The battlefields of the Old World are hugely varied, from open grassy plains to narrow ravines in the mountains to deep forests infested with Beastmen, and the images they create in our minds are a key aspect of the immersion that draws us in when we play this game. On the tabletop, however, terrain can vary and you’ll be lucky if you have a themed table where everything fits into the idea. You’ll be even luckier if you manage a matching battle mat or board to really help paint that picture.
The terrain on boards needs to do more than just look the part, and making the most of your terrain is a key part of the battle. During this article I hope to try and give examples of leveraging terrain in your games to get a leg up on your opponents.
So what does a standard Old World table look like? I’ve borrowed some terrain pictures from a recent event I went to at Patriot Games in Sheffield (UK) hosted by the Wondering Warlocks, which are a small group of event organizers putting on regular events. The below tables are all differently themed, but all contain the “same” terrain setup, just laid out differently.
Each of the above tables has the following scenery on it: two Forests, two Hills and two Impassable Line of Sight blocking bits of terrain. This has become the standard setup in most of the games I play, and bar the occasional addition of some Low Linear Obstacles or patches of Difficult Terrain, these are kind of the bare minimum of what you should really expect to get in most of your games, or something to aim for if you’re making your own.
How do these pieces impact your play?
- Forests: These are usually played as infinitely high when it comes to blocking line of sight (per the core rulebook wording) to stop troops on hills shooting over them. They’re difficult ground, so units moving through (or flyers ending their movement in) them suffer from a -1 to their movement and must take the lowest of the 2d6 when attempting a charge. I’ve also seen them played as Dangerous terrain, meaning whenever a unit moves through or ends its movement within them, you must roll a d6 for each model which did so, and on a roll of a 1 they suffer 1 wound (or d3 wounds in the case of chariots).
- Hills: An artillery staple (it shouldn’t be, but we’ll come to that), these terrain pieces allow you to see over troops on lower levels granting more Line of Sight options and letting your missile troops have a buffer of your melee troops between them and the enemy while still being able to dole out their shots. In addition, those missile troops that are on a hill can fire in an additional rank while on high, meaning you’ll get even more shots into your foes than you would standing on level ground like some schlub. Note that this is on a model per model basis per the FAQ. The other key bit about utilizing hills is that units on hills get +1CR when calculating combat resolution against foes who are considered lower to the ground (for the sake of determining this, the FAQ states that units closer to the center of a hill are considered to be higher up). Lastly, hills block line of sight if they stand between two units and can stop cannonballs in their tracks, making them excellent protectors for your flying monsters in a pinch.
- Impassable/LoS blocking Terrain:Â This is maybe the hardest one to describe. These range from buildings through to large statues or more natural rocky features. They usually block LoS, limiting some lanes of fire you’ll want in game and are impassable meaning units can’t move through them like they can with Forests, difficult terrain, or Hills.
- Difficult/Dangerous Terrain Patches: These often represent swamps or dense thickets and act similar to forests though without the LoS blocking component. They provide a little bit for a player to think about when trying to engage with the enemy, or something to defend when trying to mitigate having to fight a unit when you don’t particularly want to.
- Low Linear Obstacles: One of the most “powerful” terrain features. When defended, these pieces prevent the enemy from getting into base-to-base contact with your units despite being engaged. As a result, this means that they’re limited to a single attack per model (incredibly powerful against monsters and other units with multiple attacks) and don’t get impact hits or stomp attacks (as both require base to base contact). They also count as difficult terrain when undefended, potentially foiling charges and reducing movement. In addition, if you mess up and end up straddling one of these with a unit, you become disrupted and can’t claim a rank bonus.
That should cover about 99% of the terrain you’ve been seeing on tables. The new Wrath of the Storm Dragon Arcane Journal brings with it rules for buildings and rivers that might spice things up in the future, particularly the new option to garrison units. Despite this, I expect most tables in the Old World will still be made up mainly of the terrain types described above.
Using the Terrain to Your Advantage – Basics
So how do you make the most of the terrain once it’s been placed? Let’s start by going over some very basic tricks you can use and then slip into some more complicated ones which require a little more planning to pull off.
The first of these more basic tricks is to just use the rules to your advantage during your deployment phase. For example, when deploying missile troops, look at the terrain; do you have a unit of Handgunners/Thunderers who can’t make the most of the Volley Fire rule like archers can in other armies? Why not deploy them on or within walking range of a hill? You can now fire in that second rank all you want, while also having the bonus of it taking up less horizontal board space to limit opposing sight lines, getting that extra rank bonus when in combat, and getting the bonus for being on a hill. A lot of benefits, and all you’ve done is deploy them in the right place. Pure profit.
Just a quick word of warning; do be careful with how much you do this. Putting one unit on a big hill is great. One and a warmachine? You can normally get away with that. But I wouldn’t really go more than that unless you’re dealing with an absurd mountain range in your deployment zone. If you end up putting too much on a particular hill not only do you have less room to vacate to in an emergency, but you really paint a target on that part of the table making it an easy choice for counter deployment. If you put enough points on there, then your opponent will just rush that hill, quickly negate its advantages and the game will be over before it’s began, so don’t get yourself into that issue and spread your threats into multiple baskets.
Speaking of making the most of deployment, I can’t talk enough about how good an area of difficult ground or a forest/wood is for an army with some ranged firepower. In the photo above you can see one to the right of the Dwarfs that they could have taken refuge inside instead of the hill they elected to group themselves, on making the opposing Chaos army’s assault an easier one.
If you look in the photo below, you can see the two Cathay Grand cannons have deployed with their front edge into the forest. This allows them to now not only draw great Line of Sight through the trees but provides an excellent piece of defensive setup. The warmachines are now more protected from shooting than they would be out in the open due to the light cover provided by the forest. In addition, they’re also less likely to be charged from anyone who has to pass through the forest they’re in due to the -1M penalty for most troops and the charge roll penalties that difficult terrain provides.
If I’m playing with any type of missile piece, then these are always something I look for on the table for where I’m able to get key pieces into the terrain (clipping at the back) and use that reduced chance of being charged to my advantage. Ideally you’re doing this with a unit that doesn’t benefit from having ranks and doesn’t ever plan to make a charge themselves so you don’t suffer any of the negatives associated with being in those terrain pieces.
The photo below shows two different ways to use terrain as there are usually positives and negatives. In a recent event, I played a game with my Cathay against some Tomb Kings and my opponent had a hill in his deployment zone. With cannons not being able to shoot over a hill, it offered some protection for the Necrosphinx making it a solid choice to protect the beast from all that iron. However, this was a double-edged sword as it also blocked his own Line of Sight for projecting it’s own threat since it was unable to declare charges against anything on the opposite side. This meant I was able to push up with my army as a whole on that end of the table knowing I couldn’t be charged by one of his largest threats. This doesn’t mean that my opponent made the wrong choice, chances are if he’d left it out in the open I would have shot it off and killed it before it got chance to move, and he wasn’t to know that I’d go that far forward so he managed what he could control and denied me shooting that monster turn 1.
Predicting with Terrain – Advanced
Once you’ve got the basics down, then you can start to move into predicting what you and your opponent will want to do in the game and as a result of that, how you can make the most of it. In the photo below, you can see the Beastmen attacking the land of men and the Cathay force looking to defend it. In this example, playing King of the Hill, I knew my opponent was going to head both onto the hill and into my force. With this in mind, where I wouldn’t normally deploy cannons behind my units due to it limiting where they can fire, with the hill being the focal point of the mission around which the game would be fought it allowed me to castle up a little easier accommodating the compressed terrain setup on my side of the board.
The important thing (as with the Necrosphinx above) is that there are always two sides to this type of gamble. The Beastmen might have elected to forgo the hill based on my deployment and return to it later, and then I’d have lost a turn of shooting, but it was a calculated gamble and it paid off. That’s where understanding the matchup and the game come into play, just know that this does come with time and you’ll all get there at different speeds.
In the next example, I want to show where not taking into account all the terrain can come back to bite you. In the photo below you can see a Wolves of the Sea army advancing into a Goblin Block (pre-v1.5.1) and the Goblins have caused themselves some issues. Firstly, the Wolves of the Sea being a very numerous multiple small unit (MSU) army doesn’t help the Goblins in this situation as the Greenskin player plans on using Travel Mystical Pathways to maneuver their normally unwieldly goblin unit around the table and the Wolves have gone first and pushed right into the Goblins side of the table. The Chaos Dragon has had Arcane Urgency cast on it and has moved as quickly as possible into a place where it can hide from the Doom Diver and still threaten the side of the big block. This means the goblins have to move towards the forest (Bretonnian Tents) or have it’s flank on the edge of the table so any slight angle on a Give Ground of Fall Back in Good Order will force it off the board.
This is where the terrain comes in. The Goblin player has a few choices. They can either angle the unit and take charges from all different sides hoping the damage from a stand and shoot reaction keeps them around for a turn, they can move forward into the space on the far right of the photo, or they can hide near the Forest. The building in front of the unit limits landing space, and electing to go into the forest could easily cause you to lose your rank bonus (and it’s associated Warband rule) by having 25% of the unit in it. As a result of this, the Goblin player has effectively painted himself into a corner and really limited their options. If they had deployed on the left hand side with the hill, then there’s a lot more space that could have provided an easier escape route. This comes back to planning out a little more and thinking about where units and armies are going to move that might save you in the early game rather than getting caught between the wrong types of terrain for your army.
The last scenario I want to talk about is the one shown in the photo below. We have a Chaos Army running longways into an Empire Gunline. The Empire Army has two Hellblaster Volley Guns and three Cannons. The wood feature can’t be used to hide from the Cannons (as they target a point in the wood, then hit the dragon on the bounce) but it can be used to shield the Dragon from the Hellblasters. When approaching the game from deployment, the Dragon was deployed over on the flank with this in mind. It’s not really about the protection he’d get from the terrain on deployment but more where the terrain would hlp him when it mattered, either in the Empire T1 or T2 shooting phases depending on how quickly the dragon made it up that flank, if magically assisted.
The point I’m trying to make with this is that you need to potentially plan out what you think is the most likely sequence of events, then try to make the most of it with not just the enemy army but the terrain in mind as well. If you can do that you can put your opponent in scenarios (like the Dragon above) where they have no good options and have to spend time and mental power working out how to get over the line and find their own path to victory.
There are a few key rules when looking at the board setup I like to take into account for in each game and plan around. Area Terrain for ranged units which is just in my deployment zone, or at worst, just outside? Brilliant, I’ll take that if I need it. If I’m against lots of artillery, then where can I hide from it as the offensive army? I might even give my opponent the better deployment zone on a roll-off with the intention of using the terrain they’re planning on using defensively as terrain I can hide behind if needed. Impassable terrain near objectives and how I can use pieces to protect the flanks of my scoring units is another thing I think about as well when deploying units on the table. There are lots of things which go into these decisions, many of which you have to see for yourself and adjust based on your army of choice. At worst you won’t pick up that victory but it’ll teach you a valuable lesson about managing the table for next time and make you a better player overall.
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