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.

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.

 

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!