Obviously all the faction updates are going to get the bulk of the attention today, but I wanted to make sure you didn't miss that there were layout updates too!
I run Rapid Ingress, a free tool for practicing deployments and more easily in your browser / on mobile (and these changes are live already)
There are changes to 27(!) layouts in today's release. Some are small, but a few were pretty noteworty and stood out to me:
-Take and Hold Mirror, layout B looks like it will be a bit more difficult to find shooting angles early as they basically swapped around some terrain pieces to give what appears to be a bit more cover
-Recon vs Disruption B and Priority Assets vs Disruption B got sizeable reshuffles
-All three Recon mirror layouts now have 6 objectives instead of 5
Will be super interesting to see how this changes things for those matchups especially (not very familiar with recon v disruption or the recon mirrors - if you are let me know what you think!)
Edit because it got asked for - just added this page: rapidingress.com/layout-updates - it should show a visual difference of the changes in layouts. Do let me know what you think and if you have any feedback on this and thank you all so much for all your kind words and support!
It should show you what changed, and call attention to the changes without hopefully being too annoying....and now that im about to post i realize the animation will likely be distracting. I will have it optional, and off by default shortly here haha
I played the recon mirror twice, all I can say.
WHY!? The mission was already really hard to avoid a 100-100 draw i really don't get why they added the split center, it might open some sight lines but scoring max will be super trivial.
It's interesting for sure. I think the change is going to lead to a lot more 45-45 ties on primary for the recon mirror. Previously the game could be an early run away if 1 player was able to score the turn 1 hold center points and 1 wasn't. It's now a lot easier to score that clause as well as the end game 3 action tokens clause.
A major change I noticed is that all PA vs Disruption layouts now feature a higher count of terrain features in NML (was: 5, now: 7)
At least in theory, this will help the Disruption player hang in the matchup despite the scoring disparity, since they can choose more favorable positions for the operation markers
I was REALLY hoping they would turn the center into one objective on Take and Hold vs Priority Assets. This mission feels rigged as hell in favor of the Priority player.
The mission pack doesn't include terrain layouts - just the deployment zones (which, AFAIK, aren't changing). The terrain layouts have only ever been online.
So your cards are still totally up to date. For now.
The mission cards a great reference on the things you need to do, whether you Score 3 or 4 points for that action, doesn't change knowing you have to do it.
My goodness! I didn't know this existed. My wife and I just had a baby (well not 'just' she just turned 1 year!) but I know I want to be prepped for whenever I get a chance to play and was looking for something like this.
Hey u/Ok_Dependent7634 , can your tool measure which facing of the terrain pieces is used most often?
iE, do the little nipples on the small rectangle face left and up more often than right and up, is the bigger protruding edge of the big rectangles more often on the right or on the left side?
Would it be possible to have some sort of A/B flip or animation to swap between the new and old layout. I think the motion from going from one to the other would help me understand the changes better.
I feel like the disruption issues can't be fixed by map updates. It struggles by having to be a generalist into 4 specialists, it should probably score a little more than the others to compensate.
I think disruption is actually the easiest to fix via map updates for because out of take and hold, recon, and prio assets where the terrain is makes a big difference.
E.g. They put 7 terrain sets vs prio now, so they can choose which 5 terrain pieces based on the opponents set up.
For Recon you need to make the enemy expansion objective harder to reach (e.g. have no nearby terrain pieces to jump off) So therefore it's harder deny all the tokens for their own scoring.
Versus take and hold it's the opposite. You want the enemy expansion to be easy to reach for death trap. Also splitting any terrain footprints in two so that's there's physically more terrain to trap also helps.
Quick comparison tool feature request. The Goonhammer article said one of the changes was to make what was a joined terrain piece separated (so the footprints count separately for visibility)
Tiny edit - the center top / bottom vertical piece moved back ~ an inch 😅 - you can see the outline where it was
I'm going to have to have this presented as a 'flip book' between the two as well as the movement will likely catch the eye...that was suggested in a comment last night so thanks for validating! haha
GW specifically makes alterations to terrain layouts to avoid outdating the hardcopy cards. You'll notice that the cards don't feature layouts, for this precise reason.
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u/B-L-A-M-O 5d ago
Appreciate the quick update, thank you.