Both of the Ant squads that VC has put out have always intrigued me, so a couple months ago I went and bought a bag of the Xualtica Fire Ants from Amazon, landing a total of 192 ants (no idea why they couldn’t just go up to an even 200, but oh well). More than I needed for myself, of course, but I figured that I could keep six squads for myself and then have 42 squads left over to use as prizes at our Monthlies (4 or 5 squads at a time — I feel like it would be nice for players to be able to leave with half of a new army). So I picked 24 of the most unique Ants that connected with me personally, and created my Ant family (being Ringo, John, Paul, George, Antony, Bryant, Jordant, sAnta, Timothy, Edward, Dimitri, Wallace, Julianne, Heather, Shoshauna, Jill, Stephanie, Heather, Jackie, Sharon, Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo). Then, when I saw the point limit for this format, I had to use them since the army fit perfectly:
BiggaBullfrog’s Army:
Xualtica Fire Ants x6 55 (330)
Quahon 190
Total: 520 Points/25 Figures (Drop one ant)
Boy oh boy was I ready for some stinging/swarming map control action. Although, in a game I played with the Ants before the tourney (against True’s Arrow Grut army), I tried stinging everything I could and felt that it wasn’t working well enough. So I did some research and looked up AliasQTip’s Dice Probability Chart. Turns out, often attacks of 2 are going to have as good or better odds of inflicting a wound on a figure (when that figure has 3 or 4 defense), so I printed off a copy to use during my games. Basically in gameplay that meant that I would usually make normal attacks with my Ants until I was engaged with at least 5, preferably 6 different enemy figures, at which I would start rolling for stinging damage. High defense figures changed things, of course, and Heroes I would almost always normally attack (especially with height) unless they were almost completely surrounded (as you’re more likely to get multiple sounds off of attacks than rolling a D20 where if you miss the first roll, you’re done for the turn).
Basically, there were a lot of decision points with this army, and I loved it.
Game 1
Spoiler Alert!
VS
@Starling
Quahon
Wyvern
Fyorlag Spiders x5
Kira Jax
Aquilla civil war! Both armies using Quahon supported by a bunch of creepy crawlies! Plus a Wyvern and Kira Jax.
Obviously, both of us were scared of the other army’s Quahon, who is more than capable of burning through 2-defense squaddies. So priority number 1 was enemy Quahon, and I had to use mine to get her since my Ants would just get wiped away. Problem was that his Quahon had bonding friends.
I used my first OM to bump up some Ants to have a couple within striking distance when my Quahon went down, as well as to try to bait the enemy Quahon into an aggressive attack. The Quahon took the bait (poor Edward and John … ), and my Quahon moved up to meet her. Cue a battle between Quahons on the high ground in the middle of the map (with some Spiders running around too). Luckily I got the first attack as well as some good rolls, and by the end of round two his Quahon went down while mine had only taken two wounds.
Next his Wyvern came to avenge Quahon, while Spiders surrounded my Quahon seeking for revenge. Not wanting to lose any OMs, I only took one turn with Quahon before bringing up Ants to start taking control of the whole board, expecting my Quahon to die fairly quickly (I still had some PTSD after getting wrecked by Leaf_It’s Wyverns in a tourney earlier this year). I doubted too much, though, as my Quahon survived repeated attacks from the Wyvern and some Spiders (ones that weren’t going for my Ants) for two more rounds, often blocking every attack rolled against her.
That said, my Ants were doing pretty well too. My bugs crashed with his arachnids, and soon I was swarming all over the place (that power is nuts!). Attacks of 2 are good enough against 2 defense that I used normal attacks for the first bit, but soon I was engaging so many Spiders each turn that I just rolled the D20 about 10 times a turn to see how it went (I had so many Ants engaged that I ran out of available ones to activate with Swarming). I also was able to fight over and claim Lodin for an extra bump to my roll, and I took chunk after chunk out of the Spider army. Even the Wyvern got hit after it finally killed Quahon. Once I had cleaned up those units, I ran my remaining Ants to the enemy Start Zone to take out Kira Jax for the win.
Great fun game with so many little Spiders and Ants running around. My early luck with killing the enemy Quahon and my Quahon tanking so many attacks definitely swung it.
2-0
Game 2
Spoiler Alert!
VS
Jonathan
Sir Dupuis
Templar Cavalry x3
Sometimes when you go to a tourney, you just run into your natural predator. In this case, the predator was the map. Not for me — Quahon loves being able to fly up high and shoot lightning at stuff, and my Ants are fast enough to be okay. But for an army full of expensive double-spaced figures that’s already tough to pilot, this map wasn’t going to help.
It started out alright. I led with my Ants and we fought over the glyphs, mainly Astrid since I really wanted that extra attack against the Templar Cavalry (I had a better chance of killing one with a normal attack of 3 than a D20 roll). Despite holding the glyphs consistently, though, I wasn’t killing the Templar quickly enough, and at the end of the second round I had only managed to kill 2 of them while they had killed two squads of my Ants (even Julianne! she’s usually my rally point!).
So, with a good few Knights engaged on the low ground with a bunch of Ants, I switched to Quahon.
Two rounds later, Quahon had taken two wounds. All the Knights were dead, including Sir Dupuis despite his valiant charge up the castle walkways to take Quahon toe-to-toe. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much a bunch of double-spacers could do against a Dragon flying up to the top wall area, but Jonathan played well nonetheless.
2-0
Game 3
Spoiler Alert!
VS
@Sir Heroscape
Nhah Scirh Cultists x4
Mezzodemon Warmongers x3
I made it onto Sir H’s livestream! If you want to see the video you can here:
This matchup was definitely uphill. Sure, I had plenty of ways around the Warmongers, but Sir H had a lot of Cultists, who not only slay Quahon, but are strong enough in both numbers and stats individually to keep my Ants from reliably out valuing them.
We both started out pretty cautious, developing our boards. We had some initial skirmishing between Ants and Cultists, and I found that my Ants weren’t doing enough individually to be able to reliably kill enough Cultists. I initially planned to keep with the map control battle, trying to take out individual Cultists while trying to keep the high ground, but at one point there were enough vulnerable Cultists coming across the board and my Ants were doing poorly enough on the hit-for-hit game that I decided to risk it and go for stings (partially also because he had a lot of high ground, but the D20 would ignore his bonus defense). Basically a little good luck would help me immensely with this plan, and a little bad would pretty much ruin me.
So a bit of average luck later (I wasn’t doing terrible, usually killing a couple of Cultists a turn) I ended up overextended and there were Cultists knocking on my Start Zone door. I still had enough Ants to keep them from tackling Big Blue, but they were burning out.
Then, as I was going through my turns too quickly (and with almost all of my Ants engaged anyway), I forgot to move for Swarming, and missed a single chokepoint that was keeping the Cultists off of my Dragon, and accidentally threw the game.
The Nhah Scirh jumped on Quahon like toddlers on a big blue teddy bear dragon, and in a couple of turns she was gone. That was basically game. I had a few Ants left, but not enough to match the Mezzodemons at this point even if I was able to get rid of the remaining Cultists. sAnta did come to town and almost managed to finish off the last of the Cultists, but it was a lost cause.
This was Holden’s first tournament! I love playing against first timers! Especially when they turn out to be really solid players like Holden is.
Expecting to be rushed by Hounds, I used my first turn to run out some Ants to do some light screening. As the met the expected Wulsinu, Quahon took some high ground and started shooting some lightning. At one point I got a really cool shot where I was able to get a shot of lightning completely around the central glacier by linking Hounds. Killed two of them, too. It was looking good.
But then the Hounds stopped dying, and started plaguing my Ants (literally). He got both he Beatles and most of the Ninja Turtles before I was able to clean the Hounds up. Then Su-Bak-Na came to play with his Nagrub friends. Well, Nagrubs die to Lightning Breath rather easily, but Su-Bak-Na’s hefty attack put some serious hurt on Quahon. I don’t remember if my Dragon died first or if his Hivelord did, but they both went down, and my Ants started cleaning up Nagrubs while the Stingers came out to play.
Here’s where it got tricky. At this point, I had enough Ants to take out the Stingers comfortably if it was a fair fight, but there’s a moat in front of the Start Zone and a Nagrub that wouldn’t die blocking the main entrance in. I caught a couple Stingers that advanced too far, but then had to start massing Ants for a charge while the Stingers continued to shoot at my friends. However, I was hitting a good streak with defense rolls, and I was able to block a good amount of attacks while claiming high ground (but still lost Dimitri, Donatello, and Jordant). This got Holden desperate to take out some Ants before they rushed in, so he started rolling for Stinger Drain. The first one had no effect either way, then Holden got an initiative switch and rolled for it again. And hit a 1.
That was a huge relief to me, of course, as he lost a Stinger and his attacks for the turn. Then, with the aforementioned Nagrub out of the way, I ran in with my remaining Ants to start attacking Stingers. I only had a squad remaining at that time, but the Stinger Drain fail had put him down to one squad as well, and getting the first set of attacks for the round helped a bunch, and after a bit of a struggle, my Ants and I pulled out victorious in what was easily my closest game of the day.
3-1
Great fun tournament! Xualtica Fire Ants come highly recommended as a fun (and surprisingly powerful) army to run.
In other news, after updating my tournament lists (I keep track of the Utah meta, what units have been played, as well as my own tournament lists of units played and win/loss record) I realized that, with this tournament, I have played 100 tournament games (in 23 tournaments), which is pretty neat! (Or at least I think it is.) So, for those who want to indulge in myself with me, I’m posting here some snapshot statistics for funzies (and so I can come back and look at where I was).
Probably most interesting to people is my win/loss record, which is 69/31. That means I have a 69% win rate. I have a soft goal of bumping that up to 75%, as that’s where I’d ideally like to be, but 69% isn’t half bad (in fact, it’s only 31% bad). (EDIT - Forgot to mention probably the other most interesting thing here: I've played in 23 tournaments and won 3 of them, a significantly lower statistic than my overall win rate.)
This goal does take a back seat to my goal of seeing every unit in both Classic and VC played at a Utah Monthly, though, which may affect my win rate (Groks only do so well, but I enjoy the challenge of that goal more than the winning one). This year I have played at least one unplayed figure in each army, and still have some units from last year that I’m the only one to have played (Ashigaru/Kato probably being my favorites from last year). I’ll keep playing unplayed units until they’ve all seen play at a Monthly.
Speaking of units that I’ve played, I have a running list of those in addition to the one I keep for the Utah Monthlies as a whole. The numbers work like this: Number of armies/Unit/Total amount played (for commons/uncommons). So 3 Warforged (x8 ) means I’ve played Warforged in 3 armies, with 8 squads played total (in this case, two armies with three squads and one with two).
Agent Skahen
Airborne Elite
Anubian Wolves (x3)
Ashigaru Harquebus (x2)
Ashigaru Yari (x3)
Blade Gruts (x4)
Blastatrons (x2)
Brave Arrow
Brute Gruts
Capuan Gladiators (x3)
Crixus
Deathwalker 9000
Dund
Eldgrim
Gladiatrons (x2)
Goblin Cutters (x4)
Grimnak
Grok Riders (x2)
Hoplitrons (x5)
Hrognak
Iron Man
Isamu (x0)
Jarek Guy
Kaemon Awa
Kato Katsuro
Khosumet
Kira Jax
Kozuke Samurai
Kursus
M-43 Resistance Fighters (x3)
Major J15
Major Q9
Major Q10
Marcu Essenwein
Marcus Decimus Gallus
Marrden Hounds (x2)
Marrden Nagrubs (x3)
Minions of Utgar (x2)
Mohican River Tribe (x3)
Ne-Gok-Sa
Ornak
Otonashi
Quahon
Raelin the Kyrie Warrior (RotV)
Roman Legionnaires (x3)
Runa
Samuel Brown
Shieldsmiths of Granite Keep (x3)
Spartacus
Syvarris
Thanos
Tor-Kul-Na
Tornak
Valguard
Venoc Warlord
Werewolf Lord (x2)
Wolves of Badru (x2)
Xualitica Fire Ants (x6)
Zetacron
Most of the individual army lists can be found in my battle reports, with the exceptions of Utah NHSD 2014 where I played Grimnak, Nerak, Heavies x3, Syvarris, and Eldgrim (going 2-2), and the Goblin Throw Down 2016 in Idaho where I ran Venoc Warlord, Venoc Vipers x5, and Q9 (going 2-1).
All in all, it’s been a gas, and I’m super lucky to live where Heroscape is played so much, and with such a variety of people (I regularly get to play against new players as well as experienced ones). Here’s looking forward to the next 100 games! (In a tournament. Including playtesting, I’d hit that pretty quickly … )
June 9th, 2018, 01:29 PM
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