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All the forests I have played with is just trees. In any natural forest, there would be undergrowth and bushes growing in the edge of the forest stopping line of sight of anything standing just a couple meters within it.

Another thing is that most forest will be impassable terrain for most vehicles and cavalry rather than difficult terrain.

You simultaneously ask and answer your own question.

With the two dominant 28mm games being army scale, actual impenetrable forests as terrain pieces are impractical - hence why their rules don't really cover them that well.

Even for smaller scales - if you can't place models/units IN them to designate they are in there for cover/ambush purposes, then that also defeats the purpose of using that terrain.

This is also where "imagination" comes in.

If you can imagine that Pacific Rim is a good movie, then you are more than capable of imagining that a kidney shaped green zone with a few straggly trees is a dark and forboding sylvan glen.

That depends on the forest. For example, my favorite forest:



Note the lack of undergrowth beyond a couple inches of moss, widely spaced trees, etc. You'd have no problem having an infantry fight in there at 40k-scale ranges.

See a picture of a forest. For one to be nit picking, but forests are rather large areas including not only woodland areas but also large fields and open areas. This picture in paticular is taken right in the heart of an area known as the new forest one of the largest forests in england.

I believe that thicker terran for say a jungle battle would be appropriate with areas withr blocked off or made difficult terrain. But in general non senario based gaming this generally gets in the way of the mentality of getting the game set up and played with as little messing around as possible.

please don't attach non wargaming images to dakka.
Thanks.
Reds8n

Who wants a stupid forest....
But you are right its not something I've seen. It wouldn't be fun for most current armies to play in. Especially if it truly dominated the board.

It would do for kill team or other small squad like games.
Add in muiltiple foot and game trails and a cave or two.

When I set up a game outside of tournaments (scenarios/ect) I use blobby shaped peice of green felt to represent "forest areas" kind of like what you mean. Use them as difficult (but not impossible) terrain and also use them as cover/concealment....

 Crabpuff wrote:
Who wants a stupid forest....
But you are right its not something I've seen. It wouldn't be fun for most current armies to play in. Especially if it truly dominated the board.

It would do for kill team or other small squad like games.
Add in muiltiple foot and game trails and a cave or two.

I would be all over that idea. I love the idea of a forest " Senario" But not general gameplay.

It wont be too impractical. You just need those discs with removable trees, but instead of all those trees, you can have some removable bushes along the edge of the disc.

Say the enemy is in front of you, and your entire unit is behind or in a forest, you should imo, always be out of line of sight.

i completely see infantry can fight in this forest. Vehicles on the other hand...

When it comes to line of sight, this pic is from within the forest where mossy ground and the lack of light keeps the smaller thees and bushes from growing there. At the edge of the forests, if it is untouched by humans, ill bet undergrowth keeps you from looking into the forest.

And if its a forest like this with trails, i can see how its just dangerous terrain for vehicles, and cavalry.

Didn't the 3rd or 4th edition codex catachan have some rules for jungle fighting? They were pretty good as I recall at an abstract approach to representing dense forests without sacrificing the ability to actually play the game.

 killerpenguin wrote:
i completely see infantry can fight in this forest. Vehicles on the other hand...

Can we make it so that tanks knock trees over, remove cover and clear a path?

What im really trying to say is that there is a big difference between a 6+ save in a forest and no line of sight to a unit in a forest. Any realistic forest has no line of sight through it.

Btw. The picture above is a plain with a tree, not a forest:


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Senden wrote:

 killerpenguin wrote:
i completely see infantry can fight in this forest. Vehicles on the other hand...

Can we make it so that tanks knock trees over, remove cover and clear a path?

Yea! Both realistic and awesome, my favorite combination. Not troop transports maybe... A trukk mowing down 1m thick trees.

You need to work on your definitions, that is a forest. What it isn't is woodland, forested areas don't have to have woodland everywhere. I did say I was nitpicking but talking about areas designated forests and woodland are different. My point being that you can have very sparse tree cover in a forest at the edge of woodland and that armies would often prefer to fight there than thick woodlands.

It sort of depends I guess about forging the narrative and all that.

Normally you will see a table with the odd ruin and the odd clump of trees and they arent very themed. It can look a little odd that a "forest" would only be able to hold half a unit of men but i dont really want to get too far into a discussion about scale though.

It would be nice to see maybe even a quarter of a board taken up with severeal peices of area terrain of trees. As long as the actual model of the trees are not to dense as it would get highly irritating having to get your hands between the trees and then knocking trees over etc.

We might differ on some definitions, but I wont argue since english is my second language. I agree armies would prefer fighting on plains....



...If you're Tau or imperial guard.

It would depend how you play line of site. I would rather just say if you are in the forest and at least one model can be seen then the whole unit can be seen with cover save.

Its the same issue i have with ruins, especially the games workshop models, they have only one or two gaps in the walls so means only one or two models can draw line of sight to and from it, which I think isnt very good. Especially as the rulebook says to assume that you can move through a wall as they would have cutting gear or the ability to smash. In which case they should be able to make holes to shoot through

If were talking 40k. You have two holes, where two models can see their target. That would mean only two models can shoot, and if they get shot by the enemy unit and they only two see two, only those two models can die.

So a few things.

1.) For a "Forest" to truly block LOS it would be nearly impossible to move through for any model because there would be too much undergrowth.

2.) It is already a super abstracted game...those "Forests" on the table are often not much larger than say a Land raider, at which point they are not really forrests But stands of trees.

If you really want to play in a forest/wood land you would need trees that are taller than what you generally see on the table, and more numerous. Essentially if you populated the entire table with trees, that were say 2-3" in diameter, and staggered with say 2-3" between them (some in clumps) you really would not be able to see much and those tanks and cavalry though having the ability to "pass" the terrain, would take dangerous tests every time they moved at all.

Which could work for a themed game, but for a standard game, leave the realism at home, the game is not realistic. Otherwise we would get rid of True LOS, beacuse playability restricts true realism.

We usually house rule our woods and forests to block line of sight to stuff hiding behind, but not in, them. It makes tree filled areas more interesting IMO.

Christopher300 wrote:
It sort of depends I guess about forging the narrative and all that.

Normally you will see a table with the odd ruin and the odd clump of trees and they arent very themed. It can look a little odd that a "forest" would only be able to hold half a unit of men but i dont really want to get too far into a discussion about scale though.

It would be nice to see maybe even a quarter of a board taken up with severeal peices of area terrain of trees. As long as the actual model of the trees are not to dense as it would get highly irritating having to get your hands between the trees and then knocking trees over etc.

It would be a great idea, have a quarter of one of the short edges of the board being a forest, you only put trees and underbrush in a line on the edge towards the board and leave the rest open. Would be awesome with beast units to run through and flank for example.

 chromedog wrote:
If you can imagine that Pacific Rim is a good movie,

O.o

What did Pacific Rim ever do to you?

I think a lot of it also comes down to the actual, physical terrain.
GW games like true-to-scale representation, stuff that looks realistic next to your miniatures. Trees are harder than many other types of terrain for a number of reasons:

1) Forests are annoying to place models in. They have to be visually quite sparse in order to put models in and around the trees. See the citadel woods, which only has 3 trees on it.

2) Trees are relatively expensive in 1:48 scale. Trees in smaller scales like 6mm are cheap to source from model train stores, but 40k scale is the high upper end of trains and trees that are barely taller than your tanks look a bit silly. To get larger trees, you're stuck with more expensive ones or building your own.

3) Trees are hard to build cheaply as terrain and look decent. Someone can easily make buildings or ruins from cardboard, but any of the home-made trees I've seen need a lot more cost and work for a lot worse result.

4) Trees aren't durable terrain. The best looking trees with clump foliage and stuff can't cope with the rigours they get put through during games and storage; even all of my club's plastic GW trees have had their leaves snap off in less than a dozen outings.


Warmachine in my experience is much more about the rules, rather than the visual aspects, of terrain. And so you see many more 'forests' because all you put down on the table is a green-coloured area with a single tree on it. Because the game is rules-driven, you see a lot more forests on the table simply because people don't care so much about getting the look 'just right' as they do with 40k terrain.

I just think it would be a nice gamechanger it a 1/6 or 1/5 of the map is forest covered. Like my pic above.

Adepticon's area terrain pieces this year were fantastic, for much this reason - large pieces (roughly 1 square foot), and with all of the elements in place, they usually blocked line of sight through the thickest parts.

The catachan codex had rules for fighting in heavy jungle/ruin. Iirc you no model could see more than three inches through the jungle, and you got a good cover save as long as you were in it - Catachans could see and shoot six inches. They basically required loads of heavy jungle on the board in order to be playable, and I think the fact that few people have a table covered in jungle to play on was a big drawback in their popularity.

 Forar wrote:

 chromedog wrote:
If you can imagine that Pacific Rim is a good movie,

O.o

What did Pacific Rim ever do to you?

Nothing that the last western version of Godzilla hadn't already, I'll give you that.

Kaiju just doesn't push my buttons. Hasn't since I was about 9 (That was when Star Wars came out, btw).
Sure, I enjoyed Godzilla and Gamera movies as a kid - but past that point, they just couldn't compete with spaceships and pew-pew.

My point was about using imagination with regards to abstractions - like terrain in GW games.

 killerpenguin wrote:
All the forests I have played with is just trees. In any natural forest, there would be undergrowth and bushes growing in the edge of the forest stopping line of sight of anything standing just a couple meters within it.

Another thing is that most forest will be impassable terrain for most vehicles and cavalry rather than difficult terrain.

The official tournaments are notorious for having virtually no terrain whatsoever. I'm not saying there's nothing but two armies on the field skipping merrily towards one another but what the hell are they fighting over!?!? It always looks like some blotchy wannabe cover and a few small set pieces til they came out with the newest larger scale terrain. Of course now it still looks like an empty field with a couple fortified buildings.

Why? Who the hell is fighting over East Jesus Land? My Friends and I are just getting back in now but we're building more city oriented terrain and ruined city terrain. Lots of multi-level buildings and tiered hills/cliff sides. Screw the tournaments.

Well tournments mean multiple tables, meaning lots of terrain. I don'r really see them builing that mean tables of terrain when they can build/paint some random building and terrain bits to place.

While it would be awesome to show up to a tourney where every table is a complete terrain set with theme(snow, desert, city, crystal field) I don't see it happening really.
Its a shame because you could add extra rules depending on the terrain. during a tourney this puts everyone at a potential advantage/disadvantage becausw they can't plan for all terrain weirdness or what tables they end up on.
Some Ideas:
Snow: Blizzards that obscure roll a D6 every trun and on a 2 shooting distance is cut in half or minus 6 inches.
Crystal fields - Shooting laser weapon (lascannon, lasguns, scatter lasers) in to a crystal creates d6 additional shots that shoot in random directions roll scatter dice for each direction. Laser mayhem that can help hurt or do nothing
Swamps- Slow down movement phase for foot sloogers.

 Crabpuff wrote:
during a tourney this puts everyone at a potential advantage/disadvantage becausw they can't plan for all terrain weirdness or what tables they end up on.

What it really means is "roll a die and see if you're randomly screwed". That kind of thing isn't fun.

True it could end up that way. You could also tone down the effects. But terrain is supposed to give (dis)advantages, not just be a LOS/cover tool.

 Crabpuff wrote:
True it could end up that way. You could also tone down the effects. But terrain is supposed to give (dis)advantages, not just be a LOS/cover tool.

We've played tournaments before with themed boards, snow boards had a chance each turn to kick up a white out, which in 6ed would be like rolling for Night Fight every turn. Areas of deep snow were considered difficult for vehicles, but area cover for infantry. We've always used the rule that our woods areas block LOS through them, but you could see 6" into them where they only provided cover up to that distance. Did play on a swamp board once where the methane gasses could explode if you fired a template weapon. Dropping a 5" blast on your heavy flamer sister was a bit of a surprise, but fun.