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I noticed this at my FLGS as well as here when I look at battle reports..It seems like terrain is really neglected most of the time. What I mean by this is it always just seems like a few random ruined buildings..Maybe a hill or a forest...and that is about it...

So the past few weeks i made an effort to use a lot of interesting terrain and it really made the game a lot more fun and interesting and my opponents noticed it as well. Throwing in a piece of terrain that really blocks LOS and a few tank traps that tanks can't move through...a few lengths of barbed wire to really make your infantry think twice before they run through it.

It really added a lot to the game and made it feel a lot better. I feel 40k was really meant to be played on boards like this instead of just random ruins throw about.

Anyone else notice this?

Yes it is yeah,but thats our fault... Toy marines be Mo fun to paint

Etched In Pride wrote:
I noticed this at my FLGS as well as here when I look at battle reports..It seems like terrain is really neglected most of the time. What I mean by this is it always just seems like a few random ruined buildings..Maybe a hill or a forest...and that is about it...

So the past few weeks i made an effort to use a lot of interesting terrain and it really made the game a lot more fun and interesting and my opponents noticed it as well. Throwing in a piece of terrain that really blocks LOS and a few tank traps that tanks can't move through...a few lengths of barbed wire to really make your infantry think twice before they run through it.

It really added a lot to the game and made it feel a lot better. I feel 40k was really meant to be played on boards like this instead of just random ruins throw about.

Anyone else notice this?

Definitely. Been going down hill since 07. Sad actually. Very sad.

I am tempted to load up a "terrain bag" and carry with me to be able to always have the option to add to the table the more interesting things that most places seem to lack. Everyone has a ton of old ruins and woods and hills..but it always stops there.

Terrain is always neglected, because people would rather paint their army than paint some hills.

A lack of terrain is what stops me from reading most battle and tournament reports (that and armies where the models haven’t been built). Some people just put nothing on their tables, and while I appreciate that having enough terrain to cover 30+ tables at a tournament can be a challenge, so many fail at it so completely.

I’ve got this image saved in my gallery, edited with my l337 MSPaint skills as you can see, to show a table that has little terrain, no matter how good that terrain is.



Putting a rock or a tiny ruin in the centre of a large tract of empty space does not constitute terrain.

I'm spoiled i think.

My FLGS has a closet full of terrain for all occasions. TOns of the stuff, and most of it looks good.

I have several crates of it at home too, and like a terrain-heavy board.

Might help if certain manufacturers would make some fething xeno terrain. IOM terrain is boring as hell to paint..

Agreed with H.B.M.C.

Here is one of my pictures of terrain in my 500 point Combat patrol Tournaments, done years ago at a local GW store Have enough terrain for 32 tables.

And of course how can we not forget a 4x8 city of death boards. Got 4 of those too.

Terrain to me is as important to the hobby as the models you paint.

im sorry, but that city board is so..... boring.

Thats just as bad as a lack of terrain for me. It might as well be shoeboxes on the table.

HBMC's board isnt far off from being a good table IMHO. A couple more large pieces or some scattered wreckage/craters would help, but its the piece of terrain in every corner and a forest in the middle thats off-putting to me. Its too cookie cutter and not scenic at all.

What a great city board! Those look like they come apart, am I right? How awesome. The desert board is great, too. (Most desert boards I've seen are virtual parking lots.)

Personally, I love terrain, the more the better. I really hate when I get to a tourney and the terrain has been set up like a video game map, with some silly symmetrical arrangment with no conceivable tactical value. I love the board to suggest a story.

I really like making big pieces of terrain.

Its nice to make something that doesn't come with directions sometimes.

The city board has the right amount of terrain, but it should be orientated at an angle so it's not just LOS right across one side to the other.

Otherwise its perfect.

Because to much terrain is a bloody hassle.
We have a guy who sets up nice terrain at our club, but its annoying because it screws with deployment and vehicles.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Because to much terrain is a bloody hassle.
We have a guy who sets up nice terrain at our club, but its annoying because it screws with deployment and vehicles.

This is the strangest comment I've read all day, and that's saying something as I've been reading Kickstarter Comments.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The city board has the right amount of terrain, but it should be orientated at an angle so it's not just LOS right across one side to the other.

Otherwise its perfect.

This is a great point; one of my favorite things to do when setting up buildings/ruins on a table is to orient them to one another, but all at a 15 to 45 degree angle to the table edges. Not square to them. Orienting the ruins/streets so they're exactly square to the table edges, to me, makes the table look more unnatural and like a game board. Angling everything makes the table look more like a slice of a real place.

I do every city table that way. Workout the layout, then shift it 45 degrees to the right or left. Creates nice lanes and it can look like a ruined city (or full city, depending on what type of terrain I'm using - I have tables and tables worth of terrain as I love building it), but there's lots of LOS and movement blockers or obstacles because it's not quite one side to another with no blocks.

Not that a game on the city table posted above couldn't be fun, but it could be quite predictable for ceratin types of armies just as much as an empty table could.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Because to much terrain is a bloody hassle.
We have a guy who sets up nice terrain at our club, but its annoying because it screws with deployment and vehicles.

This is the strangest comment I've read all day, and that's saying something as I've been reading Kickstarter Comments.

when you play a shooty army dense terrain really favors assault and not shooting.

Of course the square set up is ok for the diagonal deployment.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
when you play a shooty army dense terrain really favors assault and not shooting.

And when you play on an empty table it favours shooting over HTH. So what else is new?

The problem isn’t a lack of dense tables, it’s a lack of tables with terrain. So many tables in the BatReps (and various tournaments) are damn-near empty. I even saw one shocking BatRep where the special rules for the particular tournament round told you to remove all terrain from the table (to be fair, it didn’t take ‘em long as the table only had 3-4 bits of terrain on it).

The picture I posted is, as mentioned, near to being a good table. It just needs to put something in those big blank spaces to help balance the sides (one side clearly has more terrain than the other), and to stop it being a battle over such an open field.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Of course the square set up is ok for the diagonal deployment.

You... you... nit-picker you!

Take your biting logic elsewhere!

 Mannahnin wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The city board has the right amount of terrain, but it should be orientated at an angle so it's not just LOS right across one side to the other.

Otherwise its perfect.

This is a great point; one of my favorite things to do when setting up buildings/ruins on a table is to orient them to one another, but all at a 15 to 45 degree angle to the table edges. Not square to them. Orienting the ruins/streets so they're exactly square to the table edges, to me, makes the table look more unnatural and like a game board. Angling everything makes the table look more like a slice of a real place.

This. Quantity of terrain is important, and a visually pleasing tabletop is equally important to me. City boards are fun, but they dont have to be bland.

This is why I like the new random terrain deployment rules. I can't stand the cookie cutter, exactly 25% of the table, mirror image tournament style boards. I actually had someone argue with me that, our super dense board was the wrong way to do it, because it's only supposed to be 25% of the board.

Which by the way, got dropped this edition. Get out of 5th

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Because to much terrain is a bloody hassle.
We have a guy who sets up nice terrain at our club, but its annoying because it screws with deployment and vehicles.

This is the strangest comment I've read all day, and that's saying something as I've been reading Kickstarter Comments.

when you play a shooty army dense terrain really favors assault and not shooting.

And too little tilts the balance to shooting armies.

I've found the best rule of thumb is terrain should cover at least 25% of the board, and be of a variety of sizes and types. Less and assault units never make it into combat, the game's a shooting gallery. Too much and shooting has too little effect.

Personally i prefer denser terrain to sparser.

Speaking of good looking terrain does anyone remember when White Dwarf battle reports used to have custom made terrain? There were some fantastic boards over the years (The Armageddon ones stand out in my memory). Now it's the same realm of battle board trotted out.

I feel that 25% is the bare minimum, 40% is more like it.

Yeah, playing on the planet Billiard Ball as Orks or DE sucks.

Especially when you play vs Guard....

 Grey Templar wrote:
I feel that 25% is the bare minimum, 40% is more like it.

I'm happy with rolling a D3 per 2x2 square, and then adding or taking away some depending on how we feel. The best game I've ever played was a 7k a side apoc game on the Dheneb Capitalis board at Warhammer World, which probably has about 90% terrain!

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?aId=6900034a Pictures of the board about half way down this page.

I've been trying to improve the quality of the terrain I use at home (myself and three others regularly play here). Nothing is better than playing a game with two (painted) armies on a board with great looking (painted) terrain. For a while, we played with a few items bought from the $.99 store and some built items but frankly none of it was very big and battles were usually fought with a fairly wide open board. This past weekend I went to an LGS and picked up the Imperial Sector boxed set (at a steal, $80!) and put together four great looking ruins with enough bits and ends leftover to scratch build some more great looking terrain.

Terrain is what makes the game feel more... realistic? Sparse, unpainted and/or poorly built terrain is effective enough to play a game but it just doesn't give that same feeling you get when time and effort is put into making the terrain look like your models.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Because to much terrain is a bloody hassle.
We have a guy who sets up nice terrain at our club, but its annoying because it screws with deployment and vehicles.

This is the strangest comment I've read all day, and that's saying something as I've been reading Kickstarter Comments.

when you play a shooty army dense terrain really favors assault and not shooting.

And yet shooting armies can still excel in denser terrain. Moving to get better firing angles on assaulting units, focus firing to eliminate chunks of assaulting squads without them getting a cover save (an often overlooked rule of 6th edition), and, if you know you will be facing an assault army, packing a flamer in most squads all do wonders for shooting armies even on dense tables.

For as much flak as 40k takes for not being a tactical game, it actually is once some terrain is placed on the table. It just means people using gunlines need to actually think, though that might not be the desired outcome for some.

Eldercaveman wrote:
This is why I like the new random terrain deployment rules. I can't stand the cookie cutter, exactly 25% of the table, mirror image tournament style boards.

Why you gotta bring tournaments into this like it's a dirty word?

Most of the tournament tables I've seen haven't been cookie-cutter. If anything, they're all wild and varied forms of empty.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Eldercaveman wrote:
This is why I like the new random terrain deployment rules. I can't stand the cookie cutter, exactly 25% of the table, mirror image tournament style boards.

Why you gotta bring tournaments into this like it's a dirty word?

Most of the tournament tables I've seen haven't been cookie-cutter. If anything, they're all wild and varied forms of empty.

Speaking from personal experience, if you have a better word to describe the sort of board I'm on about, let me know and I'll change my post. I don't intend to cause any conflict by the post, and I will freely admit it is an opinion purely formed by reading tournament battle reports online, as I have never been to one myself. So maybe the opinion I have deployed is either very narrow minded, or a case of unfortunate choices of battle reports. I personally hope you are right, and most tournaments aren't as you described, as the tables is one of the few things that has always put me off the tournament scene.

We see this kind of table;

H.B.M.C. wrote:

And we get this kind of comment;

hotsauceman1 wrote:Because to much terrain is a bloody hassle.
We have a guy who sets up nice terrain at our club, but its annoying because it screws with deployment and vehicles.

Yet some people complain that; "GW obviously slanted the game towards shooting!! Those idiots!!"

It's the terrain, guys. Use at least 25% of actual game-affecting terrain (more is even better) with actual LOS-blocking features and it all evens out nicely.