Ah, there’s a few familiar faces! The gang is mostly back together now, just in time to save Lysander and company from quite the onslaught. That being said, Lysander is still in super tank formation and Narima’s horse archers can whittle away quite well from the wall, so the bottom four can hold their own. The natural choke point between the fortress walls can help slow the slaughter if you didn’t build any of those four squads particularly defensively.

A few squads with sentinels up front and any sort of damage behind them should be quite the bulwark against the cavalry here. The assassin squads have three assassins in each, so you might want to have more than one armored unit in the back of squads that attack them. The cluster of four also makes it significantly harder to initiate into them all on player phase. However, you could advance and bait the cavalry in, dispose of them & then be in a position to reach some of the assassins on the second player phase.

The large bulk of enemy squads to the lower left won’t begin to attack until you move their way, so consider waiting on that until more of your squads arrive in the south. The two most dangerous squad types here are the fire mage leaders with 3 fire mages and the gunner leaders with 5 total gunners. Archers or attacking the fire mages on player phase will wipe them out quick and sentinels can hold up the gunners.

The treasure chest at the lower left is a proof of merit. If you are having trouble getting it without wiping out the last enemy you can send someone flanking through the forest as the enemy rushes right and then use teleport plus blessing to get them into position swiftly.

The pyrocite mine and bazaar are considerably out of the way, so be sure to send a squad that way early on. I missed out on one of the best unique mercenaries as I neglected to use my arena tokens to replenish my gold supply. Alphonse’s Dragon Slayer trait is very situational but his insane 113 strength makes him a melee powerhouse and Warrior’s Hubris boosts his magic defense hugely given his strength.

Interlude

Time to grind a few arena tokens to replenish my gold supplies. Speaking of tokens there was a silver token for sale & I snapped that up first, since the gold reward for arena is higher than the cost of the token.

After platinum and silver arena, I’m back up to 13K for future mercenary impulse buys. I also obtained another bodyguard trait that I used on MC’s front line and purchased Boots of Tyranny for Jules’s horse archer squad.

That gives him an incredible 9 movement points for hit and run and with St Teresa’s Tiara still equipped, the damage loss from the morale penalty is not an issue. Morale will raise back up anyway, with each ranged attack his squad performs.