Rana Mission 4 - Cheekham dies within three turns

[Nevindar]

I have no idea if this is by design or not, but roughly three turns after Cheekham returns, an enemy army comes in from the east, destroys the small settlement and engages in combat with Cheekham.

The dialogue is about how the enemy commander has to fight Cheekham, but offers to teach him afterwards. Their army is comparably classed as Challenging or Suicidal depending on if I get Cheekham to the settlement first or not.

Cheekham usually have around 8-14 Hunters and perhaps 7 Shamans or 4 Guards.

So am I suppose to lose the fight and the settlement almost instantly after getting it, along with any items Cheekham was carrying?

[Ereghor the Enigmatic]

I played the Rana campaign pre-last patch, so I got to clear out Cheekham's side of the map pretty freely back then. Maybe the new AI changes make it a lot more aggressive (which it needed, because it wasn't particularly threatening before).

[Ichthyic]

you need to keep moving cheekham south. collect your units from the town ASAP, and then move south.

[Nevindar]

Originally posted by Ichthyic:

you need to keep moving cheekham south. collect your units from the town ASAP, and then move south.

Well thats the thing, the units are not enough and the enemy commander still somehow reach Cheekham even while converting the settlement. Of note, after defeat, I get an error message the following turn about the game trying to reference something which doesn't exist.

[Ichthyic]

that's a common error, probably nothing to do with the ai behavior on this particular mission.

[Ereghor the Enigmatic]

The error message is the default Unity feedback for an empty reference, likely there's some screw-up as to the order of object destruction (it also occurs when you kill things off with some spell combos) that isn't critical but there is clearly a coding oversight to troubleshoot.

It is beneficial to max Cheekham out on levels during mission 2 and get his command to at least 6, alongside with things that synergize with his specialty (cunning, preparation, getting his pre-existing Destruction to level 3 to cast the best versions of Sabotage and Aggression). Building a unit congregator in the town he appears next to and using it to hire a decent army from your main town (+ potentially the one to its south and the walled Baryan one you can try rushing with Rasc) might help fight that army off, and also quickly collecting some of the neutral rana stacks nearby.