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How big is too big?


graeme27uk

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It would mostly depend on whether models can be moved in/on the said terrain piece. Theoretically you could make your whole table a single terrain piece, if it doesn't restrict model movement too much.

If we are talking about an impassable terrain piece, then I'd say anything bigger 5"x5" starts to feel like it's restricting play too much.

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Which companies manufacture Malifaux buildings that arent to scale? Most buildings I've seen have been to scale, but the bases on the models sometimes makes doors look too small.

Join A Wyrd Place on facebook, members add tons of pictures of homemade and purchased terrain, pics from tournaments with tables set up to play and so on. Its a great source of inspiration for terrain making and table set up.

You can also just scroll through the battle reports right here on the forums or google "Malifaux tables" or Malifaux terrain" :)

 

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On 03/05/2016 at 7:32 AM, graeme27uk said:

What should the maximum size of a single terrain piece be?

I have to agree with the posts above.  The whole table can be one piece or you can go much smaller.  It all depends on what it is that you are trying to do.  Try to figure out a theme for the table you are setting up and see if the terrain base sizes makes sense.  I also have to agree with restrictions on movement since that will end up being the focus of games (like a single bridge on a river that crosses the board).

On 03/05/2016 at 7:32 AM, graeme27uk said:

Also, the purchasable buildings I've seen seem to be out of scale with the models, bring too small in general. What size should a typical building be?

Building scale in wargames is relative.  In many cases buildings (or vehicles for that matter) will be built at a reduced scale.  In most cases it is becasue many terrain manufactures do not build buildings with accessible interiors.  My general rule of thumb is that if I build with an interior I will build a realistic sized building.  If the building does not have an interior, I build at a reduced scale so it does not take as much space on the table (reducing space for game play).  

My best suggestion is to either build or purchase terrain that works and looks right for friendly games on your own board.  If you are building or purchasing terrain for a tournament table then worry about the rules lawyers.  Personally I don't worry about them since I only play friendly games. 

Hope that helps.

Snitchy sends.

 

 

 

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I treat 1" as 3 feet (height 2 models are 5-6 feet tall) my asylum block takes up 24" by 24" so 72 feet square.

buildings on my bayou board and old west styled town take up 4"x4" so 12 feet square at the smallest  to the church which if I remember correctly is something like 5" by 7".

Larger building definitely need to be placed carefully but part of the game is building your crew around the strats schemes and board your going to play on.

For me the visual appeal and correct scaling is no less important than the subjective balance of the board. 

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I have a load of A3 6mm foamboard. So I was thinking of making some buildings. 

All the buildings I make seem to be too big however. So I was thinking the average building size would be 5" x 3" x 3" with a pitched roof. Does that sound about the right size?

I could make the roof detachable so that models can go in and out of buildings. 

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In my opinion any buildings that are bigger than 3"x5" need to have elements that you can interact with in game. I would suggest at least 2 entrances (front door/back door, front door/side door etc), some windows or ruined walls. Buildings look great but very often they are just areas of impassable terrain and you'd get more interaction from some woods or other dense terrain.  

For example my FLGS had this huge 10"x15" (or maybe even bigger) chateaux dollhouse type building and the only thing you could do with it in game was climb the front steps (it had no interior). It functioned as essentially as a very large area of impassable terrain. It felt like both a waste of table space and a waste of a lovely terrain piece. 

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Maybe its a touch heretical, but I'm beginning to hate buildings. Far too often they're just large cubes or rectangles that take up space and offer nothing interesting, other than movement complications and fussiness should anyone decide to use the interior. One thing I've begun considering lately is facades that you simply cannot go inside. Of course, this potentially has the problem stated above where you just end up with a chunk of impassable terrain that eats up table space. However, if you can go inside them, the scaling just always seems...off, and the interiors are often just lazy and unappealing (we have a lot of mdf terrain starting to show up which feels just sort of flat and boring imo). 

Lately with buildings I've begun thinking a little differently than I had before when my focus was on making it so you can enter them (without dedicating much of the table to a large and interesting interior).  What about doing facades but putting the emphasis and focus on making the outside interesting, appealing, and useful. Have multiple ways to get up on the roof, use shapes that aren't simply big squares and add interesting angles of cover. Create breezeways, rooftop signs for cover, balconies with ladders, and other little bits of personality.

Basically my thinking is, more focus on making the exterior appealing and useful, less focus on bothering with the inside and the scaling nightmare that seems to occur in there. Part of this might just be my bias after multiple experiences with rules lawyers always managing to make buildings you can enter miserable.

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Yeah, buildings are just plain tricky. I've been moving towards interiors only in the case of large buildings with 2-3 entrances, and then they use that oft-overlooked Enclosed rule, but are otherwise infinitely tall walls with some doors, and with small buildings, they're just solid blocks you can't enter.

I've given up completely on elevation rules, only house ruling "they're basically the same as horizontal LOS except the other axis" if I really want height to be a factor, but usually I don't.

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I guess you could make buildings more interesting if they interacted in some way. maybe there is a piece of jewellry needed from a particular house; maybe a house has a secret tunnel that you can move through... smugglers tunnels or such

i have some "buildings " but you can climb on them for height and such; they've all got ladders, steps or such

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You can definitely set up buildings so objective are in them, which can be interesting, but IDK about crazy tunnles etc.- tried that ages back and it's really hard to balance the amount of actions it takes for it to be useful enough to want to do, but not game breaking.

On climbing... I really don't like it. Really. Every time I start to deal with elevation, and actually read the rules closely rather than just assume that vertical LOS is intuitive, it gets extremely confusing, like, depending on a model's height, you might be able to see straight through floors; you can see through models standing on things; some heights change your LOS while others don't, etc.

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I like buildings.  The games ranges are such that the game doesn't really work with less than a 36" space, but 9 square feet is also a little too much room to run around on.  Buildings do a good job of increasing the former and decreasing the latter.

As for complex terrain; I just don't think tape measure minis game rules are well suited for it.  It seem to work best with highly abstracted movement, but I have yet to find a system that mixes fantastic looking terrain with rules that make it a joy to play on.

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3 minutes ago, SpiralngCadavr said:

Yeah, it's too bad. It looks like Deadzone might have figured that out with lots of terrain but abstracted cubes of space, but I've never played it.

I've been curious about that one myself.  It does seem far more workable with guns.  I think the real trick would be making a system that worked with swords.

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I've found making a mock up and playing some games can be really useful for designing terrain. That way you can figure out if something skews the game, leads to confusing rules situations, or doesn't really contribute to the game (like stuff too near the board edges) before you put the effort into actually building something.

I've been playing games on a table I'm working on as I go with random boxes assigned terrain attributes. When I'm happy enough with how something plays I can build a terrain piece to replace it, or at least that's the plan anyway. At the moment there are still a fair amount of random boxes on that table, but at least they play well. :) 

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26 minutes ago, LunarSol said:

As for complex terrain; I just don't think tape measure minis game rules are well suited for it.  It seem to work best with highly abstracted movement, but I have yet to find a system that mixes fantastic looking terrain with rules that make it a joy to play on.

I would argue that Necromunda did a pretty good job of it back in the day.

If it is a design consideration from the beginning of development a system can be made that is simple yet intriguing to play.

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33 minutes ago, LunarSol said:

I've been curious about that one myself.  It does seem far more workable with guns.  I think the real trick would be making a system that worked with swords.

Following the Necromunda comment, Mordheim is great. My gaming group is getting together a campaign, and with modern laser cut terrain available, it's awesome. 

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Necromunda and Mordheim handle climbing okay. Both editions of Deadzone are good, but a bit odd if trying to convert terrain rules over to a game like Malifaux. Movement is fairly unrestricted. It does not differentiate between sheer surfaces and a ladder when it comes to climbing. You either can move somewhere, or you can not. The distance available to move remains the same regardless of what is available to climb as long as there is some sort of structure there to climb on one of the adjacent facings. Check out Carnevale. They sadly recently announced their closure, but the game itself has parkour rules. It's a little clunky, but it is the only system where I have seen a model start on a balcony, wall run to be directly across from a window on another building, jump off the wall, take a shot at a model because mid jump was the only time they could see their target, and attempt to crash into the window of the second building. It's difficult to do because chaining actions like that increases the difficulty, but it is technically possible. You might be able to do it in Inquisitor, but that is up to your GM or whoever you are playing with.

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My solution for building interiors is to add interior details only cover the floor 1/2 inch from each wall.  Even rooms with limited interior details can be more interesting than a blank wall.  Here are a couple of examples. 

SNITCHYTHEDOG-Second_no_roof.jpg

SNITCHYTHEDOG-floor2.JPG

You can go nuts with it and make the building seem positively cluttered as long as you keep it to the wall.  Building within the first 1/2 inch of floor space from the wall gives the appearance of interior clutter without taking up the space. 

SNITCHYTHEDOG-P7300022.JPG

Personally I prefer to have buildings with playable interiors.  They make the game more visually appealing and tactically more interesting.  That is just my preference and since I do not build for tournaments anymore I can pretty much build what I want.  Like everyone else said make sure there are multiple entrances and exits.  A dead end building will not be used. 

Hope that helps.

Snitchy sends.

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