Thinking about levels of height for terrain in 40k

Because people use space marines as the basic unit of measurement in the 40k game, level one is an inch or less. Level two is an inch to three inches, and level three is three inches or more. This is, of course, absolutely wrong, and what's worse, it makes boards look like crap. Chances are 90% of your terrain is going to be level one; it provides cover for level two minitures but it doesn't block line of sight. That means, 90% of the stuff on your table should be an 1" tall. Does anyone have a board where that's true? If so, how does it look? Like crap? Yes, I imagine it does.

Now, I know that there are a lot of people out there who assume that if a building or structure has holes in it at less than an inch then it's considered level one terrain. Great. So, a ten inch tall building is level one because you can peek through a window.

This all seems to me to be badly worked out solutions to a common game problem. Here's a better solution. First of all, don't use marines. Marines are one of the smaller of the level 2 miniatures. A better idea is to use something like a wraithguard, a Tau crisis suit or a Tyranid ravener. If you use a Tyranid ravener for instance, you'll find that level two really starts at about 2 1/2". Level one is below 2 1/2" and level three starts at about 4 1/2" or 5". Well, why not? I mean really, if I put something down on the table that's 5" tall, very few players are going to have trouble believing that it can provide cover for most level 3 models (except the Defiler, of course). 3"?....Not really. Put something down that's 3" tall and put a Land Raider behind it. Hull down, yes; blocked LOS, no.

Keep in mind that this is also extremely useful for terrain designers like myself. If 3" is level three, than a 3" hill is level three and there's really not that much room to do much in terms of sprucing that hill up. You can't carve out interesting symbols in a 1" space--at least, you can't carve them out so that they look interesting from 5' away. But if a level one hill is up 2 1/2" tall, and a level two hill up 4" tall, all of a sudden there's more room on the board to move upward without having to get weird about it, or without making pieces on the board look out of scale.

So, final results or me are: level one hill 1 1/2"-2" tall. Level two 3" tall minimum. Level 3 about 4 1/2 or 5" tall. Of course, this coincides nicely with the basic unit of scenery building: the styrofoam sheet which sells in 3/8", 3/4" or 1 1/2".

How's that for convenient