A SOLO PLAY TEST - Carcharodontosaurus & Deinonychus VS Parasaurolophus & Saltasaurus

Itching to go and trapped in a lockdown i decided to boot up tabletop sim, move some trees around, import the character sheet JPEGs and play a solo game. I chose to go for 150 points which is the top end of a suggested starting match. I balanced it out with 3 Parasaurolophus (Paras for this article) and 1 Saltasaurus (Salty for this article) vs 1 Carcharodontasaurus (carco for this article) and 3 Deinonychus (Deinos for this article).

Next to each card i put a red token so i could track alertness and the relevant amount of black ones for their HP. This way i could lay them on top of the relevant hide areas as they got knocked out. 

I played a four turn game using a marker to indicate who had initiative. In this game the initiative went Predators X2 followed by Herbivores X2. It was an even matching almost and it really helped the Herbivores to turn the tables later in the game. 

I set the Carco up on the one corner and the raptors are on the other (barely visible behind some trees in the above image). They all failed their smell checks (except one raptor) and except the one guy they dordled about in the general direction of the prey models until combat ensued in turn 3. 

The Herbivores tactically grazed the first turn gaining a whopping 4 grazing points for the team, in the second turn they managed to spot the incoming Carco and three of four became alert. The final becoming Alert as a meander roll bought him into a clearing and he suddenly saw the combats ensuing! 

Combat was a messy (and literall) Tet-a-Tet with th Paras on the left flank running into pre-emptive combat and one of the Paras on the right flank also doing the same. Both un ocupied herbivores used their "bolster" rawr to increase the combat efficiency of the attacking herbivores. All of the herbivores on the board also have the "Herd Animal" & "Reptiles Song" special rules so as long as they consciously stayed within a certain range of each other the Herbivores where hitting very hard in this game. (A total of +4 on the left flank and +5 on the right meaning those poor raptors where fighting against +5 attacks even before the Paras own modifiers, for the record...most of his attacks where at +8 or so in this.  

Right flank Para won this one for the herbivores!). Because of the hard hits the dinosaurs where almost trapped in combat, running away and risking attacks of oppertunity was un ergonomic so the two teams fought to the last bitter second, most of the time causing double score damages across the board.

The Salty on the right flank did wonders for his Para buddy and he really bostered his attacks a large amount with his bolstering rawr. I did find that if one thing stood out in this game it's that there is a discrepency between the distance of your roar and the strength of it, i think rawrs need a little looking at, but as with most of the re draft changes we are talking minor and only positive changes. 

As the game hangs in the balance in the last turn the right flank para turns about and whips the raptors with his tail, a devastating +5 on top of his +3 (already) tail whip gives him +8 on the dice, he scores a 9, an 11 and a 12 and he knocks them out with one fell blow. So goes the story of comradre, if you support you're buddies, you make them unbeatable machines (not bad real life advice that). 

END RESULT: The predators killed one of two target animals necesary to win the game. The herbivores managed to graze a total of 6 points, though not the 8 they need to win by grazing they outlived the Predators so they won the game. Those raptors will think twice before messing with that Parasaurolophus again!

THOUGHTS: Not many to be honest, i only wrote down two notes and i had a wail of a time. The hardest thing to justify in Cretacea is why predator players wouldn't jsut set their models up with line of sight to enemy models IF that is a possibility. The answer is "controlled and appropriate levels of meta gaming" so as to culitvate a good and fun atmosphere, i myself don't mind it, but i can't imagine a lot of gamers do. I might re jig that but i feel like it could be covered with a simple "this is jsut the rule" approach also. Let's see what people make of the new "meta gaming" dscription in the new book. 

I also noted about Rawrs as mentioned before and also that it should be mentioned in the book that when a hide area is broken in a combat, and subsequent attacks in that combat (damages) are to be added to the character, they go to the HP but that the broken hide area may NOT be intentionally attacked again, as it is broken. I might make this so that it can be, but that it's at a -1. 

Until next time i hope you enjoyed this, it was SUPER easy for me to do, so i think i'll do more as i go along!

Cheers for reading.