Forest Heart
Tuesday May 19, The Edge of Forest Heart.
Aww shiet, Soublighta!
My preciousss...
We are welcomed in this mission by getting slaughterd. Fortunately, those are only our scouts. It would be nice to have them alive but since there is Trow there, there's no fucking chance.
We have control over those guys though, so I ordered them to attack Trow in vain hope of damaging it a little.
This is our main force. Again, no dwarfs but a lot of archers and berserkers.
We saw it matey. Get your ass over here before those three Myrmidons behind you cut you to pieces...
We shoot myrmidons while mysterious rest of our troops are coming to join us.
Myrmies are getting chopped by berserkers and reinfrocements are here...
Yup, suck it down Trows! we got forest giants!
Cool looking buggers. I don't know what convinced them to join us again, but that doesn't matter, I'm happy they are here. They are "giant" type unit just like Trow's and I don't think there is any difference between those two other than different sprite. They both pretty much instantly kill lesser units and turn to stone when their health reaches 25%.
But! in campaign you will never be given enough forest giants to counter Trow's so you still have to watch out.
Our mission is to find and kill four Trow generals of Soublighter army. Legion is so fucking badass that their reaction to "SOULBLIGHTA IS HERE!" is "LET'S KILL HIS GENERALS!". Also, we can't select all our units, there's too much of them. I thought RTS's had this shit figured out after first Age of Empires, but no. Oh, did I mentioned that Soulblighter is immortal? and not "I can only be harmed by magic mcguffin made of me" or "I don't die of old age but I can be killed", Soulblighter is straight up fucking Immortal and cannot be killed. He was like that even before Balor arrived. But he have not other skills beyond that.
We march our 1st Merry Company of Forest Heart slightly east and we find a bridge. Bridge is guarded by Soulless so we use standard tactics to kill them (dancing 'zerks and shooting fir'Bolgs)
I botched it a little and berserker got wounded but whatever, bridge is ours and we can continue.
Actually, we can't continue just yet. Thralls waiting under water ambushed us. We order everyone to fall back a little.
Then we shoot thralls with archers and wait for them to attack.
We killed couple before Thralls decided to attack.
Also, thanks to minimap, we spotted approaching Trow.
We send our three tree-dawgs to deal with Trow.
Morningwood? I did not change his name, fucking Bungie...
3 to 1, Trow is fucked. I didn't send any berserkers to support because it would be certain death for them if Trow decided to attack them instead of one of the Treedudes.
Trow died and we order treedudes to fall back. There is no point in loosing their health on thralls.
Archers reduced numbers of thralls so we order berserkers to chop remaining undead to pieces.
We order one tree-dawg to bitchslap thrall because it's fun as hell!
We chopped thralls to pieces and now we can finally get over the bridge.
We encounter some random Soulless patrol near the bridge but they didn't put much of a resistance.
On the other side of the bridge few myrmidons run in circles not reacting to our archers at all. So we put game at 16x speed and wait...
Myrmies? u no AI?!
More myrmidons, but those at least run away from our archers.
And our old friends, Thrall-Soulless duo. It's bloody obvious that Myrmidons will attack when thralls get close so we are going to watch out.
We order our archers to shoot and send couple of berserkers to either force undead to split their forces or kill separated Soulless.
Myrmidons attacked surprising absolutely nobody. We send 'zerks and treedudes to deal with them.
Then we order archers to pick off soulless while rest is falling back.
Awww shieeet! now we are fucking surrounded...
We order 'zerks and treedudes to come back because close combat is inevit...ive... sure as fuck.
Meanwhile we try to dodge thralls with archers but that's not going to work very well because archers are not much faster than thralls.
Two archers got killed but it could be worse.
Ok, everything is under control now.
We are beaten up a little bit, but since we don't have journeyman we will have to deal with it.
We are moving closer to place where our scouts got killed. We spotted some myrmidons so we prepare to defend ourselves.
Unfortunately our archers won't be very effective because of trees. But every little bit damage they do mean's one less slash of berserkers claymore.
It won't help our treedudes though, they one-shot pretty much everything.
We killed myrmidons but our units keep moving and I was not sure what the hell...
Oh, Trow. YOU ARE NOT SCARY ANYMORE!
We attack him with forest giants and then order berserkers to butt-fuck him.
And he's dead. I don't know if they count as "generals" but if they do, we already kill two of four.
Loosing those two archers have it bright sides. Now we can select all our units.
We move slightly to the right because there are less trees here.
We send one berserker to scout ahead and make enemies come to us.
Unfortunately, enemy choose to approach from side that gives them some cover.
Archers are falling back and I ordered berserkers to split into two groups.
We killed myrmidons and now we are in process of swarming Trow.
He went down in matter of seconds. Now we regroup and send another berserker to lure more enemies here.
Scout failed to lure anyone so we have to move. We put our troops near place where our scouts died and then we send berserker to look for enemy further.
He found some. Actually, he found quite a few but no Trow among them so luring them might have been stupid idea.
Too fucking late to change our mind now.
Myrmidons got too close so we must retreat our archers and engage them in melee.
There is really a lot of myrmidons and our berserkers are badly wounded so I'm prepare to take few casualties.
My only goal is to kill undead without loosing any treedudes.
We lost 2 berserkers but myrmidons are dead. We order everyone to fall back and let archers weaken thralls.
Thralls are almost dead so we will just mop them up with treedudes.
This was completely pointless. Only thing we achived was loosing two berserkers and getting our forest giants even more wounded. But I hoped that Soulblighter was among this group so I could show him to you. I think he is on this map somwhere (Actually, he also was on Flight from Covenant map but I didn't bother to look for him there).
Then I looked for Soulblighta a little more, forgot to save the game and then loaded. So I done this pointless battle again, didn't loose anyone this time. It's a fair cop but society is to blame...
There are no Trow anywhere around here so we crossed water and started looking on tiny islands in the north. Some Thralls tried to ambush us but they came out of water too soon and we manage to kill them with archers.
We continue our island hopping keeping formation in case of another ambush.
After taking few steps we were attacked by Myrmidons. We order berserker to flank them and tell our archers step aside and make way for tree-dawgs.
Then Trow arrived so we ordered our least damage treedude to "tank" him while rest slap the shit out of him.
He managed to get one treedude below 25% of health but died shortly after. Then we heard crows...
Holy crap...
Fortunately paralyzing forest giant does not count as kill so he should be back if we ever are to use forest giants again.
And now about Soulblighter and his immortality. Soublighta done some self-mutilation experiments on him and it gave him immortality, no weapon magical or normal can kill him. Even most powerful sword in Myth universe cannot finish him. He can be defeated in combat though, if someone managed to beat him unconscious we could use confinement dream to trap him or simply chop the fucker to pieces and let him live in this state. But it would be pretty hard since he is most powerful melee fighter in the world AND only known creature that can shapeshift. He can change into murder of crows when in danger so he can easily escape when overwhelmed.
He's badass fighter but have absolutely no magical abilities and this makes him strange choice for Fallen Lord since every other Fallen is powerful sorcerer. Shiver was master of dream duels, even though she got defetead in one by Rabican (but Rabican got help of the Head). The Watcher is first and most powerful nercomancer in the world and can raise whole armies of undead at will. Full power of Deceiver is known only to Deceiver himself but it's safe to say that he knows few magical tricks. We don't know anything about other two Fallen Lords, Bungie never even given their names but they are also presumably magicians. Soulblighter can only chop shit with his glaive but he was not only been chosen by Balor as one of the Fallen Lords but he was made his second in command. Immortality alone could not be the reason for this choice because Watcher is also pretty much impossible to kill. I don't think I will spoil anything if I say that Fallen Lords and Balor even after their change still have some memories of their past incarnations, and that's why Soulblighter was given such high rank. Soulblighter knows some things...