With the current Honour The Prince event live to unlock the Lord Kakophonist, Adamatar, I’ve fallen on an old faithful to help me meet the requirements on some of the missions. I stumbled upon this myself and then realised there’s a lot of people sharing missions like this on the Discord for example. So I can’t pretend to be the discoverer of this wonderful level and it’s usefulness in the wider context but it was a revelation to me. Before I move on, you can avoid my prior ignorance on a lot of stuff by checking out my guide here to Getting Started with Tacticus.

So, what’s the big deal with Fall of Cadia: Battle 40 then? Well let’s look at the information on this particular Campaign Battle

So, as it says on the tin, this is the 40th battle in the Fall of Cadia campaign. This means you’ll need Haarken, Archimatos and Angrax of the Black Legion as the minimum campaign character requirements and you’ll have to complete 39 battles prior. But what this particular battle has that makes it stand out, is the 5 Vox-Casters.

Vox-Casters are pretty annoying when you’re playing through the campaign normally as they can call in a Valkyrie Strike that can force you to relocate your team to avoid some (hefty, when you’re low level anyway) area damage and they can Call In Reinforcements. It’s this last ability that’s the reason we’re interested in Fall of Cadia: 40.

Call in Reinforcements allows each Vox-Caster to summon one Cadian Guardsman. Lots of summon abilities are one use only, but not this one. So, if the Vox-Casters are alive, there’s a theoretically infinite number of Cadian Guardsmen waiting in reserves. Now, again, in the campaign this can be annoying because in can slow you down as you have to grind through Guardsmen to clear a level and chip away at your Chaos Space Marines as they go about the Chaos Gods’ good work of destroying Cadia. But sometimes, sometimes it’s really useful to have an infinite supply of Guardsmen to murder…

The mission above, from the Honour The Prince Event for Adamatar is a really great example of where having this particular Battle in your back-pocket can be very useful. There’s two requirements for the mission and they’re essentially set up in opposition to one-another. You need to kill 100 enemies with Chaos units and also Raid 25 Campaign battles. If you’re raiding the Campaign battles you’re not making any kills (for the purposes of this mission anyway). So rather than having to waste lots of energy raiding 25 battles AND playing multiple battles to make those kills, you can spend a measly 6 Energy to play Fall of Cadia: 40 once plus whatever you need for those 25 Raids.

The trick is, to let the Vox-Casters summon as many Guardsmen as they can, keep killing the additional Guardsmen and keep this going until you’ve hit the number you need. There are a few things to keep in mind.

Firstly, is that chip damage from the Guardsmen, depending on how buffed up your characters are, this may be anywhere from totally inconsequential to quite a concern. Therefore, you may have to play cautiously and split your kills over a couple of shifts if that’s an issue. The summoned Guardsmen aren’t too difficult to deal with but enough Lasgun shots will eventually start to make their mark.

Generally I find it’s useful to think about your Team Composition a little to make this work for you and having a healer (if you have Rotbone) or a tank (Toth is good for this as he heals himself) who can help keep your other characters alive and maintain the roadblock (more on this below) can be really handy.

One of the things to keep in mind with both the Cadian Guardsman and the Cadian Vox-Caster is the Battle Fatigue trait that they have:

Battle Fatigue

If a friendly unit is defeated in an adjacent hex, there’s a 10% chance that this unit flees and is removed from the battle. +40% if it was Overkilled.

This means if you kill a Guardsman or Vox-Caster, any others standing next to them are a flight risk. The main issue with this, is we don’t want those Vox-Casters running off before they’ve done their job of summoning enough grunts for us to kill to complete our mission! This is especially important when you take into account some of the abilities on the Black Legion characters for example are geared towards triggering Battle Fatigue more often e.g. Angrax’s Bringer of Despair ability:

Bringer of Despair – Angrax

Deals 4x # Power Damage to a melee target and 4x # Power Damage to another random enemy adjacent to Angrax. Any resulting Battle Fatigue is triggered twice.

Now in theory, you can work around this fairly well and just avoid killing near the Vox-Casters, but they can move about on the map. If they die, the world doesn’t end but the Guardsmen become finite and you may need to play the Battle again if you have a particularly high kill-count to have to reach!

The best way to avoid this I have found is to create a cordon at the bottle-neck in the map just above where your characters start (see the picture below). If you have one of your tanks sit in the key space that closes off this section from the other, they can hold that for you indefinitely. Once the top section of the map is filled with Guardsmen, the Vox-Casters will start summoning in the space you’ve left at the bottom of the map. I find it easiest to just kill the spill-over Guardsmen as there’s no danger of triggering Battle Fatigue from these. If all of the Vox-Casters are alive you can kill 5 Guardsman a turn without outpacing their replenishment. The eagle-eyed amongst you will spot I went a got this screenshot at a later point as Adamatar is now in the team for this one:

It may take a great number of turns, and it might not be the most fun way to play the game but it’s definitely a more resource efficient way of tackling some of these missions. It works with all sorts of missions from Events, Campaign Missions and the Battle Pass for example and there are a number of different kill requirements that might allow you to jump onto this Battle and hit the target number – e.g. Defeat 250 enemies with Ranged Attacks was another from the Honour The Prince Event.

Refer A Friend!
This’ll help you get some extra Blackstone and as a happy by-product also helps me to do the same as a reward for referring you and for when you hit some key progression milestones too. My referral code is as below:

Play Tacticus and share rewards with me by using my referral code: ran-27-phi

You just need to tap the ‘cog’ icon on the Home screen and then ‘Refer a Friend’ where you can enter the code.