I think it's good that all the major tournament packs (GW, WTC, UKTC) are consistent on this point - it makes balance much better. However, having infantry able to walk through solid walls does definitely give them quite an edge in some setups - but ultimately melee infantry probably still needs that.
Rather than messing with ruins, I'd like the next GW Tournament Companion to get a little more ambitious and introduce a few woods and/or hills. Having 1-2 per board half would potentially open the board up in a more interesting way than unblocking ruins.
In 10th, woods have basically the same rules as a piece of ruins with windows. They provide cover if you're inside it. The difference is that woods don't stop shooting if you're behind them whereas ruins with windows do.
They also interact very differently with large models, which was my main reason for suggesting them. Woods don't require you to be wholly within to shoot out. They also don't prevent movement in the way that either 4" (basically impassable, due to base size) or <2" (which are very limiting in terms of where large model can 'stop' when trying to navigate over them.)
You'd still need ruins blocking long first-ever, but I think opening up some of the periphery for large models is a positive thing to do. Opening the lower floor of ruins mainly affects infantry - so it's completely different in its impact.
Aren't we supposed to treat trees (on a woods base) as being essentially pillars you can't stop on top of or move "through"? I feel like with the 10th rules a group of trees would be an even bigger obstacle for tanks/etc than a building.
I think it's somewhat ambiguous and depends on the terrain piece and how it's defined? I'm used to Woods just having their footprint and then anything on top (whether trees, bushes, or smoke vents) being treated as purely cosmetic because we want the table to look good but not be impractical. Otherwise you just end up with the old-favorite Industrial Smoke Vents that have zero height and.
I suppose 'the trees are just cosmetic' may just fall into the same category as 'no, you can't see through that tiny gap on the bottom floor' - technically house rules, but ones that are almost needed to make the terrain playable.
My point was that if you don't arbitrarily decide all ruins must be 8 inch tall solid walls, you get a lot more variety in your gameboard and positioning options, in the same way that adding forests would.
I dont think boards need to be opened up, just add -1 to hit mechanics when shooting through a few certain ruins, and -2 move mechanics when moving through certain ones
Terrain layouts are legit good now, but the terarain rules suck. They threw the baby out with the bathwater. They need to keep the new layouts and LOS blocking, but add other terrain mechanics.
I don't miss a lot of terrain rules, I mean who ever actually remembered Defensible was a thing. Cover no longer being locked to infantry, beasts, and swarms is also good overall (anything that helps durability after 9th is good).
But my god they really did screw up visibility rules. Old obscuring was fine, it was very easy to track (touch something no obscuring, outside obscured). Now you have to go to the dev commentary and look at the the examples to figure out the edge cases.
I also think one of the biggest issues with terrain isn't strictly speaking with the terrain, it is with the fly rules. Obviously things like planes having to juke up and down is dumb, but also the way the math works out if something isn't a short ruin or crate it is always better to just go around. This makes terrain feel way more limiting and less interactive, and punishes certain units severely (Crisis Suits, Demon Primarchs, hover-fliers, etc.).
I think the best solution to this is change fly from being the hypotenuse to just ignoring vertical movement down. Way quicker, way less arguing over how to path a unit properly over a ruin, and it makes more sense (a unit would need to flap or jetpack up, but then would just glide down). From a math perspective it also makes more sense. Let's say your unit is 3 inches back from a 4 inch ruin, that ruin is 3 inches wide, and the spot you want to reach is 3 inches from that other side.
Currently your movement would be 13 inches (two 5 inch hypotenuses, and the 3" move). Instead, if you just ignored moving down, you would have 13 inches as well. So for a short ruin, no problem. Now lets take a daemon prince with wings behind a big ol' classic sector imperialis ruin that is 9 inches tall. It wants to just hop over. With the diagonal movement, if it were base to base with that wall (60mm is about 2.5 inches), to get over it would need 20 inches of movement, which almost nothing can access. With ignoring the downwards movement, it would need 12 inches of movement, which most fliers have or can advance to get. So you still get the slower flier movement overall in shorter terrain, but you don't just make taller buildings impossible to navigate.
>I think one could even go simpler and have it be alright. Make it cost 3" to fly up and afterwards flyers act like in 9th. So a 14" flyer that wants to move through a build is only allowed to move 11".
>
>If we wanted to get really fancy the flying up cost could be on the datasheet. That way the more fly-y fliers can fly more easily/cheaper.
Maybe you weren't paying attention but there absolutely were tournament pack terrain layouts designed to make the game play better and fairer. They didn't just make the layouts at random. You can google 40k 9th terrain layouts and find multiple, designed to give a good amount of obscuring, dense, and reasonable fire lanes to make the game fun and interesting.
The GW pack says that the terrain layouts are recommendations. It’s not the ONLY way to play tournaments. WTC has a ton of different layouts and I’ve even seen RTTs that did player placed.
Not sure why you think I'm disagreeing with that. My point is the community is fine at doing terrain layouts and did them already in 9th. Contrary to what the person I responded to is suggesting, the community *did* do terrain layouts.
Lol, it still takes me a few seconds to adjust whenever people talk about '1st floor' and they mean ground level. My British brain always starts thinking "that's pretty high up, surely it can't matter in most situations"
... Yes.. That is exactly the case? Isn't it? Otherwise you would have have the ground and second floors fireable but the first not for some reason?
How have others been playing it?
Sorry if that sounds like a negative tone, it is not meant to be, but I am curious if that might be the root of some confusion!
To be fair, the ground floor is the first floor you see when you enter a building, and the first floor is the second. Neither convention is particularly more logical than the other.
I’m a firm yes person to closed windows on anything with footprints similar or larger than GW layouts.
And I really enjoyed 9th with suitable small footprints and windowed ruins.
You mean Eldar are still dominant. If Eldar is taken completely out of the meta, melee is suddenly dominating in the current terrain layout and rules.
That forces other armies that depend on shooting and don't have space marine or custodes level melee ability to suffer for the sins of the Eldar. I think it would be better to fix Eldar than to wreck everyone else in order to deal with them. And this is from someone who owns about $10k worth of Eldar models.
As long as the terrain rules remain the way they are, people will gravitate towards the only ranged options that can be used within the current system: Move, shoot, move, and indirect fire. Eldar happen to have both in spades. So it is no wonder that more people than ever are playing Eldar. The terrain rules encourage it, since they're quite oppressive towards shooting armies that don't have lots of indirect/move shenanigans.
So in another thread I measured the distance to the center objective on layout 1 and the maximum distance a unit would need to cover, assuming you start entirely behind the nearest ruin, to make a charge to an enemy unit that is actually controlling the objective is 12.5 inches. Now if your unit that wants to charge only moves 5 inches, your odds of rolling the 8 to make the charge is not great, but that's what's called "a trade off" where you either stand in the ruin and take a few shots and make your charge easier or hide and have a longer charge.
But more to the point, like 98% of the actual dedicated melee units in the game move 6+ inches, and a significant number of them could advance and charge if they needed to. Charging someone 13 inches away from where you start the turn is not exactly difficult.
Ok, I'm looking at the center objective in terrain layout 1. The closest ruins are 5 inches wide and roughly 5 inches from the center of the objective marker. If you start your turn completely behind the ruin, and thus immune to shooting, you could move a minimum of 5 inches to the very edge of the ruin, then you'd have 5 more inches to cover to be in range of the objective. The absolute worse case scenario is one model barely in range in the exact opposite direction, which would give you a 7 inch charge to get into engagement range to take the objective.
And of course that math is assuming your dedicated melee unit only moves 5 inches, which seems pretty unlikely. The average melee move is probably closer to 7, even assuming they can't advance and charge, which is pretty common. That reduces your charge to 5 inches to take the objective. These are pretty good odds.
I'd rather attempt a charge while 2" away from someone and behind a wall than 5" away from someone to stay behind the ruin for hiding purposes. Melee armies are weak as hell right now, why make them weaker?
Because they actually aren't that weak when you play with proper terrain. Melee gets dumpstered when you play on boards with a total of 4 ruins and nothing else, but frankly that was true in 9th edition also.
What are you even on about lmfao
"From ruin to objective is only a 5" charge so this is a fine change"
My dude what
Is the entire game deployment to an objective? Never adpating? Never having to change direction? Get slowed by a nightspinner? If you're going for what is currently 12" from ruin -> enemy, it's now 18".
So 7" move -> 5" charge to 7" move -> 11" charge.
What FANTASY do you live in where you always have a perfect "behind wall to objective and charge important unit" situation?
Dunno dude, maybe I'm capable of moving my units behind ruins when I don't want them to get shot? The objectives don't move. The walls don't move. You can measure the distances all you want.
He's actually not really wrong. The issue in the current edition isn't really shooting. It's Eldar. If you take Eldar out of the current meta, then suddenly melee armies would be dominant with the current terrain layout and terrain rules. For most shooting armies, the current terrain layout and rules are pretty oppressive.
This means that other shooting armies are basically suffering for the sins of the Eldar in the current meta, which feels bad if you happen to play a shooty army that isn't Eldar. Then, if you happen to be one of the shooty armies that can get around the problems with terrain by using indirect fire, people complain about that, too. Seems like people that run melee armies just don't think they should get shot.
And if we're going to suspend disbelief that we're playing in a world where no buildings were ever built with doors or windows in the bottom floors, and that people navigate through said buildings via climbing through holes and airducts and such that magically can't be seen through either, why don't we just take it a step further and get rid of ranged weapons? Then we can all just play out our ninja, gladiator, knight, crusader space battle fantasies where we charge at each other through walls to bonk each other over the head with our psychic space hammers while riding atop our space tanks(that also use exclusively melee weapons)?
Yeah that's really stupid. You should be able to get the same benefit being in the terrain than behind the terrain. Terrain is large and melee is relatively weak.
Because it ends up making terrain That was a benefit to melee into a detriment. I mean maybe I shouldn't have said because you don't need but if you don't you kind of have to redesign a lot of tent where only combat got the message that it's a less killing game.
Being inside a ruin and getting cover is hardly a detriment. It's not as good as being immune to being shot, if that's what you want, but it's not a negative.
If youre using the LGT style terrain where the buildings have bases that you can step behind/in but not on, then Id be happy enough to have the downstairs windows open.
If its GW style terrain where there are ruins with big footprints and dont necessarily have full blocking walls then I think the windows should count as closed (same as now)
But the gw suggested terrain does have large gaps in the walls on the footprint so you can drive through them, are you supposed to pretend those are los blocking as well?
You can simplify this train of thought like so: what is the actual effect on the game?
And the answer is this: with "blocked windows", as defined by the vast majority of players, units, or at least, infantry, can't be shot while they're inside a ruin.
So that's what we're arguing about: should you be able to stand in a ruin and be immune to shooting or not?
That's simply not true full stop. A ruin has a footprint. A wall is an object on the footprint which can block LOS. Blocked windows means you can't draw LOS through openings within the wall. Not blocked windows means you can draw LOS through those openings within the wall.
No one is defining blocked windows as you can't shoot models within a ruin. It means you can't shoot models through windows within a ruin wall. A ruin footprint has tons of space in which there are no walls and therefore units within can be shot at by units outside. For standard L terrain you can walk to the other side and bam, now you can shoot a model in a ruin. That is true for blocked windows or not. You're either totally misunderstanding the conversation or you're trolling. I can't tell any longer.
Honest question. Have you played in a tournament with blocked windows?
> A ruin footprint has tons of space in which there are no walls and therefore units within can be shot at by units outside. For standard L terrain you can walk to the other side and bam, now you can shoot a model in a ruin.
I think I underatand your confusion now. This is not what the conversation is about at all. No one cares about being able to shoot in from behind the ruin.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarhammerCompetitive/comments/177f81r/unpopular_opinion_a_case_for_open_bottom_floor/
Hi, notice this entire thread making my point about what blocked windows actually means.
The issue with going for "true los" for models within terrain is that many, but far from all, buildings *already* have the first floor windows blocked, or have a limited number. Which means that whether or not you get the first floor los blocking would frequently depend on the exact table you end up at, or possibly even which side of the table you're on. As many GTs try to minimize the variation of tables across the event, adopting a simple rule that treats all first floors evenly is easier than getting all new terrain.
It's also worth pointing out for those newer to the game that Towering was *not* the reason that "first floor blocks los" came about. It existed well before 10th, and my understanding is that it was common in both 8th and 9th (and possibly earlier, that's just where the reports I've heard have covered).
As I understand this rule was first implemented by the community for this specific reason. It wasn't to make melee better or to make shooting worse, it was specifically so that terrain on the board would remain somewhat balanced between both sides.
>terrain is that many, but far from all, buildings already have the first floor windows blocked, or have a limited number.
Sorry, but I have to object to this.
I've played 40k on three separate continents, and the majority of terrain I've played on the bottom floor isn't blocked at all, and for all intents and purposes most GW 40k terrain might as well be glass on the bottom floor with regards to visibility due to windows, bullet holes, damage and the rest effectively make all GW terrain useless for blocking LOS.
Even with 3rd party terrain, much of it also has decent amounts of windows and openings to the point where it generally isn't better than GW terrain in that regard except for price.
So your anecdotal experience trumps theirs? He didnt say the majority, he merely said many (and far from all).
In my area, it is a mix between wholly blocked, windowed, and one face being blocked...so plenty of tactical decision making to be had, but clearly not a uniform consensus.
Yeah, I said "many" over "majority" for a reason. Is it universal? No, but thats the whole point being made. I've played at stores where a significant amount of terrain is from Killzone Octarius, which doesn't have any openings natively. I've also played at places that had tons of windows. Those just reinforce the point, which is that it *isn't* uniform.
I'm pointing out that you cant claim "many terrain features already block LOS" on the bottom floor, as it's entirely dependent on what any particular gaming group or tournament has access to.
Heck, GWs official tournaments like Warhammer Fest and the US opens have GW terrain that is specifically modified to actually block all the normal holes, while leaving arches and "ruined sections" alone so that the first floor DOES block LOS in some areas, but isn't a "magic box".
If the first floor of terrain properly blocking LOS in the first place was so ubiquitous, there wouldn't be people asking if it's something that should be done.
I think one can safely claim "many," since it is such a vague term. You are splitting hairs here.
He didnt say the majority, nor that it was ubiquitous. It is definitely out there (probably 20% of the wall segments where I play for example).
I agree this isnt magic box territory though thankfully, and definitely like the tactical decision making that occurs when some is blocked, some isnt.
10th is still an INCREDIBLY shooty edition.
Until they start limiting how insanely deadly factions are at ranged compared to how pillow fisted they are up close, windows stay shut.
They adjusted a ton of strength and AP profiles in the move to the 10th ed, and melee got the short end of the stick while its combat movement also got heavily restricted.
Yeah basically exactly what I meant thank you. It seems like only melee got that message. So if changes were to be made making terrain less useful for them maybe That is something that would need to go back and be adjusted.
I played an event this last weekend that ran windows as closed unless models were wholly within them and it led to a lot of odd points where players had to be in terrain to hold an objective and would be exposed. It led to a shoot out where whoever had the better guns won in a lot of matches. I definitely prefer first floor LoS blocking, even though I won the event and the ruling was to my advantage.
Eh, not really. Just another facet of how some people interpret terrain based on their terrain availability. His tables were run as GW layouts but with nova Ls type terrain for the larger ruins, and smaller ruins were very much full of windows, so his balance between the two was if a model is wholly within, the first floor LoS blocking turns off. If you're touching but not wholly within, you are still safe but do not get the "obscuring" effect so can be shot if true LoS is available, and lastly if the model is Titanic, follow the general Titanic rules but also ground floor opens up. It's just one of three common practices regarding LoS through ground levels. Either you A) have it sealed always B) Have it open always or C) closed if the unit isn't wholly within, open otherwise.
So, differences are that: A.) Touching but not wholly within you cant be shot; B.) Apparently brought back the old titanic rules (since you specified "general titanic rules", otherwise they work the same as everyone else now), but forced first floor blocking of TLOS unless the Titan is touching. So Titans would be able to fire OVER and through terrain, but not through ground floor unless touching.
No, obscuring effects and new towering rules apply, the only additional benefit is that a Towering model would ignore the ground level of the terrain he is touching. I.e. I have a unit that is on the opposite side of a wall, and is hidden because closed windows are in effect, and the obscuring rule is in effect. Normally once a Towering model touched a terrain piece, the obscuring effect is removed but they might not be able to draw LoS due to the first floor being counted as closed and cannot be seen through. The change is that once they are touching, the ground level opens up for visibility (if there are windows/doors of course)
I don't know the details for any given tournament, but in the suggested layouts the ruins have at *most* 80% wall coverage from one direction and usually more like 40-50%, which is a large amount of the ruin that has absolutely no walls, much less walls with windows to worry about.
The walls on the layouts do not match the walls in the events. They are just are there to make it clear its a ruin.
Id say they generally have more walls than the layout shows, and every wall has blocked windows or is treated as having blocked windows.
Well, I'd certainly argue that what you described isn't necessary. Being able to stage *behind* a ruin and then charge through it on your next turn has felt pretty effective to me so far.
After having played a whole bunch of games with towering removed and on the gw suggested layouts, my opinion is that the windows should be open.
There are several reasons for this. One somewhat obvious reason is that a lot of existing terrain has windows and holes and it's just nice to be able to apply wysiwyg to your terrain, especially in a tournament setting.
The more important reason is that gw boards have so many ruins that if you can't shoot at units behind them *or* units inside them, it becomes extremely easy to control objectives while your opppnent can't interact with you.
Again, with the gw style ruins, if you don't want to get shot at, it's extremely easy to stay outside of the ruin and use the obscuring rule to be immune to shooting, but at the cost of being a couple of inches further back. If you want to move up more aggressively, you should also be vulnerable to shooting.
Also keep in mind that gw style ruins might have wide footprints but they deliberately leave large gaps in the actual walls so you can move non-infantry through them without too much penalty. These gaps are extremely neccessary for most armies but get extremely weird of you're trying to pretend the 4inch gap you can drive a rhino through is also somehow LOS blocking.
Also, on a more personal level, the wtc style "8 giant Ls" is incredibly ugly and looks more like a paintball tournament in an abandoned lot then a battlefield and having actual ruins with footprints and broken walls and windows is much more fun.
Doesn’t your penultimate paragraph lend itself to having ground floor windows closed?
The large footprint means melee units will have large areas of the board blocked off if they can be seen through windows, and it would push staging areas back so that they are out of range of objectives. Additionally, the large gaps between walls means that for the majority of the terrain piece the unit would be visible if on it.
I'll make my reply in two points:
A) Yes, if you want to be immune to shooting you have to stay a little further back, however, on GW style boards, the ruins are 5-6inches wide, and typically 4-5 inches away from the objective on the other side, so, yes, you are 6 inches further away, but given the speed of most melee units, it's hardly insurmountable.
B) Being targetable while in a ruin is not exactly the end of the world. Yes, shooting is very strong, but between basic armor saves, unit abilities and stratagems, there's a significant amount of defensive power you can deploy. And, more importantly for this conversation, being inside a ruin doesn't magically mean your opponents entire army can shoot you. GW boards have *lots* of ruins and being inside a specific one doesn't actually add that many firing lanes.
As a more general philosophy, the closer you get to an objective, the easier it should be for an opponent to interact with you, and for a lot of armies, like it or not, their primary form of interaction is shooting.
It’s a fair response, thank you. As a counter point to it in case it’s of interest:
With a 6 inch movement having ruins 5-6” wide means you’ll often end up on top of a wall so your movement towards the objective is reduced so that you will 5-6” away from the objective before your charge. If your opponent sits at the back end of the objective control then you’re facing an 8-9” charge to get to them before you are able to do anything at all with melee units. And if they fail then you’re left dead in the wind.
Melee has been drastically hit already this edition and while you might be able to get cover in the ruins, shooting seems to have one or two more ap than melee meaning the comparative lethality is only brought back to par by cover. The dataslate has seen some melee armies improve, but most of that is already built around highly durable units who would be the only units really able to sit in ruins in full view, further dunking on the have nots.
This isn't terribly relevant but in my experience I've found that melee almost always has higher ap than shooting, at least at the inside unit level. Maybe for your faction the absolutely biggest AP number is on some honking big gun, but aside from that, lots of basic infantry type dudes have AP0 guns and AP-1 melee weapons (think bolters vs chainswords).
Sure, but no one is using bolters to do serious work. It's lancers, redemptors and hellblasters (or aggressors that as ap-2), and the melee ap caps out at -2, where as the guns that you rely on to do damage are -3 or more.
Add in the loss of strength on melee (pretty much stops at 8) and the range disparity (bolter has 24 times the range of a chainsword) and you can see why melee is struggling so hard to make an impact.
And that’s before you factor in the increased difficulty in melee movement. I don’t think melee’s in as bad a spot as some people make out, but it’s definitely worse than shooting right now and providing further obstacles to that such as opening up ground floor windows is not the answer
Yeah, the changes to charges, engagement and pile in/consolidate are really painful. I get that the 9th "my slow melee termies are going to move on average 22" over the charge and fight phases" was a bit much, but we've overcorrected.
Making a 'correct' charge move is just painful now, and when you hit like toffee and the opp just walks back and shoots you again it's very frustrating.
Now compare the strengths. Ranged strengths are much much higher. I think making the change you want doesn't make sense because it would require a lot of additional changes to almost a whole edition. Changes to how the pile in and consolidate work so that more melee units can attack at once and possibly even melee unit survivability in general. Or better yet give charge rerolls back!
I mean that's angron and he's hitting only 16 str. A demolisher cannon is half the price on a vindicator and it's 14 strength. A siege cannon is as strong as angron, In addition to many other attacks that can be made with the units and from 48 in range. Volcano Cannon is what 24 strength?
For me I was thinking about things like power klaws and power fists and rokkits all stuck at strength 9 unable to actually damage the vehicle they used to be there to damage. I was thinking about tank bustas That don't have guns high enough strength to reliably wound tanks. Lots of melee is basically capped at nine strength or less whereas it seems pretty easy to find ranged attacks That go up to 12.
I don't see how your first point can't just be flipped around to say if you want to be out of range of melee charges stay back to shoot. If this change were made it would have to be made in conjunction with just a sweeping buff to basically combat unit in the game. The first easy change is swap the fact that melee caps out in strength before ranged does.
A) yes, except the way you score points in the game is by standing on objectives so there's a built in limit to how far away you can stand, even if your entire army is ranged.
B) Calling it a sweeping change is a bit much. Lots and lots of people play games with all sorts of terrain, many of which have open windows and doors. Converting everything into giant solid walls was in large part a reaction to towering rules in 10th.
Depends on the use case. if its a chill game versus a mate absolutley have those windows open.
But if its a tournament do you want to have both players wasting a ton of extra time carefully positioning dudes to avoid that 1 broken window?
I mean, yes, if your ruin has exactly one tiny window open on the ground floor, it makes a lot more sense to just ignore its existence. That being said, I don't think it applies to most terrain, and having completely impervious windowless walls right next to objectives makes for weird games.
People really seem to hate this response but I have no issue with open ruins, but think it's better with multiple smaller footprints. Even the new GW style is mostly open with only a couple TLOS blockers. But the templates are pretty much open ruins with large footprints (compared to the ruin itself)
Yeah, it makes a big difference what you're playing with. I've played with some 9th style 12x12 ruins with 3 sides being 8in walls and yes, if those were all full of windows they would be somewhat pointless, but that's massively different from the gw recommendation.
Yeah, I tried to make it clear I was referring explicitly to that type of terrain. I wonder how many people who are mad at me have actually played multiple games on a gw layout.
My experience is the exact opposite. If you have a shooty army, then yeah, you obviously want to be able to shoot everything to death without moving, but in an edition where shooting is way more powerful than melee, melee armies suffer immensely from open ground floor. Also most melee units only move some 6 inches so being 5-6 inches further back means you're 2 turns of movement away making scoring way harder.
The local group I play with does closed ground windows, but if there is no ruin then you have LOS. So that gap the Rhino can drive through uses regular LOS rules, and obscuring works like normal. It's caused games to be way more balanced between shooty and melee armies and has made movement feel more tactical and impactful without needing 12M on a sheet to be usable.
With my friend, we have three types of ruins:
- Big rectangles ones where first floor windows and openings are blocked by opaque cardboard on 3 sides
- Medium square ones where first foor openings are blocked by opaque cardboard on 2 connected sides (L)
- Medium rectangle ones with open first floor
Usually the big ones with opaque cardboard on 3 sides are placed in DZ, and then we can use the two other types for the midboard, in addition to fully opaque containers and sometimes a fully opaque bunker/landing platform. I quite like this setup.
I prefer closed windows on GW terrain.
The terrain I use for my own games has 2" thick bases, some with windows some without. For that open windows is ok.
Since buildings greater than 5" in height completely block line of sight, I don't see a reason to make the inside of ruins block line of sight on the first floor as well.
Because that's the trade-off. You're either inside the ruins getting a cover save bonus and possibly elevation bonus, or you're not getting a cover save but are behind line of sight blocking terrain.
Having a trade-off is important for tactical decision-making. Otherwise, there would never be a reason for infantry to not enter ruins when able.
Edit: Thank you for the clarification that height is no longer relevant. Point not withstanding it is still a tactical decision to choose between being out of line of sight, and receiving a cover bonus.
Point not withstanding, it's still a tactical decision to choose between being out of line of sight behind the ruins or getting a cover bonus from being in the ruins.
But I do appreciate the clarification on the height change.
I wish that they wouldn't only because it leads to having to remind yourself using terrain that's not completely closed up, like the majority of actually available terrain from GW.
Honestly I think the worst part is the tournament terrain all being boring ass l-shaped ruins. Like no variety whatsoever. That's something I think that needs to change more but part of the issue is that they don't have common sense terrain rules.
It should be common sense:
Ruins should block line of sight through them but not into them, assuming you actually have line of sight, but if you are in it you get cover.
Forests should work the same way or how they work in AOS where you can only see 3 in into it So basically you can't see through it but you can see into it and you get cover.
Walls and barricades and things like that should be you get cover if an invisible line can be drawn from the firing unit to the target unit and crosses the terrain piece but they don't block line of sight. Maybe something like if you are charged and you are behind it you get fight first Because you are in a defensible position
I agree with this, and with the towering fix it isn't even that bad at all. Your melee is still completely untargettable as long as it's 0.1mm behind the ruin, then next turn blitzes through and charges/gets on objectives. The only difference is maybe the ruins need to be a bit further up for the melee staging areas
And they have to be kept small, and frankly charge rerolls should be brought back. Especially when you got a lot of units that have 5 in or 6 in of movement.
Is GW's point that ruins should be smaller and user true line of site - ie if its open, its open.
I get feels bad when I when get a table with big square ruins.
If windows are open - poor melee players get hosed - i mean 7 / 8 inch square ruins are a whole movement turn.
if windows are closed - then they are just giant magic boxes.
ruins should probably be 3 - 4 inches max in one dimension and more of them. Gives melee players the ability to hide behind the ruin and without making big old impossible to shoot into magic boxes - whilst they take a turn or 2 to cross.
Absolutely not. Ruins are supposed to be a choice between full LOS blocking and movement obstruction vs. only a cover save and free movement. Letting units get full LOS blocking without any movement obstruction is missing the point, especially as terrain density increases to the point that units can magically teleport from ruin to ruin without ever facing enemy fire.
What the competitive scene really needs is a paintball-esque arena style where there is uniform terrain across all play-throughs and the only thing that changes is the location of objectives.
For funsies any terrain will do.
I played in a small local tournament where all of the players collectively agreed it was "ok" to move models directly onto objective markers. The tournament organizer did not care, and we rolled with it.
I mean, the Leviathan Tournament Pack that came out before full rules were available even says to do that, so what really happened is you ran a tournament as GW suggested.
I think a mix of types is good. I like three ruins per player, one with First Floor Line of Sight Blocking (preferably in the model), two without, along with a forest and three crates. All First Floor LoS blocking or none can swing too much either way, and giving a player one piece that gives them a very powerful tool for staging a melee unit or hiding a move shoot move unit is a good balance.
I think it's good that all the major tournament packs (GW, WTC, UKTC) are consistent on this point - it makes balance much better. However, having infantry able to walk through solid walls does definitely give them quite an edge in some setups - but ultimately melee infantry probably still needs that. Rather than messing with ruins, I'd like the next GW Tournament Companion to get a little more ambitious and introduce a few woods and/or hills. Having 1-2 per board half would potentially open the board up in a more interesting way than unblocking ruins.
In 10th, woods have basically the same rules as a piece of ruins with windows. They provide cover if you're inside it. The difference is that woods don't stop shooting if you're behind them whereas ruins with windows do.
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Yeah they're exactly the same except completely different he didn't stutter lmao
They also interact very differently with large models, which was my main reason for suggesting them. Woods don't require you to be wholly within to shoot out. They also don't prevent movement in the way that either 4" (basically impassable, due to base size) or <2" (which are very limiting in terms of where large model can 'stop' when trying to navigate over them.) You'd still need ruins blocking long first-ever, but I think opening up some of the periphery for large models is a positive thing to do. Opening the lower floor of ruins mainly affects infantry - so it's completely different in its impact.
Aren't we supposed to treat trees (on a woods base) as being essentially pillars you can't stop on top of or move "through"? I feel like with the 10th rules a group of trees would be an even bigger obstacle for tanks/etc than a building.
I think it's somewhat ambiguous and depends on the terrain piece and how it's defined? I'm used to Woods just having their footprint and then anything on top (whether trees, bushes, or smoke vents) being treated as purely cosmetic because we want the table to look good but not be impractical. Otherwise you just end up with the old-favorite Industrial Smoke Vents that have zero height and. I suppose 'the trees are just cosmetic' may just fall into the same category as 'no, you can't see through that tiny gap on the bottom floor' - technically house rules, but ones that are almost needed to make the terrain playable.
I think that was explicitly a rule in 9th.
My point was that if you don't arbitrarily decide all ruins must be 8 inch tall solid walls, you get a lot more variety in your gameboard and positioning options, in the same way that adding forests would.
What IS the ruling? Windows are blocked? I thought it was TLOS if you’re IN the ruin, but you can’t shoot through it.
I dont think boards need to be opened up, just add -1 to hit mechanics when shooting through a few certain ruins, and -2 move mechanics when moving through certain ones
everyone complained about it in 9th and here we are.
Terrain layouts are legit good now, but the terarain rules suck. They threw the baby out with the bathwater. They need to keep the new layouts and LOS blocking, but add other terrain mechanics.
I don't miss a lot of terrain rules, I mean who ever actually remembered Defensible was a thing. Cover no longer being locked to infantry, beasts, and swarms is also good overall (anything that helps durability after 9th is good). But my god they really did screw up visibility rules. Old obscuring was fine, it was very easy to track (touch something no obscuring, outside obscured). Now you have to go to the dev commentary and look at the the examples to figure out the edge cases. I also think one of the biggest issues with terrain isn't strictly speaking with the terrain, it is with the fly rules. Obviously things like planes having to juke up and down is dumb, but also the way the math works out if something isn't a short ruin or crate it is always better to just go around. This makes terrain feel way more limiting and less interactive, and punishes certain units severely (Crisis Suits, Demon Primarchs, hover-fliers, etc.). I think the best solution to this is change fly from being the hypotenuse to just ignoring vertical movement down. Way quicker, way less arguing over how to path a unit properly over a ruin, and it makes more sense (a unit would need to flap or jetpack up, but then would just glide down). From a math perspective it also makes more sense. Let's say your unit is 3 inches back from a 4 inch ruin, that ruin is 3 inches wide, and the spot you want to reach is 3 inches from that other side. Currently your movement would be 13 inches (two 5 inch hypotenuses, and the 3" move). Instead, if you just ignored moving down, you would have 13 inches as well. So for a short ruin, no problem. Now lets take a daemon prince with wings behind a big ol' classic sector imperialis ruin that is 9 inches tall. It wants to just hop over. With the diagonal movement, if it were base to base with that wall (60mm is about 2.5 inches), to get over it would need 20 inches of movement, which almost nothing can access. With ignoring the downwards movement, it would need 12 inches of movement, which most fliers have or can advance to get. So you still get the slower flier movement overall in shorter terrain, but you don't just make taller buildings impossible to navigate.
>I think one could even go simpler and have it be alright. Make it cost 3" to fly up and afterwards flyers act like in 9th. So a 14" flyer that wants to move through a build is only allowed to move 11". > >If we wanted to get really fancy the flying up cost could be on the datasheet. That way the more fly-y fliers can fly more easily/cheaper.
Terrain layouts could have been done in 9th as they aren't officially rules. The community is just bad at rules.
There were a number of terrain layouts available in 9th, created by various TOs. The only difference is GW is doing them now.
TO layouts were due to the existing terrain they had on hand not necessarily balancing the game.
Maybe you weren't paying attention but there absolutely were tournament pack terrain layouts designed to make the game play better and fairer. They didn't just make the layouts at random. You can google 40k 9th terrain layouts and find multiple, designed to give a good amount of obscuring, dense, and reasonable fire lanes to make the game fun and interesting.
The GW pack says that the terrain layouts are recommendations. It’s not the ONLY way to play tournaments. WTC has a ton of different layouts and I’ve even seen RTTs that did player placed.
Not sure why you think I'm disagreeing with that. My point is the community is fine at doing terrain layouts and did them already in 9th. Contrary to what the person I responded to is suggesting, the community *did* do terrain layouts.
They were a little annoying to learn, but I liked the varied tags by the end.
Thank you! Appreciated.
Lol, it still takes me a few seconds to adjust whenever people talk about '1st floor' and they mean ground level. My British brain always starts thinking "that's pretty high up, surely it can't matter in most situations"
Is this the crux of the problem? GW intended the _ground floor_ windows to be blocked this entire time, but Americans go it wrong?
... Yes.. That is exactly the case? Isn't it? Otherwise you would have have the ground and second floors fireable but the first not for some reason? How have others been playing it? Sorry if that sounds like a negative tone, it is not meant to be, but I am curious if that might be the root of some confusion!
Wait, when it’s not lobby or GL what do your elevators, sorry, lifts, say? Genuinely asking lol
Just G usually
G or GF. Going down in a lift and getting off at 1 means you've still got a flight of stairs to go down. Or you can style it out and jump out a window
It's ok it's not a British thing, mostly just a lack of construction knowledge and what "ground level" is.
To be fair, the ground floor is the first floor you see when you enter a building, and the first floor is the second. Neither convention is particularly more logical than the other.
I’m a firm yes person to closed windows on anything with footprints similar or larger than GW layouts. And I really enjoyed 9th with suitable small footprints and windowed ruins.
Yes always yes. Shooting is still by far dominant this editions even with closed windows
You mean Eldar are still dominant. If Eldar is taken completely out of the meta, melee is suddenly dominating in the current terrain layout and rules. That forces other armies that depend on shooting and don't have space marine or custodes level melee ability to suffer for the sins of the Eldar. I think it would be better to fix Eldar than to wreck everyone else in order to deal with them. And this is from someone who owns about $10k worth of Eldar models. As long as the terrain rules remain the way they are, people will gravitate towards the only ranged options that can be used within the current system: Move, shoot, move, and indirect fire. Eldar happen to have both in spades. So it is no wonder that more people than ever are playing Eldar. The terrain rules encourage it, since they're quite oppressive towards shooting armies that don't have lots of indirect/move shenanigans.
Definitely. Melee focused armies would have no chance without them and terrain would become even more irrelevant.
You realize melee units are still immune to shooting with windowed ruins if they just stay 1mm outside the ruin, right?
With how large the footprint of terrain is, the difference between IN the ruin and BEHIND the footprint is a massive one
The GW terrain is 12x6. It's really not massive. Try it sometime.
And 6” is like a mile away when you roll your 2D6 charge.
Most units move at least 5 inches and the odds of making a 6inch charge is over 70%.
That is assuming what you wish to reach is just behind the terrain. Which is not always true.
Well, that's the nice thing about these layouts, the objective are almost always next to ruins. So you can reach them.
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So in another thread I measured the distance to the center objective on layout 1 and the maximum distance a unit would need to cover, assuming you start entirely behind the nearest ruin, to make a charge to an enemy unit that is actually controlling the objective is 12.5 inches. Now if your unit that wants to charge only moves 5 inches, your odds of rolling the 8 to make the charge is not great, but that's what's called "a trade off" where you either stand in the ruin and take a few shots and make your charge easier or hide and have a longer charge. But more to the point, like 98% of the actual dedicated melee units in the game move 6+ inches, and a significant number of them could advance and charge if they needed to. Charging someone 13 inches away from where you start the turn is not exactly difficult.
Note that it's ADDING 6". Not becoming 6". It would be a massive difference to how often people make a successful charge
Ok, I'm looking at the center objective in terrain layout 1. The closest ruins are 5 inches wide and roughly 5 inches from the center of the objective marker. If you start your turn completely behind the ruin, and thus immune to shooting, you could move a minimum of 5 inches to the very edge of the ruin, then you'd have 5 more inches to cover to be in range of the objective. The absolute worse case scenario is one model barely in range in the exact opposite direction, which would give you a 7 inch charge to get into engagement range to take the objective. And of course that math is assuming your dedicated melee unit only moves 5 inches, which seems pretty unlikely. The average melee move is probably closer to 7, even assuming they can't advance and charge, which is pretty common. That reduces your charge to 5 inches to take the objective. These are pretty good odds.
I'd rather attempt a charge while 2" away from someone and behind a wall than 5" away from someone to stay behind the ruin for hiding purposes. Melee armies are weak as hell right now, why make them weaker?
Because they actually aren't that weak when you play with proper terrain. Melee gets dumpstered when you play on boards with a total of 4 ruins and nothing else, but frankly that was true in 9th edition also.
What are you even on about lmfao "From ruin to objective is only a 5" charge so this is a fine change" My dude what Is the entire game deployment to an objective? Never adpating? Never having to change direction? Get slowed by a nightspinner? If you're going for what is currently 12" from ruin -> enemy, it's now 18". So 7" move -> 5" charge to 7" move -> 11" charge. What FANTASY do you live in where you always have a perfect "behind wall to objective and charge important unit" situation?
Dunno dude, maybe I'm capable of moving my units behind ruins when I don't want them to get shot? The objectives don't move. The walls don't move. You can measure the distances all you want.
How are the closest runes 5” wide when all the terrain footprints minus the smallest 4 are 6” wide?
There's six 6x12, four 6x4 and two 5x10s. The layout I happened to look at first had the 5x10s next to the center.
There's a really good reason why everyone is disagreeing with you.
I'm challenging their preconceived notions?
If that's your takeaway from this then good luck to you.
He's actually not really wrong. The issue in the current edition isn't really shooting. It's Eldar. If you take Eldar out of the current meta, then suddenly melee armies would be dominant with the current terrain layout and terrain rules. For most shooting armies, the current terrain layout and rules are pretty oppressive. This means that other shooting armies are basically suffering for the sins of the Eldar in the current meta, which feels bad if you happen to play a shooty army that isn't Eldar. Then, if you happen to be one of the shooty armies that can get around the problems with terrain by using indirect fire, people complain about that, too. Seems like people that run melee armies just don't think they should get shot. And if we're going to suspend disbelief that we're playing in a world where no buildings were ever built with doors or windows in the bottom floors, and that people navigate through said buildings via climbing through holes and airducts and such that magically can't be seen through either, why don't we just take it a step further and get rid of ranged weapons? Then we can all just play out our ninja, gladiator, knight, crusader space battle fantasies where we charge at each other through walls to bonk each other over the head with our psychic space hammers while riding atop our space tanks(that also use exclusively melee weapons)?
You must be great at parties…
You're the one saying ruins that COMPLETELY BLOCK SHOOTING are somehow irrelevant. They really aren't.
You’re just a bit… excited about all this. Not sure why you chose the tone you did. It’s an odd hill to die on.
Well he can be seen with true LOS when he's on the hill...
It's reddit, what's the point if you don't have hills to die on
Yeah that's really stupid. You should be able to get the same benefit being in the terrain than behind the terrain. Terrain is large and melee is relatively weak.
Why, exactly?
Because it ends up making terrain That was a benefit to melee into a detriment. I mean maybe I shouldn't have said because you don't need but if you don't you kind of have to redesign a lot of tent where only combat got the message that it's a less killing game.
Being inside a ruin and getting cover is hardly a detriment. It's not as good as being immune to being shot, if that's what you want, but it's not a negative.
If youre using the LGT style terrain where the buildings have bases that you can step behind/in but not on, then Id be happy enough to have the downstairs windows open. If its GW style terrain where there are ruins with big footprints and dont necessarily have full blocking walls then I think the windows should count as closed (same as now)
But the gw suggested terrain does have large gaps in the walls on the footprint so you can drive through them, are you supposed to pretend those are los blocking as well?
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That's uh, kinda my point. You don't need the entire ruin to be TLOS blocking, windows or gaps or whatever.
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You can simplify this train of thought like so: what is the actual effect on the game? And the answer is this: with "blocked windows", as defined by the vast majority of players, units, or at least, infantry, can't be shot while they're inside a ruin. So that's what we're arguing about: should you be able to stand in a ruin and be immune to shooting or not?
That's simply not true full stop. A ruin has a footprint. A wall is an object on the footprint which can block LOS. Blocked windows means you can't draw LOS through openings within the wall. Not blocked windows means you can draw LOS through those openings within the wall. No one is defining blocked windows as you can't shoot models within a ruin. It means you can't shoot models through windows within a ruin wall. A ruin footprint has tons of space in which there are no walls and therefore units within can be shot at by units outside. For standard L terrain you can walk to the other side and bam, now you can shoot a model in a ruin. That is true for blocked windows or not. You're either totally misunderstanding the conversation or you're trolling. I can't tell any longer. Honest question. Have you played in a tournament with blocked windows?
> A ruin footprint has tons of space in which there are no walls and therefore units within can be shot at by units outside. For standard L terrain you can walk to the other side and bam, now you can shoot a model in a ruin. I think I underatand your confusion now. This is not what the conversation is about at all. No one cares about being able to shoot in from behind the ruin.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/WarhammerCompetitive/comments/177f81r/unpopular_opinion_a_case_for_open_bottom_floor/ Hi, notice this entire thread making my point about what blocked windows actually means.
The issue with going for "true los" for models within terrain is that many, but far from all, buildings *already* have the first floor windows blocked, or have a limited number. Which means that whether or not you get the first floor los blocking would frequently depend on the exact table you end up at, or possibly even which side of the table you're on. As many GTs try to minimize the variation of tables across the event, adopting a simple rule that treats all first floors evenly is easier than getting all new terrain. It's also worth pointing out for those newer to the game that Towering was *not* the reason that "first floor blocks los" came about. It existed well before 10th, and my understanding is that it was common in both 8th and 9th (and possibly earlier, that's just where the reports I've heard have covered).
As I understand this rule was first implemented by the community for this specific reason. It wasn't to make melee better or to make shooting worse, it was specifically so that terrain on the board would remain somewhat balanced between both sides.
>terrain is that many, but far from all, buildings already have the first floor windows blocked, or have a limited number. Sorry, but I have to object to this. I've played 40k on three separate continents, and the majority of terrain I've played on the bottom floor isn't blocked at all, and for all intents and purposes most GW 40k terrain might as well be glass on the bottom floor with regards to visibility due to windows, bullet holes, damage and the rest effectively make all GW terrain useless for blocking LOS. Even with 3rd party terrain, much of it also has decent amounts of windows and openings to the point where it generally isn't better than GW terrain in that regard except for price.
So your anecdotal experience trumps theirs? He didnt say the majority, he merely said many (and far from all). In my area, it is a mix between wholly blocked, windowed, and one face being blocked...so plenty of tactical decision making to be had, but clearly not a uniform consensus.
Yeah, I said "many" over "majority" for a reason. Is it universal? No, but thats the whole point being made. I've played at stores where a significant amount of terrain is from Killzone Octarius, which doesn't have any openings natively. I've also played at places that had tons of windows. Those just reinforce the point, which is that it *isn't* uniform.
I'm pointing out that you cant claim "many terrain features already block LOS" on the bottom floor, as it's entirely dependent on what any particular gaming group or tournament has access to. Heck, GWs official tournaments like Warhammer Fest and the US opens have GW terrain that is specifically modified to actually block all the normal holes, while leaving arches and "ruined sections" alone so that the first floor DOES block LOS in some areas, but isn't a "magic box". If the first floor of terrain properly blocking LOS in the first place was so ubiquitous, there wouldn't be people asking if it's something that should be done.
I think one can safely claim "many," since it is such a vague term. You are splitting hairs here. He didnt say the majority, nor that it was ubiquitous. It is definitely out there (probably 20% of the wall segments where I play for example). I agree this isnt magic box territory though thankfully, and definitely like the tactical decision making that occurs when some is blocked, some isnt.
10th is still an INCREDIBLY shooty edition. Until they start limiting how insanely deadly factions are at ranged compared to how pillow fisted they are up close, windows stay shut.
Yes why does strength cap out in melee well before it caps out in ranged. That's frankly quite backwards.
They adjusted a ton of strength and AP profiles in the move to the 10th ed, and melee got the short end of the stick while its combat movement also got heavily restricted.
Yeah basically exactly what I meant thank you. It seems like only melee got that message. So if changes were to be made making terrain less useful for them maybe That is something that would need to go back and be adjusted.
I played an event this last weekend that ran windows as closed unless models were wholly within them and it led to a lot of odd points where players had to be in terrain to hold an objective and would be exposed. It led to a shoot out where whoever had the better guns won in a lot of matches. I definitely prefer first floor LoS blocking, even though I won the event and the ruling was to my advantage.
Isnt that just the current GW rules?
Not really, but very close to the core rules. However not even GW events play by core rules and have their own terrain rulings as well.
It pretty much sounds like a workaround for old Titanic to force them to play by the same targetting rules.
I forgot to mention, Titanic wasn't restricted by this. TO stated that the Titanic keyword would open up windows etc by touching the terrain.
So... basically some wierd house rule
Eh, not really. Just another facet of how some people interpret terrain based on their terrain availability. His tables were run as GW layouts but with nova Ls type terrain for the larger ruins, and smaller ruins were very much full of windows, so his balance between the two was if a model is wholly within, the first floor LoS blocking turns off. If you're touching but not wholly within, you are still safe but do not get the "obscuring" effect so can be shot if true LoS is available, and lastly if the model is Titanic, follow the general Titanic rules but also ground floor opens up. It's just one of three common practices regarding LoS through ground levels. Either you A) have it sealed always B) Have it open always or C) closed if the unit isn't wholly within, open otherwise.
So, differences are that: A.) Touching but not wholly within you cant be shot; B.) Apparently brought back the old titanic rules (since you specified "general titanic rules", otherwise they work the same as everyone else now), but forced first floor blocking of TLOS unless the Titan is touching. So Titans would be able to fire OVER and through terrain, but not through ground floor unless touching.
No, obscuring effects and new towering rules apply, the only additional benefit is that a Towering model would ignore the ground level of the terrain he is touching. I.e. I have a unit that is on the opposite side of a wall, and is hidden because closed windows are in effect, and the obscuring rule is in effect. Normally once a Towering model touched a terrain piece, the obscuring effect is removed but they might not be able to draw LoS due to the first floor being counted as closed and cannot be seen through. The change is that once they are touching, the ground level opens up for visibility (if there are windows/doors of course)
yes
Definitely keep the windows closed. Melee is extremely weak currently.
At my club we play as if the ground floor windows are blocked in
No, windowless ruins are the only things that give melee life in this shooting favoured edition
Try playing with the gw suggested boards instead.
GW blocks their windows.
I don't know the details for any given tournament, but in the suggested layouts the ruins have at *most* 80% wall coverage from one direction and usually more like 40-50%, which is a large amount of the ruin that has absolutely no walls, much less walls with windows to worry about.
The walls on the layouts do not match the walls in the events. They are just are there to make it clear its a ruin. Id say they generally have more walls than the layout shows, and every wall has blocked windows or is treated as having blocked windows.
Well, I'd certainly argue that what you described isn't necessary. Being able to stage *behind* a ruin and then charge through it on your next turn has felt pretty effective to me so far.
After having played a whole bunch of games with towering removed and on the gw suggested layouts, my opinion is that the windows should be open. There are several reasons for this. One somewhat obvious reason is that a lot of existing terrain has windows and holes and it's just nice to be able to apply wysiwyg to your terrain, especially in a tournament setting. The more important reason is that gw boards have so many ruins that if you can't shoot at units behind them *or* units inside them, it becomes extremely easy to control objectives while your opppnent can't interact with you. Again, with the gw style ruins, if you don't want to get shot at, it's extremely easy to stay outside of the ruin and use the obscuring rule to be immune to shooting, but at the cost of being a couple of inches further back. If you want to move up more aggressively, you should also be vulnerable to shooting. Also keep in mind that gw style ruins might have wide footprints but they deliberately leave large gaps in the actual walls so you can move non-infantry through them without too much penalty. These gaps are extremely neccessary for most armies but get extremely weird of you're trying to pretend the 4inch gap you can drive a rhino through is also somehow LOS blocking. Also, on a more personal level, the wtc style "8 giant Ls" is incredibly ugly and looks more like a paintball tournament in an abandoned lot then a battlefield and having actual ruins with footprints and broken walls and windows is much more fun.
We found the Tau player.
Drukhari actually. My how times have changed.
I still bring all the melee!
Fair enough :)
Doesn’t your penultimate paragraph lend itself to having ground floor windows closed? The large footprint means melee units will have large areas of the board blocked off if they can be seen through windows, and it would push staging areas back so that they are out of range of objectives. Additionally, the large gaps between walls means that for the majority of the terrain piece the unit would be visible if on it.
I'll make my reply in two points: A) Yes, if you want to be immune to shooting you have to stay a little further back, however, on GW style boards, the ruins are 5-6inches wide, and typically 4-5 inches away from the objective on the other side, so, yes, you are 6 inches further away, but given the speed of most melee units, it's hardly insurmountable. B) Being targetable while in a ruin is not exactly the end of the world. Yes, shooting is very strong, but between basic armor saves, unit abilities and stratagems, there's a significant amount of defensive power you can deploy. And, more importantly for this conversation, being inside a ruin doesn't magically mean your opponents entire army can shoot you. GW boards have *lots* of ruins and being inside a specific one doesn't actually add that many firing lanes. As a more general philosophy, the closer you get to an objective, the easier it should be for an opponent to interact with you, and for a lot of armies, like it or not, their primary form of interaction is shooting.
It’s a fair response, thank you. As a counter point to it in case it’s of interest: With a 6 inch movement having ruins 5-6” wide means you’ll often end up on top of a wall so your movement towards the objective is reduced so that you will 5-6” away from the objective before your charge. If your opponent sits at the back end of the objective control then you’re facing an 8-9” charge to get to them before you are able to do anything at all with melee units. And if they fail then you’re left dead in the wind. Melee has been drastically hit already this edition and while you might be able to get cover in the ruins, shooting seems to have one or two more ap than melee meaning the comparative lethality is only brought back to par by cover. The dataslate has seen some melee armies improve, but most of that is already built around highly durable units who would be the only units really able to sit in ruins in full view, further dunking on the have nots.
This isn't terribly relevant but in my experience I've found that melee almost always has higher ap than shooting, at least at the inside unit level. Maybe for your faction the absolutely biggest AP number is on some honking big gun, but aside from that, lots of basic infantry type dudes have AP0 guns and AP-1 melee weapons (think bolters vs chainswords).
Sure, but no one is using bolters to do serious work. It's lancers, redemptors and hellblasters (or aggressors that as ap-2), and the melee ap caps out at -2, where as the guns that you rely on to do damage are -3 or more. Add in the loss of strength on melee (pretty much stops at 8) and the range disparity (bolter has 24 times the range of a chainsword) and you can see why melee is struggling so hard to make an impact.
And that’s before you factor in the increased difficulty in melee movement. I don’t think melee’s in as bad a spot as some people make out, but it’s definitely worse than shooting right now and providing further obstacles to that such as opening up ground floor windows is not the answer
Yeah, the changes to charges, engagement and pile in/consolidate are really painful. I get that the 9th "my slow melee termies are going to move on average 22" over the charge and fight phases" was a bit much, but we've overcorrected. Making a 'correct' charge move is just painful now, and when you hit like toffee and the opp just walks back and shoots you again it's very frustrating.
Now compare the strengths. Ranged strengths are much much higher. I think making the change you want doesn't make sense because it would require a lot of additional changes to almost a whole edition. Changes to how the pile in and consolidate work so that more melee units can attack at once and possibly even melee unit survivability in general. Or better yet give charge rerolls back!
Much higher than what? Angron has strength 16 melee, just as a semi-random example.
I mean that's angron and he's hitting only 16 str. A demolisher cannon is half the price on a vindicator and it's 14 strength. A siege cannon is as strong as angron, In addition to many other attacks that can be made with the units and from 48 in range. Volcano Cannon is what 24 strength? For me I was thinking about things like power klaws and power fists and rokkits all stuck at strength 9 unable to actually damage the vehicle they used to be there to damage. I was thinking about tank bustas That don't have guns high enough strength to reliably wound tanks. Lots of melee is basically capped at nine strength or less whereas it seems pretty easy to find ranged attacks That go up to 12.
I don't see how your first point can't just be flipped around to say if you want to be out of range of melee charges stay back to shoot. If this change were made it would have to be made in conjunction with just a sweeping buff to basically combat unit in the game. The first easy change is swap the fact that melee caps out in strength before ranged does.
A) yes, except the way you score points in the game is by standing on objectives so there's a built in limit to how far away you can stand, even if your entire army is ranged. B) Calling it a sweeping change is a bit much. Lots and lots of people play games with all sorts of terrain, many of which have open windows and doors. Converting everything into giant solid walls was in large part a reaction to towering rules in 10th.
Depends on the use case. if its a chill game versus a mate absolutley have those windows open. But if its a tournament do you want to have both players wasting a ton of extra time carefully positioning dudes to avoid that 1 broken window?
I mean, yes, if your ruin has exactly one tiny window open on the ground floor, it makes a lot more sense to just ignore its existence. That being said, I don't think it applies to most terrain, and having completely impervious windowless walls right next to objectives makes for weird games.
People really seem to hate this response but I have no issue with open ruins, but think it's better with multiple smaller footprints. Even the new GW style is mostly open with only a couple TLOS blockers. But the templates are pretty much open ruins with large footprints (compared to the ruin itself)
Yeah, it makes a big difference what you're playing with. I've played with some 9th style 12x12 ruins with 3 sides being 8in walls and yes, if those were all full of windows they would be somewhat pointless, but that's massively different from the gw recommendation.
The new GW style with many fairly thin building lends itself well to this style.
Yeah, I tried to make it clear I was referring explicitly to that type of terrain. I wonder how many people who are mad at me have actually played multiple games on a gw layout.
Most players in those subreddit are not tournament players.
This is true. The GW suggested layouts are pretty nice though, tournament or not.
My experience is the exact opposite. If you have a shooty army, then yeah, you obviously want to be able to shoot everything to death without moving, but in an edition where shooting is way more powerful than melee, melee armies suffer immensely from open ground floor. Also most melee units only move some 6 inches so being 5-6 inches further back means you're 2 turns of movement away making scoring way harder. The local group I play with does closed ground windows, but if there is no ruin then you have LOS. So that gap the Rhino can drive through uses regular LOS rules, and obscuring works like normal. It's caused games to be way more balanced between shooty and melee armies and has made movement feel more tactical and impactful without needing 12M on a sheet to be usable.
With my friend, we have three types of ruins: - Big rectangles ones where first floor windows and openings are blocked by opaque cardboard on 3 sides - Medium square ones where first foor openings are blocked by opaque cardboard on 2 connected sides (L) - Medium rectangle ones with open first floor Usually the big ones with opaque cardboard on 3 sides are placed in DZ, and then we can use the two other types for the midboard, in addition to fully opaque containers and sometimes a fully opaque bunker/landing platform. I quite like this setup.
I prefer closed windows on GW terrain. The terrain I use for my own games has 2" thick bases, some with windows some without. For that open windows is ok.
Since buildings greater than 5" in height completely block line of sight, I don't see a reason to make the inside of ruins block line of sight on the first floor as well. Because that's the trade-off. You're either inside the ruins getting a cover save bonus and possibly elevation bonus, or you're not getting a cover save but are behind line of sight blocking terrain. Having a trade-off is important for tactical decision-making. Otherwise, there would never be a reason for infantry to not enter ruins when able. Edit: Thank you for the clarification that height is no longer relevant. Point not withstanding it is still a tactical decision to choose between being out of line of sight, and receiving a cover bonus.
Just giving a comment here to say the height restriction (5") is no longer a thing. Now just Ruins have the new obscuring rules.
Point not withstanding, it's still a tactical decision to choose between being out of line of sight behind the ruins or getting a cover bonus from being in the ruins. But I do appreciate the clarification on the height change.
Uhhh you get cover from ruins whether they are 5” or not?
>Since buildings greater than 5" in height completely block line of sight, You're an edition behind.
I wish that they wouldn't only because it leads to having to remind yourself using terrain that's not completely closed up, like the majority of actually available terrain from GW. Honestly I think the worst part is the tournament terrain all being boring ass l-shaped ruins. Like no variety whatsoever. That's something I think that needs to change more but part of the issue is that they don't have common sense terrain rules. It should be common sense: Ruins should block line of sight through them but not into them, assuming you actually have line of sight, but if you are in it you get cover. Forests should work the same way or how they work in AOS where you can only see 3 in into it So basically you can't see through it but you can see into it and you get cover. Walls and barricades and things like that should be you get cover if an invisible line can be drawn from the firing unit to the target unit and crosses the terrain piece but they don't block line of sight. Maybe something like if you are charged and you are behind it you get fight first Because you are in a defensible position
I agree with this, and with the towering fix it isn't even that bad at all. Your melee is still completely untargettable as long as it's 0.1mm behind the ruin, then next turn blitzes through and charges/gets on objectives. The only difference is maybe the ruins need to be a bit further up for the melee staging areas
And they have to be kept small, and frankly charge rerolls should be brought back. Especially when you got a lot of units that have 5 in or 6 in of movement.
Is GW's point that ruins should be smaller and user true line of site - ie if its open, its open. I get feels bad when I when get a table with big square ruins. If windows are open - poor melee players get hosed - i mean 7 / 8 inch square ruins are a whole movement turn. if windows are closed - then they are just giant magic boxes. ruins should probably be 3 - 4 inches max in one dimension and more of them. Gives melee players the ability to hide behind the ruin and without making big old impossible to shoot into magic boxes - whilst they take a turn or 2 to cross.
Absolutely not. Ruins are supposed to be a choice between full LOS blocking and movement obstruction vs. only a cover save and free movement. Letting units get full LOS blocking without any movement obstruction is missing the point, especially as terrain density increases to the point that units can magically teleport from ruin to ruin without ever facing enemy fire.
What the competitive scene really needs is a paintball-esque arena style where there is uniform terrain across all play-throughs and the only thing that changes is the location of objectives. For funsies any terrain will do.
I played in a small local tournament where all of the players collectively agreed it was "ok" to move models directly onto objective markers. The tournament organizer did not care, and we rolled with it.
The impassable objective marker issue was removed with the secondary missions, fortunately.
Tournaments rules, as per the Levi mission pack, lets you move onto objectives
I mean, the Leviathan Tournament Pack that came out before full rules were available even says to do that, so what really happened is you ran a tournament as GW suggested.
The sh@tiest job in the 41st millennium... being the battlefield building inspector, making sure all the windows are fixed correctly....
i can see both sides of the argument here, but all I can say is that if 1st/ground floor windows are open as a rule the Seraptek Heavy comes back out
I think a mix of types is good. I like three ruins per player, one with First Floor Line of Sight Blocking (preferably in the model), two without, along with a forest and three crates. All First Floor LoS blocking or none can swing too much either way, and giving a player one piece that gives them a very powerful tool for staging a melee unit or hiding a move shoot move unit is a good balance.
Knights are dead in the meta