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Wanted to start a discussion about tournaments and events having set terrain maps. I think the standardisation could be a good idea so created six maps for each mission.

Check them out here https://www.facebook.com/weylandyutaniinc/posts/784354458841201
(Obviously this is somewhat a plug as well, so if this is inappropriate or at the wrong place please remove/move toic)

I personally think that playing on identical terrain game after game would get boring quite quickly.
While I agree that playing on terrible tables sucks and it happens too often at tournaments, some of the most memorable games I've played in them were on peculiar (ie asymmetric) tables.
It was a lot of fun.

We should try to get to a happy medium between competitive balance and nice tables imho.
Simmetrical tables with flat cardboard ruins look so dull to me.

No.

Set terrain leads to the abomination of "symmetrical" ITC terrain.

Terrain should be natural, logical, creative and good looking.

Tournaments are for determining the better player, not the visual spectacle.
IMO set terrain is better for those.

But obviously that shouldn't spread into casual games.

I think a much more valuable thing would be a pool of rough maps which show you where to place which categories of terrain (ruins, dense, barricades, LOS blockers), so you don't have build a table from scratch each time - building good tables is hard!

I imagine something like this:


Whether this map then becomes an imperial outpost, an eldar craftworld or a trenched battlefield full of smoking craters is up to you.

In our case one side was heavily ork-themed with barricades from speed freeks and smoking piles of scrap for the dense terrain, while the other side was forests and gothic architecture.

Well that looks boring.

There is a roll to determine on which side you deploy, and if you select the side, you have the handicap of deploying a unit first.

If you make the tables symmetrical, you are making it wrong. Selecting the right side of the table for your strategy, is part of the game.

What you should avoid is making one side flat out better than the other.

Spoletta wrote:
There is a roll to determine on which side you deploy, and if you select the side, you have the handicap of deploying a unit first.

If you make the tables symmetrical, you are making it wrong. Selecting the right side of the table for your strategy, is part of the game.

What you should avoid is making one side flat out better than the other.

In my experience not having the exact same terrain available for both sides already makes a big difference.

 Jidmah wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
There is a roll to determine on which side you deploy, and if you select the side, you have the handicap of deploying a unit first.

If you make the tables symmetrical, you are making it wrong. Selecting the right side of the table for your strategy, is part of the game.

What you should avoid is making one side flat out better than the other.

In my experience not having the exact same terrain available for both sides already makes a big difference.

That's what I mean.

There should be some difference between the two sides.

Maybe one has one dense where the other one has a barricade.

Small differences like that actually have a lot of impact and make for a more deep gameplay.

Spoletta wrote:
That's what I mean.

There should be some difference between the two sides.

Maybe one has one dense where the other one has a barricade.

Small differences like that actually have a lot of impact and make for a more deep gameplay.

I understand what you are saying, but that's not what I meant though.

Just because I drew box-shaped ruins in both deployment zones didn't mean that those two ruins were the same. IIRC one was a three-story ruin with lots of windows, while the other was actually an ork mek garage which was wider, lower and had less windows. One side had an actual forest made of trees which also allowed units to hide out of sight, while the other had smoking scrap heaps. Ork barricades have high and low sections, sometimes making it harder to run over, other times making it easier. The ADL on the other side is roughly the same everyhwere.

Despite the abstract map being symmetrical, the actual table was not - when my DA opponent won the roll for defender, he immediately went for deployment zone A because it fit his needs better.

I like when stuff is symetrical, and even more when it is stays the same. So I like the idea. Seems fair too, if everyone plays on the same type of table. In sports no one likes to hear that the mat is going to be moved or changed in the middle of an event. I wouldn't like one week to have this terrain and the next another, specially if it actually impacts the game in 9th.

To me, it seems like a very bad idea because, just like with lots of other things, many people will see it as a God-Emperor given directive on how the game is meant to be played which removes a lot of variety for pickup games and makes terrain in general much more difficult and might very well (for many at least) restrict it purely to the GW-approved terrain kits built in the approved ways.

Aside from that, the very idea of determining the best player of a game like 40k is quite silly. Not only is there a huge chance component, but there also are countless issues with the rules and army building. To do such a thing, you should at the very least also give fixed army lists to people and remove dice rolls in some way.

Not to mention that the "best" 40k player is also the one who can take advantage of different table setups.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Tournaments are for determining the better player, not the visual spectacle.

This is why i hate the tournament community with every atom of my body.


Just play with stones or bases with unit names on it. Why even terrain like ruins? Abstract blocks are just enough for the CoMpEtItIon.

Meh. I am angry today...

I think the idea of providing better guidelines for how much terrain should be placed with an indication of distribution and position would great. It's a really undeveloped part of the rulesets.

Obviously, things would be expressed as a preferred range for amount of cover and distribution, but tournaments and other competitive scenes could narrow up the range more and have more consistency if that was desired.

Forgot to link the actual map document

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0033/5196/9865/files/WY_Terrain_Maps_1.0_Low-Res_0085f29c-3063-4cdf-bbd5-a96344fba607.pdf?v=1614013417


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lord_Valorion wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Tournaments are for determining the better player, not the visual spectacle.

This is why i hate the tournament community with every atom of my body.


Just play with stones or bases with unit names on it. Why even terrain like ruins? Abstract blocks are just enough for the CoMpEtItIon.

Meh. I am angry today...

Not really constructive feedback, but thanks for your opinion!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Dolnikan wrote:
To me, it seems like a very bad idea because, just like with lots of other things, many people will see it as a God-Emperor given directive on how the game is meant to be played which removes a lot of variety for pickup games and makes terrain in general much more difficult and might very well (for many at least) restrict it purely to the GW-approved terrain kits built in the approved ways.

Aside from that, the very idea of determining the best player of a game like 40k is quite silly. Not only is there a huge chance component, but there also are countless issues with the rules and army building. To do such a thing, you should at the very least also give fixed army lists to people and remove dice rolls in some way.

To be fair, there is potentially a team tournament format possible with set army lists, combined with a WTC pairing process that include bans.

Hmm, I'll be honest, I don't really like those maps.

They are good for 8th edition, but for 9th they seem quite bad.

You are using only obscuring elements and containers... why?

Dense terrain, difficult ground and heavy cover are the cornerstones of 9th edition.

Spoletta wrote:
Hmm, I'll be honest, I don't really like those maps.

They are good for 8th edition, but for 9th they seem quite bad.

You are using only obscuring elements and containers... why?

Dense terrain, difficult ground and heavy cover are the cornerstones of 9th edition.

Why do you think they are bad? I would genuinely appreciate if you can explain it further.

Some of those are used in the second half where the WTC terrain elements are used.

Hmm, that could be the issue then.

I consider WTC terrain setups to be quite bad, and players who have been through a few games of 9th tend to think the same.

The "Let's fill the table with obscuring terrain and LoS blocking containers!" screams a lot of armchairing. It is an old design, from an era where you had to do that or an army was going to disappear to high range alpha strikes.
That is no longer the case.

9th edition is mostly about melee and infantries. All those terrain elements do jack squat about influencing how those terminators are going to punch your face. At least WTC has those grid looking elements that work as difficult ground, but the community made tables that you find on TTS are much much better usually. "Better" in this case is used as "More fun/interesting".

You obviously need an healthy amount of obscuring elements, but after that, what really makes a battlefield interesting are craters, forests and barricades.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Tournaments are for determining the better player, not the visual spectacle.
IMO set terrain is better for those.

But obviously that shouldn't spread into casual games.

And game rules are designed for asymmetric boards

I do think map design is woefully underdeveloped in tabletop gaming. Like, I get why and all, but just think how much work goes into map design in videogames and how much that matters to a game's overall success. Someone made a map in WC3 so good it spawned entire genre after all.

So like.... I get it, but still, its something I'd love to see given some real attention.

Lord_Valorion wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Tournaments are for determining the better player, not the visual spectacle.

This is why i hate the tournament community with every atom of my body.

Don't worry, you're not the only one who feels like that.

Why can't it be both?

Racerguy180 796421 11064142 wrote:
Don't worry, you're not the only one who feels like that.

Why can't it be both?

Because when looks are added to any competition bad things start to happen. And you get favourism to those that do both, very soon afterwards.
Just look at football.

Not to mention that the "best" 40k player is also the one who can take advantage of different table setups.

the best w40k players often play armies which out right ignore terrain and most of its effects.

Aside from that, the very idea of determining the best player of a game like 40k is quite silly. Not only is there a huge chance component, but there also are countless issues with the rules and army building. To do such a thing, you should at the very least also give fixed army lists to people and remove dice rolls in some way.

You just described every sports and most games in the history of men kind. And yet somehow here we are doing wrestling, boxing and playing football just like our ancestors.

Karol wrote:

Racerguy180 796421 11064142 wrote:
Don't worry, you're not the only one who feels like that.

Why can't it be both?

Because when looks are added to any competition bad things start to happen. And you get favourism to those that do both, very soon afterwards.
Just look at football.

I'm quite sure that if there was less spectacle in Football(American and otherwise) it wouldn't nearly be as popular.

I think adapting to the terrain is part of the skill of the game so I really dislike tournaments that have fixed set-ups, known ahead of time. There also seems to be a lack of anything other than Obscuring terrain in the first half of those tables. You need more Dense and Difficult Ground, IMO.

Table layout and map design are probably the least well-developed part of the 40k tournament scene. It takes a lot of skill and testing to come up with interesting, asymmetric, yet fair set-ups. The idea of fixed, symmetrical, tables is just exceedingly dull to me and quickly leads to one part of the game being "solved".

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
No.

Set terrain leads to the abomination of "symmetrical" ITC terrain.

Terrain should be natural, logical, creative and good looking.

Yeah, this basically. The missions are too streamlined and all the same already so that I couldn't imagine playing any of them twice against the same faction. But if that's what tournament players want, they may go ahead, just keep it out of the normal game

I agree with most of the what is stated here in principle. But in practice i have to disagree. Here are some of my points, essentially an explanation why there is a terrain map and the enterprise that is producing said terrain.

Terrain shouldn't be set, you shouldn't know what table you will play

This is a valid point about player and army adaptability however in practice in tournament settings it eventually ends up in a scenario;
*Where you face up against an opponent to only lose because of the terrain. You would have had a more equal, maybe even favourable matchup if you played at the next table in an event.

And that will sour your mood because in the end it is just dumb luck to have the correct table. Yes, you can make an army that can work in most tables, if not all; and that point will be addressed down below.

It makes the game boring

That is true when your set maps don't differ much in quality or quantity, that can easily solved by increasing the amount of maps you have and having them include different terrain elements.

It looks bad aesthethically

Another good point, considering there are some tables out there that should be placed in museums as excellent creature of miniature craftsmanship. And when you are focusing in only one table with unlimited time and resources i actually would encourage anybody to make that single table better instead of buying one the sets linked in the pack.

But these maps are being created mainly for event organisers or quick competitive games in the store, in those situations you simply can't put in unlimited resources on your terrain. And even then, such beatiful tables rarely survive edition changes and remain playable, unless heavily houseruled.

Also, set terrain maps can definitely be improved when it comes to looks. You can even have them with a theme of Ancient Aliens

Logistics

Set terrain maps in general, and this ones originator in particular (the WTC maps); are created for events with multiple tables that need to be transported, setup and dismantled quicky, played on by players who might not show the greatest care, and stored for long periods of time. Pretty looking terrain usually doesn't surive such treatment without needing repairs.

But more importantly it is a nightmare for TO to manage when it comes to numbers, say you have a very nice building in your inventory but what rules should it have? Does it count as obscuring? How many pieces you have in total and how many terrain pieces you think will be enough in general?

About placement. Where will you place it in your 16 table setup. You can indeed eyeball it during the setup of the event, but your guess might not be correct. That terrain where you placed assuming its taller than 5" might be 4.5" tall, opening up chunk of deployment zone to enemy shooting.

And terrain move throughout play and not placed back perfectly at the end of the game. So at round three the players come to a table and terrain just looks weird, the judges are too busy to make the terrain setup proper in time and the players have to start their game, now what? They eyeball it themselves?

Different deployment zones

A great setup for long edge deployments might be utterly terrible for short edge deployments. If the players have enough time to make a table proper cooperatively this is no problem. But sometimes it favours one side, and even though it is not cheating by anybody, a player might cheated because the reason they lost wasn't because the roll of the dice during shooting, nor the tactics of their army or the opponent proves but simply terrain setup that was done by chance that is entirely not in the scope of the game played.

Conclusion

If you have the time and energy to perfect a single table to play in an enviorenment you know, you don't need set tables at all. You can create great terrain pieces and randomise them in a way where the familiar attendees like.

But if you want to increase the pool of players and number of tables, set terrain maps and pieces is the way to improve your club/event. The drawbacks are there, but the benefits surely outweight them considerably.

I'm very much not a fan of this idea, but for context, I dislike the entirety of 9th's matched play mission set too.
If the goal is to take out all elements of imbalance, tournaments should use a set army list that everyone must play. This is just the terrain equivalent of that.

I like going to tournaments to test my abilities but I need variety (and a hard limit on book keeping during the battle). If I know the tournament will use set maps of uninteresting terrain (read printed card buildings), I will not attend.

Oh :(

It’s certainly an idea. And not inherently a bad one.

For instance, WarCry I believe to have exactly that. The advantage being it’s a much smaller scale, and the required scenery came in the Big Box.

But woe and lamentation to those who attempt such things in 40K. One need only look at the notorious London GT for that....



And double warning.....

This is GW we’re talking about. If set terrain becomes commonplace, they will seize on that, given they already have an extensive range of terrain. They’d leverage that, because they’d be daft not to.

Whilst their offerings are superb kits (chunky, robust, visually interesting, highly interchangeable. There’s really a lot to like!), you’re adding another price barrier to the hobby.

You’d also be removing a slice of creativity from the wider hobby, as with set terrain for a given scenario, all that interchangeability is for naught.