Games Workshop have been dropping rules for the upcoming 11th edition of Warhammer 40k bit by bit since the Adepticon reveal, and today's was the largest yet, showing off the rules for terrain in 11th edition. They elaborated on the new
Hidden rule - which makes Infantry, Beast, and Swarm models in terrain who haven't shot in the current or prior turn invisible to enemy models unless they're within 15". That's pretty great! We love how this turns off some potential turn 1 alpha strikes and doesn't seem to allow for invisible knights and defilers. Good stuff.
Terrain area also appears to be standardized as a term/concept now. Great, I love that too. One of the biggest problems with casual play in 9th and 10th edition was seeing players not get how important it is to have large areas of terrain which block line of sight. I cannot stress how important that is in Warhammer 40k, a game where you can shoot people to death from across the table.
Credit: Games Workshop
Next it appears that the
Obscuring rule is back for terrain, making it impossible to see through terrain areas with that rule. Again, great stuff.
The
Benefit of Cover has also changed, now giving the attacking unit -1 to their Ballistic skill rather than granting the unit +1 to its saves. This is really interesting. It's going to have a massive impact on the game. It immediately makes AP-1 weapons much, much more deadly, as before they just had no effect against targets in cover, particularly targets with a 2+ or 3+ save which otherwise would not have benefit from cover. On the flip side, it potentially makes high-value, low shot count weapons worse, so you may actually opt for a heavy bolter over a lascannon when picking Predator sponsons.
Also, Plunging Fire is back and easier to get, triggering if you're a TOWERING unit within 12" of your target or standing on a terrain feature that is 3" or more in height against ground-level targets. in both cases your BS improves by 1, making it so knights aren't just immediately screwed by the new rules.
They also showed off the new terrain pieces/areas for the edition. This is critical info for every tournament organizer out there, and I can only assume third party manufacturers across the globe are already working on designs for new neoprene mats to match these shapes.
Specifically, they call out:
- Four large rectangles – 7” x 11.5”
- Two large right-angle triangles – 8” x 11.5”
- Four medium rectangles – 6” x 4”
- Two long lines – 10” x 2.5”
- Four short lines – 6” x 2”
And it looks like those two large right-angle triangles are designed to fit together to make a single 11.5" x 10" rectangle, shown in the diagrams for missions. These look pretty cool, and they certainly create more pieces of obscuring terrain and make for more dense, but still potentially traversable, terrain layouts in Warhammer 40k.
But then we have those layouts. Let's talk about those for a second. One of my biggest concerns with having separate layouts for every mission combination is that, at events, players will need to set up terrain before every game. That's not a huge problem if the process is fast and you have three-hour rounds, but on anything less it's going to eat up 10+ minutes, especially if the layouts are weird. Let's see what we ended up with:
Oh lord.
Visually, these layouts are fine. The Hammer and Anvil layout has a lot of dead space in its backfields, but that's not my issue. My issue is:
Who came up with these placements?
Both of these maps have a large number of terrain features which have appear to have been nonsensically placed to make things difficult.
Take this ruin in Hammer and Anvil up there:
This appears to be positioned 0.25" off the middle line of the table. Why? Putting it directly on the center line of the table would have made things much faster and easier, and made it easy to understand how far in those two runs - both 6"x4" - push onto that side of the table.
How about this one:
What exactly is the advantage to having this ruin sit 0.5" away from the deployment zone? Have it either be 19" away or on the deployment line; neither allows a model to sit inside it during deployment but both are easier and faster to measure. My preference is 18", as it creates a clear visual aid for players during deployment: you have to be behind this ruin.
It's the same thing here on Crucible:
I just don't understand these decisions; Moving those ruins up to align them with the deployment line makes deployment visually easier
and helps players avoid being on the terrain in the first turn if they don't want to be (and even with hidden, I'm going to assume you do not want to be).
It's such a weird mistake to make. I like these layouts and I like what we've learned so far about the terrain rules - I'm eager to find out more! But I legitimately struggle with the decisions being made on the terrain layouts. Players already struggle to get terrain set up quickly at events and creating a lot of half- and quarter-inch measurements is only going to make that worse by making it needlessly complicated.
The good news is that if we get a tournament packing for 11th similar to the ones we received in 10th, this could get adjusted and fixed. I'm not mad about it or anything - just confused and disappointed.
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Warhammer 40k 11th Edition Terrain Rules: The Goonhammer Hot Take
