Movement trays

[hendrik]

Today i've been relaxing after my exams have finished by cleaning up my model stage, putting my space wolves in cardboard boes,freeing up their army case for my much more beloved imperial guard. i've also started working on making some foam transport trays to keep my imperial guards A) safer during transport, B) better organised, as for the moment my deployment arrangement take up a crap of time trying to find all the right memberes for each squad. In doing so I stumbled across some pieces of 2mm cardboard we kindly recieved from a papercompany down my street that stopped a few years ago, when the idea of using movement trays to speed up game play as well. In most of my games my infantry stays hidden in their rides anyway so they would only get used occasionally, of when i decide to go all out and field over a 100 models on foot, in which case i can see them significantly speeding up game play! hence i started this topic to find out what the other players here in the barracks think of the idea, hence a couple of questions to get the discussion rolling:

 

-would you consider using? Why not?

 

-If you would consider using them, how would you organise them? 8 models on a tray so you field the special weapons/heavy weapons as loose models? 10 models on a tray (both 10 model versions and 8 +1 heavy model versions), blocks of 4 models?anything else? (in theory even 2 model trays would speed up the movement phase...)

 

-how would you organise them, optimal symmetrical spread outs? random formations? a mixture of both?

 

 

DISCUSS! ;)

[march10k]

No!  Not going to discuss!  

 

 

Just kidding.  I've seen them used for green tides, it was five models to a tray in a staggered line.  The positives were less time consuming movement phases and good enforcement of keeping the models spread out to guard against blast weapons.  The big negative was that movement trays are incompatible with terrain.  I would leave them to the fantasy players.

 

A good alternative I've seen is to measure a max move from the front of a horde, then jump the models from the back to the front.  If you're roughly 8 wide and 6 deep for a 50 man blob, you end up moving the back 6-8, then jumping about 6-8 more from the back to the front to fill in the gaps and reestablish coherency.  Moving 15 models with the same result as if you had moved all 50 is a pretty good deal.  The only caveat is that you have to move any special models, like characters and special/heavy weapons, separately, deliberately, individually...happily, in the case of 50 conscripts and a priest, there's only the priest to treat separately!

[Ulrik_Ironfist]

I agree, the trays make using terrain difficult, and I usually just move the front models up 6 inches and pile the rest in and shuffle them around to max coherency. 

[hendrik]

the trays make using terrain difficult

now would it? consider you'll need to move all individual models into area terrain individually anyway, what's the difference between moving them individually from a movement tray into the difficult terrain, and moving them individually from the table into the difficult terrain?

my reasoning is either infantray gets deployed inarea terrain(thus without movement tray), or outside of it, thus with their movement tray. moving them around in the tray fastens it up to move them, but still allows them to get taken out of it when going into terrain, thus only helping out when movement outside of area terrain is needed.

 

is this just me looking for a good reason to make elaborate bases? or is there an actual benefit to my idea?

[Ulrik_Ironfist]

I was actually referring to using multiple levels and hills. It's a bit less precarious to position the small bases on a hillside, whereas you essentially ramp with a movement tray, making it more likely that your models will all go tumbling off the tray. Most of the fantasy games I have seen have much less terrain than 40k, as well they don't generally have buildings you move into, usually only forests. 

 

If you want to do it go for it, I'd love to see what you come up with, I've thought about it, but the dynamics of the game just don't seem to lend itself to that very well.

[WarriorFish]

They could help for moving if you were to keep formation, then moving off when appropriate, but it seems like more effort than it is worth. Sounds like maybe what you really want to do is make diorama bases :P

[Cap'm Heckus]

I used to get teased about the amount of time it took me to move my big blobs of conscripts so I started using the movement trays from the Middle Earth games. They fit the round bases perfectly. I lucked into a big stack of them that some guy was getting rid of. They help speed things up.

[march10k]

I'm thinking more of the incompatibility between movement trays and bits of terrain that have uneven surfaces, like ruined buildings with rubble on the bases.  It's pretty straightforward to work around that with bases, but trays can't...certainly, forests with removable trees, craters, etc, are less of a problem.  I use trays for WHFB, but not for 40k.