Should I update my terrain for 40K's 11th edition?

As I write this we're a few months away from Warhammer 40,000's eleventh edition. In the Warhammer Community post describing the new edition's approach to terrain, they describe how different match ups will come with recommended battlefield layouts. This was hitherto something limited to Matched Play, but since that distinction is also being ditched in favour of a more unified player experience, it will now be the default setting for all players. Naturally there are now plenty of people thinking about getting some new acrylic or cardstock rectangles to slap down on their game mats.

I wish them all the best.

When the minimum table size (very reasonably) shrank from 72"x48" to 60"x40" it was treated as the table size, despite the word 'minimum' appearing in black and white right there in the rules. Similarly, even in the post advertising the new rules, the WarCom team said "if you are playing a casual game with friends, you are welcome to set up your terrain in any way you like." Which is good, because the terrain layouts they showed off in the post look very well balanced on a tactical level, but utterly bizarre so far as believable environments go.

In Matched Play it makes sense to try to produce a balanced layout, but this can often end up looking less like a lived-in place and more like a paintball arena. I would rather have mid or even bad game balance so long as I can have an immersive battlefield. If there are terrible balance problems with the layout, then that's an interesting challenge. I almost wonder if a fun approach might be to set up the terrain and determine deployment zones, and after that, the players select their army lists so that they can try to plan for the challenges of this specific battlefield.

But whether or not one wishes to treat a default setting as the be-all and end-all, there's a more practical reason I won't be ensuring my terrain is in line with the new 40K rules, and that is the shelf life of an edition of 40K. At present this appears to be three years.

I still use terrain I made twenty years ago.

I am making new terrain right now, but I am not thinking about the new rules because this terrain will outlast them. Ultimately the task is to create cool terrain, and then figure out how best to use it in the current rules. If you have to adapt things a bit, or discuss it with your opponent before you play, then good! This kind of relaxed, collaborative approach is why we play tabletop games as opposed to more rigid board games or videogames. All of this is not to denigrate 11th edition; what we've read so far seems promising, and I'm eager to see how it all fits together.

It would of course be poor form to mention that I'm making new terrain right now and then hide said artifice under a bushel. The current project is more progress on the giant Sector Imperialis buildings I wrote about back in November. They've now had rubble and primer added to them, so all that remains is a weekend of painting with the crew of Deep Space Nein. Currently that's scheduled for the end of May.

The large building on the right of this image is almost tailor made to not work in any official ruleset. It's effectively two ruins at the ground level, but becomes one single piece by the time you reach the top.

We've cut the doors out in a number of places, but in each instance, the door is never far from its frame, even if it's half-buried by rubble. In other places we've got doors ajar or even fully open, as shown in the previous image.

These buildings reach 15" up from ground level, giving the table more verticality than we're used to.

This small anteroom is still big enough to fit multiple units.

There will eventually be a proper tutorial on how we're doing the basing for these ruins, but in short, it's a layer of styrene sheet reinforced with lengths of sprue. We glue large chunks of ruined building onto that, then heap a paper-based modelling compound over the top to create bulk. After that, the surface has chunks of broken plaster, then finer grit and sand over the top of that. The whole thing is sealed with a huge amount of watered down PVA glue. I primed it with Mechanicus Standard Grey followed by a more random application of Zandri Dust.

The main thing that strikes me at this stage is that it would be good to have more loose sections of rubble we can put around the outside of the ruins. We couldn't have had those glued to the buildings as they're already so big that storage would have become impossible. Hopefully I can find the time to make some of this scatter/rubble before the end of next month, so we can get it all painted up in one hit.

On the Chapel project, I achieved a higher level of fidelity with the rubble at the cost of time. With three large buildings to handle this time around, that wasn't a viable approach. Given how much quicker this was, I'm happy with the effort to reward ratio. The end of May can't come fast enough.