[Rules] 8.4 Elevation makes no sense to me

[plloyd1010]

Elevation lines have long been a problem in PG and other games. They threw me when I first started too. Let's start here, at your first problem:

8.4 Elevation

The map contains lines indicating changes in elevation. Each line represents an elevation change of 20 meters. The LOS between two hexes is blocked if it passes through one elevation line (or other elevating terrain like a town, 8.42) that is higher than both hexes.

If the LOS crosses just one elevation line, let's say "20", then one hex is necessarily at height 0 and the other hex is necessarily at height 20, right? So how could the elevation line be higher than both hexes? It seems like this sentence is describing a LOS-blocking condition which is logically impossible.

First, forget the "one elevation line" part, it can't happen. There is no way to have "one elevation line high than both hexes". You can have other elevating terrain such as towns or woods, which will be 20 meters higher than the ground they are on.

Here hex a is on a 20-hill and hex b is at height 0, so the LOS crosses a 20-contour, of course. How could a and b both be lower than 20 if a 20-elevation line is crossed?

Or does "one elevation line" mean "AT LEAST one elevation line" = "AN elevation line"?

I think they meant 1 line here. As I said before, it can't happen

It is also blocked if it passes through two elevation lines of equal height and one of the hexes is lower than both elevation lines.
If the LOS crosses 2 elevation lines of equal height, let's say "20", then if one hex is lower than 20, then necessarily it's at 0, and necessarily both hexes are in fact at 0, right?

Does sentence this mean "exactly two" or "at least two"? If "exactly two", then at least I understand why the LOS would be blocked: there's a hill between the 2 hexes:

But if it means "at least two", then it's less clear. It implies that a 20-high hill would block LOS between a 0-height hex and a 40-high hill, e.g.

Whether they meant to say "at least two" is irrelevant, but linguistically that would be correct. This is the ridge rule.

Here hex a atop the 40-hill can't see hex b because of the tiny intervening 20-hill (which creates 2 elevation lines of equal height - in total, one 40-line and 3 20-lines are crossed)?

Technically yes. I know, it wasn't thought out well.

This all makes no sense to me.

Would anything go terribly wrong if I just used the elevation LOS rules from Combat Commander or Fighting Formations?

No and it would likely go better. You may have also noted that you can see down any slope of a hill from any hex on the top. (We created a crest rule to deal with that.) We the elevation chart from Panzerblitz 2: