The optional achievement for this chapter requires forcing every single imperial squad to surrender. You can kill all the cultist squads with stars though. The imperial squads are at very low morale, but they aren’t quite at the max surrender threshold (silver tongue leader skill reaches that). Couple that with the squads not being all that resilient and you can accidentally wipe them trying to weaken them. I recommend using force surrender for every battle (against imperial forces) to avoid this. For more information on maximizing surrender chances, refer to mechanics.

It’s important that your forces end up out of range of whichever imperial squads are still alive or they’ll come attack you and likely wipe themselves out. Alternatively you can get them to attack the squad with the Skull of Rowdain if you have it or build a low threat, low enemy phase damage squad you can use to attract them to. Cannons with sentinels in front work great for the latter.

Force surrender the imperials who MC’s squad could reach while keeping your forces out of reach of any non cultist squads. It’s fine if the crossbows survive as long as they won’t attack one of your stacked raider/warbow squads and die. For some of the squads that are hard to reach and hard to stay out of reach of, use one of the bait squads to avoid killing them (or kill them with the skull to force surrender). I moved Jaromir’s skull squad into the breach and cannon/sentinel squad to the east to draw the last imperial champion squad.

Reduce how far your MC can go by shuffling him backwards with extra infantry squads. If you don’t have 20 battle ready squads this is one good use for a few extra small squads. MC will move towards the closest enemy squad, so consider that they might move in front of your bait squad and draw the enemy. High magic resistant characters like paladins and valkyries will be very helpful for the squads that press the furthest to the northeast and end up taking on the necromancers. Keep in mind there’s no MC revive and no temples this stage.

With the extra push eastwards, I’ve influenced MC to head toward the crossbow squad there and the imperial champion squad did come ineffectually stab my sentinel/cannon squad. The necromancers put quite a hurt on Sybil, Lt Archibald and Barnabus, but templars and dark resistance artifacts prevented casualties. A squad with temporal modulator could also be used here to safely deal with up to three necromancer squads on enemy phase. The last three imperial squads can easily be force surrendered now & the focus shifts to inside the walls.

The imperial sentinel squads inside the castle have archers, so you should try to bait those squads to get onto the walls and attack you from range. You can then try to force surrender them across the walls & if you fail, you’ll do minimal damage to them. They also will just shoot you again from the wall instead of charging to their doom. Be careful of the necromancer enemies & be sure you have the right magic resistant squads in place if you would be luring those along with the sentinels.

I spared the last (damaged) necromancer squad outside the walls so that MC will finish them and give me a bit more time to deal with breaching the gate. The imperial sentinels will come shoot arrows at my cannon squad while the mage squads on the walls come cast magics at my circled cavalry squad on the left and Diana and Sybil on the right. Following that the assassins will filter down and line up for the slaughter.

Lysander is perfectly situated to surrender the last sentinel squad here. Surrender chance wasn’t quite max, so I dropped a salvo of arrows on them first. Using a silver tongue squad also could help raise the chances. After that there are just two imperial crossbow squads left, which will be trivial to surrender. Take your time and clean up the assassins and necromancers first. The boss has five mages, so an opening cannon/archer salvo is advised, but not strictly required

Interlude

I bought a dark sentinel with precision and high strength to turn into a champion and a lightning affinity for a swordmaster. More optimization than necessity at this point, but that is half the fun.

I reorganized MC’s unit back to the temporal modulator pure offense squad, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with my squads.