Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 10


You don't get new spells in this mission. The previous mission is the one that puts you at your final level -this is just a final test against a cheating foe.

And Marduk is a cheater, though to the game's credit Zyzyx does forewarn you that he's not liable to play by the same rules as you.

First of all, Marduk has massive straightforward advantages. His HP is fairly close to twice what it should be for a max-level wizard, he takes only 10% damage from spells (As opposed to the wizard default of 50%), he takes only 65% of what he should from unit-derived damage, he moves noticeably faster than most wizards, he has around 25% more mana than he should as a max-level wizard, and he has several bonus spells on top of a full normal Charnel spellbook... though he actually only uses the added creatures: Phoenix, Boulderdash, and Silverback. He actually has four more spells beyond that, but I've never seen him use any of them.

Second of all, Marduk is cheating Altar-wise. Technically speaking he has an Altar -I meant to show it off and didn't end up doing so, but I'll be showing it off in a later video- but it's off on an inaccessible island and so you can't Desecrate it. In real terms, you have to go along with the game's intentions of smashing all his Manaliths so you can then smash his Megalith -which is not only invulnerable until you've smashed all his Manaliths but also zaps anything that gets too close to it for massive damage. That's why I circled around the hill instead of climbing up it. And then the game cheatspawns him back in nearby your Altar, so it's entirely possible for Marduk to kill you at the last minute if you're careless -make sure you Teleport over, or have already moved an army over while some forces deal with the Megalith.

Third and final, Marduk addresses his inability to perform normal conversions (Can't reach his Altar, doesn't have any Shrines) by simply treating all souls as blue souls. If a Hellmouth of yours dies on top of Marduk and he doesn't wander off before the souls are collectible? Boom! Five souls for him, instantly, effortlessly. On the plus side, Marduk doesn't try to run over your souls... but it's pretty easy to end up killing one of his units behind your lines, at which point he'll zip right through your dead units and steal a bunch of souls. Since he's so insanely difficult to kill, even once you've got a large army this is a very real scenario to worry about. You can see in the video that at one point he incidentally scoops up one of my Abomination's souls, and I'm frankly amazed I never screwed up and let him collect a Hellmouth's.

Since he is so insanely durable, Marduk is really hard to steal souls from, as well, especially at the beginning when you have very limited forces and Marduk has a proper army. Intestinal Vaporization is a huge help -assuming Marduk doesn't just scoop the souls right back up- and a big reason why this wasn't a much longer video. Not all gods are so lucky as Charnel. This leads to the very defensive sort of play I was engaging in initially -I desperately needed to peel away some souls before I started trying to get aggressive, as otherwise things could go very wrong very quickly, in spite of Marduk's Manaliths only having a pair of Guardians apiece, many of which aren't even particularly good as Guardians.

The point is exacerbated by the lack of a forward Manafount until you've busted one of Marduk's Manaliths. This video quite clearly illustrates how hard it is to prevent Marduk from interrupting a longer conversion, between his AI priorities and how insanely difficult he is to kill, with that one case where he blocked me from converting a Hellmouth that was nearly done even though I went out of my way to engage him, wall him off, etc. It's a bit of a mercy that Marduk is so fond of making swarms of Locusts; if you can manage to get Marduk killed before he recovers too many of them, that's far better for trying to get souls off of Marduk that Converting a Hellmouth or the like.

The thing is, though, this is actually a surprisingly fun mission! Most Sacrifice missions tend to be set up so you need to have a few clean victories and then the AI is basically helpless to stop you. In the previous mission, Jadugarr and Hachimen ended up outright having no non-Guardianed forces minutes before I managed to Desecrate their Altars, and while that was particularly extreme it's still plenty representative on most of the campaign missions. Marduk requires you to stay on your toes and avoid letting him walk into your souls, as otherwise he can unexpectedly bounce back, and then it requires so much work to get back those souls him making that little bit of forward progress matters. It's only once his Manaliths are all gone that the mission is in a state of 'you've honestly won even though the game hasn't declared it so yet'.

My primary complaint... well, I'll get to it in a later post.

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As this is the final mission, I'm also going to do a bit of an overview of Charnel as a 'faction'.

One thing right away: Charnel is the single god who has the most 'progression-y' approach to melee, thanks to Scythes having crippled HP while Netherfiends are tougher than they 'should' be. Other gods tend to find later melee units are overall advantaged from concentrating their stats into one spot, making them less easily taken out by splash and take longer to start having your army lose chunks of it's damage output and so on, but for other gods that's generally about it. Only Charnel sees a consistent rise in soul-to-HP rates from climbing through his melee units; Blights are more efficient than Scythes, and Netherfiends are more efficient than either of them. In conjunction with some more complicated examples on ranged stuff (eg Necryls tending to be shunted aside by Deadeyes), Charnel in general is unusually biased toward more or less replacing the early portion of his unit list with the later portion, with the Locust as a notable exception.

Another thing is Charnel generally has the second-highest damage output on a given unit archetype. There's exceptions -for example, part of why I'm unimpressed by the Blight is that in spite of being soul-cheap for a melee flier its souls-to-damage ratio is actually bad for a melee flier- and in melee units randomness can obscure this some, but for the most part Charnel's units edge out the competition. I didn't list this when talking about 'god statlines' because it's not a mostly-consistent percentile modifier. The game simply couldn't do that; for example, of the basic melee units, two of them attack every 0.8 seconds, two of them attack every 1.6 seconds, and the Scythe attacks every 1.8 seconds. This is part of why the Scythe's high roll is so tremendous; it has to make up for its poor attack rate relative to the competition.

This damage advantage tends to make Charnel units fairly solid choices even if they don't have any particularly stand-out qualities, especially since it ties directly into making them tougher in battle thanks to their leeching.

In terms of an overall strategy, Charnel is a bit odd to talk about. Broadly speaking, outlasting and wearing the enemy down is something his forces are good at, with in-battle healing from leeching, Animate Dead letting units bounce back from death, etc, but it's not really a coherent strategy of Charnel's. Animate Dead, in particular, is a supremely splashable spell, making that particular aspect of Charnel 'strategy' something you can slip into any god's forces effortlessly. Similarly, Charnel is biased toward ranged blobs, but when it gets down to it that's true of every god; Charnel doesn't even so much excel with ranged forces (For all that Deadeyes are amazing) as it is that his melee forces are flawed in ways that make them a bit more narrow in their utility, where other gods are a bit more flexible as to whether they want to go 'ranged blob with nearly no melee support' or 'ranged blob with modest melee support'.

Charnel is also in the middle ground when it comes to a dichotomy that you might not have thought about; wizard focus vs army focus. Two other gods tend to be oriented more toward their wizard supporting their army, two other gods are much more able to murder enemy armies on the basis of their wizards' innate firepower. Charnel can kinda go either way as the situation calls for it, able to both fling out Plague, Demonic Rift, Death, and Intestinal Vaporization for fairly solid 'my wizard makes the enemy die horribly' potential yet also able to eg spam Animate Dead to keep his army in the fight, with Slime and Plague acting as decent support tools to boot.

I said Charnel is, in my opinion, the closest Sacrifice comes to a 'the mario' god, and I meant it; it's part of what makes it tricky to talk about Charnel as a 'strategy', since doing so is automatically talking about how Sacrifice plays in a more fundamental sense. Other gods can be described as excelling in particular pieces of the game's framework. Charnel is instead the core gameplay essentially unvarnished.

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Narratively, we've killed Marduk. All the other gods are dead, it's just Charnel left to rule in his awful way over everything (Until the other four gods reincarnate, anyway), and Eldred gets a chance to stick things out with Charnel or leave for greener pastures. I went with sticking things out -it's the more in-character one for Eldred in my opinion, and it also results in one of the best exchanges of the entire game.

I think Charnel's 'story' could've been better-developed, and there's some oddities I'll be getting to later, but overall it makes for a nice little arc for Eldred. He did his best, turned to dark powers, and it cost him everything. He came to a new world, found himself drawn to the darker powers again, was faced with the foe that cost him everything once before, but he's learned from his prior experience and this time his dark arts are good enough. It's not precisely a happy ending, but it's a positive one, and it's a believable one for Eldred.

Charnel himself feels a little off, overall, with his dialogue clearly positioning himself as a For The Evulz sort of god but his storyline having him function as The Only Sane Man, the only god who is actually focused on fighting this literal apocalypse, but it works out okay overall even if it feels like the dev team didn't have a consistent idea of what Charnel was about and in turn didn't have a clear idea of what Eldred's story underneath Charnel would be about.

But what if, way back at the beginning, we'd turned to James, instead?

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