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Chapter 7: Flyover Chapter
We are back to having little world map exposition scenes, and already I just realized a mistake on my part. I positionned these portraits thinking the generic bandit face was supposed to be the bandits on the west side, when it's supposed to represent Shiva's bounty hunters. I guess the vanilla placement wasn't as arbitrary as I though, huh. (Although they're all facing the wrong way.)
This title is one of few instances where we chose to deviate from Project Naga, which has “Thracia's Shield” as Hannibal's title. It's a detail, and it's not like you hear that title often, but I do think it sounds a little bit better.
: Those damnable cowards took everything from me: my kingdom, my mother, my father... I'll not come crawling to them with cup in hand!
: Do you expect to fight off the Knights of Manster with the strength of your pride alone? We are not fighting to satisfy your own sense of vengeance, my prince—we fight to liberate North Thracia from the tyranny of the Empire. You yourself said that there was "no hardship you would be unwilling to endure" to accomplish this. Did you think the only kind of hardship in this war would be from battle?
This chapter has some really choice exchanges that don't just fit on one screenshot, so there's going to be a few of these.
: The same city being besieged by the Imperial Army for their rebellion? Going there with the small force we have now is certain death. Does my prince wish an early grave?
Augustus is really dunking on Leif, today.
And here's Shiva, at last! And... ah, crud, Cirosan changed that bandit's portrait, too. That's another thing that's off about the world map scene.
Over on the left, there's a whole pile of armors I'm not even going to bother killing. They're hard to lure out, and my fliers don't like being pelted with arrows. There's barely anything worth taking from them either. Even the Arch Knight down there only has a couple Torches as loot.
This guy here is quite the badass, though. Barons have Accost as a class skill, and huge bases.
Except for Speed.
He has less Speed than Hicks.
Guess how many items this guy will have in his inventory by the end of this chapter. 
The bounty hunters turned into less less threatening brigands. There's a few Hammers and Poleaxes in there, but nothing we can easily capture.
Shiva is still the same. He's a bit low-level now, compared to all our level 8 folks (and Lithis sitting at 15...), but he's still a killing maching. That Poleaxe is dropping his AS to 0, though.
Let's start! Leif is going to be sitting right here for a few turns. I have my reasons. They're pretty fun reasons.
: You folks are just so brave, with a body to match—Hm? Beg pardon? You're not with the Panzerritter? ...Oh, c'mon! I had this whole spiel prepared an' everything! Ugh, there go my plans...
Look, one of the knights in the Panzerritter was by earlier, and he left this here. I thought it was the classic "pretend to forget something so you have an excuse to come back" ploy, but I guess not... Well, see that this gets back to him, will you?
This village used to have an old guy who did some kinda crime and thinks we're here to arrest him, then gives us a Master Seal as hush money.
I think we can agree that it's definitely an improvement. 
Hell no, we're not giving this back to anybody.
“If you get poisoned, just stab yourself, and you won't feel the poison anymore.”
Everyone on foot is going south to meet the bounty hunters and escape. The fliers are going to stick around to pilfer some stuff. After the enemies move, a bunch of events trigger.
I know it's a bit of a tangent, but I wish the vanilla game was a bit smarter with its choice of portraits. I get that there is only so much sprite art to use, but this guy shows up both as an NPC and a named boss later on. That exact face also has a perfectly fine recolor that, to my knowledge, goes completely unused. There are about 15 unused portraits in total, which quite a lot actually, for this kind of game.
And here's the other event where Finn and Safiya spawn. It's so convenient that I can just...
… fly her right over there and make her preach to Shiva.
Because of his Poleaxe weighing him down, Shiva would have some trouble dodging his former colleagues, so I elect to have him flee down south. That means he will need to dodge two out of three ~66% chances of hitting him.
It's turn 2. I can deal with a reset.
And Safiya can't help him, because I loaded the wrong save before starting Manster, so both Finn and her came empty-handed. 
Back up north, Hicks and Lara are going to do their thing for the next few turns.
Lithis got a movement star, so he perches himself on a mountain, and dares all to break their axes against him. 
On turn 3, Raydrik comes over to chat with general Eisenhau, who just spawned in the nearby forest. Problem is, Eisenhau didn't spawn, because Leif was standing on that forest. 
Which is really weird, because this game does have code to move spawns to a different position if the tile is blocked, and it's not like they didn't expect players to do this, when Eisenhau shows up so close to the player's army. Maybe the Raydrik cutscene wasn't playing well with a different spawn point? 
The main point of doing this is that it will block all reinforcements after the first wave. It's not like they're much of a threat, but man, I just don't want to deal with dozens of bow armors moving on every single enemy phase.
Granted, I could have achieved the same result by killing Eisenhau with my very huge Leif, but...
This man is also very huge and kind of super dangerous, what with Wrath and all. Grabbing that Silver Lance would have been great, but it's also basically impossible to capture him.
So yeah, Leif is just going to throw some handaxes at the reinforcements, and be done with it.
It's not a great level, but after all the other good ones, I think Leif is doing fine.
Back in the south, Nanna and Lithis take care of the brigand frontlines. Nanna switched to a Slim Sword, now that she's caught up on stats. It lets her train her sword rank a bit without using up the Shadow Sword.
Lithis tanked almost everyone else, and took barely any damage from it.
As for Shiva, well...
… he's doing fine.
Then it's cleanup with Fergus providing some spookumss, and Macha making wonderful use of Accost. That's.... most of the threats on this map taken care of
Yeah, even the bow armors didn't last long at all.
Shiva visits the last village, gets a lecture on the arena, and something incredibly un-magical.
The fliers are going to hang around for a bit while everyone's going toward the escape point.
The Baron guy has no weapons left on his person, so he leaves.
The Bow Knight is going to get poked for a bit, to get those experience bars to 100.
Better combat for everybody!
I did fuck up my positionning at some point, which could have made Lara extremely dead. Though it seems every time I do that, she procs her 10% Str growth!
That's about it for the fliers crew. I'm getting really full on junk though. I'll need to do some spring cleaning, once I get a preparations screen...
Back down south, my units are starting to evacuate already.
Aside from the Battle Axe, this shop doesn't have anything unique to sell. I think I'm good on powerful axes, though.
Fergus keeps being mediocre, but does reach C rank in staves. He's probably going to play second-fiddle to Halvan until I get at least Ronan promoted.
Leif and Finn get a little bit of catch-up time on the way down. There's some pretty good lines, again.
Oh, and if you happen to have anyone escape inside Meath while Eisenhau is on the field, this little event happens. Hannibal and his troops take the field, and the knights of Manster start retreating.
So much for the Panzerritter / Armored Knights. Hannibal is yet another Prince, with his retinue of Elfire Mages and a bunch of Clerics with high-end healing.
Hannibal himself is pretty baller, too. Low HP for a Lv 20 promoted unit, though.
And that's already it for this map. Pretty simple, when you don't fight half of the enemies, and cheese the boss early on.
”Miacis, chapter 4x” posted:
I don't know why I tried so hard to save you, Asbel, but now I'm making damn sure you get all the way through Manster so that I can bench you as violently as possible.
It's a Brave Sword, actually, and gets silently added to the convoy. Apparently, it's B rank, so nobody can use the two I have, yet.
Next time:
One of these is not like the others...
