Matchup analysis › Terrain
Every board, measured
Across all 45 official layouts, a home objective can be held by its owner from a spot a median 0% of the enemy deployment zone can see, while taking that same objective off them means standing in front of a median 47.4% of it. The victory point is identical; the price is not, and the terrain sets it.
Mission cards tell you what an objective pays. They never tell you what it costs — and the cost is the terrain. Holding a marker means putting a unit somewhere the enemy can shoot it, and how exposed that unit is depends entirely on which of the three boards you drew.
So we measured it. All 45 official layouts were transcribed from their printed measurement sheets into real geometry, then measured with the same line-of-sight code the playable game runs. For every objective on every board, every legal spot within control range (3") is tested against every legal spot in each deployment zone, and the best spot is reported — because that is the one a real player looks for.
The numbers
Openness is 0-20: how exposed the average objective is even from its safest legal spot. Centre, hold your home and raid theirs are the share of the enemy deployment zone that can see that best spot.
| Pairing | Board | Deployment | Openness | Centre | Hold your home | Raid theirs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Disruption Mirror | 1 | bands on the short edges | 9/20 | 4.6% | 0% | 91.7% |
| Disruption Mirror | 2 | diagonal across the long axis | 5/20 | 4% | 0% | 34.1% |
| Disruption Mirror | 3 | diagonal across the short axis | 4/20 | 0.9% | 0% | 54.6% |
| Disruption vs Priority Assets | 1 | diagonal across the short axis | 3/20 | 6.9% | 0% | 15.1% |
| Disruption vs Priority Assets | 2 | diagonal across the long axis | 5/20 | 15% | 0% | 35.7% |
| Disruption vs Priority Assets | 3 | diagonal halves | 6/20 | 20.8% | 0% | 64.7% |
| Disruption vs Purge the Foe | 1 | diagonal halves | 7/20 | 20.7% | 0% | 66% |
| Disruption vs Purge the Foe | 2 | diagonal across the long axis | 2/20 | 3.9% | 0% | 14.2% |
| Disruption vs Purge the Foe | 3 | diagonal across the short axis | 5/20 | 8.1% | 0% | 46.2% |
| Disruption vs Reconnaissance | 1 | diagonal across the long axis | 5/20 | 13.8% | 0% | 38.3% |
| Disruption vs Reconnaissance | 2 | diagonal across the short axis | 6/20 | 5.8% | 0% | 61.5% |
| Disruption vs Reconnaissance | 3 | diagonal halves | 7/20 | 19% | 0% | 55.6% |
| Priority Assets Mirror | 1 | diagonal across the short axis | 4/20 | 5.1% | 0% | 44.6% |
| Priority Assets Mirror | 2 | diagonal across the long axis | 5/20 | 10% | 0% | 37.5% |
| Priority Assets Mirror | 3 | diagonal across the long axis | 4/20 | 13.7% | 0% | 40.5% |
| Priority Assets vs Reconnaissance | 1 | bands on the short edges | 5/20 | 4.6% | 0% | 38.5% |
| Priority Assets vs Reconnaissance | 2 | diagonal across the long axis | 4/20 | 1.6% | 0% | 26.7% |
| Priority Assets vs Reconnaissance | 3 | diagonal across the short axis | 4/20 | 2.6% | 0% | 27.8% |
| Purge the Foe Mirror | 1 | diagonal halves | 3/20 | — | 0% | 36% |
| Purge the Foe Mirror | 2 | diagonal across the long axis | 5/20 | — | 0% | 34.5% |
| Purge the Foe Mirror | 3 | diagonal across the short axis | 5/20 | 8.9% | 0% | 32% |
| Purge the Foe vs Priority Assets | 1 | diagonal across the short axis | 5/20 | 11.9% | 0% | 47.7% |
| Purge the Foe vs Priority Assets | 2 | diagonal halves | 5/20 | 9.1% | 0% | 54.3% |
| Purge the Foe vs Priority Assets | 3 | bands on the short edges | 7/20 | 7.6% | 0% | 75% |
| Purge the Foe vs Reconnaissance | 1 | bands on the short edges | 3/20 | 0% | 0% | 47.4% |
| Purge the Foe vs Reconnaissance | 2 | diagonal across the short axis | 8/20 | 44.3% | 0% | 65.6% |
| Purge the Foe vs Reconnaissance | 3 | diagonal across the long axis | 5/20 | 11.3% | 0% | 58% |
| Reconnaissance Mirror | 1 | diagonal across the short axis | 4/20 | 0.4% | 0% | 55.6% |
| Reconnaissance Mirror | 2 | bands on the short edges | 9/20 | 4.6% | 0% | 91.7% |
| Reconnaissance Mirror | 3 | diagonal across the long axis | 5/20 | 4.1% | 0% | 32.7% |
| Take and Hold Mirror | 1 | diagonal across the long axis | 6/20 | 1% | 0% | 84% |
| Take and Hold Mirror | 2 | diagonal across the short axis | 5/20 | 0.5% | 0% | 63.2% |
| Take and Hold Mirror | 3 | diagonal halves | 6/20 | 0.9% | 0% | 88.7% |
| Take and Hold vs Disruption | 1 | diagonal across the short axis | 3/20 | 0.4% | 0% | 21.1% |
| Take and Hold vs Disruption | 2 | bands on the short edges | 4/20 | 3.3% | 0% | 31.2% |
| Take and Hold vs Disruption | 3 | bands on the short edges | 6/20 | 0% | 0% | 76.5% |
| Take and Hold vs Priority Assets | 1 | bands on the short edges | 7/20 | 19.7% | 0% | 63.9% |
| Take and Hold vs Priority Assets | 2 | bands on the short edges | 3/20 | 0% | 0% | 41.1% |
| Take and Hold vs Priority Assets | 3 | diagonal across the short axis | 7/20 | 17.3% | 0% | 60.8% |
| Take and Hold vs Purge the Foe | 1 | diagonal across the short axis | 6/20 | 7.7% | 0% | 36.2% |
| Take and Hold vs Purge the Foe | 2 | diagonal halves | 5/20 | 8% | 0% | 56.6% |
| Take and Hold vs Purge the Foe | 3 | bands on the short edges | 5/20 | 2.4% | 0% | 42.7% |
| Take and Hold vs Reconnaissance | 1 | diagonal across the long axis | 3/20 | 0% | 0% | 20.7% |
| Take and Hold vs Reconnaissance | 2 | diagonal across the short axis | 5/20 | 0% | 0% | 55.8% |
| Take and Hold vs Reconnaissance | 3 | diagonal halves | 5/20 | 1% | 0% | 54.7% |
Where the territory line falls
Territory is not the deployment zone — it is the half of the board on your side of the dividing line, and several mission clauses pay double for markers or actions inside the opponent's half. Competitive discussion of this edition turns on terrain that just clips the far side, which is not something you can settle by looking at a printed sheet. Measured across all 45 boards:
- 25 objective markers sit within one inch of the territory line — close enough that which half they belong to is decided by millimetres of printing.
- 114 terrain areas straddle the line, a mean of 2.5 per board. A piece that crosses is worth more to whoever actions it from the far side.
- Every board in the pack is split-centre — two markers near the middle, not one. That is what turns "control more objectives than your opponent" into a four-to-three ask rather than a three-to-two one.
How to read it
- A low "raid theirs" number is an invitation. Cards that pay for enemy home objectives — Disruption above all — are worth far more on a board where the raid costs 30% exposure than on one where it costs 90%.
- Centres are almost always the safest ground. That is why cards paying for central objectives tend to look cheaper than they read on paper.
- Openness is a tempo number. A high-openness board punishes plans that must survive a full enemy turn before scoring, and rewards plans that grab at the end of your own.
What is and is not measured
- Policy-independent. Pure geometry and line of sight. No army lists, no AI, nothing to tune — the same inputs always give the same numbers.
- Upper bounds. Weapon range is not weighted, so "can see" is not "can hurt". These are ceilings on who can shoot you, not damage estimates.
- Transcribed, not hand-authored. Terrain comes from image analysis of the printed sheets. Outlines are traced and simplified, and a piece drawn as several torn fragments may read as several areas. Treat these as well-founded estimates of the drawn board.
- Self-checked by symmetry. Every official board is 180-degree rotationally symmetric, so an objective and its mirror must trade exposures. The residual gap is published per board in the data file and averages under 5 points.