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

 

The right representation

According to the rules, you need to define the zone for the special terrain you want to place. With this, it is easy to determine when you enter silhouette contact and when LoF crosses the zone or not. For your game, you should take care of fitting terrain-zones like cut bases or detailed ponds for example. But in many cases, some paper can do the trick, too. Without such a clarification, a lot of confusion and arguing can appear, limiting your fun.

While creating the zones, you have to determine the size of each zone. This decision has a big impact on how the terrain affects the game. Not only that you need the space to place bigger zones, but also the amount of LoFs crossing it are influenced by the size. Keep in mind that you don’t create classic full cover. You can either walk through it or you can shoot through it. And in most cases you won’t get any cover on it. If you have many small zones or some big zones of special terrain, the map may become quite open in many cases, or at least becomes too open if MSV-units show up.
Besides the area of your special terrain zones, sometimes it may be necessary to define the height of the zone. This won’t be necessary for difficult terrain, but once you work with visibility conditions and saturation zones, you need to define at which height the conditions may end. Once there is a LoF drawn unobstructed from one point of the silhouette of a trooper to another one, the effects of your terrain won’t apply and maybe arguments may start. So pay attention to your definition of height here to ensure that there is no space for arguments. Better define things a bit higher than needed, than defining them too short. 

 

In this case it is not directly indicated by the terrain, if the effects for shooting through apply for the Black Friar or not.

 

On the other hand, you can use different heights to create more interesting terrain pieces, like a cereal-field with S1 height as zero and white noise visibility conditions. Troopers may crawl through it unseen, while everything standing in it can be shot easily. 

This lower storage of the forest could be defined as S1 high zero-visibility and white noise-zone, to create new save paths.

To generally limit the impact of MSV units but also have some importance of visibility zones, I would advise to take a medium number of smaller patches for visibility zones. Planters are a good example here, but zones to the size of a circular template should also work, if it is limited to visibility and saturation. As a medium number you can take something around 3 patches of the size of circular template or five to six smaller ones.

Many small patches on the other hand will have no impact if you use them for difficult terrain. If they are too small, units can either simply go around them or cross them with one additional order. The opposite would be some large patches, at least of the size of a circular template, but most of the time bigger than that. The bigger those patches are, the more impact they will have. In most cases, two or three of those patches define clear zones where the special terrain determines the game, but also leaves some space for normal troops to be useful in the game.

If you combine both types, you either lose the impact of the difficult terrain, or create big patches without proper cover. It is a good advice to go with some medium to big patches of special terrain, if you want to combine different conditions. But then add some solid cover in these zones to limit the benefit for high-burst big guns on well trained or good equipped gunfighters. Place some solid rocks, where S2 units can hide in the zone or put some real trees in your forests. This kind of scatter terrain also allows you to create flexible fire lanes and break longer ones up where needed.

 

This map has four bigger forest-patches. Three of them define the narrow but more open left side, while the fourth seperates the two settlements on the right.

 

As there are trees placed in the forest-zones, not only solid cover is added to the zones to break up LoF, but also LoFs in the upper storage of the forests are broken, limiting some decent firelanes on this map

Next to the quantity and specification of special terrain, the placement is the third important factor, influencing the game. In general, you should use the special terrain to define what you want from your map. If there should be some spots with good LoFs to key-positions, you can place difficult terrain around that or on the path towards it. Or you can narrow bigger corridors down with difficult terrain, maybe with saturation zones, too. In this situation, terrain-specialists may have better access to this path, while the standard gunfighters and ARO-units are weakened.

In general, it is easier to break the game with the wrong quantity of special terrain, rather than breaking it by a wrong position. But again, you don’t create solid cover, maybe the most important thing in Infinity, by placing special terrain on your map. This means that you can’t replace your basic terrain with special terrain. Even with tons of special terrain zones, a too open map will stay open and hardly balanced in most cases. But if you have set up a thought through open map, special terrain can add additional value to it and spice up many interactions. So keep in mind, that special terrain should be used in addition to your normal terrain and not instead.  

 

Simply removing single solid terrain pieces often creates too open areas

 

Bigger patches with solid terrain in it mitigate this problem a bit, but still leave more area open as wished

 

The easiest way, especially in the beginning, is to simply add special terrain zones to your normal terrain

 

Once this is done, you can place the areas there, where you need them: some smoke from burning stuff in side-corridors to the main-streets, forests around a otherwise easy to access objective or some difficult terrain on the fast-lane towards one deployment zone to force units like Achilles into other, less favourable corridors. By doing such things, you can utilize special terrain to create different sides of the map. In most cases, the choice of side is made by oversight of the map or by easy to defend positions. By adding special terrain, the amount and quality of units in each player's lists to deal with given conditions, becomes a new factor.

Localized Decompression

The topic of special terrain and its influence on the game today can’t be completed without having a look at the new addition to the current set of ITS missions. In some missions, both players need to place two circular templates on the map, counting as difficult terrain (zero g) and saturation zone. Each of these templates needs to be placed outside of the deployment zones and somewhere they fit without interfering with other scenery. This requirement may cause some problems on its own on denser tables, but even with more scatter terrain on the map, it could be difficult to fit all the templates somewhere. If you are the one setting up maps for someone else to play such ITS missions, make sure there are fitting places, but also have in mind, that you can create special areas for those zones, shaping the game a bit more.

But how to utilize this new feature as a player? Independent to the placement, three effects may be applied: Reduced movement/order efficiency for normal troopers, increased movement for troopers with terrain(total) and terrain(zero g) and reduced burst for all BS attacks through the zone. These effects are valid for both players, so the aim should be to give your opponent most of the disadvantages on the one hand and on the other hand avoid those disadvantages for your game. To get this to the map, you need to search the major firelanes from your opponents deployment zone and the sweet spots for linked ARO-units. If you could place a zone intereferring in such corridors, you can take it to reduce the impact of linked units with sniper rifles and missile launchers. Another use of the saturation zone may be to reduce the potential of the opponents attack-pieces. This is mostly valid for weapons with B3, but if your ARO-unit is strong enough and does not rely on one shot more or less, also for B4 weapons. If you identify one or two sweet spots from where you may be attacked, the saturation zone placed there enhances the risk of failure for your opponent. 

An other way to use the zone against attack pieces is to slow them down with the difficult terrain. There are some alpha-strike units in the game, utilizing spitfires or other weapons with shorter rangebands, which need to leave some area behind without spending much ressources for this. If they need to cross the difficult terrain to get to your units, they might lose one or two orders there.

With all these options, it is important to not set up a trap for yourself. It will happen, that your units want to use the same spot or firelane to attack the enemy or want to use the same route to get as close to the opponent as needed. If you place the zones close to your deployment zone or around the center of the map, you will have to deal with the negative effects of the zones quite early and quite often. The better option is to place them as close to the enemy deployment zone as possible. This allows you to develop your position in the midfield and set up a strategy utilizing the zones, instead of figuring out how to leave your own deployment zone without getting slowed down and forced into bad situations too often. Your opponent of course will do the same, so in the worst case, you have two zones set up perfectly against you and also your own zones set up not that well. But if you manage to get them as close to the deployment zone as possible, your opponent will have to deal with them somehow. But as always, there is one more thing to consider: If you want to limit enemy ARO-units, you will also limit your potential to kill them, if you have no plan for a different engagement-route. So you need to pay some attention to this, before simply drop the zones in front of ARO-spots.

A last option to utilize the zones is to take them to increase the survivability of your units. This may seem odd in the first place, but in the end everything that reduces the burst against you increases at least your chances to survive. If you deploy a TR-bot or some high burst neurocinetics-units, you may be able to lose one shot. In some situations you still may have three shots against two from your opponent. But in most situations you may have B3 against B3, which only reduces the success-rate for both units. And since the biggest purpose of the reactive turn is to force your opponent to spend as many orders as possible, this is a great thing! The other defensive option is to protect your squishy terrain(total) specialists from heavy enemy fire by placing the zone somewhere around these units. In many cases they also have some visual modifiers on them, so opponents need to rely on their burst. This is reduced here, while you get no real disadvantages.

 

The saturation zone reduces the burst of both units, the TR-bot on the left and the SMR Druze on the right. But while the burst of the TR bot is only reduced by 25%, the Druze loses 33% and most of his odds in this situation

But once the Druze gets some support from his haris-team and has to face a linked MSR, the saturation zone alters the odds into his favour, since the Fusilier loses most of his linkteam benefits, which make sniper rifles and missile launchers that scary

The edge of the map allows units to reach the deployment zone in proper cover or has no good position to deploy defensive elements in there. The difficult terrain here is able to slow down such units a lot, especially when they need to enter the zones twice

Covered by the saturation zone, Saito Togan can reach the objective better protected or even can deploy there more savely, since enemy fire is reduced and stacks with his mimetism

To conclude this (longer than expected) part of the guide I want to point out all the unique and interesting interactions you can add to the game with special terrain. There are tons of different options and if you don’t fall to the major traps, they can be included into many games. Don’t try to replace basic terrain with special terrain zones, but add special terrain to general good maps. Also choose a small set of different terrain types to reduce the overall thinkload during the game and have all the added rules easy to remember. And as the last point, be clear about the size and the terrain-silhouette to don’t create arguable game-situations.