Brutal- Navidian Dawn

[Epaminondas 2]

completed.

that is one difficult campaign!

[fallen]

epaminondas - Great work! That is a very difficult campaign from top to bottom. Did you use a lot of war gear?

Welcome to the forum!

[johndramey]

Welcome, Epaminondas! Good work on getting through that campaign, it is a doozy and took me a long time to get through. What difficulty did you play, and what was your overall strategy? I've recently found out that I am one of the few players that relies heavily on melee, most players prefer to use scouts and ranged gear. I want to find another melee buddy

[slayernz]

Ha, most guys like ranged weapons and soldiers. I (oh vocal babbling one) am probably the biggest champion of the scout squad. I've been trying to use soldiers in the challenge (just because you're forced to), and they suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

epaminondas, We'd love to know what kind of tactics/strategy you used ... or what type of units you relied on to make it through the missions. Oh ... and did you put the effort in to find all of the bonuses?

[Cyrus]

I just finished the campaign too on Brutal. I used a Scout Captain, 2 scouts and a Hydra throughout the campaign, since those were the only well-trained units I had, with about 80 battles under their belts before starting ND.

The early missions were not too hard, especially the ones with xenos or corrupt FDF. The Narvidians themselves are nasty, every type in its own way. The normal ones with 7-8 HP and high defense just soak up your bullets and the scout drones sometimes fly up to 5 squares per move, then attack with a ranged melee attack (?!?) which kinda is my scouts' weakness. Finally, the Narvidian cannons made me curse time and again with their tendency to sneak up at the last moment and kill a Templar two turns from the extraction point.

Then I got to the "Perimeter Landing" mission. 3 objectives, not even that far away from the middle, but each had about 3 new Narvidians spawn around it every turn. Ammo ran out and some hallways were so clogged with drones you could hardly move 2 squares per turn. Each try would see two objectives succeed and one get bogged down until a Templar got killed. More than 10 attempts ended in failure, no strategy seemed to work. I was about to abort the campaign, having decided Scouts weren't good enough for this.
Finally I thought "Screw this, they're scouts, let them run!" and sent one scout running for the southeast objective, not stopping to shoot except when the path was blocked. By some miracle, he made it back alive despite having been attacked many times, often from the back.

The next mission was fairly easy again and then came "Patrol Alpha". Like the missions before it had spread out objectives, some good secrets in out-of-the-way corners and lots of Narvidians. On turn 2, a single shot from a Cannon drone took one scout down to 1 HP. Instead of aborting right away, I decided to scout the level for secrets by just running at breakneck speed (8 squares per turn). To my amazement, it took the Narvidians another TWENTY turns to kill that 1 HP scout, chasing him around the entire level.
After that I switched my tactics to run much more wherever it was possible, ducking around corners to avoid the ranged enemies. This was quite successful, though every so often I'd run into a bad situation. This left the Hydra a bit less useful than before, since he could only move 5 per turn. But usually I found a route for him that let him fry lots of corridors to reduce the stream of Narvidians some.

The last two missions made me decide to only go for the secrets that had weapons/armor or were along the route (after a suicide scouting run of the level), since the risk of losing a templar was getting bigger the longer I stayed in the map. I won't spoil the last map, but let's just say it was not what I expected.

I knew going in that this was hard, but I hadn't expected needing at least 3-4 restarts for *every* mission, and more than 10 for the hardest. The annoying thing is that most attempts would go quite well and then out of the blue one Narvidian would take a Templar down in 1 attack. In general it seemed they either hit very hard or not at all. This was probably because of my scouts' low armor, but the Hydra with 5/8 armor seemed to be affected just the same. Even with 8 shielding he got one-shot by Narvidian Cannons on several missions.

[slayernz]

It's an amazing campaign, and Brutal is plain crazy. The scout captain is probably the most challenging captain to take through the campaign. The maps are so huge, and there is so many Xenos and Narvs coming out of the woodwork, having the ability to provide extra ammo (Naval Vet), or heal injured units (Chaplin) definitely outweigh the benefits of a couple of extra AP.

I've done the campaign using 3 Scouts and 3 Neptunes (used in combination and as distinct offense/defense squads). The team wasn't allowed to even contemplate Narv Dawn until I had at least 100 missions under their belts. My latest squad is almost ready to go through the mincer. Captain has 100 Defense, and the rest of the squad sits in at 30+. Ideally, I am after 50+ but that's because I'm a cautious kind of a player

[johndramey]

Narvidian Dawn is a huge amount of fun and I'm building the black sheep towards it. I'm going to try to take a squad through with either some berserkers or some Hydras... Maybe both? Haha, either way good deal Cyrus! Good job.