Chapter 4, Mission 2: Warm Springs Atoll

**Map 17** (Chapter 4, Mission 2) is a 7x11 medium-sized aquatic map in TinyGroove. Its S-rank can be achieved if completed in <32 days.

### **Mission Background**

This mission is unlike any other in TinyGroove due to the hidden artefact on the battlefield (an oddly common theme in many late-stage maps of this campaign), as it mostly plays like an MOBA-style map. Sigrid torches the player's stronghold and steals more of your artefacts in the process (groan) at the beginning of the stage, leaving only a squad of player's commanders to forge ahead in a largely unfair battle against her armies and her two barracks as you slowly rebuild. The commanders the player can field is determined by those the player has recruited before this mission, chronologically. The mechanics are simple, yet the map presents many complex elements at stages in the battle to complicate a concerted forward advance.

**The unique rules for this battle are:**

**1) Sigrid loses once her Stronghold is destroyed** (same as always), yet the player doesn't lose when theirs is lost (as you begin the battle without it, and could lose it again). Also, her stronghold can only be hit by ranged attackers.

**2) The recently-pilfered relics Sigrid stole from you can be found in the map's 4 central mountaintop caves.** Each one also grants you an extra life when visiting the springs inside. Of greatest significance (on this map) is the Moontide Medallion, which will prevent your units from being immobilized by the frequent flood tides that dominate the map. It can be found in the cave that is third from the left (or second from the right, closer to the enemy stronghold) on the map, and if you are quick, it can actually be collected before Day 4's first flood tide.

**3) Each player has "9 lives"**, and each commander fielded by the player will cost them one life. The player begins with Dark Mercia and Elodie, but every commander after that will be automatically deducted from their life total, and will automatically happen when they possess less than 4 commanders, beginning the battle in most cases with 7 lives, after your first two additional commanders join the fight (assuming you have recruited at least 4 commanders at this point). The commanders that appear are determined by those the player has recruited up to this point in the campaign (there are 10 of them, and you'll need to field them all during this battle to net this map's difficult achievement).

Here they are in the order the game will spawn them:

1. Dark Mercia (Map 1: Starting Commander)
2. Mercival (Map 14: Chapter 3, Side Mission 1)
3. Mercia (Map 29: Achievement Castle)
4. Tenri (Map 15: Chapter 3, Side Castle 3)
5. Valder (Map 10: Chapter 2, Side Mission 1)
6. Caesar (Map 6: Chapter 1, Side Mission 2)
7. Koji (Map 15: Chapter 3, Side Castle 3)
8. Emeric (Map 7: Chapter 1, Side Castle 1 & also in Map 20: Chapter 4, Side Castle 4)
9. Ryota (Map 13: Chapter 3, Mission 2)
10. Elodie (Map 4: Chapter 1, Mission 1)

\*Ragna (**Map 17**: Chapter 4, Mission 2) \*Can be recruited in this mission and will immediately be fielded in this battle once you unlock her\* (does not count towards Achievement 22).

\*\*Remember, the map begins with Dark Mercia and Elodie already on the map, so if you have all 10 commanders, then Mercival and Mercia will be recruits 3 and 4 in your starting lineup.

The same life total mechanic applies to Sigrid, who loses her first life in the opening cut scene sequence, and subsequently applies to the enemy as she later fields Ragna as her backup in this battle. Defeating either of them will decrease the enemy's life total. When either side reaches zero lives remaining, their commanders stop reviving.

**4) The player can visit the wreckage of their stronghold to begin rebuilding**, which takes 5 turns for each phase of reconstruction, and costs them gold to complete. If the player lacks the gold to pay the builder, construction halts until the deficit is rectified (and then automatically resumes when the player is out of the negatives):

* After 5 turns of building, a village will be placed where the Stronghold once stood (costs 750 gold)
* After 10 turns of building, the village will be replaced with a full stronghold, and a village will be placed where the one of your barracks once stood (costs 750 gold)
* After 15 turns of building, the village will be replaced with a full barracks, and a 2nd village will be placed where the the other of your barracks once stood (costs 1500 gold)
* After 20 turns of building, the 2nd village will be replaced with a 2nd barracks, ending the side-quest's building cycle (costs 1500 gold)

**5) Endgame: once the building phase is complete, having more than 2000 gold in your war chest will allow you to replenish lives for you to field more commanders**! This will deduct 1000 gold in exchange for 1 extra life and will automatically happen, but requires the player to balance their spending to take advantage of.

#### Helpful Tips

Aside from these 4 unique facets of the battle's progression, the map itself is difficult to traverse. It is filled with water and beaches which provide little cover. Strategically speaking, Mercival and Emeric are incredible resources here. Their grooves can construct crystals that can defend your units. Emeric's creates 1, while Mercival's builds up to 4 crystals adjacent to him. This improved defense bonus is a huge advantage for your units within their aura field in this otherwise low-cover battlefield. This map is one of the few that allow you to play as other commanders aside from Dark Mercia.

The twist (another one) in this mission is introduced a couple days in to the conflict. Nuru joins the battle, and if the player hasn't encountered her yet on Map 11, her play style is very different than the main WarGroove Campaign. She has no barracks on this map, but deploys crystals on the outlying islands, and begins "warping in" splashers from the outskirts of the map on beaches within range of her crystals. Nuru's splashers would generally be unstoppable on this watery terrain, yet the chemistry of the warm springs in the Atoll affects her splashers to only possess 50% of their life. Upon using her groove, dialogue ensues, revealing that Nuru's teleport beam has been augmented to "beam in" production structures. So, she basically starts crapping Ports all over the map, with which she can construct more splashers (and nothing else, don't worry... this paragraph is already insane enough without Warships). Even more annoying, her ports can't be captured, just destroyed since she has added security countermeasures to cause them to self-destruct once their health is depleted to zero. This is little more than an annoyance, since Nuru is simply a 3rd intervening party, and not on Sigrid's team, so Sigrid's units can help minimize Nuru's initial threat.

The significant turn in the tide of this battle likely comes around Day 12 (as prophesied by Nuru on Day 2; her battle barges indeed arrive 10 days later), and involves Nuru's new mobile "Battle Barge Bases". The music in the battle will shift to Nuru's theme signifying the change, as she literally takes over the center of the battlefield, plowing over anything in her way as the barges reach the coast on Day 12, and deploy in the highlighted areas adjacent to them on Day 13 (this can be tough to see if the tide is high, since the tides functionally use the game's same 'highlight cell' mechanic). Her port production structures can be destroyed, same as before, and her army will begin to take significant damage from Sigrid's army and yours since you neither of you can easily reach each other to continue the battle until Nuru's incursion is dealt with. Once Nuru is defeated in this phase, which doesn't last long if you've been whittling down the enemy's life total, her army withdraws from the map.

All of this information was gleaned from the in-game spoilers unlocked in the Achievement Castle by completing at least 60% of the game and destroying the red gates comprising the 'Campaign Completion Counter'.

### **Achievements**

#### A22: Commander Roulette

**Conditions:** Field 10 different commanders over the course of the battle and win! (Requires having recruited each commander noted above to accomplish this).

**\*There is a known bug with getting Caesar to spawn (will be fixed in v10 release, planned for shortly after Double Trouble DLC comes out).** In the mean time, here is the issue: The final trigger (Circled) was added in V8 of TinyGroove and prevents the player from losing lives when the game attempts to respawn a commander, but there is no room for them. The 5 triggers above confirm that:

1) The player doesn't already have too many commanders on the map (at least 4),

2) That the commander (Caesar) the game will spawn next in the rotation isn't already on the field (only really matters if the player has less than 5 recruited commanders).

3) That the player has remaining lives to exchange for a newly-spawned commander,

4) That the commander (Caesar) hasn't already been fielded when other commanders in the player's recruitment pool haven't gotten field time yet (resets once all commanders the player has in their party have been fielded, then Elodie is spawned at the beginning of the cycle again).

5) That the commander is actually in your party (have they been recruited in the campaign?)

6) \*The broken trigger\* checks that there are "less than" 5 units (from either team) standing in the spawn zone consisting of the 5 spaces closest to the player's stronghold (and eventual barracks). Since the (pictured) broken trigger will only occur if those 5 spaces are all occupied by your units (or your enemies).

It is tough to trigger, but it has been tested and can be done: In the recruitment cycle for this MOBA-style skirmish, you need to ensure that you have all 10 commanders highlighted in red in the achievement castle.

* Valder (before Caesar)
* Caesar
* Koji (after Caesar)

Then, when Valder is recruited (with the loss of one of the prior commanders in the list above), you must fill every space in the red-highlighted spawn zone (and ensure that the commander that Caesar will be replacing isn't in one of those spaces or it will be counted as vacant and not satisfy the 6th (buggy) trigger, which erroneously requires all spaces to be filled. (In campaign development, placement issues can be circumvented by using the remove command to make room for newly spawned units, but that could remove other commanders to make room for a new one, which is counterproductive, and in this case, could potentially trap the game in a spawning loop), but anyway...

Now, that all of those conditions are met, the game can still reward you with the Achievement, but it won't be able to spawn Ceasar (since there is nowhere to place him), but if successful, the game will still read his spawning tag line, which is just: "Arf, Ruff! (-1 to Life Total)", and then deduct 1 life, and set the flag that you recruited Caesar to "True" (which will yield the achievement at the end of the cycle). Once this happens, move a unit to make room for Koji. If somehow not successful, then nothing will happen until you make room (since all of the other commanders' 6th trigger condition is correctly coded to read "less than" 5), and then Koji will spawn instead of Caesar.

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