I’m seeing two things coming up repeatedly:

-Wookies (and other close quarters units) are bad. (Obviously fleet troopers and Flamethrowers are strong by virtue of the volume of dice they can bring.)

-snipers and long ranged heavy weapons are really good. In fact, competitive lists seem to feature them a lot.

These got me thinking. Instead of worrying about rebalancing the units, maybe we should worry more about adjusting the terrain. If you had a spaceship interior with a couple of long fire lanes but a significant amount of LoS blocking bulkheads, doors, walls, and the like, I bet Wookies would be a powerful assault unit. Same could be said for a crowded urban or forest table.

The problem with terrain dependent units is a competitive environment will have a mix of heavy terrain and little terrain.

You’ll still lose out over just bringing the long range stuff which isn’t less good up close.

Now, Skirmish game mode is another animal...

7 hours ago, ScummyRebel said:

The problem with terrain dependent units is a competitive environment will have a mix of heavy terrain and little terrain.

You’ll still lose out over just bringing the long range stuff which isn’t less good up close.

Now, Skirmish game mode is another animal...

You're not wrong, but I feel like units like snipers that flourish with less terrain aren't less terrain reliant than Wookies (and similar units). Rather, to be effective they rely on less terrain.

And so the problem we see over and over (as yoink101 said) is that Legion, both in casual and competitive play) heavily leans towards boards with less terrain (or at least less effective LOS blocking terrain). Nearly every board is a sniper's paradise.

I really think that this should change. if a board is good for snipers but not for wookies, its an unbalanced board. Which is fine, but one out of every two boards should lean in the other direction.

As you said, a competitive environment should have a mix of heavy and little terrain. (Except really "little terrain" should never ever be the state of a Legion Board.) if I can try ti rephrase: A competitive environment should have an equal mix of terrain setups, some that favor extreme long range units, some that favor extreme close range units. One setup type shouldn't be weighted over another.

2 hours ago, Jake the Hutt said:

You're not wrong, but I feel like units like snipers that flourish with less terrain aren't less terrain reliant than Wookies (and similar units). Rather, to be effective they rely on less terrain.

And so the problem we see over and over (as yoink101 said) is that Legion, both in casual and competitive play) heavily leans towards boards with less terrain (or at least less effective LOS blocking terrain). Nearly every board is a sniper's paradise.

I really think that this should change. if a board is good for snipers but not for wookies, its an unbalanced board. Which is fine, but one out of every two boards should lean in the other direction.

As you said, a competitive environment should have a mix of heavy and little terrain. (Except really "little terrain" should never ever be the state of a Legion Board.) if I can try ti rephrase: A competitive environment should have an equal mix of terrain setups, some that favor extreme long range units, some that favor extreme close range units. One setup type shouldn't be weighted over another.

I completely agree. The lack of terrain I see in casual, flgs, and competitive is kind of weird to me. People often bring up percentages, but it's not only coverage, it's a complete lack of vertical terrain. Jump abilities are basically wasted points on most layouts. I would also like to see some more variety.

35 minutes ago, AldousSnow said:

I completely agree. The lack of terrain I see in casual, flgs, and competitive is kind of weird to me. People often bring up percentages, but it's not only coverage, it's a complete lack of vertical terrain. Jump abilities are basically wasted points on most layouts. I would also like to see some more variety.

Uh huh. So often when people bring up percentages and then show off their terrain it's just flat stuff that doesn't really provide cover at all. Of course, there's a place for that too, but I feel like the commonly suggested percentage of terrain should be rephrased as "Line of sight blocking terrain".

In the tournament regulations there is a depiction of an example table. You can debate whether you like it or not (I definitely don't, too few LOS blocking lanes and literally no cover for Danger Close and Disarray). But still this is the standard the game is designed for.

Yeah, I think the tournament example is far too sparse. It has created many obvious problems, going back to the very early days of the game. I think using that little terrain is responsible for a lot of the game's perceived balance issues.

I also suspect that the amount of suggested terrain is based at least partially on what they think they can suggest players acquire without scaring them off. In my years of tabletop gaming the #2 thing I've seen that scares new players off is having to build/buy/acquire a bunch of terrain.

1 hour ago, SailorMeni said:

In the tournament regulations there is a depiction of an example table. You can debate whether you like it or not (I definitely don't, too few LOS blocking lanes and literally no cover for Danger Close and Disarray). But still this is the standard the game is designed for.

I think this is what the OP is trying to say. You're not wrong. The standard is pretty simple and lame. He's suggesting a terrain standard change, as opposed to a unit change. If people like running gun lines and snipers on empty Hoth boards every single time, by all means, do it. That gets old to me very quickly. I don't play tournaments for this reason. It's very 2 dimensional. At home, objectives are often inside buildings, or ruins. Terrain that you must enter or impedes movement. I like using all the cool terrain and movement rules ffg provides us with. Come take my objective points when I have them locked down with the "bad" melee units inside tight quarters, completely safe from snipers. There's terrain rules in the book that some people have never even used.

@AldousSnow We definitely use more terrain and more concealing terrain which also imo leads to better games. snipers are still useful. But it is a bit of a double edged sword. More and denser terrain makes vehicles weaker because they have a harder time maneuvering through it and finding targets.

I know that my own home board terrain tends to have some good LoS blockers and really I’ve had some good layouts that worked for us. But, I also admit that’s only for 6x3 because some of the terrain pieces are just too massive for a 3x3 to be enjoyable.

I try to provide balance in everything where possible, but I definitely think there’s something to be said for more los block terrain in general.

I guess my point is, you can’t “build a list for every possible condition” and then take Wookies or similar knowing that they’ll have a hard time. A sniper stuck in close quarters is much less bad than a Wookie stuck in the open trying to get close.

Now I kinda want to run off and make more terrain ...

Lately at our local store we've been encouraging players to select several pieces that actually block LoS. after playing with very few blocking pieces for over a year I can say Legion has a much more strategic dynamic when LoS blocking terrain is in play. Recently I commissioned some Geonosis terrain. It's in the works below:

I think it's interesting that I've had an opposite experience. Almost all the terrain I've seen and played with is just LoS-blocking terrain that gives heavy cover (mostly cool buildings). Sometimes we would just decide that something provided light cover just for a variation, and I hardly ever say anything that was Difficult or Area terrain. My experience was that even with that type of terrain (and a good amount of it, too, sometimes it was hard to even fit a Huge base in there) snipers and gunlines were still really good.

1 minute ago, arnoldrew said:

. Almost all the terrain I've seen and played with is just LoS-blocking terrain that gives heavy cover (mostly cool buildings).

Just to clarify, when you say LoS blocking you mean terrain where the minis can be completely hidden behind the piece?

12 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

Just to clarify, when you say LoS blocking you mean terrain where the minis can be completely hidden behind the piece?

Yes.

8 minutes ago, arnoldrew said:

Yes.

Thank you.

23 minutes ago, arnoldrew said:

My experience was that even with that type of terrain (and a good amount of it, too, sometimes it was hard to even fit a Huge base in there) snipers and gunlines were still really good.

That's really interesting. I've found that having those big LoS blockers makes moving into place to capture objectives really easy against gun lines, especially with B1s and Grievous running the show. One of the most satisfying things to do is let my B1s do most of the objective work then wait behind a piece or terrain and use it to YEET Grievous into a unit that activated earlier in the round.

Could it have to do with which factions are being paired against each other?