Countryside Infinity Terrain Guide - General advice for your map

In the second part of this terrain guide, I want to give some general advice to set up a map four your game, avoiding strong imbalances and situations limiting the fun for both players. To minimize personal bias here and add some extra quality, I got certain support for this by badlazzor, a quite productive map-designer in the current TTS-community. 

Once you played your first games of Infinity in a club or a store, you may want to build your own terrain and figure out, how things work best. At this point you may have checked the rules about terrain in the core rules, where everything necessary is written down. Why then is there a need for this guide? Well, the section for terrain takes not more than three pages in the rule-book with a lot of empty space there. Everything written there is true and should be considered, but let us face the truth: The section leaves a lot of questions uncovered and much space for creativity or mistakes. Even the example-maps given there are nothing I would consider a good map, since there is a low amount of proper cover, so that your units can be tracked down easily from the opposite half.

An other source for not optimal/enjoyable maps may be the fact that not everybody has enough terrain or terrain of good quality, easing the set up of an enjoyable map. Or even if those things are available, you want to start playing, so the map needs to be set up fast without much planning for the idea behind it. But if you have some rules to follow, it will be easier to place the terrain available in a proper way and deploy it in a reasonable timeframe.

Before you start reading the advice and throwing your terrain on the table, you should be aware of my philosophy for setting up maps. Of course, everyone will have different aims here, but since these aims are woven into the following strategy, it will be good to know about these biases. My aims for each map I create are:

• The map is no servant for your game, but an additional challenge.

• This challenge should have an impact to the gameplans of both players, but without dismissing single list-types or units.

• The choice of the deployment zone should be important due to:

• Differing ARO-positions inside the DZs

• Different ARO-positions inside the half of the map

• Accessibility/defence of mission objectives

• Possible applications/protection of AD-troops, parachutists and impersonators

• For competitive play every unit should be playable on each map (unfortunately) 

The big question here is, how these aims can be achieved. Before I will give you a step-by-step guide how you can set up your map, here are some general advices for an interesting map:

• Set up the deployment zones asymmetric with one side containing more cover and better positions to place ARO-pieces and link teams, while the other one is more open. The good zone may have a slightly worse access to the objectives, so that half of the table may have a bit less cover in general. To even things out, the worse zone may have a better access to objectives and some nice spots for forward deployment units.

• Have one narrow LoF from deployment zone to deployment zone in maximum. Take care, that this LoF don’t need to be crossed necessarily to enter the game. This will reduce the potential for ARO-castles to pin the opponent down completely and may create some false hopes.

• To enable long range weapons, set up one to three longer corridors, optimally slightly diagonal. This eases movement a bit and allows short range weapons to enter the corridors in favourable positions.

• One deployment zone should not be able to overwatch more than 50% of the map and half of the corridors available.

   

    

  

  This spot allows some long shots on the left and middle, but the containers and high buildings limit the sight on the right
  

  
  

• Have at least one third of the map denser than the rest to create corridors where short range weapons and warbands can advance. The limited coverage of this section on the other hand prevents a domination of these units.

• Place the highest buildings between the deployment zones. This breaks up LoF and protects certain positions on ground level and above. The more you move them into the center, the harder they are to reach for ARO units. But make sure to create no new supreme sniper-spot in the center!

• Interrupt long corridors with scatter terrain of different size at different places. This creates safe spots in cover here and there but keeps the LoF, so both range-types can perform well, if needed. Also some good positions for infiltrators are created in this way.

• Place terrain of enough height on the table edges. Interrupt at least two to four this way, one deployment zone and one edge. This creates safe spots for parachutists and denies killing zones on the edges. It also adds some kind of known risk, since there are obvious spots, where you can count on those troops to appear. This adds also to the choice of deployment zone.

   

  

  The interrupted edge creates a possible safe accespoint for the Bashi Bazouk
  

  
  

• The main terrain you are using should be as high as S7 on average. On the one hand, this allows TAGs to move safely, but saves other units from TAGs, since those big guys can’t look that easily above everything.

  

  The initial papercraft-terrain from Corvus Belli is slightly lower than S7, so that TAGs can be seen easily and see a lot of things - make sure there are added things on the roof

 

• Have one oversized piece of terrain at maximum, if you can’t play on or in those pieces. Try not to place those pieces on the centerline. This prevents bottleneck situations and dead areas.

• Try to avoid unclear situations in general to ease the game.

Of course, these are some more or less easy to follow rules, but they are numerous and not always easy to remember, if you are setting up your map in a hurry before the game. To create a kind of routine, allowing you to follow the previous points, here is a practical step-by-step list:

1. Mark places for the mission objectives or set up your objective markers.

2. Spread your tallest terrain pieces loosely in the center of the table with a diagonal orientation

3. Starting from the center to the deployment zones, place the rest of your terrain pieces. Try to give them a diagonal orientation.

    

   

   The tallest buildings are around the center and the density decreases towards the deployment zones

4. Check the corridors created in the previous steps, starting from the deployment zones. Change the orientation, add or remove terrain to create the wished main corridors.

5. Interrupt the edges with additional terrain.

6. Check the horizontal lines of the map and break them, if necessary by placing additional terrain on rooftops.

   
   
   

   

   Even with two big buildings in the center, there is more obstruction needed horizontally - Done with containers on the buildings

7. Check the lines parallel to the center line and break them, if needed.

8. Spread bigger pieces of scatter terrain in the corridors and break up crossings and places, as well as horizontal fire lanes

    

   
   
   

   

   Many of the long corridors can be broken easily with walls or containers, creating the needed density

9. Finalize your map by adding smaller scatter terrain to create more cover here and there.

   

   Smaller and larger planters are great to create the needed additional cover-elements
   

   
   

   

   The final result, thrown together in a few minutes and always interesting to play
   

   
   

   So that is my advice on how to generally put together a reasonable and fun map to play on. Of course, there are many other ways and there will be different experiences. So if you have any comment on this, hit me up!