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What do you think constitutes balanced terrain?
As in, how many LOS blocking pieces, how much difficult ground, how much cover, what placements?

Take your table, divide it into quarters.

Pick a quarter, this is your 25% you're going to use for terrain, fill half of it with area terrain templates, each with at least 3 objects capable of obscuring a standard infantry person.

With what is left of that quarter, fill half of it with general LOS blocking stuff such as buildings, tall rocks, tall walls, etc.

That's pretty much the requirement, with the last bit of the quarter left being taken up with various things like buildings, hills, swamp (difficult) terrain, etc.

After that, scatter the terrain as evenly as possible, with each deployment zone getting at least a single area and one LOS blocking terrain, and each a hill if there are any, with the rest to be tossed about between equally.

Edit: Oh yes, no need to fit exactly within the quarter allocated for terrain, and going a little over id better than being under.

So for a standard 6' x 4' we're talking:
1' 6"x2' Area terrain
9"x2' LOS blocking
9"x2' other?

Did a quick scribble on a post it to check up on that, and that sums it up pretty close to standard tournament terrain for me, though it took a few seconds to parse your method of denoting dimensions.

So the following does sound close to what's standard for me:

18"x24" Area Terrain
9"x24" LOS Blocking
9"x24" Other/Mixed

Yeah sorry, shouldn't have been mixing inches and feet like that. I put it down to my upbringing.
I'll give this sort of set up a go in some test games at my club and see what people think.

That would be great.

If you do that at a tournament in Ireland everybody will fall over in shock.

The usual is 1 forest, 1 hill and if you're lucky, a ruin.

More would be good.

This for Gaelcon? Or what tourney, out of interest?

I'm not involved with Gaelcon I'm afraid. I haven't been in a few years either, since the price went up so much.
No, this is musing from travelling round to a lot of cons and seeing the terrain set ups and thinking "Dear lord, is this what people think is balanced?"
If I end up running a tournament any time soon it's likely to be either Confess or Dominicon, both are pretty small cons. But I prefer playing in tourneys to running them
I'll say this though- the Warpcon guys tend to do a pretty good job with terrain. They could possibly do with one or two more pieces per table, and less rivers sectioning off boards, but they run a good tourney.
Getting terrain together is the hardest part of running any tourney, and I've noticed that a lot of places don't really bother. I played on a table at leprecon that was all size 2 difficult terrain. And another that was 50% size 2 difficult terrain, and then had one giant impassable rock on the other side. Confess this year suffered from an unfortunate terrain shortage because the supplier fell through at the last minute. (Not the organisers fault really.)
Has Gaelcon been good the past few years? I'm thinking of going this year, because I have a bit more money than I used to.

Not from what I've heard, and I've no idea who's running it this year. Sadly I'd guess there won't be many at it tbh.

The drogs are having a gamesday the weekend before - http://droghedagamers.com . That will have a lot of people at it, and should be well organised. It's not a tournament though, and iirc has some list building restrictions.

If I had to bank on one going smoothly, that's the one I'd bank on.

Or come to my WarMachine tourney in Models Inc this Saturday instead I'll loan you an army. 500 points, steam-roller rules, 15euro entry, and it's a great game

Aha, you're one of the Drogheda Gamers lot. Cool. I'm from Maynooth originally. Ye were at Warcon when it was in maynooth weren't ye?
I'd love to go to the Models Inc tournament but I couldn't get the day off work :(. I have 500 points of Trolls that I'm itching to get playing with.
Are the saturday things fairly regular? I would really enjoy playing at one, though I'm a bit of a newbie at PP games so forgive my rules knowledge.
I'm working my way through the maynooth gamers with the games though, so far I've managed to hook a legion player, 2 skorne players, 2 privateer players and a Khador player. Also got one of the Galway lads to start Cygnar.
I was thinking next year I would try and get some of the local conventions/games days to run hordes and warmachine demos. It's a great system.

Nah, I'm not a Drog - DGG instead, but the Drog's gameday has a good reputation already. Long as you're not only interested in a competitive tournament.

There's warmachine tourneys every couple of months in models inc. Hopefully see you at once of them soon