Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 6

This mission took three attempts: the first time, I tried freeing Charlotte partway through the mission and the game, for whatever reason, softlocked when it should've ended in victory. The second time I quit in disgust partway through because I hit one of the snags of Sacrifice's campaign design; that if you manage to screw up even once in a moderately substantive way, often it's the case that even if you are able to come back from the mistake it will take so long it would be substantially quicker to just start over. Combined with a bit of bad luck with Hachimen and Buta attacking close together, and it was just not worth it.

Anyway, for mission six Charnel provides...


Abomination
1100 Mana, 3 Souls

The Abomination is an artillery unit; it has long range (Though as you'll see in the video not as long as a Deadeye's!), hits fairly hard with significant splash on impact, and its semi-unique distinguishing feature is that the projectile drips a trail of blood that causes damage to anything the projectile passes over. Like other artillery units, it takes massively increased damage from melee attacks (four times the usual) and somewhat increased damage from splash ranged attacks (+35%), the latter of which has always seemed a bit of an odd feature to me since it largely means artillery is good at killing artillery. There's only a handful of other ranged attackers that do splash damage.

Being an artillery unit, the Abomination is fairly decent as a Guardian, though for a Charnel-only run Deadeyes tend to be better, and the arrival of artillery is also the deathknell of swarms of basic units. Prior to artillery showing up, stuff like Scythes or Locusts  is weak and susceptible to wizards breaking out assorted spells to kill them, such as Demonic Rift's potential to hit a large number of targets close together, but can still justify their presence in sizable numbers. With artillery showing up, this becomes a really bad idea, as you'll just end up having a pile of units drop dead instantly, often before they get the chance to do anything. The process of collecting and re-summoning such a swarm is also incredibly lengthy, and the overall result is that such a force will at best horribly slow down progress and at worst allow your enemy to reliably steal souls from you. This restricts basic, weak units to relatively niche uses. (eg using a small group of Scythes to flank some ranged units)

The Abomination is a relatively forgettable artillery unit. I should emphasize that it isn't actually bad, and in fact it's probably the most generically solid of the artillery units, but there's not really much more to it than being a good artillery unit. Charnel leech is mostly not very significant on an artillery unit, since all artillery has a slow rate of fire (On the order of 8 seconds between shots), hits hard, and is both fragile in general and in particular is quite weak to melee, so it's prone to going from full health to dead without any opportunity to leech.

The blood-dribble effect is also kinda irrelevant for reasons that merit a bit more delving into Sacrifice mechanics: specifically the way ranged units go about targeting. They draw a straight line between them and their target, and if anything blocks that line they won't attempt to fire on that unit. This behaves sensibly enough when it comes to terrain, and normally is only an issue with units blocking line of fire in that your units aren't smart enough to get out of each others' way...

... but in the case of artillery, they still use these rules even though their projectile arcs overhead.

In a normal RTS, the Abomination's blood-dribbling mechanic would encourage you to try to order your Abominations to target toward the back of the enemy's formation to maximize damage. In Sacrifice, it mostly means that melee units advancing on your forces take some damage even if the projectile ends up landing behind them (from eg a well-timed Speed Up), and that the Abomination is a little less prone to completely wasting a shot relative to other artillery because a shot that randomly lands behind their target instead of on it still gets to do a little damage. Terrain can occasionally help the blood-dribble stay relevant, such as if your forces are standing on a hill, the enemy's ranged units stop on a slope, and their melee is charging through the low ground; in that scenario your Abominations can target enemy ranged units consistently while the blood dribble catches the melee in passing.

In general, while artillery is good in Sacrifice, it doesn't live up to its full potential, since their targeting behavior is much more limited than what they should be able to do with their firing behavior.

While we're in the vicinity of the topic of randomness in Sacrifice's combat, something that becomes a lot more obvious once artillery hits the field is that Sacrifice actually has a lot of randomness to its combat. I've already alluded to ranged units having accuracy in the form of lobbing a projectile, trajectory randomly selected within a cone defined by their accuracy stat, but while melee units don't have to worry about missing Sacrifice consistently gives ranged units fixed damage and melee units a damage roll. The Scythe is one of the more extreme examples, doing anywhere from 10 damage to 600 damage on a given hit; given they only have 540 HP, that means a Scythe has a minor chance of one-shotting a fellow Scythe... or it could roll to do basically nothing. But while the Scythe has an unusually wide range, this randomness applies to all melee units.

It's significant enough that small-scale fights can easily be swayed against the tide of expected numbers (eg Wizard A has 8 creatures, Wizard B has 7, but Wizard B ends up winning in spite of possessing no skill advantage), and it has a particularly pronounced impact when Charnel is involved since his units get half their damage as health. A Scythe that's nearly dead and rolls a full 600 damage hit gets back more than half its max HP!...while a Scythe that's nearly dead and rolls its minimum of 10 damage gets an irrelevant 5 HP and probably immediately dies. This makes his melee -which we've seen all of, it's just Scythes, Blights, and Netherfiends- particularly erratic, which is a contributing factor in why with Charnel-heavy forces I tend to lean more heavily on ranged units.

Returning to artillery, the randomness of their shot placement, in conjunction with their high firepower and poor durability, has an odd impact on how eg a large group of artillery fighting a smaller group of artillery will tend to go -specifically, the larger group will tend to suffer casualties sooner, and suffer more casualties overall! After all, artillery shots always land somewhere nearby their original target (As contrasted with regular ranged units, where the shot may impact a point far beyond from them having passed within a hair's width of their target), and a larger force means a more densely-packed force. A target-rich environment, in which a 'miss' just means something other than the intended target gets walloped.

This means that extremely large groups of artillery are the opposite of an answer to small groups of artillery -unless you have a huge number of artillery, such that it's tremendously unlikely that you won't land a lethal number of attacks in the first volley, it's just a way to let the enemy do disproportionate damage to your force.

It's good to mix in a few artillery regardless, but if they're ever the most common unit in your force you're probably doing something wrong. (Worth mentioning: the AI loves spamming artillery. No idea why)

Anyway, Abominations are also Charnel's first unit to cost more than 2 souls. This is actually odd of Charnel -the other gods all push up soul counts sooner than Charnel does. In fact, overall Charnel is probably the swarmiest god, for whatever reason. Most of the other gods outright have a 4 soul creature at this exact level!


Wailing Wall
1200 Mana

The Wailing Wall is a, well, wall spell. Every god has one; it generates a line that is perpendicular to your current facing, with the middle being placed wherever you click -assuming it's in range of course- and then the wall somehow or another discourages enemies from passing through. Units will generally refuse to enter a wall's region without you riding herd on them to force them into it (By which I mean mashing right-click), and AI wizards treat them as impassable barriers... and apparently so do Sac Doctors, as I discovered to my dismay while recording this mission.

For most walls, that makes perfect sense, but the Wailing Wall doesn't actually bar passage in any way -it just drains the mana of units that are inside it really rapidly, so rapidly that trying to run your wizard through it using Speed Up will still result in your mana being zeroed out. Mana generation also won't kick back in when leaving the wall until several seconds have passed.

Wailing Wall is actually one of the most useful of the wall spells, particularly from a campaign perspective where it's probably just plain the best one -after all, the AI treats it as a 100% impassable barrier, but you can still pursue if you decide it's a good idea, send in Sac Doctors on units that died right inside the wall, and with a bit of effort even push eg melee units to go through it. It also has the best uptime of a wall spell, with a duration of 60 seconds and a cooldown of 70 seconds meaning that if you really want to keep blocking off an area there's a very tiny window in which you don't have a wall up. Similarly, this maximizes the time bought for stuff like Conversions to actually go through, and when a Wailing Wall is placed at a chokepoint the AI is prone to turning around and leaving instead of sticking around and trying to kill your Sac Doctors. It's also tied for shortest cast time of the walls!

It's actually kind of an error in my opinion that the game didn't have AI stuff treat the Wailing Wall differently. Its theoretical disadvantages -that melee units mostly don't care about its effects, either not having mana at all or only having limited use for their mana, chiefly- don't really hurt it because units still treat it like it's impassable and so functionally it just about is for anything that isn't a flier or player-controlled wizard. This is particularly relevant to campaign play, of course, but even in multiplayer it feels to me like it's a little more favorable to Wailing Wall than was intended. Certainly, it's my favorite of the walls.

Charnel 6 actually tends to be my default choice from a rainbow build perspective, between the Abomination's overall solid nature and Wailing Wall being my favorite wall.

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The mission itself is... annoying, but simpler than it sounds.

The Pyrodraulic Dynamo has a few fixed locations on the map it can potentially fire at. You don't get any warning outside the ground rising up a few seconds before the actual eruption begins, which is not enough time to clear out anything short of maybe your wizard -Speed Up!- if you're right on top of it, but if you're not actually at or near any of the possible eruption points it'll never matter, and the Pyrodraulic Dynamo will not wait for you to be near an eruption point before firing. I'm not convinced it ever tries to target you per se, honestly. It's also worth noting that the Pyrodraulic Dynamo is perfectly capable of murdering enemy units, and not only is the highly visible lava plume lethal but it hurls surprisingly lethal rocks at everything in a fairly sizable radius around it. As such, the Pyrodraulic Dynamo can occasionally allow you to scoop up some enemy souls!

Now, the game clearly intends for you to do something like clear out the Manalith guarding Charlotte's Altar, then go bust up the Pyrodraulic Dynamo -which is supposed to free her, but in the run where the game softlocked she didn't spawn- and go on to do another 2v2 wizard battle like when Buta was ally rather than enemy.

But that's frankly a terrible plan.

First of all, so long as the Pyrodraulic Dynamo is intact, there's no possibility of Charlotte being banished (The AI ignores her Altar), and you lose if she's banished, so freeing her is adding a lose condition. She also has an irritatingly small pool of souls when she's released, and so in practice instead of helping you fight she tends to require babysitting so she doesn't end up banished.

Second of all, going off to kill the Dynamo's defenses while there's two wizards constantly trying to go after your Altar is just a terrible plan. Whether you split up your forces or try to carefully time an assault on it so neither of them is there, the Pyrodraulic Dynamo is a huge slog from your Altar with even the one Manalith that can shorten the distance via Teleport still being hugely out of your way.

Third of all, once you've secured Charlotte's Altar, Hachimen's Altar is a hop, skip, and a jump away, and if you've done things properly the process of fending off both wizards and clearing out the Altar has probably swollen your soul supply while crippling both of theirs. And then Buta's Altar isn't much farther than Hachimen's, and if you've already managed to desecrate Hachimen's Altar Buta is going to be effortless to roll over. You've already cut the enemy's ranks in half, and Hachimen may well have left bodies behind for you to take when you completed the desecration. (For whatever reason, the AI won't Convert allied corpses even after the ally has been banished. It's absolutely possible for you to Convert allied corpses, so this is an AI thing)

And fourth of all, the game doesn't punish you or even take away any scenes or anything if you save the Pyrodraulic Dynamo for last! The only thing you're missing out on by me doing this is that if you don't deal with the wizards first, Charlotte will object to Eldred's plans to destroy the Dynamo because it'll kill her and then goes 'wait, that would actually work since I'd be spectral and so could get out'. (I'm a little puzzled that scene didn't play, actually -maybe I just didn't get close enough to trigger it this time?)

It's just all-around easier, faster, and less stressful to ignore the Dynamo until Buta and Hachimen are both banished. To the best of my recollection, there's only two Dynamo generation points that meaningfully interfere with this plan -the video shows off one of them, down one exit route from your Altar. The other is off down the other way out, but angled to blocking your way to the Dynamo itself rather than blocking you from Charlotte's Altar... so basically if you're unlucky the Dynamo might cause problems when you're initially trying to leave, but once you're on the war path it doesn't matter anymore, bar maybe interrupting Conversions by killing the Sac Doctors and their cargo on their way back.

The game doesn't even tie the Boon to anything to encourage freeing Charlotte. It's actually the first example we've seen of the mission automatically giving you a Boon just for completing the mission. (Which, thankfully, is a rare occurrence; I don't think it's good for the design to have some Boons guaranteed. It's not like the game ensures you get a Boon at Mission 6 or something)

Oh, and this is when we meet Hachimen. And technically Charlotte, but she didn't get to do anything this mission. Hachimen's whole thing is that they have bonus spells rather than bonus stats, more the deeper you go into the campaign, from a variety of gods to reflect their mercenary nature. It... has less impact than you might expect from looking at their page on the Sacrifice wiki; as far as I can tell, a good portion of the list is stuff they'll never, ever cast. That said, in this mission they're quite happy to spam Rainbow, which is a very useful Persephone spell.

On a more aesthetic note, Hachimen is conceptually a pair of wizards working together. It's easy to overlook it in the chaos of combat and Zyzyx doesn't actually allude to it. Speaking of Zyzyx, it's kind of too bad he's always heavily transparent in the actual game -his model is actually pretty amusing, with him wearing a cute little coat and glasses while being some weird armless imp-critter with wings sprouting out its head. You can barely make out the glasses if you know they're there, and of course you can see the wings but they don't look like anything interesting in-game.

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Plot-wise, we've got Charnel making false overtures of peace toward James, and also we've gotten to witness Pyro's Pyrodraulic Dynamo in action. There's... also some lines of dialogue that get quite funny if you know some stuff from other gods' routes, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Like I said, Charnel is kind of at the edge of the main plot, for whatever reason. It's a bit odd for someone with the exceedingly memorable line of 'what is a life, devoid of strife?' You'd think he'd be more involved in the plot.

See you next Charnel Mission.