Countryside Infinity Terrain Guide - Special terrain to spice up your map part I

While we now know how to set up interesting maps for competitive play or regular games, everyone may reach a point where some spice need to be added. Whenever you cross the idea of a campaign, you define your location and think about ways to bring the jungles of Paradiso to your map or how the caverns of an asteroid around Human Edge may influence your game. But even without interest in campaigns and such stuff, the new ITS 12 adds some terrain rules to certain missions. If you have read through the previous two articles, you now may know how sensitive the game-experience can be to changes in the terrain. This applies most of the time to the placement of your regular terrain, but special terrain with added rules also can have a big impact.

The most important step for this topic may be the knowledge of how special terrain works rulewise in Infinity and how units interact with this. Everything basic you need to know for this is written in the core-book on p. 133 and following, as well as p. 115. The section around p. 133 explains the different terrain special rules and p. 115 includes the terrain-special skill for your units. Of course, MSVs also interact with terrain-rules, but since it is a quite clear interaction and this equipment also interacts with other things, so it is not that important here. The core rules define three effect-types for terrain, besides the actual terrain-type like aquatic, desert or zero-g:

• Difficult terrain - influencing movement of troops

• Saturation zones - influencing the burst of weapons

• Visibility zones - influencing LoF of troops

While in N3 every type here had different levels, only the levels of visibility zones are left in N4. Nevertheless you can combine all the different options, depending on what you want to achieve or what you need. To give you the needed information to properly choose between all these options, we will go through each type in the following.

Difficult terrain

Difficult terrain describes everything that limits the movement of troops. This may be a very rocky plane or a swamp where even a Morat is slowed down by the mud. The rules here are summed up as each trooper has to end its movement when entering silhouette contact with the terrain and needs to substract 1” from both MOV-values. In return, troopers with the fitting Terrain-special skill don’t need to end their movement by entering silhouette contact, ignore the limitations of moving in this terrain and gain 1” on both of their MOV-values. So in total, they become even faster, while everything else is slowed down in two ways. Altered moving speed on its own influences of course the order-efficiency for troops that want to move and reach more favourable places, but also exposes troops longer to AROs. This could be one additional shot from a long distance, one more chain rifle but most of the time one more attempt of spotlight or other hacking-programs.

Gainers of difficult terrain in first place are troops with the special skill, gaining quicker movement and the option to take paths too difficult for normal troops. In the second place all troops benefitting from slow opponents gain some more use. These are hackers, strong ARO-units and now CC-specialists with or without terrain-skills, since they can dodge with every ARO they get and ignore the terrain-limitations with this movement, except for the forced end of the movement by getting into silhouette contact (at least that is how I would read the current rules).So in the worst case Saito Togan appears in the forest you try to cross with your Azrail, engaging you directly.

On the other side, all units which need to reach places on the table and lack terrain-skills or high MOV-values get some problems with difficult terrain. In most cases you lose one short skill of moving by entering silhouette contact and depending on the size of the zone need one order more to cross the distance thanks to the reduced movement. If you then have nothing to protect you properly against DTWs or other AROs, like mimetism or dodge (+3), you have reached a wrong place.

One special thing for difficult terrain is the type you choose. We have many troops with terrain (desert) or terrain (aquatic) scattered unequally around the game, while terrain (zero-g) seems to be spread more equally (at least if you take the terrain (total) troops into account, too). So if you work with a lot of terrain from a not equally distributed type, you change the balance a lot.

Saturation zones

A saturation zone is filled with debris or other stuff, catching bullets flying through it. In this way, your burst is reduced by 1 to a limit of 1, if you are shooting through such a zone. It is important to note that the reduction is done after splitting burst, so a spitfire could shoot three shots into one target, or four shots against four targets, for example. For the moment there is no way to ignore those zones, besides having only B1 in general.

The reduction of the burst allone of course favours all units and weapons, which take their potential from high BS or other points and not from spamming shots. DTWs in most cases are not affected here and single missile launchers also see no difference by shooting through such a zone. Also weapons with high burst are not affected extremely by this reduction. Of course, B4 or B5 is better than B3, but in the end you still have two dice more than your opponent, which should do the job, if you engage in a good position. In short: actively, high B-weapons and link-teams with them deal good with those zones and may be a bit favoured by this. Reactive all vanilla-ARO pieces not gaining their value out of boosted B become better, since they are attacked by fewer shots now.

In return, natural B3 weapons like marksman-rifles or HRLs with natural B2 lose most of their advantage in active turn against the ARO-units. A link-team may reduce this impact a bit, but in the end, your engagements with these weapons become more risky. Also if burst is the only thing that shall win you the ftf-rolls, you may get some problems with saturation zones (like Krizas, Knights or Azrails). When it comes to the reactive turn, your linked missile launcher or sniper now suffer a lot, since the second shot in ARO is one of the most valuable things you have. If your defensive link-team needs to defend your ground through a saturation zone, it will be a quite ineffective investment.

Visibility zones

This kind of terrain has the most variation to offer. The core-rules distinguish visibility zones into the following:

• Low visibility (-3 to BS)

• Poor visibility (-6 to BS)

• Zero visibility (no LoF through it)

• White noise (no LoF for MSV-units)

It is important to note that MSVs cancel most of the negative effects of low, poor and zero visibility conditions and that the negative mod is not applied to dodge-rolls when you are targeted through such a zone. Thanks to smoke-grenades and the White Noise hacking-program, visibility zones can be created sometimes during the game and since many strategies or solutions for specific problems are including this, we are quite used to this type of terrain.

Besides White Noise, all visibility zones boost units with MSVs of any kind, since they get free reign about some LoFs and can use the good old smoke-trick even without spending orders to set up smoke first. If you don’t have to deal with zero visibility zones, full core-teams are boosted by this terrain, too. The +3 to BS-attacks limits the impact of the zone on your troop, while the target still has to apply it to his attack. This increases your chances actively and makes your ARO-snipers really hard to remove. Depending on the amount of MSVs on the field, also mimetism-troops and troops which act better in mid- to close distances can benefit from additional visibility zones. The mod stacks with the native mimetism on the one hand and may boost or guarantee your survivability against AROs while getting into the positions you want to start working.

While troops with mimetism may benefit from additional visibility zones, a high amount of MSVs on the field or at least one good placed MSV can also limit your use of these troops. If solid cover is replaced by visibility zones, you are losing all your protection without any benefit. Besides this situation, long range weapons and units without top-notch BS stats lose a lot of their potential. Even if both sides suffer additional negative mods, the success-chance of both units is reduced. This may be good, if you just want to survive while crossing a gap, but if you want to take out a target, you need to invest more orders for this, if you are able to hit the enemy at all. 

 

Special terrain in practice

Most maps in practice show that special terrain is difficult to use or most of the time not used because of the complexity. Probably the theoretical part has reinforced your concerns about this topic. It is true that you easily can create unbalanced situations by using these rules. But on the other hand you skip a lot of the fun Infinity has to offer, if you don’t use it. The next part shall try to give some advice on how you can use these rules without breaking the game.

Possible combinations and definition of terrain

Since there are only three different types of special terrain, the overall rules are quite simple. But then you are given the choice to combine the three types of terrain and label them in the way you want or need, creating a high number of possibilities. You can have difficult desert terrain without any further things or a difficult, poor visibility saturation forest zone, a White Noise zero g zone and so on. In many cases the map you want to create at least gives you a limited set of wanted terrain, like some desert-patches on a Bourak-styled map, or zero g terrain in a cargo bay. From this reduced complexity, you can start and tailor your terrain to what you want to achieve. A very important factor here is to keep things as simple as possible, at least if you don’t plan to prepare a week before for the game. Infinity has a lot to remember and to think about during the game, so the added terrain rules should be well communicated and not too numerous. Too much complexity and diversity would lead to non considering the rules, which you don’t want to achieve. Keep things simple and clear and according to your goal.