Countryside Infinity Terrain Guide: The trade-off between rules and reality

Maybe the most exiting thing about Infinity is the stunning terrain you play your games on. Even if you don't own one of these premium tables, you can find them shared all over the internet and sometime will find the place, time and money to build one yourself. Unfortunately, the best looking terrain or the most realistic terrain may cause problems when it comes to the practical games, since the rules require certain considerations. To avoid the situation that you spent hours on your map and only see these issues in the first, long awaited game, I want to discuss these points in this part of the guide.

Cover

Before the cover-rules changed in N4, 30% of the actual silhouette of a model needed to be concealed to get cover. This set the height and width of most scatter terrain, since it was quite useless in game-terms, if a S2 model is not able to get cover while standing behind it. With N4 there is no given percentage, but only that a part of your silhouette is concealed by the terrain you are touching. In this case, the new edition lowered the error-potential while building the right terrain a bit. Before the planter you wanted to use as scatter terrain needed a specified minimum size and even if S2 would gain cover, the next S4 unit maybe won't get cover there. Now even a small water hydrant gives cover to everything hiding behind, even a Maghariba Guard.
In the same way, N4 changed the cover-rules for units on elevated positions. In N3, your trooper needed to be prone on an elevated position to get cover, or stand on any kind of handrail. While being prone on an elevated position limits your LoF in many ways and causes misunderstandings, handrails are not usable or nice on every piece of scenery. Not every roof is designed to walk on it, mointains or bigger rocks rarely have any handrails and whatever weird situation there may have been...Now it is solved, since you only need to be higher than the trooper you are interacting with. So your troopers can walk on any kind of roof and rock-formation you are planning. But before throwing away all your handrails, make sure to have other horizontal structures to grant any kind of cover against troopers on the same level.

Scarface on the right now gets cover from everything on the ground level. Thanks to the small planter, a part of his silhouette is covered even for things on the same roof. On the other hand, the Uhlan on the left has free sight on Scarface. Take this situation into account while setting up your map.

Placing

Besides cover as one former important point to consider for your map, the necessity to be able to place a model somewhere may be the most important thing to consider while planning and building your terrain. The issue of placing occurs whenever you are building any kind of non-standard terrain. Espcially if you want to work with rock-formations or anything similar, you need to make sure that every model you want to be there is able to be placed somewhere. It isn't that important anymore that the whole path is wide enough to fit the base, but to make terrain playable in this term, there needs to be a place big enough after a narrow path. This path should not be longer than 4", maybe in some rare cases 6", so that there are places where troopers can move to with their build in MOV. If this isn't planned properly, troopers may only cross the terrain with two short movements and have no opportunity to react to the AROs they will produce, since they can't legally stop their movement in the path. Nevertheless, you can always use this kind of problem to design paths not suitable for bigger units like TAGs or REMs, if you think this would be necessary.
One last thing to consider regarding placing issues are te highest points of your map. Sometimes you build rock formations or even buildings higher than the rest of your terrain. In most cases, this generates really fancy sniper spots, which can't be accessed from the ground. To avoid this, make sure to either design your terrain in a way that you can't place a model on this pieces, or that it is clear for everyone, that deploying there is forbidden. 

This hill is designed to minimize placing problems and avoid miniatures falling down. While Saito can be placed nearly everywhere here, Scarface can't legally take the current position, but cansimply vault over the hill to a position, where he can be placed.

Interaction

Rulewise models use and interact with terrain most of the time when they are vaulting over obstacles, climbing on things or jumping from one point to an other. While climbing and jumping are more or less designed to deal with specific terrain-situations but are quite order intensive in most cases, vaulting is the short-cut for this. Rulewise a model can move over or climb on obstacles without any restrictions, if the obstacle is not higher than the silhouette of the active model. In many cases you want to make your buildings and other higher terrain-pieces more accessable while also lacking some ladders to fulfill this role. For this situation, the vaulting-rule allow you to create easy access-points for normal troopers by stacking some smaller boxes or creating other stacked structures. This also adds new combinations for cover to your terrain. On the other hand you need to make sure that bigger units, especially TAGs can't go everywhere without any difficulties. This is an issue with the old Icestorm-terrain, since the buildings are slightly lower than S7 models, so rulewise every TAG can just move over them. While building your own map, take care of these two problems and choose the right height for your terrain.

The old papercraf terrain from Corvus Belli is slightly smaller than S7, so that TAGs can simply vault on the buildings and containers. Take this into account to determine where things can move easily and where not.

Line of fire

Of course, some of the previous points already interacted with different situations of LoF-issues, but there is an other specific one to point out. In many situations, you want to spice your terrain up with more irregular terrain, altering the standard box-shape. This can be a walkway, a forest or some kind of industrial plant. But while leaving the box-shape with defined volume, there will appear holes and unblocked corridors within the terrain piece. This is also valid for buildings with windows, where you intentionally can draw LoF through the whole building. I would assume that these kind of LoF-issues is the most common reason for arguments and kind of gotcha!-moments in Infinity, since it is played differently everywhere and so is up to interpretation.
This overall problem could only be avoided if you build complete consistent and clear terrain. Unfortunately, this will be quite boring in general and would let most of the beauty of the setting unused. So please continue building cool terrain, but I heavily recommend to try to design the terrain as clear as possible, considering the different possible interpretations and ways to use it and in the best case note some instructions to be handed out on the table.

This high pillar is a premium place for every stron ARO-unit and also fits at least S6 units. If there is no ruling or clarification about deploying there, you can break your game easily.

This building illustrates several issues with terrain and LoF. Not only that it is totally open on each side, so that units can draw LoF easily through it, it also shows how terrain which is designed to block LoF can fail with this, if you don't clarify it. Be clear about the use of real LoF or home-rules and take those possible LoF-issues into account.

Clarity

The previous LoF-issue may be the most common problem of clarity on Infinity-maps, but they can and will occur in every non-standard situation. If you took all the previous points into account while desgning your terrain, you will have avoided a lot of discussion. But nevertheless, there will always be situations where the exact ruling or practical use of a piece of terrain is not 100% clear. But since the game itself is quite complex and works a lot with pre-calculating interactions, uncertainities regarding terrain-pieces really should be minimized. To do so, try to design the terrain as clear as possible and wherever this is not possible or wanted, give some easy to understand advice or instruction to the players. To talk through a map before the game really should be the standard procedure for every player, but we all know how things go sometime. So prepare two papers with short instructions and store them together with the terrain. In that way, the information is always available on the map, when it is used for a game.