At long last we arrive at the final map of the main campaign, and this one really tests our strategic chops. Sadly, however, it doesn't really test our heroes. After coming up with this build plan, all that's asked of our heroes is a little chokepoint support and maybe helping out with some stragglers. They don't even help out all that much with the boss, since they tend to get killed by him if sent toe to toe. More importantly than that, the real determination of how hard this map is is the RNG involved with the boss himself, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Once again Mecha spam is our path forward, but it's a little more complicated this time around. For one, there are three exit lanes, and that's a bit much to ask Wasp Missiles to cover, especially considering we only can start out with one fully-upgraded Mecha. So we have to throw in some level 1 Barracks to make honest to goodness chokepoints and hold up the enemy. We move the troops all the way up towards the center at the beginning (but not where they'll get hit by Malagar) to minimize the area we have to defend, then pull them back farther down the paths when wave 8 starts to make sure they pick up Saurian Nightscales coming out of invisibility.
Once the barracks plan is worked out, it's just a matter of spamming Mechas - to a point. I played around with the balance of the boss battle, and what I settled on was a total of six Mechas, then switching to building four Crossbow Forts with Barrage. This allowed me to save up over 2,000 gold for the boss battle and replacing destroyed towers. I tried spamming Mechas all the way through wave 15, in the hope that if I just built enough it would be enough for the fight regardless of how many he destroyed. It worked, but not as reliably as I liked, so this was the build I settled on.
It's absolutely worth filling all the remaining build points - even the ones you have to clear - with level 1 archer towers, as it saves you so much money and offense if Umbra destroys one of these instead. In fact, during the boss battle you should rebuild a level 1 archer tower as soon as he destroys a tower, because he can actually target that build point again later.
Umbra destroying your towers is what introduces so much RNG into the boss battle that completely outweighs any differences in the heroes. Even if you do everything right, if he goes exclusively after your Mechas it can still end in a loss even if you do everything else right. So no grades for this one, but I'm excited that we're nearly to the elite bonus campaigns, as they are some of the most fun and challenging maps in the whole KR series.
Kingdom Rush Frontiers Impossible Hero Challenge - Emberspike Depths Campaign
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