It's not really a grindy game. Even on Platinum you can win basically by just conquering bases until there's no more to conquer. The tactics are more important. Not that I'm saying you need to like the gameplay, but yeah definitely no mandatory grinding unless you count waiting a bit for troops to regenerate.
There are several characters you need to search a certain area to recruit/unlock...She might be one of them. Checking saves, I definitely had all the main interests unlocked by this point. It's also possible that you can't find them until certain other conditions are met, as Ventrius (grandma shaman lady) you unlock by exploring around Alvaria, but I think it needs to be later in the game that you explore there.
Ah! Gregory got it before me, so maybe that somehow doesn't allow me to get her? I understand Lamentia, but not Fiona. But if you get her after that, this might be the reason...
Coming back to this... it seems that she just automatically joins you on the game date: 22. 7. 1203. Started a new game on Bronze, skipped prologue, cleared out Chevron Fort, South Africa, Gecko Fort, Barbarian Camp, Gold Mine, and Levene. Explored Barbarian Fort to recruit Badbull. Then just left the game run in the background until 22. 7. 1203 to confirm.
Oof. Yeah the AI can be ROUGH sometimes, while other times they leave your most vulnerable places alone. Especially with those orcs, they get very aggressive on the front lines to try and chip down your resources. It's kind of hard to get a feel for the AI, but you sorta want to mix having something to distract them alongside having enough military force scattered around the map to deter them from attack. I think I took on the bandits before Memoria and that helped, the orcs might have been distracted on another army. It might even be optimal to fight the green empire without Memoriato avoid opening your front to the orcs. Until you take out the green empire, those 7k orcs are pretty unmanageable.
Regarding Fiona: In my save, she does not do that. I passed that date with Emerald City unconquered and nothing ever happened. I retried with a new save and she joined indeed on 22.7.03. Thanks for finding that out!
Ah, there was some inconsistency on whether or not she was joining, so I looked on the wiki
So you either need to capture Emerald City first or don't recruit Memoria until after 22.7.1203. I think the issue for most people (me included) was probably recruiting Memoria too early
Honestly, I was not. But thanks to the wiki posted by megamanx06 above this post, I was able to confirm why that is. I'll update the content in my post above but basically:
Realistically, there's no such thing. Because the game is slow. The "cheats" in this post here can help. But two of them (F5 for battle speed and F6 for time passing) are literally just quality of life improvements to create toggles to make the game progress faster. Only F7 could be considered a cheat as it toggles setting enemy troop count to 2 after battles begin.
First thing to check: are you running it using a
There's only 2.5 Generals on your side that you don't need to lose to see scenes of, but you have full control over those Generals. No AI "friendly fire" with your horny king from the rear like in Leane 2.
