It's pretty standard at tournaments. A lot of people like it because it removes the penalty for walking into a ruin, and also makes it much more consistent across different terrain sets where some are basically wide open with sight lines everywhere and others are just solid walls with no openings anywhere.
> A lot of people like it because it removes the penalty for walking into a ruin
Which is exactly why it is a bad rule. Terrain is supposed to be an obstacle to deal with.
Terrain is supposed to provide cover for infantry while being an obstacle for big units. Not to punish people for moving around the map š¤£ that would incentivize firing lines which are uninteractive, and I play the shooting armies.
> Terrain is supposed to provide cover for infantry while being an obstacle for big units.
And also to provide obstacles to infantry movement. It is unfortunate that so many people think like you and have pushed out every terrain type other than magic boxes.
The game rules have pushed out that terrain. If melee units canāt survive out in the open thatās not the fault of magic boxes. You either play with sufficient spots to stage melee or it simply doesnāt exist in the game.
You can stage melee without first floor blocking by staying behind the ruin entirely, avoiding its footprint. You just have to choose between straight line movement efficiency and defense, which is how it should be.
So the melee army has a choice of sit in the ruin and get shot by everything, but gets cover. Or sits behind it where the shooty army can reposition and now the melee army gets no cover.
With the amount of movement shenanigans in 10th Ed it just means melee armies die.
Also, your infantry with a 6" movement can sit behind the ruin with a 5" width, move up 4.5" because their 32mm base can't get to the other side then attempt an 11" charge vs sitting in the ruin, moving out and charging 6"
Melee units are only usable if they can threaten an area, if that area is "only my own deployment zone" they're functionally useless
I love this guyās take that melee players just need to **USE THEIR BRAIN** and find new ways to use their effective 2-3ā of movement to get value. Like if your melee units arenāt **going at** the opponent to melee what is even the point of having them? Sure they can wander around from place to place, but why am I paying points for that?
What do you mean "supposed to"? I thought the designers of the game decided how terrain works?
It's been years since it was an obstacle for infantry movement and it was most likely changed to improve the game. At least I think it's better like this.
> What do you mean "supposed to"? I thought the designers of the game decided how terrain works?
They did, by making ruins have windows and therefore indirectly slow infantry by making the direct route undesirable.
>it was most likely changed to improve the game.
It was changed to *simplify* the game as part of the general trend of removing simulationist wargame elements in favor of special rules and dice math. It was only an improvement if you're the kind of player who hates on-table strategy and wants to reduce the game to seeing which player won in the list building phase.
Ok, fair enough. But it doesn't say in the rules that you need to use ruins with open windows and most tournament organizers including GW themselves have come to the conclusion that the game is more balanced with ruins being able to be used as better staging points.
Since most don't want to buy entire new terrain sets it's common to play them as "bottom floor is closed". I imagine this will changes over time so that you play them as they look.
The last sentiment is what I disagree with. I used to play back in the days when terrain was more limited. THAT was a dice game. If it was a shooting army vs a melee army it was all about weather you could survive rushing forward or not. Right now movement, charging and pile in / consolidates is probably the most strategic part of the game and that is improved by how terrain is currently handled in most tournaments.
> But it doesn't say in the rules that you need to use ruins with open windows
It doesn't, but the standard terrain sold by GW has windows/doors/etc and the implication of ruins granting cover to models in their footprint is that it is possible to draw line of sight to those models.
>If it was a shooting army vs a melee army it was all about weather you could survive rushing forward or not.
It was but not because of terrain. It was because the lack of early-game scoring meant a gunline could sit back at the far edge of the table and shoot for 3-4 turns before making a last-turn objective grab (if they hadn't already tabled the melee army for the auto-win). 10th has already fixed this issue by scoring objectives every turn. A shooting army that deploys at the back and dares you to try to come at them over open shooting lanes loses every game because it can't hold the mid-table objectives during the critical early turns. Even if they manage to get line of sight on the melee army (which can still stay behind terrain to block line of sight even if the footprint is only a cover save) by the time they clear out the melee units and it's safe to make that last-minute objective grab the melee army will already have too much of a VP lead.
>Right now movement, charging and pile in / consolidates is probably the most strategic part of the game
It really isn't. You're making the common mistake of confusing rules gimmicks with strategy. Exploiting all the edge cases and nuances of how melee moves are done is just a question of whether you've memorized all those edge cases and exploits, it isn't any more strategy than the shooting player who figures out it's a good idea to use a Sentinel to ignore the indirect fire penalty.
Whatās silly is looking at a game and thinking āhow can I make this more difficult and less pleasant to play?ā
If terrain is as much an obstacle to tanks as it is to infantry, why would anyone ever take infantry?
> Whatās silly is looking at a game and thinking āhow can I make this more difficult and less pleasant to play?ā
Which is funny because I'm advocating playing by RAW instead of adding rule changes to make the game less enjoyable.
>If terrain is as much an obstacle to tanks as it is to infantry, why would anyone ever take infantry?
Because infantry has advantages moving *in some terrain*. For example a set of tank traps in previous editions would obstruct vehicle movement but not infantry as infantry could walk through the gaps between them. Your complaint here only makes sense in the context of a game where terrain diversity has been stripped out and anything besides L ruins is de facto banned.
> Which is funny because I'm advocating playing by RAW instead of adding rule changes to make the game less enjoyable.
Personally I donāt find having the game end because somebody got shot off the board turn 2 very fun, but thatās subjective I guess
> Because infantry has advantages moving in some terrain. For example a set of tank traps in previous editions would obstruct vehicle movement but not infantry as infantry could walk through the gaps between them.
Yeah it would be great to have a terrain type that infantry can move through but tanks canāt. Probably want to standardize the setup of that sort of terrain so that you can use different types of physical pieces to the same result at competitive events, too. Thatād be great.
> Personally I donāt find having the game end because somebody got shot off the board turn 2 very fun, but thatās subjective I guess
Magic boxes are not essential for that, normal ruins work just fine.
> For example a set of tank traps in previous editions would obstruct vehicle movement but not infantry as infantry could walk through the gaps between them.
Likewise in this edition a ruin obstructs vehicle movement, but not infantry and provides them a place to hide.
A standard ruin indirectly obstructs infantry movement by only giving its full protection to models that sacrifice movement options to stay fully behind it. It is only house ruled ruins that are purely a benefit to infantry.
And the comment I was replying to asked the general question of why anyone would take infantry if ruins are an obstacle for infantry. The answer is that not all terrain is ruins.
Sounds like 10th edition in a nutshell, GW making all terrain boring except ruins and telling the community to fix it for them. Vehicles are bafflingly strong and the best solution to deal with them is to take vehicles yourself or warp the terrain so ruins are not what GW intended.
I just dont understand why you think this. This isn't how real life works, nor is it how the game works. In real life, there are doors in buildings, or windows, or holes in walls, but tanks can't to through these things. Therefore, how is it bad to have a piece of terrain one can move through and not the other? I do also hope you remember that there is terrain infantry can't move through, like crates...
> In real life, there are doors in buildings, or windows, or holes in walls
Correct, which is why in the standard game models in the footprint of a ruin use true line of sight with a +1 save bonus. It is only in the bizarre magic box house rule that we are assuming solid impenetrable walls. Thank you for acknowledging how absurd the house rule is and that we should use the standard rules for ruins.
Also, as I have said before, the impact on infantry movement is indirect. A standard ruin does not literally have a "infantry move slower" rule attached, it hinders movement by creating an area of the table that is less desirable for infantry to be in and forcing infantry that want the best possible protection to sacrifice movement options.
>I do also hope you remember that there is terrain infantry can't move through, like crates.
Sure, there is terrain infantry can't move through. The vast majority of it is theoretical only as everything is standard L ruins.
You sound so salty š¤£š¤£ I guess that's what happens when you have to face the reality that what you want is the opposite of what 99% of other people want, especially cause your so emotionally tied to a concept that in your head just matters so much, but doesn't make sense logically to most others. You are welcome to find a different game where the players share your opinions, but I don't want that here. And judging by the votes, neither does anyone else š
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
I don't care how much of an echo chamber reddit is truth is not a popularity contest. And if the best you can do to respond the game design argument is to appeal to reddit's voting system I'll take that as a concession that you know I'm right.
"Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who's wrong"
Stands in a room full of people who want it one way, accuses everyone else of living in an echo chamber and being wrong, and that everyone should do it his way, on a matter that is subjective... Doesn't see the irony in this and claiming he's "right" about a subjective opinion. You did it dude, you won reddit.
Sorry if you don't like it but reddit is an echo chamber. The voting system you're so concerned with is designed to amplify the echo chamber effect and drive out dissent.
But thanks for admitting you can't address any of the actual game design issues and can only appeal to popularity.
The game is better that way. Then we donāt have to talk about the minute details of windows and trying to make sure your dudeās banner isnāt showing through a tiny crack in terrain, etc.
The difference between being shot and not shot is huge, having relatively secure staging areas for both players makes it a more strategic game of taking pieces out and trading them instead of āmy sideās run is more open so I canāt stage my unitsā or āi randomly got a key unit blown up before I took it outā
> having relatively secure staging areas for both players makes it a more strategic game of taking pieces out and trading them
Piece trading has all the strategic depth of a puddle. Having to make strategic choices between greater movement flexibility and full LOS blocking makes the game deeper than "hide in the magic box until you want to trade".
I don't even think you know what a magic box is. You are just parroting things. The game is terrible with bottom floor being open. Even GW themselves realizes this and made their US Open events closed bottom floors.
> I don't even think you know what a magic box is.
It's a ruin that is magically a sold impenetrable and fully obscuring wall during the shooting phase but disappears in the movement phase, allowing melee units to hide in the magic box to avoid shooting but not be slowed at all by doing so.
No, a magic box was a concept from 8th Edition, where people would put AM mortar squads inside of a 4 walled ruin (we don't use those anymore) nothing could shoot in. But because of indirect the guard unit could shoot out. Extra special was in 8th we used to use that you couldn't fight things through walls that were more than 1" away so they were literally immortal in those boxes.
The fight through walls rule is still a thing in 10th thou?gh :p since you're not in engagement if you're more than 1" away
Was it so that infantry couldn't move through the ruins?
Now a days pretty much every TO has an exception in their rules now that allows you to fight through walls (for infantry/beasts). WTC wrote like a 12 page document explaining how its done lol. I think GW themselves are the only event I have been too that still allows the no fight through walls nonsense.
"Magic box" is not a term exclusively owned by that one rules mistake. I am well aware that 10th edition does not use those specific rules, it's still a magic box because it functions by magic.
Everything in the game is magic, the entire game is a complete abstraction.
Soldiers can't walk through walls, tanks can drive through walls, planes can't be shot by pistols, dudes armed with swords don't stand a hope in hell against dudes with guns in the real world
What matters is if the rules lead to interesting game dynamics, and being able to hide and stage melee units is important for the game to work.
The obscuring rule is an elegant solution, but it gets let down by terrain with massive footprints, and blocking LOS on the ground floor fixes that issue.
> What matters is if the rules lead to interesting game dynamics, and being able to hide and stage melee units is important for the game to work.
You can still stage melee units without magic boxes, you just have to think about where to put them and evaluate tradeoffs between locations. Magic boxes are only essential to melee players who want to mindlessly go straight into the middle of the table and roll charges.
>without magic boxes
It's not a magic box. A magic box is a four walled completely uninteractive terrain piece that can't be seen into and often can't be charged into. An L shaped LOS blocking ruin is not a magic box, and it's a widely used terrain piece that enhances games and is popular at tournaments.
>Magic boxes are only essential to melee players who want to mindlessly go straight into the middle of the table and roll charges.
Magic boxes are a problem because of indirect fire units, not melee units. Having safe staging points in the midboard for melee is a feature, not a bug.
I'd encourage you to get out to some events IRL or on TTS and try this terrain, and I'm sure you'll come around to it.
> It's not a magic box
Only if you define "magic box" to only be that one thing from 8th. I am clearly not using the term that way so stop nitpicking.
>Having safe staging points in the midboard for melee is a feature, not a bug.
You can have those with normal ruins, you don't need first floor LOS blocking magic boxes.
>I'd encourage you to get out to some events IRL or on TTS and try this terrain, and I'm sure you'll come around to it.
I have played plenty of games with the rule. It sucks and reduces strategic depth.
Strategic depth is when we each spend 3 hours trying to cut the finest angles possible with heavy tanks and artillery and do as little as possible to get out of our deployment. If you try to leave your deployment, you die.
The guy keeps saying "Magic Box" when referring to L-shaped ruin walls
Clearly he's 100% literal LOS he can see the dangerous melee unit and needs to use good strategy of blasting their first floor magical solid bullet blocking windows. Which is just baaaad for melee units
Someone doesn't want to work to get angles. He just wants to sit back and shoot everything off the board. I think it makes for a much less strategic game.
There is no single body that oversees 40k events and what ruleset they're using. In theory, it's possible to show up to an event that's just as legitimate as any other RTT where they're playing without closed ruins and only the Deploy Servo Skulls mission on non-symetrical boards. If you want to be the guy that runs that event, go for it, but don't be surprised if nobody shows up. Because of the Servo Skulls. Mission sucks, bro.
Ruins having Obscuring, as in the Ruin is treated as infinitely tall and blocking all LoS while you are outside the footprint, is in the Core Rules. Almost all events will run with that. I assume you're getting mixed up between that and the common houserule of "treat all Ruins as if there are no windows or holes in the physical wall". This is a common enough rule that GW's own Open series tournaments use it, and it exists to standardize terrain, so that purpose-built MDF terrain, homemade foam-board terrain, and GW terrain all work the same.
The story as to why this concept arose has to do with the relatively basic concept of shooting being safer than melee. In real life, we don't use swords anymore, and soldiers are trained in CQC as a safety measure, not as their primary form of combat. Put simply, the further away from danger you can keep your people, the better. But on the tabletop, charges are cool, and some factions do specialize in melee as their primary form of combat. At some point, a game dev has to make concessions to gameplay. Without Obscuring, the game devolves into long range shooting matches. Obscuring is the simplest way to prevent that. You can see that with the results from the start of 10th, where Towering units ignored it completely, and Knights basically had access to your entire army on turn one if the bottom floors of ruins weren't boarded up. At the time, Towering allowed you to ignore Obscuring, but the actual LoS issue came from Knights standing behind a Ruin and being able to draw LoS through a hole in the wall from it's leg to your dude behind another ruin. They were only kept in check by Eldar being absolutely buck-wild, and they were playing their own Wraithknights to abuse Dev Wounds and Towering.
So that covers Obscuring and the rules for that. By the Core Rules, only the footprint of the terrain blocks LoS, and units inside of the Ruin use true LoS. But the point of competitive play is to standardize certain aspects of the game so that player skill, and not factors entirely outside of any player's control, is what determines the winner. Imagine playing a melee centric army, then getting put on the last table in the venue, where the TO was starting to run out of terrain, and the sparse ruins are full of holes and you just cannot approach any objectives. You're going to get shot off the board at no fault of your own, and your opponent won without having to do anything. There's nothing you could have changed in your list to better deal with this, you cannot have played better, you lost before you even rolled up to the table. I've been playing 40k since 5th edition, before Obscuring was a rule and everything was run on true LoS. I've played in those events, I've been in that exact position. It isn't fun being target practice for a Tau player on Planet Bowling Ball. Heck, I played a player-placed terrain event in 9th edition where on my final round I got handed the smallest pieces of terrain I'd ever seen, short enough to not benefit from 9th edition Obscuring, and full of holes while playing Bloody Rose Sisters of Battle. I was tabled turn 2 by Iron Hands Space Marines. I did not have a good time. In fact, so many people from multiple nearby communities had such a problem with how that event ran it's terrain that we all got together and handbuilt competitive terrain to use from then on.
There's other interesting consequences to making Ruins fully true LoS, especially in the current edition. Rolling a solid flamer, like a Land Raider Redeemer or Baal Predator (whichever one gets the strong flamers, I don't know BA units) into the middle of the board would completely lock down the opponent's ability to move and interact with the game at the cost of a single CP, which pushs the game even more towards shooty hull spam. You can already kind of do this on some WTC board layouts where you can control the entire center objective and a good chunk of the middle with a flamer vehicle.
As for players being upset to be told terrain is using true LoS, probably not, as long as they are told ahead of time, and not after they've staged a unit of Berserkers in a ruin full of holes. Make sure your players know when they sign up, and mention it again in the briefing the day of.
If your terrain is sufficiently not covered in windows, then it matters a lot less.
Traditionally a lot of terrain for stores was the GW terrain that is absolutely riddled with holes and windows to make it more aesthetically pleasing. In most cases though, it turns the game into an effective planet bowling ball situation and heavily favors shooting.
Now more places are moving to MDF and other purpose built tournament terrain that has little to no windows. In that case is largely doesnāt matter.
If you have terrain with almost any windows and donāt declare this rule, expect a lot of shooting gallery matches
> In most cases though, it turns the game into an effective planet bowling ball situation
This is not true at all. RAW ruins still block shooting to anything behind them, the windows only allow shooting against units in the ruin's footprint. RAW ruins still very much prevent planet bowling ball, they just create more interesting strategic choices.
Yes, but if you have stay .1ā behind the footprint to be safe, then there are basically no melee units that can get anywhere meaningful.
Your standard ruin footprint is 3ā-4ā deep. That consumes most of your movement then you end up like 1ā in front of the wall and eat a bunch of shooting
Yes, that is the point of tradeoffs, there is no optimal solution. You can either have slow movement or be vulnerable to shooting. And you can choose differently for different units or on different turns. Maybe you stay behind ruins early in the game while moving into position and then move into the footprint as you close to within charge range, accepting the fact that if you fail to make the charge your unit is exposed.
The tradeoff being... Shooting armies will just stand on points with their scoring units and win vs melee armies because melee will never make contact with anything meaningful. Doesn't really sound as Strategically appealing as you make it out to be.
You really don't get this, do you?
Your 600 points of cool melee has hit their 200 points of trading chaff on objectives - great, they're dead! Now all you have to do is survive in the open against a gunline until your next turn to score... Oh, and you've died.
That's okay, next turn you can put the rest of your army on objectives because you're too far back to actually fight anything, and all you have to do is survive in the open against a gunline until your next turn to score... Oh, and you've died. What a fun game this was!
What does this have to do with magic boxes? The objectives aren't in the magic box so if your units are getting shot to death out in the open on objectives that's going to happen regardless of the ruin rules.
It's got nothing to do with magic boxes, because this isn't a magic boxes problem. You're just using that term because you know people hated actual magic boxes and you're trying to evoke the same feeling from a completely different situation.
It's absolutely the same kind of problem. The issue was ruins behaving in a counter-intuitive way and being a magic immunity box instead of a realistic representation of terrain. And now we have the same kind of problem again: people want ruins to be solid impenetrable walls against shooting but nonexistent at every other time.
Not true from what I've seen. I've only been to GTs and Tatts that doesn't use first floor ribs and I play melee as much as I can and never had an issue same for other players that I know.
It's not to hamper melee - it just doesn't make sense that you have an impermeable barrier that you somehow just waltz on through. It's counter-intuitive and imo that's bad design.
It's also led to highly repetitive only ruin boards - you barely ever see forests, craters, or anything anymore.
There are better ways to balance the issue than the way it's balanced now.
Rules exist to create fun gameplay patterns, not to completely mimic reality. You can play anything you want and call it obscuring, itās just that ruins are typically the most stackable, storable, and easily/cheaply mass produced for TOs.
I organize local events, and terrain is the biggest hurdle to running tournaments. You need a lot of it, it needs to be consistent, it needs to be durable (people are absolutely not considerate of othersā terrain), and it needs to be storable.
The MDF ruins hit those criteria while being relatively cheap. Trees on a footprint that you play as obscuring definitely do not, and they would cost significantly more for operations that are not making (much) profit
I think perhaps a bit of clarifying would be helpful. Obscuring refers to the height and what can or cannot be seen behind it. What you are talking about is done at all the tournaments I have been to over the past several years, and the way I have heard it referred to is āClosed.ā As in all, all first floor windows, doors and gaps in ruins are closed, and therefore they block LOS.
And to answer your question, I very much prefer games that way. And I play Tau. The game is just way more tactical and fun when the bottom floors are closed.
So just as a clarification for me, if you are in the ruin, you can still be shot? So the closed applies to units not being able to shoot units on the other side of the ruin not inside it , right?
The common house rule is that the entire first floor of a ruin is treated as being a solid wall. So in effect you canāt be shot while staging against the front wall.
Not being able to be shot while behind a ruin is Obscuring and thatās part of the core rules
You should expect essentially every tournament to either (a) have fully enclosed MDF ruins, or (b) specifically treat the first floor of their ruins as entirely enclosed. There may be a few exceptions, but this is the overwhelming majority of tournaments - including GWās open series
What they are discussing is what is called āMagic boxesā.Ā
Itās a terrain feature that cannot be interacted in anyway unless you go inside said terrain feature to shoot, or if you have indirect weapons. The same rules apply to units within - they cannot shoot out.Ā
This means if you have a ruin with three walls and an opening on the fourth side, you cannot fire at anything within that terrain feature at all.Ā
It creates some weird circumstances.Ā
Ā A lot of tournaments run just solid walled ruins, so they donāt have to do this āhouse ruleā.Ā
Itās best to talk over ruin rules with your opponent before you start the match so expectations can be set.Ā
Honestly I feel weird when we *don't* use that rule. It's pretty standard at the tournaments in my area / is how my friends & I play it. Otherwise cover almost becomes a liability
Because cover is a liability for shooting. Difficult terrain and undesirable area terrain are liabilities for movement (and by extension melee). Every strategy should be hindered by terrain.
Honestly I kinda miss some of the nuance we used to have, difficult terrain giving -2" Movement for example
For the liability, I get what you're saying but personally I think it's main use is to block LOS so you don't just get tabled T1 heh :P Then again you could always say that's a liability for the person who wants to shoot
Iām sure the big hater in the room will comment on this. But me and my community where I play as greatly benefited from having bottom floor of ruins obscured since we have a lot of random and different terrain pieces. Weāve noticed any time we didnāt use these rules, any melee oriented army would likely get blown off board by round 3. Shooting is incredibly oppressive rn this edition and although melee often has advantage with speed, u often canāt hide your units well behind the footprint of ruins enough to actually keep them safe. If they could bring back better terrain rules like -1 to hit from woods for example I think some of these issues could be mitigated. But sadly her we are where tournaments feel itās best to augment some rules for the sake of making more matches balanced.
Ignore whatever the MostNinja guy says, he seems to be playing a different game. In 9th edition it was fairly common to have some ground floor windows but often just 1 or 2 pieces on the table. In 10th every tournament I've seen has gone to fully blocked ground floor windows to help the game have more movement. I think it's a good change because otherwise you get people parking shooty infantry units in them and closing down most of the board with firing lanes. That said in 9th it was harder to get cover, your models had to be fully in the terrain whereas now you can just be partially hidden by it so you can push out safer to places that used to be wide open. At the beginning of 10th a lot of events told people to just ignore the ground floor windows but now terrain has mostly caught up so you don't need to pretend. If that's not super common in your area just make sure everyone at the event is aware
The dude has the most inane takes on almost every subject. At this point I think he's a contrarian troll who gets his jollies just disagreeing with people and running them around in a verbal circle. His arguments all come down to "nuh-uh".
He strikes me as one of the old school war gamers who just doesn't jive with the modern game and how its played. It all sorta fits and isn't super un-common. Those folks have mostly moved to things like Bolt Action or Flames of War or one of the GW specialty games.
It's pretty much a universal standard at this point.
Without it, melee armies just aren't viable because of how deadly the game is (especially shooting).
By obscuring, do you mean that you are unable to see in regards to shooting but can still move through the first floor if your Infantry or a Beast? Or obscuring in the sence where it is true LOS blocking and move blocking terrain?
Both ways where there is a wall. Most people play large gaps or open halves of ruins to be, well, open. It's just that there aren't these tiny windows you see on most GW terrain that give almost or literally nowhere to stand inside of ruin without being seen.
I think it's a hold over from 9th and the early part of 10th. If Codexes keep coming out fairly weak I think it'll become more and more clearly absurd. But previously it was necessary not to just instantly die to 9th eds insane shooting power.
There are no standard terrain models, and terrain varies so wildly between events, that most TOs just have first floor block LoS so games are somewhat fair. Otherwise this table here is loaded with magic boxes and that table over their is planet bowling ball and the table you end up on really impacts your game - significantly.
The two shops I regularly play at use the rules as presented by GW. Both shops have sufficient quantity and quality of terrain that it usually isn't an issue. There are enough ruins with no or limited first floor openings that infantry can move around somewhat safely if you are careful.
If by obscuring you mean you can't see through it, yeah, that's pretty standard.
People will always be upset. Apart from who will or won't be upset, true line of sight will likely make shooting armies dominante your tournament.
It's a really good change on average.
Melee armies that have to stand behind ruins as opposed to just being in them to avoid shooting are already at a huge disadvantage. I played with a group that doesn't do it as pre-lobotomy Custodes and it was silly having an AM player line up his entire army to shoot at a Warden squad in terrain right from the get-go.
Not having it makes for some serious first turn advantage problems.
It mainly depends on the availability of terrain and what the TO decides is best for their event.Ā
For context, LVO does ***not*** do obscuring first floor unless the terrain piece is identified as such in the packet.Ā
The big issue with āMagic boxesā is that it pretty much makes it so you cannot take out a unit hiding within it unless you go in and get them.Ā
So if you roll up behind a ruin that doesnāt have a back and try to shoot those models inside 5ā away, sorry - my magic box protects me.Ā
>Is there specific reasons itās implemented at most events?
Because people want melee armies to be able to hide in magic boxes while moving into range and for terrain to only impact shooting, never movement or melee.
The way ruins are intended to work is that you have a choice between full protection at the cost of movement by standing behind the ruin or less protection but full movement by moving the unit into the ruin's footprint. But certain melee players think that terrain being an obstacle to their plans is a problem that needs to be solved by rules changes.
>Would people be upset to be told terrain is true LoS?
Unfortunately yes. Certain people don't want to have to think about terrain, they just want a de facto rule that shooting beyond 24" (except for artillery) is banned. They will not be happy if you don't use their favorite house rule.
You have commented on nearly every other comment and seem to have your own agenda but yet entirely misunderstand the point of declaring this rule.
Your argument is predicated on the assumption that all terrain per the core rules has bottom floor windows.
Nowhere in the core rules is this specifically called out. If the terrain placed on the table didnāt have any windows on the bottom floor TLOS rules would still apply and effectively be the same as this declaration.
So in effect what this rule does is replace visually what terrain people have with that of what is intended to be on the tabletop, it does not modify the rules of this edition whatsoever.
> Your argument is predicated on the assumption that all terrain per the core rules has bottom floor windows.
Which is a correct assumption. The example ruins in the rulebook have windows, as does every ruin kit GW sells. You don't get closed bottom floors unless you buy (or make) third-party terrain.
>what is intended to be on the tabletop
If it is intended to be closed on the tabletop then why did GW specifically write rules for handling terrain that has windows? It is incredibly obvious that ruins are meant to have windows in most cases.
>The example ruins in the rulebook have windows, as does every ruin kit GW sells. You don't get closed bottom floors unless you buy (or make) third-party terrain.
This is demonstrably false as I have GW terrain that has no windows.
Ok but like, I could argue just as easily that "shooting armies just want the board to be flat and featureless so they can shoot my melee army down in a nice neat firing line."
You can't have melee focused armies and not give them the opportunity to walk up the board safely. I think characterising it as people not wanting to think is a bit narrow minded.
I'm lucky I can 3d print terrain, but if someone has to buy their terrain, they have to pick the most optimal one for lod blocking as opposed to what they like. Not to mention gw doesn't really offer LoS blocking ruins (always have holes).
Why GW can't make terrain rules more robust and make more sense is beyond me.
> Ok but like, I could argue just as easily that "shooting armies just want the board to be flat and featureless so they can shoot my melee army down in a nice neat firing line."
You could, and a flat featureless board would also be a terrible layout. But nobody is using those layouts.
>You can't have melee focused armies and not give them the opportunity to walk up the board safely
Sure you can. You just have to stay behind the ruins instead of in their footprint, sacrificing movement speed for defense.
>Not to mention gw doesn't really offer LoS blocking ruins (always have holes).
Correct, which is why the actual rules of the game assume ruins have windows.
So how does a melee army meaningfully engage with a shooting army? Especially when there are shooting weapons that will dev wound models with absolutely 0 way of avoiding it besides your opponent not rolling a 6. Which btw armies can just change their rolls to a 6.
Like I get it makes sense that bringing a knife to a gunfight usually means you get shot but this is a sci-fi fantasy game? So either have terrain to keep the models alive or we add a new invulnerable +++ save that will then be cancelled out by the a "catastrophic wound" type and the cycle continues?
I don't really understand what you want? Melee armies should just sit behind a ruin or get shot? So what's the downside for shooting armies? You can sit IN a ruin, have protection AND deal damage to anything that comes anywhere near? What does your dream gameplay experience actually look like?
> So how does a melee army meaningfully engage with a shooting army?
How does it not? You can charge. You can use terrain for defense. If you can only "meaningfully engage" when terrain exists only to block shooting then that's a problem with your lack of strategic ability.
>So what's the downside for shooting armies?
The fact that control of the objectives outside your deployment zone is essential to winning and that brings shooting units within charge range.
Charge? I can move anywhere from 7-18 inches on a charge for most units. So I move, get overwatched by flamers or something similar, lose a model or two, and then if I miss the charge my squad melts. Range of weapons isn't a roll of the dice? Maybe if every weapons shots value was d3 or d6 but it isn't.
I think you're imagining ruins everywhere on the board? Most of the WTC layouts have plenty of blank space with ruins as little "checkpoints" to move between.
Sounds like you're just getting charged and don't want to pay for screen units? Talk about "lack of strategic ability"? Are you standing right next to occupied ruins with ranged units? You know you can spend turn 1 and 2 decimating the melee units then just take objectives for turns 3-5?
> So I move, get overwatched by flamers or something similar, lose a model or two, and then if I miss the charge my squad melts
Then maybe you should charge multiple targets with multiple units? If we're at the point of complaining about flamer overwatch then this isn't about ruin rules, it's about bad melee players.
>Sounds like you're just getting charged and don't want to pay for screen units?
Screening has nothing to do with the ruin rules. And I play a faction with the best screening units in the game.
>Why GW can't make terrain rules more robust and make more sense is beyond me.
No one wants different terrain. Everyone wants the rectangles that block LOS from shooting their guys. Then players will complain and want more indirect because of too much terrain blocking LOS.
This is the cycle of terrain complaints.
Devils advocate. Shooting units actually pay points for having 48" weapons and melee units are often cheaper for the lack of ranged weapons, or have additional movement to make up the difference.
Why would shooting armies have to pay extra for a feature that can't be used in a tournament?
I don't know if that's consistently true though? Wraithguard are 190 pts for 5. I think custodian guard are about 180 for 4. The fact that the wraith guard will admittedly hit on 4s but then wound on 2 and have a more than 50% chance of outright killing a custodian means that you'd need the ability to hide those models. The -1 ap for ruins does nothing against an ap -4 weapon. Being t7 w3 on the wraithguard, the custodians in this scenario have negligible ranged options so they will need to charge. Or not engage.
I'm not saying that the board needs to be littered with ruins, but I should have a reliable way to put a melee unit somewhere where it won't just disintegrate into dust.
The devil's advocate counter play can just as easily be; you know where the models are, dont be within 6-12" of a melee meat grinder unit OR pay you screen tax and send them in first.
I dunno, the concept of elite soldiers or seasoned warriors from any army just standing in an open window to get shot baffles me. Surely they'd press against a pillar, duck down? I think this rule reflects that very clear logic.
Consistently true? Absolutely not. GW points are all over the place. But more true than not I would still say.
Well, it's 50% to hit, then sure, pretty much an auto wound.
But after that it's still 50% inv save, and you need to roll at least a 3 on dmg.
That comes down to about 1 in 5 shots ge a kill.
So it will take the wraithguard a whole game to kill the custodians in this scenario.
Depending on if those ruins are within 12" of an objective marker that might be a good choice.
But in reality most objectives has a ruin within 12" meaning you can't shoot the opponent before they can hit you.
I absolutely agree on the last part. But I feel like that is what cover represents? And we also have that generic strat no one uses for going to ground.
I honestly think it's more wierd to have safe spaces in a battle zone. Can you imagine a real battle zone where you have 100% absolute certainty that you can't get shot what so ever?
You are immune to any kind of fire power, weather it's from small arms, anti armor weapons, tanks or air cover?
No building is THAT secure?
When you're talking about rolling dice though, the squad shooting could just as easily paste a whole squad or not wound at all.
I think that it's reasonable that trained soldiers wouldn't stand out in the open almost ever? I think it's stranger to think that soldiers would charge into a gun line totally unprotected. In fact, many of the imperium factions would be toppling buildings or using ships/tanks as cover. Eldar would be singing wraithbone barricades and tau would be advancing with shields.
It's a weird setting to try and balance, I agree, but unfettered shooting brings a real feelsbadman game approach. I think of many rank and flank games where movement is its own nuance; positioning yourself with range to make a charge while not getting charged yourself. It feels much more interactive than "I can see the left heel of 1 model in a 20 man unit, I can now obliterate them all and all you get is -1 ap (which realistically, is getting you what, a 3 or 4+ save usually?).
I get it, I too would set up overwhelming gun batteries and just unload molten lead and plasma at things in real life. But we're talking about having a fun game. Otherwise just make the shooting way more interesting and do away with melee.
True. But I'm assuming that they are supposed to balance it around what is most likely to happen, not that could happen if u only roll 6s?
Agreed. An in my opinion that is why basically everyone has cover basically all the time.
And they are not unprotected, they have power armor, force fields and other stuff.
Being immune to shooting should be incredibly rare in my opinion. Cover should be abundant. Ruins already blocks line of sight.
I might be biased, but in 9th my most common match up was admech in to sisters.
And having all my big expensive units doing nothing most of the game because the enemy was in a building, then as soon as I got close to an objective a hord of half-naked ladies with chainsword charged out and killed me.
And sure, I killed them back. But they where basically free since they had little to no protection. A fundamental weakness being made entirely irrelevant since they where immune to shooting until after they had killed me.
That was a feelsbad moment.
Yeah looks I'm not an advocate for boards to be littered with LoS blocking and only safe charges; but the sentiment the original guy had rubbed me wrong. It's such a cop out to just say "got gud" when I feel there are issues of fine tuning and balance.
You're right it feels just as bad to have your giga unit get charged and die.
But when the board doesn't have a) a staging area where you can keep your units hidden turn one and b) some sort of angle of approach with cover (maybe only one side of the board or something), then playing a melee army is just charge and pray, which feels bad š
Maybe we need to just build trenches...
I think we are pretty much on the same page.
My only thing is, we already have cover, stealth and lone op to balance ranged vs melee. And that's in the rules. I don't think tournaments should put their fingers on the scale and give melee ~4" "free" movement as well.
That being said, ranged are doing better than melee currently so it's not a big problem.
In my opinion ~85% of a normal size army should be able to completely/almost completely hide in the DZ. Obviously more for elite and less for hord.
And no position on the board other than in a DZ should be hidden from more than ~70% of the board.
That is "balanced" terrain in my opinion.
I think that the reason why this gets so much pushback is because melee just doesn't work with the rules as they are unless terrain is basically a set of L shaped ruins that you can walk infantry through and hide inside.
If you changed it now, melee would just be trash. *But* if the rules were designed from the start to actually support other terrain types in a balanced way then we wouldn't be in that mess. GW obviously have this idea of how 40k should play where infantry advance and hide inside craters and behind pipes. Where the front lines skirmish and then charge each other in a back-and-forth tussle over objectives. Intercessors fire salvos at ork boyz before going over the top and charging, and everyone is picking different targets to make up an intense and spread out firefight.
In reality, you hide everyone in a corner behind an obscuring terrain feature then whoever reveals themselves first gets shot off the board by focused fire. Melee units position themselves where they can't be shot and then charge through walls because otherwise they die when someone looks at them funny. The game is just way too lethal, and if you can't pick up a target in a single activation it feels like you've wiffed.
> I think that the reason why this gets so much pushback is because melee just doesn't work with the rules as they are unless terrain is basically a set of L shaped ruins that you can walk infantry through and hide inside.
Melee works fine with normal terrain. It's just that certain melee players hate having to think beyond moving straight at the enemy and maybe occasionally exploiting the melee phase movement rules to maximize their movement distance.
And if certain shooting units are overpowered then they should be fixed by point cost adjustments, not by absurd terrain rules.
I don't think that holds true, because we've seen that terrain at tournaments can have a huge impact on melee viability. Event organisers didn't arbitrarily decide to start using the same bland sets of ruins, but rather that happened *because* melee armies were underperforming otherwise.
If it were possible to do well on more sparse terrain with melee focused armies, then you'd expect that you'd see more people proving it at the highest levels of play. As it stands they aren't even really at the top of the meta when we have terrain compensating for their shortfalls.
>Event organisers didn't arbitrarily decide to start using the same bland sets of ruins, but rather that happenedĀ *because*Ā melee armies were underperforming otherwise.
Because LVO and Frontline Gaming sold terrain designed around 6th and 7th Edition terrain rules. First floors block is a house rule that's a hold over from 3 editions ago.
Think of a 2 story house with windows and doors and rooms and hallways and such. The house has a front and back door and its roughly 40ft squared.
Youre in the front with a lasgun and i walk in the back door, 40ft away with many walls and rooms between us. Using your RAW rules that you stated in other comments you can shoot me clearly without penalties. That makes NO sense.
In reality (yes its a game) i would be running through the house where you have no idea where i am and can get to a position to rush you.
Also first floor closed works for all players around the world where all the terrain is not created equally. This gives players the much easier ability to creat standard footprints and generate a much more fair and balanced board. If all my pieces have no windows and yours do, in your rules, you would be shot up fairly quickly while im safe.
Additionally a ruin with two walls obviously blocks los through the walls but if youre behind that ruin where the wall is not between you and your target then you can in fact shoot them even if theyre in the ruin, theyll just get a cover save.
I understand where youre coming from but its just much more fair for all armies if this rule is standard across the board
> Think of a 2 story house with windows and doors and rooms and hallways and such
That is not a ruin, it's a solid square of impassible terrain. A ruin in 40k represents a collapsed building with only parts of an exterior wall or two standing. There is debris, pieces of internal walls, etc, within the ruin but that is represented by the +1 save bonus.
>Also first floor closed works for all players around the world where all the terrain is not created equally.
Terrain should not always be equal. This idea that every game ever played needs identical terrain is incredibly toxic for good gameplay in a wargame. Your army should be able to handle a wide variety of terrain and terrain layouts.
Especially after having so many of his comments down voted any normal person would take a step back to try to understand the situation. Though I doubt what's their face is capable of it.
Not at all. Your very specific reasons for your terrain preference makes you sound like someone who doesn't play many games, and your dememor makes you seem like someonenl that not many people want to play with you.
My reasons for my terrain preference are *because* I have played a lot of games, including games which used better terrain rules with more depth and more interesting decisions.
And your complaint about "dememor" is pretty hilarious coming from someone like you.
It's pretty standard at tournaments. A lot of people like it because it removes the penalty for walking into a ruin, and also makes it much more consistent across different terrain sets where some are basically wide open with sight lines everywhere and others are just solid walls with no openings anywhere.
> A lot of people like it because it removes the penalty for walking into a ruin Which is exactly why it is a bad rule. Terrain is supposed to be an obstacle to deal with.
Terrain is supposed to provide cover for infantry while being an obstacle for big units. Not to punish people for moving around the map š¤£ that would incentivize firing lines which are uninteractive, and I play the shooting armies.
> Terrain is supposed to provide cover for infantry while being an obstacle for big units. And also to provide obstacles to infantry movement. It is unfortunate that so many people think like you and have pushed out every terrain type other than magic boxes.
The game rules have pushed out that terrain. If melee units canāt survive out in the open thatās not the fault of magic boxes. You either play with sufficient spots to stage melee or it simply doesnāt exist in the game.
You can stage melee without first floor blocking by staying behind the ruin entirely, avoiding its footprint. You just have to choose between straight line movement efficiency and defense, which is how it should be.
That's the point, it makes melee so much less efficient because of it, and thus completely irrelevant.
So the melee army has a choice of sit in the ruin and get shot by everything, but gets cover. Or sits behind it where the shooty army can reposition and now the melee army gets no cover. With the amount of movement shenanigans in 10th Ed it just means melee armies die.
Also, your infantry with a 6" movement can sit behind the ruin with a 5" width, move up 4.5" because their 32mm base can't get to the other side then attempt an 11" charge vs sitting in the ruin, moving out and charging 6" Melee units are only usable if they can threaten an area, if that area is "only my own deployment zone" they're functionally useless
I love this guyās take that melee players just need to **USE THEIR BRAIN** and find new ways to use their effective 2-3ā of movement to get value. Like if your melee units arenāt **going at** the opponent to melee what is even the point of having them? Sure they can wander around from place to place, but why am I paying points for that?
Obstacles to infantry movement? The same infantry that move freely through ruins? š¤”š¤”š¤”
Yes, terrain is supposed to be an obstacle to infantry movement. The fact that isn't is a massive flaw in this game.
What do you mean "supposed to"? I thought the designers of the game decided how terrain works? It's been years since it was an obstacle for infantry movement and it was most likely changed to improve the game. At least I think it's better like this.
> What do you mean "supposed to"? I thought the designers of the game decided how terrain works? They did, by making ruins have windows and therefore indirectly slow infantry by making the direct route undesirable. >it was most likely changed to improve the game. It was changed to *simplify* the game as part of the general trend of removing simulationist wargame elements in favor of special rules and dice math. It was only an improvement if you're the kind of player who hates on-table strategy and wants to reduce the game to seeing which player won in the list building phase.
Ok, fair enough. But it doesn't say in the rules that you need to use ruins with open windows and most tournament organizers including GW themselves have come to the conclusion that the game is more balanced with ruins being able to be used as better staging points. Since most don't want to buy entire new terrain sets it's common to play them as "bottom floor is closed". I imagine this will changes over time so that you play them as they look. The last sentiment is what I disagree with. I used to play back in the days when terrain was more limited. THAT was a dice game. If it was a shooting army vs a melee army it was all about weather you could survive rushing forward or not. Right now movement, charging and pile in / consolidates is probably the most strategic part of the game and that is improved by how terrain is currently handled in most tournaments.
> But it doesn't say in the rules that you need to use ruins with open windows It doesn't, but the standard terrain sold by GW has windows/doors/etc and the implication of ruins granting cover to models in their footprint is that it is possible to draw line of sight to those models. >If it was a shooting army vs a melee army it was all about weather you could survive rushing forward or not. It was but not because of terrain. It was because the lack of early-game scoring meant a gunline could sit back at the far edge of the table and shoot for 3-4 turns before making a last-turn objective grab (if they hadn't already tabled the melee army for the auto-win). 10th has already fixed this issue by scoring objectives every turn. A shooting army that deploys at the back and dares you to try to come at them over open shooting lanes loses every game because it can't hold the mid-table objectives during the critical early turns. Even if they manage to get line of sight on the melee army (which can still stay behind terrain to block line of sight even if the footprint is only a cover save) by the time they clear out the melee units and it's safe to make that last-minute objective grab the melee army will already have too much of a VP lead. >Right now movement, charging and pile in / consolidates is probably the most strategic part of the game It really isn't. You're making the common mistake of confusing rules gimmicks with strategy. Exploiting all the edge cases and nuances of how melee moves are done is just a question of whether you've memorized all those edge cases and exploits, it isn't any more strategy than the shooting player who figures out it's a good idea to use a Sentinel to ignore the indirect fire penalty.
This opinion is silly, you're silly
What is silly is treating battlefield obstacles as a problem that needs to be solved by rule changes instead of a deliberate part of a wargame.
Whatās silly is looking at a game and thinking āhow can I make this more difficult and less pleasant to play?ā If terrain is as much an obstacle to tanks as it is to infantry, why would anyone ever take infantry?
> Whatās silly is looking at a game and thinking āhow can I make this more difficult and less pleasant to play?ā Which is funny because I'm advocating playing by RAW instead of adding rule changes to make the game less enjoyable. >If terrain is as much an obstacle to tanks as it is to infantry, why would anyone ever take infantry? Because infantry has advantages moving *in some terrain*. For example a set of tank traps in previous editions would obstruct vehicle movement but not infantry as infantry could walk through the gaps between them. Your complaint here only makes sense in the context of a game where terrain diversity has been stripped out and anything besides L ruins is de facto banned.
> Which is funny because I'm advocating playing by RAW instead of adding rule changes to make the game less enjoyable. Personally I donāt find having the game end because somebody got shot off the board turn 2 very fun, but thatās subjective I guess > Because infantry has advantages moving in some terrain. For example a set of tank traps in previous editions would obstruct vehicle movement but not infantry as infantry could walk through the gaps between them. Yeah it would be great to have a terrain type that infantry can move through but tanks canāt. Probably want to standardize the setup of that sort of terrain so that you can use different types of physical pieces to the same result at competitive events, too. Thatād be great.
> Personally I donāt find having the game end because somebody got shot off the board turn 2 very fun, but thatās subjective I guess Magic boxes are not essential for that, normal ruins work just fine.
Terrain diversity is reduced because of GW's rules making such terrain setups necessary for the game to not just be a shooting gallery.
> For example a set of tank traps in previous editions would obstruct vehicle movement but not infantry as infantry could walk through the gaps between them. Likewise in this edition a ruin obstructs vehicle movement, but not infantry and provides them a place to hide.
A standard ruin indirectly obstructs infantry movement by only giving its full protection to models that sacrifice movement options to stay fully behind it. It is only house ruled ruins that are purely a benefit to infantry. And the comment I was replying to asked the general question of why anyone would take infantry if ruins are an obstacle for infantry. The answer is that not all terrain is ruins.
Sounds like 10th edition in a nutshell, GW making all terrain boring except ruins and telling the community to fix it for them. Vehicles are bafflingly strong and the best solution to deal with them is to take vehicles yourself or warp the terrain so ruins are not what GW intended.
This is nothing to do with 10th edition, we've been doing it way before that
First floor closed dates back to at least 8E
I just dont understand why you think this. This isn't how real life works, nor is it how the game works. In real life, there are doors in buildings, or windows, or holes in walls, but tanks can't to through these things. Therefore, how is it bad to have a piece of terrain one can move through and not the other? I do also hope you remember that there is terrain infantry can't move through, like crates...
> In real life, there are doors in buildings, or windows, or holes in walls Correct, which is why in the standard game models in the footprint of a ruin use true line of sight with a +1 save bonus. It is only in the bizarre magic box house rule that we are assuming solid impenetrable walls. Thank you for acknowledging how absurd the house rule is and that we should use the standard rules for ruins. Also, as I have said before, the impact on infantry movement is indirect. A standard ruin does not literally have a "infantry move slower" rule attached, it hinders movement by creating an area of the table that is less desirable for infantry to be in and forcing infantry that want the best possible protection to sacrifice movement options. >I do also hope you remember that there is terrain infantry can't move through, like crates. Sure, there is terrain infantry can't move through. The vast majority of it is theoretical only as everything is standard L ruins.
You sound so salty š¤£š¤£ I guess that's what happens when you have to face the reality that what you want is the opposite of what 99% of other people want, especially cause your so emotionally tied to a concept that in your head just matters so much, but doesn't make sense logically to most others. You are welcome to find a different game where the players share your opinions, but I don't want that here. And judging by the votes, neither does anyone else š
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum I don't care how much of an echo chamber reddit is truth is not a popularity contest. And if the best you can do to respond the game design argument is to appeal to reddit's voting system I'll take that as a concession that you know I'm right.
"Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who's wrong" Stands in a room full of people who want it one way, accuses everyone else of living in an echo chamber and being wrong, and that everyone should do it his way, on a matter that is subjective... Doesn't see the irony in this and claiming he's "right" about a subjective opinion. You did it dude, you won reddit.
Sorry if you don't like it but reddit is an echo chamber. The voting system you're so concerned with is designed to amplify the echo chamber effect and drive out dissent. But thanks for admitting you can't address any of the actual game design issues and can only appeal to popularity.
The game is better that way. Then we donāt have to talk about the minute details of windows and trying to make sure your dudeās banner isnāt showing through a tiny crack in terrain, etc. The difference between being shot and not shot is huge, having relatively secure staging areas for both players makes it a more strategic game of taking pieces out and trading them instead of āmy sideās run is more open so I canāt stage my unitsā or āi randomly got a key unit blown up before I took it outā
> having relatively secure staging areas for both players makes it a more strategic game of taking pieces out and trading them Piece trading has all the strategic depth of a puddle. Having to make strategic choices between greater movement flexibility and full LOS blocking makes the game deeper than "hide in the magic box until you want to trade".
I don't even think you know what a magic box is. You are just parroting things. The game is terrible with bottom floor being open. Even GW themselves realizes this and made their US Open events closed bottom floors.
> I don't even think you know what a magic box is. It's a ruin that is magically a sold impenetrable and fully obscuring wall during the shooting phase but disappears in the movement phase, allowing melee units to hide in the magic box to avoid shooting but not be slowed at all by doing so.
No, a magic box was a concept from 8th Edition, where people would put AM mortar squads inside of a 4 walled ruin (we don't use those anymore) nothing could shoot in. But because of indirect the guard unit could shoot out. Extra special was in 8th we used to use that you couldn't fight things through walls that were more than 1" away so they were literally immortal in those boxes.
The fight through walls rule is still a thing in 10th thou?gh :p since you're not in engagement if you're more than 1" away Was it so that infantry couldn't move through the ruins?
Now a days pretty much every TO has an exception in their rules now that allows you to fight through walls (for infantry/beasts). WTC wrote like a 12 page document explaining how its done lol. I think GW themselves are the only event I have been too that still allows the no fight through walls nonsense.
"Magic box" is not a term exclusively owned by that one rules mistake. I am well aware that 10th edition does not use those specific rules, it's still a magic box because it functions by magic.
Everything in the game is magic, the entire game is a complete abstraction. Soldiers can't walk through walls, tanks can drive through walls, planes can't be shot by pistols, dudes armed with swords don't stand a hope in hell against dudes with guns in the real world What matters is if the rules lead to interesting game dynamics, and being able to hide and stage melee units is important for the game to work. The obscuring rule is an elegant solution, but it gets let down by terrain with massive footprints, and blocking LOS on the ground floor fixes that issue.
> What matters is if the rules lead to interesting game dynamics, and being able to hide and stage melee units is important for the game to work. You can still stage melee units without magic boxes, you just have to think about where to put them and evaluate tradeoffs between locations. Magic boxes are only essential to melee players who want to mindlessly go straight into the middle of the table and roll charges.
>without magic boxes It's not a magic box. A magic box is a four walled completely uninteractive terrain piece that can't be seen into and often can't be charged into. An L shaped LOS blocking ruin is not a magic box, and it's a widely used terrain piece that enhances games and is popular at tournaments. >Magic boxes are only essential to melee players who want to mindlessly go straight into the middle of the table and roll charges. Magic boxes are a problem because of indirect fire units, not melee units. Having safe staging points in the midboard for melee is a feature, not a bug. I'd encourage you to get out to some events IRL or on TTS and try this terrain, and I'm sure you'll come around to it.
> It's not a magic box Only if you define "magic box" to only be that one thing from 8th. I am clearly not using the term that way so stop nitpicking. >Having safe staging points in the midboard for melee is a feature, not a bug. You can have those with normal ruins, you don't need first floor LOS blocking magic boxes. >I'd encourage you to get out to some events IRL or on TTS and try this terrain, and I'm sure you'll come around to it. I have played plenty of games with the rule. It sucks and reduces strategic depth.
Strategic depth is when we each spend 3 hours trying to cut the finest angles possible with heavy tanks and artillery and do as little as possible to get out of our deployment. If you try to leave your deployment, you die.
Sorry, but you aren't a tactical genius for piece trading.
Ok
Man, judging by your manner, I bet you suck to play a game with. Do you want to be āthat guy?ā
Yeah, what kind of TFG wants a deep and engaging strategic game instead of mindlessly rolling dice to see who rolls better.
You certainly don't really know the meaning of "Deep and engaging"
Deep and engaging is when tabled at top of 2. Duh
Don't play much, do you? Your ideas are bad and that's why the community at large and every single TO play first floor los blocking.
The guy keeps saying "Magic Box" when referring to L-shaped ruin walls Clearly he's 100% literal LOS he can see the dangerous melee unit and needs to use good strategy of blasting their first floor magical solid bullet blocking windows. Which is just baaaad for melee units
Someone doesn't want to work to get angles. He just wants to sit back and shoot everything off the board. I think it makes for a much less strategic game.
There is no single body that oversees 40k events and what ruleset they're using. In theory, it's possible to show up to an event that's just as legitimate as any other RTT where they're playing without closed ruins and only the Deploy Servo Skulls mission on non-symetrical boards. If you want to be the guy that runs that event, go for it, but don't be surprised if nobody shows up. Because of the Servo Skulls. Mission sucks, bro. Ruins having Obscuring, as in the Ruin is treated as infinitely tall and blocking all LoS while you are outside the footprint, is in the Core Rules. Almost all events will run with that. I assume you're getting mixed up between that and the common houserule of "treat all Ruins as if there are no windows or holes in the physical wall". This is a common enough rule that GW's own Open series tournaments use it, and it exists to standardize terrain, so that purpose-built MDF terrain, homemade foam-board terrain, and GW terrain all work the same. The story as to why this concept arose has to do with the relatively basic concept of shooting being safer than melee. In real life, we don't use swords anymore, and soldiers are trained in CQC as a safety measure, not as their primary form of combat. Put simply, the further away from danger you can keep your people, the better. But on the tabletop, charges are cool, and some factions do specialize in melee as their primary form of combat. At some point, a game dev has to make concessions to gameplay. Without Obscuring, the game devolves into long range shooting matches. Obscuring is the simplest way to prevent that. You can see that with the results from the start of 10th, where Towering units ignored it completely, and Knights basically had access to your entire army on turn one if the bottom floors of ruins weren't boarded up. At the time, Towering allowed you to ignore Obscuring, but the actual LoS issue came from Knights standing behind a Ruin and being able to draw LoS through a hole in the wall from it's leg to your dude behind another ruin. They were only kept in check by Eldar being absolutely buck-wild, and they were playing their own Wraithknights to abuse Dev Wounds and Towering. So that covers Obscuring and the rules for that. By the Core Rules, only the footprint of the terrain blocks LoS, and units inside of the Ruin use true LoS. But the point of competitive play is to standardize certain aspects of the game so that player skill, and not factors entirely outside of any player's control, is what determines the winner. Imagine playing a melee centric army, then getting put on the last table in the venue, where the TO was starting to run out of terrain, and the sparse ruins are full of holes and you just cannot approach any objectives. You're going to get shot off the board at no fault of your own, and your opponent won without having to do anything. There's nothing you could have changed in your list to better deal with this, you cannot have played better, you lost before you even rolled up to the table. I've been playing 40k since 5th edition, before Obscuring was a rule and everything was run on true LoS. I've played in those events, I've been in that exact position. It isn't fun being target practice for a Tau player on Planet Bowling Ball. Heck, I played a player-placed terrain event in 9th edition where on my final round I got handed the smallest pieces of terrain I'd ever seen, short enough to not benefit from 9th edition Obscuring, and full of holes while playing Bloody Rose Sisters of Battle. I was tabled turn 2 by Iron Hands Space Marines. I did not have a good time. In fact, so many people from multiple nearby communities had such a problem with how that event ran it's terrain that we all got together and handbuilt competitive terrain to use from then on. There's other interesting consequences to making Ruins fully true LoS, especially in the current edition. Rolling a solid flamer, like a Land Raider Redeemer or Baal Predator (whichever one gets the strong flamers, I don't know BA units) into the middle of the board would completely lock down the opponent's ability to move and interact with the game at the cost of a single CP, which pushs the game even more towards shooty hull spam. You can already kind of do this on some WTC board layouts where you can control the entire center objective and a good chunk of the middle with a flamer vehicle. As for players being upset to be told terrain is using true LoS, probably not, as long as they are told ahead of time, and not after they've staged a unit of Berserkers in a ruin full of holes. Make sure your players know when they sign up, and mention it again in the briefing the day of.
Incredible write up! Thank you for typing this all out, it was very helpful. And i'm not even the OP!
If your terrain is sufficiently not covered in windows, then it matters a lot less. Traditionally a lot of terrain for stores was the GW terrain that is absolutely riddled with holes and windows to make it more aesthetically pleasing. In most cases though, it turns the game into an effective planet bowling ball situation and heavily favors shooting. Now more places are moving to MDF and other purpose built tournament terrain that has little to no windows. In that case is largely doesnāt matter. If you have terrain with almost any windows and donāt declare this rule, expect a lot of shooting gallery matches
> In most cases though, it turns the game into an effective planet bowling ball situation This is not true at all. RAW ruins still block shooting to anything behind them, the windows only allow shooting against units in the ruin's footprint. RAW ruins still very much prevent planet bowling ball, they just create more interesting strategic choices.
Yes, but if you have stay .1ā behind the footprint to be safe, then there are basically no melee units that can get anywhere meaningful. Your standard ruin footprint is 3ā-4ā deep. That consumes most of your movement then you end up like 1ā in front of the wall and eat a bunch of shooting
Yes, that is the point of tradeoffs, there is no optimal solution. You can either have slow movement or be vulnerable to shooting. And you can choose differently for different units or on different turns. Maybe you stay behind ruins early in the game while moving into position and then move into the footprint as you close to within charge range, accepting the fact that if you fail to make the charge your unit is exposed.
The tradeoff being... Shooting armies will just stand on points with their scoring units and win vs melee armies because melee will never make contact with anything meaningful. Doesn't really sound as Strategically appealing as you make it out to be.
Why are you unable to make contact with a unit that has advanced up the table to get into scoring position?
You really don't get this, do you? Your 600 points of cool melee has hit their 200 points of trading chaff on objectives - great, they're dead! Now all you have to do is survive in the open against a gunline until your next turn to score... Oh, and you've died. That's okay, next turn you can put the rest of your army on objectives because you're too far back to actually fight anything, and all you have to do is survive in the open against a gunline until your next turn to score... Oh, and you've died. What a fun game this was!
What does this have to do with magic boxes? The objectives aren't in the magic box so if your units are getting shot to death out in the open on objectives that's going to happen regardless of the ruin rules.
It's got nothing to do with magic boxes, because this isn't a magic boxes problem. You're just using that term because you know people hated actual magic boxes and you're trying to evoke the same feeling from a completely different situation.
It's absolutely the same kind of problem. The issue was ruins behaving in a counter-intuitive way and being a magic immunity box instead of a realistic representation of terrain. And now we have the same kind of problem again: people want ruins to be solid impenetrable walls against shooting but nonexistent at every other time.
Don't play much 40k, do you?
Not true from what I've seen. I've only been to GTs and Tatts that doesn't use first floor ribs and I play melee as much as I can and never had an issue same for other players that I know.
I just wish that closed ground floors meant *closed*. If theyāre blocking shooting they should block movement.
What is with people and wanting to hamper melee to the point where we just sit with tanks and lob shots back and forth?
It's not to hamper melee - it just doesn't make sense that you have an impermeable barrier that you somehow just waltz on through. It's counter-intuitive and imo that's bad design. It's also led to highly repetitive only ruin boards - you barely ever see forests, craters, or anything anymore. There are better ways to balance the issue than the way it's balanced now.
Rules exist to create fun gameplay patterns, not to completely mimic reality. You can play anything you want and call it obscuring, itās just that ruins are typically the most stackable, storable, and easily/cheaply mass produced for TOs. I organize local events, and terrain is the biggest hurdle to running tournaments. You need a lot of it, it needs to be consistent, it needs to be durable (people are absolutely not considerate of othersā terrain), and it needs to be storable. The MDF ruins hit those criteria while being relatively cheap. Trees on a footprint that you play as obscuring definitely do not, and they would cost significantly more for operations that are not making (much) profit
I think perhaps a bit of clarifying would be helpful. Obscuring refers to the height and what can or cannot be seen behind it. What you are talking about is done at all the tournaments I have been to over the past several years, and the way I have heard it referred to is āClosed.ā As in all, all first floor windows, doors and gaps in ruins are closed, and therefore they block LOS. And to answer your question, I very much prefer games that way. And I play Tau. The game is just way more tactical and fun when the bottom floors are closed.
So just as a clarification for me, if you are in the ruin, you can still be shot? So the closed applies to units not being able to shoot units on the other side of the ruin not inside it , right?
The common house rule is that the entire first floor of a ruin is treated as being a solid wall. So in effect you canāt be shot while staging against the front wall. Not being able to be shot while behind a ruin is Obscuring and thatās part of the core rules
Is that the tournament rule that is also discussed here. So if I want to prepare for a tournament should I start playing like this?
You should expect essentially every tournament to either (a) have fully enclosed MDF ruins, or (b) specifically treat the first floor of their ruins as entirely enclosed. There may be a few exceptions, but this is the overwhelming majority of tournaments - including GWās open series
What about indirect fire weapons.
Those don't require LoS so the presence (or not) of a wall or Obscuring is irrelevant.
I played in one tournament where the 1st floor was a magic box and nothing could shoot into it not even indirect.
Thatās a weird ass ruling
What they are discussing is what is called āMagic boxesā.Ā Itās a terrain feature that cannot be interacted in anyway unless you go inside said terrain feature to shoot, or if you have indirect weapons. The same rules apply to units within - they cannot shoot out.Ā This means if you have a ruin with three walls and an opening on the fourth side, you cannot fire at anything within that terrain feature at all.Ā It creates some weird circumstances.Ā Ā A lot of tournaments run just solid walled ruins, so they donāt have to do this āhouse ruleā.Ā Itās best to talk over ruin rules with your opponent before you start the match so expectations can be set.Ā
Honestly I feel weird when we *don't* use that rule. It's pretty standard at the tournaments in my area / is how my friends & I play it. Otherwise cover almost becomes a liability
> Otherwise cover almost becomes a liability The whole point of terrain is to be a liability.
Explain why cover exists if the point of the terrain is to be a liability.
Because cover is a liability for shooting. Difficult terrain and undesirable area terrain are liabilities for movement (and by extension melee). Every strategy should be hindered by terrain.
Thats the dumbest thing I have ever heard. You might as well argue fire isn't hot.
Honestly I kinda miss some of the nuance we used to have, difficult terrain giving -2" Movement for example For the liability, I get what you're saying but personally I think it's main use is to block LOS so you don't just get tabled T1 heh :P Then again you could always say that's a liability for the person who wants to shoot
Played perfectly RAW, terrain is zero liability because it essentially does nothing.
RAW terrain works just fine.
Does first floor as obscuring mean that infantry fully within the terrain can't shoot out?
Yup, so long as they're blocked by a wall, it works both ways. Most ruins have gaps in the walls which you can see into and out of, though.
Iām sure the big hater in the room will comment on this. But me and my community where I play as greatly benefited from having bottom floor of ruins obscured since we have a lot of random and different terrain pieces. Weāve noticed any time we didnāt use these rules, any melee oriented army would likely get blown off board by round 3. Shooting is incredibly oppressive rn this edition and although melee often has advantage with speed, u often canāt hide your units well behind the footprint of ruins enough to actually keep them safe. If they could bring back better terrain rules like -1 to hit from woods for example I think some of these issues could be mitigated. But sadly her we are where tournaments feel itās best to augment some rules for the sake of making more matches balanced.
Been playing with it for a long time..it's awesome.
Ignore whatever the MostNinja guy says, he seems to be playing a different game. In 9th edition it was fairly common to have some ground floor windows but often just 1 or 2 pieces on the table. In 10th every tournament I've seen has gone to fully blocked ground floor windows to help the game have more movement. I think it's a good change because otherwise you get people parking shooty infantry units in them and closing down most of the board with firing lanes. That said in 9th it was harder to get cover, your models had to be fully in the terrain whereas now you can just be partially hidden by it so you can push out safer to places that used to be wide open. At the beginning of 10th a lot of events told people to just ignore the ground floor windows but now terrain has mostly caught up so you don't need to pretend. If that's not super common in your area just make sure everyone at the event is aware
The dude has the most inane takes on almost every subject. At this point I think he's a contrarian troll who gets his jollies just disagreeing with people and running them around in a verbal circle. His arguments all come down to "nuh-uh".
He strikes me as one of the old school war gamers who just doesn't jive with the modern game and how its played. It all sorta fits and isn't super un-common. Those folks have mostly moved to things like Bolt Action or Flames of War or one of the GW specialty games.
It's pretty much a universal standard at this point. Without it, melee armies just aren't viable because of how deadly the game is (especially shooting).
By obscuring, do you mean that you are unable to see in regards to shooting but can still move through the first floor if your Infantry or a Beast? Or obscuring in the sence where it is true LOS blocking and move blocking terrain?
I'm not OP but I assumed they meant LOS blocking but still following the normal Ruins rules otherwise.Ā
Itās in reference to blocking line of sight but not movement
Does āfirst floor obscuringā block LOS both in and out of the ruin, or just in?
Both ways where there is a wall. Most people play large gaps or open halves of ruins to be, well, open. It's just that there aren't these tiny windows you see on most GW terrain that give almost or literally nowhere to stand inside of ruin without being seen.
Thanks!
I think it's a hold over from 9th and the early part of 10th. If Codexes keep coming out fairly weak I think it'll become more and more clearly absurd. But previously it was necessary not to just instantly die to 9th eds insane shooting power.
There are no standard terrain models, and terrain varies so wildly between events, that most TOs just have first floor block LoS so games are somewhat fair. Otherwise this table here is loaded with magic boxes and that table over their is planet bowling ball and the table you end up on really impacts your game - significantly. The two shops I regularly play at use the rules as presented by GW. Both shops have sufficient quantity and quality of terrain that it usually isn't an issue. There are enough ruins with no or limited first floor openings that infantry can move around somewhat safely if you are careful.
If by obscuring you mean you can't see through it, yeah, that's pretty standard. People will always be upset. Apart from who will or won't be upset, true line of sight will likely make shooting armies dominante your tournament.
Yea, underneath the table (basement floor) is also obscuringĀ
It's a really good change on average. Melee armies that have to stand behind ruins as opposed to just being in them to avoid shooting are already at a huge disadvantage. I played with a group that doesn't do it as pre-lobotomy Custodes and it was silly having an AM player line up his entire army to shoot at a Warden squad in terrain right from the get-go. Not having it makes for some serious first turn advantage problems.
It mainly depends on the availability of terrain and what the TO decides is best for their event.Ā For context, LVO does ***not*** do obscuring first floor unless the terrain piece is identified as such in the packet.Ā The big issue with āMagic boxesā is that it pretty much makes it so you cannot take out a unit hiding within it unless you go in and get them.Ā So if you roll up behind a ruin that doesnāt have a back and try to shoot those models inside 5ā away, sorry - my magic box protects me.Ā
>Is there specific reasons itās implemented at most events? Because people want melee armies to be able to hide in magic boxes while moving into range and for terrain to only impact shooting, never movement or melee. The way ruins are intended to work is that you have a choice between full protection at the cost of movement by standing behind the ruin or less protection but full movement by moving the unit into the ruin's footprint. But certain melee players think that terrain being an obstacle to their plans is a problem that needs to be solved by rules changes. >Would people be upset to be told terrain is true LoS? Unfortunately yes. Certain people don't want to have to think about terrain, they just want a de facto rule that shooting beyond 24" (except for artillery) is banned. They will not be happy if you don't use their favorite house rule.
You have commented on nearly every other comment and seem to have your own agenda but yet entirely misunderstand the point of declaring this rule. Your argument is predicated on the assumption that all terrain per the core rules has bottom floor windows. Nowhere in the core rules is this specifically called out. If the terrain placed on the table didnāt have any windows on the bottom floor TLOS rules would still apply and effectively be the same as this declaration. So in effect what this rule does is replace visually what terrain people have with that of what is intended to be on the tabletop, it does not modify the rules of this edition whatsoever.
> Your argument is predicated on the assumption that all terrain per the core rules has bottom floor windows. Which is a correct assumption. The example ruins in the rulebook have windows, as does every ruin kit GW sells. You don't get closed bottom floors unless you buy (or make) third-party terrain. >what is intended to be on the tabletop If it is intended to be closed on the tabletop then why did GW specifically write rules for handling terrain that has windows? It is incredibly obvious that ruins are meant to have windows in most cases.
>The example ruins in the rulebook have windows, as does every ruin kit GW sells. You don't get closed bottom floors unless you buy (or make) third-party terrain. This is demonstrably false as I have GW terrain that has no windows.
If youre talking about the impulsor and the Termagants its not a window, thats an open area that you can draw clear los through.
Yes, because clearly the history of recent 40K is āwe donāt have enough shooting.ā
The recent history of 40k is "shove your whole army into the middle and brawl" and it's in large part because of the poor terrain rules.
If that's your opinion of recent 40k metas you are wildly out of touch with how the game has been played at a serious competitive level.
Ok but like, I could argue just as easily that "shooting armies just want the board to be flat and featureless so they can shoot my melee army down in a nice neat firing line." You can't have melee focused armies and not give them the opportunity to walk up the board safely. I think characterising it as people not wanting to think is a bit narrow minded. I'm lucky I can 3d print terrain, but if someone has to buy their terrain, they have to pick the most optimal one for lod blocking as opposed to what they like. Not to mention gw doesn't really offer LoS blocking ruins (always have holes). Why GW can't make terrain rules more robust and make more sense is beyond me.
> Ok but like, I could argue just as easily that "shooting armies just want the board to be flat and featureless so they can shoot my melee army down in a nice neat firing line." You could, and a flat featureless board would also be a terrible layout. But nobody is using those layouts. >You can't have melee focused armies and not give them the opportunity to walk up the board safely Sure you can. You just have to stay behind the ruins instead of in their footprint, sacrificing movement speed for defense. >Not to mention gw doesn't really offer LoS blocking ruins (always have holes). Correct, which is why the actual rules of the game assume ruins have windows.
So how does a melee army meaningfully engage with a shooting army? Especially when there are shooting weapons that will dev wound models with absolutely 0 way of avoiding it besides your opponent not rolling a 6. Which btw armies can just change their rolls to a 6. Like I get it makes sense that bringing a knife to a gunfight usually means you get shot but this is a sci-fi fantasy game? So either have terrain to keep the models alive or we add a new invulnerable +++ save that will then be cancelled out by the a "catastrophic wound" type and the cycle continues? I don't really understand what you want? Melee armies should just sit behind a ruin or get shot? So what's the downside for shooting armies? You can sit IN a ruin, have protection AND deal damage to anything that comes anywhere near? What does your dream gameplay experience actually look like?
> So how does a melee army meaningfully engage with a shooting army? How does it not? You can charge. You can use terrain for defense. If you can only "meaningfully engage" when terrain exists only to block shooting then that's a problem with your lack of strategic ability. >So what's the downside for shooting armies? The fact that control of the objectives outside your deployment zone is essential to winning and that brings shooting units within charge range.
Charge? I can move anywhere from 7-18 inches on a charge for most units. So I move, get overwatched by flamers or something similar, lose a model or two, and then if I miss the charge my squad melts. Range of weapons isn't a roll of the dice? Maybe if every weapons shots value was d3 or d6 but it isn't. I think you're imagining ruins everywhere on the board? Most of the WTC layouts have plenty of blank space with ruins as little "checkpoints" to move between. Sounds like you're just getting charged and don't want to pay for screen units? Talk about "lack of strategic ability"? Are you standing right next to occupied ruins with ranged units? You know you can spend turn 1 and 2 decimating the melee units then just take objectives for turns 3-5?
> So I move, get overwatched by flamers or something similar, lose a model or two, and then if I miss the charge my squad melts Then maybe you should charge multiple targets with multiple units? If we're at the point of complaining about flamer overwatch then this isn't about ruin rules, it's about bad melee players. >Sounds like you're just getting charged and don't want to pay for screen units? Screening has nothing to do with the ruin rules. And I play a faction with the best screening units in the game.
>Why GW can't make terrain rules more robust and make more sense is beyond me. No one wants different terrain. Everyone wants the rectangles that block LOS from shooting their guys. Then players will complain and want more indirect because of too much terrain blocking LOS. This is the cycle of terrain complaints.
Devils advocate. Shooting units actually pay points for having 48" weapons and melee units are often cheaper for the lack of ranged weapons, or have additional movement to make up the difference. Why would shooting armies have to pay extra for a feature that can't be used in a tournament?
I don't know if that's consistently true though? Wraithguard are 190 pts for 5. I think custodian guard are about 180 for 4. The fact that the wraith guard will admittedly hit on 4s but then wound on 2 and have a more than 50% chance of outright killing a custodian means that you'd need the ability to hide those models. The -1 ap for ruins does nothing against an ap -4 weapon. Being t7 w3 on the wraithguard, the custodians in this scenario have negligible ranged options so they will need to charge. Or not engage. I'm not saying that the board needs to be littered with ruins, but I should have a reliable way to put a melee unit somewhere where it won't just disintegrate into dust. The devil's advocate counter play can just as easily be; you know where the models are, dont be within 6-12" of a melee meat grinder unit OR pay you screen tax and send them in first. I dunno, the concept of elite soldiers or seasoned warriors from any army just standing in an open window to get shot baffles me. Surely they'd press against a pillar, duck down? I think this rule reflects that very clear logic.
Consistently true? Absolutely not. GW points are all over the place. But more true than not I would still say. Well, it's 50% to hit, then sure, pretty much an auto wound. But after that it's still 50% inv save, and you need to roll at least a 3 on dmg. That comes down to about 1 in 5 shots ge a kill. So it will take the wraithguard a whole game to kill the custodians in this scenario. Depending on if those ruins are within 12" of an objective marker that might be a good choice. But in reality most objectives has a ruin within 12" meaning you can't shoot the opponent before they can hit you. I absolutely agree on the last part. But I feel like that is what cover represents? And we also have that generic strat no one uses for going to ground. I honestly think it's more wierd to have safe spaces in a battle zone. Can you imagine a real battle zone where you have 100% absolute certainty that you can't get shot what so ever? You are immune to any kind of fire power, weather it's from small arms, anti armor weapons, tanks or air cover? No building is THAT secure?
When you're talking about rolling dice though, the squad shooting could just as easily paste a whole squad or not wound at all. I think that it's reasonable that trained soldiers wouldn't stand out in the open almost ever? I think it's stranger to think that soldiers would charge into a gun line totally unprotected. In fact, many of the imperium factions would be toppling buildings or using ships/tanks as cover. Eldar would be singing wraithbone barricades and tau would be advancing with shields. It's a weird setting to try and balance, I agree, but unfettered shooting brings a real feelsbadman game approach. I think of many rank and flank games where movement is its own nuance; positioning yourself with range to make a charge while not getting charged yourself. It feels much more interactive than "I can see the left heel of 1 model in a 20 man unit, I can now obliterate them all and all you get is -1 ap (which realistically, is getting you what, a 3 or 4+ save usually?). I get it, I too would set up overwhelming gun batteries and just unload molten lead and plasma at things in real life. But we're talking about having a fun game. Otherwise just make the shooting way more interesting and do away with melee.
True. But I'm assuming that they are supposed to balance it around what is most likely to happen, not that could happen if u only roll 6s? Agreed. An in my opinion that is why basically everyone has cover basically all the time. And they are not unprotected, they have power armor, force fields and other stuff. Being immune to shooting should be incredibly rare in my opinion. Cover should be abundant. Ruins already blocks line of sight. I might be biased, but in 9th my most common match up was admech in to sisters. And having all my big expensive units doing nothing most of the game because the enemy was in a building, then as soon as I got close to an objective a hord of half-naked ladies with chainsword charged out and killed me. And sure, I killed them back. But they where basically free since they had little to no protection. A fundamental weakness being made entirely irrelevant since they where immune to shooting until after they had killed me. That was a feelsbad moment.
Yeah looks I'm not an advocate for boards to be littered with LoS blocking and only safe charges; but the sentiment the original guy had rubbed me wrong. It's such a cop out to just say "got gud" when I feel there are issues of fine tuning and balance. You're right it feels just as bad to have your giga unit get charged and die. But when the board doesn't have a) a staging area where you can keep your units hidden turn one and b) some sort of angle of approach with cover (maybe only one side of the board or something), then playing a melee army is just charge and pray, which feels bad š Maybe we need to just build trenches...
I think we are pretty much on the same page. My only thing is, we already have cover, stealth and lone op to balance ranged vs melee. And that's in the rules. I don't think tournaments should put their fingers on the scale and give melee ~4" "free" movement as well. That being said, ranged are doing better than melee currently so it's not a big problem. In my opinion ~85% of a normal size army should be able to completely/almost completely hide in the DZ. Obviously more for elite and less for hord. And no position on the board other than in a DZ should be hidden from more than ~70% of the board. That is "balanced" terrain in my opinion.
I think that the reason why this gets so much pushback is because melee just doesn't work with the rules as they are unless terrain is basically a set of L shaped ruins that you can walk infantry through and hide inside. If you changed it now, melee would just be trash. *But* if the rules were designed from the start to actually support other terrain types in a balanced way then we wouldn't be in that mess. GW obviously have this idea of how 40k should play where infantry advance and hide inside craters and behind pipes. Where the front lines skirmish and then charge each other in a back-and-forth tussle over objectives. Intercessors fire salvos at ork boyz before going over the top and charging, and everyone is picking different targets to make up an intense and spread out firefight. In reality, you hide everyone in a corner behind an obscuring terrain feature then whoever reveals themselves first gets shot off the board by focused fire. Melee units position themselves where they can't be shot and then charge through walls because otherwise they die when someone looks at them funny. The game is just way too lethal, and if you can't pick up a target in a single activation it feels like you've wiffed.
> I think that the reason why this gets so much pushback is because melee just doesn't work with the rules as they are unless terrain is basically a set of L shaped ruins that you can walk infantry through and hide inside. Melee works fine with normal terrain. It's just that certain melee players hate having to think beyond moving straight at the enemy and maybe occasionally exploiting the melee phase movement rules to maximize their movement distance. And if certain shooting units are overpowered then they should be fixed by point cost adjustments, not by absurd terrain rules.
I don't think that holds true, because we've seen that terrain at tournaments can have a huge impact on melee viability. Event organisers didn't arbitrarily decide to start using the same bland sets of ruins, but rather that happened *because* melee armies were underperforming otherwise. If it were possible to do well on more sparse terrain with melee focused armies, then you'd expect that you'd see more people proving it at the highest levels of play. As it stands they aren't even really at the top of the meta when we have terrain compensating for their shortfalls.
>Event organisers didn't arbitrarily decide to start using the same bland sets of ruins, but rather that happenedĀ *because*Ā melee armies were underperforming otherwise. Because LVO and Frontline Gaming sold terrain designed around 6th and 7th Edition terrain rules. First floors block is a house rule that's a hold over from 3 editions ago.
Think of a 2 story house with windows and doors and rooms and hallways and such. The house has a front and back door and its roughly 40ft squared. Youre in the front with a lasgun and i walk in the back door, 40ft away with many walls and rooms between us. Using your RAW rules that you stated in other comments you can shoot me clearly without penalties. That makes NO sense. In reality (yes its a game) i would be running through the house where you have no idea where i am and can get to a position to rush you. Also first floor closed works for all players around the world where all the terrain is not created equally. This gives players the much easier ability to creat standard footprints and generate a much more fair and balanced board. If all my pieces have no windows and yours do, in your rules, you would be shot up fairly quickly while im safe. Additionally a ruin with two walls obviously blocks los through the walls but if youre behind that ruin where the wall is not between you and your target then you can in fact shoot them even if theyre in the ruin, theyll just get a cover save. I understand where youre coming from but its just much more fair for all armies if this rule is standard across the board
> Think of a 2 story house with windows and doors and rooms and hallways and such That is not a ruin, it's a solid square of impassible terrain. A ruin in 40k represents a collapsed building with only parts of an exterior wall or two standing. There is debris, pieces of internal walls, etc, within the ruin but that is represented by the +1 save bonus. >Also first floor closed works for all players around the world where all the terrain is not created equally. Terrain should not always be equal. This idea that every game ever played needs identical terrain is incredibly toxic for good gameplay in a wargame. Your army should be able to handle a wide variety of terrain and terrain layouts.
I think once you get some more games in, you'll see how absurd your position in this thread is.
That'd require self reflection.
Especially after having so many of his comments down voted any normal person would take a step back to try to understand the situation. Though I doubt what's their face is capable of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum An echo chamber abusing downvote spam doesn't make them right.
Mmm copium
Abusing the downvote mechanic is not something to be proud of.
Double dosing that copium!
Double dosing that copium!
I've played plenty of games over multiple editions but thanks for trying. The current state of competitive terrain is a joke.
Nothing in any of your comments would indicate you've got plenty of games. Thanks for trying.
Ah yes, the classic "anyone who doesn't agree with me must be inexperienced" nonsense.
Not at all. Your very specific reasons for your terrain preference makes you sound like someone who doesn't play many games, and your dememor makes you seem like someonenl that not many people want to play with you.
My reasons for my terrain preference are *because* I have played a lot of games, including games which used better terrain rules with more depth and more interesting decisions. And your complaint about "dememor" is pretty hilarious coming from someone like you.
Sure you have, champ!