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How much terrain do youbusualy have?

We might have some hils. But besides that we plott down mats representing som aria terain and places some ruins of topp of them. Very little blocking LoS.

What would you recomend?

Fill it up with as much as you have, especially in the middle of the board. You'll need a bit of room to drive tanks through, but too much is better than too little.

I'd second Lammia's post and add that you should use some los blocking terrain. It can really cut down on first turn alpha strikes and just the general killiness of 8th. It's not much fun just taking turns eliminating each other's units imho.

Depends upon what type of board you want to make.

At the local shop about 1/2 the table gets covered in blocking/ruins/areas. All sorts of terrain.
At home I've got alot less options. So some ruins, some hills, & a whole lot of jungle terrain (about 1/2 a tables worth) that'll effectively block anything about 5" or shorter depending upon how it's set up.

At home there's a house rule for the jungle tree bases.
I have bases (assorted GW bases ovals & larger rounds) with differing #s of trees - 1/2/3/4+.
Trees 1 - 3 = each tree on the base increases the # needed to hit a target in/behind a base. It stacks & there's no limit. Sure, you might be able to draw LOS through any # of tree bases. But you might well end up with a To Hit mod of 12+ or something.....
Trees 4+ = LoS blocked (these are in effect solid objects that just happen to look like trees. There's no room to put a model in them)
Now if you're taller than the trees/shooting at things taller than the trees then obviously that'll reduce the # of bases your LOS is going through. And NO, you're not shooting via your antenna etc.

I’m limited with what I own for home use, but I subscribe to the old general recommendation of 1d3 bits per 2’ square of table. And a single tree does not count.

I include buildings, area terrain, and hills on my table. Ideally, enough that a unit moving and advancing can move from cover to cover if need be. I also play with the ITC rule that first floor ruins block LOS.

Some games define area terrain as blocking LOS through it to make it easier to move units around while still having some LOS block.

There was an article years ago in White Dwarf about terrain. Jervis, was involved. They had a 6x4 table which they divided into thirds. They then filled a whole third jam packed with terrain including lots of line of sight blocking stuff. They then spread this out over the table. That's what they were recommending.

4-5 rhinos sized bunkers 5-6 big buildings, roads rubble, 2 hills big enough to hide a knight behind, on each of the 2 tables we had. third table was for infintiy, and it was practicly just terrain. Aside for a bit streets, and even those had cars, stores etc on them.

In a word? Lots. I don't play any tournament style games though, so it's more about having a believable location instead of a "equally spaced wargaming table". Bunkers, buildings, fences, crates, hills, forests, bridges, water, etc.

I don't really do 8th anymore, but in general I follow old 2nd edition suggestions from the actual makers of the game; lots of terrain...to keep the game from bogging down into a long-ranged shooting gallery. The original recommendation was to cover a full 50% of the table if not more with terrain. That's about what I do on an average table.

Terrain, or a good looking table is absolutely the most underused aspect to wargaming in general - not just 40K. It's the third army and almost never gets as much as attention as it should. I spend heaps of time assembling/painting terrain because it's what makes the game look good. All the beautiful painted minis in the world still look like poop playing on unpainted MDF or a table littered with soda cans. By comparison to miniatures (particularly GW ones), terrain is dirt cheap. You can amass a full table's worth of MDF for around $150-200, etc.













I'm always on a crusade for people to basically "give a damn" about their table.

PS: Regarding 8th edition...LOS blocking is pretty much the only real consideration and you want as much as you can manage. In my tables above we use the "hills" as forested sections. Units can see into or out of the forested sections (and they provide cover), but cannot see through them...so each hill blocks LOS if it has trees on it. Very simple and cheap way to get a mass of line of sight blocking terrain. However this requires an agreement between players obviously. That's not an issue with our group but may be for random pick-up games.

That terrain looks amazing, I'm envious.

 harlokin wrote:
That terrain looks amazing, I'm envious.

All I can say is that there is nothing crazy on those tables beyond a little elbow grease.

1) Faux leather for water (from the local fabric shop)
2) Upholstery foam, spray paint and flock for the hills
3) MDF buildings from TT Combat (cheap with free shipping over 100 pounds), sprayed simply and quickly
4) Fences made from sintra and window screen material
5) Plastic containers from the GW terrain kit - the good one that was discontinued
6) Gaming mats from Urbanmatz and Deepcut Studios (most expensive part, as most good mats hover around $80-90)
7) Some bridges from Pegasus Hobbies, and some cheap "Army men" toy bridges from Amazon - spray painted a variety of rusty colours
8) Trees built from cheap Woodland Scenics armatures covered with lichen
9) The large platforms over the water are hobby craft boxes (lid and base) simply covered in some gubbins and sprayed.

There's nothing magical about terrain. Now, granted if you try to really scratch build some glorious stuff...it's an art, an art I don't understand. But building basic wargaming crap is really reasonable/easy. It does take up a couple big plastic bins though, so if you're in a dorm room or something it's not particularly feasible.

Thanks very much....I might have to get crafting

Like Elbows said, it's preferable to have plenty of terrain and actually use rules for it (GW provides lots, though most people for some reason don't use them). Coming up with your group's own terrain rules is also cool, like scattering weapon bankments here and there to be used by those who control them.

Here's a typical setup for our side with super easy paper buildings (a mobile setup for a non-club environment).




With obscuration, hard and soft cover, movement penalties, area woods, using grenades and flamers with more effect inside buildings... things get interesting quickly, while reducing the lethality problem. Variety in setups is the spice of life, so that the terrain both breaks line of sight everywhere but there are also occasional firing lanes and kill boxes scattered around for players to use.

It's the single most irritating part if 8th that terrain doesn't matter unless it blocks LoS. Every single house rule quoted above lends the game more depth, decision-making, and, dare I say it, fun.

Nice table, I've played on some of the same terrain and really like it for 40K, etc. This was a big huge silly game we did by throwing everything on a large T-shaped double-sized table. That same card terrain was mixed in and is excellent.

I like seeing/having 1 decently sized terrain piece in the center and getting smaller as you get closer to the edge. Another interesting thing i saw was having 4 large corner pieces in the center but leaving the middles open with some medium sized buildings covering up the LOS. Also craters in odd areas.

 Niiai wrote:
How much terrain do youbusualy have?

We might have some hils. But besides that we plott down mats representing som aria terain and places some ruins of topp of them. Very little blocking LoS.

What would you recomend?

The FLGS has boxes that each has about 2 large buildings, 2-3 smaller buildings, 2-3 craters, and 2-3 forests.


At home, I use a bunch of desert hills from an old dinosaur playset: there are 3 large ones with big flat tops that can hold multiple IG rifle squads, 3 long ones, and 4 smaller ones that can hold small squads like a SM squad. Then we sprinkle the board with some sandbag entrenchments, lots of barbed wire, and czech hedgehogs. I've been losing the hedgehogs, I need to make more.
My friend has a ruined middle eastern village with 2 3-story L-shaped medium buildings, 2 2-story walls about 8" long with wrecked floors overhanging that can be stood on, a long solid building that's about the same dimensions as my long hills, and a little building, plus a pond and some copses of trees. We add my and his terrain sets together to make a fairly terrain dense board that we play one when he comes by to play.

We wind up with a good board that has enough LoS-permeable but cover granting terrain, LoS-blocking terrain, and movement-blocking terrain for pretty good games when we put them together.

 Niiai wrote:
What would you recomend?

As much as possible, but without overwhelming the table.

These are my last three tables:

I aim for approximately 33% coverage by surface area, with at least half of that LOS-blocking. The easiest way to gauge terrain coverage is to stack it all up in one corner of the board with no gaps, then once you hit ~1/3 distribute it across the rest of the board. 33% is a LOT more than people intuitively assume.

If you aren't blocking LOS, you don't have much of a game. 40K's current rules really rely on LOS-blocking terrain to prevent gunlines from dominating.

Size of terrain is important too. With the current LOS rules, a scattered bunch of small LOS-blocking obstacles (like tall rocks) might as well not exist. You need stuff big enough to block LOS to a significant area of the board, and allow units to hide. Combine with hills that can see over said terrain, and then you get a trade-off between being able to see the enemy versus being able to avoid enemy fire.

The only addition I’d have to the previous posters is if you are primarily playing with tournament goals, some of the bigger ones have default terrain layouts so you can practice on the same general terrain as the event.

33% doesn't seem like enough at all.

And always avoid tables that look like this:

I think most people do not use enough terrain to create the optimal and most fair gaming experience.

Now this is not to say that people are always at fault for this, it's often a factor of what is available to use. If you play in a local store with 10 tables and 30 pieces of terrain, on busy day you cant stick 15 pieces of terrain on your table!

But ideally, there should be a LOT of terrain. In my opinion, there should be terrain that fully blocks line of site large enough to fit a standard tank behind it at least in every quadrant of the battlefield. Then there should be various ruins and other area terrain filling out much of the rest of the board.

I'm a firm believer that a large number of issues people have with the game can be remedied by using more and better terrain.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
33% doesn't seem like enough at all.

The recommendation given in the rulebook has historically been 25-33%. Like I said, if you actually cluster all the terrain together (with no gaps) on one side of the table and keep adding more until you cover 1/3 of the table, it ends up being a lot more than you would think. I suspect your second photo, for example, is closer to 25% coverage.

Here's an example of using the quartering method to produce 25% coverage (I might have actually gone a little light on this one):



And here's an example of a board with roughly 33% coverage- note that the 'empty' bases (inc. the one hidden by the cluster of 'Nids on the right) represent LOS-blocking forests, but have had the trees temporarily removed for gameplay purposes:



Too much denser than that and I find it starts to become difficult to handle vehicles, but can be real fun for infantry-based urban or jungle fighting.

Looking at these images reminded me that one other thing to consider, OP, is verticality. A lot of ruins have the capacity to fit troops on higher levels, but simple hills work too. Elevation changes provide a mechanism to limit LOS that doesn't cause traffic problems when crossing the board, so can be easily combined with other types of terrain.

Very little because I never buy/paint terrain and don't like most of gw's terrain but don't know anywhere decent to get alternatives. But it's definitely better to have more terrain than none. I really wish I had some good vertical terrain though.

pm713 wrote:
Very little because I never buy/paint terrain and don't like most of gw's terrain but don't know anywhere decent to get alternatives. But it's definitely better to have more terrain than none. I really wish I had some good vertical terrain though.

Well, for reference regarding what's in my pictures:
-The buildings are laser-cut MDF from Laser Craft Workshop. There are a lot of companies doing MDF buildings now so you have lots of options there for much lower prices than GW's plastic buildings.
-The sandbag lines are Tamiya sandbags glued together on 1/8" MDF bases.
-The jungles are a combination of large 1/8" MDF bases (to define a 'footprint') with 60mm round MDF bases containing the actual foliage, which is aquarium plants and plastic palm trees I found on Amazon.
-The hills are 2" insulation foam glued to 1/8" MDF bases.

I cut the 1/8" MDF on a band saw for the irregular bases, and ordered 60mm rounds on Etsy for the foliage. I'm sure there are other ways to do it.

You can DIY a table's worth of terrain for fairly low expense.

Just adding onto the dislike of planet bowling ball. My group makes its own terrain as well and we aren't geniusses or work-a-holics. I also use a lot of lasercut but tjis place is also great:
https://everylittlewar.com/

My tables go with 30-50% of opponent's deployment zone is out of LOS from your own (almost always split up not one big section) and almost always no LOS from opposite corner to opposite corner.
some of it from my gallery:

Just to add a bit more, a properly planned out and executed table heightens the gaming experience a lot. Too often I see tables that have just been randomly thrown together from a few pieces that were lying about the place. Why not... this?

(all tables by StrikingScorpion82, a YouTuber)





Every one of these tables tells a story and guides the game play by virtue of existing, even before we get to the mechanical details. Sure it takes a lot more work to put them together and pack them away, but since when has miniature gaming with armies worth of models been a quick hobby to begin with ?

Because of the quarantine I've been working on my home terrain collection. It's mostly GW ruins (quite nice and modular), and some hills and forests crafted from foam and model train terrain. I bought most of it from my local hobby store in order to give them business before the shut down, but my previous (crappy) collection was mostly buildings I made out of thick cardboard, covered in caulk, and painted as adobe-style construction.

I'll agree with the chorus that 1/4 to 1/3 of the table should be covered in terrain. I generally like to have more terrain, but I don't mind having a more open table on occasion - variety being the spice of life and all that.

At least 1/2 of the terrain you use should block LOS to some degree, and you'll need a couple of pieces that big enough to block LOS to something the size of a Land Raider. However, if you don't have "proper" LOS-blocking pieces it's easy enough to house rule that you can't see through forests and ruins: i.e. that you can see into and out of the terrain, but you can't see models on the other side.

Those are some gorgeous boards @Sherrypie