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 H.B.M.C. wrote:

dhallnet wrote:
Or unless you're fine with the bigger models being able to shoot everywhere.

Why is that a bad thing?

It's a bad thing to me, it doesn't have to be a bad thing for you.
And I asked first.

Voss wrote:
Well, in theory, if you're a game designer trying to limit the power of shooting by breaking up line of sight... Letting big stuff (with more guns) shoot whatever they want just might be counter to the design decision.

Firstly that implies that they're trying to limit the power of shooting. The new blast rules say otherwise. But even putting that aside, why shouldn't a towering engine of destruction that can see over buildings be allowed to, y'know, see over buildings?

I don't mean to sound overly rude, but the examples attempting to show the terrain rules are ridiculous are absolutely terribly thought out and ignore that both players must agree the traits of each terrain piece before the battle begins. For the 2 models on top of a box with an opaque lump in the middle, why would anyone ever agree before the game that a block which completely blocks line of sight should also be granted the obscuring rule to make it infinitely tall? There's already the rules for armoured containers which are in a similar position to that block, and unsurprisingly, they don't have the "obscuring" trait. Likewise, why would you ever agree that 2 trees stuck on a base is obscuring? You could make an equally ridiculous situation by shoving a 6" flagpole in the middle of a 2' x 2' board and then saying "look how ridiculous it is that this flagpole blocks line of sight over the whole area"; the issue is you've given it the trait obscuring despite it visually clearly not doing anything of the sort, the rule is functioning as intended.

I can see there might be issues with these new rules, but let's not mistake user error for a genuine flaw in the rule.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Voss wrote:
Well, in theory, if you're a game designer trying to limit the power of shooting by breaking up line of sight... Letting big stuff (with more guns) shoot whatever they want just might be counter to the design decision.

Firstly that implies that they're trying to limit the power of shooting. The new blast rules say otherwise. But even putting that aside, why shouldn't a towering engine of destruction that can see over buildings be allowed to, y'know, see over buildings?

Warcom says that's because their weapons can't shoot at the right angle to ignore the intervening buildings, even if they can see above it.
That's an answer like another. The thing is, it's obvious the designers wanted stuff to be able to break LOS for these.

Eyjio wrote:
I don't mean to sound overly rude, but the examples attempting to show the terrain rules are ridiculous are absolutely terribly thought out and ignore that both players must agree the traits of each terrain piece before the battle begins. For the 2 models on top of a box with an opaque lump in the middle, why would anyone ever agree before the game that a block which completely blocks line of sight should also be granted the obscuring rule to make it infinitely tall? There's already the rules for armoured containers which are in a similar position to that block, and unsurprisingly, they don't have the "obscuring" trait. Likewise, why would you ever agree that 2 trees stuck on a base is obscuring? You could make an equally ridiculous situation by shoving a 6" flagpole in the middle of a 2' x 2' board and then saying "look how ridiculous it is that this flagpole blocks line of sight over the whole area"; the issue is you've given it the trait obscuring despite it visually clearly not doing anything of the sort, the rule is functioning as intended.

I can see there might be issues with these new rules, but let's not mistake user error for a genuine flaw in the rule.

So you're saying that obscuring should only be put on things that aren't actually obscuring, and not on things that really are obscuring? With the result that terrain with a bunch of windows in it, as long as part of it is 5" or higher, will block LOS even over the bits that are only .5 inches high...but the solid ruin that is 5" tall in some places but .5 inches tall in others will not block LOS for those .5 inch parts?

Doesn't that just introduce another silly inconsistency into the game? Does making terrain with holes in it better at blocking LOS than solid terrain of the same height really make any sort of sense at all?

Is there really such a small amount of people that had played with abstracted terrain rules before ?

It's not the abstract that's the issue, at least not for me. I already laid out a while back that I'd prefer a fully abstracted terrain system where you draw LOS from base to base then apply rules to terrain that tell you what it blocks LOS for based on the keyword of the model. I.e. this wall blocks LOS for infantry, but not for vehicles, if you cannot draw a line from base to base without passing over it. Then you either base everything (the good solution, but the costly one) or come up with some approximation for models without bases (the bad but cheap solution).

But if I have to choose between the TLOS of 8th, or the weird hybrid in 9th that is mostly TLOS but partially non-true LOS in some situations for some models but not for all, I'd rather just keep it simple with TLOS for everything. Taking a little bit from the TLOS side and a little bit form the non-true LOS side is the worst of both worlds in my opinion.

yukishiro1 wrote:

dhallnet wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
If you don't understand the difference between RAW and RAI that's fine, but again, please don't tell other people they can't read properly because you don't understand what's being discussed. We are discussing what is written RAW, and there is a clear, objective answer to that question.

The rule is 100% clear that RAW a terrain piece with obscuring never blocks LOS to an aircraft or 18W+ model. That may be unintended, but it is what it says.

I can perfectly read thanks. You're just ignoring the first paragraph for the second paragraph to be dumb. Sure, if I just read the part "you can ignore this feature", then, hey, I can ignore this feature right.
Just as when I'm reading about controlled environments and setting stuff on fire, I just read the part about setting stuff on fire, it makes more sense. I like to see stuff burn.

You're the one who said I couldn't read properly. I never said you couldn't read properly. Please don't accuse others of what you said yourself.

I'm not ignoring anything. I'm reading what the sentence actually says, and it's very clear. It says "ignore this terrain feature," not "ignore the obscuring keyword on this terrain feature." It is certainly possible that what they wrote doesn't reflect their intent, like in my analogy to the guy who wrote "stupid" instead of "not stupid." But you can't argue that what they wrote doesn't say what it says because you think they didn't mean to say what they said. That doesn't make sense.

The rule says you ignore the entire terrain feature when targeting if the target is aircraft or 18W+. That's just what it says. What you think they meant is a different question.

This isn't a question of context. There was a very simple way to say what you think they meant to say - "ignore the obscuring keyword on this terrain feature" - and they explicitly did not say it. That may be their error, but you can't argue about what the text actually says on a semantic level.

I think It doesn’t say that you can “ignore this terrain feature”. It say that that model can be targeted even the obscuring terrain is in between.
However, LoS is another rule which you also can’t ignore it.

armisael wrote:


I think It doesn’t say that you can “ignore this terrain feature”. It say that that model can be targeted even the obscuring terrain is in between.
However, LoS is another rule which you also can’t ignore it.

That's the same thing.




"are visible and can be targeted even if this terrain feature is in-between it and the firing model."

The point is that it says that you can target it regardless of the piece of terrain being in the way, not regardless of the obscured keyword being on the piece of terrain.

I think it's very possible this is just badly written, and they are trying to say what you are saying - that for aircraft and 18W+, pretend this terrain doesn't have obscuring, but still check LOS normally. But what it says is that you just pretend like the terrain piece isn't there at all.

Imagine just keeping total line of site and not making up for bad terrain with convoluted abstract rules.

Line of sight cuts both ways and its fair, a lot of what made it unfair in 8th was the idea that seeing and being in range of 1 out of 30 models meant it was ok to kill 30 models instead of 1. Bring back common sense line of sight, make better terrain. Consider patching keyholes with broken up popsicle sticks. Weight los blocking to the center and the cooler "scenery" to the periphery of the board.

GW shipping crates, done. Just't don't glue both sides open then complain about los.



Sometimes you break out the less pretty but more functional terrain for balanced play:

yukishiro1 wrote:

Eyjio wrote:
I don't mean to sound overly rude, but the examples attempting to show the terrain rules are ridiculous are absolutely terribly thought out and ignore that both players must agree the traits of each terrain piece before the battle begins. For the 2 models on top of a box with an opaque lump in the middle, why would anyone ever agree before the game that a block which completely blocks line of sight should also be granted the obscuring rule to make it infinitely tall? There's already the rules for armoured containers which are in a similar position to that block, and unsurprisingly, they don't have the "obscuring" trait. Likewise, why would you ever agree that 2 trees stuck on a base is obscuring? You could make an equally ridiculous situation by shoving a 6" flagpole in the middle of a 2' x 2' board and then saying "look how ridiculous it is that this flagpole blocks line of sight over the whole area"; the issue is you've given it the trait obscuring despite it visually clearly not doing anything of the sort, the rule is functioning as intended.

I can see there might be issues with these new rules, but let's not mistake user error for a genuine flaw in the rule.

So you're saying that obscuring should only be put on things that aren't actually obscuring, and not on things that really are obscuring? With the result that terrain with a bunch of windows in it, as long as part of it is 5" or higher, will block LOS even over the bits that are only .5 inches high...but the solid ruin that is 5" tall in some places but .5 inches tall in others will not block LOS for those .5 inch parts?

Doesn't that just introduce another silly inconsistency into the game? Does making terrain with holes in it better at blocking LOS than solid terrain of the same height really make any sort of sense at all?

Is this a serious question? I'm genuinely trying to wrap my head around the people complaining about this rule. I honestly cannot understand how you can read a rule which gives an infinite LOS blocking ability to terrain, read that people have to agree if a trait belongs on a certain piece of scenery - and then make examples where the models aren't obscured at all, the scenery between them clearly shouldn't be blocking line of sight at all, and then argue that it's actually the rules themselves which are at fault.

The terrain with holes in isn't better at blocking line of sight. You can't be "better" at blocking line of sight - the idea doesn't even make any sense, it either blocks line of sight or it doesn't. The designers are adding a trait to let you model scenery with holes in without completely destroying the balance of shooting by giving it LOS across the table. Just because they called it obscured doesn't mean you should slap it on everything which might literally obscure a model, especially when you're going to make examples where the terrain gives a clear LOS.

dhallnet wrote:
Is there really such a small amount of people that had played with abstracted terrain rules before ?

Abstracted terrain rules are fine... but only if they're consistently abstracted. These are a weird mix, and a lot of them are counter intuitive and break past precedent (back before TLOS, GW did a lot of abstract terrain rules, and they largely didn't work like these).
Functionally buildings only have a real height if they're less than 5" tall (otherwise they're infinitely tall) and models never have a real height- at least not when interacting with terrain.

Plus some folks here have only dealt with GW's take on true line of sight. Which while largely functional and straightforward, collapses into dark matter when asked to deal with abstractions.


--
Also, some of the rules snippets read like the tournament play testers were relating some of the Privateer Press terrain rules to the GW designers, but bits got lost in a very silly game of Telephone, where they were trying to relate the PP rules to old GW rules (that inspired the PP versions in the first place) and important concepts got left out of the final translation.

Eyjio wrote:


The terrain with holes in isn't better at blocking line of sight. You can't be "better" at blocking line of sight - the idea doesn't even make any sense, it either blocks line of sight or it doesn't. The designers are adding a trait to let you model scenery with holes in without completely destroying the balance of shooting by giving it LOS across the table. Just because they called it obscured doesn't mean you should slap it on everything which might literally obscure a model, especially when you're going to make examples where the terrain gives a clear LOS.

It is better, in your example. The piece with holes in it, that you give the obscuring keyword, now obscures infinitely in the vertical direction. Meanwhile, the solid piece, which you say it would be stupid to give the obscuring keyword, only obscures to its actual height.

If you are just making a semantic argument, we can say that the terrain with holes and "obscuring" blocks more line of sight than the solid terrain without obscuring. Presumably you agree with this statement? Why would this make any sense? Why should the 5" ruin with windows block a 6" KoS behind it, but a solid 5" tall ruin should not? Yet that is the result of your recommendation only to put "obscuring" on stuff with holes in it, and leave it off stuff that is already solid.

This is the fundamental problem with a system that is TLOS for some purposes and not true LOS for other purposes: you end up with these weird interactions that don't make sense no mater what approach you take. Either you give obscuring to everything 5" and higher, and that leads to weird things, or you give it only to stuff 5" or higher with holes in it, and then that leads to other weird things like the hole-filled terrain blocking more LOS than the solid terrain.

yukishiro1 wrote:

armisael wrote:


I think It doesn’t say that you can “ignore this terrain feature”. It say that that model can be targeted even the obscuring terrain is in between.
However, LoS is another rule which you also can’t ignore it.

That's the same thing.




"are visible and can be targeted even if this terrain feature is in-between it and the firing model."

The point is that it says that you can target it regardless of the piece of terrain being in the way, not regardless of the obscured keyword being on the piece of terrain.

I think it's very possible this is just badly written, and they are trying to say what you are saying - that for aircraft and 18W+, pretend this terrain doesn't have obscuring, but still check LOS normally. But what it says is that you just pretend like the terrain piece isn't there at all.

Maybe you are right and I’m wrong. But this is what my entire gaming group understand when reading the rule.
However, I don’t know why GW need to write the wording so complicated. Can’t it be more simplified?

yukishiro1 wrote:

Eyjio wrote:


The terrain with holes in isn't better at blocking line of sight. You can't be "better" at blocking line of sight - the idea doesn't even make any sense, it either blocks line of sight or it doesn't. The designers are adding a trait to let you model scenery with holes in without completely destroying the balance of shooting by giving it LOS across the table. Just because they called it obscured doesn't mean you should slap it on everything which might literally obscure a model, especially when you're going to make examples where the terrain gives a clear LOS.

It is better, in your example. The piece with holes in it, that you give the obscuring keyword, now obscures infinitely in the vertical direction. Meanwhile, the solid piece, which you say it would be stupid to give the obscuring keyword, only obscures to its actual height.

If you are just making a semantic argument, we can say that the terrain with holes and "obscuring" blocks more line of sight than the solid terrain without obscuring. Presumably you agree with this statement? Why would this make any sense? Why should the 5" ruin with windows block a 6" KoS behind it, but a solid 5" tall ruin should not? Yet that is the result of your recommendation only to put "obscuring" on stuff with holes in it, and leave it off stuff that is already solid.

Very true, it just seems simpler to block a few holes than re-arrange physics. One is infinitely more intuitive and comprehensible than the other.

yukishiro1 wrote:
It's not the abstract that's the issue, at least not for me. I already laid out a while back that I'd prefer a fully abstracted terrain system where you draw LOS from base to base then apply rules to terrain that tell you what it blocks LOS for based on the keyword of the model. I.e. this wall blocks LOS for infantry, but not for vehicles, if you cannot draw a line from base to base without passing over it. Then you either base everything (the good solution, but the costly one) or come up with some approximation for models without bases (the bad but cheap solution).

But if I have to choose between the TLOS of 8th, or the weird hybrid in 9th that is mostly TLOS but partially non-true LOS in some situations for some models but not for all, I'd rather just keep it simple with TLOS for everything. Taking a little bit from the TLOS side and a little bit form the non-true LOS side is the worst of both worlds in my opinion.

The wall breaks los for certain units and not others based on what ? The wall height ? An arbitrary rule ?
It's just faster to say the wall or terrain feature breaks los to everything, even though there might be holes in it and be done with it.

It's like when you couldn't shoot through forests even though it was 3 trees on a plate. You could see your target but rules wise you couldn't and the targeting rules still asked you to see your target to be able to shoot.
I might be missing it but I don't see how it's a mix of TLOS and abstracted that they are proposing, they ask you to target stuff you can see (which seems fair) and some terrain is abstracted because it isn't always practical to have terrain that is useful (forest or hills at scale, features that are high enough to break los for the biggest models, etc). You don't have to abstract everything, a container is a container for example, you don't need rules to tell you if you can see or not through it, but if you think the piece of terrain you have doesn't represent adequately a container, you can abstract it. Or not. Your choice. They can't control every groups' terrain collection.

dhallnet wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
It's not the abstract that's the issue, at least not for me. I already laid out a while back that I'd prefer a fully abstracted terrain system where you draw LOS from base to base then apply rules to terrain that tell you what it blocks LOS for based on the keyword of the model. I.e. this wall blocks LOS for infantry, but not for vehicles, if you cannot draw a line from base to base without passing over it. Then you either base everything (the good solution, but the costly one) or come up with some approximation for models without bases (the bad but cheap solution).

But if I have to choose between the TLOS of 8th, or the weird hybrid in 9th that is mostly TLOS but partially non-true LOS in some situations for some models but not for all, I'd rather just keep it simple with TLOS for everything. Taking a little bit from the TLOS side and a little bit form the non-true LOS side is the worst of both worlds in my opinion.

The wall breaks los for certain units and not others based on what ? The wall height ? An arbitrary rule ?
It's just faster to say the wall or terrain feature breaks los to everything, even though there might be holes in it and be done with it.

If you wanted to adopt base-to-base LOS with only one LOS height, so that a wall blocked LOS for everything or nothing, that would be fine too. It would be even more abstract, though, and I don't think a lot of people would like the idea that a 2" high wall blocks a titan from shooting over it at another titan. Hence the suggestion of a few levels of LOS blocking - so that 2" wall can block LOS for infantry while still letting a land raider shoot over it at another land raider. But I don't really care personally. If for simplicity you wanted to say that 2" wall blocks infantry and warlord titans alike go for it; it wouldn't bother me at all, though I think it would bother a lot of other people.

yukishiro1 wrote:
It is better, in your example. The piece with holes in it, that you give the obscuring keyword, now obscures infinitely in the vertical direction. Meanwhile, the solid piece, which you say it would be stupid to give the obscuring keyword, only obscures to its actual height.

If you are just making a semantic argument, we can say that the terrain with holes and "obscuring" blocks more line of sight than the solid terrain without obscuring. Presumably you agree with this statement? Why would this make any sense? Why should the 5" ruin with windows block a 6" KoS behind it, but a solid 5" tall ruin should not? Yet that is the result of your recommendation only to put "obscuring" on stuff with holes in it, and leave it off stuff that is already solid.

This is the fundamental problem with a system that is TLOS for some purposes and not true LOS for other purposes: you end up with these weird interactions that don't make sense no mater what approach you take. Either you give obscuring to everything 5" and higher, and that leads to weird things, or you give it only to stuff 5" or higher with holes in it, and then that leads to other weird things like the hole-filled terrain blocking more LOS than the solid terrain.

No, again, it's not better - both block line of sight. The argument that it blocks "more" is only relevant if the piece of terrain is physically larger or there are ways to see over it, and even then, it's already agreed at the start with your opponent. I see absolutely no reason why, if both players have agreed something should block line of sight before the game begins, that the terrain piece shouldn't have rules to support that.

As for ridiculous rules interactions, of course there are issues where it's not perfect because models could be seen over/under things. By the same merit, it's also ridiculous in a TLOS system that because I can see the tip of your tank's tread through a pinhole, tracing a line via an intervening forest, under someones leg, and through a building, that I should be able to fire a 120mm tank shell at you with impunity. Some abstractions have to be made; I'm broadly about as fine with LOS blocking being generous to models with scenic bases or pointy bits as I am with the older system where munition size, arcs of fire and frankly sheer plausibility of any degree of accuracy are all ignored. I don't see what all the fuss is about, and I don't understand why people are making examples where the rule shouldn't clearly apply as if it's some incredible discovery that badly applied rules work badly.

5th basically said a balanced game had 25% coverage, a mix of large terrain pieces that block los entirely, smaller piece that block partially, barricades for infantry and basically a healthy mix weighted towards large los blocking terrain. Too little it's a shooting gallery, too much it's a cc fest. The warlord titan example is extreme but still relevant. I don't think people will like some of the absurdities that come with abstraction. There's certainly a scale to how much any one thing may break someone's immersion.



Using this example, you either weight the los blocking the way it is because the inverse doesn't help the game very much. I don't know how you look at the inverse and go, well lets just make that incredibility spindly tall refinery platform magically block los. (I can just put it behind the wall, the game will be better for it) Granted not everyone has their now terrain and may only have what their club has available. Either way, total los works well because its objective. I don't see why you start with abstract rules and not like limiting wound pools to whats in los for example. No shortage of good and compact los blocking terrain from gw, the necromunda walls are great example.

yukishiro1 wrote:

If you wanted to adopt base-to-base LOS with only one LOS height, so that a wall blocked LOS for everything or nothing, that would be fine too. It would be even more abstract, though, and I don't think a lot of people would like the idea that a 2" high wall blocks a titan from shooting over it at another titan. Hence the suggestion of a few levels of LOS blocking - so that 2" wall can block LOS for infantry while still letting a land raider shoot over it at another land raider. But I don't really care personally. If for simplicity you wanted to say that 2" wall blocks infantry and warlord titans alike go for it; it wouldn't bother me at all, though I think it would bother a lot of other people.

Is the issue the arbitrary number they have chosen ?
They've chosen 5", it allows a decent amount of existing terrain (custom or not, every two story building made by anyone should be fine and it's the scale of GW's terrain) to work.
If the issue is that it's not "realistic" enough, what is your option as a designer if you want to be able to have features that allows to break loss to your biggest models, ask every player to suck it up and make/buy new cumbersome terrain able to truly block LOS for aircrafts, knights and titans ?

yukishiro1 wrote:

 addnid wrote:


Feeding into this would be if you didn’t represent 30% of the posts in some (most ?) pages of this thread. I would say you are shovelling metric tons into it

This is a message board. Who comes to a message board not to post?

Seems like a really weird reason to attack someone - for discussing things too much on a discussion board?

Me.



Crap

dhallnet wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

If you wanted to adopt base-to-base LOS with only one LOS height, so that a wall blocked LOS for everything or nothing, that would be fine too. It would be even more abstract, though, and I don't think a lot of people would like the idea that a 2" high wall blocks a titan from shooting over it at another titan. Hence the suggestion of a few levels of LOS blocking - so that 2" wall can block LOS for infantry while still letting a land raider shoot over it at another land raider. But I don't really care personally. If for simplicity you wanted to say that 2" wall blocks infantry and warlord titans alike go for it; it wouldn't bother me at all, though I think it would bother a lot of other people.

Is the issue the arbitrary number they have chosen ?
They've chosen 5", it allows a decent amount of existing terrain (custom or not, every two story building made by anyone should be fine and it's the scale of GW's terrain) to work.
If the issue is that it's not "realistic" enough, what is your option as a designer if you want to be able to have features that allows to break loss to your biggest models, ask every player to suck it up and make/buy new cumbersome terrain able to truly block LOS for aircrafts, knights and titans ?

The new ruins are pretty tall if you try and build one with an upper floor so the 5 inches does seem like an arbitrary number given the old ones were a lot smaller.

Can't see 5 inches being comforting for someone who just built this as two levels high:



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 megatrons2nd wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

 addnid wrote:


Feeding into this would be if you didn’t represent 30% of the posts in some (most ?) pages of this thread. I would say you are shovelling metric tons into it

This is a message board. Who comes to a message board not to post?

Seems like a really weird reason to attack someone - for discussing things too much on a discussion board?

Me.



Crap

lol

dhallnet wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

If you wanted to adopt base-to-base LOS with only one LOS height, so that a wall blocked LOS for everything or nothing, that would be fine too. It would be even more abstract, though, and I don't think a lot of people would like the idea that a 2" high wall blocks a titan from shooting over it at another titan. Hence the suggestion of a few levels of LOS blocking - so that 2" wall can block LOS for infantry while still letting a land raider shoot over it at another land raider. But I don't really care personally. If for simplicity you wanted to say that 2" wall blocks infantry and warlord titans alike go for it; it wouldn't bother me at all, though I think it would bother a lot of other people.

Is the issue the arbitrary number they have chosen ?
They've chosen 5", it allows a decent amount of existing terrain (custom or not, every two story building made by anyone should be fine and it's the scale of GW's terrain) to work.
If the issue is that it's not "realistic" enough, what is your option as a designer if you want to be able to have features that allows to break loss to your biggest models, ask every player to suck it up and make/buy new cumbersome terrain able to truly block LOS for aircrafts, knights and titans ?

No. The issue isn't the number they chose at all. It could be 2". It could be 10".

The issue is that they have a system that is mostly TLOS but then has this feature stuck into it that doesn't operate based on TLOS.

Any time you start mixing TLOS with non-true LOS you will get strange edge cases where the rules behave in very odd ways.

 Crablezworth wrote:

The new ruins are pretty tall if you try and build one with an upper floor so the 5 inches does seem like an arbitrary number.

It is the height of the first floor of their ruins I think ? And again it's kinda small enough that even older terrain can work with it, and high enough that it isn't completely dumb (like 2").

yukishiro1 wrote:

dhallnet wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

If you wanted to adopt base-to-base LOS with only one LOS height, so that a wall blocked LOS for everything or nothing, that would be fine too. It would be even more abstract, though, and I don't think a lot of people would like the idea that a 2" high wall blocks a titan from shooting over it at another titan. Hence the suggestion of a few levels of LOS blocking - so that 2" wall can block LOS for infantry while still letting a land raider shoot over it at another land raider. But I don't really care personally. If for simplicity you wanted to say that 2" wall blocks infantry and warlord titans alike go for it; it wouldn't bother me at all, though I think it would bother a lot of other people.

Is the issue the arbitrary number they have chosen ?
They've chosen 5", it allows a decent amount of existing terrain (custom or not, every two story building made by anyone should be fine and it's the scale of GW's terrain) to work.
If the issue is that it's not "realistic" enough, what is your option as a designer if you want to be able to have features that allows to break loss to your biggest models, ask every player to suck it up and make/buy new cumbersome terrain able to truly block LOS for aircrafts, knights and titans ?

No. The issue isn't the number they chose at all. It could be 2". It could be 10".

The issue is that they have a system that is mostly TLOS but then has this feature stuck into it that doesn't operate based on TLOS.

Any time you start mixing TLOS with non-true LOS you will get strange edge cases where the rules behave in very odd ways.

Yup, messing with TLOS seems weird too given how crazy permissive vehicle shooting is for example in 8th vs prior editions, flyers included.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

dhallnet wrote:

 Crablezworth wrote:

The new ruins are pretty tall if you try and build one with an upper floor so the 5 inches does seem like an arbitrary number.

It is the height of the first floor of their ruins I think ? And again it's kinda small enough that even older terrain can work with it, and high enough that it isn't completely dumb (like 2").

Can we agree the infinite pillar would have been perhaps at least better off divorced from the primary obscuring rule? Like make it its own thing, call it "piller of smoke" the terrain is partially aflame making a sky high black cloud that blocks los bla bla bla.

dhallnet wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

If you wanted to adopt base-to-base LOS with only one LOS height, so that a wall blocked LOS for everything or nothing, that would be fine too. It would be even more abstract, though, and I don't think a lot of people would like the idea that a 2" high wall blocks a titan from shooting over it at another titan. Hence the suggestion of a few levels of LOS blocking - so that 2" wall can block LOS for infantry while still letting a land raider shoot over it at another land raider. But I don't really care personally. If for simplicity you wanted to say that 2" wall blocks infantry and warlord titans alike go for it; it wouldn't bother me at all, though I think it would bother a lot of other people.

Is the issue the arbitrary number they have chosen ?
They've chosen 5", it allows a decent amount of existing terrain (custom or not, every two story building made by anyone should be fine and it's the scale of GW's terrain) to work.

Actually... the latter does strike me as a drive to buy their current terrain. Most of their old terrain wasn't 5" tall. Even some of the newer stuff (Ryza pattern ruins and Sector Imperialis Ruins in the webstore) don't look like they are- especially the Ryza stuff, and those are pictured with Primaris and Death Guard.

Now granted you can glue an extended antenna mast to the side of old ruins and they now qualify as 5" tall and so matter for obscuring terrain, but I rather suspect the height was specifically chosen to sell the more expensive terrain kits.

yukishiro1 wrote:

No. The issue isn't the number they chose at all. It could be 2". It could be 10".

The issue is that they have a system that is mostly TLOS but then has this feature stuck into it that doesn't operate based on TLOS.

Any time you start mixing TLOS with non-true LOS you will get strange edge cases where the rules behave in very odd ways.

I really don't get this thing of mixed TLOS & abstracted (unless you're talking about being able to target any part of a model in which case I understand and tend to agree it isn't great). I have an issue with hills being treated like open terrain (which you could treat as obscured if you had 5" tall hills, which I doubt is common thing though) but otherwise i don't have examples were the terrain won't be blocking by default (because of how it's made), obscuring or an obstacle.

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Voss wrote:

Actually... the latter does strike me as a drive to buy their current terrain. Most of their old terrain wasn't 5" tall. Even some of the newer stuff (Ryza pattern ruins and Sector Imperialis Ruins in the webstore) don't look like they are- especially the Ryza stuff, and those are pictured with Primaris and Death Guard.

Now granted you can glue an extended antenna mast to the side of old ruins and they now qualify as 5" tall and so matter for obscuring terrain, but I rather suspect the height was specifically chosen to sell the more expensive terrain kits.

The old imperialis stuff had 3" stories so every building (all of them as far as i remember) with an upper floor should work. But 5" is for sure at least partially chosen because it meshes with the newer stuff.


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 Crablezworth wrote:
Can we agree the infinite pillar would have been perhaps at least better off divorced from the primary obscuring rule? Like make it its own thing, call it "piller of smoke" the terrain is partially aflame making a sky high black cloud that blocks los bla bla bla.

Why not, it would allow obscuring lower levels for infantry/vehicles without also having infinite height but it doesn't bother me much. It's not super hard to patch these to be blocking if i want to. As far as I'm concerned it would impact small walls sections with holes in them, any piece of carboard can temporarily or definitely solve the issue. Maybe forests could use this too if there is nothing for them but I don't have an issue with making them obscuring.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Voss wrote:
Well, in theory, if you're a game designer trying to limit the power of shooting by breaking up line of sight... Letting big stuff (with more guns) shoot whatever they want just might be counter to the design decision.

Firstly that implies that they're trying to limit the power of shooting. The new blast rules say otherwise. But even putting that aside, why shouldn't a towering engine of destruction that can see over buildings be allowed to, y'know, see over buildings?

reaching over super tall terrain to move minis can sometimes be awkard so it might be that they wrote these rules so as to not require 6 foot tall skyscrapers on maps where someone hauls out the titans.

It may very well be that obscuring terrain still functions normally for knights/flyers, as in line of sight must be drawn the same way it is now.

It is also not unlikely that flyers have their own rules in regards to sight and targeting which we have not seen yet.

Or those things could not be true, and the rules could be as poorly designed as feared. That is certainly not unlikely, given GWs track record.

But we don't know yet.

I am ok with these terrain rules. Except for one big cavaet. Did they consider how weapons like thunderfires and basilisks basically ignore all LOS and obscuring rules ?

Imperium has a lot of weapons that can ignore LOS. Not all xenos factions have much of those. In fact, Chaos doesn't either unless we are going into forgeworld.

We don't know if melee blocking is going to be a thing. But if it isn't, Basically, if I am playing a knight army, my knights will still be easily stopped from moving up the table by sacrificial small units of infantry halting my movement, while basilisks out of LOS rain fire on me, while I cannot shoot them at all. So, knight armies are going to be auto lose against imperium now? :X

I think either weapons that fire out of LOS need to be costed a lot more, or they need to ensure that all factions have access to such weapons. (which may kinda render terrain irrelevant if people start to focus on only the units that have such weapons).

Leaving aside weapons that can fire out of LOS, I think we might be able to say this is a buff for melee. Because now, obscuring terrain is infinitely tall. If we have enough intervening, obscuring terrain, then footslogging armies can literally advance up half of the table without being shot at.

Like if there is a big centrepiece ruin, with side ruins and such. You can advance up to the centre while staying behind that centerpiece ruin, and your opponent would need to be very far up the table to be able to claim LOS to you. Even snipers and squads parked three stories high up will not be able to claim LOS on you.

So, my main issue is for knight armies movement being blocked by small models. And weapons that can fire out of LOS (which are definitely not evenly distributed amongst all the various factions). Otherwise, I can see this as a buff to melee armies.

Another thing I want to add. If your ranged unit cannot shoot out of LOS. Then based on these terrain rules, if you want to shoot something, you likely have to position yourself such that you may get shot back as well. So, you can either place yourself behind ruins, which means nobody can shoot you, but you can't shoot anything except flyers and superheavies either. Or you put yourself in a ruin, in which case, you can claim the cover save +1, and shoot freely, but everyone can see and shoot you too.

From what I understand, if you are in a ruin, LOS doesn't matter. doesn't matter there is a wall between you or not. everyone can shoot you and you can shoot everyone else.

So in conclusion, I definitely see this as a buff for melee. But, a big but! have they considered weapons that fire out of LOS. I can easily visualise an army focusing on melee units, along with selected artillery style weapons like basilisks or thunderfires, and it forgoes all normal shooting altogether. So, such an army's shooting basically ignores all terrain, while its melee half focuses on making its way up the board staying behind obscured cover until it is ready to charge. It not a bad concept really, except that not all armies can pull that off well. Imperium is probably the one that benefits the most in this case.