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Is there a rule about how close terrain can be set up? I can’t find anything but it feels weird clumping terrain together and the rules suggest you and your opponent place terrain back and forth. What stops my opponent from putting all the terrain together?

For some reason, I feel like there was a minimum such that knights could move between terrain...but I didn't see anything beyond a recommendation of one terrain piece per square foot in the core rulebook

But, say we’re playing on a 30” x 44” board like the rules suggest for under 1000 points. What’s stopping us from putting all the terrain in one corner?

My buddy is new to the game and I find myself telling him to do things out of convention because I’ve been playing since 5th edition. So I told him terrain has to be at least 6” away from each other because he wanted to put all the LoS blocking terrain clumped together.

I feel like I know you’re not supposed to do that but I’m trying to find actual rules to show him rather than just saying “no, that’s not how it’s done.”

My only other alternative would be playing a couple games like this to show him that a) it’s not fun, and b) it’s not particularly beneficial tactically.

Edit: never mind. You mean one terrain piece in every 1 square foot section, not overall amount/size.

Yup, I probably should have been more explicit about that heh.

There are no rules how to set up terrain, only recommendations. Its up to the players.

While there are no hard set rules on how to set up the terrain, the general guideline is that you set it up depending on how balanced you want the game.

 skchsan wrote:
While there are no hard set rules on how to set up the terrain, the general guideline is that you set it up depending on how balanced you want the game.

Yes, but when dealing with a new player who doesn't understand what constitutes balanced terrain, I look to the rules. Without rules, I only have "suggestions." So, I let my friend know what the game suggests and that the rules are generally designed around the idea that the game is going to be played with the suggested terrain placement.

I find it tricky because I don't want to design the table for my own advantage, but at the same time it *is* a war/battle so my opponent does try to design the terrain in his favor.

Do most people set up terrain as the rules suggest, by having the players take turns setting terrain pieces? Or do you guys just set up the board and tell your opponent to rearrange it if they'd like?

Iggy88 wrote:

 skchsan wrote:
While there are no hard set rules on how to set up the terrain, the general guideline is that you set it up depending on how balanced you want the game.

Yes, but when dealing with a new player who doesn't understand what constitutes balanced terrain, I look to the rules. Without rules, I only have "suggestions." So, I let my friend know what the game suggests and that the rules are generally designed around the idea that the game is going to be played with the suggested terrain placement.

I find it tricky because I don't want to design the table for my own advantage, but at the same time it *is* a war/battle so my opponent does try to design the terrain in his favor.

Do most people set up terrain as the rules suggest, by having the players take turns setting terrain pieces? Or do you guys just set up the board and tell your opponent to rearrange it if they'd like?

A good place to start is going by LVO standard terrain set up.

It typically consists of 3~4 large area terrain w/o obscuring in middle of four quadrants, 2~3 small/medium obscuring towards the center and a few scatter terrain for advancing infantries to take advantage of.

Such set up deters 1st turn barrage across the board allowing to game to cook into something more interesting towards turns 3.

Just explain to your friend the game requires certain degree of houseruling to make it more fun/interesting.

Iggy88 wrote:


Do most people set up terrain as the rules suggest, by having the players take turns setting terrain pieces? Or do you guys just set up the board and tell your opponent to rearrange it if they'd like?

Personally, I prefer to set up terrain cooperatively rather than adversarially. We float ideas, put out some terrain, and generally try to get a good layout that we both like. Sometimes we end up having to move the terrain about after we've placed other terrain to make sure everything seems approximately equal (if that's our goal for that match) and we both have the sort of terrain features we like (which there's a lot of overlap). That said, these days I always play with the same person, so that makes it easier as well.

an earlier edition suggested covering IIRC a quarter of the table with terrain, roughly split between stuff that blocked line of sight, stuff that blocked movement and stuff that just provided cover - then basically spreading it out between you. - not sure why they dropped this to be honest as it was quite a simple concept

Personally I found the method of one player sets up the board (so it can be done in advance) but the other picks the deployment (as in they count as winning the dice for deployment choice) works quite well

The ITC has a version of player-placed terrain that might be interesting for your friend if he likes adversarial terrain placement. GW's version of the same was unfortunately useless.