Highlands is a beautiful strategy game that can be a little tricky until you understand several key game mechanics and character abilities. This is a quick, no spoiler guide to getting through the challenging difficulty mode without having to stress. Enjoy!

-Pay attention to what is a normal amount of damage to receive in battle. The game autosaves immediately before you fight, so if you have a bad battle there is always a convenient place to reload. A few bad dice rolls in a row will hopelessly wreck your army, so don't be afraid to reload often.

-When in battle, you should generally choose as a blocker the person with the least hp that is guaranteed to survive the attack. Here's an example: you have a 40 hp and 15 hp character in a battle. You fight against something that deal 4-14 damage. Let's pretend it deals the full 14. It is better going into the following battle with 40 hp and 1 hp characters rather than going in with 26hp and 15 hp, especially if you happen to fight something that deals 20-30 hp. Death is permament, so it is important not to take risks like this throughout the game. Also from this example, the 1 hp character can still utilize any of their abilities perfectly (such as heal, resource generation, fortify, etc.) and can then go off dealing with other tasks. It is for this reason you should try to assign damage to the resource generation characters early, so they quickly contribute their hp to combat and then can go off and still efficiently do other things.

-It is best to use blockers that have the double strike ability. This allows you to sometimes get a free attack before combat is rolled, which helps to reduce incoming damage.

-Make sure your blocker in battle is wearing the best armor you have access to. After fighting a battle, you may need to move this armor to someone else with more hp. Since swapping equipment outside of battle is instant and unrestricted, your defender should always be equipped properly. The several hp it saves per battle adds up over the course of a level.

-Make sure every character has the best possible weapon equipped. Every person and weapon brought to battle adds to your attack score. Only the ones chosen as blockers need to worry about armor though.

-Enemy units with shield or medic icons are good targets to use your ranged consumable weapons. Shield units absorb all damage from one attack instead of letting it spill over; medic units give moderate healing to allies after each round. Use molotov cocktails/frag grenades to snipe them quickly.

-There are almost always uses for nearly every idle unit. Apart from the obvious abilities like resource generation, healing, crafting, and fortifying, sometimes injured units can be brought to a region to prevent an enemy squad with fewer hp from advancing or even trying to tear down fortifications.

-Enemy squads that have even 1 hp less than you will never attack. Always look for ways to use this to your advantage. Chapter 5 is a reasonable place to utilize this rule and dash through. There are no taverns or ways to consistently generate resources/hp. Since you start with so many hp, make sure only to fight key battles which grant you mobility toward the end of the stage. This is fairly easy since none of the units will attack you.

-Use the militia ability! This really can't be stressed enough. It allows you to send a single unit of any size or combat ability and injure/freeze an enemy squad at a relatively low cost per turn. It buys you time, it weakens squads whose hp is too high, it allows one person to potentially jam an entire army. This is a great option for Cecaelia/Wondor (and a few others) when they have low hp but need to keep contributing to the fight.

-Make the enemy come to you. One tactic you must use again and again is allowing the enemy to invade your territory, even when you have units that could defeat it. The region they move out of will not have units and will not typically fill back in without the regenerating warlord units moving through. You may then recapture the territory you lost on the previous turn. Leaving as many 0 hp enemy region buffer zones as possible is profoundly useful.

It is better to have them come to you for another important reason. Moving into the enemy territory to crush a squad will often lift fog of war on several adjacent tiles. This could activate several squads with hp in the 100s. Be careful not to stir up the hornets' nest before you are prepared.


Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy the game as much as I did. glhf