Meanwhile I did something I do a lot with this kind of games and started a second playthrough long before I finished a first one. On games that have significant decisions to make on the strategic map, I often use a first and partial playthrough to understand how the strategic part of the game works, and then start over. That worked particularly well for The Lamplighters League, due to a great and rarely seen feature: You can not only skip the tutorial part of the game, but if you do, you can also decide to take different heroes than Ingrid, Eddie, and Lateef to start with. So in my second playthrough I am using Ingrid, Alexandrite, and Jianyi. Why not change Ingrid too? Because she is just too good, being the character that can most reliably produce additional action points, which is just overpowered when everybody else gets just 2 of those. In that second playthrough I put enemy strategic progress on slow, which is definitively a good option when trying to finish the campaign for the first time.

I got reasonably good at the game's real-time stealth mode, even if the controls for that are definitively janky and the AI somewhere between stupid and unpredictable. But the reason I like The Lamplighters League is definitively the turn-based combat. At the start of the game that is pretty standard, with 2 AP per character per turn, and a small selection of standard attacks. But with the skill trees, equippable items, and the card of the Undrawn Hand, the options quickly multiply. And you can make some pretty crazy builds, which aren't very balanced, but certainly fun. All 10 characters in the game (I could buy an 11th on Game Pass of $7, or you get it with the Deluxe version) play very differently from one another in turn-based combat, even if there are only 3 different variations in the real-time mode. And with the monsters also being rather varied, I am still enjoying my time with the game. While random maps sometimes repeat, there is a fair number of different ones, plus specific ones for critical story missions.

Today I played a mission where I had to hold a position on an otherwise empty map against hordes of enemies. First time I saw it, and it only emphasized that all other missions play mostly the same. Frequently you just kill everybody on the map, because that also allows you to maximize the collection of resources. And then it doesn't really matter whether your mission was to gather something or to destroy something else. So, yeah, I could think of a couple of things that would make this game better. But if you like turn-based games, I would still recommend checking The Lamplighters League out. For $10 on Game Pass, preferably.