Just now, NeonWolf said:

@Zrob314

To be fair, the amount of terrain you use is beyond what is required, or even reasonable, from an organized play perspective. I am under the impression that your pictures are of your home setup and not at an FLGS or a tournament.

Your collection is impressive and I'm sure games on your table are very cinematic. My post is related to terrain at competitive events.

The actual in play pictures are from a 25% coverage amount that was measured prior to a game. Don't confuse that with the picture showing ALL of my stuff.

11 minutes ago, Zrob314 said:

The actual in play pictures are from a 25% coverage amount that was measured prior to a game. Don't confuse that with the picture showing ALL of my stuff.

From the angle of the images I have no way of being able to tell how much terrain you used so I assumed it was your entire collection since that is the image you posted with the other close-up pics.

The first image looks more bare than it is because 6" must be chopped off from each side. You can see the lightly drawn line if you look close.

15 minutes ago, NeonWolf said:

From the angle of the images I have no way of being able to tell how much terrain you used so I assumed it was your entire collection since that is the image you posted with the other close-up pics.

That's cool, I just took these. This is the entire, pre-measured, set used in the two games my earlier pictures came from.

FYI, this is 53 pieces of scatter terrain, 33 pieces of large terrain and 2 barricades (because there was still some space to fill and they'd been left in the bin)

@Zrob314 Impressive collection. I don't see any area terrain in that setup, do you not usually us any?

Just now, NeonWolf said:

@Zrob314 Impressive collection. I don't see any area terrain in that setup, do you not usually us any?

I have no area terrain, it doesn't really fit with the theme of my boards.

I might do some but I've been going for a more urban/industrial setting.

That said, you could easily swap out the base of the battle kiwi tower for area terrain, or the truck, or set up the scatter in such a way that you've created a field of "junk"

and let's be honest, it's starting to be less "impressive" and more "problematic" =P

The point is, that is a full tournament board....heck it's possible you could even not call that full and jam some more scatter or barricades in to fill the cracks. Even then we still did stuff like put a pallet of crates on the bed of the truck.

Once you measure it out...and then actually put it out and play on it boards that aren't will feel very sparse to you.

Terrain at the first 2 maximum firepower events were not sufficient as evidenced by the outrage so even competitive events might not be the best place to look. The problem with the 25% rule is a board can still be empty of full depending on what you use. If you had a bunch of thin height 2 walls and filled up a board with 25% of that, it would create the most cluttered board you'd ever see. When building a board, you have to be conscious of how cluttered or empty things are despite the 25% rule. You can see having 30 small barrels can create tons of clutter but is still technically 25%. There needs to be both long range and midfield cover or anything with range 2 will suffer. There needs to be some area light terrain and a few buildings. Having too much or too little is what hurts boards along with the actual placement.

5 minutes ago, WillKill said:

Terrain at the first 2 maximum firepower events were not sufficient as evidenced by the outrage so even competitive events might not be the best place to look. The problem with the 25% rule is a board can still be empty of full depending on what you use. If you had a bunch of thin height 2 walls and filled up a board with 25% of that, it would create the most cluttered board you'd ever see. When building a board, you have to be conscious of how cluttered or empty things are despite the 25% rule. You can see having 30 small barrels can create tons of clutter but is still technically 25%. There needs to be both long range and midfield cover or anything with range 2 will suffer. There needs to be some area light terrain and a few buildings. Having too much or too little is what hurts boards along with the actual placement.

Agreed, you also have to have enough space to set down massive base items.

That said I was using an AT-ST with the stuff Showed above.

@NeonWolf Here's the other half of it.

With this much scatter and modular pieces you also need to think about what could go in what or on top of what, and that's going to impact how much of the board is taken up and what sort of fire lanes you might be creating. That's why it's important to get that 36x18 space packed as densely as possible to at least from above you can't see anything.

Then you need to think about verticality too.

Someday I will use that landing platform to build the ultimate sniper perch.

1 hour ago, Zrob314 said:

Would you count "I have so much regular and scatter terrain that we don't need barricades?" as a good reason for not including them?

...

Absolutely.

7 hours ago, Lord Cedric said:

Definitely can as some scatter terrain can play a barricade role. When I look at FFG barricades, I can conceptualize a soldier actually jumping over it etc. When I look at my scatter boxes and crates, most do not look like something that can be jumped over. Sure they can give off similar/same cover. But as far as looking the part of an actual barricade, they do not do it for me. (for reference, I use Imperial terrain 3D printed crates and containers). However, if I have a table set up and my opponent would like to use them as such, I can go with it - just hasn't been brought up yet. I do suppose that I may want to get *some* games in with them as when I go to tourney's or events I'm certain I'll be seeing some.

To answer your question though, I use normal 'light', 'hard' cover and apply LoS rules. Though.. it may be fun to paint some containers up red color and have some house rules where these have 'wound points' and when a red container is out of wounds, it does a radius explosion! and then have a replacement terrain feature that shows a blown-up container. Hmmm.... I think I'm going to do that now.

- Cedric

Well, barricades use normal terrain rules, it just sounds like you make your barricade-like pieces Impassable instead of Difficult.

So, somewhat off topic...but where'd you get those mats?!

5 hours ago, ndogg229 said:

So, somewhat off topic...but where'd you get those mats?!

I got all 10 of mine from Frontline Gaming (FLG). Very good quality, many different prints and sizes too.

Necessary? Heck no. Star Warsy lookin' and readily available? Yes.

I would not include them on any table where they looked weird. Luckily they look ok as fences on a star wars farm, or whatever. I've never actually run into a problem having them look cool on most of my boards, but to look right on my snow table I think they'd need some snow/ice accumulation painted onto them. I own way more toy stone fences, trees and hills/cliffs than barricades though so if it came down to it, I don't need to use them.

If you're new they're liable to be among the only scenery you own which would make them as close to necessary as any of this stuff ever gets.

On 11/12/2018 at 4:10 PM, NeonWolf said:

Based on the recent conversation in a different thread, it has come to my attention that some people are of the opinion that a game of Star Wars: Legion requires the use of Barricades as terrain to be a truly competitive game.

It requires cover and broken up sight lines to be fun/competitive/interesting/whatever.

You don't need abrricades, you could do with just lots of patches of felt with trees on them that are cover for anyone inside them, but block LOS through them. Or if you can't afford felt and a toy trees, use construction paper and a few "boulders" aka pieces of gravel and "fallen logs" aka twigs from your backyard. I mean, maybe you want your mission to take place somewhere that barricades would never be.

You could manage with tons of LOS blocking scenery that is within a normal move distance of each other. You'd move forward by darting across alleyways and corridors without taking any fire, avoiding each other if possible, until two units met head on and massive casualties would ensue. Most people don't want to make, buy or store that many buildings though, for something that can get kind of gimmicky if you use it all the time.

People often check range between scenery for shooting purposes but you also want to use the movement ruler to make sure units can at least theoretically move from cover to cover some of the time.

And it's ok to have some deadly no-man's lands sometimes. Gives the vehicles some bang for their buck since they can charge through them if they want.

We usually put a big LOS blocking item or three near the center of the table. Then we put scatter terrain out it in a visually pleasing way. Then we fill in with rough terrain and cover where anything looks glaringly wrong. Since deployment zones are figured out after this is fine. We don't allow things for tall ruins and the like to be at table edges, or else snipers by any other name will have an outsized influence. But. As someone else said about using barricades to define the corners of a deployment zone. In shooty scifi games, we often give each other a couple barricade-equivalent items to deploy with their army in their deployment zone. This helps keep the game from being over before it starts from a lucky round of shooting. And sometimes despite our best efforts, someone gets a real sucky deployment zone and being able to put a little cover in front of your most valuable unit can alleviate that.

If you count hills (which we count as blocking sight for two infantrymen on opposite sides of a hill), at home I tend to play with way more than 25% terrain. Usually about 50%, sometimes as much as 75% terrain I'd say. For dispersed, shooty sci-fi games like Star Wars and 40k that is. For ranked up fantasy and muskets-or-earlier historical games, all you usually NEED is like a pond and a couple buildings.

Right now, in Legion, I think most people agree that the scenario mechanics hand some huge advantages to infantry units so if your scenery appears to penalize them a bit, it will probably work itself out.