Sword masters, assassins, fire mages and necromancers make up the bulk of this level’s threat. Your team should have plenty of counters for the first two by now and the mages can be countered with paladins, valkyries, characters with high magic and the Warrior’s Hubris trait. The fire mages also will take a turn before they cast, so on player phase you will have two attacks to kill them before they can respond. The dark mages are dangerous, but they have only a single infantry character defending them & should fall fast. Sometimes offense is the the best defense.

The assassin squads will all move toward you, save the one at the top left, even if you are not in range of them. This will slightly complicate planning, but you have time for careful simultaneous advances north and south. Splitting your forces will enable you to gather the treasure and hit all the switches to the north with time to spare. The necromancer squads in the center have no archers, so you can easily weaken them before you enter the portal.

Make sure to grab the lower left treasure: a platinum arena token. This should be the first guaranteed platinum arena visit, though you might have lucked into one randomly. The Hand of Zanatus will appear just below the chest, so try to get there early.

Lt Archibald with the Skull of Rowdain was modestly successful. He is typically wiping the front line of squads with gunfire & sometimes takes out one middle/back line enemy with spear damage. All of those defeated become surrenders & then I can usually have a high threat squad force the rest of the enemy to surrender. Ideally I could do enough damage to wipe the entire enemy squad in one combat despite the Skull’s penalties.

Interlude

Oh what’s that, someone came back huh? And all the reserves too! Welcome back Centhos the Muse and the Outcast! With MC’s new attack set, it’s even more effective to pair some mages with her, so I think I’ll drop the Outcast into her squad. Likely he is a good candidate for arcane shield too, with that insane magic stat.

Faction rank up! However, I don’t have any pyrocite to unlock the gun techs, so more firearm units will have to wait. Instead I unlocked Popular Support and Supply Chain Mastery from the middle tree to give morale and healing from friendly villages. I filled in a few minor lower end techs and last I took Master Artificer on the right tree for a little more free use of artifacts (-1 to all artifact cost).