A thought on terrain

Well, i had my second game of 8th ed last week with dylan and it was fun.

I brought along my goats led by Khazrak the One Eye, but he got slaughtered by the vile Dark Elven army headed by Lord Azkanan.

Anyhow, we took it slow and played it out step by step.

One of the things that took me by surprise was the terrain.

We had a whopping 10 pieces of terrain, but due to the lack of terrain bits, we place 9 pieces of terrain instead.

Now terrain no longer really slows units down, but instead has a whole host of effects on the table. So my initial thought was that we would have units zooming all over the place, which would minimize the terrains' effect, making the board like an open field. But i must say it gave me a pleasant surprise instead.

Previously, terrain had 2 effects, to either slow stuff down or to block line of sight. Now terrain does stuff to your troops as well, certain terrain still slows things down but not cripplingly slow... So it's really up to you to see if you want to use the terrain effects to your advantage...

For example, in the midst of my deployment zone was a Earthblood Mere, a type of swamp that confers a 6+ regeneration save, but since it was a marsh, it was also dangerous terrain for all troops... meaning, if i moved a unit in it, every model in the terrain needed to take a dangerous terrain roll. Now, if i had skirmishers in the Mere instead, i could ignore the dangerous terrain but still benefit from the regen roll. During the game i ignored it, and the terrain affected my deployment, effectively cutting my army in half.

Another example was a river running down the length of one short edge... Dylan bravely put his cold one cavalry on the far side of the river, whilst i hoped the terrain would protect my flank. In the end, he didn't really push his cavalry over the river, although his cold ones turned stupid for a turn and he didn't really need his cavalry anyway...

To sum it up, i think terrain is now more interesting, because of all the funky rules, which makes the game more interesting. So with that in mind, as i needed to hit 10 pounds for free postage on Maelstrom (i bought the high elf cards), i decided to buy the Temple of Skulls terrain piece! I realised GW raised prices on their stuff again... The Temple used to be 15 pounds but now it's 18! As Maelstrom didn't seem to realise that, their Temple was still going at 15, and after discount was 13.50... So i grabbed it! woo!

Now since we're on the topic of terrain... i thought i'd post up some pics of the newly painted Arcane Ruins that i did...

Hold on for the next post soon!