So... as of right now, I consider the Coria Dogs fight to be *the worst* experience I have had with the game yet. I just spent 2 hours completing it, and need to take a serious break from the game before I continue.
Slowdown was the biggest factor that contributed to everything, but I've dealt with that just fine up until now. The factors that, combined with slowdown, turned out to be really annoying were:
1) The map size and objective placement - It takes a good 4-5 turns to move everyone from the main bar room to the lever room safely, and everyone has to move together due to the number of high-leveled melee units able to backstab and sidestab you for super-damage. Movement alone in my experience took me close to 20 turns total across the entire fight.
2) The bartender gets his own turn phase. This may only take a few seconds (before slowdown happens), but because he does nothing it's kind of pointless and annoying to have him there.
3) The dastard unit must be fought in a 1-space wide hallway. You're forced to choose one unit to enter that hallway and fight them. If you want to choose a marching order, it has to be done in an almost-equally constrained hallway, because once you go in, there's no going out. In that marching order, there can only be so many ranged characters with you too (once again due to all the backstabbing melee characters present in the fight).
4) The dastard unit hits ridiculously hard. I had to have a healer stationed behind my fighting unit, and pass up all bandages and apples available in the party to that character to keep them alive during this fight.
5) The dastard unit has bandages. So as soon as you've spent 5 turns whittling them down with that one character in front, they restore themselves back to full health.
Solutions?
Maybe put the Dastard unit in the big room with the barrels. Don't give them bandages.
Maybe put the stairs in the lever room itself (so you don't have to double-back after that big fight).
Here's some tips:
You don't need to fight the fencer 1v1. Clear the lever room first, leave a unit there, and then send 2 melee, 1 ranged and a healer and station them in front of the gate. Wait for the fencer to move so there's room to go in, and open the door and bring everyone in. You can take out barrels for more comfort.
Use frost armor, use shining. These will make its hits laughable. The best ranged you can bring are these two mages as well, blinding / freezing it turn him into a non-issue.
(Frost armor in general is amazing for these kind of things)
for narrow hallway I went with two units, main girl with snare trap, and some sort of range attack. set snare, hit with range, step back one space. repeat until defeated. also to get the three high level units behind the bar I picked them off with archers. if you hit with double or triple shot from a square that is not directly in front of them, they won't counter. as for the rest of the enemies. I used mechanics and went in from different angles and set barricades. I even blasted a hole in the wall below the switch. if you set barricades just outside the blast zone you'll won't have to take them on all at once.
Yup. You can also bypass the right room entirely if you
[spoiler]a) have Harynx Shadowport in, throw the lever, and escape; or
b) have Teresa set explosive charges to blow open the door / walls containing the Coria Dastard.[/spoiler]
Murdering the bartender takes away his turn phase. You lose 100 "bonus points" but they don't mean anything.
Aaaaand now there's a mod for getting rid of the Bartender's turn phase!
Also one funny thing I used to make this entire fight laughable:
After clearing the first room, and noticing the iron door needs to be activated by a lever guarded by another dozen units... I checked the iron door's resistances..... >:D
...The door was not immune to ice.. hehehe
5 or 6 cryo blasts later the door was destroyed. I then used motivate on Phoeboe to use cryo blast again on the dastard unit, freezing them solid and then pummeling them in a cruely hilarious way
speaking of the bartender, and civilians in general. is there any negative to hitting or killing them?
Yes. If you do, you're a terrible person.
I never tried hitting/killing them before. Do they even give exp from attacking them, or would the only point in attacking them, to be evil?
You'd get experience from it, but only a very small amount. And by small, I mean miniscule dependent on how high of a level the character you're using to eliminate them is.