HOW WE PLAY TERRAIN, LINE OF SIGHT AND COVER AT NEWCASTLE LEGION
Some of this stuff comes from the rule book, some from forums and some I actually wrote myself! In determining how the rules should be interpreted I have used the guideline of trying to keep things as consistent and simple as possible whilst remembering that Epic Armageddon is quite an abstract ruleset.
Q: How do Lines of Fire work?
A: The Line of Fire is a straight line drawn from the shooting unit to one unit in the target formation. The line of fire is blocked by terrain features such as buildings, hills, woods, etc. Weapons higher up (on hills and multi-level hills) can often see over any terrain that is lower down. Buildings, rubble, woods, fortifications and the like don’t block the Line of Fire to or from units that are in the terrain itself unless the line of fire passes through more than 10cm of the terrain feature (ie, you can shoot 10cm into a terrain feature, but the line of fire is still blocked to units on the other side).
If you want to check a difficult line of sight between two units, all you need to do is bend over and get a model’s eye view to see if they are in each other’s Line of Fire. Models will be:
- concealed - cannot have Lines of Fire drawn to any sides of them, cannot be directly fired at.
- partially concealed - cannot have Lines of Fire drawn to both sides of them, -1 to hit.
- not concealed - can have Lines of Fire drawn to both sides of them, no effect.
Q: What are the exact dimensions of a terrain piece?
A: All terrain pieces are assumed to cover the whole base of the terrain piece and are infinitely high for ground units. The only exception to this are multi-layered hills where the first layer is usually declared as blocking Line of Fire for normal ground units (ie not War Engines)and the second layer is blocking to all ground units.
Q: When is a unit in cover? A fraction of the model, more than half, fully?
A: For infantry, they can gain concealment to-hit benefit from simply touching an AV, so it makes sense that would be the standard for claiming the to-hit penalty for any terrain. As long as they touch the terrain, they can claim the benefits. To claim a cover save, infantry units must be partially within the terrain.
For vehicle models, they must at least touch the terrain and take a dangerous terrain check (if the terrain type requires it), and can then claim the cover benefits, i.e. no cover benefits without taking the terrain penalty. For terrain that has no effect on vehicles but might provide cover (and to remain consistent with infantry and dangerous terrain for vehicles) a vehicle touching the cover can claim the benefit.
Q: How does a city block work?
A: A city block will follow all normal terrain rules and will offer a building save but will act as a road for movement. Building are not required to be moved (but may be) to allow units to move through and may be placed on top of the buildings if needed.
Q: We are using a unique piece of terrain which these guidelines don’t make sense for. What should we do?
A: As always, use the 5 minute warmup to define exactly how each piece of terrain works. For instance you might like to agree that a piece of terrain has True Line Of Sight or that a piece does not totally block Lines of Fire from one side to the other and only gives a partially concealed modifier when shooting through it.