TheSouthGuard

General Campaign Advice (SPOILERS!)

The toughest enemies in this campaign will be skeletal undead and liches. It is helpful to prioritize promoting units that perform well against these enemies, such as those with arcane or impact attacks, and to avoid promoting units that do poorly against these enemies, such as those with primarily piercing attacks.

Both Deoran and Sir Gerrick acquire impact attacks when they level up, and those will be the only impact attacks you have access to for the first 3 scenarios, so maximizing their XP early can make a big difference.

This campaign was significantly updated in version 1.14.6. One of the notable changes is that almost every enemy keep is now much more easily accessible via either water or swamp, which makes Merfolk more relevant than in earlier versions. The merman hunter starts off with only piercing attacks, but promoting it to a netcaster gives you access to both impact damage and the Slow ability.

Born To The Banner

• Objectives: Defeat Bandit leader
• Lose if: Deoran dies or turns run out
• Turns: 40/32/24 (easy/medium/hard)
• Starting Gold: 120/100/80
• Starting Units: Deoran, Moreth

You start with Moreth, a loyal spearman, and only the ability to recruit peasants. You will see the River Fort marked on the map south of your keep. Once you move a unit to the River Fort, you will be joined by Sir Gerrick and gain the ability to recruit spearmen and bowmen. Note that the dialogue says Deoran must move to the fort, but in reality you get the same result by using Moreth.

In the river to the southwest there is a water village. When capture it, you will receive a loyal merman fighter and a loyal merman hunter. You will also gain the ability to recruit merman hunters, but not fighters, so be careful not to throw away your one fighter carelessly!

The enemy has to travel for several turns to get to you, and Deoran will be occupied travelling to and from the river fort to get Sir Gerrick anyway, so by the time you start recruiting, you will know the enemy's force composition and can recruit the right mix of units to counter it (i.e. bowmen for thugs, spearmen for poachers and footpads).

The first enemies will reach the river around First Watch on Turn 4. You can try to hold the river with the help of the mermen, or let the first wave cross to your side and surround them. If you want to hold the river, it is better to leave Deoran in your keep on turn 1 and send Moreth to activate the river fort. This allows you to start recruiting bowmen and spearmen earlier and gives them more time to set up defensive lines on your side of the river. You can then send Moreth west to activate the water village on turn 5. Remember to use Sir Gerrick's leadership, and note that he has great resistance to blade and pierce, but very little to impact, so a few lucky thugs at night can take him out if you leave him exposed.

Time is on your side, since you have more villages on your side of the river than your enemy does, so just hold out through the night, try to get a kill or 2 with Deoran/Gerrick/the merman hunter, and then counterattack in the morning. Again, you will get more desirable troops than spearman/bowmen later in the campaign, so your xp is better invested in your leaders and possibly in leveling your hunter into a netcaster.

Note that leadership only applies to units that are lower in level than the leader. A first-level leader can only lead Peasants and other zero-level troops. Sir Gerrick will be able to use his leadership on Deoran and your other units, but Deoran's leadership will only apply to peasants right now, since he starts at level 1.

When you capture the village at 11.12 you will receive a surprise. On easy, you'll be rewarded with Aleron, a Longbowman who is loyal to you. On medium, Aleron will be a Peasant, and on hard you'll find an enemy Footpad instead.

In game terms, a loyal unit will work for you for free [has no upkeep]. If you have Aleron as a Peasant, you might think to yourself: he is only a level 0, there's no upkeep cost anyway. Big deal, right? Well, it is. You should make every effort to keep those loyal troops alive, and those should be the ones that reach the highest levels. If Aleron becomes a Royal Guard or Master Bowman [units which normally cost you 3 gold per turn to supply], he will still be loyal and still cost you nothing. Moreth and the Mermen are loyal as well, so keep them alive. That means don't throw Mermen away on land attacks. Keep them in the river or swamps where they are better adapted. After you have crossed the river, leave them behind as a rear guard or send them down the west side of the map through the swamps.

As you press towards the Urza, the majority of your troops will be funneled along the road south. A few should come along the edge of the hills in order to attack the enemy keep from due north. The idea here is to get the enemy to split up his forces, or you'll have an unguarded area to attack. By turn 9 you should be in more defensible terrain [forest, hills or mountains] as night will be falling again. Hopefully you will have dispatched the majority of the baddies in the battle by the river, but a lucky strike by some bandits could still cripple you. By the way [this is a matter of playing style] I usually pull a unit back for healing once its health bar turns yellow or red. There are times when you have to sacrifice a unit to achieve some bigger goal, but you'll never get your units to level up if they get killed before they get enough experience...

By turn 11 or so, you should have captured all the villages on the map. On turn 12 I would expect to see some of your units in the enemy keep. The keep is the best defensive terrain; also, the more of its area you fill up, the fewer fresh troops the enemy can recruit. By turn 13 your troops could be attacking the Urza himself, and daylight is coming. With luck you can finish him off on turn 14. Since the enemy keep is mostly surrounded by forest it gets kind of fussy juggling all your troops around so as to rest the wounded, bring your attackers where they will do the most good [Bowmen against Thugs, Spearmen against Poachers, or either against Footpads], and get the most from your leaders. If it is not obvious, you can have Sir Gerrick direct several attacks, move him, direct more attacks, etc. Optimally he should finish his turn by attacking. Ideally you'd like the killing blow against the Urza to be delivered by Sir Gerrick or [better] Deoran. That way he can accumulate enough experience to eventually advance.

Proven By The Sword

• Objectives: Capture the Citadel of Westin and defeat Bandit leader
• Lose if: Deoran or Sir Gerrick die or turns run out
• Turns: 40/32/28 (easy/medium/hard)
• Base Starting Gold: 130/100/85
• Starting Units: Deoran, Sir Gerrick

Similar to the last go round, this scenario comes in two parts: first is seizing control of the Westin Keep, second is actually defeating the enemy. There are only a few footpads and thieves between you and Westin Keep right now, but you want to secure the city before the enemy reinforcements get across the river to the south. 1 or 2 turns of recruitment at your initial keep should be plenty. Recalling loyal troops here saves you some upkeep as you fight your way to Westin. Sending a unit northwest to tag villages can also be a good long term investment. Bowmen will be your best recruits at this point, since they'll be more useful against the bats you face later.

Here I'll give a few words about a few of the criminals: Footpads and Thieves are "elusive" units, which means that they are extremely agile and quite fast. If they are on halfway defensible terrain, you'll have a pathetic 30% chance to hit them. However, they are weak to blades and piercing weapons, so if you do hit them, you do more damage. The other thing to watch out for is the 'backstab' ability that the Thieves possess: they can stab for double damage if an allied unit is on the other side of their target. You have to keep you units close enough together that they can't break through and surround you.

By turn 4 Deoran and his retinue should cross the bridge and face down the criminals in the city. If it takes you longer than that, the Urza's forces will have reinforced the city and you'll have a *much* harder time crossing the river. After Deoran has captured the city [i.e., is at the hex 22.13, labeled 'Westin'], the citizens of the city will give him 5 more loyal troops: 4 more Peasants and a White Mage. Minister Hylas is an extremely important figure in this campaign, and is currently the only of your troops who will be very effective against the undead that you will soon face. Deoran should recruit/recall again here, possibly including bringing back the loyal Mermen, then go on the attack. Remember that the peasants are lvl 0, so they don't exert any Zone of Control on enemy units.

Now the Urza begins playing hardball: he won't capture any of your villages. If one of his troops comes upon a village held by you, they will destroy it. It can make sense to not even attack with your peasants, but just leave them sitting on villages to buy time until your more powerful troops can push the bandits back.

Once you have Minister Hylas on your side, the Urza reveals all the tricks up his sleeve: he can recruit Undead. The skeletons and skeleton archers are a real nuisance, as they are highly resistant to attacks by piercing and bladed weapons [exactly the kind that most of your troops possess].

If you're curious, select a Skeleton and look at the description. Depending upon how the version of Wesnoth you are using was compiled, usually this is accomplished by pressing the 'd' key or right-clicking and selecting 'Unit Description'. You will see that the Skeletons are vulnerable to fire and impact weapons, and particularly weak against arcane attacks. You don't have any fire attacks yet, but Minister Hylas' arcane 'Lightbeam' spell, though, is extremely powerful against these foul creatures:

• The Skeletons' -50% resistance to this attack means you will deliver much better damage to them. During broad daylight this totals up to a maximum 51 points of damage every turn.

• Three strikes make it quite reliable, and two hits will bring down a Skeleton from full health at daytime.

• The Lightbeam is a magical attack. This means that it does not matter if they're hiding in mountains, a village or whatever; you still have a 70% chance to hit them.

With the exception of Minister Hylas, your most effective anti-skeleton units are ones with impact attacks. Gerrick gets an impact attack at lvl 3 and Deoran gets one at lvl 2, which is why leveling them up early is such a high priority. Merman netcasters also have impact attacks, and can be devastating against skeletal undead trying to cross the river. Piercing attacks are extremely bad against skeletons and skeleton archers, but massed blade attacks from Gerrick's glaive, bowmen's shortswords, or any spearmen you have leveled into Swordsmen, can eventually wear them down.

When you claim the swamp village at 14.20, you will get a loyal merman fighter. This is the second and last merman fighter you have access to in the whole campaign, whereas you can recruit as many merman hunters as you want, so think carefully before putting him at risk. Hunters are generally more desirable anyway, since they can advance into netcasters with impact attacks, but merman fighters at least get a blade attack at lvl 3, and there will be some moments in the campaign where having a powerful aquatic melee attack can open up important strategic options.

Anyway, by turn 8 you can have cleared the west bank of the river and will be lined up ready to wade across. Here is where merman hunters can be very helpful. They will do pitiful damage against the skeletons (unless you level one into a netcaster) , but their mobility and defense in water is much better than the skeletons', so the mermen can encircle and slowly whittle down the skeletons while your other troops wade toward the enemy keep.

If it takes longer to clear out the city, or if the resistance in the south is particularly stiff, then better wait on your side of the river and let them attack you from the water. Mermen are again useful here for coming around behind the skeletons after they engage with your troops on the shore. By turn 14 you should have reduced their numbers enough to make it across.

After you've crossed the river again, the rest is quite straightforward: get through the forest to the enemy keep, and beat them down. Mermen can circle around the east side of his peninsula and attack from the south as your ground troops attack from the north. Note that mermen get a decent 40% defense in castle tiles, which is the same as your land troops standing on open ground. This lets them clog up your enemy's castle tiles and prevent him from recruiting.

I should mention that while Minister Hylas is healing all of your troops that are near him, nobody is healing Minister Hylas. Since he is so critical, you'll have to retreat him if he gets banged up too bad. For this reason, it is often a bad idea to use his ranged attack against skeleton archers, since they will often hit him back hard, and he will have to sit on a village for several turns before he can attack again. Against skeleton archers, it is better to use the melee impact attacks from deoran/gerrick/a netcaster if you have them levelled up, or just to beat on them with bladed weapons like Gerrick's glaive or even a bowman's short sword.

Also note that the enemy keep is on an isolated peninsula at the southernmost part of the map, with no nearby villages. This means that, if you don't let any villages be burned, you can just tag all the villages and then camp around the enemy keep for the rest of the scenario, farming some xp from his last few units without sacrificing too much carryover gold.

For promotions in this scenario, feeding xp to Deoran, Gerrick, and minister Hylas are high priorities, as well as levelling hunters into netcasters. You can level some spearmen into swordsmen, but you're going to get better options for melee units later. Levelling bowmen is mostly a waste in this campaign due to the preponderance of skeletons.

A Desperate Errand

• Objectives: Move Deoran to the elvish city
• Lose if: Deoran, Sir Gerrick or Minister Hylas die or turns run out
• Turns: 30/24/20 (easy/medium/hard)
• Base Starting Gold: 120/105/75
• Starting Units: Deoran, Sir Gerrick, Minister Hylas

Your keep is on the east bank of a river. The objective is to move Deoran northwest across the river and through the forest to an elvish keep. There is a bandit keep on an island in the river adjacent to your route. You can technically beat the level without defeating the bandit leader, but in practice there is no reason not to.

On turn 3 a loyal cavalryman named Jarek will arrive, and you will gain the ability to recruit cavalrymen. Note that, if Jarek survives, you get him for free at the start of most scenarios after this one, so although you don't NEED to keep him alive and level him up, it is a VERY good idea.

Cavalry start with a blade attack at lvl 1, which is more effective against skeletons than the pierce attacks on your other lvl 1 units. They also have better resistances against blade and impact, although they are more vulnerable to pierce. For that reason, it's probably not a good idea to recruit any spearmen in this level and is better to wait for the cavalry to arrive.

There is a bend in the river that leads from the southern edge of your starting keep to the southern edge of the the enemy's keep, which opens the possibility of an amphibious merfolk assault.

One strategy is to spend the first 2 turns recruiting merfolk and sending them southwest down the river, then recruit some cavalry and maybe bowmen after Jarek arrives. The merfolk will attack the enemy from the south while the ground forces attack from the east. Prioritize taking out poachers and skeleton archers, since their pierce attacks pose the most threat to your cavalrymen.

Even if you defeat the enemy leader, the scenario doesn't end until Deoran reaches the elf keep, so make sure to disengage him and send him north as soon as possible and leave the rest of your units to finish the fight. It is useful to prioritize killing off any bats, since they are the only units which can catch up to Deoran and delay him from reaching his destination.

Vale of Tears

• Objectives: Defeat all enemies and move Ethiliel to Mebrin's village
• Lose if: Deoran, Sir Gerrick, Minister Hylas or Ethiliel die or turns run out
• Turns: 40/32/28 (easy/medium/hard)
• Base Starting Gold: 150/125/80
• Starting Units: Deoran, Sir Gerrick, Minister Hylas, Ethiliel, and Jarek

To finish this scenario, you must BOTH defeat both enemy leaders AND move Ethiliel to Mebrin's village. So much like last scenario, make sure to disengage Ethiliel and send her towards Mebrin's village a few turns before the rest of your forces take out the last enemy leader, to maximize your early finish bonus.

There are 2 enemy leaders in this scenario. The bandit leader to the south recruits the usual lvl 1 chaotic human troops you've seen before, but the Dark Sorceror leader to the east recruits some very scary lvl 2 skeletal undead.

Ethiliel is key in this scenario. She is a second healer, like Hylas. She also has ranged attack that Slows, like a netcaster, and an alternate attack that does pierce damage but is magical. Keep in mind that her Slow attack is NOT magical, so try to use it on units in bad defensive terrain. She also flies and gets high defense on most terrain, especially forest.

The Bone Shooters, Revenants, and Death Blades are the major challenges in this level. They do huge damage, especially at night, and they have high resistance to blade and pierce attacks. Hopefully you have leveled up Deoran and Gerrick by now to access their impact attacks. Minister Hylas and any netcasters will also be key. The Bone Shooters will be especially tough, since they will do huge retaliation damage to Minster Hylas, Ethiliel, or the netcasters (if the Slow attacks miss), and Deoran is especially vulnerable to pierce damage. Cavalrymen can be very useful for this purpose. Try to use their high mobility and blade attacks (enhanced by leadership!) to surround the Bone Shooters and take them down ASAP. They are also good for defending your glass cannon units like Minister Hylas after they've made their attacks. Just don't expect all of your cavalrymen to survive, since a Bone Shooter can take one out in a single turn if it gets lucky. Swordsmen also perform well in this scenario, as they are less vulnerable to arrows than the cavalrymen.

The undead keep is on an island and is approachable from 3 directions: from the south, from the north, and from the west. The western approach is directly over the river and is best suited to mermen. Here is where a leveled up merfolk fighter can be useful for attacking the Dark Sorcerer directly from the water. The southern approach is the most direct and is where most of the enemy will naturally head. It can be useful engage the main body of the enemy on the southern approach and send some cavalrymen around to the north to assassinate the enemy leader.

When your first unit dies, Ethiliel summons her bodyguard, composed of loyal Elvish Rangers. The size of the bodyguard will be of 4, 3 or 2 units for the easy/medium/hard difficulty levels, respectively. These rangers are fast and powerful in the forest, and they possess the ambush ability, which helps you set up traps for the enemy. If your first unit dies on your own turn, the bodyguard will appear right at that moment and can attack immediately. No matter where the unit dies, the bodyguards will appear near ethiliel. It is possible to exploit this effect in various ways, such as by flying ethiliel to the east of the undead leader's keep, intentionally triggering the bodyguards with some kind of suicide attack, and then immediately using them to assassinate the leader.

The human leader is farther away to the south, so ideally you will be mostly done with the undead by the time his units start to really pressure you, at which point you can just mop them up at your leisure.

Choice In The Fog

• Objectives: Defeat all enemies
• Lose if: Deoran, Sir Gerrick, Minister Hylas or Ethiliel die or turns run out
• Turns: 50/40/35 (easy/medium/hard)
• Base Starting Gold: 150/125/80
• Starting Units: Deoran, Sir Gerrick, Minister Hylas, Ethiliel, and Jarek
• Other: You must side with either the Elves or the Bandits when you first sight the bandit keep

Some definition of terms: "Shroud" is the totally black portions of the map where you can't see anything. "Fog of War" is the portions of the map that look sort of hazy, where you can see the terrain but not the units. Shroud and fog are both removed by Line of Sight. A unit's line of sight is every hex that it could reach with a full turn of movement points from its current position. This is affected by terrain. So, a cavalryman might only "see" through 2 or 3 hexes of forest, but an elf would see through 5 or 6. When all of your units move away from an area, so that it is no longer in any of their Line of Sight, the fog of war returns but the shroud does not.

As the title says, this scenario gives you an important choice that divides the rest of the campaign into 2 different branches. You must choose to either side with the bandits or the elves. This choice will not be revealed to Deoran until several turns into the scenario. So, some players choose to "roleplay" this scenario, playing the first turns as if they did not know the map or the choice that is coming. However, you can get better outcomes by making your choice ahead of time and playing with that gameplan in mind from the beginning. In particular, if you are planning to side with the bandits, you would obviously do better by not recruiting elves early on.

The choice is triggered when one of your units has the bandit leader within their line of sight. Before this point, any bandits or undead that you encounter will be hostile toward you. If you choose to side with the elves, the only thing that changes is that your victory conditions change to specify that you must defeat both bandits and undead. If you choose to side with the bandits, the changes are dramatic. All of your elf units, including Ethiliel and her bodyguards, will disappear forever. All of the bandits on the map, including the bandit leader, will join your team, and you will be able to recruit thugs and footpads from now on. Your objective will now be to only defeat the undead. Choosing the bandit path will also remove all the shroud from the map, although fog will remain everywhere outside of your units' line of sight.

Either of these choices dramatically improves your fighting ability against the undead for the rest of the campaign. Thugs and footpads give you access to plentiful and cheap impact attacks. On the other hand, elvish shamans offer impact attacks, the Slow ability, and can eventually upgrade into units with Arcane attacks as well. The downside of the shamans relative to thugs/footpads is that they are less mobile and much more fragile.

Campaign-wise, this choice offers a trade off between long and short term thinking. This scenario itself is significantly easier if you take the bandit path, since you instantly eliminate a bunch of enemies AND gain a bunch of new units for free. On the other hand, the last scenario of the bandit path is much harder than the last scenario of the elf path. There's a moral here, living your life like a bandit is easy in the short run but you pay for it in the end!

A river cuts this map into 3 main sections: a strip of land across the northern map edge, an L-shaped section along the western and southern edges, and an island/peninsula in the east-central region. There are bridges connecting these landmasses. You start on the northwestern corner, the bandit keep is on the eastern landmass near the center of the map, and there are 2 undead keeps in the southwestern and southeastern corners.

From your starting keep, the most obvious path is to take a bridge straight south to the southwestern landmass. The terrain is rough, with lots of hills and forests that will obscure both movement and line of sight. You will encounter the bandits and undead fighting each other around the bridge between the central landmass and the one you're on. The undead from this nearer keep are mostly zombies and ghouls. You can't see it, but the further away undead keep is producing various skeletal undead, including lvl 2 units, and sending them toward the bandit keep from the east. If you weren't involved, the natural course of the battle would be that the bandits will push southwest toward the first undead keep, with most of their units slowly succumbing to poison, and then their leader will be taken out by the stream of more powerful undead from the east.

Whichever choice you plan to make, don't over-recruit at your starting keep. Every unit takes upkeep, and having a big mass of units walking for several turns before fighting anyone is a waste. Recruit 1-2 keeps worth of either humans or elves and then get Deoran moving. He can recruit again at either the first undead keep, the bandit keep, or a small empty keep that is between them on the south bank of the river. If you take the bandit path, this allows you to save your starting gold to spend on thugs and footpads rather than wasting it on too many units with non-impact attacks.

Strategy for this scenario is different depending on which path you want to take in the campaign:

Elf Path:

If you are planning to take the elf path, you can make it easier on yourself by letting the bandits and undead fight each other for as long as possible before you intervene. The main battleground is right in the center of the map, with the bandits crossing the river from the north and the undead coming through the forest from the south. There is a little waterway on the far west side of the map, and a line of mountains just north of the undead keep. The mountains are useful because they block line of sight. You can recruit 2 keeps worth of elves and take them and all of your units down the narrow corridor between the waterway and the mountains, thus staying out of sight of the bandits and undead fighting, and attack the undead keep from the northwest without engaging with the bandits at all.

West of the first undead keep, there is a lake with a single water village. If you claim that village, it triggers a lvl 2 sea serpent to appear. The serpent will attack all other teams. So, one strategy is to send ethiliel down the west side of the map far ahead of your other troops, and have her trigger the sea serpent and then run away. The serpent can give the undead some trouble and soften them up before your main force arrives, but it can also make things complicated by threatening your own units as well.

After you kill off the first undead leaders, you can use the undead keep to recruit some reinforcements, pick off the remaining, mostly poisoned, bandits and proceed north across the river to the bandit keep. Again, you can save upkeep costs by recruiting only as many units as you need, because there's another keep just south of the bandit keep where you can get more units if you need then.

Sometimes, if the bandit leader was especially unlucky, he will already be dead by the time you get to the river, and you will be greeted by some skeletons crossing to meet you. In this case, you either use the keep on your shore to recruit reinforcements, or backtrack Deoran to the undead keep to get more there.

After the bandit leader and/or skeletons are cleared out of the bandit keep, use it to recruit your final wave of units to take out the southeast undead leader. This leader is a lich, and his damage output is huge. It can be helpful to focus heavily on elvish shamans. Even though their damage output is much lower than the elvish fighters, you want to have enough extra that you can use them to suicide attack into the lich to make sure he is slowed before your more valuable units get into his range. Getting some of them to lvl 2 Sorceresses is also a game changer, as they are your only source of Arcane damage other than Hylas.

The lich gets a big cash surge the first time you move into his vision range, and will recruit several lvl 2 units the next turn. It can be hard to fight them effectively near his keep because your movement is restricted by a lot of mountain and frozen tiles, and the lich himself will jump out and blast your units at every opportunity. So it can be helpful to send a quick unit ahead of your main army just to trigger this event and then run away, so that you can deal with the reinforcements at a safe distance. Once you attack the lich, try to surround him with shamans and make sure he is slowed. He will retaliate with ridiculous damage, so expect one or more of them to die each turn they do this. Keep in mind that, if minister Hylas is level 3, his Illuminate ability will reduce the lich's damage output just by standing next to it at night. Then you can finish him off with whatever unit you want to get the xp.

Bandit Path:

If you are planning on taking the bandit path, it's important to control when you trigger the choice by seeing the bandit leader. If you meet him before he finishes using up all of his starting gold, then that excess gold just disappears, and you will miss out on all the other units he would have recruited for you. If you meet him too late, you might be forced to actually fight and kill some of his units before they have a chance to join you, or he might get them killed with unnecessarily aggressive attacks against the undead. The optimal time to meet him is Turn 6, which is right when he finishes spending all of his starting gold. You can use a merfolk unit or Ethiliel to hover in the river west of his keep, just outside of line of sight with him, until it's time to trigger the choice on turn 6.

Before turn 6, you can proceed with a similar sneak attack plan to what you would do on the elf path, just using human units rather than elves. You can also recruit either no units or just a few cavalrymen for line of sight and wait around in the western forest watching the undead and bandits fight until turn 6, making sure to keep far enough away that none of them see you and come in your direction. Then once you trigger the bandits to join you, you can move your forces east to assist your new bandit allies against the undead.

If you're not doing the sneak attack, it is an even better idea to use ethiliel to trigger the sea serpent before she disappears, since it will be a while before the rest of your forces get to its lake.

When the bandits join you, they will have a random mix of thugs, footpads, and poachers. Most of these units will be in the central portion of the map south of the river engaged with the undead, and a few will be further east. The southwestern undead are much easier than the southeastern one, and they focus on ghouls and zombies rather than skeletal undead. So a good strategy is to redirect all of your poachers and footpads toward the southern front, and pull all of your thugs back toward the bandit keep to heal and prepare for the skeletons to arrive. The poachers would be useless against the skeletons either way, and the footpads are fast enough that they can catch up to the rest of your forces after they finish off the southwestern undead leader.

Move Deoran, hylas, and Gerrick to the bandit keep, and spend the rest of your gold on the force that will take down the big skeletal undead and the lich. Since you don't have the shamans' slow attack, the lich will deal so much damage that it can be risky to even attack him with Hylas at night. Your best bet is to bring along some expendable thugs to surround him and just bludgeon him. The drain on his melee retaliation attacks will probably keep him alive for a few turns against their melee attacks, and he will usually kill one of them with his magic during each of his turns, so be sure to bring extras.

The same as with the elf strategy, it can help to trigger his reinforcements early and then fight them away from his keep.

Levelling footpads is a higher priority than thugs in this scenario, as the next bandit scenario prioritizes mobility.

Diverging campaign path - Elf branch

Into the Depths

• Objectives: Root out the source of the undead
• Lose if: Deoran, Minister Hylas or Ethiliel die or turns run out
• Turns: 50/45/40 (easy/medium/hard)
• Base Starting Gold: 125/100/80
• Starting Units: Deoran, Minister Hylas, and Ethiliel

One of the few genuinely tough scenarios in this campaign, mainly because you're fighting underground with Loyalist humans and Elves. The Loyalists are lawful and get -25% damage penalties because underground always counts as "night" time of day, and the Elves have very low defense and movement on cave tiles.

This scenario is a long dungeon crawl. You follow a fairly narrow cave east, then south, then back west, and fight 3 increasingly difficult undead leaders. Managing your recruitment and upkeep is important here. Recruiting 50 units from your starting keep is not any better than recruiting 10, because they would just all pile up behind each other in the bottlenecks, and the upkeep would bankrupt you while they were standing around. Instead, you want to recruit just 1-2 keeps worth of units at the start, and then replenish your forces as necessary every time you get to a new keep.

One way to open up these bottlenecks is to use merfolk. The path from your starting keep to the first enemy leader has multiple 1-2 hex wide bottlenecks and is mostly cave terrain type, meaning your ground forces will move slowly and have a hard time pushing through tough units like Necrophages. On the other hand, there is a parallel water route from your starting keep to the first enemy keep that the enemy completely ignores. The first enemy leader is a Lvl 1 Soulless, which means you can probably take him down with a well-timed surprise attack by just 3-4 mermen. Even if they don't finish him off on their own, they will force him to divert forces to defend against them, which will allow your ground troops to break through the bottlenecks faster.

When selecting your ground units, focus on quality over quantity. To get through the bottlenecks, you want units with high and reliable damage output, like Ethiliel's bodyguards, Elvish Sorceresses, Swordsmen, etc. Also prioritize recalling units with at least 6 movement points, as this can be the difference between moving 2 and 3 spaces on cave terrain. Use leadership and Illumination to optimize your damage output whenever possible.

The first wave of enemies will be mostly ghouls, necrophages, and bats, so total damage output is more important than damage type at this point.

Send one quick unit to walk directly along the southern wall of the cave, and he will discover a hidden passage to some friendly trolls who will join you against the undead. You can't take any of them with you after this scenario, but it can still be very useful to level them up, because there are some very tough skeletal undead coming and you are short on high-damage impact attacks. Surprisingly, trolls move better in water than any of your other troops, so they can be useful to support your mermen later on. The troll cave exits just southwest of the first leader's keep, so they can join your main forces there and help hold off the second wave from the south.

The second wave will reach the first undead keep at about turn 10. If at all possible, try to get Deoran there first, so he can recruit reinforcements on the spot. The second wave is mostly more ghouls and necrophages, along with some dark adepts and some lvl 1 and 2 skeletal undead. But, the second leader is another lich, so it can be useful to recruit a few expendable shamans to walk along behind your main troops until it's time to suicide attack him to make sure he's slowed before your valuable troops take him out.

The cave now turns south from the first undead keep to the second. The layout is similar: a land route with a lot of cave tiles and bottlenecks that make a large force impractical, and a parallel and relatively undefended water route that converges on the keep. This time, the occasional unit will come up the waterway, which should be easy for your trolls and mermen to take out. As with the last lich you faced, send in some sacrificial shamans to slow him and then try to take him down ASAP with arcane and impact attacks.

Now it's time for the main event! The cavern opens up to the west. There is a barrier of swamps and shallow water, with a single bridge on the southern side, and some castle hexes beyond those. Hopefully you have conserved your gold carefully, because the crossing will be difficult and you will need some fodder. The final leader is a lvl 4 ancient lich, and he has a couple lvl 3 Draug bodyguards as well as various lvl 2 skeletal undead to protect him. The terrain will both make maneurverability limited and will make your units vulnerable to counterattack, so expect heavy losses. Don't worry too much about losing some high level units, as the campaign actually gets easier from this point.

Having several merman Netcasters and/or Entanglers will really pay off in this scenario, as their maneuverability, Impact damage, and Slow ability will be crucial for taking out the Draugs, who will otherwise be extremely deadly to your troops standing on low-defense terrain. In the absence of sufficient merfolk sources of Slow, you can spam sacrificial shamans for a similar effect.

After you take out the ancient lich, you get to watch some shocking revelations and dramatic speeches, and then you're over the hump!

Return to Kerlath

• Objectives: Move Deoran into Kerlath Province
• Lose if: Deoran, Minister Hylas or Ethiliel die or turns run out
• Turns: 22/20/18 (easy/medium/hard)
• Base Starting Gold: 125/100/80
• Starting Units: Deoran, Minister Hylas, and Ethiliel

This is a straightforward level, a walk in the park to put it simply. Use it to level up some replacements for the high level units you lost in the last scenario. The elves will only attack you once they see you and will stay still until then, so you can take them on at your own pace. The only way to lose is to send Deoran way out front on his own to be jumped by a bunch of elvish archers.

Ethiliel requests that you "fight to subdue" rather than killing the enemy. It is unclear whether that means that when you kill a unit in this scenario it's merely being 'subdued', but there seems to be no consequence either way.

Vengeance

• Objectives: Survive until end of turns
• Lose if: Deoran or Ethiliel die
• Turns: 14
• Base Starting Gold: 125/100/80
• Starting Units: Deoran, Minister Hylas, Sir Gerrick and Ethiliel and several defenders

Another cakewalk. Resist the urge to fight the elves. Every time you kill one, several more spawn at the western edge of the map. Instead, just turtle up on the ring of castle tiles near your starting keep, focus on slowing as many of the attacking units as possible, don't attack at all otherwise, rotate your units periodically to heal, and run out the clock.

Diverging campaign path - Bandit branch

Long March

• Objectives: Move Deoran across the river
• Lose if: Deoran, Sir Gerrick, Minister Hylas or Urza Afalas die or turns run out
• Turns: 30/25/20 (easy/medium/hard)
• Starting units: Deoran, Sir Gerrick, Minister Hylas, Afalas and Jarek

Just follow Urza Afalas for a standard scenario unless you want a challenge, in which case head north and fight. The end result is the same.

Actually, the above is a matter of opinion. In earlier versions, following the suggestion of the Urza would allow you to sneak around the edges of the map with relatively few contacts with the enemy. As of version 1.3.14 and above, many users find that this scenario is so hard that they end up going back to "Choice in the Fog" and choosing to side with the elves. In the newer versions, the amount and level of enemies that come hunting you down will provide plenty of challenge even if all your important characters are fully leveled up. For starters, this scenario resembles "Crossroads" from the Heir to the Throne campaign in that every time you step off the path you are likely to create several new elves to harass you. Staying on the path makes you an easy target for the hordes of undead and elves that each want your blood. The only reprieve you'll have is that the elves and undead are equally willing to destroy each other, though in my experience this rarely worked in my favor.

The good thing is that the victory condition is fairly simple: Deoran is the only unit that needs to cross the river. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to let you know that only a Naga awaits you on the South bank of the river, so it's perfectly okay to send him out alone once you've dealt with it. At this point, it would be better if the rest of your team hunker down together in a classic hedgehog defense. The less you move, the fewer elves attack you. Also, you may want to avoid the valley with the three villages in it - setting foot in there summons a large Elven ambush. Actually, the northmost of the three villages is safe to rest in.

There are some elves that will come out even if you keep to the path. The ambushes happen when you stray. You can use this to your advantage by recruiting a Peasant or two. Have them hang back behind the party. When you start to see undead, have the peasants sprint south into the forest/off the path. They will trigger an ambush. Since the undead are south and the triggered ambush is south, hopefully the elves and undead will attack one another (or at least ZOC each other). Besides that, stay to the path. The elves you encounter on the path are weaker than the elves who ambush you.

Pebbles in the Flood

• Objectives: Hold out as long as possible
• Lose if: n/a
• Turns: n/a
• Starting units: Sir Gerrick, Urza Afalas and several defenders

Deoran leaves Sir Gerrick behind to hold the undead at a border fort while he and Minister Hylas prepare at Westin. Urza Afalas stays with Gerrick to atone for his prior transgressions. The objective is to keep Sir Gerrick alive as long as possible.

The longer you hold out, the better the set up is in the next scenario. The milestones are lasting 6, 22, or 24 turns. The following table describes these benefits; the column on the right explains your reward for holding the undead for at least the number of turns in the left column.

Turns	Benefits
6	An Encampment (Castle) location on the northern bank of the river.
7	A Heavy Infantryman occupies the above encampment.
8	A new Encampment (Castle) location.
9	A Heavy Infantryman occupies the above encampment.
10	Two additional villages.
11	Two additional villages.
12	Two additional Castle locations.
13	A new Encampment (Castle) location, occupied by a Lieutenant.
14	A new Encampment (Castle) location, occupied by a Spearman.
15	A new Encampment (Castle) location, occupied by a Bowman.
16	A new Encampment (Castle) location, occupied by a Heavy Infantryman.
17	An illuminating campfire. This is a special terrain modifier that irradiates light for a large radius around it, providing all those locations with the same effect as the illuminates ability of certain units (like Mages of Light).
18	A new illuminating campfire.
19	A new illuminating campfire.
20	A new illuminating campfire.
21	A new Encampment (Castle), south of the river.
22	A new Encampment (Castle).
> 22	20 additional gold per turn, above 22.

In addition to this, one of the key elements for the next scenario is the help you receive from the Council of Westin, composed by an Arch Mage, a Red Mage, a Silver Mage and two White Mages. If you happen to maintain Sir Gerrick alive for 24 turns here, the full Council will be with you from the start. Otherwise, you will start with just the Silver Mage, and the rest of the Council will arrive in turn number (25 - number_of_turns_lasted).

Unlocking all the benefits can be quite a challenge (at least on Normal and Hard difficulties), but with some effort it shouldn't be too hard to hold out for at least 12 turns, which gives you those two extra Castle locations. They are quite useful to start recruiting in larger numbers from the beginning.

When Gerrick dies, the scenario is over (you 'win'). You cannot kill all the units as Mal M'Brin cannot be hit (in this scenario only).

You will be fighting all undead, so recruit Footpads and Thugs. You can't recall any units (they are all with Deoran, not Gerrick).

The Tides of War

• Objectives: Defeat Mal M'Brin
• Lose if: Deoran dies or turns run out
• Turns: 60/60/60 (easy/medium/hard)
• Starting units: Deoran, Minister Hylas, Jarek and some defenders

With Gerrick and his band of defenders defeated, the undead arrive at Westin. Deoran has fortified the city and recruited some defenders (how much of both depends on the previous scenario). Minister Hylas has summoned the Council of Westin. The Council consists of a Silver Mage, a Red Mage, two White Mages and an Arch Mage. The Silver Mage, Minister Mefel arrives at the beginning. Depending on how well you did in the last level, the rest of the Council may or may not be with him.

This level is not that difficult and is easy once the Council arrives. Recruit fodder Footpad after fodder Footpad. Secure the two crossings. Note that Draugs are Level 3, so killing a single one can almost level up an intelligent Footpad on its own. When the Council arrives, push towards Mal M'Brin. All the heroes except Deoran can die.

Try and keep your Silver Mage alive. Also when the Red Mage levels up, turn it into a Silver Mage. They will be very helpful when the time comes to kill Mal M'Brin who, as an Ancient Lich, is quite robust.