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Hi there Community

I and a Friend started playing Wh40k 1 year ago and finally we were able to get our own gaming table. So with that we bought some Ruins and build some of our own too. The problem we face now is: The ruins are basically killing our game, with their 4+ cover save which is super easy to upgrade to a 2+. It takes just one unit or model with shrouding, Stealth or some warlord trait that increases the cover save in ruins. At first it wasn´t that big of a problem, but in the last game it was just two corridors, each controlled by one big ruin with heavy units inside of them just denying the whole table side. In a situation like that no one wanted to move into line of fire and everyone knew that he hadn´t had any kind of units still alive that would make it through that corridor of certain death! We started to play with some huge los blocker, but putting them right in front of a ruin seems...well stupid. We could just not play with the ruins in the first place with that method. As stated above we have 2 ruins right now. One has the ground floor and a first floor and has enough room for 2 full 10 model squads. The other ruin is a 3 floor ruin with enough room for 3 full 10 model squads and a tank based on the sizes of a Rhino. We also tried to play the ruins as destructible buildings with 5 HP and an Armor rating of 14 but in the end it only took one lucky shoot to let the whole thing collapse causing 4d6 Wounds on every unit inside of it. The reason we have two different ruins is that we wanted to make the roll worth it where you have to choose your side.

What are your experiences with ruins? Do you think they are fairly balanced or do you hate these Terrain? Right now our only solution would be to cut down the 3 floor ruin to a 2 floor ruin to make it less potent, but in the end we are not sure if that would be the right thing to do.

I don't know what you play, but bringing in some flamer template weapons is a great way to nullify the potency of the ruin. A Heldrake simply sets fire to anything in a ruin.

Also, try not placing your ruins too much in the center. Make it a tactical decision whether or not to hold up in the ruin. If it's in the middle, the people held up inside are going to be effective against anything. If the buildings are out on the sides, you can choose to hold your flank really well, but they might also end up too far from anything to actually fire at all.

Sounds like your dudes stand in rather tight formations in these ruins...

Why are you not templating and blasting them to kingdom come then? templates ignore cover by default, and quite a few blasts do too.

If cover became an issue, get cover ignoring guns. there is no other trick to it.

We run tables practically littered in terrain of all sorts, and we rarely find ourselves in a situation we can't kill stuff.

I think the Problem we have is that the ruins are to big or to high. If some unit stand on the 3 floor there is no chance in hell that a normal template weapon could kill them before the unit attempting to kill them would have been annihilated, since it needs at least two movement phases to get to the top floor, so that the model with the template weapon can see and kill them, the helldarke is an exception for that yeah, but not everyone uses him or even plays CSM.

How Big are the ruines you play with most of the time? 1 floor? 2 floors? How many different units can be placed inside of them?

Sounds like the ruins are in your deployment zones with a killing field in between. Purifier's advice on placement is good. Also make sure there is cover and LOS blocking terrain units can use as they advance.

If it really doesn't work for you, make some house rules. Here are some examples. The further you go down my list, the greater the deviation from the standard rules.

- Agree they are dangerous terrain
- Count them as LOS blocking apart from a 1" perimeter. This limits the number of models that can fire so if you position a lascannon so it can fire, it will also be one of the few models available as casualties.
- Reduce the cover they provide to 5+ or 6+
- Cap the best cover save possible including bonuses to 4+ or 3+
- Make them ramshackle (-1 modifier to cover save for each turn of incoming fire)
- Make them really dangerous (test even if you remain stationary)
- Make them haunted (fall back test if you start your turn in them)
- Make them treacherous (can only fire snap shots from them)

I really like your suggestions and I think I will try to convince my friends to play with some of them

The other thing we should try is to place the ruins on the table after the players have choosen their side to ensure that you cannot deploy inside of these ruins, so that you actually have to move to the third floor.

Or just house rule that you can't deploy inside the ruins or at least not above ground level.

Glad you like my suggestions. Don't use them all at once!

There is such thing as too much terrain as well, though cities of death type missions do look fun and seem to be more suspenseful.

I like them, but I usually see at most 4-5 of them on the table. I guess the trick is to not make them too big or if you want a big one, then put one in the middle of the table and have everyone fight over it. Use smaller stuff like craters and small walls around it. Building the table is sort of like building a neutral army.

I actually prefer cities of death ( im a DE player so less tiem getting shot) but cover normally isnt an issue. It when you have cover that you can just sit in and have huge killing zones that its a problem.

Mixing it up so that the cover is spread around, or place other things to break up line of sight.

Lots of cover to me isnt an issue as it breaks up killing fields and forces people to move to be able to get shots off, creating a more tactical game.

Remember that you can make terrain count as buildings. So if there's a big 3-story structure that all the players keep sticking their dudes in, give it the building rules. People will be a little more leery about cramming all their guys into a rickety building after you blow it sky high.

In fact, using the building destruction rules for all terrain can dynamically change the board over the course of a game. Is there a big LOS blocker keeping your guys from getting to an enemy? Blow a big chunk out of it first and then charge your dudes across. Want to give some better cover to your troops running across the board? Turn a flat no-mans land into a bunch of craters with some large blasts.

You can make the terrain rules as simple or as complex as you want.

I'll echo suggestions to place the ruins in the centre of the board to start with. That way the ruin becomes something to take and hold (especially if it's got an objective in or on it), leading to close range firefights and close combat for control, rather than a bunker to deploy your support units in from turn one.

Fauk wrote:
I think the Problem we have is that the ruins are to big or to high. If some unit stand on the 3 floor there is no chance in hell that a normal template weapon could kill them before the unit attempting to kill them would have been annihilated, since it needs at least two movement phases to get to the top floor, so that the model with the template weapon can see and kill them, the helldarke is an exception for that yeah, but not everyone uses him or even plays CSM.

How Big are the ruines you play with most of the time? 1 floor? 2 floors? How many different units can be placed inside of them?

A flamer guy on ground floor can hit the top floor of a ruin. they even put that as the demo picture in the rule book.

other than that, Barrage weapons, fast units that can cover the intervening ground quickly, and as suggested previously, agree to place the ruins only in the outer area's of the table.

As for the Ruins I play with, my FLGS had 6 or seven different ruins, and usually had 3-4 on the table at a time. most were done up as 2 level "only remaining corner" style, and could hold 1-2 squads able to fire. one was a 3 level (ground, middle, and top) that could have 2-3 squads able to fire, depending on how you placed them.

thing is, with most of the GW ruins, there is not a lot of LOS out of them. the Manufactorum only has a few windows and the guard-rail. the Sanctum Imperialis has about the same, with a few more windows and the giant doors. only the Basilica really has a lot of available windows to shoot out of.

The key really is not having ruins in deployment zones.

There's one guy locally who always does a row of ruins in each deployment zone, and nothing blocking line of sight in the middle. Games range from boring to frustrating, depending on the army match up.

Make the ruins something to fight for, where, at the very least, you can assault a unit which has cover-buffing shenanigans (why they kept Stealth and Shrouding as stacking buffs I have no idea). This rule applies to almost any game environment; think of the worst, campy FPS maps out there, and they almost always have the best cover in spawn zones, and a killzone between them. At least on the table, you aren't beholden to such stupid designs.

If the battle takes place in an urban setting then just put a TON of ruins around in a sensible fashion- they'd provide ample LoS blocking as well as cover for advancing forces if the player uses them right.

It would also simply make sense, given that it's an URBAN battle setting.

You DID notice his complaint was that its too hard too kill stuff, right?

Anyway, as for the "cant get in range with templates" problem, in 7th thats not a problem, templates do not seem to care what floor you are on anymore, even if you are on the tenth floor, that template still hits you (getting silly at some point, but these are the rules...)

 BoomWolf wrote:
You DID notice his complaint was that its too hard too kill stuff, right?

Anyway, as for the "cant get in range with templates" problem, in 7th thats not a problem, templates do not seem to care what floor you are on anymore, even if you are on the tenth floor, that template still hits you (getting silly at some point, but these are the rules...)

Yep. Templates hit anything beneath them. They can flame every floor of a building.
Not in my group, as we found this ridiculous and house ruled it to the 6th rules, but according to the BRB, yeah. Multi floor buildings are death traps.

 Purifier wrote:

 BoomWolf wrote:
You DID notice his complaint was that its too hard too kill stuff, right?

Anyway, as for the "cant get in range with templates" problem, in 7th thats not a problem, templates do not seem to care what floor you are on anymore, even if you are on the tenth floor, that template still hits you (getting silly at some point, but these are the rules...)

Yep. Templates hit anything beneath them. They can flame every floor of a building.
Not in my group, as we found this ridiculous and house ruled it to the 6th rules, but according to the BRB, yeah. Multi floor buildings are death traps.

Does it say what is under the template or what the template cover because if it is under they your flame dude needs to get above the ruin.

 Purifier wrote:

Yep. Templates hit anything beneath them. They can flame every floor of a building.
Not in my group, as we found this ridiculous and house ruled it to the 6th rules, but according to the BRB, yeah. Multi floor buildings are death traps.

Why ridiculous exactly? This is exactly what flame throwers are meant to do.

However, regarding the OP, make sure you supplement your ruins with plenty of smaller terrain, and place them in the middle and on the sides instead of in deployment zones. Throw objectives in them and watch as the conflict over them devolves into brutal close ranged shooting and hand to hand. Very fun. But yeah, make sure there is always a way to approach them without be shot to pieces.

My $0.02.

Farseer Anath'lan wrote:
Why ridiculous exactly? This is exactly what flame throwers are meant to do.

Well first, I have to ask, you think flamers can cover 10 floors of a building completely? It's ridiculous even from that stand point.

Second, my group is not the kind of people that go "THIS IS HOW IT WOULD WORK IN REALITY!" because that's an incredibly silly stand point to take in a game like 40k. Instead, we base what is ridiculous on how balanced it is in game terms. And being able to fit every model on every floor of a building under your flamer template is ridiculous.

Third, if you're going to actually go by the letter of the BRB, then illuknisaa is right. The BRB says that you have to put the flamer in contact with your models base and measure from there. That means if you are standing really close to an enemy model, you have to tilt it at an extreme angle just to get it over that one model, which will leave you with only one hit.

Are you playing it like that? No, neither is anyone else. We "touch" the model's base with the template on the X and Z axis, but we hover it above on the Y axis.

 BoomWolf wrote:
You DID notice his complaint was that its too hard too kill stuff, right?

Anyway, as for the "cant get in range with templates" problem, in 7th thats not a problem, templates do not seem to care what floor you are on anymore, even if you are on the tenth floor, that template still hits you (getting silly at some point, but these are the rules...)

The problem was that it made stuff too hard to kill and allowed them dominating line of fire against things out of cover, making advancing on them suicidal.

Having plenty of cover and LoS blocking along the way hampers that quite nicely.

 Purifier wrote:

Well first, I have to ask, you think flamers can cover 10 floors of a building completely? It's ridiculous even from that stand point.

Second, my group is not the kind of people that go "THIS IS HOW IT WOULD WORK IN REALITY!" because that's an incredibly silly stand point to take in a game like 40k. Instead, we base what is ridiculous on how balanced it is in game terms. And being able to fit every model on every floor of a building under your flamer template is ridiculous.

Third, if you're going to actually go by the letter of the BRB, then illuknisaa is right. The BRB says that you have to put the flamer in contact with your models base and measure from there. That means if you are standing really close to an enemy model, you have to tilt it at an extreme angle just to get it over that one model, which will leave you with only one hit.

Are you playing it like that? No, neither is anyone else. We "touch" the model's base with the template on the X and Z axis, but we hover it above on the Y axis.

No, probably not 10 floors, although a flamer thrower has a much bigger range then most people give them credit for, and don't throw flame as much as burning liquid which splashes and bounces, so, yeah, I'd not say no, but you play with 10 storey scenery? I'd love a board like that. The fire fights would be brutal.

Yes, we play that the template can be any height as long as looking down it 'touches' the models base.

We generally don't have multiple floors occupied, as we tend to run armies that enjoy getting close and assaulting, and we clutter our boards with terrain. However, I understand that many people don't, and as a result I'm biased. Flamers aren't really that much more scary anyway. You make the choice when entering a ruin to put your models at risk. It's a risk-reward situation. But, however you play it, go for it.

2 sections of ruins is not enough scenery.
Put a big LoS blocker in the middle, and use it to get close.
Or, put the ruins either-side of a wooded park or something, to get some form of cover yourself as you advance. Wrecked vehicles, or craters, or something. A killing-field between 2 buildings is not going to be fun.

to me the below are good and bad exaples of board set up


Bad
http://www.cardplace.ru/images/articles/Elvis/City/18.jpg
https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSPhyt81PWaZviD-BGC25qETrZrrIuEyQRfu3YU59zJnpY02cMu
the next one is thematic but lends to rubbish games
http://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1376/40/1376401020990.jpg
http://www.dakkadakka.com/s/i/at/2008/6/8/13d4fbc65e82f23409e4b1243ac518b1_5164.jpg__thumb


Good
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MgGeBbWkweY/UmLBcbjC_nI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/JHIzH_lIbE8/s1600/table+plan+plain.png
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQxgempHuwt_BuhRXpj-UIIzHjP3C9YM_GyN6d98UDrAOi8bD58


to me there is nothing wrong with ruins, or even ruins in your deployment zone, however they should not have a clear vision and a killing zone , break it up with other ruins, trees, inpassable terrain etc