Had a game my buddy thought it was a good idea to put a crane platform on one deployment zone. This thing was literally 1/3 taller than anything else on the board. I won deployment and put a neurocinetics missile launcher +1B yuan ho in a Haris on top of it. My opponent was tabled before I got my first turn. Bad times. Terrain placement REALLY matters. This was before the fireteam changes, but he has never made that mistake again.
Great video as always, both for new and more experienced players! In addition to making sure there is room for TAGs and bikes, make sure to put terrain on the table edges so Parachutists can walk on in total cover.
Haven't really engaged with Infinity content much in the just few years but jeezy Rob this reminds me of Micky or my content from back over what 10 years ago now. Well presented ofcourse your much more articulate then myself and you touched on every talking point I would have if I presented any of my tables. Excluding I think tables have gotten a bit too dense in the Australian meta part of this I think it's because the card stock terrain both the newer and older folding ones have replaced larger MDF pieces so your seeing more small to medium things rather than large and small that was more predominant in the past. Not a bad thing I'm sure you will agree especially when it comes to events and storage!
The white table with red interactable elements is basically the idea of the video game Mirror's Edge :) You can look at screenshots and you can see that's exactly what they did to let the player know that they could interact with an element in some way. It is an awesome idea.
I like to break things into 'tactical blobs,' usually 2-3 per table. Most of the table will often be streets/buildings, but a few places where the terrain asks questions is nice. I usually like to have one open area, one hyper-dense area, and one weird area, then figure out a few good ways to cross the table.
Great content as usual ! If you want ideas for more topics, I would love to see some more listbuilding for tournaments. Lets say there is a 3-5 round tournament down in aussie-land with missions published. And you go through "fast" 1-3 factions list. With focus on mission/split. What are key models for the missions in the lists, and how would you split list for missions.
My 2 european cents: - Make the chosing of the side a meaningful decision, so it's not "I win initiative, I go first for Alpha strike". Also, the sides should never be simmetrical (even if the same size pieces are used, alter the order). Adding an eagle's nest to one side within the DZ (but NOT in one corner of the table!) is ok as long as... - Cut the lines of fire from side to side of the table somehow. Infinite height buildings near the center of the table are great for this, but the important thing is that you can't simply place Atalanta in an tower with a yudbot and call it mostly a day (because coordinated orders). - Make sure a parachutist entering the enemy's DZ cannot rambo the whole enemy list. It is stupid to need such a rule, but the danger exists with any troop that can "spawn" in the enemy's DZ (but at the very least, AD troopers and Impersonators have to roll for it... Duroc can just walk in and say hi with smoke and other nastyness for Margot to start culling). - Make sure the objectives of the mission are reachable for any faction. Looking a table and seeing two of the three consoles are on rooftops with enough space for both players to deploy infiltrators on them, but no stairs whatsoever (or stairs completely exposed to one player's AROs) is the same as laughing at those factions without autoinclude infiltrating specialists and/or tons of climbing plus (it actually happened to me; against nomads. Two morans with koalas short of a Move order on rooftops 25cm -that is, 10 inches or so- from the ground with hacking support and a chimera among other things; and no, the guy wasn't the table setter).
One rule for my tables I've picked up over the years is a couple of Los blockers on top of some of the buildings. Breaks up that rooftop parking lot effect and lets hard aros pick their angles far better. Would go so far as to say the default building of the game should be a structure with an s2 object on top.
Been loving these more tutorial-esque videos in addition to the battle reports. I can't believe you're managing to put them out in such quick succession. Between you and Perun i think Australians giving PowerPoint presentations is my new favourite UA-cam genre. On the topic of this video, what's your opinion on having height in deployment zones? My FLGS generally includes nothing more than one storey high, but I feel this limits variety in tables and means they all have a very similar shape. The reason they gave for it is to avoid dominant ARO positions, which i definitely appreciate, however it does dictate the rest of the table a lot.
I think you absolutely can have height in deployment zones but I think it needs to be managed carefully to avoid creating an overly dominant position. In the terrain set I used in this video, I'd almost never put the sniper tower in a deployment zone, as it's the highest terrain piece in the set. But in other videos you'll often see me use two-story terrain in deployment zones, provided it isn't any higher than terrain elsewhere on the table.
One thing you should really do to make a good table is to beak up the grid of your table by having sections on a different grid. For example, everything in the supplied image is on roughly a 20 degree angled grid. Feel free to have a section that's perpendicular to the table edge. This helps to break up the flow of sight lines.
I agree with the idea of having different parts of the table aligned/functioning differently. Something I talk about at the end is visual accessibility - just having everything at irregular angles hurts this, but you can get the best of both worlds by having sections of the table that are integrally visually cohesive/parseable but different to other parts of the table.
Great video! I have to fight the urge to build "real spaces" because they just don't make the most fun boards to play on. Sure they look great but just like you said a 4 story building is a pain to actually play around and it doesn't really bring any benefits other than the purely visual, and realistic straight open streets become deathtraps that no one wants to cross.
There's definitely an art to it. Once you know how to build a table that plays well, you start to get a bit more of an idea how to create 'real' spaces on the board. There's pretty much always still concessions to playability, but it is possible to reach a happy medium. Street tables for example - big open streets are rough, but with a bunch of traffic (parked, abandoned, ruined, or even positioned as if in motion but obviously static for the purposes of the game) they start working much better while still feeling 'real'.
Great video, I’m looking into getting into infinity but always hesitant because of the amount of terrain need. The infinity terrain packs in the video look to be a fairly affordable way to do it, how many of those did you used in this video / how many would you recommend I would need to cover a 48x48 board sufficiently?
This is five of the Corvus Belli terrain sets plus one expansion set. That's not exactly cheap if you buy it all new, but affordable if you can find it on sale - or, you could also very easily stretch it out a little. For example, starting with maybe three terrain sets plus an expansion, then spend some time looking into other shapes and elements to bulk the table out. Even just decently sized cardboard boxes or the old 'books under a tablecloth' approach will add up fast and give you enough terrain for the buildings to combine with and give you a good experience.
I am working diligently to setup interesting but 100% playable tables for infinity, what example for table planning can you give showing missions' objective location and common (therefore avoided) firelanes that tends towards?
So, this is something I didn't cover in the video, but an optional 'step zero' many people use is to first place objectives down and then build around them. However, and here's a hot take: I don't think you necessarily need to do that. Provided you've made the entire table relatively playable, I don't think it's a problem if an objective ends up say slightly forward or slightly back or on a rooftop (provided the rooftop isn't inaccessible). This makes deployment zone choice more interesting and avoids creating the predictable fire lanes you mentioned.
@@R0bertShepherd Yes this, but if a table is set for a day of play (at a tournament) and your going to have say firefight's 3 panoplies, capture and protect's beacons, and an objective room; then you have a number of mandatory locations. Tourneys DO NOT move tables between rounds. At least not here. How to deal with 1 setup for many objectives?
@@gregoryisom7741 generally I have two rules of thumb. The first is, as a TO, I tend to pick scenario lineups that make this a bit easier to manage. For example at CanCon this year (where I helped the TOs pick scenarios), we ran Acquisition, Unmasking and Supplies on day one. Nice and easy, setup was one and done at the beginning of the day. (However, this is much harder with objective rooms and makes including objective rooms in events a lot more difficult. I don't really have a solution for that.) Otherwise as noted above, I'm pretty laissez faire about just moving objectives for different scenarios to their best fit on an existing table even if it means putting them on roofs or in buildings sometimes. I check if they can be accessed at the Sanity Check stage, but usually it's pretty much ok.
I actually really like it in terms of its potential and the shapes etc it can form (as well as the aesthetics) but I do think you get less *volume* of terrain than in the N4 sets - which makes it less of an attractive buy for building a table just by itself. It's more a supplement now.
Yeah they are the discontinued Plasticraft COLOR ED range. If you want something similar there's a few MDF like options from BP Laser or Knight's of Dice off the top of my head. Same concept add height variation of about 2" or 3" enough for total cover of your a S2 model but not a S6/7 TAG etc.
Brilliant video, easy to digest and wealth of information to absorb.
Will definitely look at building my boards differently.
Had a game my buddy thought it was a good idea to put a crane platform on one deployment zone. This thing was literally 1/3 taller than anything else on the board. I won deployment and put a neurocinetics missile launcher +1B yuan ho in a Haris on top of it. My opponent was tabled before I got my first turn. Bad times. Terrain placement REALLY matters.
This was before the fireteam changes, but he has never made that mistake again.
Great video as always, both for new and more experienced players!
In addition to making sure there is room for TAGs and bikes, make sure to put terrain on the table edges so Parachutists can walk on in total cover.
Haven't really engaged with Infinity content much in the just few years but jeezy Rob this reminds me of Micky or my content from back over what 10 years ago now.
Well presented ofcourse your much more articulate then myself and you touched on every talking point I would have if I presented any of my tables.
Excluding I think tables have gotten a bit too dense in the Australian meta part of this I think it's because the card stock terrain both the newer and older folding ones have replaced larger MDF pieces so your seeing more small to medium things rather than large and small that was more predominant in the past.
Not a bad thing I'm sure you will agree especially when it comes to events and storage!
I've been looking forward to exactly this video. I'd love to hear more also, it's super helpful. The terrain really makes the game
The white table with red interactable elements is basically the idea of the video game Mirror's Edge :) You can look at screenshots and you can see that's exactly what they did to let the player know that they could interact with an element in some way. It is an awesome idea.
That's a great analogy - it was exactly like Mirror's edge.
Careful with these... power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely
I like to break things into 'tactical blobs,' usually 2-3 per table. Most of the table will often be streets/buildings, but a few places where the terrain asks questions is nice.
I usually like to have one open area, one hyper-dense area, and one weird area, then figure out a few good ways to cross the table.
Great content as usual ! If you want ideas for more topics, I would love to see some more listbuilding for tournaments. Lets say there is a 3-5 round tournament down in aussie-land with missions published. And you go through "fast" 1-3 factions list. With focus on mission/split. What are key models for the missions in the lists, and how would you split list for missions.
My 2 european cents:
- Make the chosing of the side a meaningful decision, so it's not "I win initiative, I go first for Alpha strike". Also, the sides should never be simmetrical (even if the same size pieces are used, alter the order). Adding an eagle's nest to one side within the DZ (but NOT in one corner of the table!) is ok as long as...
- Cut the lines of fire from side to side of the table somehow. Infinite height buildings near the center of the table are great for this, but the important thing is that you can't simply place Atalanta in an tower with a yudbot and call it mostly a day (because coordinated orders).
- Make sure a parachutist entering the enemy's DZ cannot rambo the whole enemy list. It is stupid to need such a rule, but the danger exists with any troop that can "spawn" in the enemy's DZ (but at the very least, AD troopers and Impersonators have to roll for it... Duroc can just walk in and say hi with smoke and other nastyness for Margot to start culling).
- Make sure the objectives of the mission are reachable for any faction. Looking a table and seeing two of the three consoles are on rooftops with enough space for both players to deploy infiltrators on them, but no stairs whatsoever (or stairs completely exposed to one player's AROs) is the same as laughing at those factions without autoinclude infiltrating specialists and/or tons of climbing plus (it actually happened to me; against nomads. Two morans with koalas short of a Move order on rooftops 25cm -that is, 10 inches or so- from the ground with hacking support and a chimera among other things; and no, the guy wasn't the table setter).
One rule for my tables I've picked up over the years is a couple of Los blockers on top of some of the buildings. Breaks up that rooftop parking lot effect and lets hard aros pick their angles far better. Would go so far as to say the default building of the game should be a structure with an s2 object on top.
Been loving these more tutorial-esque videos in addition to the battle reports. I can't believe you're managing to put them out in such quick succession. Between you and Perun i think Australians giving PowerPoint presentations is my new favourite UA-cam genre.
On the topic of this video, what's your opinion on having height in deployment zones? My FLGS generally includes nothing more than one storey high, but I feel this limits variety in tables and means they all have a very similar shape. The reason they gave for it is to avoid dominant ARO positions, which i definitely appreciate, however it does dictate the rest of the table a lot.
I think you absolutely can have height in deployment zones but I think it needs to be managed carefully to avoid creating an overly dominant position.
In the terrain set I used in this video, I'd almost never put the sniper tower in a deployment zone, as it's the highest terrain piece in the set. But in other videos you'll often see me use two-story terrain in deployment zones, provided it isn't any higher than terrain elsewhere on the table.
Another point on the angled deployment of terrain is that it prevents the Phoenix test issue by giving you those edges to dodge around
One thing you should really do to make a good table is to beak up the grid of your table by having sections on a different grid. For example, everything in the supplied image is on roughly a 20 degree angled grid. Feel free to have a section that's perpendicular to the table edge. This helps to break up the flow of sight lines.
I agree with the idea of having different parts of the table aligned/functioning differently. Something I talk about at the end is visual accessibility - just having everything at irregular angles hurts this, but you can get the best of both worlds by having sections of the table that are integrally visually cohesive/parseable but different to other parts of the table.
Really like this video. I thin as well as forward deployment, parashutist requires some concideration in table deployment. it is veery table dependent
Great video! I have to fight the urge to build "real spaces" because they just don't make the most fun boards to play on. Sure they look great but just like you said a 4 story building is a pain to actually play around and it doesn't really bring any benefits other than the purely visual, and realistic straight open streets become deathtraps that no one wants to cross.
There's definitely an art to it. Once you know how to build a table that plays well, you start to get a bit more of an idea how to create 'real' spaces on the board. There's pretty much always still concessions to playability, but it is possible to reach a happy medium.
Street tables for example - big open streets are rough, but with a bunch of traffic (parked, abandoned, ruined, or even positioned as if in motion but obviously static for the purposes of the game) they start working much better while still feeling 'real'.
"2fort effect" - instant classic
Great video, I’m looking into getting into infinity but always hesitant because of the amount of terrain need. The infinity terrain packs in the video look to be a fairly affordable way to do it, how many of those did you used in this video / how many would you recommend I would need to cover a 48x48 board sufficiently?
This is five of the Corvus Belli terrain sets plus one expansion set. That's not exactly cheap if you buy it all new, but affordable if you can find it on sale - or, you could also very easily stretch it out a little. For example, starting with maybe three terrain sets plus an expansion, then spend some time looking into other shapes and elements to bulk the table out. Even just decently sized cardboard boxes or the old 'books under a tablecloth' approach will add up fast and give you enough terrain for the buildings to combine with and give you a good experience.
Any chance we can get an estimate on how many Corvus Belli terrain sets were used for that game?
From memory a set comes with two large and two small buildings. So this is five sets plus the expansion set.
I am working diligently to setup interesting but 100% playable tables for infinity, what example for table planning can you give showing missions' objective location and common (therefore avoided) firelanes that tends towards?
So, this is something I didn't cover in the video, but an optional 'step zero' many people use is to first place objectives down and then build around them.
However, and here's a hot take: I don't think you necessarily need to do that. Provided you've made the entire table relatively playable, I don't think it's a problem if an objective ends up say slightly forward or slightly back or on a rooftop (provided the rooftop isn't inaccessible). This makes deployment zone choice more interesting and avoids creating the predictable fire lanes you mentioned.
@@R0bertShepherd Yes this, but if a table is set for a day of play (at a tournament) and your going to have say firefight's 3 panoplies, capture and protect's beacons, and an objective room; then you have a number of mandatory locations. Tourneys DO NOT move tables between rounds. At least not here. How to deal with 1 setup for many objectives?
@@gregoryisom7741 generally I have two rules of thumb. The first is, as a TO, I tend to pick scenario lineups that make this a bit easier to manage. For example at CanCon this year (where I helped the TOs pick scenarios), we ran Acquisition, Unmasking and Supplies on day one. Nice and easy, setup was one and done at the beginning of the day.
(However, this is much harder with objective rooms and makes including objective rooms in events a lot more difficult. I don't really have a solution for that.)
Otherwise as noted above, I'm pretty laissez faire about just moving objectives for different scenarios to their best fit on an existing table even if it means putting them on roofs or in buildings sometimes. I check if they can be accessed at the Sanity Check stage, but usually it's pretty much ok.
Looking at the new Santrap terrain. It seems like a step down.
I actually really like it in terms of its potential and the shapes etc it can form (as well as the aesthetics) but I do think you get less *volume* of terrain than in the N4 sets - which makes it less of an attractive buy for building a table just by itself. It's more a supplement now.
Where did u get that big flat building at the bottom?
Plastcraft games - who are unfortunately now out of business :(
Very usefull!!!
This is how you (and I) do it 🙂
I'm pretty sure your raised blocks are Plastcraft Games pieces.
Yeah they are the discontinued Plasticraft COLOR ED range.
If you want something similar there's a few MDF like options from BP Laser or Knight's of Dice off the top of my head. Same concept add height variation of about 2" or 3" enough for total cover of your a S2 model but not a S6/7 TAG etc.
Where is that big building that you use as a base for the large building from?