Valkyria Chronicles: Battle of Barious Desert done.
I've been working on this one for a couple of days. It's a desert map with occasional sandstorms. The huge number of enemy lancers and light tanks makes advancing the Edelweiss an issue. I always knew this mission would have to be won by scouts circling around the back while the main force provides a distraction to the south.
The commander said snipers would be important, and provided some positions for our snipers. The enemies have lots of snipers, too. Our snipers were to take out the machine gun and sniper nest above the first capture point to allow foot soldiers to come through, kill the enemy lancers and shocktroopers, and retreat to the newly captured point.
The enemy will keep calling reinforcements to replace any fallen troops, so it's really impossible to advance far without taking that forward capture point. How many times did I fail hoping I could just ignore it?
How many times did the Edelweiss get blown up because I felt I could ignore the enemy lancers?
My winning strategy (and I should put that in quotes, because it was barely a win) was to assault the forward point with shocktroopers in front, while scouts snuck around back and took out the machine gun and the snipers. Cherry was shot by an entrenched enemy shocktrooper. Alicia medvaced her as she capped the point, called up Ted to replace Cherry and headed to a safe point well behind enemy lines in a sandstorm, followed swiftly by Ted.
That's where they found and killed the enemy ace.
Advancing for the surprise capture failed each time I tried it with an enemy light tank nearby, so I started advancing the Edelweiss to draw the tanks away from the scouts. Next sandstorm, I sent the scouts in.
There were three enemies in their main base — a shocktrooper leader and two recent sniper reinforcements. Alicia got herself killed trying to take out the shocktrooper. I sent Ted in to take out the snipers (easily accomplished) and tried to take out the shocktrooper with a mortar, which didn't do much damage.
It did, however, knock him out of the main base, which opened up the cap point, and Ted capped it for the win.
I'm not really sure how I could have done this better. It took me days just to get this win. Maybe if I'd focused more on taking out the enemy tanks… but I'd have had to get a lancer and an engineer up behind enemy lines, and that is a thing that wouldn't happen. Maybe call in a crowd of lancers and snipers from the first cap point. I honestly don't know. And I don't want to go looking, either. Once I start looking for spoilers, I won't stop.
This may have been a cruddy win, but it was my win.
Next fight is going to be against the enemy commander, Prince Maximillian, and his Valkyrur friend. She was in the game trailer, but this will be the first time we meet her in person. I also know from the trailer that we lose this fight, since, duh, her scene in the trailer hasn't happened yet 😛 And they get possession of the thing we're fighting over.
We got a new sniper rifle off the enemy ace. R&D had a number of upgrades for my crew. I couldn't afford to train anyone up, since spent the xp on learning "Retreat" from the old guy in the cemetary, whom I suspect to be Isara's father.
