Ruins, Firing Lines and Why I Hate Myself – Sam V Chris

I know want to hear more about ruins and I am a people pleaser so here it is.

Is this post fuelled entirely by salt? Maybe, maybe not, maybe go fuck yourself.

To be super clear on this, I lost this fair and square – Chris had no role in setting up the terrain, played a pretty flawless game against me with targeting priority, forcing me to spend CP where I didn’t want to and making the most of those red/orange lines I draw further down. But it is interesting to see how much of an effect terrain can have on a match as I ended the game pretty happy with how I played and that it still game down to T5 potentially shows that Custodes might be due a little nerf (I SAID LITTLE GW!!).

Let’s set the scene – a meta ascendant force of golden boys in a mission heavily favouring them, running into a skew tank list. Terrain league rules set up to match competitive play and give plenty of obscuring. Primary theoretically forcing the tanks to walk TOWARDS the choppy bananas. Chris and I both agreed it was largely mine to lose.

The league terrain rules are largely based on UKTC type set ups. 10 obscuring ruins with reasonable footprint – one protecting each home objective and one favouring each player in NML, with the middle quite hidden. This is set up because, despite GW’s attempt to make 10th less lethal, 10th is in fact still very lethal at range. Having a bunch of firing lines that allows armies, who can skew into range, to sit back, not really interact and kill everything trying to score is not really a fun game for either player (shut up Rob).

Forcing ranged armies to still position correctly, alongside melee armies, makes the game more challenging, interesting and tactical for all players. It also broadens your skillset in terms of venturing into other armies.

This doesn’t mean removing firing lines altogether – they should still exist but simply not cover the whole board and force both players to consider their movement. No sitting entirely for ranged and no brainless easy forward movement for melee.

This is what it SHOULD have looked like on this mission. As you can see there are still quite a few distinct firing lines. However they are not all open directly onto objectives or deployment zones.

Chris was a perfect gentleman and allowed me to set up the terrain….and this is what I did with it.

Looks kinda similar right? Wrong. The green lines are where there SHOULD be firing lines. The red and orange lines are where there absolutely SHOULDN’t be firing lines. It prevents a reasonable safe redeployment and a complete inability to hold centre objectives. You can shoot objective holders on their way to the middle, one objective then being somewhat safe, one being dicey (as it should be) and the final being really difficult.This gives plenty of opportunity to kill anyone heading towards an objective but not carte blanche to have everyone running their most shooty tanks as their whole list (sorry Admech, Drukhari – you probably still couldn’t do that).

Lesson learned – if you are playing a shooty army ask me to set up the terrain.