missions.
To spell it out "Mid Tier Annihilation" could instead be Mid Tier Annihilation - Visibility" and then includes a fixed set of Low Vis/White Noise Zones/terrain pieces.
Alternatively those temlates could simply require you to place X items out of different categories, which each template combining different categories and a variaton of numbers.

It's important this should be a "Addon" to the main mission with no intention to dominate the entire table with the added stuff.
But it would mean you can work various Skills and gear into a list/strategy and give them value before seeing the table.

 

Right now I'm running a modified version of Campaign : Paradiso , and I'm honestly unsure if the 'hostile environment' rules are worth it. They seem like a bit of a hassle to me, but "Jungle Ambush" completely covers the board in them...

 

To be honest, those "do bad things on a particular roll no matter what you roll for" rules seem like an afterthought to me. Especially when the entire board is covered by such a zone. In latter case it just becomes a pointless roulette unless you can try to win doing significantly less rolls per model than your opponent.

 

I mentioned it earlier, but we used the Dangerous Terrain rules for streets with traffic. You lay out a bunch of cars on the road, but instead of moving the cars and making people dodge them, we assigned a danger level based on the assumed speed of the street.

Worked pretty well.

 

I really like that, one addition I would make would be to have those kind of roads also be a Saturation Zone. After all, if you can get run over by a car it would make sense some of your bullets would hit them.

 

The train mission in Paradiso just flat killed anyone and everyone on the tracks outright, regardless of wounds, when the train arrived (in Turn 2, IIRC). Even a TAG was dead.

One of the things we added to the street traffic rule was that you needed to make a WIP test to cross the traffic lane. You could stand on the line without trouble, but if you fail the WIP roll to cross you're too scared to move. Roll the Danger number and some asshole ran you over.

 

Danger zones make much more sense when they don't cover entire boards. Put them into right places and they become a factor in risk/reward game we play. Otherwise, like I said, it's just something almost randomly cleaning a board from models.

Traffic areas is one may to make it. And a WIP roll is okay to make sure risk considerations are taken regardless of what you are going to do there, if you need that. Oh, and since it's WIP rolls we're talking about, it also works as a stealth reference to that piece of fluff where some PanO dudes became road kills because they did not update virtual street sign database

 

I remember that previous iterations of Interplanitario also had low vis zones, saturation zones, etc just as table effects not attached to terrain. I guess that wasn't popular.

But I would legit like to see stuff like that.

Have a couple of illuminated areas on the ground, and say the rest of the board is low vis because its dark.

Have a table with infinitely high buildings with interiors and say its raining outside so its saturation.

Terrain effects are there and a lot of skills interact with them - we really should make more use of them.

 

I had a subway station table with tracks and a train. My friends and I had a rule that each game round at the beginning of the round we'd roll to see if the train was coming. You can hear a train coming, and see the light in the tunnel. If the train was coming that round and you were still on the tracks at the end of the round, you got squished, auto-dead. And we'd put the train on the board, too, which would cut lines of sight. Sometimes we'd even have civilian objectives arrive by train.