Goatboy’s Warhammer 40k: Terrain is Evolving
Goatboy here and I want to talk about how terrain is evolving in Warhammer 40K 9th Edition.
I’ve been playing since 2.5 and I remember the old days of infinitely tall trees, random area terrain blocking all sight, and 6 inch charges. The heyday of having terrain that somehow matched two game systems (40k and WFB) and still looked good enough on the tabletop. What I find interesting is this new hybrid style system that again brings the “area” terrain back and the infinitely tall pieces of the olden days with a twist.
40K Terrain Is Coming Full Circle
I have had conversations with one of my oldest friends about terrain a lot. We have lived thru a few iterations where trees gave you the best save, hills were the best terrain for days, and everyone tried to block the first-floor windows. We always came back to the idea of making terrain less “realistic”. The broken buildings were cool but those awesome days of 4th edition where anything blocked your line of sight made the game a heck of a lot easier. It allowed you to quickly determine if you could see or not without having to stoop down, shine a laser thru whatever broken debris, and then haggle your way to rolling to hit. Now it seems the old ways are back – but again with a twist.
That annoying twist for those playing big monsters is those tall walls of vision control have a wound limit – and while annoying it’s most likely for the best. They also can still be blocked due to the true line of sight rule that adds to the overall tweak to the terrain. It isn’t exactly like 4th edition – but it works similarly enough to make it alright. I am just glad the old days of driving over a small little bit of terrain would break your Land Raider’s tracks and you had to spend all game trying to fix it or hoping its Lascannons could see something.
Terrain For Events
I feel that this is probably the best way to go with terrain – utilizing a mixture of the True Line of Sight dynamic gameplay with the simplified area terrain method for event organizers. Heck, I see a lot of events moving towards just utilizing the “mousepad” mats to showcase the care and more interesting terrain pieces on top. This way you can create a tabletop and stretch your terrain out a bit more to allow for a complete table. I love to play on neat-looking terrain – I just want it to work for the brutal death race we have now in 9th edition. This means having things actually hide your options, creating lanes of movement, and just not having a bowling lane of lasers, bullets, and psychic energy.
Terrain is always the dividing factor amongst fans as we all want stuff to look cool and be functional. Event organizers want it to also look cool and survive the brutal beatdown of 5-8 games full of butter fingered generals ready to do battle on soft and supple battle mats. Right now I think the biggest factor holding some of the games streaming excitement is terrain that tries to go for too much “grimdark” paint style instead of making it bright enough to see. So many of these streamed games lack the “splash” of color needed to help a player follow along. If you know the game it makes sense but just someone jumping on and thinking – let’s watch that live action “Dawn of War” game – it becomes hard to figure out what’s going on.
Terrain For Streaming
Thankfully the stream casting has been pretty good on most events. Either having players well-informed by eyes on the ground or just casters who know how the players play are great ways to keep it interesting. I just think we have a few more things to do to really bring it up to the next level. I have talked to some of my friends in the casting crews to look at ways to “brighten” up the playing field. I am sure someone can figure out a way to do a nice LED based objective to “shine” up the table a bit. I told some events they should just set up an LED system under the mat that can shine thru and show where things are on the table top. This way you can easily see where everything is or where things are going.
I also still like the idea of having some kind of marker around the bases of the models as well. I utilize this in my own armies to keep me honest and I think having this as a next level of “playing” for the stream helps out immensely. I also think we could use more tokens or other bright options to show things happening on the tabletop and not just if someone does a digital drawing as the player plays Madden style.
Right now what do you think is missing from the streaming experience? What other things can be added on to make it a much more interesting watch and bring in some new players?
