Part 22: Homecoming - recap

Mission Recap

Game film: LP Homecoming (TFL 1.5)

Technical note: This was my attempt at playing late at night and trying not to talk loud enough to disturb anyone else. Not sure I'll do that again... apologies if I put anyone to sleep with my golf-commentator stylings. (And some general improvements for my voice recording quality are in the pipe.)

Anyway!

First things first: we received some definite Plot in the briefing. The Fallen Lord Shiver, last seen in the defeat screen of A Traitor's Grave, has been toasted by one of The Nine. Go team! And this was made possible by our new best friend The Head, last seen in the Prologue video.

The Head also sent our crack commandos off to search for the Total Codex, so we teleported into Covenant on its trail. Not sure why it's there; Covenant is one of the major cities that has been destroyed by the Dark in the course of the war. But The Head apparently knows his stuff.

As far as the mission gameplay is concerned, this is the level where the training wheels come off. All the units introduced so far are in play (although wights mostly indirectly) and in good quantities. This is also our introduction to the wonderful world of "pus ghôls": ghôls that pick up wight pieces and then chuck them at us.

I was a little too mesmerized by the pus ghôls near the end. Or, well, some combination of that + being tired + expecting the mission to end sooner than it did... whatever the reasons, I just plain left one of my dwarves to die. It's painful for me to watch the video now and see the dwarf hung out there as the seconds roll past. At least the Dark paid a high exchange rate for our casualties this mission.

And we kept Alyce alive, so I guess we can repopulate our lands after the war. Dodged a bullet there!

In the end we did scarper with the Codex, but we're not out of the woods yet.

P.S. Something that I don't think I noticed on my original playthrough back in the 90s: if you pay close attention you'll see that the veteran units carried over from The Siege of Madrigal are sporting the same color scheme that they had in that mission, while my newbie warriors for example have a green/brown color scheme instead. I'll have to keep an eye out to see if that consistency keeps up across more missions.

Click on the overhead map below if you'd like to see the full-resolution landscape texture.




Screenshots:










Victory!




And the cumulative bodycount: