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Terrain in 8th edition seems a little uninspired to me. Both in looks, and rules. It seems like what terrain you use is now of little concern. The only things you have to ask is "Does this block line of sight?", and "does this grant +1 to my save?"

Because of these rules, I see most boards becoming much less inventive visually as well, both in online battle reports and at the FLGS. So, with that in mind, what are some rules we could use to spice things up? Also, is there any type/piece of terrain you'd like to see more of because of how it looks or effects tactics?


On the rules side, I'd like to see "rough terrain" make a return. It seems odd that a soldier can move just as fast through a waste-deep boggy marsh as they can walking across a parking lot. Modeling wise, it makes river terrain pointless, and bridges over those rivers even more pointless. And I like rivers darn it.


Also, not all places are good to be when you are being shot at. Being in shin deep mud without cover is worse than standing on pavement. At least a moving target can be hard to hit. With that in mind, I'd like to see certain terrain pieces have a -1 modifier to armor saves.

On just a playstyle side, I'd like to see more boards with footbridges, walkways, and gantries. Bridges long enough and tall enough to drive a vehicle/monster under, while being so narrow vehicle/monster can't actually be on them. Not only does this add to the 3-dimensional feel of the game, it creates areas that are infantry-specific. Being forced to diversify can create more interesting games. Narrow alleyways can also accomplish this. Two buildings close enough that single-file infantry on 32mm bases may pass, but a Carnifex would be stopped.

 cuda1179 wrote:

On the rules side, I'd like to see "rough terrain" make a return. It seems odd that a soldier can move just as fast through a waste-deep boggy marsh as they can walking across a parking lot. Modeling wise, it makes river terrain pointless, and bridges over those rivers even more pointless. And I like rivers darn it.

In my experience, those sorts of terrain pieces were treated, in game, as impassable terrain most of the time, as units would simply avoid going into them, because there was a chance of being bogged down for 2-3 turns and rendered completely useless. In a game where you might get only 6 turns of movement, losing effectively 2 of those turns (taking 3 turns to move what you normally could in 1) was too expensive and it was better to simply go around.

Granted, there are other options to restrict movement than just random distance - for example, terrain might make Advance moves impossible - but I get the feeling players will just avoid going into terrain if at all possible if it overly restricts movement. Losing 2" isn't so bad when it's a Charge move, but 2" off normal movement when most units are 4"-6" is pretty rough and makes a 6" piece of terrain a tarpit.

Haha, yeah.. most people genuinely advocate for tournaments to have flat blank tables with black or grey plain boxes as terrian. It's like, what's even the point of playing if you're on a table like that? I know it's more competitive but at what cost? Look at all the high level competitive games in the e sports scene. The games look amazing and that's what attract such a large audience... Honestly, to make them more fair it would probably be better to have just plain developer boxes representing the map but it would look awful and turn people off. These games arn't just there for people to watch the player, they're there to see an awesome looking game!

Scientifically the shape and colour of your armies actually change and determine how you play and how your opponent plays. For example, if your army is painted red you're actually more likely to play aggressively while your opponent plays more submissive. It's a genuine fact! So, should we ban the colour red now to make it more fair? Because if you play a blue army the relaxing colours actually slightly increase your brains tactical thinking and helps you make clearer tactics. So should we now ban blue and red? At what point do we stop to make the game fair and competitive?

This has always been the case with Warhammer 40K. It's probably the least hobby-intensive wargame you'll see amongst the others. That's mostly to do with its audience and the average age/wage of the gamers themselves. If you look at historical wargaming which is more popular with 40-60 year olds you'll see a lot more gorgeous tables simply due to the time and attention to detail they have for those kind of games.

While my current tables are a bit uninspired, I do try to push our terrain a bit when possible. Most people will have 5-6 different armies before they consider actually assembling a proper table and terrain.

One of our tables from the other weekend:


Another week:


My buddy's fantastic table:

Terrain should absolutely drive tactics, but in a game with so few turns, highly restrictive terrain will just make everyone bring flying units to take advantage of their unrestricted mobility.

Choke points like bridges are a classic tactical problem, but it's also one that penalizes certain armies really heavily, while other armies can basically ignore the need for a bridge in the first place - certain Eldar or Tau forces will just fly across the river. Tau and Eldar vehicles are already quite good, this sort of scenario makes them godly, while mechanized infantry in Rhinos and Chimeras will bottleneck horrifically, Ideally, a good bridge scenario will have 3-4 bridges, YMMV.

I do miss terrain that restricted the range of shooting (woods did this once upon a time, unless you were Kroot).

I use a lot of acid lakes/rivers on my tables, so our rules are simple. Any model which starts, ends, or passes through acid during its turn must take an armour save or suffer one wound (units with <FLY> exempted). We've even had games when objectives were in the middle of the acid ocean. While some armies are more prone to use that - almost everyone has robust units, or jump pack units, flyers, or heavy vehicles they'll risk. Of course we do a lot of bridges and walkways too - so it's rarely a genuine bottleneck, simply an added terrain feature.

Elbows, Wow, floating islands. Very Avatar inspired. In your second pic I see you have a Pegasus techno-bridge. Nice piece, I love mine.


Terrain doesn't have to totally neuter armies. Simple rough terrain could be something like "move through it, take a -1 modifier to your movement".

Also, how about roads? If a non-flying unit moves completely on a road add +1 to its movement. The sword cuts both ways then.

We haven't used them yet, but we've decided on rules for things like mine fields - if a model choose to Advance or Charge through part of the mine field you roll a dice per model, suffering a mortal wound on a roll of '6' (or something to that effect).

We have other house rules, such as the sliding doors on the power station take 3" to open or close (allowing units to hide out of line of sight, etc.).

I see a lot of complaints about terrain and cover rules in 40K, but it's soooooo easy to make up your own, I have a hard time taking this complaint seriously - if you're unwilling to put some work into the game, it'll always be a bit more boring.

I like somewhat abstracted area terrain. Not in the sense of just laying down flat pieces of fabric with "forest" or "building" written on them, but rules saying things like x" of forest is considered line of sight blocking, even if a model can technically see in between the trees (it's assumed that there is a bunch of undergrowth that isn't represented for practicality's sake). That can go too far, as IMO a 1.5" hill blocking LOS to a 6" tall war machine is pretty lame.

Would putting a lot of sections of ruins or forests onto bigger bases effectively be creating area terrain in 8th edition? It stinks in that it would be less versatile, but it might be an easy solution.

I wouldn't mind more advanced terrain rules if they didn't slow the game down too much. My brother and I were talking about getting much more creative with terrain house rules (destructible terrain, +2 cover saves for certain terrain, etc.) but that works better for garagehammer between friends than pickup games at a store.

I'll have to see if I can find my old Codex: Cityfight. I remember it having a lot of terrain rules that were both pretty complex but also abstracted so they would play quickly. One thing I though was interesting was the rules for dividing large buildings up into different sections so that enemy units could occupy different sections and fight eachother. Again, that's probably something that would need some pre-game discussion unless building started to be made following certain dimensional specifications.



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 Elbows wrote:
One of our tables from the other weekend:

Spoiler:

Another week:

Spoiler:

My buddy's fantastic table:

Spoiler:

Nice!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I was talking with my brother, and we were thinking about going with the old system of certain terrain "attacks" having a strength, AP and damage profile. I understand why GW went with mortal wounds, it makes things easier to remember and faster, but it seems to punish more elite, heavily armored infantry that narratively should be more protected than hordes of light infantry.

I've got to say, I did like area terrain in the past. Forests today are stupid. If you model them to be line of sight blocking, then they are unplayable. If you model them so you can place models there, they don't block line of sight.

One of the times "magic cylinder" makes total, logical sense.

We just use normal line of sight...so if you're behind forests we give you cover. No big deal.

I'd like to see a dedicated table of a city frozen in ice with a couple inches or so of city under a translucent resin and bits of building, tress, etc. poking up through the ice. I think the effect would be pretty jawdropping and go great in a dedicated gaming room.

That sounds pretty awesome. I was thinking it would be cool for a flooded city as well, but while the terrain would look good it would be weird to see armies of dudes walking on water.

 cuda1179 wrote:
I've got to say, I did like area terrain in the past. Forests today are stupid. If you model them to be line of sight blocking, then they are unplayable. If you model them so you can place models there, they don't block line of sight.

One of the times "magic cylinder" makes total, logical sense.

Incidentally AOS 2nd ed went to that kind with forests...1" LOS, beyond that no LOS.

tneva82 wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
I've got to say, I did like area terrain in the past. Forests today are stupid. If you model them to be line of sight blocking, then they are unplayable. If you model them so you can place models there, they don't block line of sight.

One of the times "magic cylinder" makes total, logical sense.

Incidentally AOS 2nd ed went to that kind with forests...1" LOS, beyond that no LOS.

I like this, maybe modify it to if you are within 3" of the terrain and your target is max 3" away it's targetable but both would get a cover modifier to represent projectiles impacting/ricocheting off of intermediate cover.

all of the boards I set up are generally 2 large Los blockers in middle and various craters/ruins populated thru out, so there is no spot on the board where you can see all the way across it.

Racerguy180 wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
I've got to say, I did like area terrain in the past. Forests today are stupid. If you model them to be line of sight blocking, then they are unplayable. If you model them so you can place models there, they don't block line of sight.

One of the times "magic cylinder" makes total, logical sense.

Incidentally AOS 2nd ed went to that kind with forests...1" LOS, beyond that no LOS.

I like this, maybe modify it to if you are within 3" of the terrain and your target is max 3" away it's targetable but both would get a cover modifier to represent projectiles impacting/ricocheting off of intermediate cover.

all of the boards I set up are generally 2 large Los blockers in middle and various craters/ruins populated thru out, so there is no spot on the board where you can see all the way across it.

We have house-ruled this, so that it is possible to look into and out of a forest, but can not see through it.
So a model behind the forest is hidden (and can not see anyone on the other side either), but as soon as it enters the forest, it can be seen from any direction and shoot out of the forest in any direction. Obviously it is also in cover.

It's a bit more abstract, but then we don't have to measure distance within the forest, which would be a bit annoying to do with the occasional tree getting into the way of the measuring band.

At this point any terrain rules at all would be welcome. IMO, it's the biggest failing of 8th so far because good terrain rules are so important in games of this scale. The problem seems to be because GW don't want to have generic terrain rules, instead concentrating on rules for their own terrain pieces so we have the ridiculous situation where we have rules for "Promethium Pipes" but no really functional, fleshed-out rules for forests.

Even without coming up with rules for specific terrain, I'd like to see much more detailed guidance from GW about how to set up a table. I know a lot of newcomers at our club are surprised by the amount of terrain we use and I suspect it's because people generally use much, much less than they should.

Terrain rules are pretty naff - I can see an aerial! Fire all weapon systems at the tank!

Something like area terrain would be a vast improvement.

Terrrain in 8th is absolutely dumb. The amount of times i've had to explain that units don't grant cover and terrain not giving cover if you aren't close to it (as in, a unit is 20 inches away, and terrain is blocking LoS partially 10 inches away) is mind boggling.

8th edition doesn't have terrain, it has table decoration.
GW has no interest in slowing the game down with terrain rules.
Actually having to play arround terrain would stop it being fastest ever edition

Ice_can wrote:
8th edition doesn't have terrain, it has table decoration.
GW has no interest in slowing the game down with terrain rules.
Actually having to play arround terrain would stop it being fastest ever edition

If they want fastest edition ever they should a) reduce rerolls b) do something for those god damn awful FNP rolls. Nothing like rolling 10 d3 damage hits against 6+++ guys. Any suggestions on how to speed up the process?

IMO terrain should balance the game.

In 7th it didn't. In 7th, Eldar and Tau were able to do move-shoot-move on some of their best units, which made LoS blocking terrain work in their favor because they could effectively hide their units from slowly moving shooty units and melee units.

Cover saves worked in favor of the few armies that could ignore cover saves, so Tau in particular.

So in that sense, 8th terrain rules are actually better than 7th.


Enough jokes, some things I think would be nice:
- Perturbations in gravitational/electrical/warp fields: This piece of terrain counts as an enemy unit for units that arrive from reserve. Helps armies with bad/no cheap screening units against deep strike and similar things an reduces the need for chaff for all armies.
- Roads: Roll an extra die when advancing/charging(?) and discard the lowest.
- Woods that block LoS when a targeted unit is within that wood and the enemy shoots from more than x".
- The first level of a ruin blocks LoS.

....there is terrain that creates an infantry specific area, it's called a ruin.

There is also rough terrain that restricts movement. However you usually have to give some incentive for people to want to go into it otherwise they just won't.

the_scotsman wrote:
....there is terrain that creates an infantry specific area, it's called a ruin.

There is also rough terrain that restricts movement. However you usually have to give some incentive for people to want to go into it otherwise they just won't.

Isn't +1 to saves good enough⸮

tneva82 wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
8th edition doesn't have terrain, it has table decoration.
GW has no interest in slowing the game down with terrain rules.
Actually having to play arround terrain would stop it being fastest ever edition

If they want fastest edition ever they should a) reduce rerolls b) do something for those god damn awful FNP rolls. Nothing like rolling 10 d3 damage hits against 6+++ guys. Any suggestions on how to speed up the process?

Unfortunately it depends alot on your opponents, against 1 wound models most people are reasonable enough to just pick up those models in a casual game.

If its 1 big multiple wound model who cares roll the d3's and then whatever the result of 6+++'s mass.

If its 2 or 3 wound models it's really hard to speed it up as doing anything but slow rollinh baisis the results.

Sonic-style accelerator strips.

I'm still annoyed we didn't get the rumoured rules for faction-specific terrain when the 7th ed Tyranid codex dropped.

Digestion pools, spore chimneys, etc.

Personally I feel GW have missed a trick both in terms of not having more faction-specific terrain (with decent rules) and also making fortifications so poor (again).

Hedges.
Walls.
Fences.
Barricades.
Roads.
Scrub.
Scatter terrain.

Every 40k game I see is 2 small buildings in two opposite cornets.
2 medium buildings in the other opposite corners.
And 1 large building in the centre.
All of which will probably be unpainted or just undercoated.
BOOOOOOOOORING!!!!!
Even chess has more terrain.

You look at the average boards for Historical games like Napoleonics or WWII and it puts your average 40k or fantasy board to shame.
But these people have pride in what they do. Which is a huge factor.

Before we can have better terrain we need better terrain rules.

Terrain rules is just another example of where GW screwed up 8th by oversimplifying.

I personally like seeing hills, trees, rivers. Armies actually fighting it out in the field rather than grinding their objective city into dust...