Terrain (Front Mission 1)

Terrain has various effects on the battle. The most obvious one is that your wanzers with treads and tire legs can’t go up or down two levels. There are also a few hover type legs that let you cross water or rocks easily but other legs would be slowed down.

Terrain also provides cover. This is explained in the NDS port during the OCU tutorial mission, but not in the SNES original. For example, the Jungle or Forest terrains slowdown your movement but provide huge defensive bonuses compared to the Glass terrain. A Soil terrain with snow would provide much less cover than the normal Soil terrain.

Cover rating changes between platform ports thus I am not going to list them here. You can observe the ratings in game. If you have high Hit rating arm and weapons and your shots still miss, check the cover ranting in the status bar (Ge% in the Japanese version) to see if you need to lure enemy out of it.

If enemies are under good cover, you want to lure them out if possible. At the same time, find good cover yourself. Of course if you can make a choke point (e.g. at street crossing or on a bridge) and take out anyone approaching quickly, ignore it.

Altitude difference also limits what weapon you can use and how fast you can move. You can’t use Short and Melee weapons when the altitude difference is more than one level. Moving one elevation level costs one movement point.