Terrain Spacing

I'm not sure if I should put this here or in the Gameplay section.... but I'm curious as to what people find is a good amount of spacing between buildings/terrain when they play? We've always been really bad about setting up terrain for our games leaving large gaps (probably 6" or more) between all the buildings quite often. Since our terrain is going to be attached to modular blocks, sometimes with multiple buildings per block, I want to get a good idea of good spacing for playing before we build the terrain for our table (see my sig). Is 2" between buildings too small of an area? I was thinking that we should maybe shoot for leaving 2-4" gaps for the most part, and avoid anything smaller or larger than that.

So, opinions from people who have played games packed full of terrain?

depends on what your wantig to do,

Anything from 3inches roughly up to 7inches i think is fine and making a large town square area with lower terrain made of carts, stalls a fountain etc adds more character. not only that but the varations keep the city feeling mor elifelike in my opinion, if their all 2 inches or 6 inches it does look bit same old.

Yeah, we're definitely going to have a variety of terrain. We've already got a well piece for the "town square".

So, 3" you say? We'll definitely try that out. That sounds about right. 7" is closer to what we used to have, and I think that was a bit too open... it lead to a lot of charging straight to the other team without using any terrain for climbing, jumping, diving, etc.

Personally, I like to set up my terrain tight, with small alleys and such - after all, it's Mordheim, a city and not a village with lots of open spaces between the building. I try to set up some streets, junctions etc. and of course a town square and a graveyard, to break it up
Conclusion: a mix of open and tightly packed areas is in my opinion a great set up as it allows for many tactical aspects. Plus, shooting is not as powerful anymore.

Even though, we noticed at the Amsterdam meeting that lots of people still avoid actually using the terrain, like entering buildings, as it is often easier (and faster) just to walk around them to find your opponent. Therefore, we placed some wyrdstone counters (regardless of the scenario) in them and added random events upon entering a building for the first time, and it was quite a lot of fun (and contributed to the 4 and a half hour game (or was it 3? never mind, it took ages), even though we were only 3 players )

I live the third dimension of height in Mordheim. So we have lots of buildings with multiple levels. We also have tons of ladders and bridges connecting everthing. That way if you move into the upper levels you still have plenty of options of getting across the battle field. And I like to encourage the use of all the cool buildings I used so whenever it's my turn to place an objective it's always in the tallest most difficult place to get. This helps to inspire us to use the terrain more. Since we like to have lots of ladders and bridges it usually means the buildings are close together 2"-4" It can make it difficult to actually move your models around, we are always knocking over ladders but that's ok, some times a bit of poster tack will keep things in place. I've always seen Mordheim as a crowded city so that's how I like to play, [/ramble]

Yeh i think we need to do something to make us use the buildings, because we rarely used them and just ran strait to h2h, and games ended in like a half hour to a hour usually depending on the number of players...

having random encounters or putting shards on the roof would help i imagine...

For me, my buildings are all free standing, without blocks. That way I'm not bound by the size of the base. I like it tight myself, keeping the buildings close in together. Gives it a nice feel too, small alleys, overhanging buildings, lots of planks from window to window to create a rooftop street sustem even.

But again, it depends on what you're after. That's when I play Mordheim (most of my games). Sometimes, if there's a keep, or EiF game, we'll space it out a little more. But I don't find those games nearly as enjoyable.

I like tight buildings as you get that close-in knife fighting feel when warriors are squeezing in to the spaces and alleys to kill each other and it makes shooting far more tactical as warriors with ranged weapons need to do some fancy footwork to find gaps and clear lines of sight.

My group figured out quickly that there should be no alleys in Mordheim narrower than a gamer's hand . So our narrowest gaps are roughly 3 inches. We tried playing the "Writing on the Wall" scenario where the focal point is a 2" wide alley, and that was just a miserable experience. More time was spent removing and replacing terrain than was spent actually playing the game.

I'm with Ash on the use of the third dimension!

We set up our terrain with both wide roads and narrow allies, sometimes open squares and impassable blocks of several buildings as well!

Always, always use lots of ladders - if somewhere is not accessible from the ground by ladder it has to be accessible from another building that is accessible from the ground by ladder.We have made tons of walk-ways, gang-planks and ladders!

Thanks for the suggestions.

WarbossKurgan: Looks like we're gonna have to get to work on some ladders. I hadn't thought about it before, but we had plenty of places that were only accessible by climbing walls.

Identity: The largest gap you can jump across is 3". I would think that having a lot of 3" gaps would help with people actually using the full 3D terrain.

Ethlorien: You echoed my thoughts exactly.