The one thing that Horus possesses above any of his brothers, is that he never loses. His is the ability to turn a setback into an advantage, to play any hand and win. To escape his limits.
Going round and round with my problems with odd tile sizes and other things and the overall design of my SH3D board this weekend (which has been utterly unproductive otherwise - I can't even find my clippers) it occured to me that one thing I hadn't considered was inflating the tile size to a more workable unit, one which would also handily match the grid on the other side of the movement tray - from 46.7mm up to 50mm. Now compared to the "natural" SH cardstock grid of 31mm (1mm lines between tiles) that's a huge increase - and to be sure big missions might have to happen on the deck not the dining table - but if I'm already committed to the city of death tiles (which I probably am) it's only adding another 6%. Workable.
Now here's where the opportunity part comes in. A 50mm tile will happily accommodate two standard infantry bases waving arms and big guns around as much as they like.
Doesn't sound like much. Sounds pretty bloody obvious actually. Banal even. But two models on the same square? Think about the possibilities that adds for maybe playing guardsmen in the game. Guardsmen just don't work very well in space hulk with any ruleset which tries to reflect how very not-terminators they are. Trust me on this, I've written enough home brew to know that SH is very well engineered game, but also very tightly engineered. The average kill distance of a storm bolter on overwatch is built into the balance of the maps. So is the limited number of marines. Swamping the board with too many underpowered models just bogs things down. The guardsmen block each other all the time and they don't have the guns for the point men to be effective anyway.
But if I was to say let two guardsmen occupy a tile then not only can we avoid blocking problems, we can also double up on firepower at the point. Cinematically (the best justification for any games designer imho) I can totally see lines of guards down the corridor wall, bringing a heavy weapon up from the rear. I can see two guards staring at the crossroads ahead down their gunsights. Maybe they're back to back on overwatch. A lot of things to think about there from a games designer point of view.
And that leads me onto thinking about other things I can do with smaller bases in a big base world. Remember the ventilation shaft missions from WD around SHv2? Remember the collapsed corridor from Warhammer Quest?
What if I could do something like this, a section which only smaller bases could move through:
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| From another 3D head... |