Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 5

For this mission, Charnel provides us...


Deadeye
1000 Mana, 2 Souls

The Deadeye is Charnel's first truly great unit. It fires at an incredible range, only matched by the artillery units of the game, its accuracy is nearly perfect (Offset some by its projectile having a lot of ground to cover without being particularly faster than other ranged units' projectiles), it deals good damage, it costs a convenient 2 souls, and it has no particularly significant disadvantages. It is weak to melee attacks like most ground ranged units are, taking quadruple damage, but it's one of the best ranged units at just plain killing enemy melee before it gets in range.

It's also a spectacularly good Guardian, as Guardian bolsters both Charnel leech and poison damage attacks. In conjunction with Guardian's damage reduction, Deadeyes end up doing shocking amounts of damage while being surprisingly difficult to kill so long as the enemy doesn't get melee in range of them. Since they have a tremendous range, the leash effect isn't even that burdensome.

The Deadeye's poison effect is one of the biggest reasons why the Necryl is dubious. Deadeye poison has all the same functionality as Necryl plague, with the only significant differences being that poison can't spread to additional targets but does real damage while being able to stack. (ie if five Deadeyes hit one target, the target is taking five times as much damage from poison than if one Deadeye hit them) So like the Necryl's plague, targets hit by Deadeyes stop generating health and mana while taking increased damage from attacks. (The wiki also indicates poison lowers accuracy of units, but this is more-or-less impossible to observe in actual play so I have no idea if it's real) And since Deadeyes cost just as many souls as Necryls... well, stats-wise, Necryls actually have slightly more HP than Deadeyes, surprisingly, but they have a worse attack rate, just over half the range, much worse accuracy (The Deadeye's name is quite justified), identical resistances, and the Deadeye's mana cost increase is both not that large in the first place and more importantly the way the game is designed unit mana costs aren't super-influential. Furthermore, a large group of Deadeyes will simultaneously function as a proper ranged attacking force and get to leverage the stacking resistance-reduction from each other's attacks, where using Necryls tends to mean choosing between investing souls into a proper ranged force vs investing souls into decreasing enemy resistances etc.

So yeah. Deadeyes pretty well shunt aside Necryls once you get to them. I'm skeptical Necryls are particularly worth including in an army that has Deadeyes, even considering how multiplayer works regarding levels and thus unit access.

Notably, poison damage doesn't fall under any of the damage classes and so units with significant resistances to ranged damage (Including eg a wizard under a shield) aren't particularly well protected from Deadeyes as the majority of their damage comes from the poison effect. Though on the flipside this would mean Deadeyes don't perform particularly well against units that are particularly susceptible to ranged attacks... but wait, basic fliers are the only unit that's seriously weak to ranged attacks, and they're too fragile for the point to matter much. So in the Deadeye's case, it's basically all advantage.

Deadeyes are really good, and when I do Charnel-heavy forces they tend to make up a sizable fraction of my forces.

One counter-intuitive point: poison damage actually works on buildings! It doesn't block their health regeneration, but it does deal damage. (I have no idea if it lowers their resistances. I suspect not, based on experience, but it's possible there's esoteric mechanics obscuring the issue)


Demonic Rift
1000 Mana

Demonic Rift involves the casting wizard standing still for several seconds. If they're interrupted at any point during this casting animation, the spell fails but you're still dealing with its cooldown; that's stock behavior for spellcasting, but Demonic Rift is the first spell where it's a meaningfully noticeable consideration. Anyway, once successfully cast, a spot in front of the casting wizard proceeds to generate a series of projectiles that chase down nearby enemies in a fairly sizable range. Individual projectiles hit decently hard, but the big thing is it generates a fair few of them, and if your originally selected target dies the projectiles will simply automatically select new targets on their own.

It also has the odd quality that -as you'll see in the video itself- it's actually incapable of hurting friendly units. Even if you outright target one of your own units, the projectiles will refuse to target your units, and in fact even if a unit shoves itself right in the path of a Demonic Rift shot the projectile will just sort of wiggle around them. This can actually be a useful trick for getting started on casting Demonic Rift when an enemy force is approaching to minimize their opportunity to interrupt the spell; just target one of your own units! It's not like the AI is going to recognize what you're doing and wait until the spell has run out before approaching.

There are other spells that are overall better at damage output, but Demonic Rift is really good. You just need to account for its sizable casting duration and how it immobilizes you to maximize its effectiveness.

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The actual mission is semi-straightforward. First you do a defense mission -if Gangrel dies you do, in fact, lose, so don't abandon him- and then you go on the offense, with the stipulation that you fail if you banish Abraxus instead of Yogo. I think you'll also lose if Astaroth dies, but I've never tested it and he's enough of a monster it's unlikely to happen even if you're fairly careless.

The overall result is a bit of a pain, with you first thrown with no time to properly prepare into defending against two wizards who will constantly attack you and leave you little opportunity to gather souls -the Zombies performing the ritual on Gangrel are likely to be your primary source of new souls during the defense since the AI can't pick them up themselves and mostly won't even try to Convert them- and even though there's an unclaimed Manafount nearby you're unlikely to be able to get enough breathing room to go for it without it being a bit much of a risk to Gangrel.

Gangrel is, fortunately, unlikely to die if you're playing properly. The AI prefers to focus on your forces over Gangrel, and Gangrel still has monstrous resistances and surprisingly high HP, so incidental damage isn't going to casually kill him off.

The offensive portion is also a pain, though it's not too problematic to more or less ignore the two Manaliths next to the ritual site while Abraxus focuses on them, making it easier to focus on Yogo, so that's something. It's actually a reasonably enjoyable mission once you are past the defense portion, and in fact it's a little frustrating how beating Yogo ends the mission, as you've basically only just stabilized your defense and all and suddenly you're done.

Also, this mission is pretty obviously why Gangrel didn't join me past the first Charnel mission: the plot demands he's alive to have Astaroth bound to him in this mission, and as we'll be seeing if a hero who can join you permanently dies, they'll be dead for good... well, aside some glitchy cases. It'd be either that or have Gangrel in all four prior missions with each of them having Gangrel's death be a mission failure, which would be obnoxious.

Yogo's own modifications are normally that he's got stronger versions of the same basic bonuses Shakti gets -more health regeneration and more health, 50% more of each. I say 'normally', because in this mission, and only this mission, he actually doesn't have any bonuses at all. I'm unsure if that's an oversight or a deliberate attempt to make the mission less frustrating or something of the sort.

Astaroth is another Charnel hero who won't carry forward. We get him in this one mission, and that's it.

Annoyingly, this mission is bugged, and even though it technically has a Boon coded the scripting can't fire so it's impossible to get.

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Plot-wise, we've gotten to see that in the world of Sacrifice it's possible to bind a Demon's soul-or-whatever-it-actually-is to a living -or unliving, as the case may be- form to create some weird hybrid creature. This also has Eldred once again calling on a big demon in an attempt to defeat foes he feels outmatches him, though I'm going to spoil right now that this attempt goes better than when he summoned Marduk. It's... kind of an awkwardly handled plot thread, honestly, and unfortunately it's not going to be really touched on again until I'm doing other campaigns. Feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to delve into what Eldred was thinking and feeling and all. He's literally doing a repeat on summoning Marduk. Shouldn't his dialogue touch on that some?

We also see that Stratos is not entirely on the up-and-up, working with Charnel and working to hide it from Persephone, though the motives and ends are currently unclear.

It's worth commentary that, oddly, Charnel tends to be at the outer edges of the 'action' of Sacrifice's plot. This is the fifth mission of ten total and Charnel hasn't really interacted with the main of the plot at all. It's a bit of an odd thing, and in some ways Charnel's campaign feels the least fleshed-out to me, which makes it a bit odd that I like his route so much, though I'll get more into why I feel it's the least fleshed-out in later posts.

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As an aside, this mission's opening provides one of the more blatant examples of tessellation in action; tessellation is why the giant demonic face we get a good look at in the beginning of the mission keeps randomly contorting as the camera moves. You might similarly have noticed in the previous mission Netherfiends having visible gaps between their legs and lower body, and other odd omissions.

The short version is Sacrifice is constantly making judgment calls on how many triangles (polygons) to actually render. Stuff that's in your face gets the full rendering effort. Stuff at a distance gets simplified into unclear messes, which you usually don't notice because it's so far away you wouldn't see anything more than some color and a vague impression of shape anyway. In conjunction with some other shenanigans -the game will outright stop rendering grass during some of the more impressive spells, for example, which you usually won't notice in actual play because your attention is on the volcanic eruption- Sacrifice is able to run very smoothly with surprisingly nice graphics even on a machine that theoretically shouldn't be able to pull it off.

Tessellation in gaming is (Thankfully) actually fairly common at this point (And with much better execution -supposedly AvP 2010 uses tessellation, and I've never noticed any of Sacrifice's oddities in it), but as far as I understand it Sacrifice was the first game to employ the concept, and it's a pretty big deal.

See you next Charnel Mission.