40 CARROTHow does Benefit of Cover work in Warhammer 40K?
In 11th Edition, Benefit of Cover means ranged attackers take -1 to hit against Infantry, Beasts, and Swarms that are wholly within a terrain area. Two things switch it off: an attacker with Ignores Cover cancels the benefit, and auto-hitting weapons are unaffected because there's no hit roll to modify.
Which units get Benefit of Cover, and when?
The benefit keys off unit type and position, not just line of sight. It applies to Infantry, Beasts, and Swarms — the kinds of units that can plausibly duck behind rubble — and only while the unit is wholly within a terrain area. A squad with one model poking outside the footprint doesn't qualify, which makes cover a spacing problem as much as a positioning one: the same discipline that keeps a unit in coherency keeps it inside the terrain. When it applies, the attacker's ranged attacks suffer a flat -1 to hit. Vehicles and Monsters standing behind a wall don't get this benefit — for them the question is usually whether the terrain blocks line of sight entirely, which is the job of Obscuring.
What are Obscuring, Towering, and Plunging Fire?
These three terrain interactions come up alongside cover constantly. Obscuring terrain blocks line of sight drawn through it — if the sight line passes through the obscuring piece, the shot simply can't be taken. Towering is the exception for very tall models: they can see, and be seen, over obscuring terrain, so a skyscraper hides a squad but not from (or for) a towering war engine. Plunging Fire is marked on tall terrain and covers units shooting down from a high position at nearby ground targets — its exact effect depends on your mission pack, so check the pack you're playing. 40 Carrot badges all three on the board (OBS, TWR, PF), so you can read a piece of terrain at a glance the way you'd read a datasheet.
How do you practice cover positioning?
Cover mistakes are quiet ones — you rarely notice the -1 you gave away by leaving one model outside the ruin. On a true-scale virtual tabletop you can set the exact situation up, toggle positions, and run the numbers: the damage calculator shows how much that -1 to hit is actually worth against a given weapon profile, and the AI advisor can sanity-check whether a unit is wholly within the footprint it thinks it's hiding in.