Thracia 776 Playthrough - Chapter 4

Chapter 4 - Imprisoned

Resets: 3 (4)
Turns: 23 (66)

Leif is in jail, he's being held until the Imperial forces from Connaught arrive to pick him up. This is the point in the game that the difficulty starts to ramp up. The rebel group Magi appear at the start of the map with their goal of performing a prison break. Ced and Asval move deeper into the prison to look for where children from Lopt Sect child hunts are being held captive, while Brighton, Macha and Lara work through the current floor. Lithis has been caught and is with a small group of brigands who can help cause a distraction when freed from their cell. Leif is rooming with Fergus and Karin who were jailed for a streetfight. Karin tells us of how the Silessian Royal Family has been protected by rebels and how their king abandoned them and that Ced went to chase after him. Incidentally, Ced is the one who is now leading Magi.

There's a lot to do on this map, and it takes a bit of time to get through stuff. There is an extra requirement of rescuing all the civilians in order to reach a side chapter after this one. Which is a very, very, important chapter to go to even if I didn't have to recruit everyone. A lot of my units start unarmed, so it's necessary to open up a bunch of tresure boxes in order to get characters some weapons to work with. And lastly this is the introduction to Escape Chapters. Escape Chapters require you to have all units reach an end point and escape the map. THE MAP ENDS WHEN LEIF ESCAPES, EVERYONE WHO DOES NOT ESCAPE BEFORE LEIF DOES GETS COUNTED AS CAPTURED. Captured units are basically removed from your roster, and there is one side chapter late in the game where you perform a jailbreak on a prison to rescue your captured units.

Speaking of capture. Enemy units can capture your units as well. Units attempting to capture an unarmed unit will automatically pick them up. Enemy units capturing someone will automatically take all their equipment (or at least as much as they can swap into their inventory). Enemies do often also prioritize going for these easy captures. When a player unit is grabbed by an enemy, they can still be released if you kill the enemy unit, they don't count as lost until the enemy unit can walk away to an exit point to escape the map. It is useful to take advantage of this in order to stop enemies from attacking, and to allow their stats to be debuffed when you go for the attack on the following turn.

Now on to the map. We work through the map by moving clockwise, rescuing Lithis, then Leif, then going up and around to getting treasure boxes and freeing the civilians. The number of items in the chests is always the same, but the location for the chests is randomly generated between 4 different storage rooms. In the end, it's important to open just about all of them because I need to get the Rapier and Light Brand out of the boxes.

The first part of the map, of escorting the civilians out of the prison is relatively tame. It's important to try to capture or steal from a few soldiers as they spawn in order to gather some vulneraries. The hard part of the map comes from the end of it. After some time, enemy reinforcement soldiers start showing up from the south, east, and west entrances of the map. How many and where they spawn is random. It is possible for none to spawn for a turn, or as many as 3 or 4. The NPC Brigands help stall their progression but eventually they are taken out and the soldiers start swaming up towards me. I had one reset because a soldier captured a civilian then the other NPCs body blocked me preventing me from killing them to free the captured civ, thus failing the sidestory unlock objective.

After saving the civilians we head north to make our own exit. The catch is that blocking the path to the exit is a large amount of enemy armored units, along with a couple of mages. Given my weaponry at the current point, Armors are considerably tough to take on, and a lot of them have ranged attacks making it slower to deal damage to them to get them out of the way. In addition to this platoon of armors, the reinforcement soldiers don't stop spawning, so I very quickly end up being pincered between the two forces. One of the armors is a recruitable character, Dalsin. Who joins me after we rescued his son in the previous chapter, so it is important for me to recruit him first before getting too hasty with dealing with the enemy blockade.

It takes a few tries before the game decides to not have someone die to a string of 20-50% accurate attacks. In the end, what ends up working is that I open the door with Lara, then immediately rescue her to get her out of attack range. I then place Leif up front with Light Brand. I then back track down the center hallway while Leif weakens the Armor with a shortbow and one with a Battleaxe. On my next turn, I recruit Dalsin, then create a bit of a wall as I slowly take out the ranged weapon armors. To deal with the mages quickly, I have Lithis steal their Thunder tomes. This both helps in letting me stop them from attacking me and gives me some Thunder Tomes to use for later. Eventually we are able to break through, and I have everyone escape out. I am able to go and steal one Heal Staff as well before everyone is able to make it to the end. Leif is last to leave, thus everyone is accounted for.

At the end of the chapter, we get a scene between Manfloy, Veld, Ishtar, and Julius. While the Lopt Sect is trying to conduct Child Hunts to gather sacrifices to their dark god, not everyone in the empire is so keen to let it happen. Ishtar shows her dissent towards the actions and says that the occupying forces of Friege in the area will not take part in such actions.