There turned out to be a few more differences between this and Liberation:
- There are only 5 companions now, down from the previous 8.
- Ultimate abilities now only have an initial 2-3 turn delay.
- Line of sight for ranged units almost never matters.
- Flying units now take damage from hazardous floor tiles.
- Friendly fire’s been removed.
- You can now combine legendary shards at the Rank IV Blacksmith.
While Chapter V is much too long, for the most part I feel this game was paced better than the prequel; ended up hitting level 50 just after the point of no return and the final boss is level 44. Your last Leadership upgrade happens at level 45 though (170 with Rank IV Castle), so that’s really the main target to hit. Lack of gold turned out to be a constant pressure throughout, while a persistent lack of Divine Essence started to hit in Chapter III.
I ended up going with Liches and Overlords for my frontline army to great effect, while my backline remained static most of the game. Started out with Infernal Knight, Half Born, and Priestess and didn’t have to upgrade them until the Rank IV units became available (Knight was replaced with Sundancer and Half Born with Blood Shaman). Meteor was my go-to spell with Wotan’s Fury coming in second.
Much like Liberation, beating the final boss here unlocks a new game mode. All cosmetics start out unlocked, the tutorial is skipped, the companion limit is removed, new dialog options are available, and XP gain is supposedly increased. Not sure if I’m going to bother trying to play through it though, as there don’t seem to be any ‘target all enemy’ spells and the Auto-Resolve Battle button is almost never available. The closest thing to a 1st-turn win is to ~maybe~ field a bunch of Liches with a Witch Queen multi-casting Eventide followed by Blooming Corpses and Corpse Explosion.