Chapter 24 returns us to a sprawling map and pushes the deploy count to the final heights of the game. While you don’t need the full 20 squads, it can speed things along. With the enemy forces spread out, a staggering number of mines and a few timed treasure chests, you will want to divide and conquer.

The cavalry to the northwest are a mix of dragoons, knights, cavaliers and valkyries and their position makes them highly vulnerable to cannon or archer fire from the walls. The dragoons can shoot up at squads on the wall, so do be wary of that and position your archers/cannons at spots on the wall where they cannot be attacked from the northern side. The far western square (where Beatrix is) or the square where my cannon squad is stationed would both serve well. Block both holes in the wall with sentinel squads and you should be able to destroy the cavalry here with a smaller force. There are four dragoons in each dragoon squad, so I highly recommend softening them with cannons/archers before one of your squads takes all the fire at once.

You can also send a small force down to the southwest to avoid being flanked at the walls. Two solid squads can hold the choke point there, but will need to weaken the mages and be resilient to cavalry charges.

The enemy forces on the walls directly east will wait for you to come to them, so you can focus northwest and south first if you don’t want to divide your forces in too many groups. However, the group of four cavalry squads directly beneath the enemy base will charge at you immediately. The samurai and archer group directly west of the bridge will move north to attack your forces if you moved south, but they are mostly a threat to mages without arcane shield/vigor. Once you have broken these foes you can divide your forces between the southeastern mines and east across the bridge to seize the temple and confront the boss.

Returning to the northern theater, the goal is to break their charge against the walls. Then you can send a flying (or cavalry but hold teleport in reserve) squad to pick up the timed chests. I sent over Beatrix’s flying dragon squad, as she’s the one who will be putting the Sin Credo (one extra turn for leader, -25% damage for the rest) to it’s best use. The other chest contains arcane might, which is very handy for dragons, paladins and valkyries. More enemy forces will come to reinforce this area on turn 5, necessitating a swift withdrawal. Blessing or teleport can be used to escape if needed. Leave the local forces here defending the walls; there will be a second reinforcement of another six cavalry squads on turn 9 and you wouldn’t be able to catch up to your eastern forces anyway.

Don’t forget to stop by the bazaar to the far southeast before you take on General Ragavi. I bought a few high tier traits: bodyguard, challenger, desperation and I recruited a unique templar: Matriarch Rosalie. I’ll fix her affinity and soldier captain should make her a decent leader even with her leadership score being a bit low (due to being recruited so late).

General Ragavi dodges quite well, but archers or cannons will still whittle her down enough for a melee squad (or two) to finish her off. Oh wait, she’ll join us too? She has a nifty mini temporal modulator leadership skill: Once per phase each swordfighter, swordmaster and blademaster will strike first on defense. This could be put to use against enemy squads with damage focused in the front line, but she could also just ambush.

Interlude

I reorganized some swordmasters for General Ragavi and tossed in a spare dragon and archer for now. Likely some heavy infantry up front would be a good idea eventually, if I’m to try and use her defensive strike first skill; all the swordmasters will just strike in one group after all.

Matriarch Rosalie gets my other spare dragon and the leftover spears. Not a core squad right now, but maybe once they become centurions it’ll be worthwhile.

I realized I had never given my counterattack skill (+25% damage on defense) to anyone & that it was a leader skill. I put it on MC to stack with blackbelt & further leverage temporal modulator.

My MC’s centurion also didn’t have any skills, so I thought two constant damage skills, Coldblooded(25%) and concentration(15%), might be effective to stack on top of blackbelt and counterattack. I’m not sure if these percents stack additively (+90%) or multiplicatively (+125%) but either way it’s roughly doubling your damage. Cold blooded also works really well on heavy infantry when you have mages and light infantry attack before them.