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not true at all, I'm playing tau orks and space marines at the moment.... EVERY time, if someone suggests alternating terrain, I tell them to just set the entire table.

Sure, the game is easier when I can shoot everywhere on the board with tau, or hide everything till I assault with orks.... but its not fun at all if I have to start the game knowing the person on the other end is an ass.

Think on it all you want, but your argument boils down to how people invariably want to game it for an advantage. I don't know about you, but I try and play with friends who can agree most of the time. The games are more fun when both players don't try to screw each other with placement, and look cooler when the desert table don't have a giant iceberg sitting in the center of it.

I often play against rather hostile players because that's whom I get to play with. The alternative is not playing. When 6th came out, it was Vendetta spam. Now it's Taudar. In general, my playgroup is competitive and unrelenting. People are gaming everything in 40K for an advantage.

Thats very unfortunate :( At most Ive got one player who is very quick to netlist, three who play very strongly (with their chosen army) and five or six who are very much the antithesis of WAAC.

The largest problems I have are with maturity, not competition, Only one dude at my club tries to force the alternating terrain thing, and he's dropped it since I started letting him deploy all the terrain (it gets boring fast when you have to roll for it all, and deploy it all solo).

Where-abouts are you? Maybe I can help ya find some cooler opponents? Hell, if your near enough, you can even swing by my city and I'll put you up for some gaming! (but the terrain goes rule of cool at my place )

 davou wrote:

Think on it all you want, but your argument boils down to how people invariably want to game it for an advantage. I don't know about you, but I try and play with friends who can agree most of the time. The games are more fun when both players don't try to screw each other with placement, and look cooler when the desert table don't have a giant iceberg sitting in the center of it.

You know, that's fine and all, and among my friends, we generally play for more cool terrain than gamesmanship terrain. That does not change the nature of the discussion, which is the rules for 6th edition. The rules for 6th edition, terrain placement included, make things difficult for assault armies. Whether your friends are cool or not does not change that fact.

The one time someone forced me to play random terrain, I made the stupidest table I could possibly do. I went and go a roll of toilet paper, the broken end to a chair. I deployed the ruins on their sides and facing the corners... Its a garbage way to start a game.

When you don't get your own way you suddenly decide to be as childish as you can be? You sound like a wonderful player to have a game with.

That's the difference. I enjoy the challenge. I just wish GW would make the system more balanced. I do not want to have to rely on friendly terrain to have a competitive list.

 Redbeard wrote:
rules for 6th edition, terrain placement included, make things difficult for assault armies.

Again, the rules for alternating terrain are the fallback option, not the default one. If someone told me that they were having trouble with making assaults work, and wanted a board that gave them some help Id be all over helping them set that up. Same goes for someone who wanted a bit of buffer against a scary assault army.

When you don't get your own way you suddenly decide to be as childish as you can be? You sound like a wonderful player to have a game with.

I was asked for a game and said yes. He wanted to alternate terrain, I wanted narrative, so I conceded and told him that he could place the entire table. When that devolved into a fight, I conceded again, and we setup terrain. I made two attempts to let him have a table he was happy with (whether or not it favored his army was entirely upto him) and he still insisted I do something I dont enjoy, so he got a garbage table from it. I met malice with malice and he's since been very pleased with setting up the terrain however he likes; the games are more fun, and they look better to boot.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

The one time someone forced me to play random terrain, I made the stupidest table I could possibly do. I went and go a roll of toilet paper, the broken end to a chair. I deployed the ruins on their sides and facing the corners... Its a garbage way to start a game.

When you don't get your own way you suddenly decide to be as childish as you can be? You sound like a wonderful player to have a game with.

I think his point is that if you give your opponent the opportunity to build his own battlefield then you are voluntary running into a minefield. Nothing protects your from some major troll-move like a forest of impassable terrain or the aforementioned impassable river of lava. Of course, you can say that you won't play against such opponent but thing is, it was your idea and not eating what you cooked is a pretty dickish thing.

 davou wrote:

Again, the rules for alternating terrain are the fallback option, not the default one.

And, again, I point out that when you have players who want to win, the fallback option quickly becomes the default. That's fine, you can keep your delusion.

I have never played a game that wasn't using the "fallback" option or designed by a tourney organizer. That makes the "fallback" the "default" in my book.

Yah I suppose you giuys are right. God forbit anyone prioritize fun over winning outside of a tournament.

Fun is subjective. Most players, in my experience, don't consider your terrain system fun. Therefore, most players opt for the randomization procedure.

Also, you are completely neglecting the idea that piling the board full of terrain is not fun for the shooting lists.

The fault, as usual, is with GW's codex balance, or lack thereof. No amount of putting down hedges or hills can make that better.

I Suppose I'll conceede that some players may enjopy the randomized terrain, but must re-iterate Ive seen far too many 'This river is lava', 'This statue is a shrine to chaos' and 'Im going to put this book down in front of your quad gun' to place any faith in the alternating play-style. The narrative terrain isn't my system, its the first option laid down by the rules (and again, I didn't bring up rules to say that narrative was the goto first choice. I mentioned narrative appearing first, cause someone else mentioned alternating being the rule default)

By far, the best solution so far was the one where a third party sets up the table. I played a game on a table last week that had ongoing sandstorms. Each unit had to roll a 2+ at the start of the turn of be blinded (nightvision doing nothing to prevent it). An iceberg would have been massively unwelcome then.

Narrative is a blast when the outcome of the game does not effect your advancing in a tournament.

Martel732 wrote:

The fault, as usual, is with GW's codex balance, or lack thereof. No amount of putting down hedges or hills can make that better.

Yes. Yes it can. You've been saying it yourself; bigger amount of LoS-blocking terrain is an advantage for melee and vice versa. The fault really is with people refusing to play with enough terrain.

Martel732 wrote:

Also, you are completely neglecting the idea that piling the board full of terrain is not fun for the shooting lists.

25% isn't full, and you'll also have to weigh the fun of someone having a chance of playing his army vs. the fun of completely annihilating the enemy because there's no terrain. If the only way you (not you personally) can have fun is to wipe your opponent off a board with hilariously slanted terrain then more power to you.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

The fault, as usual, is with GW's codex balance, or lack thereof. No amount of putting down hedges or hills can make that better.

Yes. Yes it can. You've been saying it yourself; bigger amount of LoS-blocking terrain is an advantage for melee and vice versa. The fault really is with people refusing to play with enough terrain.

Martel732 wrote:

Also, you are completely neglecting the idea that piling the board full of terrain is not fun for the shooting lists.

25% isn't full, and you'll also have to weigh the fun of someone having a chance of playing his army vs. the fun of completely annihilating the enemy because there's no terrain. If the only way you (not you personally) can have fun is to wipe your opponent off a board with hilariously slanted terrain then more power to you.

A piece of LOS blocking terrain should be plenty for assault lists. But that's not how GW has balanced the game. The whole point of competitive play is to make sure your opponent has as few chances to "play their army" as possible.

By "refusing to play with enough terrain" do you mean not following the randomization procedures, or going above and beyond that?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 davou wrote:
I Suppose I'll conceede that some players may enjopy the randomized terrain, but must re-iterate Ive seen far too many 'This river is lava', 'This statue is a shrine to chaos' and 'Im going to put this book down in front of your quad gun' to place any faith in the alternating play-style. The narrative terrain isn't my system, its the first option laid down by the rules (and again, I didn't bring up rules to say that narrative was the goto first choice. I mentioned narrative appearing first, cause someone else mentioned alternating being the rule default)

By far, the best solution so far was the one where a third party sets up the table. I played a game on a table last week that had ongoing sandstorms. Each unit had to roll a 2+ at the start of the turn of be blinded (nightvision doing nothing to prevent it). An iceberg would have been massively unwelcome then.

Narrative is a blast when the outcome of the game does not effect your advancing in a tournament.

It's not "some players". It's every game I've ever played. At the same time, I've never ran into people trying to give terrain abilities above and beyond those in the rule book. I've never seen someone try to place a shrine to chaos.

25% may not be full, but it's certainly reasonable.

Using the d6 alternating method of terrain distribution in the book, this leads to the following:

If you assume all terrain is 6"x6", perhaps a generous assertion, but certainly the size of an official GW bastion, then a 4'x6' table would have an average of 12 6"x6" pieces of terrain on it. That's 3 square feet of terrain, on a 24 square foot table, or 12.5%.

If you rolled really well, and got d3 pieces per 2'x2' board section, you'd have a total of 18 6"x6" pieces of terrain, for a total of 4.5 square feet of terrain, less than 20%.

That means that the best-case scenario, using the rulebook-supplied method for alternating terrain has 5% less tabletop covered than the average distribution of 25% recommended by the 5th ed rulebook.

Maybe we are using too little terrain... but the rulebook then is recommending too little. Almost as if the rulebook is encouraging a shooty edition...

"Maybe we are using too little terrain... but the rulebook then is recommending too little. Almost as if the rulebook is encouraging a shooty edition... "

Gotta sell those Taudar!

Why shouldnt they? Shrine to chaos and deadly terrain are both in the rulebook.

So I'm curious, how did everyone who insists on randomised terrain play games in 5th, you make it sound as if there is no other way to set up terrain.

In my experience with randomised terrian against players who insist on it two things always happen.

1. The randomness ends up with a board that puts my opponent at a massive disadvantage and then they start asking if they can place an extra piece in their half or put less pieces in my half. And I've never played against someone who insists on random terrian to remember that terrain can't be placed within 3 inches of another terrain piece.

2. The table looks boring as gak with both players placing everything just within 12 inches of their deployment zone with an open field in the middle of the board.

Also if 6th wasn't so punishing to 6th why is it that on a regular basis we get threads like these with people claiming their assault armies are no good anymore.

 davou wrote:
Why shouldnt they? Shrine to chaos and deadly terrain are both in the rulebook.

I don't know. I've used mysterious terrain several times, but never the shrine or outright deadly terrain.

 Madcat87 wrote:
So I'm curious, how did everyone who insists on randomised terrain play games in 5th, you make it sound as if there is no other way to set up terrain.

Obviously there are more ways to do it. The thing is that gamers, especially gamers who don't necessarily know each other, such as at a pick-up game at a store, are more likely to fall back on what the rules say than to do something else. In 5th ed, the rules said put about 25% terrain on the table (page 88 of the old rule book, if you're keeping score at home). So that was the fall-back.

In 6th, it says "do a narrative, and if you don't agree, do this other thing with terrain density and random rolls". Well, again, getting two gamers who have just met and are playing for the first time to agree isn't necessarily easy, so they fall back to the more tightly defined method, which happens to suck.

I can't be the only person who just assumed that *every* infantry unit in the game would get a 4+ cover save. Now the default is 5+, plus directed fire, is itself a huge nerf to assualt. Far larger than random charge distances.

It's a package of nerfs and buffs for shooting. Arguing over which one is the worst is pretty fruitless.

 Redbeard wrote:

 Madcat87 wrote:
So I'm curious, how did everyone who insists on randomised terrain play games in 5th, you make it sound as if there is no other way to set up terrain.

Obviously there are more ways to do it. The thing is that gamers, especially gamers who don't necessarily know each other, such as at a pick-up game at a store, are more likely to fall back on what the rules say than to do something else. In 5th ed, the rules said put about 25% terrain on the table (page 88 of the old rule book, if you're keeping score at home). So that was the fall-back.

In 6th, it says "do a narrative, and if you don't agree, do this other thing with terrain density and random rolls". Well, again, getting two gamers who have just met and are playing for the first time to agree isn't necessarily easy, so they fall back to the more tightly defined method, which happens to suck.

And yet the general trend seems to be to completely ignore random objectives, despite them being standard rules.

I think the best way to really approach this issue is to look at 5th edition. The assault lists by the end of 5th were getting mostly hammered even under that rules set.

You talk BA, and the GK and Necrons were taking the BA's lunch money by the end of 5th. IG were leafblowering Orks and Tyranids and Khorne lists off the table.

So assault wasn't that good at the end of 5th's life cycle, and then GW made it *worse*. I don't understand how this is even a debate really.

I make a point of assuming the person I'm about to play with can be amicable, rather than disagreeable. They have plenty of time to proove me wrong later, but I maintain starting with animosity hurts the entire process.

I have found that most of the people that play this are at least somewhat disagreeable to start with.

Martel732 wrote:
I have found that most of the people that play this are at least somewhat disagreeable to start with.

Find better people. I couldn't play 40k with someone who's argumentative.

xruslanx wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
I have found that most of the people that play this are at least somewhat disagreeable to start with.

Find better people. I couldn't play 40k with someone who's argumentative.

Those people exist? I guess there must be a few non-gamers that play this.

Martel732 wrote:

xruslanx wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
I have found that most of the people that play this are at least somewhat disagreeable to start with.

Find better people. I couldn't play 40k with someone who's argumentative.

Those people exist? I guess there must be a few non-gamers that play this.

40k is mainly played by people who don't play other wargames. So yeah.