Warhammer: Mark of Chaos - Chaos Campaign - Chapter 3, Mission 3

Here are general tips for playing the Chaos Champaign in Warhammer: Mark of Chaos on HARD Difficulty. At the end of Chapter 1, Mission 6, we chose Nurgle instead of Khorne. A list of all our Warhammer: Mark of Chaos articles can be found here.
We won't be hand-holding you through absolutely everything, but instead just give tips on situations that we found tricky or that you might not have considered.

Chapter 3: The Path to Glory

Mission 3: Blood on the Sands

Overview

• Dense wall defenders and reinforcements from behind make this a messy mission and it's hard to come through with no net casualties. Even so, the main difficulty is managing combat on two fronts and figuring out traffic jams on the battlements:
• Sometimes your regiment can be right up against an enemy regiment, but no amount of clicking will let you engage them in melee. You cannot attack them, nor can you go past them. Meanwhile, other enemy regiments shoot at you.
• As with previous siege missions, pathfinding is extremely annoying. If you send a regiment too far, it might decide to take a long route that involves going down stairs and back up another set of stairs.
• In rare cases, an enemy model could end up in an impossible location, and the game starts to stutter (maybe because of the game engine taking up resources trying to calculate a valid move).
• The bigger the regiment, the longer it takes to go up stairs or ladders. The entire regiment must finish their climb before any member can take any action.
• Once you capture both siege points AND clear the castle of all defenders (the ships don't count), the timer stops but the mission continues until all objectives are done.
• You need to destroy two elven ships. Although they are on shore, melee units cannot attack them.

Walkthrough

Deployment

• The deployment zone is an L shape with the farthest forward location on the west side. Put your sorcerer plus a battlement-sweeping team (Warriors Undivided, probably) there.
• In the southwestern corner, but your reserves: two cannons, and a guard of 2 regiments of Axe Throwers and your two remaining heroes (you can bring three into this mission).
• Once deployment is finished, arrange your remaining two heroes unattached, a bit to the north and east of your placement. You want them to intercept cannon fire first because they can survive it, but individual regiment models can't. Cannons will typically fire from the fog of war, so you need something that won't die on the first hit.
• If these reserves are attacked figure out what's going on. If it is from the castle, retreat those forces. If it is from the west, charge them with heroes first to tie up the forward enemy forces in melee and share getting blown up by their cannons. Bring your axe throwers safely up behind them to cut down the enemy while your heroes keep them busy.

Phase 1A - Secure battlements

• When you end deployment, march the sorcerer to the northwest corner of the battlements and set them to climb immediately. Stop only to heal with Steal soul if you had really bad luck and got cannon fire squarely in your regiment.
• Ignore ground forces coming out of the castle. They are just there to delay you so you get shot at. Get on top, empty out the northwest tower if it is occupied, then start sweeping east.
  The ground force will wander over to another regiment it knows about, which could be your cannons.
• Alternatively, you could handle them at the wall before going up, to keep your reserves hidden for as long as possible.
• Go up, sweep the wall.
• Do NOT step into the courtyard. We need the knights there to stand still for now. You therefore need to be very careful with your clicking. If you do end up downstairs, you could try to get back up immediately, especially if there are still forces on the wall for you to Soul Steal and resurrect any models lost from being attacked by the knights.
• You can start shelling the enemy cannons now, but you might lose sight of them depending on where you are on the battlements. Just wait.
• You could also move one regiment of Axe Throwers to the wall, but pathfinding in this mission is so severely bad that we didn't want to clutter things up too much.

Phase 1B - Reinforcements.

• As soon as you get close enough to the castle, reinforcements show up from the southeast corner. In this walkthrough we pretend we don't know this but if you want an easier time you could position your heroes there to intercept them right away.
• If you have a hard time switching your attention between battles, park your battlement sweepers inside a tower (they can still be attacked by missile fire, but weakly) and finish this battle first.
• Let broken regiments go: You need to get to that cannon in the back of the reinforcements with your heroes to stop it from shelling your regiments. Also, the timer is still ticking, so don't blow two minutes running after a broken regiment.
• After the reinforcements are destroyed, send one hero to capture the external siege point.
• If both are injured and you might not survive a cannon hit, you can detach your sorcerer and teleport outside (you cannot go back down your own siege ladder, apparently).
• To get back on the battlements, you will need to teleport your sorcerer inside, then go up the stairs. This will alert the knights, but they can't follow up the stairs.

Phase 2 - Destroy the Cannons.

• If you've swept the wall of at least all missile troops, position your force on the wall so you can see the cannons you need to attack. Melee units cannot attack the cannons, so you'll need to destroy them some other way -- such as using your own cannons.
• Start moving up your axe throwers if you don't think you'll take too many losses; otherwise, wait for the cannons to be destroyed. Unlike the skaven mission, we need enemies to Soul Steal in order to recover our lost models, and because of the time pressure we have to clear them all from the walls. What's left is very limited.
• Once the cannons are destroyed, move all regiments the castle because it is now clear except for the knights in the courtyard. Remember to turn ON Stand Ground for Axe Throwers because they could attack the knights, which you need to resurrect models with.

Phase 3 - Resurrect Lost Models and Win the Mission

• Hopefully you will have plenty of time, maybe over 10 minutes. Start resurrecting models with your sorcerer by attaching him to damaged regiments and using Steal Soul on the knights in the courtyard.
• Once the knights are dead, move down and capture the second siege point. The timer will stop now that you have both siege points and you have destroyed all defending regiments. At this point you can blow a hole in the wall to move in any other regiments.
• Use Steal Soul on the ships to refill even more of your regiments (8 HP each ship). After all this, hopefully your net casualties will be very low or zero.