Now we have options again, but what we decide depends wholly upon what the enemy does with his next move. If he charges his assassin straight forward and attempts to rush our precious enchantress and her prey, we'd be forced to barrier her in to protect her. If he charged his pyromancer as far forward as possible, without attacking, we'd have an extra turn to play with. We could barrier the enchantress, heal if needed, or attack the pyromancer. If any move besides barriering the enchantress is made, the following turn, regardless of what move the opponent makes we're forced to barrier our girlfriend in. Real men protect their women, and for the rest of your TAO career, you'd be wise to consider the enchantress as such a relationship. Let's imagine the opponent doesn't move anything towards our enchantress on his next move. Let's have him make the age old classic move of attacking the lightning ward with his knight, or perhaps healing. This gives a move to use at our leisure, and also gets our sweetheart the enchantress down to wait 2 turns. Now our opponent isn't very smart, so he spends another turn making some pointless move, and our enchantress is down to wait 1 turn and is still unbarriered. Fianlly, our opponent realizes it's now or never, and rushes his assassin forward in the following manner.
Now we have a decision to make. We have that wonderful barrier ward at our disposal that could be used here to protect the enchantress, or we could use our knowledge of damage and unit wait cycles to our advantage. The chanty has 35 hit points, and the assassin will hit her for 18 only, leaving chanty with broken focus and 17 life remaining. This doesn't sound as good as barriering her in, but if we let her be bait and get attacked, we'll be able to just refreeze and have a new unit in our jail. I personally find that option preferable over the barrier, so let's get her hit as shown.
There's a little gem of strategy we need to use right now. Have you ever noticed how a cleric takes 5 turns to recover if you move him, and 3 if you don't? The enchantress is similar to the cleric in that if you move her and freeze, she is on 3 turn wait, but if you keep her still, she recovers in 2 turns. Let's stay very disciplined here, and not move her to the other spot that would also result in a 3 piece capture. We refreeze in position, adding an assassin to our pile.
Well, our opponent is really getting tired of little miss muffet sitting on her tuffet holding his units hostage, so he decided to charge that knight he used to attack the lightning ward back towards our jailer and the prisoners. He's focused and determined now, so he doesn't attack the knight from the side like he could. He sees that hurt enchantress with her 17 hitpoints and knows he can kill it in 1 shot with his big wife beating knight. He's on a mission, so we have to outthink him.
We need to make a decision now. We could simply throw a barrier on the chanty and have a free enemy knight back with our cleric, we could pound his knight with our lightning ward if we haven't already, or we could bring that pyromancer over and do a whopping 11 damage to him (see why we traded that other pyro out instead of a useful piece like a knight?) but maybe there's a better move. Since the enchantress is now on wait 2 turns, with the enemy knight on her next turn, what if we can impede his movement just slightly? Maybe there's a way to stall his knight long enough to get chanty ready to fire again. Consider what would happen if we move our knight in the path of his knight, and maybe take a swing at him while we're there.
It turns out our hunch was right. He was on a mission with his knight, and he's smart enough to just go around our knight, so he's only 1 move away from our weakened enchantress again. She's still got 1 turn left to wait before she's ready to fire again, so moving her to capture this new piece is impossible. Once again, we could barrier, and almost without exception you will actually need the barrier in every game you freeze pieces with, but I'm showing advanced strategy here. Simply barriering wouldn't illustrate the following concept. Our enchantress has 17 hit points, and that big burly knight is about to slap her with 22 hit points of sword, leaving her dead. But the cleric heals everyone for 12, and 17+12=29. If we heal now, the chanty will be off her wait cycle, and have enough hitpoints to survive the knight's hit. But what if the knight isn't really after chanty? Since he was so focused on killing our cleric earlier in the game, which is what got him into this mess, maybe he's after our cleric. I don't think it matters in this case. We're owning this poor kid so badly, even if we lost our cleric the outcome is pretty clear. Here's a little move I have done in the past with great success. Our 2 biggest targets right now for our opponent are our enchantress, and our cleric. What if we use them both as bait to lure Mr. Knight to his death? I will occasionally charge my cleric towards my enchantress, so if he goes for him he'll get frozen again. Look at the cleric placement I did immediately following healing the enchantress back to 29 hit points.
Now our opponent moves his knight again, as expected, towards our double bait. If this game was close, our move would have been disastrous, but we know we're in good shape, so we freeze again following his focus breaking attack on our enchantress. Some people think the cleric is essential to winning, and others are terrified of paralyzing their own pieces. At this point in the game, the enemy has very little left to hurt us with, so who cares? paralyzing our cleric doesn't hurt him. He's waiting 4 turns anyways, so being paralyzed doesn't matter for at least that long. If we focus on killing a couple of paralyzed units, later we could move chanty and refreeze the remaining men in our corner, and free the leric to heal again. The likelihood of needing to do this for this example is small, but notice my point. Paralyzing your own units, even your beloved cleric, is not necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on the situation on the battlefield to determine if this is something you can afford to risk. I will, almost without exception, freeze one or 2 of my pieces to capture 3 or 4 of the opponents. Look at this picture and think about it for a while. Is it really a bad move, or can you see my point? Also notice the enchantress is at 7 hitpoints. If anything came in at us now, we would be forced to barrier her in.
