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What kind of footprint range do you think ruins should have? How big do you want to see the dimensions? How small?

Big enough to look good & be useful on the table, yet not so big as to make transport/storage a problem.

I like a variety, personally. Big ruins are fun. Little ruins are fun. Lots of little ruins pushed close together to make a weirdly-shaped big ruin are fun.

I'd love to see a bit more terrain that is large, tall, and sturdy enough to give my battlefields a more three-dimensional feel. Gates with arches below and ramparts above. That sort of thing.

Currently, most of my battlefields are just a ground floor and the couple of towers our long-ranged infantry units have climbed up on.

 AduroT wrote:
What kind of footprint range do you think ruins should have? How big do you want to see the dimensions? How small?

As big as you want. As small as you want.

Standardisation leads to stagnation. And that leads to tiny boards with symmetrical L-shaped terrain. Don't fall down that pit.

I don't really use in home games. I prefer scenarios with no buildings, just rocks or jungles and I never liked pieces of terrain that allow campers that are hard to reach. Terrain that blocks LOS and other terrain that grants -1 to hit are a must have though.

 AduroT wrote:
What kind of footprint range do you think ruins should have? How big do you want to see the dimensions? How small?

Somewhere between 10 square inches and 50 square inches, either 3" tall or 6" tall with windows above the ground floor. If the ruin is an L rather than a rectangle it should have windows and a lip outside models can stand on or doors wide enough big models can get a foot inside to get vision through the ruin.

Smaller than 10 square inches and you cannot really hide anything inside it or get cover for a big unit. Bigger than 50 square inches and it becomes too much of a pain for big models. Shorter than 3" and it won't block LOS at all. Taller than 6" and models become too hard to get to with melee. A bunch of Ls blocking line of sight to everything and being impassable from most sides of the board isn't really fair to long-ranged tanks and monsters.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
What kind of footprint range do you think ruins should have? How big do you want to see the dimensions? How small?

As big as you want. As small as you want.

Standardisation leads to stagnation. And that leads to tiny boards with symmetrical L-shaped terrain. Don't fall down that pit.

A 1 square inch ruin is silly and not in a good way, you're better off placing an obstacle there instead. Not everything has to be a ruin, you've got several other terrain types. You're using the slippery slope fallacy. Standards are good, standards like following the rules and errata of the game you are playing, standards like good sportsmanship. Standards like terrain being assymetrical enough that being the defender isn't a pure downside because you have to place the first unit on the table.

I am not saying standards can never be broken, if you and your friends like to call each other nobheads when luck swings the wrong way, if you want to use homebrew or if you want a 10" tall ruin with a walkway at 3" height to another ruin that makes it impossible for Knights (and more importantly Monoliths) to move across most of the table then that's fine, but it is something that should be agreed upon ahead of time. Using terrain that makes it impossible to play with a Monolith is not okay in pickup games and in tournaments.

For context, I’m getting I believe now a pair of 3’x3’ neoprene mats with generic ruins/rubble printed on them that I shall be cutting up into various rectangles and shapes to act as the footprints of ruins. Separate walls can then be placed on them for that aspect.

 vict0988 wrote:
Standards are good, standards like following the rules and errata of the game you are playing, standards like good sportsmanship.

None of this has even the slightest thing to do with what I said. I have no idea what you're blathering about.

I'm making mine with 3" high floors and generally 3" "panels" for the lengths, with a little wiggle room. It means large based models can generally stand on the floors and most reasonably sized minis can fit into them.

My first attempt was maybe a bit wide compared to it's height, but it's still fine.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
Standards are good, standards like following the rules and errata of the game you are playing, standards like good sportsmanship.

None of this has even the slightest thing to do with what I said. I have no idea what you're blathering about.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Standardisation leads to stagnation. And that leads to tiny boards with symmetrical L-shaped terrain. Don't fall down that pit.

Wikipedia wrote:Standardization is the process of implementing standards.

How we set up terrain, how we act toward our opponent and their belongings, how we play the game, these interactions within and surrounding the game should be standardised.

 vict0988 wrote:

How we set up terrain, how we act toward our opponent and their belongings, how we play the game, these interactions within and surrounding the game should be standardised.

I'm going to agree with HBMC here - standardized terrain setups look incredibly boring when every single battlefield looks exactly the same. IMO, even in a tournament setting, there should be some kind of asymmetrical terrain setup. Mirrored terrain is the epitome of yawn-inducing, at that point you might as well play with flat 2d terrain, and at that point, you might as well just go play Warmachine instead.

No to standardised 40K terrain.

As for size? Well, remember the foot print can include different levels.

If you’re using something akin to Sector Mechanicus, remember your linking walkways. Remember to leave “weak points” where you can be up high, but not necessarily have barriers etc.

If you’re going for a cityscape, remember roadways to allow non-Grav vehicles to actually take part, and not be forced into Static Bunker behaviour.

Make it as interesting as you can. Let the terrain become the Third Player - something to be exploited to help bring victory.

 Mr. Grey wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

How we set up terrain, how we act toward our opponent and their belongings, how we play the game, these interactions within and surrounding the game should be standardised.

I'm going to agree with HBMC here - standardized terrain setups...

That's not what I want. I said that the types of ruins should be standardized, not the entire setup, although I do think there should be standards for terrain as well, like having less than 30 pieces of terrain and more than 4. I think GW's 2 terrain setups are terrible for a lot of reasons. I want every car to have seatbelts, I don't want every car to be an electric blue Prius.

For my part, I prefer terrain be reasonable, but not standardized.

Personally, and especially as a builder of terrain, I prefer two types of ruins - small "piles" and large ruins.

By "piles" I mean essentially hills of broken rubble, sometimes with a wall or building corner sticking up out of them. These ought to have irregular footprints, as collapsing buildings don't care about right angles. These are useful as difficult ground, line of sight blockers, light cover, and are aesthetically pleasing in amongst the bigger stuff.

And by large ruins I mean 6" to 18" footprints with 1 to 5 levels of partially collapsed flooring. I recommend using photographs of actual war torn areas - from WW2, Chechnya, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and Syria - to give you an idea of what those ruins could look like. Remember that buildings typically have 4 walls and L shaped ruins tend to disregard 2 of them. Even if that whole section fell down, there'd still be a pile of rubble where it was.

Terrain layouts look and play best when they are asymmetrical and at an angle, as they present tactical challenges that the game rules can't hand wave away. It tests the tactical acumen of the player to best use their forces in concert with the terrain rather than simply pitting two matched armies in a contest of dice.

 vict0988 wrote:
How we set up terrain, how we act toward our opponent and their belongings, how we play the game, these interactions within and surrounding the game should be standardised.

Yeah... still not seeing what I said has anything to do with ranting about sportsmanship and the way we treat people.

I'm talking about not having "standard" terrain, that being boring symmetrical terrain set ups increasingly favoured by tournament types, so much os that it's beginning to creep into regular games. Like how GW's recommended/minimum/standard sized game table has become the norm.

 Mr. Grey wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

How we set up terrain, how we act toward our opponent and their belongings, how we play the game, these interactions within and surrounding the game should be standardised.

I'm going to agree with HBMC here - standardized terrain setups look incredibly boring when every single battlefield looks exactly the same. IMO, even in a tournament setting, there should be some kind of asymmetrical terrain setup. Mirrored terrain is the epitome of yawn-inducing, at that point you might as well play with flat 2d terrain, and at that point, you might as well just go play Warmachine instead.

I played a lot of Starcraft. Matched games were always on mirrored terrain since being closer than an opponent to the next mineral patch or having terrain with better bottleneck geometry could be a huge advantage. And based on those experiences I will always advocate for mirrored setups.

That said, I do appreciate asymmetrical terrain. The problem I have with it in 40K is that people use it and then come complain that they got stomped and then we have to parse what exactly happened to cause their angst. This is aside from the desire of others to tone down the lethality of 40K, because this has been a problem since forever.

For tournaments I'd consider advocating a combined approach of mirrored setups, but then having wildly different mirrored setups. Some loose, some dense, with very different terrain types for each. That way each match is ostensibly on equal player footing, but an army/player has to be able to adapt to very different layouts.

I find large peices with dimensions between 1' square and 8" square have enough space to get squads into them and move around, but are small enough that the table remains modular and you can store them easily.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I'm talking about not having "standard" terrain, that being boring symmetrical terrain set ups increasingly favoured by tournament types, so much os that it's beginning to creep into regular games. Like how GW's recommended/minimum/standard sized game table has become the norm.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
What kind of footprint range do you think ruins should have? How big do you want to see the dimensions? How small?

As big as you want. As small as you want.

Standardisation leads to stagnation. And that leads to tiny boards with symmetrical L-shaped terrain. Don't fall down that pit.

You rejected any standard for how big ruins should be and then used a logical fallacy, that's not the same as saying that having the same two terrain setups using the exact same terrain on every table is bad. It's lazy, but at least it's better than LGT 2018 unpainted insolation foam terrain.

A ruin that is 1 square inch with no walls does not belong on a table unless you and your opponent are making an exception to good terrain standards, neither does one with a ground floor that is 200 square inches and 10 levels above the ground floor. You probably think these examples are ridiculous, congratulations, you have standards. Now, your standards might be a lot looser than mine because you're not playing with or against as crazy armies as me, but I think a table is bad at being a generalist table if it doesn't allow for all sorts of armies to play. Jungle terrain with no LOS blockage, city fight terrain with 12" tall ruins and whatever GW calls their tournament terrain is fine if both players want that sort of thing. It wouldn't be right to spring that on an opponent out of nowhere and tell them to adapt to all situations, because let's face it, if you're using that sort of terrain your army is probably alright for it. I still remember playing against an invisible Skaven Warp Lightning Cannon in WHFB because whenever the Skaven player I played against had to place a forest it would be shaped exactly right to benefit his Warp Lightning Cannon. We should have had terrain standards from GW, then it'd be a lot easier to say "wait, why are we
not following the GW standards here? This forest shape only benefits you" but when a forest can be:

As big as you want. As small as you want.

and in any shape you want, then why not in the shape that protects Warp Lightning Cannons the best?

 Insectum7 wrote:
For tournaments I'd consider advocating a combined approach of mirrored setups, but then having wildly different mirrored setups. Some loose, some dense, with very different terrain types for each. That way each match is ostensibly on equal player footing, but an army/player has to be able to adapt to very different layouts.

No to lottery tables and mirrored tables from me.