Casual Games and Map Review

[Shiftrex]

Hey Everyone,

This is my space to record and focus on having more fun with Heroscape. I play an exhaustive amount of games, around 4 to 5 a week and sometimes I wind up focusing on the wrong stuff. Bracket games are really frustrating for me personally because this is the only 'non-dexterity' based thing that I do in a competitive setting. In order to enjoy things more I'm going to start focusing on some more random games and battle reports.

I'll be using this opportunity to play on random maps or with little used figures and try to give creators feedback. I don't think we have enough of that in this community and I love the creativity that we have here. If you have a map or unit that you don't think anyone is using or playing with, let me know so I can see about changing that sometime. My goal is to do a battle report about once a week.

Linked Reports:

• Subduction (Ninjas vs Undead)
• Receding Waters (Clerics vs Sentinels)

[Shiftrex]

Subduction
by Ulysses

Armies:

• RED SIDE
• 10 Isamu
• 80 Kumiko
• 110 Moriko
• 110 Ninjas of the Northern Wind
• 10 Otonashi
• 60 Shiori
• 120 Kantono Daishi
  500, 9 hexes

VS

• YELLOW SIDE
• 160 Ataraxis the Starlich
• 315 Skeletons of Annellintia x3
• 20 Marcu Esenwein
  495, 14 hexes

Stats:

Spoiler Alert!

Shiftrex
Attack rolls: 56 out of 107 (52.34%)
Defense rolls: 38 out of 124 (30.65%)
Total dice rolled: 231
Time used: 0h, 28m, 50s


Sheep
Attack rolls: 53 out of 119 (44.54%)
Defense rolls: 39 out of 96 (40.63%)
Total dice rolled: 215
Time used: 0h, 30m, 1s

Battle Report:

Spoiler Alert!

Played a 500 point game on this map with some interesting armies, had never found the chance to sit down and play full ninjas. Also have not faced the Star Lich since an initial round of testing back when she was revealed.

During the Early game I developed Otonashi to snatch the glyph of Valda turn one and the pushed Isamu out on the other side of the board with the intent to grab Ulvania if it seemed attractive. I leveraged the move to get Moriko and Kumiko up onto the road and then I moved Oto off to go block two skeletons that had come up on that side of the board. I figured if she could get a kill that she would have accomplished her points worth.

She didn't wind up getting a kill but she soaked up an impressive 3 attacks and bottlenecked development northeastern part of the board outside the yellow start zone. After this a lot of my action economy went to Moriko and Kumiko, Moriko got up next to the start lich and tried to use her special to no avail but she held out against a round of attacks just fine. After that she disengaged and went to fight over the valda glyph where she would occasionally get a skeleton kill throwing 3 dice on her special.

Ataraxis stayed on 4 height and made good use of the Aura, I had to position Daishi far enough away to not present too good of a target. Before I had gotten a full round of attacks with Ninjas of the northern wind they were down a squad member from a single attack (R.I.P.). So I got them out there to kill a couple of skeletons before they really went to waste and act as LEA tethers to control the 6 move skeletons (Valda) that wanted to racecar even faster with the road bonus. This also killed my interest in Ulvania because I was using a lot of special attacks. Moriko actually popped off in a turn, scoring three kills and taking height with her special. Best performance I've seen out of her.

Isamu only got one sucessful vanish roll, so he wasn't terrible oppressive either. There were good trades here and there with skeletons reviving at a fairly steady rate. Seemed about 50/50 to the person that wasn't counting them too hard anyways!

The lategame came down to Daishi and Shiori vs a lot of skeletons and a lich. I was able to kite effectively here and dance around for Shuriken throws. This worked fairly well and Daishi could move around to never give the skeletons enticing attacks. Star Lich pulled weight here, putting 2 wounds on Daishi but not being able to kill him. At the end of a round Shiori got a height attack on the lich dropping her to one, then Shiori died to lava and Daishi began his killing spree. Daishi managed to drop atraxis (who went onto Marcu) and then mixed kills with counterstrikes never giving the skeletons height. The picture above shows the endstate of the game where a skeleton finally broke through the defense and got the last wound on Daishi but it was close!

2 Skeletons and Marcu hiding the Star Lich on his card. Sheep didn't want to try and put an Order Marker on marcu because he was afraid of the potential to lava dunk, so he played the slow game and attacked with 1 skeleton per turn. Great game with some fun on units on this map.

Map Thoughts:

Spoiler Alert!

Really great experience.

I didn't realize it was an asymmetrical map at first because of all the 4 height (not symmetrical looking down the board at my opponent). Really pleasant to move around, I feel like a lot of maps fight me where ever I am trying to move. This was really pleasant to navigate, always felt like there was places to go or terrain to leverage. The lava field covering a lot of the height had a good feeling to it. Since I had phantom walk I was moving on and off it quite often, but the height wasn't oppressive to the point I could try to camp on it.

The line of sight blockers didn't come into effect too much, but I had to be careful where I stepped with Daishi so that I didn't miss out on my bonding.

Glyph zones were in nice positions, not enough to get to in one turn (without using the Oto trick). They never felt like they were too far away to try and interact with. I had a lot of options to retreat in lategame or to go and attack an glyph holder with Daishi and Shiori trying to stay out of the fear aura. Really pretty looking map, would definitely play more games on it.

[Shiftrex]

Receding Waters
by Gamebear

Armies:

• YELLOW SIDE
• 200 Acolytes of Vorganund x4
• 175 Corvor the Tainted One
• 55 Father Caylus
• 65 Skull Demon
  495, 16 hexes

VS

• BLUE SIDE
• 80 Concan the Kyrie Warrior
• 320 Shieldsmiths of Granite Keep x4
• 100 Sentinels of Grax
  500, 15 hexes

Stats:

Spoiler Alert!

Sheep
Attack rolls: 55 out of 118 (46.61%)
Defense rolls: 45 out of 134 (33.58%)
Total dice rolled: 252
Time used: 0h, 27m, 55s


Shiftrex
Attack rolls: 45 out of 104 (43.27%)
Defense rolls: 19 out of 56 (33.93%)
Total dice rolled: 160
Time used: 0h, 28m, 4s

Battle Report:

Spoiler Alert!

Played a 500 point game on this map with a lot of units that I don't see very much. Shieldsmiths seem a bit rare to run across and the Acolytes never quite work out for me so I don't play them often. Spoiler, they didn't here either!

During the Early game I used the first Order Marker on Caylus to get my clerics moving, all but 1 of them started in the aura after Caylus stepped up onto the level 2 outside the start zone. 7 move, 4 attack clerics are pretty good. I spread them all out and started looking for a good place to drop corvor while Concan immediately took height on level 4. Early 2 rounds were some positioning and I eventually summoned skull demon who failed to kill anything on his turn and took the life of another cleric. Things were still ok though, clerics could sprint out of the start zone pretty easily and I established control over dagmar.

Dwarves on height are very good, it was neat to see them use a map like this to their advantage. I eventually dropped Corvor on the map over on the right side. With one of the double 4's being held the middle just didn't look worth contesting, even if I put corvor up there he would just get waited out because his aura is only good for 2 spaces. I decided to move corvor over to Zawit but not before he flubbed a turn and took a cleric with him. Over the course of the game the demons took 6 clerics down the tubes with them which was pretty rough and is why I started putting ordermarkers on purely corvor after round 3.

I Startzone bombed and covor decided to recover some points which was nice but it happened at a slow pace. He took down a squad of dwarves, trading about 3 wounds for it and then started to creep towards the center of the map. The Sentinels of Grax decided to get into the mix at this point, one of them removed Skull demon from dagmar while the other stayed far enough away corver could never chase them. There was a point where corvor engaged one, it only put 2 wounds on him and he moved up for an adjacent attack where he rolled 4 skulls into 4 shields, anti-climactic for sure. The turn after that Concan disengaged from the last cleric I had on the board and finished him off.

The lategame came down to Caylus vs way too many remaining threats, took an attack down on a sentinel but was unable to do anything and the sentienls of grax cleaned up. The stats were a little low but not absolutely terrible, Corvor really failed to make the impact that I needed him to and Skull Demon + Clerics had a very bad time trying to punch into the shieldsmiths. Rough matchup in a few ways and makes me think that the cleric army lacks a little bite in some ways. Always a pleasure to see Concan on the board buffing people in defensive positions though!

4 Dwarves, 2 Sentinels (never died), and a 4 life Concan remained on the board.

Map Thoughts:

Spoiler Alert!

This is a cool experience, I usually hate water in the start zones (I put raelin there all the time so I can ignore it) but I got some good use out of them. With Caylus giving clerics 7 move and having the level 0 swamp and shadow nearby there were easy paths to use the low start zones. More than once I was able to move a cleric up from the water on the startzone to reinforce Skull demon and try to attack a dwarf on height, which prolonged him holding the glyph.

The level zero everywhere is a neat way to make a pseudo level 5 map. Lots of shadow is a plus, I enjoy that most of the height on the map has opposing shadow so you can try and fight your way up. Though that was really rough against big defense dwarves.

Map really captured the feel of isolated bits of land with the waters receding. The little perches over the glyphs are fun, shieldsmiths held that over my skull demon on a glyph for a long time and they were very difficult to remove but skull demon held the glyph nicely. The strongest point on the map definitely feels like the center with the 4 height. Early in our game Concan and dwarves took on of the sets of 4, it looked really hard to remove so I circled around and used the teleport glyph with Corvor to get to a better vantage point in enemy start zone.

I think that the level 4s here are really beneficial for double space figures (braxas and quahon come to mind, don't know if nilfheim fits) but Corvor can't make as good of use because his aura is short 😂 he just gets camped out. Thanks for making this map.

[Foudzing]

Thank you for the review Shiftrex I suggested both Subduction and Receding wlWaters for the classic random draft tournament organized by kevindola. Also thanks to anyone who did the online board.

[Shiftrex]

Awesome! Glad it helped.