I'm trying The Battle of Lake-Town for the first time.

Question 1: During setup, I drew Town-Baiting , which says Smaug makes an attack. However, Smaug is not in play. So, should I just ignore that card?

Question 2: The active location is South Pier , which says "When faced with the option to travel, players cannot travel to other locations." Meanwhile, Fisherman's Dock says "Travel: If there is 1 active location, exhaust a hero to travel here". So, am I able to exhaust a hero to travel to Fisherman's Dock or not? Or does South Pier prevent me from doing that?

Question 3: Can I travel to 2 Fisherman's Docks in one turn? Or can I only perform one "Travel" per turn, in which case I need to wait until a later turn to travel to the 2nd Fisherman's Dock?

Question 4: Can I use 2 Travel Actions per turn? Example: Merchant's District has a Travel Action which lets me remove it to the victory display. Can I remove 2 Merchant's Districts per turn, or do I have to wait until the next turn?

Question 5: Can I do a Travel Action in the same travel phase that I perform a normal Travel? For example, can I remove a Merchant's District and travel to a Fisherman's Dock in the same travel phase? Or does a Travel Action "consume" the entire travel phase?

Question 6: When the locations in the staging area get too numerous, we just don't have a chance, because staging threat increases, burn damage increases, and we're too busy "fighting fires" to defend effectively against Smaug, let alone hurt him. I'm guessing this is a normal experience for first-time players. Is this one of those scenarios designed to force you to build a deck to beat it? In other words, is it a "puzzle" scenario? And are most of the standalone scenarios "puzzles"?

1 hour ago, tripecac said:

I'm trying The Battle of Lake-Town for the first time.

Question 1: During setup, I drew Town-Baiting , which says Smaug makes an attack. However, Smaug is not in play. So, should I just ignore that card?

Question 2: The active location is South Pier , which says "When faced with the option to travel, players cannot travel to other locations." Meanwhile, Fisherman's Dock says "Travel: If there is 1 active location, exhaust a hero to travel here". So, am I able to exhaust a hero to travel to Fisherman's Dock or not? Or does South Pier prevent me from doing that?

Question 3: Can I travel to 2 Fisherman's Docks in one turn? Or can I only perform one "Travel" per turn, in which case I need to wait until a later turn to travel to the 2nd Fisherman's Dock?

Question 4: Can I use 2 Travel Actions per turn? Example: Merchant's District has a Travel Action which lets me remove it to the victory display. Can I remove 2 Merchant's Districts per turn, or do I have to wait until the next turn?

Question 5: Can I do a Travel Action in the same travel phase that I perform a normal Travel? For example, can I remove a Merchant's District and travel to a Fisherman's Dock in the same travel phase? Or does a Travel Action "consume" the entire travel phase?

Question 6: When the locations in the staging area get too numerous, we just don't have a chance, because staging threat increases, burn damage increases, and we're too busy "fighting fires" to defend effectively against Smaug, let alone hurt him. I'm guessing this is a normal experience for first-time players. Is this one of those scenarios designed to force you to build a deck to beat it? In other words, is it a "puzzle" scenario? And are most of the standalone scenarios "puzzles"?

1. Yes ignore it.

2. I don't believe you can, could be wrong here though.

3. Well if you have a different location in play and you use the travel action on Fisherman's Dock then there will be 2 which will prevent you from moving a third location there since the ability only references if there is 1 active location.

4. Yes you can do as many legal actions as allowed so you could add two of those to the victory display.

5. You can do both.

6. This one isn't so much of a puzzle as it is one you need to have very aggressive deck-building. Massive card draw, resource acceleration and playing tons of allies/having strong attacks. I managed to beat this recently with a mono-lore Ent swarm led by Aragorn, Grima and Beravor. It was all about the Booming Ents to finally defeat Smaug. And the POD quests are all about different.

1 hour ago, tripecac said:

Question 1: During setup, I drew Town-Baiting , which says Smaug makes an attack. However, Smaug is not in play. So, should I just ignore that card?

Correct. Lucky you.

1 hour ago, tripecac said:

Question 2: The active location is South Pier , which says "When faced with the option to travel, players cannot travel to other locations." Meanwhile, Fisherman's Dock says "Travel: If there is 1 active location, exhaust a hero to travel here". So, am I able to exhaust a hero to travel to Fisherman's Dock or not? Or does South Pier prevent me from doing that?

Since South Pier's effect is not limited to when it's in the staging area I would say you can't travel to other locations even when it is the active location.

1 hour ago, tripecac said:

Question 3: Can I travel to 2 Fisherman's Docks in one turn? Or can I only perform one "Travel" per turn, in which case I need to wait until a later turn to travel to the 2nd Fisherman's Dock?

You still get only 1 travel opportunity per Travel phase, so no 2 Fisherman's Docks in the same turn.

1 hour ago, tripecac said:

Question 4: Can I use 2 Travel Actions per turn? Example: Merchant's District has a Travel Action which lets me remove it to the victory display. Can I remove 2 Merchant's Districts per turn, or do I have to wait until the next turn?

There are basically no limits to the actions you can perform in a window action. Just remember that the Action window of the Travel phase is after the actual Travel opportunity.

1 hour ago, tripecac said:

Question 5: Can I do a Travel Action in the same travel phase that I perform a normal Travel? For example, can I remove a Merchant's District and travel to a Fisherman's Dock in the same travel phase? Or does a Travel Action "consume" the entire travel phase?

See the two answers above. Just remember that the actual travelling is a separate thing from an Action you can perform only in the Travel phase and thus called "Travel Action".

Make sure you note the difference between a " Travel: " cost and a " Travel Action: " action.

I tried Lake-Town again last weekend, and made it a little further (stage 2) but still got slaughtered.

I definitely need to adjust my decks. Cards like Forest Snare are a waste, as is Thalin.

I'd still like to stick with Dwarves, if possible, because that's the only archetype I know, and Dain's ability seems pretty awesome.

Is Lake-Town relatively beatable with a Dwarf swarm? Or am I making things hard for myself?

Dwarf swrm was the top tier archetype when Lake-Town was released, and people did beat it when it was released, so yeah, you can absolutely do it with a Dwarf swarm.

To be fair, dwarf swarm has been hit particularly hard by errata, so it beating a quest back in the day doesn't mean it would do so as often now. When Laketown was released, had Erebor Battle Master received its first errata yet?

Battle for Laketown was released in October 2012, the Battle-master was errataed in Faq 1.6, published in February 2014, so more than a year later.