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I was thinking about this the other day, but the way GW sells terrain while it appeals to those who want to build a table piece meal it doesn't lend itself as well to people who want to build a full table all at once. I feel like there is something of a missed opportunity for GW. I think it would be beneficial if GW had prescriptive bundles of terrain, like a bundle explicitly designed to fill a 4'x8' or a 4'x6' or a 4'x4' table with the amount of terrain they actually intend for game play on tables of those different sizes. Likewise when they have something like urban conquest or kill team.

I also think something like this would help event organizers, where even if they don't want to use GW's terrain there is something of a "standard" for the amount and nature of terrain on the table.

Thoughts?

Terrain is subjective imo. To some people if you have a single 1x1 foot area of open space, it's far too open, you need to just have every possible angle getting full LoS like some sort of city block maze. Other people are fine with 3-4 big pieces, and scatter. It's all in the eye of the bee holder.

Considering the prices of GW stuff? Unlikely. For a proper table you'd be in the $400+ range for a box of plastic buildings.

They have the 'Ruins of the Apocalypse' board with all the terrain you would need.

I would say yes but

A) GW terrain is often pretty but functionally useless due to 40k's LOS rules. The vast majority of their terrain pieces are ruins, which means they might as well not exist since they don't block LOS.

B) They are stupid expensive. They have sold terrain bundles before, usually with a realm of battle board, and it was like $600+ (USD). Beyond ridiculous.

They did once upon a time with the Cities of Death board.

Though people should make their own terrain, it's dead easy and cheap and can look great. It's inexpensive and a learned skill. There are loads of Youtube channels that cover stuff like this like TheDMsCraft, BlackMagicCraft and Critical Crafting to name but three.

But people don't want to do that. They want everything spoonfed like several other things in 40k.

So you want enough terrain for a whole table all at once?

Easy, you just add x items to your cart & hit checkout..... As an added benefit? You get exactly the pieces you want.

ccs wrote:
So you want enough terrain for a whole table all at once?

But from what I have seen nowadays people don't know what terrain for a whole table looks like simply as GW have not told them so. I see far too many battles taking place on planet bowling ball as lip service is given to terrain.

I've always played (apart from scenarios etc) with 12 'terrain pieces' for a standard 6x4 board. With a good 25% of the table covered in area terrain.

I'd have no interest in such a product until GW releases terrain rules that aren't a skeleton of useless for 90 percent of what they currently sell. They did a better job with that in kill team, so I don't know why they are being so slow in just porting those over or getting someone to write decent rules that takes into account that most of what they sell has a ton of windows that makes it worthless rule wise.

As someone whose current project is the Warcry starter terrain, I think a full table's worth of terrain is going to be a tough sell both in terms of the money it would cost and effort to get it all painted up.

I don't really see GW offering much, or even any discount, for bundling everything together. While they seem fine bundling stuff for a game at a discount, they seem less willing to just do it for a general purpose as seen in the webstore already. So we are talking a few hundred dollars at minimum. It is more likely to be over $500 US. I don't know about you, but that is quite the sticker shock to me.

Then there is the sheer effort of building and paint such a project. Not to say there aren't people out there that wouldn't have any issue having all that stuff in front of them all at once. Just I know I would be super overwhelmed by it, and I have painted up 3 (4 when I get the Warcry stuff done) Kill Team sized boards worth of terrain. Which was still easier since each board is pretty different than any other boards so the tedium of painting never really set in. Even then I still have a couple of pieces of scatter terrain I haven't finished.

I think the current system is fine. Well, good enough, I am not going to complain in any event. I do think the GW terrain is pretty good, if overpriced like pretty much everything GW. It looks better and more in universe than anything I can or have built. And I would rather pay the little bit extra to save the time making my own since I honestly don't care for the modeling aspect of this hobby (but really enjoy painting though).

IIRC the rules say use at least 1 terrain piece for every 2x2 of the table. So that's 6 buildings, right? Doesn't sound too bad.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
IIRC the rules say use at least 1 terrain piece for every 2x2 of the table. So that's 6 buildings, right? Doesn't sound too bad.

The standing guideline has been 25% coverage, which should be a mix of LOS-blocking and non-LOS-blocking. For a standard 6'x4' table that means you need 3'x2' of terrain, which is a lot more than people tend to think.

Why would you buy GW terrain on purpose? Especially for 40k? Most of it is overpriced and completely worthless for actually being terrain in 40k. Hardly any of their building block LoS or provide an actual cover folrtprint at all.

It could be pretty neat, should they do a saving on, say, 6 piece terrain bundle. Like 20% less of what you would pay buying everything separately.

Wayniac wrote:
I would say yes but

A) GW terrain is often pretty but functionally useless due to 40k's LOS rules. The vast majority of their terrain pieces are ruins, which means they might as well not exist since they don't block LOS.

B) They are stupid expensive. They have sold terrain bundles before, usually with a realm of battle board, and it was like $600+ (USD). Beyond ridiculous.

This, There terrain is often to expensive. And not very good for the price. But i would think it would be helpful to have the company work out and sell what they think is a full table. As well as have some better options for a reasonable price. Its doable and i think its hard enough to find good sci fi Terrain that there is a market for it if they do it.
I still to the life of me think they are missing out on good city fight rules and Terrain, as i think its the one place where the game still seems to play ok.

The expense is kinda secondary to what I was thinking about. It was more that there is something of a disconnect between how much terrain you're "suppose" to use in a game and how some people want to buy that much GW terrain in one go. Lets face it some people will drop $300 or $500 in one go, but what I'm really getting at is the information gap. Who knows GW could always sell it at a discount, it just depends on how such a table in a box kit is marketed. I mean, I know some game stores that like having terrain for 40k, but the people running the store don't play and don't really know how much terrain they need to buy for the store. So us hobbyists might not even be the intended buyer. Its the idea of GW more directly prescribing how much terrain should be used at different sized games by saying "this much" and by showing how many of a variety of kits that is.

 CragHack wrote:
It could be pretty neat, should they do a saving on, say, 6 piece terrain bundle. Like 20% less of what you would pay buying everything separately.

I imagine the "best" price we'd see would be comparable to the "best' prices on terrain we've already seen, which would be the Kill Team Killzones. If you break down the regular terrain kits you're paying $16-$18 per sprue, but the Kill Zones typically break down to $11 a sprue, but that doesn't take into consideration whatever price you would associate with the booklet and cards that come in that set. Using, the $11, and going by the Kill Zone Sector Mechanicus set you'd need 4 or maybe 5 of those sets for a fairly dense 4'x4' - $400 to $450... From a marketing stand point it would be straight forward, to say $400 for 4'x4', $600 for 4'x6', $800 for 4'x8'... and there could always be extra sprues beyond just directly scaling up the the 4'x4' for the larger tables.

I'd say something slightly different.

I mean I couldn't justify £200 on one load of terrain, as it'd take me ages to build/paint and blow my gaming budget for a long while.

Why not release them separately, and in full bundles... but also do narrative campaigns which suggest which maps or things can work together.

Then I could buy bits piece by piece by be able to follow a theme (I like the new Kill Zones and Sector names), but also use them in the plans that I see in the books or missions.

 Hollow wrote:
I've always played (apart from scenarios etc) with 12 'terrain pieces' for a standard 6x4 board. With a good 25% of the table covered in area terrain.

I think that's a good rule of thumb, but if its someone less familiar with the edition or rules in general what constitutes a "terrain piece"?- I know some Tau players that would be happy with using the Munitorum shipping containers set to only place 4 or 5 shipping containers and 7 or 8 barrels. -That's kinda what I'm getting at with the idea of GW selling terrain bundles that are more directly intended for a given table size.


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TarkinLarson wrote:
I'd say something slightly different.

I mean I couldn't justify £200 on one load of terrain, as it'd take me ages to build/paint and blow my gaming budget for a long while.

Why not release them separately, and in full bundles... but also do narrative campaigns which suggest which maps or things can work together.

Then I could buy bits piece by piece by be able to follow a theme (I like the new Kill Zones and Sector names), but also use them in the plans that I see in the books or missions.

They already sell the terrain separately. The bundles are what's missing. I like the idea of theme-centric bundles in the vein of the Kill Zones... and I think you're exactly right with what GW can do if they had a "standard table" set of terrain. Having that kind of standard also helps in the competitive gaming circles too, where you don't want the terrain to be the sole deciding factor.

Wayniac wrote:
I would say yes but

A) GW terrain is often pretty but functionally useless due to 40k's LOS rules. The vast majority of their terrain pieces are ruins, which means they might as well not exist since they don't block LOS.

B) They are stupid expensive. They have sold terrain bundles before, usually with a realm of battle board, and it was like $600+ (USD). Beyond ridiculous.

Second that. Build your own stuff and implement abstract LOS rules.

I think the issue is that GW has spent years trying to get gamers to buy a table full of terrain and typically gamers didn't. Now short term sets like Warcry and Killteam are something GW has found works - boxing it up not as terrain bundle but a game bundle.

They've also found faction terrain works, which is why its appearing everywhere now for pretty much all factions getting a workover (every AoS faction with a 2.0 tome barring a few of the first, has terrain in their release).


GW has found that people generally don't get excited about a boatload of terrain for the table in quite the same way as they do buying into a whole game; or getting faction terrain that gives them a faction bonus.

 Overread wrote:
I think the issue is that GW has spent years trying to get gamers to buy a table full of terrain and typically gamers didn't. Now short term sets like Warcry and Killteam are something GW has found works - boxing it up not as terrain bundle but a game bundle.

They've also found faction terrain works, which is why its appearing everywhere now for pretty much all factions getting a workover (every AoS faction with a 2.0 tome barring a few of the first, has terrain in their release).


GW has found that people generally don't get excited about a boatload of terrain for the table in quite the same way as they do buying into a whole game; or getting faction terrain that gives them a faction bonus.

I think it becomes a case like what TarkinLarson had brought up; by bundling it into a complete table its an opportunity to have campaign books, rules, stratagems or whatever else refer directly to that set, being more specific in terrain layout for scenarios... or just do for 40k what Kill Zone terrain sets do for Kill Team. For example, imagine if when Urban Conquest came out in addition to selling that box with rules, tokens, and a few sprues GW also sold a big terrain bundle thematically tied into Urban Conquest, maybe even going so far as to include a set of instructions on building the terrain to represent some special buildings that could have been in the Urban Conquest rules. Imagine in that there were a mission to defend and reinforce the defenders at a shrine and the terrain instruction says use the existing sprues like this to build a shrine.


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 Strg Alt wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
I would say yes but

A) GW terrain is often pretty but functionally useless due to 40k's LOS rules. The vast majority of their terrain pieces are ruins, which means they might as well not exist since they don't block LOS.

B) They are stupid expensive. They have sold terrain bundles before, usually with a realm of battle board, and it was like $600+ (USD). Beyond ridiculous.

Second that. Build your own stuff and implement abstract LOS rules.

Shouldn't have to do this, but I usually just chop up ruins and reassemble them into a more complete building or I use them as bombed out top floors of building.

The terrain is made to look cool; it isn't always practical, but there are still some people that want to do full tables. I think one of the challenges is that terrain building is just enough outside of what us hobbyists usually do that it can be hard to figure out just how many kits is enough. Part of that is also because of just how flexible the terrain kits can be built. Some might be able to stretch a kit further while others will want to build huge structures. Maybe GW doesn't want or need to bundle it, but in the least an article that equates how many kits it should take to fill different standard table sizes is useful even if you acquire your terrain piece by piece or from 3rd parties.

Price isn't much of a reason for GW not to do something, for example plenty of people bought FW's Zone Mortalis boards. A big table with quality terrain and centerpiece structures are something many people dream about and pursue. More companies are attempting to facilitate that service that need, it seems silly for GW not do the same or do more.