Liberty

Footpads are the core unit for this campaign. High defense, mixed attacks, and low cost makes them handy in all events. You get Harper, a loyal Footpad in all scenarios, and assume the role of Baldras, a Bandit; level these up, plus any others you recruit with good traits.

Notice that, during the first two scenarios of this campaign, your units will not be exactly Footpads, Thugs and Poachers. They will be instead Peasant Youths, Villagers and Peasant Hunters. The main difference of these counterparts is that they have a neutral alignment, so you need to adjust your strategies accordingly in case you're accustomed to the Time of Day cycle for chaotic units. From the third scenario onwards, your army will become regular (chaotic) units.

The main problem in this campaign is finding units to deal damage; Footpads are great for swarming and pinning enemies, but even swarming an enemy from all sides they might take less than half its HP off in one turn. None of your L1 units cause much damage. It's important to level up a couple each of Thugs and Poachers; you then use these as first strike against an enemy unit, followed by the Footpad swarm to finish them off or at least pin them so you can finish them next turn. In particular, you want a Huntsman by scenario 7 so you have decent marksman damage for busting enemy commanders.

You have enough troops to beat the goblins in a straight-up fight; your problem is luring the leader to attack you rather than running straight up the board and into the town of Dallben (if this happens you lose!). This means you need to dangle some units in his engagement range. Using Footpads for this purpose is a good idea, given their high defense.

Running Harper and one other Footpad north works well. Provided the other draws the goblin leader off of his run north, Harper can then either join in fighting him, or complete the run north, where you get a couple of thugs for free (3 on Easy) and return with them, depending on how far north you get before he breaks his run. These guards will show up if the enemy gets too close to Dallben anyway, but since the goblins will try very aggressively to get into town, it's better to support them with extra footpads to keep them out.

If you look closely at hex 1.10, there is a castle tile with a little backpack on it. If you move Harper there, he will get "a bag for holding more rocks", giving him +1 ranged damage permanently.

Civil Disobedience

Objectives: Defeat the army captain
Lose if: Baldras or Harper die or time runs out
Turns: 14/13/12 (easy/medium/hard)
Starting units: Baldras and Harper

Bunch up all your fighters and use them to swarm single or paired cavalry units. Use houses for cover. Remember to keep recruiting in those early turns, even if you have to forgo attacking enemies from good cover to make the space for the recruit to stand.

Poachers are useful for getting damage into the enemy cavalry and have decent defense when in your castle or in villages, and then use footpads to take positions in the open (they have good defense in the open) to wrap around enemy units. Ideally you want the enemy to wrap cavalry around units in your keep, and you then wrap around the ones behind your keep with Poachers and Footpads.

The enemy commander is a tough fight, since he has good melee and ranged attacks he will stay in his keep until you put a unit within his movement range, but from that point on he will move freely, so don't put harper in his reach as you approach. The best way to take him down is encircling him with poachers.

At hex 31.14, right under the windmill marked "Baldras' Farm", there is a little mace icon on a castle tile. If you move Baldras over this tile he will get a permanent +1 to damage.

The last line of dialogue in this scenario is "yes, we're outlaws", and fittingly, from now on all of your units are chaotic and have the usual bandit unit names.

A Strategy of Hope

Objectives: Defeat the enemy leaders
Lose if: Baldras, Harper or Relana die or time runs out
Turns: 35/30/25 (easy/medium/hard)
Starting units: Baldras and Harper

This scenario is not hard to beat overall, but to get a lot of carryover gold for the next scenario, you need to consider your unit choices and movement carefully.

To get the best early finish bonus and carryover gold, you want to kill both enemy leaders around the same turn. If you kill one of them way before the other, then all your units on that side of the board will be useless for several turns as they walk across the whole map to help attack the other leader, and they will be eating up your upkeep the whole way.

There are a lot of allied villages in the southwest quadrant of the board, so it can pay off to send 1-2 footpads that way in the first few turns. You can use harper for this, since the pitcher is in that area anyway, but he will miss a lot of opportunities to gain xp since he'll be so far from the fighting.

Your allies are surprisingly effective and focus all their attention on the saurians. That means your main focus will be the orcs, but you still need to send enough units toward the saurian leader to help your ally so that you kill both leaders at roughly the same time. It can be hard to find the right balance of which units to send to which side, so one strategy is to recruit a mix of thugs and poachers on turn 1, then see what your ally and each enemy leader recruits and send your units in the directions where they will be most useful. Your last recruitment turn can be mostly footpads, since they're fast and versatile and you can send the majority of them to whatever front seems to be having a harder time. Keep in mind that saurians have resistance to pierce and vulnerability to impact, so a footpad will do just as much damage to them as a poacher.

Notice that, after the stark realization reached by Baldras at the end of the previous scenario, your army has turned now into standard chaotic units (Footpads, Thugs, etc.). But Relana hasn't gone full outlaw and killed any human soldiers yet, so she and her troops are still neutral.

At hex 5.28, in the southwest corner, there is a pitcher which will give Harper +1 hp permanently.

Unlawful Orders

Objectives: Defeat Asheviere's general
Lose if: Baldras, Harper or Lord Maddock die or time runs out
Turns: 30/22/16 (easy/medium/hard)
Starting units: Baldras and Harper

There are a lot of villages on this map, so your first 3 recruits should be footpads. 1 should go northwest, the other northeast. If one of them is quick, or if you can recall a quick one, send it first to the west side of your starting area and then south across the river. The enemy will focus mostly on your ally's troops that run straight down the center of the map, so a quick footpad can often sneak down the west side of the map and claim several villages without being noticed. You can also use your starting units to grab all of your ally's villages nearby on turn 1.

Lord Maddock's troops will be barely a speedbump and by the end of the first night you'll be on your own.

You can play this defensively by holding the north bank of the river and letting the enemy come to you, or you can try for a faster victory by sending a swarm of units right on the heels of maddock's men. If you're trying to rush, a swarm of footpads is the best bet. Their high mobility lets them get past the bottleneck at the bridge, and their high defense on flat gives them a decent chance of surviving the counterattack. Either way, sending some quick units over the bridge to the east will help you to break the bottleneck at the southern river crossing and flank the enemies fighting at the central bridge crossing.

Your enemies' resistances change dramatically with time of day. So it can pay to get some poachers for attacking during daylight when the enemy horse units are vulnerable to pierce, and some footpads for attacking at night when they're vulnerable to impact. Thugs are your only melee unit, so you want some of them to deal with archers either way.

Maddock will obligingly jump off of his keep once he's spent his starting gold if you're nearby, so on turn 3 or 4 you will be able to recruit in your own keep, then run over to Maddock's keep and recruit again in the same turn.

There are 2 easter eggs in this scenario. In the northwest corner there is a treasure chest with some extra gold that will help with your initial recruitment. In the southwest corner there is an odd looking white structure on the beach that will also give you some gold. The second treasure stash will be way too late to help you recruit, but it will at least give you a little extra carryover gold.

Hide and Seek

Objectives: Get Baldras to the signpost (preferably without being seen)
Lose if: Baldras or Harper die or time runs out
Turns: 34/30/26 (easy/medium/hard)
Starting units: Baldras and Harper
Other: You will be seen if you end your turn within visual range of an enemy unit

The moment you get within an enemy's visual range (its movement range plus 1 hex in any direction), it will attack and all the other enemies wake up also. What saves you is that Harper can see farther than they can. Don't run ahead with him, you need Baldras to the exit point; Harper scouts the way, he follows.

The safe route is south-east, using Harper to eye a way between the soldiers. Head between some others through some mountains and head all the way across to the east edge of the map. Then head south through a lake and then southeast until above the exit and down.

If you still need to level either Harper or Baldras, go ahead and kill one or two of the soldiers when you are right near the signpost. If one enemy can see you, they can all see you and they slowly converge on your location. But if you kill the only enemy that can see you, the rest all freeze and forget that you exist. Try to let the first unit they see be Baldras on a castle tile, in a position where they have to attack him from flat terrain. He will do huge retaliation damage and you can usually finish them off the next turn before reinforcements arrive.

The Hunters

Objectives: Kill all enemy patrols before they reach the outpost
Lose if: Death of Baldras, Harper, or Helicrom. Any patrol units survive when turns run out. Any allied unit is sighted by the outpost guards.
Turns: ??/??/27 (Easy, Medium Hard)
Starting units: Baldras and Harper

Helicrom and Baldras are each their own team, with their own income, and you control each one each turn. Unfortunately, this means Helicrom's leadership does not affect Baldras' units.

Like the starting dialogue says, you will need to intercept 5 patrols. They each appear in the southeast corner of the map and travel along the path toward the outpost in the northwest corner. Here is their composition and the order of their appearance, on Hard difficulty:

Turn 1: 3 shock troopers, 2 heavy infantry

Turn 5: 1 shock trooper, 1 heavy infantry, 1 swordsman, 1 longbowman, 1 javelineer

Turn 11: 1 shock trooper, 1 heavy infantry, 1 pikeman, 1 longbowman, 1 spearman, 1 javelineer

Turn 17: 2 shock troopers, 1 heavy infantry, 1 longbowman, 1 swordsman, 1 lieutenant, 1 spearman

Turn 21: 1 master at arms, 3 duelists, 1 swordsman, 1 javelineer

You and helicrom are "team 1" and "team 2" and the enemy is "team 3". So they appear at the beginning of the turn cycle, then you and helicrom take your turns, THEN they take their turn. So whenever you have breathing room between patrols, you can take advantage of this by positioning your units in the forests directly beside the spawn point, so that each time a patrol pops up, you can immediately attack them from both sides and hopefully take out 1-2 of their units before they get a chance to attack. On the other hand, if you hang back and let the patrols walk for a few turns, the faster units will get ahead of the slower ones, and that can make it easier to take them out separately.

Helicrom's keep is much closer to the action than Baldras', so he can go back and forth between the front and his keep to recruit more units. But for Baldras it's probably a better idea to just spend all of your starting gold and then have him join the fight.

Helicrom's shadow mages are very good against heavy infantry and decent against swordsmen/pikemen, but they have a lot of trouble against longbowmen and javelineers because their hp is so low and they really can't afford to take much retaliation damage. For that reason, make sure Baldras recruits enough thugs to handle these units.

The last patrol is full of high damage skirmishers, which can be a nightmare for your fragile mages. The best defense against skirmishers is a good offense, so try to level up some mages beforehand, and bring some huntsmen if you have them, so their marksmanship can counter the skirmishers' high defense.

The day/night cycle is distorted to give your chaotic troops maximum advantage. Here are the turns when the time of day changes:

start: first watch

Turn 4: midnight (the same as first watch and second watch, mechanically)

Turn 7: second watch

Turn 10: dawn

Turn 11: morning

Turn 14: afternoon

Turn 17: dusk

Turn 18: first watch

Turn 21: midnight

Daylight only lasts from turns 11-16, so it can make sense to retreat during this period. Just remember not to retreat TOO far, because if the units at the outpost see you or any member of the patrol, you lose.

This is just my observation, but the patrols seem to become more 'focused' as they get closer to the outpost. If you put a bait unit off the path when they are far from the outpost, one of the patrol units can sometimes be lured into the forest to attack it. But once they get close to the outpost, they won't go for a lure like this any more and will just drive straight for the outpost no matter what.

There are 4 easter eggs in this scenario. In the southwest corner there is a whirlpool which will spawn an extra large tentacle. There is no bonus for killing it, but it is lvl 3 so you can get some easy xp. XP is plentiful in this level though, and you will waste a lot of upkeep walking your units over to it and then all the way back to the main fighting, so it's probably not worth the trouble. North of Baldras' keep there is a key. Southeast of the keep is a white coffin. If one of your units touches the key and then another unit touches the coffin (they don't have to do it at the same time), it will unlock and reveal a ghoul. If you kill the ghoul you will get a potion that gives any unit that picks it up a melee poison attack and some extra hp. Northwest of Helicrom's keep is a white structure that will give a bonus 16 gold EACH to both Baldras and Helicrom. Northeast of Helicrom's keep is a sword that will give Helicrom a permanent +2 melee damage.

The next scenario is the end of the campaign, so plan your advancements accordingly. It will feature a lot of fighting on castle tiles and mountains, and it will emphasize speed and mobility. This means that the magical attacks from helicrom's units will be useful, as will the speed of the footpad advancements. Huntsmen are of dubious importance. On the one hand, their marksmanship ability is useful for attacking enemies on castle tiles, but on the other hand the enemy will have lots of Shock Troopers and Pikemen next turn, so pierce damage will not be very effective.

For maximizing carryover gold into the next scenario, keep 2 things in mind:

1) the objectives say there is no early finish bonus, but this is not exactly true. There is no way to finish before turn 21 when the last patrol appears. But there is an early finish bonus from turn 21 on.

2) At the end of this scenario, it will calculate carryover gold for both Baldras' and Helicrom's team, but only Baldras' carryover actually affects the starting gold for next scenario; Helicrom's carryover gold just disappears. For this reason, it can be a good idea to send a footpad from Baldras' side to steal all of Helicrom's villages ASAP. They will help offset Baldras' upkeep and increase his income for the whole level, and are just wasted on Helicrom.

Glory

Objectives: Destroy all four towers
Lose if: Baldras or Harper die, or time runs out
Turns: ??/34/?? (Easy/Medium/Hard)
Starting units: Baldras and Harper, possibly Helicrom
Other: Move a unit onto each of the trap door to destroy a tower

The Wesnothian army is tough to beat if you have to try to take them on inside their fortress - and they get reinforcements every afternoon. You have to lure as many as possible out of the fortress -- dangle bait just within their engagement range. It's the final scenario, so don't worry about money, just recall all your L2 and L3 recalls and recruit until you are out of gold.

If you chose to have Helicrom join you in battle, he will be auto-recalled for you, and you will be able to recall and recruit his Shadow Mages. (In earlier versions they would be a separate, allied faction.)

March your troops straight North and hang out around the first village there. It will be a nice pitched battle for a few turns, but eventually your numbers will overwhelm them. Then you can split your forces a bit to the west and south entrances. Remember that your Outlaws and above fight a lot better in the mountains than your opponents (offsetting the garrison bonus).

On Turn 8 (on Medium difficulty) , Lord Maddock's son, Gwydion, will appear in a Northwestern castle. He will send in 8-9 mounted units, Lancers or Knights on Medium difficulty, which will proceed to attack. Unfortunately, equestrian tactics don't seem to be one of Elensfar's strong points, and their riders will just make a headstrong charge, which will fail to defeat the defenders. They will shake things up a lot, kill a bunch of units, and create openings for you to sneak in your quick units.

Remember: It's the trap doors that matter, not defeating enemy units.

Once you've reached all 4 trap doors (not necessarily at once), you have two more turns to survive before the fortress collapses and the scenario is won; make sure to keep Baldras and Harper alive and make sure they're out of the fortress' perimeter when it collapses.

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[Comments by cph] At hard, I played it a bit differently. Helicrom's units throw themselves at the south gate and clog it for a day or so; the riders attack the west gate and tie up the enemy there. So I marched my entire force into the woods southwest of the fortress; once both gates were clogged by the allies, I moved my forces closer to both gates, and then lunged into the fortress with all the Footpads, Outlaws and Fugitives I could fit in. Fugitives on good defensive tiles are great for holding the flanks of the thrust, and Footpads are expendable. Bash away throughout the night on all the enemies you can, moving as much as you can into the fortress; seize the central fort with outlaws, and rush Footpads to the 4 towers as soon as you get an opening. The orcs went down the east side of the level, so they ran straight into the reinforcements, and I didn't have to fight either.

[Comments by Bumblebee] A different strategy is to avoid direct fight as much as possible and remember you lead guerilla fighters. Recall all quick L2 and L3 units (with at least 6 or 7 moves per turn), recall all quick L1 Footpads, some poachers and a couple of Thieves or Rogues are helpful too. Spend the first day taking villages and moving your forces, let riders and orcs kill some defenders. Don't send too many units on eastern flank, or they will lure orcs, and orcs will fight mostly you instead of garrison. When army reinforces arrive, retreat if they notice you. Kill pursuers one by one. Let reinforces meet orcs.

Meanwhile, put quick units near every tower. Southern, western and northern sides of the fortress are relatively safe for that. Don't put units too close to bridges and entrances, or they will draw defenders' attention. Let riders and orcs fight and lure enemy forces away from the towers. When a tower is empty for a moment, sneak into it. Quick Footpads can reach entrance to catacombs from outside in one turn if way is free. When riders and orcs are dead, simulate night attacks on the bridge opposite to the towers you want to take. I had to sacrifice some units at the southern bridge before guards left one of the northern towers. I finished at turn 16 at medium.

[Comments by KingElk] Similar to bumblebee, but more specific. This worked on normal difficulty, I'm not sure if it would work on hard. First, recall any Outlaws/Fugitives, or Rangers (I had one ranger (L3 Poacher) and it came in handy fending some of the enemies off, and it is fast.) As the above states, any units with 6/7 moves per turn. Do NOT recall anything else, even if its L3. After, with any leftover gold, recruit Outlaws until you are out of money. Move your entire army (and leader) along the dead west part of the map, until you reach the west entrance. Do NOT fight the army coming from the south gate. They might get a few shots at you but you will beat the scenario before they swing around their main army to trap you in the west (your northwest ally will fend them off for 3+ turns). Split your Outlaws and send 3-5 to the north gate, and the remaining shoved into the west gate. You will probably meet resistance in the west, but the only entrance you need to reach from the west gate is the southwest one. From the north, split again and attempt to reach the northwest and northeast objectives in one turn if possible. As a bonus, if your Outlaw has one extra movement point when it takes an objective, it still has that after and can move onto a castle for 70% defense. The southwest objective can be taken by pushing through the west gate. After those three are down, squeeze some Outlaws from the north or west to the southeast, at any cost. In all likelihood, the northeast Outlaw will have little resistance because of the orc/human fighting. Your leader can head northwest to the corner of the map for safety, don't use him for fighting. NOTE: You don't need the extra ally that was offered earlier in the campaign, or the extra gold. I made the mistake of getting Rogue Mages, but it didn't matter.

[Comments by Hipparchos] Similar to KingElk, but even faster in my experience: recall/recruit all quick troops then it's "student body left" as you march north along the west side of the map. Hugging the edge isn't necessary (and slows you down a bit), just stay about 4 hexes away from the city walls and you won't attract any defenders (which is what you want). Avoid all enemy contact and combat, and ignore villages, as your goal is the NORTH gate! You must accept Helicrom's help, then fall in behind his lines as his horsemen attack the city and attract the guards away from the western walls while the orcs attract the guards away from the eastern walls. I also send a single sacrificial unit east to distract and delay the Wesnoth reinforcements. And sometimes the west gate is left unguarded for a turn, so it's a good idea to drop off an outlaw nearby to exploit that. By the time you're at the north gate, it should be unguarded. The city is fast-moving pavement, so you should be able to rush enough units in through the north gate to take all four towers in one or two turns. The game's AI makes the enemy seek out weaker units to attack, which means they will mostly leave you alone as you take their rear. The entire scenario takes me 12 turns this way at normal difficulty.