Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 3

Alright, first up the new Spells I've gained. At this level, Charnel provides...


Blight
700 Mana, 2 Souls

The Blight is the earliest example of a melee flier, which is notable as there's a specific level most of the melee fliers show up at, with only one other melee flier as an exception to this. The Blight is susceptible to ranged attacks (-20% to direct ranged, -30% to splash ranged) and especially to direct damage spells (-100%. Splash spell damage does neutral damage) but significantly resistant to melee. (90% reduction) The Blight also has the special ability Blightmites, which causes a designated enemy to move slower and take more damage for a time... supposedly. I've personally not messed around with Blightmites much, and indeed I don't use the Blight much in general, so I'm basically just giving you the wiki's description here.

The crux of the problem with the Blight is that it is, in fact, a melee flier.

Melee fliers don't work very well in Sacrifice. Melee fliers are prone to hovering for several seconds in front of their target, sloooowly drifting those last few inches before they start melee attacking the target, often ending up dead before they can even make a single attack if there's ranged units in the area. That's for immobile targets. Enemies that are actively moving are pretty much a lost cause, in spite of the fact that fliers are consistently the fastest units in the game. Furthermore, this is on flat ground. When slopes get involved, melee fliers get even less reliable, particularly if they're trying to attack something up the slope from them -and the thing is, Sacrifice loves its slopes. Flat terrain is anomalous, rather than the default. Thus, pound-for-pound, ground melee will pretty consistently perform better than aerial melee unless you're specifically taking advantage of aerial melee being able to cross the abyss to potentially take shortcuts.

Worse, melee fliers struggle to fill a clear role in army-on-army combat. Part of the problem is that Sacrifice has very, very few flying units: it has exactly three archetypes that get to be fliers, with each god having one of each... at most. A basic flier, a melee flier, and another unit archetype we're not going to meet for a while. The main point of relevance about this third unit archetype is that, in spite of what some of its numbers might suggest to you, melee isn't a very good answer to most examples of its archetype. Basic fliers, meanwhile, aren't something you should be throwing Blights and their equivalents at: you should be shooting them with ranged units. And of course it makes no sense for melee fliers to be designed to counter melee fliers -even if they weren't seriously resistant to melee attacks, that'd be a design problem. Having a conceptual archetype's 'role' to be especially effective at killing its own type is gibberish.

Another part of the problem is a subtle, big-picture problem. In Sacrifice, ranged attackers are fairly reliably good against basically anything aside wizards being annoyingly dodgy: melee damage against units can vary hugely, anywhere from the Fallen taking six times base damage to the Blight taking 1/10th base damage. (For reference, that means it takes around sixty times as much melee damage to kill a Blight as to kill a Fallen) Ranged resistance doesn't vary anywhere near as much. If you ignore some campaign-exclusive points (eg it's possible for Eldred to use Boons to reach 50% physical resistance), ranged resistance is never higher than 25% or lower than -100% except when Guardians get involved. (Which means the most resistant units only take around two-and-a-half times as much firepower to kill as the most vulnerable ones) Notably, basic fliers are the only unit to take more than 35% damage from ranged attacks, so in real terms ranged units simply can't be balanced around situational effectiveness unless the game wants to relegate them to killing basic fliers. This means a big enough ranged blob can crush enemies without worrying much about the type of enemies being fought: a melee blob does not have similar assurances, even aside the innate disadvantages of being melee. So generally a fighting force is better off being heavy on ranged units, with melee units included in small numbers to fill more specialized roles...

... and Blights and their kin are designed to counter melee and be murdered by ranged units. Oops.

A different area Blights and their equivalents theoretically excel in is the killing of wizards. After all, where a wizard can zig and zag and use Speed Up to mess up attempts by ranged units to target them, a melee unit that's started its attack animation will do damage unless the animation is actually interrupted -a wizard can literally Teleport to the other side of the map and then die to melee attacks that had started before they vanished! In conjunction with Blights and other melee fliers being fast, you'd think they'd be pretty good at running down wizards and killing them... but Blights and their equivalent melee fliers are all severely weak to direct spell damage, which is to say it's trivial for a Wizard to kill them with eg their basic attacking spell. So that role is pretty dubious.

The one realm melee fliers work perfectly reliably is when it comes to raiding enemy structures. Their flight lets them go anywhere without much regard to terrain, their nature as a melee attacker means they don't need Manahoars to keep fighting and also means they kill Manaliths fairly quickly, and for whatever reason the physics issues melee fliers have with targeting ground units don't crop up when going after structures. (They also don't tend to crop up against other fliers, but that comes back to the 'not enough flying unit types to give them a niche' issue)

Unfortunately, in the campaign this is pretty limited in its utility, and gets even more limited as you go deeper into the campaign -it becomes increasingly normal for nearly every Manafount to start out with enemy Manaliths that are protected by multiple Guardians, requiring so much firepower to overcome you're probably better off taking your army there instead of trying to make a melee flier detachment to handle it, especially since they're naturally enough usually Guardianed with ranged units that will kill the melee fliers fairly readily. This is further compounded by the fact that you should ideally scoop up Guardian souls instead of leaving them available for the enemy to collect, and a raiding melee flier force just ends up leaving such souls ready to be added to the enemy's forces. It's a bad plan all-around, with it only being worth considering if you think you can eg smash a reclaimed, unguarded Manalith whose reconstruction will occupy the enemy Wizard long enough for you to raid a Guardianed Manalith and make off with the souls.

In the Blight's case, Blightmites isn't a good enough utility ability to justify its presence in your army. A wizard's shield spell can block it, and by the time there are big enough non-wizard threats to justify the micro and other costs Blights represent too much of a loss to your force strength to be worth investing in. By the point in the campaign where your armies are massive enough for it to not be an issue, Blights are simply too weak.

As such, you're basically not going to see me using Blights much at all, and when we get to the other gods' melee fliers they won't be much better off.

The wider internet seems to feel Blights are actually fairly good in multiplayer precisely for Manalith-raiding, but as I've yet to try out Sacrifice multiplayer I couldn't say. From a single-player perspective, Blights are easily justified in skipping, with the main point in their favor being that all the other melee fliers are an even bigger soul sink without being strong enough to clearly offset the souls cost increase. (And also show up later in levels, making Blights your only option if you want melee fliers in some of the early missions, I suppose)


Slime
500 Mana

Slime is an odd spell that significantly slows a single target down (This extends to all their animations, though how this interacts with spellcasting is a bit... odd) and increases its susceptibility to all types of damage to a moderate extent. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to cast, has a brief duration relative to its cooldown, and wizard shields will block it. In fact, if you target someone with Slime and they put up their shield while you're casting Slime, Slime will be blocked! It takes a few more levels for there to start being non-wizard units that are particularly worth hitting with Slime, too.

It's not a bad spell, and I suspect it would be a lot more useful in multiplayer -in single-player you've got to deal with the AI being obsessive about continuously running their shields- but in the campaign it's one of my least favorite spells. In conjunction with how eeeeeh Blights are, when I mess around with rainbow runs I tend to avoid this Charnel mission.


Shrine
800 Mana

The Shrine is also gained at level 3 or, in our case, campaign mission 3, no matter what god you elected to take a mission for. It's an alternative option for building atop Manafounts, and instead of contributing to your Manahoar-derived mana supply it offers an alternative location for conversions of enemy souls. Hanging nearby a Shrine will add to your mana generation rate, but not by as much as a Manalith does. In this regard, they're exactly like your Altar's mana generation: something you can use if your Manahoars are dead to revive yourself if no Manalith is more conveniently accessible to where you died, but of limited relevance otherwise. In fact, Shrines have the exact same mana generation as your Altar.

Shrines aren't very useful, unfortunately. In fact, the way the campaign is structured, they tend to be anti-useful! This Charnel mission is a particularly poor introduction to them, too, with there being no location it makes the slightest bit of sense to slap a Shrine down on.

But even aside this mission in particular, the AI's behavior makes Shrines dubious. The AI doesn't try to perform raids deep into your territory. They far prefer to try to engage you at the edges of your territory, pushing you back and claiming your Manaliths to expand their territory. A forward Shrine to speed up conversions tends to just increase the vulnerability of your conversion attempts -instead of the Sac Doctors fleeing all the way to the very back of your territory and thus being far beyond the AI's reach, they stop at the nearest Shrine, which the AI might actually reach in time to interrupt the conversion. Occasionally a Shrine can be useful in a mission, such as because the terrain works out such that the AI does beeline to your Altar and so some Manafount is actually a more secure location to Convert at, but there's not often. Unfortunately, it's something where you basically have to have already played through the campaign multiple times so you have a good sense of what missions it's going to be useful on, rather than being something a new player is liable to find a use for.

The Shrine's issues are further compounded by the frustrating, counter-intuitive behavior of Sac Doctors. They go to the nearest possible conversion point, and just keep trying endlessly to get to that point. A given conversion point can only support one conversion at a time, and Sac Doctors will not go 'you know, I've been waiting in line at this Shrine for a full minute and the Altar isn't even in use, I'm going to go to the Altar'. They also don't update their destination intelligently! (ie if you establish a Shrine, Sac Doctors already in existence won't redirect to the Shrine, even if it's right there. Their destination is rigidly decided when you initiate the Convert spell, not when they get up to head to a conversion point) If Sac Doctors were smart enough to dynamically split up their loads between different conversion points, a Shrine could be used to speed up mass conversions that would otherwise end up with congestion/bottlenecking. As-is... Shrines are very dubious.

This is further compounded by the point that Manalith-to-Manahoar mana transmission actually suffers with distance! As such, on those missions with particularly large maps (Which is most campaign missions...), you don't end up with so many Manaliths you're saturated with mana and might as well build Shrines. No, you end up needing to keep planting new Manaliths so you can keep fighting effectively as the front moves forward! And since the game doesn't provide anything like a sell button, it's an enormous pain to turn some rear Manalith into a rear Shrine to slightly speed up conversions with minimal loss to mana generation.

The Shrine is basically a newbie-trap in the campaign in practice, as you'll be on the lookout for times the game must surely be intending you to summon a Shrine and just end up shooting yourself in the foot. The only reasonably safe thing to try if you don't know better is to set a Shrine on the Manafount that gets left behind when an Altar is desecrated, since there's always at least one nearby Manafount you can slap a Manalith on to bump up your mana generation. Of course, that only crops up in missions where the mission keeps going after you've banished an enemy wizard, which isn't that many of them...

From what I gather reading online, Shrines aren't even considered useful in multiplayer, and I completely buy that. The game's mechanics are just too thoroughly at odds with Shrine utility.

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The mission itself is... not precisely difficult, but fairly tedious. You've got two wizards you need to defeat -though this is offset some by having an ally- and the terrain is designed to funnel the both of them toward you. The AI is obsessive about killing your Sac Doctors, and so it's easy to get into an obnoxious cycle of killing Shakti, then by the time Abraxus is dead Shakti has come back, and by the time Shakti is dead again Abraxus is back, and so on and so forth, all while they continuously snipe your conversion attempts and recover their own souls. I generally only end up managing to make forward progress when Ambassador Buta is busy distracting them a fair distance ahead; the AI is obsessive about stopping you from stealing their souls, but only if it's happening nearby them. If you're stealing souls in line of sight of them, but outside the invisible boundary around their wizard? Meh, you can have them.

Speaking of Buta, this mission's Boon is based on getting more kills than him. Amusingly, the game actually counts kills you made on Buta before the count actually got started, so even though Buta is shortly revealed to be your ally for the mission instead of your enemy, you really should try to get into a fight with him anyway just to get a jumpstart on the kill competition. And if you do manage to convert any of his souls (Highly improbable, but not impossible), that'll also make it a little bit easier to win the competition.

Once you've gotten your first wizard banished, though, the mission is essentially over then and there.

I've never seen what happens if Buta gets banished, now that I think about it. It would require effort to arrange, especially since the opposition is a lot more interested in going after your Altar than Buta's.

Anyway, the whole thing is a bit awkward as far as campaign-as-education goes, as you're going straight from a 1v1 that's always designed to be pretty easy to this meat grinder that... again, it's not even hard, but it's very frustrating and it's not terribly representative of other 2v2 missions in the campaign. The terrain in other missions doesn't try to funnel the enemies to achieve this result! In fact, most other 2v2s tend to be designed to break up the attack waves from enemy wizards!

Buta and Shakti are also wizards who tend to be somewhat non-standard. In Buta's case, in most missions he has one of Pyro's more advanced spells -Dragonfire- even if he's too low level to normally have access to it... and if he is high enough level he should have access to it, he actually has two copies of it! Which means he can rapidly spit them out back to back for nasty damage. Shakti, meanwhile, has somewhat higher maximum health and somewhat higher health regeneration -not enough to be noticeable, and in fact I thought for a long time she had no modifiers. There's narrative reasons that would've made sense, for one thing. But no, she has bonuses, they're just too small to notice.

Also note that having done three missions for Charnel, Stratos and Persephone have gotten disgusted with me, making this the first point in the run I can't do any ol' mission.

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Narratively, this mission is pretty straightforward, and is the last of the missions where nothing of particular importance is happening. Charnel and Pyro ally, and that's really the only consequence of this mission.

And the post-mission dialogue is just the gods sniping at each other while some fellow by the name of Jadugarr gets mentioned doing... stuff whose importance or lack thereof isn't exactly clear right now. So there's really not a lot to talk about, story-wise.

See you next Charnel mission.