help with DID-A small favor (hard)? [done, replay]

[Dunno]

I won this campaign once on medium and it was so good I decided to replay it on hard. At first I was like "meh, seems doable", later it got harder but now it's impossible. Is there even a way to get through the guards unnoticed? Or do I have to recruit some bats to distract them? Because after they ring the alarm they send pikemen, swordsmen, a god damn silver mage(!) and some other spam units, and it's impossible to fight them. Thanks in advance!

[monochromatic]

I usually (well mind you, I never played this on Hard) send three/four Nightguants/Shadows and backstab the crap out of the leader, and any other mage(s) in sight (not sure about the latter though, I haven't played this for quite a while now).

[Dunno]

I made it! I'm submitting a replay, because I didn't pass in an ordinary way I think. You see, they don't sound the alarm when they see a wraith with one xp to expand, because they don't attack it. It makes it fairly easy to backstab a leader with only one nightgaunt. Then I used this bug to save my nightgaunt from mages. Maybe this wasn't a fair victory, BUT I discovered both exploits by myself so...

[Maiklas3000]

Meh. You save-reloaded to reset the invisibility status of your Nightgaunt. That's worse than save-reloading to avoid a bad random number, IMO.

I've beat this scenario a couple of times on hard (with no save-reloads at any time in the campaign), but I only have two Shadows and I lose them every time. My only other promoted unit is a Bone Shooter (which I don't use here.) Even if I can find some way to save the Shadows, then is three level 2 units going to be enough to beat the next couple of scenarios?

Descent Into Darkness has been a rough campaign. I had a sequence of bad die rolls in Haunting in Winter, so only one Ghost promoted to Shadow, and ever since then, my scarcity of high level units causes me to lose high level units. Maybe I should go all the way back to that scenario.

[Schierke]

Maybe it's because i'm really obsessive with doing scenarios the best way possible, but by the time i got to this scenario on hard i was very over prepared.

Didn't even tried to sneak once i knew i could just killed the leader, so i sent my two Nightgaunts to assasinate him. I reloaded a few times (always to turn one, for me other types of reloading takes away the fun of the game) hoping for both Nightgaunts to survive the attacks of the two mages that spawn, but that's extremely unlikely to happen and even i don't have the patience to try it until it happens, so i accepted the lose of one Nightgaunt.

So then i proceded to recruit three new ghosts and recall some more units, then destroyed every single enemy troop on the map without taking any more losses.

This is the end result:

Spoiler:

I guess having a little OCD sometimes helps in Wesnoth .