Turn 13:
I think I'm probably playing this pretty conservatively...
The line abreast swarms the bowman and horse near to it. One of them (I'm blanking on which, now, not that it really matters) did an absolutely heroic job of dodging our attacks, so it turned out that I needed almost every unit to kill the two of them off.
In the north, I decided to move the Elvish Rider into a village out of range of the enemy as opposed to one in range of an archer, as there was a chance that, if all his attacks hit, the rider would be killed. Next turn, I'm hoping he moves closer so that the three units in the area can swarm him under.
In the south, the clustered group moved towards the center of the map, but Li'Sar fireballed a knight to death, (4 hits, which made up for the 3 or 4 misses that our archmage managed to do...) as he seemed intent on stealing our villages. She's probably going to hoof it back rather than taking it back, though.
It seems possible, but not terribly likely, that we'll hit the kill limit first. We've got 19 kills to go on that, and I think the other side has only about that many units on the field. (Yup: 17 units between the two of them, right now... I'll have to be careful not to kill EVERYTHING on the way in, but we'll get at least one more Grand Knight, I'm sure.)
Turn 14:
The bowmen nearby went to grab villages instead of wandering into range
There's a knight nearby, but knights are SCARY, especially in the sun, so I'm going to opt for the strategy of running away instead. All three of our mounted units over there can outrun that Speed-9 knight and wait for some time when 2 lance charge hits won't kill off our units, even if it weakens the Gryphon Riders, too. (i.e. not day)
Killed the other Longbowman who had been in sight of the line before. He was softened up by our L3 archmage and then finished off by the (remaining, loyal) Elvish Captain. Those two units and the Elvish Rider in the north are the only units we have left on the map that can level up.
Grabbed four villages near the center of the map.
I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to choke the remaining two leaders by taking every last village on the map that I could to reduce their recruitment, but, well... purple has too many villages (15 or so) already and even black has enough with 8 or 10 or something to support his entire army. They'll be able to recruit a L1 unit per turn in any event.
My new plan is to drive SW toward the remaining two leaders while attempting to ignore, as best we can, the stinging gadflies of the couple of L1 units coming on our flank. L2 units, of course, are fair game to be destroyed for exp even as it reduces the kill counter. I think we can get at least one more GK this way, possibly two if we split our forces.
Turn 15:
We mostly just ran away, largely on a southwesterly bearing. Despite my previous observation that choking was infeasible, I decided to send our Paladin across the southern river branch so that next turn he can grab a village. Choking may be infeasible, but it's not an unreasonable way to get him across the river, which I expect to be handy, and, if you decide that's a foolish plan, his immediate turnaround move is straight onto land, so it's no real loss of mobility.
I did slightly miscalculate by leaving one of our Gryphon Riders in range of a knight: I had forgotten the day bonus when I figured he was safe. It was still 75% safe, though, and he managed to get hit by only one strike of the ensuing charge while landing both swipes back. That should be used to level the Elvish Rider, I'd say.
The situation:
![[Image: httt-test-16-m.jpg]](http://i1239.photobucket.com/albums/ff516/ranamar/Wesnoth%20SG/httt-test-16-m.jpg)
There are a few stragglers off the edges of that picture, of course. (...as well as the knight that ought to be killed in the north...)
Now, by no means do you need to split your forces the way I'm suggesting, nor am I sure it's actually the right thing to do. I'm personally thinking that it would probably be wiser to send at least one if not both of the archmages SW just because they won't catch up if chasing after the lead elements in the water until after it's all said and done. I'm not even sure running through the water like that is the right way to do things, but preparing for it wasn't far out of the way. I think the stuff best suited to the north is actually flying elves (fast on water) and the dwarf (too slow the rest of the time), although the speed-5 Mage of Light is about the right speed to keep with the dwarf we want to use to distract the purple king. Ideally, I'd like to assassinate him because he's got the lion's share of the remaining cottages and a consequently larger income. (On the other hand, black seems to be getting extra income... his base is now up to 14, somehow, instead of the 10 it was when I started. I have a sneaking suspicion they have a minimum-income trigger.) Black, whoever gets sent after him, is going to be a lot more simple, because there's basically just flat land between us and him. We're going to need to blast through a couple more L2s on the way, though, especially until we cross the bridge. Oh, and it's a tougher question who to have handle the knight... any of our horse units are basically guaranteed dead, but I think the Elvish Champion or one of our hero units should be able to eat an all-up GK charge. Another option is to wait for Li'Sar to catch up from the SE. That will take awhile and we could get everyone else there by then, too, but she is beefy, armored, and dodges as well.
the save:
http://www.qotw.net/~rickynumber24/HttT-...-Save16.gz
![[Image: T22%20North.jpg]](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24016610/Wesnoth/T22%20North.jpg)
![[Image: T22%20South.jpg]](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24016610/Wesnoth/T22%20South.jpg)