"How Do You Represent The Advantage Of High Ground?" Topic

Unless you have hidden movement or umpired play in your rules, there really is no advantage. The height will extend your range of sight, but the enemy can see you too (again, unless using some form of spotting rules). Shooting up and down hill isn't difficult if you know how to do it as you have slightly different points of aim when shooting uphill, downhill and horizontally. I don't know if infantry gets specific training in this, but I know our unit (MI) and my previous unit (medical) don't.

+1 is traditional

Agree – since "visibility" is rarely factored into miniatures games it's hard to give an advantage in this for high ground (or anything else for that matter).

You can treat it like cover and make them harder to hit, maybe give them an advantage in shooting down to reflect getting better shots as a result of better visibility.

If your rules have some sort of opportunity fire you could give a bonus for that too (if your rules allow one opp. shot give advantaged units two?).

This is one area where the "helicopter general" really makes things impossible. As Sundance said, unless you have hidden movement of some kind. And even then most systems have you deploy when spotted and stay there, so it would only give you a one-time advantage.

It also depends a little bit on scale and period.

The solution in Napoleon's Battles was to abstract skirmish deployment such that an infantry brigade could be placed behind the crest of a hill, and still fire at their opponents on the other side. (This represents skirmishers out in front of the parent unit.)

Enemy infantry could attack back with their skirmishers, but artillery (being direct fire weapons) was unable to target the infantry behind the hill.

Obviously, this is not the approach you want in a modern game. (Hence the defensive modifier for a target with a height advantage.)

+1 damage. Feel the crushing addition of gravity! Pew pew more likely to hit the head in semi-realistic land.

In RavenFeast (a Viking skirmish game), there is a -1 to shoot and melee uphill.

Al | RavenFeast 1.1

I use periscopes on my game table to determine line of sight. So I'm operating from a miniature's eye view. Or at least as close to that as I can. Visibility from on high is a nice advantage without any particular rules in such a situation. Or so I have found it to be.
When operating against troops on higher ground their cover works better for them, if they have any.
Other than just 'natural' benefits already outlined, no modifier is needed in my opinion.

I like how Battle Group Kursk employs an observation test if the shooter is using aimed fire as opposed to a more wld area fire which is used to keep the enemy pinned. In this case the observation test could probably be modified to simulate the described effect. As a side note I really love the rules themselves

If you're using spotting rules, the troops on higher ground would have an easier time, and greater range.

You mention that being on a hill makes it more difficult for the enemy to outflank you. Wargame turns are often viewed as having an action component (how long does it take to load and fire, how long does it take to march X meters) and a thinking about it component (determining what orders to give, writing them up, and communicating them to the acting unit, or even a rifleman acquiring his target). Since you'd have greater visibility from your hill, could that be viewed as allowing you to complete the thinking about it component more quickly and devote more of your turn to actual fire and movement? Movement for guys on the hill could be faster, and firing more effective (perhaps, given an SMLE or Kar 97, they acquired the target and got off five rounds in the time it would normally take to fire two). This is just coming to me as I type, not something carefully researched or anything.

Grelber

Morale high ground could be a +1 on morale :)

I extend spotting distances for units on high ground. This also makes a high ground a good place for artillery OPs.

Hills as cover: crestlines (military vs geographic), reverse slopes, dead ground etc are slightly different issue, depends on level of game, weaponry etc.

On a similar note, I've been slowly putting together a 2nd Sino-Japanese war project and have been thinking about the terrain. Some of the battles I've looked into occur in areas with heavily terraced hillsides. I haven't play tested this idea, but what I think I'll do is to give troops being fired on from downslope a slight cover bonus to represent the lip of the terrace. Has anyone tried something like this? I'm using Command Decision (ground scale 1" = 50 yds) so determining the individual terraces is impractical.