Finally we’re getting some pyrocite! It’s just guarded by a heck of a lot of firepower. Luckily the gunpowder battalion moves in a set patrol pattern, winding south then west, then south and finally east off the map. They are remarkably incurious & won’t move as far off their path as they will forward, which means little side streets fairly close to their position will remain safe spots for retreat.

Let’s leverage the set pattern to pull off a series of hit and run attacks with horse archers and cavalry, whittling down the squads until our infantry can finish them off near the eastern exit. I found the best spot for hit and run is the two yellow starting squares in the northeast. You can blind side the the convoy on turn two and three and then head east and south to the final ambush.

If you have more cavalry then the top area where MC starts is another good spot to ambush the convoy on turns three and four. If you are using the top area you will want to put enough squads here to kill off the four enemy spear squads. Those squads are separate from the fixed patrol of the battalion and will come after your archers/cavalry, so it might be a good idea to put at least one infantry squad here.

The far west also has a safe retreat where you can attack the column as it turns south and back east down the home stretch. This is the least useful ambush spot as you’ll spend a considerable amount of time waiting for the column to appear.

Note that if you use exemplar on a squad that will break the convoy’s movement: they’ll all turn around and go backwards towards the marked squad. This will let you completely close with the enemy & then bait them to move away, setting up the next turn to annihilate them on player phase again!

To set up the final infantry ambush, we also need to clear off the six southern spear squads. Spears are very one dimensional, so I’m going to wipe all six with my Skull of Rowdain squad while the hit and run action plays out. I’ll bring along MC for heal/revive duty as I’ll have to tank a few attacks due to their close grouping.

To ensure that the skull squad can take some hits, I swapped out the swordmaster and Klok for Lady Clarimonde and my other arcane shield paladin. I added on St Tersesa’s Bulwark (20 hp, 4 armor, 4 magic, -25% damage for the front row) since we are up against pure melee.

After six turns of cat and mouse tactics, I setup a defensive squad to bait one sentinel and will collapse on the rest next player phase. With all the harrying, half of the last six squads are already damaged, so it’ll be more of a surrender fest than a battle at this point.

Between chests and squad drops, I managed to seize 12 pyrocite. It’s high time for some gunpowder promotions!

Interlude

I jumped into gold arena and was able to surrender almost every enemy with Jaromir’s improved skull squad. Honestly, it’s pretty abuseable now that I have it setup right. You could max the tech tree quite early if you converted arena tokens down to bronze arena and ‘skulled’ surrenders for faction xp. I also bagged an Archer Captain trait as a reward! Narima immediately gets this and another horse archer in her squad.

I hit another faction level and unlocked all the tier 3 gunpowder techs to lead into Industrial Furnace (all upgrades have cost reduced by 1 iron, -1 obsidian) and suddenly I have been refunded 53 iron and 28 obsidian. That should set me for whatever I want to promote! Speaking of promotions, I changed Lt Archibald’s gunners to dragoons and dropped the sentinels for sword masters to be more ambush focused . I also swapped the templar for a valkyrie, since the squad should be void the first round of enemy attacks via ambush.