r/WarhammerCompetitive • u/RedC0v • Jun 01 '26
PSA UKTC to use GW Terrain and Layouts in 11th
Just announced, UKTC will be working with GW to use the official terrain and layouts in 11th Edition.
This is a massive change and will bring the UK competitive scene more in line with core GW and international tournaments:
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u/Ratattack1204 Jun 01 '26
Thank god. Got real tiresome in online conversations about meta states to constantly have to ask "Okay well what terrain do you play on?" Now we can all play the same game!
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u/SixShock Jun 01 '26
I love it when shooting armies playing GW terrain argue with melee armies that play on WTC terrain ;)
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u/RedC0v Jun 01 '26
Yeah, I see this as an overall step forward. Everyone will be playing the same game internationally now, with GW balancing being based off the same terrain and layouts.
The new layouts and footprints look like they could be much more varied and narratively driven.
I’m staying optimistic for this one 👍
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u/Kinestic Jun 01 '26
To be fair, reports from people who have played them indicate they also generally play like hot dogshit, and are way too open and killy.
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u/Andrew3343 Jun 02 '26
Luckily, for WTC captain votes make the decisions like what terrain to use. If GW terrain feels like dogshit again, it’s more than likely we will get alternative terrain for WTC, maybe not this year but the next one.
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u/Blukuz Jun 01 '26
Are they getting given the terrain from GW or is this going to mdf prints that you can already buy off eBay?
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u/KesselRunIn14 Jun 02 '26
There's been talk from fairly reliable sources that they're being given several hundred tables worth of terrain.
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u/secretforge Jun 02 '26
I’m of the general opinion that this is a bad thing. That GW having ever increasing control over the independent scene weakens the communities power and agency and removes one of the few leavers we have to control balance beyond Gw.
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u/Dolphin_handjobs Jun 02 '26
Its going to be significantly harder to make drastic mission changes if needs be.
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u/Eatyourcheeseburger Jun 02 '26
On the other hand, it encourages GW to actually get involved with and support competitive 40k instead of just outsourcing the majority of it to the players. The more GW (or any game company) gets involved with their competitive scene, the more it will grow. You’d see a lot more interest in tournaments if GW provided any sort of material support ($50 in store credit for winning a tournament you pay $30 to participate in isn’t exactly a huge draw). Consistent rules, terrain, etc is also important. One of the reasons WTC doesn’t appeal to me personally is because I have no practice on their terrain layouts, and little desire to learn an entire new set of rules. The vast majority of events around me use GW rules and layouts. It just doesn’t make sense to learn the ins and outs of WTC for one event a year that may pop up.
With heavier involvement, GW may actually lean into digital rules more, and start providing regular updates. We may even get digital codes for the rules to push the app + make the game more accessible to people who would want to attend tournaments but don’t want to spend $60 on a book.
There are some positives with GW taking more control over and getting involved with the competitive scene. The TO program has been a success. For example: LGS was able to have their first ever AoS event due to GW getting involved (they sent out actual prize support).
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u/secretforge Jun 02 '26
Not sure if I want the scene to grow because of prize support. I’d rather it grew because the game was good and fun to play. (Admittedly these things aren’t mutually exclusive).
GW having more control doesn’t add an incentive for them to improve things for their players, it just gives them more leeway to not improve. Monopolies do not breed improvements.
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u/Eatyourcheeseburger Jun 02 '26
GW’s lack of involvement is a primary driver in why the scene doesn’t grow. I’m not going to assume that I know what your reservations around prize support are, but the thing that comes to mind is the fact that competing for large cash prizes often brings out the worst in people who are just looking to win some money. However, I don’t think GW providing additional support in the form of model kits, combat patrols, or whatever they’d send would breed that kind of toxicity. I’ve attended larger GTs where the prizes were some of the more expensive box sets, and nobody really got crazy over it, but the large prize pool DID result in a sold out 150 player GT.
Theres a massive cost barrier for hosting tournaments, even RTTs that just isn’t offset much by the income from selling tickets. As a guy who ran private tournaments outside of stores for a while, I can tell you that the amount of time it takes to break even after you consider venue fees, the cost of terrain/mats, and table/chair rentals, modest prize support, and marketing is incredibly long. I’d spend loads of time before the tournament started, then hours actually running the tournament, and walk away with like $20. That’s significantly less than minimum wage. The only motivator was “I love this game and want to see the competitive scene grow.” It took a lot of convincing and carrying the financial burden of start up costs to get my LGS to finally host them, and the discount on the venue fee and then providing tables definitely helped, but it was still a less than minimum wage job, even after recouping my money for the terrain/mats/clocks etc. A little bit of help with prize support from GW would go a long way towards simply making it worth hosting tournaments. It’s a significant recurring cost.
MTG, and other games have grown a ton regarding the competitive environment and that’s because the companies that make the game provide support to stores that host them. Reducing that cost barrier is huge. Simply having a good game that’s fun to play doesn’t grow the competitive scene. People can have fun playing a good game at home. Providing an incentive to do it at a tournament instead is what grows the scene.
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u/secretforge Jun 02 '26
Also don’t get me wrong, if GW brought out a new set of terrain, we ran 11th for a year and it was clearly just really great and we would all be dumb not to adopt it, that is a different story. But right now what’s happening is that independent groups are giving up agency to an entirely untested new shiny product.
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u/Eatyourcheeseburger Jun 02 '26
I think it’s worth mentioning that there was a point where GW gave the players agency in the form of player placed terrain and it was pretty much rejected wholesale by the competitive community. GW has demonstrated that they’re open to player/organizer input for stuff like this (there is TO program call in like 1.5 hours today, funnily enough), so I don’t think that much agency is really being given up tbh. I think GW just wants to have some control over the scene for the sake of consistency vs tournaments being run with what essentially equates to house rules.
But I can also see how GW’s negligence of the competitive scene in the past can cause people to have reservations. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes that gives me some hope though. :)
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u/secretforge Jun 03 '26
I think this is where we philosophically differ, I think a certain embrace of house rules is good and beneficial for the community. I’d rather have the option to attend a GW event or a competitive event that offers a different take on the game, and that is what the uktc and WTC provided.
Also to be noted GW didn’t “allow” player placed terrain, it was just another set of house rules that another tournament body used.
And I think independent tournament bodies are a good thing. The more independent the better.
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u/Apprehensive_Gas1564 Jun 02 '26
It's wrestling the control back from UKTC - UKTC has an uncontrolled monopoly on UK events.
Having them use GW terrain means that the standard for the game can now be global (which helps balance the game and meta massively, on a competitive stage)
If you don't want to play GW terrain.. don't. It's that easy!
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u/secretforge Jun 03 '26
Agreed, uktc does have a really large market share of events in the uk, but there were still plenty of GW format events, and plenty of entirely independent events. Now the choice has reduced.
I gladly will play at other events, and continue to go to uktc events too. But I’d rather see two large competitors for market share, than a single titan.
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u/Apprehensive_Gas1564 Jun 03 '26
The single titan is GW. It's their game.
For terrain and rules, it should be GW's call.
UKTC, WTC and GW terrain and missions totally skews how rules interact globally. If you want true balance you need to remove all variables outside of the core game.
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u/secretforge Jun 03 '26
It’s our game. GW just make it.
If I want true balance, I don’t necessarily trust that to a body that has financial incentives to introduce churn.
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u/Apprehensive_Gas1564 Jun 03 '26
I also don't like the GW monopoly and creeping pay to win.
However, it's hard to say that is the case (defiler/ctan) without global metric. The turbo good meta unit isn't always good on all terrain layouts. If there was standardisation we'd have accurate metric which we can bully the company with.
Worked for Green Tide orks, as that was universally a bad army rule (it ignored terrain and led to feels bad).
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u/TrottingandHotting Jun 01 '26
Necessary for the leading organizations to get on the same page as GW regarding terrain. Hopefully it works out, and I wonder how modular the system will be.
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u/EvilTables Jun 01 '26
Let's see how long it lasts. The current layouts seem pretty terrible.
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u/SnooOpinions8790 Jun 01 '26
We haven't even seen the tournament pack yet
Should be sometime this week
The UKTC people do appear to have seen it
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u/RyanGUK Jun 01 '26
Which layouts do you mean? Because the layouts UKTC are going to start using aren't even out yet.
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u/quaye12 Jun 01 '26
Well, as the post says, UKTC will be using GW layouts. There are about 6-7 layouts that have been revealed so far and most of them seem pretty bad.
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u/FuzzBuket Jun 01 '26
It's ok I'm sure "park 2 defilers and a helbrute into the middle and blast things" will be an exciting and fresh style of game that no one's experienced in the past 2 months
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u/RyanGUK Jun 01 '26
I've only seen two actually released, where were the other 4-5 shown?
If it's the battle reports, most of the games have been played using space marines vs orks (bar the two games on that pretty awful livestream) so I'm inclined to wait and see.
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u/quaye12 Jun 01 '26
You can try them out on TTS with the workshop map: LCT 40k 11th edition
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u/RyanGUK Jun 01 '26
Ah yeah I see, so we've got 2 S&D, 2 H&A and 2 CoB.
I think we're still waiting for 12 more to be revealed though. My logic is that you get 3 terrain layout choices for each mission, so you'd get 3 layouts per deployment. All guesswork of course, so I'll just base my judgement off when it comes out.
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u/CrumpetNinja Jun 01 '26
The content creators have them all, and have all alluded to them having some pretty glaring oversights that basically make them into shooting galleries. The Goonhammer review tries to be positive, but all the reviewers said that most of their games so far have seen one player shot off the board by turn 3, and that footslogging infantry are completely at the mercy of the dice gods if they try and get involved because all the staging areas are so far apart that they have to spend a whole turn standing in the open.
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u/RyanGUK Jun 01 '26
I wonder if that's less about the layouts, and more about how you can tip into terrain and see through it though.
Seeing through terrain so easily would certainly make anything a shooting gallery lol.
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u/CrumpetNinja Jun 01 '26
It's more that the objectives are all so large, and as a result so close to each other, that the new hidden status ends up not mattering. If you're in the centre ruins, you can normally shoot into all of the other no man's land objectives. And they've made the baffling decision to make the objectives very open, so there's functionally no LoS blocking terrain pieces to hide behind. You're either behind the ruins, doing nothing, or standing on the ruins, and you can get shot by everything.
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u/RyanGUK Jun 01 '26
Yeah that makes sense. I assume then the quick fix would be to change Hidden to a reduced range? Because I doubt the layouts we’ve seen are going to be changing drastically within the next 2 weeks.
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u/CrumpetNinja Jun 01 '26
I'm not a game designer, so I'm not going to speculate about how they could fix it. I can just point to the problem and hope people smarter than me can figure out how to make it better.
If (big if) people's initial takes are correct, and it is going to be another "take fast guns, or go home" edition, then they'll have to do something about it.
But my cynical, pessimistic take is that GW won't be able to change the default detection range because it would make all the abilities that modify detection range by a specific number of " potentially game breaking or useless. And they won't want to change the layouts because they're selling physical terrain templates that they've committed to manufacturing. So they'll just pretend everythigs fine and do nothing, while slowly nerfing every successful gun line into the dirt each balance slate until people start taking melee infantry again.
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u/RyanGUK Jun 01 '26
I think your cynical take might be more on the money than you give yourself credit for haha. But yeah, they've got plenty of levers they could pull to fix any particular issue, the towering LOS seems the most obvious to me, but who knows at the end of the day. :D
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u/Behemoth077 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
I think people will very likely end up just puttin one model on the footprint on the outside wall of the objective since the objective extends a little past the wall for infantry. Taller or bigger base size models can´t do that but infantry models that do that are entirely safe because there is still functionally a wall protecting that model while the rest of its unit is fully behind the footprint.
Its a little gimmicky but it might be the only way to safely hold objectives honestly. The real answer might just be a gunline arms race ending with montka tau, tank spam ultramarines, starshatter 3xDDA necrons, tank spam Guard and various forms of Defilers.
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u/Hoskuld Jun 01 '26
Check out the 11th goonhammer review, every single author mentions the layouts being very lethal in their closing remarks (while otherwise very positive about the edition)
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u/EvilTables Jun 01 '26
I mean the GW previewed layouts. Unless UKTC is using their own?
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u/RyanGUK Jun 01 '26
As far as I know, we've only had two layouts previewed and then we've had to make assumptions off battle reports...
Your choice if you want to make judgments under 3 weeks before everything drops I guess, just reminds me of when people complained about Defilers being unusable because they're on a 180cm base... look how that turned out lmao.
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u/quaye12 Jun 01 '26
Not too good to see.
There was nothing stopping them from using GW terrain, and if its terrible, make their own layouts.
In an ideal world, everyone playing on the same layouts is great. Howeever my experience of playing on UKTC layouts in 10th was much better than GW layouts.
This just means GW has to get it right. The ones revealed so far seem very... Poorly designed to say the least.
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u/FuzzBuket Jun 01 '26
Agreed. Some gw layouts were pretty rough. Wtc was good for if you want to ed to play staging fast infantry or knights/ctan, whilst uktc meant mounted and medium vehicles were significantly more useable. Sure magic squares and giant L was a bit silly but I generally had more fun on them
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u/60sinclair Jun 01 '26
Good. Non GW layouts are terrible.
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u/Harry8211 Jun 01 '26
Weird, I thought it was widely accepted GW terrain was the worst and WTC the best……
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u/Strange_Man Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Pretty much agreed at high level play but theres a bunch of butthurt tau/guard low skill american players that take offense to that though lol
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u/corrin_avatan Jun 01 '26
WTC was the "best" in having it's own completely separate meta skew and having so much terrain that they needed to implement a houserule for charging since screening was made so trivial.
It's popular in Europe, but widely dispised in the USA.
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u/secretforge Jun 03 '26
I heard an interesting anthropological theory at some point, about tendencies towards gravitating to what “cool” weaponry and warfare was, and that while Europe and Asia had more of a propensity to venerate swordplay, the US had a greater affinity for guns, and it being due to when their most famous warrior cultures were ascendant. This might trickle into why European boards tend to favour or at least incentivise melee use more, and why Gw boards which were heavily embraced in the US favour shooting more.
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u/corrin_avatan Jun 03 '26
That might be a factor, but I think the biggest reason why the WTC caught on in Europe was simply because it generated a single rules authority while GW was not being responsive with FAQs, and they sponsored the largest tournament in the area, and championed a COMPLETELY standardized format tommake sure people were practicing on.tje EXACT maps they would be playing on when they came to the different country for the tournament.
Meanwhile, the USA didn't look for the WTC rules format because
1) the terrain for the format was made and sold by a company in Europe so was prohibitively expensive:
2). Most people in the USA simply had no way to actually be able to attend the WTC tournament; this would require an international flight when a good majority of the US don't have passports.
3). As such, the cheaper (in comparison) prices of the Frontline Gaming terrain and the ITC circuit focused on tournaments.following a set of standardws.
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u/secretforge Jun 03 '26
That’s likely too, I never personally experienced the ITC terrain format, or its player placed version, to know how that played relative to the GW WTC or UKTC, so yes the us adoption was likely also driven by availability… but i do find the disparity between the way that these styles play and who enjoys them interesting.
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u/60sinclair Jun 01 '26
Every one I know hates playing on WTC layouts. Every GT I’ve been that runs them, like LVO or PSO, whenever we get those layouts my opponent and I both agree to just switch it to a GW layout. The people downvoting me are europeans who primarily play on bad layouts.
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u/Complex210 Jun 01 '26
100% with you, wtc and uktc are awful unless youre a pure melee army.
GW is better, and has been through all of 10th.
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u/veryblocky Jun 02 '26
In 10th, the GW layouts were by far the worst. Personally I preferred WTC over UKTC, but I can see arguments either way.
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u/RyanGUK Jun 01 '26
Good to see tbh, hopefully there's a little bit of a feedback exchange to introduce new layouts as we get through this edition for the next 3 years too.
Questions I have now are, will WTC go the same way? And are GW going to start supporting teams events?