My son and I often have odd discussions where we relate gaming to real life. As you do. When watching movies, he often says "Bet that guy has an extra attack or two wounds" when a villain is particularly tough or persistent - referring to ME:SBG where heroes (and arch villains) roll extra attack dice or have extra wounds. Or "looks like he passed his Fate roll" when a villain or hero re-emerges from certain death.
Often when we are out driving, we say stuff like "where would be the best place to set up a machine gun" or "if I wanted to cover this crossroads, I'd set up an anti-tank TOW here and a squad or so here. You could cover all the way to the bridge but fall back onto that reverse slope" Yeah, perhaps we are weird.
Something we have noticed a lot while doing this is how limited line of sight actually is. We live in a very flat part of Queensland, Australia. There are barely any hills and what we might call a hill wouldn't even count as one in any other part of the world.
However, there are plentiful slight depressions and undulations in the ground - easily enough to obscure a crouching human. In fact it's very difficult, even when looking along even a relatively straight road, to find many places where you truly have 300m+ line of sight.
The problem of the perfectly flat wargame table. Flat tables suck.
I always found artificially capped weapon ranges stupid. I remember the hard 24" rifle range in Bolt Action would barely cover the length of an Arnhem/Pegasus Bridge kit they sold. It LOOKS weird. Like, the model could probably pitch a grenade that far, in true scale. (It's why I avoid vehicles in any scale over 15mm). But this range capping may actually not be as stupid as it appears.
In reality, due to depressions in the ground, culverts, ditches, etc in real life terrain - things not properly modelled on our completely ironingboard-flat wargame table - might extremely restrict shooting ranges.
But limiting range on a perfectly flat table seems silly. After all, the target is sitting in the middle of a bowling green. It seems like bullets magically evaporate at 25" in mid air.
So - stop using a flat table draped in a sheet, dummy - make some proper 3D terrain!
Not many of us can store a special foam block base table where slopes, depressions etc are built in. Heck, where I live you can't even get the pink foam beloved of modellers. So making a proper 3D table will depressions, ditches, trenches etc recessed into the table is not always a viable option. (Especially if like me you play 10 genres and need lots of terrain for each).
So why not lots of hills as scatter terrain then?
This leads us to another problem. Or set of problems actually.
Wargame Hills Suck. Wargame RULES for Hills also suck.
Mesa/contour/wedding cake vs Dome/Slope
I'm going to classify the hill types I most often see as plateau-like "mes/contour map/tiered wedding cake" style with sharp edges/defined elevation bands like you see in some Westerns; and a more natural true "long sloped hill" or "single peak sloped dome aka boob style" which looks nicer (ahem) but is less defined game-wise and probably more tippy. Also models tilted 45d sideways on their flat bases looks a bit silly too..
Hopefully my artistic skills show the type of hills I mean....^
Determining who is "Uphill" is a pain
Usually there's a bonus for melee if you're uphill. But it isn't always clear who is actually uphill. If you have single minis and a wedding cake hill, it's probably straightforward enough. I.e. are you on the next contour or closer to the next contour = you are uphill.
But what if only part of your unit is uphill? You have a big square block of troops (al la rank/flank) or a messy blob/squad of scattered minis (Bolt Action/40K) and you+your opponent's units are angled almost parallel to the peak/ridge? (see above)
Actually while we are talking about elevation/uphill....
Line of Sight is a pain
Who can shoot whom? If you're not using true line of sight, it's a bit (a lot!) messy. I'd presume for sloped hills, the peak/ridgeline would block line of sight if neither unit is on the ridge itself. Buuuuut unless you mark it on with a pen or something (boo) the ridge is kinda just inferred. Not very clear cut for game purposes.
Even for wedding cake hills.... whilst you could presume the hill itself blocks line of sight through... what about between levels? (see below)
For natural sloped long ridge hills, you could say a ridgeline goes from one side of the hill to the other which makes it a bit more clearcut, blocking fire across it, but.... ......what if a hill has rounded ends?
Along the hill slope lengthwise should be obvious, but what about a "boob" shaped dome hill? Or around the end/tip of a long, rounded hill?
What about firing over your own units? (my favourite from the PC Total War series). How do you determine when it is feasible? How far away do you need to be from your ally? How steep the slope? Options like arcing fire vs direct fire adds complexity.
Cliffs are a pain. Model placement in general is annoying.
The steep bits are a pain for placing models no matter what the hill method. They either tip over (slopes) or can't balance well (wedding cakes)... or are just impassable terrain - which is a cop out (unless it truly is impassable and not just "a bit steep, fine for actual people but no-go to minis on bases").
So what are you telling us?
Anyway, I just wanted to vent. I don't have any good answers here (sorry!) but I was considering making some (sloped) vs (wedding cake) hills my The Forest project, and I didn't like either. My only conclusion are hills are more trouble than they are worth - both annoying to make (can't source pink foam), use (slopes/ledges are annoying with based minis) and play (most rules I own don't do hills - they either ignore hills or mention them very simply in passing) good luck if you don't love 1:1 skirmish+true line of sight/aka bending your face to the table all the time. I have a table permanently set up but tucked away to the side and it is a big pain. Maybe I need a laser pointer. Hmm maybe I need to get some "true line of sight" tips or just have a rant (I suspect I may have discussed this already as we're on... 100+ game design posts?).....
Apparently I promised to make my kids an ice cream spider so any further thoughts on hills/flat ground will have to wait...
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