I know this has been touched in some topics but my group is having trouble figuring this out from the scraps of info here.
1. Can heroes "swim" off the board to flee, or is the only way to flee getting the Revenge off the board?
2. If they can "swim" to safety, could the heroes just all swim off when the going gets tough resulting in almost no benefit to the overlord? With the shoe on the other foot, can the overlord just swim away with encounter leaders resulting in a waste of time and money for the heroes?
I ask this because in our campaign the heroes were trying to lift the siege of Orris. We believed form page 17 and 18 of the rulebook that any figure can just flee the encounter by swimming off the edge. At first the heroes kept getting to Orris, realizing they cannot beat the lieutenant, and then jumping overboard before any of them gave up conquest tokens. it seemed right because the heroes had to start from their home port elsewhere and waste time, so it seem correct.
However, the heroes finally got the upper hand and the lieutenant fled, lifting the siege. The heroes declared Orris the home port and this is when things got bad. The overlord kept tried to restart the siege and the heroes kept trying to push him off. whenever the overload was about the kill the heroes, the heroes fled before any deaths and returned to their home port, WHICH IS WHERE THEY ALREADY ARE. When the overlord fled, he just returned the next week to restart the siege. All progress grinded to a halt.
After about three game weeks of half-assed fights the overlord got bored and decided to besiege somewhere else, even though the meaningless fights were to his advantage (he still got one conquest a turn anyways) because he felt it was cheesy and stupid to pester the heroes unless they let him besiege uninterrupted.
Feel free to correct anything else my group did wrong and thanks in advance for the answers.