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Curious what people do for setting up terrain. Just kind of throw stuff out? Randomly roll for what goes where? 3rd party?

Well I could tell ya how me, and my group do it, but I think you already know that one :p Sorry had to pop in and leave a smart aleck comment. I will leave now carry on.

I usually set up the terrain, listen to suggestions of placement, then allow my opponent to choose their deployment zone. My opponents have generally appreciated my fairness in terrain distribution. When one doesn't know which side they'll get, one tends to give advantages and disadvantages equally between zones. For the most part it's been that way since '93. When there is a gripe about the terrain it actually tends to be from both of us. Such as, "that was a really dumb place to put a lake!"

I have a pretty extensive set up of terrain, plus $50 worth of roads that are cut in 2 foot sections. I usually have an 8'x4' table for 4 player games have mirrored terrain. So, 1 large 2'x1' piece and the rest are all 1'x1' pieces of varying height.

My group sometimes would rather have the whole middle of the table filled up with terrain, with no spaces between for roads, but I am a perfectionist and like symmetry!

My group usually fills up 1/4 of the board with terrain then either
A) evenly distributes it among the board.
B) Use the cities of death place everything in the center and scatter rules.

I like A personally.

If there's another gamer around most people will ask for an impartial 3rd party to set up terrain.

I just set it up, and then ask if the other guy is fine with it. I am pretty good at setting it up. Generally they will comment and move something and then we will finish placing it.

Better that than wasting time.

At a store same thing, only with probably more input or else whatever they do there.

I like to just alternate placement. It's quick and both players have a chance to try and shape the battlefield to their advantage, so it evens out.

I set up the terrain to make a pretty cool-looking battlefield with my opponent, without looking to make any side/area of the board more tactically advantageous than another. As both parties are involved, it generally seems to work out ok.

I've got a number of different themed layouts (jungle, ash waste, moonscape, woodland, city, desert) and far more pieces for each than needs to go on the tabletop.

So having all that, I generally try to stick to a theme/story when setting up terrain, ie, a colony amongst a death jungle, a bunker/defensive complex on the edge of the moonscape. Neither player starts with an real advantage in terms of terrain, but there's an underlying story with the terrain placement.

My group usually has a neutral third party set up terrain (after rolling for or deciding on a mission) and then we dice for sides. If there are only two of us we usually alternate placing terrain and then roll off for sides.

I'm a fan of the third party method though because the terrain tends to end up a lot more interesting looking than when we alternate because then both players are usually just trying to set up firing lanes and firebases.

I start off by measuring out board quarters. I then completely fill one quarter with terrain so that there will be 25% terrain on the board. After that one of a couple of things happens.

1) I set up the terrain in a way that I think will be both fun and fair. This is done before I know what mission will be played or what side I will be on. Then I give my opponent the chance to make adjustments as they like. Once it looks good to both of us, we play. On ocasion there will be some mild adjustment after the mission is rolled (like if deployment ends up being quarters and all the linear terrain was set up expecting long edges) but this is more or less limited to rotation of the terrain rather than replacing any of it.

2) Trade off with my opponent placing terrain. They place one piece, I place one piece so on and so forth till its all down. Again this is done before anyone knows mission or sides so it ends up being mostly fair. The draw back with this system is that sometimes you get lopsided terrain becasue someone gambled or wanted to set up something a certain way.

That’s precisely the way we do terrain as well phoenix.

We make one house rule to style 2 though. A piece of terrain may not be placed within 3" of another piece, or a board edge. This prevents area 'walls' by stacking area terrain side by side.

Lately it's been more style 2 than 1, and I don't know if I like it.

In 1, I'm always the one who does the initial placement. But I don't like being in that much control because I feel that I can abuse the placement to my advantage --even if both sides are equal. For example, I can always make sure my squishy things have nice hiding spots. I can keep 4up out of the deployment zones. I can put impassable in the deployment zones. I can manipulate fire lanes. I can make sure that my jump troops have terrain to jump to. I can make sure to give my infiltrators a good spot. All this off the top of my head, with both sides still being 'equal'. So we switched to phoenix's style 2.

In 2, while I don't feel guilty setting up to my advantage, I have found that it makes for a much different game. In general, because we have a small group everybody more or less knows the list they're about to fight, and both players know who can outshoot the other. It tends to go like this: Both players put down the essentials, i.e.: hiding spots, 4++ area for heavy weapon squads, etc. After that, the player with less shooting does his best to demolish any fire lanes while the other player tries to stop him. It becomes combative. It's common practice to 'sabotage' said pieces of heavy weapon terrain by placing a large piece of size three area in front of them --rendering them useless. This makes for very cluttered boards that look nothing like what is seen in style 1, but more importantly, tournaments. In theory all pickup games are preparation for tournaments, so when my pickup games don't resemble tournament play, something is wrong. It also gives a slight advantage to close combat armies over shooty ones, but it's not game breaking.

I know a good solution to this would be to use a third party, but more often than not, a knowledgeable third party isn't available so it's not an option.

Has anybody else had this problem, or better yet, a solution?

-Leo037

gather up enough terrian and then scatter from center with 6 d6. the movement is general and can be fudged to make since

In my group, I seem to be the guy most aesthetically invested in the terrain layout- I like it to look good and realistic and a litlle creative (i.e. my CoD boards often have a small park area- hedges, trees, maybe a hill or pond- which is something I haven't seen other folks do much). I generally first try to make the whole thing look good, and then tweak it so that there aren't any unfair differences between sides/quarters of the board. I probably average somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the total surface being covered.

The way we usually set up terrain is to fill 1/4 of the board with the pieces we're going to use (to make sure we have the correct ammount of terrain). After that we take it off the board and take turns placing it on the board. The person who didn't place the item then rolls a scatter die and 2D6. We then scatter the terrain as indicated (if off the board we reduce the scatter as necissary) - this means that sometimes terrain peices "jump" each other.

I usually use a neutral third party.

Alternating "combative" deployment is a neat variation, but I don't like how the tables end of looking, and as Cypher noted, it's not a good simulation of tourney play.

Make sure we have 25% terrain available, then take turns placing. Then we roll for random sides like the mission says.

This ensures that both players are placing their terrain to their perceived advantage, with the random side determining who picked the better 'field of battle'. After a couple goes people stop placing terrain in really advantageous ways because of losing side picking and terrain gets some nice variation and both players can feel to blame for bad terrain.

It's probably the paintball I played in my younger years, but I like to make the table as identical from either side as possible. I.e. not a mirror, but a mirror and flip, so both players are getting the same basic thing to work with.

Then I let the other guy pick a side.