Built Up Terrain

[mhl67]

A few questions about built up terrain:

Is it intended that a built up area be entirely assumed to consist of built up terrain except for the most major roads, or is it intended to have basically regular blocks and buildings? The Alacazar scenario seemed to suggest the former but the language is ambiguous.

What exactly is the difference between the three built up areas? They seemed to basically be treated the same in actual gameplay.

A bit of a side note, but would it be possible to have some kind of table for all the different terrain types with their exact effects? I know there is the one focused on terrain movement but even then you have to go through the rulebook to figure out what counts as which class of terrain.

[Big Insect]

Hi there
The challenge with terrain is the that it depends greatly upon what scale you are playing the game in.
For the smaller scales - e.g. 2mm to 10mm (even 15mm) it is recommended that you treat a BUA as a single template, with (as you state) the major roads and/or railway lines/waterways breaking this up. Placing buildings on the template but have them capable of being moved to allow unit bases to fit into the templates. This approach allows for vehicles & guns etc. to move around in the BUA templated areas (but at a disadvantage). But to move on the demarcated roads as if they are in good going. Units on the roads will gain the benefit of the cover that the BUA offers, when shot at through a piece of BUA template, when on the roads, unless there is a clear LOS & LOF to them from the shooter (both within the BUA or from outside). It's a game mechanism to simulate the fact that both LOS & LOF inside the BUA will be compromised.

You can adopt a similar but more granular approach to larger towns/cities and put in all the minor streets on the templates and have the remaining BUA templated areas representing larger groups of buildings. This is the approach I'd suggest for the scenario you reference. By so doing, you are in effect restricting vehicles and guns etc. to moving only on the roads. With the BUA templated areas solely accessible to Infantry and Infantry Support weapons.

The 3rd approach mainly used for larger scales 15mm-28mm and is to actually put actual buildings on the table and then you treat each building as its own BUA, in effect, and that way you can have multiple floors and restricted access points as well. You can also bring in the construction material of the building(s) as well.
In the 1st 2 options above, the idea is to keep things simple, to aid game-flow.

The idea of a table to cover the terrain effects is an interesting one, and one we have considered previously. However, the challenge is around the different scales, as we'd potentially end up with 3 quite complex tables. It is something we can consider again, but it would be a way down the priority list at present as we have a lot of Cold War army lists to complete and the new FWCII on the drawing board.

Cheers
Mark