Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 1

There's a ton of ground to cover here, even though the mission itself is straightforward.

Let's start with units.

First of all, it's worth talking about god stat modifiers. Each of the five gods has a stock set of modifiers they apply to their units, which are mostly uniform. Once you account for a unit's tier and category, a unit's stats in several realms are very predictable. In Charnel's case, he makes two closely-related changes to his units and a third minor modification: specifically, his units do not passively regenerate health out of combat like those of other gods, but instead gain 50% of the damage they deal out as health. The minor change is they have slightly-reduced maximum health: 90% of the base value.

Charnel being very close to normal stats is a contributing factor as to why I elected to have him be the first god I'd run through. I actually feel his forces are the closest to a 'the Mario' bland sort of faction, more so than the other god whose stat modifiers are clearly intended to be essentially the baseline. His stat modifiers encourage nothing in particular behavior-wise, aside that you'll find yourself healing your troops between fights more often than with other gods, but less often during actual combat. (Natural unit regeneration normally only occurs when a unit is not moving, not attacking, and not being attacked, so during combat Charnel's units are gaining HP while other gods' units are not)

So, anyway units. In Sacrifice, you gain access to units and spells as you level... in multiplayer. In single-player, instead you gain them as you progress through the campaign, with your level tied to which mission you're on. Since I picked Charnel, we have his Level 1 spells (Summoning units constitutes spells: yer a wizard!), plus the standard spells available to every wizard. (eg Manalith, Desecrate, Convert, Heal, Guardian, Speed Up, Teleport, Manahoar) There is one standard spell that isn't available at level 1, but I'll get to that when I get to it.

On most levels, you get 2 god-derived spells from each level. Usually one of them is a unit and one of them is a combat spell. Since Sacrifice operates roughly on a rock-paper-scissors system where flying units beat melee units beat ranged units beat flying units (It's slightly more complicated than that in real terms), your first level is one of the exceptions, giving you 4 god-derived spells, with three of them being units so you can have the foundations of the combat system.

For Charnel, these are...


Scythe
300 Mana, 1 Soul

The Scythe is the first example of a unit that breaks from a god's normal stat modifiers, having noticeably less health than it 'should' have for its tier and type. (It has about 67% of the baseline for basic melee, instead of the 90% it should have) This is fine, because Charnel's modifiers work very well for your basic melee meatshield, at least at this low-level stage of the game: in real terms, Scythes are astonishingly effective melee units because the very process of fighting enemies keeps generating health for them, enough so it's not unusual for Scythes to outlast their technically-hardier competition on other gods.

They don't have any exclusive special traits, though. They're just a Charnel melee unit, and as power creep happens they go from being one of the best basic melee units to one of the worst, easily sniped by advanced range units and area damage spells without ever getting a chance to fight and without any weird qualities to provide niche uses. On the other hand, they also don't require any extra micromanagement, and that gets increasingly important in Sacrifice as you gain spells and army size grows.

Like all basic melee, Scythes are slightly resistant to physical attacks, shaving off 10% of the damage. It helps a little, but not enough to meaningfully influence player decisions.

On a different note, mana and souls are your primary resources in the game. Mana is a bit odd in that most of the time specific costs aren't very important because you'll usually have enough Manaliths and Manahoars that your mana generation is usually fast enough that spell cooldowns are much more of a factor in what you cast when than actual costs, but then if you do end up in a situation where your mana generation is gone or crippled suddenly you start caring very much. Note that 300 mana is the default minimum cost for a spell in Sacrifice: you can count on one hand the spells that dip below that cost. A wizard's base maximum mana is 1100, or more precisely their base maximum is 1000 and they gain 100 per level, including at level 1 -though you'll never see a wizard at level 0 outside the tutorial, to the best of my awareness. As such, 300 mana can't quite be cast four times in a row at level 1 without mana generation.

Souls, on the other hand, are most closely comparable to pop cap in a more traditional RTS: all your units demand at least one soul and potentially as many as five to be summoned, with the soul(s) tied up in the unit until such time as it dies and you pick its soul(s) back up. Where mana can be generated unliimitedly but you have a hard cap on how much you can carry at a time, with mana spent vanishing into the ether, souls default to staying in the system: they're inside a living unit, or they're tied to a corpse, or they're freely floating in the air waiting for someone to collect them (Free-floating souls are really rare in the campaign, though) or they're inside a wizard's soul pool, accessible only to that wizard. There's some exceptions to this, but I'll talk about them as we get to those cases.

Regardless, one critical detail is souls are, in normal play, never added to the game world. The campaign is willing to play a bit loose with this rule, spawning in additional units after the map has started or even injecting souls directly into an enemy wizard's soul stock to bolster their army size, but in general while you can add souls to your personal supply, it will always be by pulling souls from elsewhere, not by generating souls ex nihilo. Conversely, the overall soul supply of the map can be reduced in a few different ways, which I'll talk about as we get to those cases. The implications of this dynamic as regards to multiplayer aren't shown off by the campaign very well; multiplayer Sacrifice's approach to achieving the usual RTS dynamic of starting everybody with minimal resources and having their economy/army size grow as the match advances is largely not done by the campaign.

On yet another note, spells in Sacrifice have two possible casting behaviors; locking the wizard in place when cast, or allowing them to move freely while casting. Unit-summoning spells always immobilize the wizard, no exceptions. Basic units like Scythes are summoned quickly enough this isn't a big deal, but later units can take several seconds to summon, which can leave the wizard very vulnerable if you attempt to summon them during combat.


Fallen
300 Mana, 1 Soul

Fallen are, at the early stage of the game, something of a range-supremacy unit. If the enemy is trying to spam their own basic ranged units, Fallen will tend to win because their leeching means they outlast the enemy. They're also still well-suited to fighting enemy fliers, though they're quite bad at fending off melee attackers.

As a basic ranged attacker, Fallen are also our introduction to an important concept; all ranged attacking units burn an internal mana supply on ranged attacks. This means that while you can send ranged units to raid enemies away from your wizard, it's only practicable if you send Manahoars with them to keep their mana going. It's not a concern if you Guardian a unit, and if you play the way I do in the campaign and mostly just move your blob of units with you it won't come up very often since you constantly want Manahoars nearby you, but it has critical strategic implications, particularly in terms of the difficulty destroying a Manalith with a group of ranged units.

Fallen also have a gimmicky special ability to play dead. It has two effects: the Fallen become invisible to enemies, and the Fallen passively regenerates its health. This costs no mana and the state can be maintained indefinitely. In theory it can be used to spring ambushes on people, but unless your ambush is eg sprung at a Manafount they'll run out of mana eventually, and as far as I'm aware there's no way to tell the Fallen to exit the state in response to enemies approaching or anything so it requires you manually tell them to exit the state. This aspect is useless in the campaign and I'm skeptical it's much use in multiplayer.

In theory it can be used to heal Fallen out of battle, but this is rarely useful. Usually Fallen end a fight dead or at full health, and if you go out of your way to give your Charnel-heavy wizard one or more sources of casual healing -which is a good idea for a Charnel-heavy force anyway- then it becomes even less relevant. For that matter, it's not very useful as a way to heal during a battle, since it takes them out of the action, making it only slightly better than actually being dead...

About the only use I can see it having is engaging in Shenanigans by having a Fallen that's clearly been targeted play dead, then do the same with the next one while waking up the first, and so on and so forth, and I'm pretty sure Fallen don't actually become immune to area of effect when playing dead so even that would turn fairly useless in short order.

That said, while playing dead strikes me as an ill-considered ability on a design level, Fallen themselves are a perfectly serviceable ranged attacker, and I don't believe for a second they're the worst Level 1 ranged unit.

Fallen are, by the way, extremely weak to melee damage. This is normal for ground ranged units, with the default being to take quadruple damage from melee attacks, but the Fallen is particularly vulnerable and takes six times normal melee damage. I imagine this is to offset the leeching.


Locust
300 Mana, 1 Soul

The Locust has two unique qualities to it: first of all, its HP leech is 85% of its damage rather than 50%, and second of all it leeches mana. Even if the target doesn't have mana, the Locust still gains mana on a successful hit, though to be clear they do in fact take mana from targets that have mana. This gives it the completely unique quality of being the only ranged flying unit in the game that can perform raids with absolutely no support whatsoever, indefinitely. (So long as they don't miss too many times in a row, anyway) At low levels, I can see this being pretty amazing in multiplayer -though unfortunately single player never gives you an opportunity to see it in action- and yet the frustration factor for enemies is somewhat limited by the fact that Locusts increasingly turn into an easily-killed joke as wizards level up.

The fact that they steal mana from their target also means Locusts are surprisingly able to deal with lone ranged units, rapidly rendering them unable to fight back, and are a useful support tool even into the mid-game for preventing a wizard from contributing to a fight. In conjunction with the fact that their attack is one of a handful of hitscan attacks in the game (Note that even though there's an animation of energy coming back to the Locust, it's irrelevant; they leech the instant the animation starts, assuming it was a successful hit, not when the 'projectile' reaches them) Locusts are actually one of the best early-game units to swarm wizards with; normally wizards are difficult to kill with ranged units, since they'll dodge around and use Speed Up on themselves, causing projectiles to miss a lot. (Ranged attackers in Sacrifice normally try to lead their target, which doesn't work so well when your target keeps changing its direction and speed) The Locust's hitscan attacks make this irrelevant, plus they're crippling the wizard's ability to summon, heal, cast Speed Up, etc.

Unfortunately, in a straight fight Locusts are probably the worst of the basic fliers. Two others have splash damage, and the other two stun/knockdown their targets, even Wizards, both of which allow those units to seriously contribute even into mid-level combat. Locusts are increasingly relegated to 'unlimited raider' (While getting weaker and weaker relative to what they're raiding) and 'mana drainer', the latter of which gets harder and harder to take advantage of as mana pools grow. At max level, Locusts are very nearly worthless. There's also a much better unit for draining mana available at the second level, further hurting their case. And even at low levels, Locusts have terrible accuracy, so even though their attack is hitscan they tend to miss a lot, especially against basic, smaller units. (Accuracy in Sacrifice is like accuracy in classic X-COM: how large your firing arc cone is. Thus, a big target might be so large your entire cone of fire intersects with it, ensuring a hit)

Like all basic fliers, the Locust takes doubled damage from ranged attacks. Also like all basic fliers, they actually take normal damage from melee attacks but this comes with the caveat that basic fliers persistently hover high enough that ground melee usually can't target them in the first place. As such, it's reasonably accurate for most purposes to say that Locusts and all their equivalents are immune to ground melee attackers.

Our first non-unit god-derived spell is, of course...


Insect Swarm
300 Mana

This is a basic attacking spell; every god provides one of these at level 1. You pick a target, after a bit of a delay a projectile is launched, it deals damage to one target.  In Charnel's case, its distinguishing quality is that it also heals you by 50% of the damage it dealt, though its damage is also tied for worst of the base attacking spells. A subtle quality of Insect Swarm is that it also actually does splash damage, though it's easily overlooked 90% of the time as the radius isn't very large, the damage is dealt over time, and it centers itself on the targeted unit, which collectively means it tends to add a little bit of damage here and there to other units, but nothing decisive most of the time.

At low levels, Insect Swarm is useful for simultaneously dishing out damage and keeping your own health up. At high levels, it's largely relegated to picking off Sac Doctors -though that's typical of the basic attacking spells. It's not the worst basic attacking spell, but it's not much better than the worst one.

Note that Insect Swarm's projectile can be intercepted by terrain and units. This is true of all the basic attacking spells, and in fact Locust Swarm is actually one of the better basic attacking spells at avoiding being wasted in this way, but it's something to keep in mind when eg considering lobbing a shot at a unit attempting to flee over a hill. Especially since, unlike nearly all the spells available at this point in the game, Insect Swarm has a meaningfully substantial cooldown; wasting a shot isn't just a waste of mana, and isn't just 'you could've had your wizard cast something else at the time', it can also be the case that if you'd waited a few seconds you'd have been able to actually land the hit but now it's on cooldown and the opportunity is gone by the time the cooldown is over.

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And we also meet our first example of a campaign-exclusive concept: hero units. Gangrel is such a one, though he's... not the best example. Most hero units will stick with you until they die, with caveats. (eg one hero will follow you all throughout Pertsephone's campaign... and abandon you the instant you do any other god's mission) Gangrel will not follow us into the next mission, for reasons that will become obvious-ish as the campaign progresses. It's related to why it's a mission objective to keep Gangrel alive.

Anyway, every hero unit is quite literally a bigger, meaner version of a regular unit; Gangrel is a Scythe, and he's one of the biggest jumps in power for a hero relative to its ordinary counterpart. His sheer power honestly has me feeling like Charnel's first mission is probably the best first mission for introducing the player to the game; it's not like the other god's first missions can be failed (mostly), but they can certainly frustrate. Charnel leaves you able to focus on getting used to the controls and all -and Sacrifice is so weird you really need the opportunity to do so, even if you've got tons of prior experience with theoretically-similar games.

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Anyway, while we're covering everything that crops up in the first mission, let's also cover the basic universal spells, starting with...


Manahoar
1 Mana, 1 Soul

Your only proper unit that's not derived from a god (Sac Doctors don't behave like other units, and in fact can't be selected at all, and so in turn cannot be given orders directly), the Manahoar is also nearly unique for being a complete non-combatant: it has no form of attack at all. Its speed is a little higher than your wizard's base speed, which is pretty much perfect, as it makes it difficult to leave behind your own Manahoars accidentally while also allowing a dead wizard's Manahoars a chance to run away successfully. (Wizards are actually one of the fastest ground units in the game)

It's worth noting that AI Manahoars always flee to the nearest friendly Manalith or Altar when you kill the wizard. This makes it easy to tell where the wizard is going to try to respawn, which is useful for planning ahead, particularly if you're new to a given campaign map and so don't know where to start looking for enemy Manaliths. Usually their entire force also tries to disengage, but not always; AI Manahoars are never an exception.

This behavior is actually a standard behavior your own units will engage in. When you initially summon a unit, it's automatically assigned to follow behind you in a manner that is nearly impossible to force a unit back into once you've given them any kind of order that takes them out of this state. (The only means I'm aware of is that if you initiate a Desecration and it gets interrupted, the unit you used will assign itself to following you in this manner automatically) Units in this state, be they Manahoars or combat units, will all automatically flee when your wizard dies. Units assigned to 'guard' you won't engage in this fleeing behavior. As such, if you want your Manahoars -or any other unit, for that matter- to automatically flee on your death, you should avoid giving them orders and ideally unselect them. If you don't want them doing that, you should instead assign them to guard you. Annoyingly, once you have died you're not going to be able to put them back into that state -such units won't re-assign themselves to following you when you come back to life.

It's surprisingly questionable to try to kill Manahoars in combat. They cost literally 1 mana in a game where 300 is the default, nearly-universal lowest cost for a spell and wizards at level 1 can carry 1,100 in total, so the impact on their mana economy is negligible if you can't prevent them from immediately collecting the soul and re-summoning the Manahoar. That's time not spent on some other spell, admittedly, but it's still less useful than you might intuitively expect... unless you've got tools to siphon the wizard's mana, in which case draining their mana and killing all their Manahoars is a really effective strategy. The AI is particularly bad at coping with it, but it's not like it's a bad strategy against human players.

Furthermore, Manahoars take halved damage from spells and take 25% less damage from ranged attacks. Even though they're painfully frail in terms of HP, there's actually very few spells that can one-shot a Manahoar.

That said, once you've got an enemy wizard down you ideally kill off all their Manahoars so they have to travel further to revive, giving you more time to snatch their creatures' souls.

My personal experience is that 2 Manahoars is really the minimum to have a tolerable mana generation rate, and 4 is my preferred minimum once I have enough souls that 2 more not going into combatants isn't so big a deal. I think Manahoar mana generation is actually split among friendly units such that as your army gets larger you'll need more Manahoars, but I'm not 100% confident on this -if there is such a splitting effect, it's sufficiently minor that you need huge armies to start needing additional Manahoars. It's entirely possible I'm imagining such an effect.

Of course, more Manahoars makes it harder for you to lose all your mana generation, so in multiplayer I imagine you'd want more Manahoars if facing opponents fond of targeting your Manahoars.

One minor criticism I have of Sacrifice's game design is that I really feel like there needed to be a higher-level Manahoar alternative. The late game has enough powerful area of effect attacks being thrown around it's not unusual to instantly lose all your Manahoars , even if you make an effort to spread them out some. I'd have liked to have gained at level 5 or so some kind of tough Manahoar alternative that was soul-intensive and less efficient for the souls than regular Manahoars. eg something that took 4 souls and only provided as much mana generation as 2-and-a-half Manahoars, but which was very tough, maybe even specifically seriously resistant to area of effect attacks while being weak to melee so that it was a bad deal for any purpose aside fighting back against extreme splash damage usage -I'll be getting into more detail next post, but Sacrifice has built-in mechanics that would make that effortless to implement.


Speed Up
300 Mana

Speed Up causes a single target ally -with the Wizard themself as a valid option- to move noticeably faster for... a variable duration. If cast on the Wizard, it lasts for 4 seconds. (Which is very slightly longer than Speed Up's cooldown) If cast on a regular unit, it lasts for a duration that varies based on their maximum HP; for the most fragile of units, it will last over a minute. For the most durable of units, it will last a few short seconds.

Speed Up is a difficult spell to summarize, because I use it pretty constantly but I don't really feel like it fills any particular role in the game. It's useful for getting melee units on top of ranged units faster, particularly the longest-range examples, and it can be used to get a Sac Doctor back to base before the enemy wizard can arrive, but outside of that it's just something to spam if you don't have a better idea of what to cast. It feels to me roughly equivalent to how Starcraft 2 deliberately added micromanagement sinks for the purpose of making it so if you can't keep up with the clicks-per-minute rate of the best players you're operating at a pointless additional handicap; something that doesn't really add to the game in 90% of situations, but that a player is basically compelled to spam anyway. (Seriously, there's zero reason why Starcraft 2 couldn't have implemented automation to the abilities in question, such that they'll keep being re-used on a target whenever possible until the player changes their orders)

I do like how its duration is worse the higher a unit's max HP is. It's a clever solution to minimizing a player's ability to abuse it on stronger units and on mighty glaciers in particular without having to do any special-casing, aside the wizard special-casing.

On a different note, it's worth explicitly mentioning that almost all spells have a range limit defined relative to your wizard's current location. You can't Heal allied units across the other side of the map. You can, however, perform fairly arbitrary targeting within that radius, including that the game lets you target your own units through your selection menu. (I kind of wish Sacrifice had a mechanic for 'selecting' enemy units to target them in the same way...) For the most part I won't be talking about spell ranges: while they clearly vary, the degree to which they vary is largely pretty ignorable.


Heal
300 Mana

Heal is particularly important to Charnel since his units don't heal outside of combat and so post-battle wounds demand the player's personal attention, but is in general an important spell. It undoes 1000 points of damage to a single friendly, which is a lot. Even the single toughest unit in the game caps out at 7200 Hp, and until you're getting into the upper middle section of level/unit quality you can basically treat Heal as a full heal on many units.

Note, however, that the heal is delivered over several seconds, not all at once. You should heal yourself when your health is starting to drop alarmingly, not when you're close to death -otherwise you'll be finished off before most of the heal is actually delivered. Same for on units in combat; don't target a unit when it's about to die, target it when you notice its health starting to drop.

(I'm very bad at implementing this advice myself, mind)

Heal's endgame utility depends heavily on what tools you've picked up as you level. For this particular run, I'm going to be all-Charnel all the time, and Heal will never stop being important. For some of the other gods, though, Heal is eventually largely invalidated, and if you're building a multiplayer custom wizard it's usually best to incorporate one of the options that shunts Heal aside.


Summon Manalith
800 Mana

Summons a Manalith on top of a Manafount. Note that Summon Manalith has a very constricted range compared to eg Heal or Insect Swarm, demanding you're nearly on top of the Manafount before you can start summoning.

It's worth noting that all your structures in Sacrifice have rigid placements; they'e always placed atop a Manafount, which you can't modify the location of. There's basically no basebuilding mechanics in general, really.

The actual effects of Manaliths are; they channel mana to your Manahoars, they make it so only friendly units will get mana from being nearby the underlying Manafount, and they prevent the enemy from building their own structure on the Manafount until the Manalith is destroyed. Your first few Manaliths are vitally important economic expansion, but once you've got 4 or so any later Manaliths are probably more about denying the enemy than about giving yourself more mana to work with.

... with the caveat that there's a range limit to how far Manaliths can transmit mana to you, and campaign maps tend to be both quite large and have Manafounts sparsely placed. As such, in the campaign you'll tend to find yourself continuing to spam Manaliths no matter how many you already have just so you can have an actually positive mana generation as you work your way from your end of the map to the other end of the map.

Note that Manaliths rapidly regenerate health even when under attack, which makes it impractical or outright impossible to destroy them with small, weak forces. This also ties back to my earlier commentary about the limited utility of raiding with ranged units: if they're going to run out of mana before the Manalith actually dies, they're not accomplishing anything.

This is exacerbated by the point that I'm fairly confident Manaliths are strongly resistant to spells and ranged attacks. It's either that or they have a lot of HP and are seriously weak to melee attacks. Either way, melee units are very much the go-to way of demolishing Manaliths.

Two other quirks to note: a Manalith that is currently being summoned is actually immune to damage... but if the wizard's spellcasting is somehow interrupted before completion, the Manalith will be instantly destroyed. The first point means that you can protect yourself from ranged attackers by positioning an unclaimed Manafount between you and them and summoning a Manalith on it: any projectiles on the way will be harmlessly intercepted, and no new ones will come forth because the instant you start the summoning the Manalith's full final form is already obstructing line of fire. The latter point means you shouldn't try combat-summoning a Manalith unless you're confident you won't be interrupted -even aside that you'll be immobilized for a long time and thus easily killed.


Guardian
300 Mana

Guardian binds a target ally to a nearby structure. You can bind Guardians to Manaliths, Shrines and even your Altar though Guardianing to your Altar is the most dubious of the options and I've never seen the AI do so of their own volition. (Though it's not unusual for the AI to have some units Guardianed to their Altar by scripting at the beginning of the mission) A Guardianed unit has increased resistance to ranged damage and to spell damage, does increased damage (This even affects poison damage, and in fact it boosts poison damage more than regular damage), regenerates faster, leeches more health if it's a Charnel unit, and absorbs damage for the structure; a structure cannot be destroyed until all its Guardians are dead, with any damage the structure should take being redirected to the Guardians. If there are multiple Guardians, the damage is split among them, making it impractical to kill groups of Guardians by attacking the structure.

The damage reduction is 75% if there's only one Guardian, but adding more Guardians causes each Guardian to get a lesser amount of damage reduction. This limits the utility of stacking Guardians, though this is partially offset by the splitting effect. (That is, having two Guardians on one Manalith roughly halves the effectiveness of targeting the Manalith in an attempt to kill the Guardians)

Guardians are unable to move beyond a limited leash range, making it dubious to Guardian a melee unit unless the goal is to provide a cheap meatshield for the structure. There is no way to dispel Guardian aside killing the unit, either, so you should be careful to avoid Guardianing too many of your units. On the flipside, in campaign play you should generally endeavor to kill enemy Guardians away from their wizards so you can collect the souls for yourself instead of accidentally freeing them up for use in the enemy's roving army.

Notice that Guardian does not make a unit more resistant to melee damage. This makes melee units your best bet for rapidly killing a Guardian if you don't have overkill options relative to the Guardianed unit. Even if the Guardianed unit is a flier, that just means you target the Manalith; as far as I'm aware, the damage is redirected in full, no damage being lost in the process.

It's worth noting Hero units cannot be made into Guardians.

In the campaign there's a few specific missions where it's a really good idea to set some Guardians, but in most missions Guardian is best off ignored. This is compounded by the fact that the best units to Guardian at all take a while to show up, and while the AI isn't very bright it's usually surprisingly difficult to bait them into kill zones.

A minor point about Guardian is that you don't actually get to set which structure to assign a Guardian to; you simply target a unit that's nearby a structure and the game assigns it for you. This can most readily crop up when trying to assign a Guardian to your initial Manalith, as the closest Manafount is often quite close to your Altar, but occasionally two Manafounts are placed close enough for this to crop up elsewhere. The game handles the assignment based on where your wizard is, not on where the unit is; placing a unit closer to the structure you want to assign it to will only help if this places it outside the radius of the one you don't want to assign it to.

Amusing minor detail: you can cast Guardian on Manahoars! I can't imagine a reason why you'd want to, but I'd honestly have expected the devs to have forbidden it for some reason or another.

Guardian is another spell that has quite a short range, and in fact Guardian will disable itself if you're not nearby a valid structure. No assigning Guardians from halfway across the map for you.


Teleport
800 Mana

Teleport takes you and all friendly creatures (Exceptions: Guardians and Sac Doctors) in a pretty sizable radius to a targeted friendly structure. Ideally you'll use the minimap to target the structure -Teleport is of course best used on distant structures, and while it may be possible to get a conventional line of sight on the structure it's an unnecessary hurdle. Just mouse-wheel-click on your minimap and drag the mouse back, and you'll expand its view significantly. You don't even need to do that, actually, since all friendly structures are also marked on your minimap even if they're out of your minimap's current radius: they just get represented by arrows at the edge of the minimap if they're outside your minimap's current radius, and you can target them via those arrows. (Though this can get clunky if you've got multiple structures that are clumped in a similar direction relative to your current position, so I still prefer to pull the map back)

Teleport is, incidentally, the single longest-range spell in the game, able to target a structure no matter how far away it is from you.

Teleport takes a while to cast, so it's iffy for escaping a bad battle -especially since it doesn't take corpses with you. Somewhat counterintuitively, even if the targeted structure is destroyed before you finish casting Teleport you'll still arrive, but it can still be worth slapping a Guardian on a Manalith to buy time to target the Manalith -especially once you're getting later into the game and your spells can have significant casting periods. At the beginning of the game, you're never more than something like 3 seconds away from initiating a Teleport. (Aside if you cast Teleport recently: it has a fairly substantial cooldown) Later on, you can be as much as 14 seconds away from initiating a Teleport, which is more than enough for you to start casting a spell, get told a Manalith is under attack, and have it be destroyed before you can actually start casting Teleport.

Somewhat surprisingly, Teleport is a spell you can move throughout the casting animation. This makes it a little more useful as an escape hatch, as it doesn't require you to turn yourself into a target.

It's also worth noting the AI never uses Teleport in the campaign. This gives the player a fairly huge mobility advantage, and is one of the few factors in making 2v1 matches where you're the 1 manageable. After all, it lets you do stuff like take the offensive against one wizard, have the other wizard show up near your Altar to at which point you Teleport over and drive them off, and then Teleport back to whichever structure is nearest your previous offensive and resume it with little delay. AI wizards are just plain not as responsive as you can be.


Conversion
800 Mana

You target the red soul(s) hovering over a body; after a brief delay a Sac Doctor is summoned and runs up to the body, sticking a syringe into it. This slowly fills up the corpse's health meter and also prevents the soul from being picked up or targeted unless the Sac Doctor is killed first. Once the target's health meter is halfway full, the Sac Doctor carries their flailing body back to your Altar or a Shrine if you have one that's closer, and proceeds to perform a ritual that will eventually destroy the body and give you all the souls that made up the creature. The ritual takes longer for creatures that cost more souls, up to three minutes for 5-soul creatures, as opposed to 11 seconds for 1-soul creatures. This means you should actually be generally trying to target weak enemies for conversion before strong ones, especially since the weak ones are also quicker for a Sac Doctor to revive in the first place (I'm not sure if this is based on soul count of HP or what, but it's extremely obvious there is a difference), as a given Altar or Shrine can only have one unit being Converted at a time, with any extra Sac Doctors simply running futilely up against the Altar/Shrine until the previous Conversion ends. After all, in the 3 minutes it takes to convert a 5-soul creature, you could've converted sixteen 1-soul creatures! (Okay, not really sixteen due to various delays not directly factored into these numbers, but 14-15 is probably correct, and plenty ridiculous a difference)

Note that if the Sac Doctor is killed at any point after the creature has been revived (Including during the ritual -even though there's visually four Sac Doctors all of a sudden, just killing one still works), it will be fully battle-ready and of its original allegiance and so you've just given your enemy a unit back for free. In conjunction with the cost of casting the spell, it's a really bad idea to be trying to convert units when enemies are in a position to interrupt your attempt. This is another reason why targeting weak enemies for conversion is usually smarter than targeting strong ones; having a lone Fallen bounce back into battle at half health because the enemy interrupted it generally isn't a big deal. Having one of their ultimate units bounce back into battle at half health on your dime can be a disaster.

Conversion is another spell with a short range. There's a lot of those at the basic level.

While we're on the topic of Sac Doctors, it's worth pointing out that Sac Doctors have low HP but have bizarrely high HP regeneration and unlike most units they regenerate continuously. This means you generally either kill them instantly or accomplish nothing; having a lone weak unit attacking a Sac Doctor is usually a waste of time. Sac Doctors also disappear if their job can't be completed, such as if the corpse they were going after vanishes. (eg if souls are picked up by their wizard)


Desecrate
1000 Mana

You can only cast Desecrate when you're near an enemy Altar, much like you can only cast Guardian near a friendly structure. You pick one of your own nearby units (It's another short-ranged spell, obnoxiously so), and a Sac Doctor is summoned to grab it and drag it over to the enemy Altar, at which point it begins performing a ritual similar to the Conversion ritual. Once this ritual begins, if the enemy wizard was dead they are instantly revived at their current location with whatever HP their ghost had at the time. Unless the ritual is interrupted, the wizard that owns the Altar will periodically be zapped no matter their location, which does HP damage and drains mana and drains experience, and if at any point the wizard dies during the ritual that's it, the game is over for them; their wizard is gone for good, their Altar vanishes and leaves behind a Manafount, all their creatures keel over dead, and any remaining Manaliths or Shrines are no longer considered owned by any particular player. The creature used in the Desecration is killed if the ritual succeeds, their souls directly refunded to their owning player, whereas if the ritual is interrupted they bounce back into battle just fine.

Additionally, while the ritual is ongoing the suffering wizard has their current location marked on the minimap for everyone to see and has a giant pillar of light rising into the sky from them, making them easy to track simply by taking a look about even if you're incapable of paying attention to your minimap. You can even order units to attack them via the minimap, even if they're in completely unexplored terrain!

It's not relevant at level 1, but Desecrate's damage/mana drain/experience drain is more effective the more souls the creature you used has. The scaling isn't what you might expect: 2 souls is 50% more effective than 1 soul, 3 souls is 33% more effective than 2 souls, 4 souls is 25% more effective than 3 souls, and 5 souls is 20% more effective than 4 souls. As such, the three optimal points are: a Manahoar (Cheap 1 soul creature, easily replaced), a 2 soul creature (Biggest improvement in damage relative to the soul count) and whatever is currently your highest soul count. (When you want Desecrate to kill them dead and don't care about 'efficiency')

Desecrate is the way you beat enemy wizards. As we'll see later on, there's a few times in the campaign where you get to defeat a wizard without Desecrating an Altar, but even aside the technical point that the game is not actually coded to allow no-Altar play (Any wizard who doesn't seem to have an Altar just has it placed somewhere you're not supposed to be able to find it, with code to try to hide the Altar from your minimap and an additional bit of code to Desecrate their Altar when you do whatever it is the game is pretending you did to defeat them) in normal play it's completely impossible to defeat a wizard without Desecrating their Altar. Even sending a wizard tumbling into the abyss won't permanently kill them -it just causes them to teleport to their Altar. And ghosts are completely untouchable, so it's not like it's possible to double-kill someone to bypass Desecration or something.

One odd quirk of Desecrate is that it actually competes with Conversion. If the Altar you intend to Desecrate has a unit being Converted at the moment, your Desecration Sac Doctor will futilely bump its head against the Altar, patiently waiting for the Conversion to finish. For that matter, the flipside is true; if someone is Desecrating your Altar, your Conversion Sac Doctors won't be able to get started, though since you urgently need to stop the Desecration to avoid dying this is a largely-pointless point of trivia.

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The mission itself is fairly straightforward. Get used to the controls, get a bit of an introduction on some plot elements, summon a bunch of Fallen and find the Ragman's cave. (Though I found the Ragman's cave first in this case) It's also illustrative of a bit of a flaw with the game, in that it's not very good at explaining its objectives. Charnel casually suggests 12 Fallen would be enough to deal with the dragons, which sounds like a hint on how large an army you should prep before engaging with any dragons that happen to be on the map, but it's actually your primary objective in itself with the dragon-fighting occurring during a cinematic and off-screen.

Fortunately, in most missions your objective can be summarized as 'banish all the hostile wizards', so as flaws go this isn't a particularly bad one most of the time. This case stands out mostly because the game never explains how to perform friendly fire and if you end up summoning a bunch of non-Fallen a new player could easily end up wandering the map indefinitely, baffled as to what they're doing wrong, since the only way to reclaim the souls of your units is to get them killed.

I missed the Boon on this mission, as the way you get it is somewhat counterintuitive. There's three Farmers on the mission, and if you don't kill them, James will give you a Boon. This... is a bit of a recurring issue with Boons, as you'll see, that some of them are things you really have no reason to be able to figure out. This case is particularly new-player-unfriendly, since it's not necessarily obvious you can kill your own units to recollect their souls and summon them in a new form, which is pretty much what you'll need to do if you want to hit the Fallen number without killing the Farmers.

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Narratively, there's already a lot going on. The player has been thrown into a really weird world without a lot of context, given an inkling that the character they're playing as has a pretty important and interesting backstory but hasn't gotten to hear it, and told to go pick one of five gods to side with without having a lot of idea what they're like. They each provide an ALLCAPS word to try to tell you what that particular god is supposed to be about, but they're generally only tangentially related to their plot roles and are mostly almost completely unrelated to the gameplay they come with -Charnel's CONFLICT is honestly the only one that's even slightly accurate to gameplay, and it takes some thinking to see the connection. (Specifically: his units gain health in battle, where other gods' units gain health out of battle)

Fortunately, you're not overly-committed to anything here. The god you first side with defines your most basic spells and so will influence you all the way to the end -your basic attack spell in particular never stops mattering- but though I'm constructing my runs for this site as mono-god runs, you can actually jump about as you like to a fair extent. The first two missions, in particular, you can jump to any god you like; it's with the third you might have missions locked off, and it's only from the fourth onward you can expect to have missions locked off.

I'm not personally fond of a flashback framework normally, but Sacrifice uses it to good effect. Notably, by showing us the end state of our story before it introduces the idea of choosing a god, it conveys to the player that they shouldn't be going in expecting their choices to influence the outcome to an unrealistic extent. I can contrast this with a number of other games where you get to make narrative choices where it's easy to think that the story can go in radically different directions based on what choices you make and in the end you're really on rather narrow rails and it's disappointing having built up this expectation in your head that reality fails to conform to.

Sacrifice is also willing to have fun with it. If you fail a mission, Eldred -that's the default name of the player character, though for whatever reason the game gives you the option to pick your own name, and as a result no one ever calls Eldred by his name- will do a voice-over during the loading screen saying 'of course that's not what really happened, let me start again'.

Speaking of loading screen voiceovers, one of the nice, smart things Sacrifice does is have Eldred and Mithras talk over loading screens. It's ironically a bit annoying on a more modern system, as you end up with the loading bar filling and they just keep talking (Though you can actually press the spacebar at that point to end it prematurely, it's just... this is never mentioned anywhere and isn't intuitive), but historically it meant you weren't just impatiently waiting for the game to load, you were getting to have the plot actually advance some while you're not doing anything anyway -which is a fair description of cinematics! I'm honestly kind of amazed this has never become normal for plot-focused games that are heavy on loading screens, as it's a very clever solution and while Sacrifice's framework of a flashback makes it particularly easy to smoothly fit things in it's not like it's not an option for other games.

His best lines are yet to come, but I'm fairly fond of Charnel. I'm usually not a fan of For The Evulz villains in fiction, as it's usually just a cop-out to avoid writing anything resembling an actual character, but Charnel takes the whole 'I'm an evil bad guy, that's my personality' and embraces it. The result is quite fun, and it makes a surprisingly logical amount of sense in-universe since he's a deity who is shaped by belief and whatnot. (Though it's going to be a while before we get to the game actually touching on this itself, and it never delves into the mechanics) Overall, Charnel is probably my favorite god for a variety of reasons -though as we'll be getting to, one of the key points is how there's almost no missteps in his writing, and what few he has tend to be minor.

See you next Charnel mission.