A Bit of Scatter Terrain

Terrain Concepts, I’ve been playing with ideas for terrain rules.

Initially I conceived of a dichotomy with hard terrain, such as ruined buildings and concrete rubble, versus soft terrain, such as bushes and grass. Hard terrain would have better protection over the softer variety against such things as incoming small arms fire.

Concepts evolve, though, and I gradually struck on the idea of scrapping the relative cover density for a more fundamental terrain dichotomy: area vs linear.

Esentially this: If your troops are in a piece of area terrain, such as bushes, they get a moderate level of cover. If they are behind a bit of linear terrain, like a rock or wall,  they get a more substantial cover bonus.

Area terrain is easier to accomplish. It is easier to get a squad into area terrain. If half or more models in a squad are in the area terrain, then they get the area cover bonus.

Linear terrain requires more deliberate positioning. The models in a squad must be behind the linear terrain relative to the firing unit before the linear cover bonus applies. 

Linear cover depends on the position of the firing squad. Linear can be flanked, where area cannot. The linear cover bonus can make the target rather difficult to hit, which promotes flanking moves and a more dynamic game.

A linear position can degrade, once flanked, to area or open, depending on how the terrain is modeled and where the models are positioned. Which is to say that a bit of area terrain can be modeled with a stretch of linear terrain within it, but not all linear terrain is within area.

The infantry man is Clearhorizon Miniatures, for scale. Some of the boxes and crates are from a mold I picked up from Jason Moore over at Micropanzer. All the air bubbles in the crates are my own miscasts. Jason will hook you up with some serious high quality crates for a small, small fee. The barrels are electronic bits I have been evangelizing about for a while now, and the tanks... can you guess?

Regards,
Tom

HADES Reapers and Spec-Ops K-9's

This is the first blog post since I moved to Ohio. I finally got settled in enough to work on some miniatures. So far I'm loving it here, very cool people.

First up we have some of the kit from Clearhorizon's Kickstarter. This is the HADES Recon Light Walker escorted by a HADES Reaper Team. We are about half way through the Kickstarter event as I post this, and they have bugs too, so Get Some! For those of you living in the future, you can get yours on the Clearhorizon website.

The marvelous Mr. Harold was kind enough to send me a squad of the new HADES Reapers from the Sigma Event 2177 box set. They're sculpted by Anton Ducrot, of Flytrap Factory fame; very crisp, clean sculpts making them relatively easy to paint. They are big troopers, power-armored and cyber-augmented. The ground cars in the back are some conversions I posted earlier.

Next is the Covert Ops Cyber-K9 and Handler Operative, also by Clearhorizon Miniatures, and also well sculpted. What can I say, you had me at teched-up AK-47.

I really love the styling on the Operative, super clean. The jury is still out, but this may be my favorite trooper from Clearhorizon. Yeah, but those Hell Divers, I don't know... tough call.

I'm still warming up to my Hell Diver army. I think I ended up with over two platoons when I finally stopped spending. I need to work on some terrain before I get stuck-in on a big project, and then there's all the other things.

Thanks for looking,

Tom