Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga

52 ratings
Beating Chapter 12 and get the Achievement
By yahiko
This guide describes a way to eliminate all enemy squads in chapter 12 and get the achievement.
   
Award
Favorite
Favorited
Unfavorite
INTRODUCTION
If you want to kill everyone, chapter 12 is arguably one of the most difficult chapters of the game.

However, if you just want to finish the mission with a rank S, this chapter 12 is also the easiest one since you just have to kill Teremor, which happens soon enough since the guy is eager for throwing himself onto your blades.

This guide is obviously not for this second goal. If you read this, you want the achievement.

So, this guide describes a way to get rid of every ennemy squad with a strategy reliable enough to not depend on RNG too much.

There are two phases in this mission, but you must prepare yourself long before this chapter to be ready, ideally since the very begining.

I will go more into details when I will explain the second phase, which is by far the most difficult phase of the combat.

This guide applies for the highest difficulty, which is Warlord at the time being (current version 1.0b2) and should obtain even better results in lower difficulties.

PHASE 1 : TEREMOR'S ARMY
This is the easy part since after 11 chapters of levelling, your army should be clearly superior. The only challenges during this phase will be about to trick the AI pathfinding while avoiding any casualties, which is done with cautious positioning.

Jules’ archers on the south wall should be able to kill some careless Horsebows and Raiders.

Lock the right side with couple of decent squads to prevent your Home Base to be seized by the ennemy.

Send most of your best squads, including your MC to the left side.

Setup to buy some time in the first phase

This setup will force Teremor to cross the entire battlefield, and let you the time to clear the map.

On this left side, woods will give you the opportunity to launch couple of ambushes (Stefan, Raskuja or Narima depending of your army of course) to attack safely.

Take care to open the timed chest before it disapears.

All in all, fighting Teremor’s army should be a funny surrender fest and except maybe few casulaties, this is not the real challenge of this chapter.

Once Teremor is dead, move your whole army to the bottom right corner within three turns. It’s wise to use this little break to heal up (and possibly revive some of your dead units in the Temple).

Also, don’t forget to stop by at the Bazaar at the south. If you have enough gold, you can buy some reinforcements for this battle.
PHASE 2 : CASAMIR'S ARMY
Opponent forces

The real challenge begins. In this phase, you will be outnumbered both in quantity and in raw firepower.

Casamir’s army shows up

An average Casamir squad threat is between 8k and 10k compared to the 5k of Teremor's.

There are 3 kinds of enemy squads :

Cannon squad



  • 3 Siege Cannons in the back row heavily protected by 3 Sentinels in the front row.
  • The leader is the Siege Cannon in the middle of the back row.

This squad is very tanky and deals massive damage at range during its offensive phase. During the defensive phase, this squad is globally harmless.

A point to note is this squad has no healer. So any damage you inflict to this squad is definitive.

Against this squad I tend to use “Target Leader” tactic to open a breach to the leader, kill him, and make the squad surrender.

Gun squad



  • 3 Gunners : 2 in the front row, 1 in the back row.
  • 1 Sentinel in between the Gunners in the front row.
  • 2 Dragoons in the back row.
  • The leader is the Gunner in the back row, protected by the Sentinel.

This squad deals deadly damage both during its offensive and defensive phase but lacks of survivability.

Like the Cannon squad, this one has no healer.

Against this squad I tend to use “Normal Attack” tactic. So my units are more likely to kill gunners in the front row, left and right, since they can cause too much damage, instead of wasting turns focusing the Sentinel if I were to choose “Target Leader” tactics.

Cavalry squad



  • Two Knights in the front row.
  • Two Valkyries in the middle row.
  • Two Dragoons in the back row.
  • The leader is one of the knights in the front row.

A very mobile squad, so don’t get surprised if they can reach you even from afar.

Knights are quite tanky and Valkyries can be annoying when attacking or healing. So this squad will not be so easy to get rid off. Hopefully, since its leader, in the front row, is begging for being killed, the obvious strategy is to make this squad surrender.

Against this squad I tend to use “Target Leader” tactic since I want to make this squad surrender right after.

Preparation

At this point of the game, you should have something like 10 squads around 10k or above, with a good tanking ability, ideally, a front row full of Sentinels. For DPS, it depends of your preferences: you can go with Dragons (my personal choice), Fire Mages, Swordmasters, Zweihandlers or Champions.

My typical squad was:
  • Defence: A front row of 3 Sentinels or Soldiers
  • Main DPS: A Dragon
  • Auxiliary DPS: A Swordfighter / Swordmaster or an Apprentice / Firemage
  • Support: One or two healers



Sentinels really shine in this chapter thanks to their increased firearms resistance. You should try to have at least one squad with a full row of Sentinels.

The advantage with Dragon over physical DPS is that the Dragon’s breath bypasses armor, which is quite useful against Sentinels protecting the cannons. Also, in early game, when ressources are scarce, Dragons have the good idea to not require sunstones, gems or ingots for upgrading.

Mages are also very powerful in this chapter since like Dragon‘s breath, magic ignores armor completely. Also, a Fire Mage can sometimes one-shot first turn a full row of cannons. Pretty handy. But the drawback with Mages is they are quite long to raise. At this point of the game, quite early, you shouldn’t be able to get enough sunstones for turning enough of your Apprentices into Mages. I tend to favor having Templars before.

Aside of your main squads, your remaining forces could be under 10k, but you should try to maximize their survivability (HP, armor, SKL, healing)

You can field up to 15 squads simultaneously. Needless to say you must engage no less than that to get the achievement.

It is also a good idea to prepare more squads (5 or even more) to deploy them later for replacing your squads destroyed in combat.

In terms of artifacts, it depends a lot of your luck during previous chapters, so you should not rely on some specific ones for beating chapter 12. Just put your best artifacts on your best squads.

Also, in the current version I’m playing, 1.0b2, some artifacts don’t work and so are useless. So when they are fixed, I suppose this should make this chapter a little bit easier.

Some would have obtained the Temporal Modulator, which is an extremely powerful artifact, but very rare. For instance, I never got it yet. Hopefully, this artifact is not mandatory to beat this chapter and get the achievement, although it helps a lot.

If you succeeded to get one Saint Theresa's Bulwark, which is not that rare, it would be a good idea to put it on one of your top squads (which should probably be MC, Diana or Abigayle) to increase its survivability. But it's still optional.

Battlefield strategy

If you followed the guidelines about Phase 1, your squads should be at the bottom right corner. There are two reasons for this:

  • First, you want the local superiority. By massing all of your troops at this spot, you will fight with 15 squads against 12. On the left side, you should fight against 18 enemy squads (+50%). Another story…

  • Second, you want to trick the AI pathfinding as well as in Phase 1. This way, the Casamir’s army will not be tempted to move toward your Home Base, but directly go to you which should make your life a (little) bit easier by not being forced to split your forces in two.

Your main goal will be to destroy opponent deadly cannon squads before they can act.

To spice up the challenge, you not only need to kill all the squads to get the achievement, but also to do it within 6 turns after Casamir's army shows up. So don’t take your time too much…

You will have to identify your key squads, the ones you must not lose to reliably kill both cannons and gunners. This is generally the MC, Diana, Abigayle, and a handful of others. During your defensive phase, these squads should avoid ennemy fire as much as possible to keep their destructive power intact.

On the other hand, you will have to identify your expandable squads. Those who may cause some useful damage, even maybe kills during the first turns of this phase, but whose main purpose will be to attract the enemy fire, and so being killed in the end. RIP. Simply put, these will be litterally your cannon fodder to allow your most precious squads to survive.

When you lose a squad, you should immediately replace it by another one from your Home Base. This new squad will probably be very weak, but this is not important. You need this kind of squad to aggro the opponent and let your main squads to kill the cannons and the guns when it’s your turn.

During this second phase, don’t try to revive your units. This is both a waste of money and time. Permadeath is disabled in this chapter. Just ensure you replace your dummy squads by new ones in reserve, put them in the range of the enemy’s cannons and guns, ideally within forts or on rough terrain for improved survivability.

Then, when it’s your turn, strike back with all your might by killing cannons first.

An instance of an endgame

Scenario results (with a bug until 1.0b2 since we did more than surviving…)
CONCLUSION
So, with a powerful and tanky enough army, prepared since chapter 1, some reserve squads to replace your losses (there will be), a wise positionning and squad movements, in the end, you should be able to defeat Casamir’s army completely within 6 turns, and claim the achievement.

All of this without spending hours savescumming to get some powerful artifacts or units at the shop.


Hope this helps.

Yahiko
26 Comments
Painbringer 13 Oct, 2023 @ 9:29am 
10/10 guide, helped me a lot
tyvm
Asahida 14 Sep, 2023 @ 6:30pm 
@Alexious-94 There was no New Game+ when this guide was written. New Game+ allows you to modify some game settings to fit your preferences. These are distinct settings, different from the Warlord or Ludicrous etc. difficulty settings which come with their own intrinsic difficulties for the player. So yeah, this should work for Warlord... but I doubt it does on Ludicrous, since this one comes with its own set of heavy restrictions on top of the difficulty, locking in some very hefty NG+ settings which hamstrings your playstyle considerably.
Khroniclas 11 Sep, 2023 @ 11:18pm 
Can someone remind me if I will permanently lose Devoa's squad units after the chapter?
It's been a while and I don't want to lose good artifacts and units.
Alexious-94 6 Sep, 2023 @ 10:40pm 
Guys, is this guide for New Game or New Game+? Is possible to defeat Casamir's army with fresh start setting in new game on Warlord difficult?
Esuo 6 Sep, 2023 @ 4:28pm 
Lysander Squad with 5 cannons was probably my MVP. This is from another guide but early cannon squad (doable even on Ludicrous if you rush all the Crafts and Technology upgrades first and do some pyrocite conversion at Bazaar,) either outright destroy or leave couple units with sliver of health. Very satisfying glass cannon, literally.
Esuo 6 Sep, 2023 @ 4:24pm 
Just did it on Ludicrous difficulty. Fresh Start and other settings untouched.

Definitely harder than on Warlords but suggested strategy still works. Local superiority is the key and "Enemy Advanced AI" doesn't make AI to charge into the undefended castle if all our army is positioned on the lower right corner.

Resource and army size is tighter on Ludicrous default settings but doing some Legends chapters helps. I did Legends chapters 1A, 2, 4, 5 before attempting chapter 12. Other than that, didn't do any kind of grinding or artifact farming. Just did all the arenas up to gold because I figured platinum would be too hard. Did not do any arena token conversion.
attack turtle 1 Sep, 2023 @ 1:17pm 
for anyone wondering:
you can replace the squads by clicking on the main base and deploying a new reserve squad - if you had more than 15 or if you deployed less than that at the start.
You can also use the donari tample to buy back units - I managed to do it 2 times and it was a great help at the end.
And extra info that I didn't actually killed all the units, 1 more stationary left from the initial army in one castle, So you don't have to kill all of those or mb only the stationaries are ignored.
attack turtle 1 Sep, 2023 @ 1:14pm 
ty, got it for second try.
Damos 25 Jul, 2023 @ 4:35pm 
Finally got this. Took far too many tries. Thank you for this, it helped a lot.
solidstate 29 Jun, 2023 @ 2:35pm 
Just did this last night.

By the time I got here, I knew about the achievement but figured I could turn down the difficulty from Warlord if I couldn't do it. I didn't have as many high-end troops suggested (you'd need the right tree maxed, or to have avoided guns yourself). I handled most of the right side guys in the first round. Lost 1 to the 2 remaining gunners. I was retreating upward toward the wall while throwing in 1 unit at a time to bait them.

I left Nerima (w/ t2 swordfighters) in forest as bait. And she held. Slowly getting whittled down, but huge attrition back. Even the cannon fire was tolerable. So while the 'correct' solution is very high end troops (red dragons, fire mages), Dodge-tanking with a high skill guerilla unit + forest bonus seems very doable, and those units are much less resource-intensive to acquire (the artifacts are easier to get too - greens like the Puffin charm, True shot bow, kesh's daikatana, etc, anything that gives +skill or +evasion).