Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 7

For this mission, Charnel provides...


Styx
1300 Mana, 4 Souls

... firstly, a unit we got a sneak peek at three levels ago.

The Styx is straightforward, if a bit odd; it's a ranged unit whose range is fairly short, but it hits quite hard and it has splash damage, and its attack seems to be hitscan and I've never seen it properly miss, most likely due to its fairly significant splash. This is a unit archetype in Sacrifice outright, and they work fairly well for fending off melee units closing in with your swarm of snipers and artillery. The Styx also has a bonus gimmick of being able to detonate a blue soul for fairly significant area of effect damage -and it does scale up its damage if you target a cluster of souls hovering over a single body- but honestly this gimmick is extremely questionable. I could maybe see it being useful for targeting a soul that had been an enemy's that the enemy wizard is closer to as a way of using gibbing+the soul explosion effect to outright deny the enemy soul(s), but most of the time you'd rather pick up blue souls or use Animate Dead to revive your units. The damage alone isn't enough to justify it unless you're confident that detonating a soul will eg finish off the enemy wizard and give you the opportunity to salvage several enemy souls left behind.

As such, I actually consider the Styx a fairly underwhelming representative of its archetype. Its usable, but like the Abomination it's a bit boring in real terms, and unlike the Abomination the alternative tends to be superior in performance. It even shares some of the secondary qualities like having a poor fire rate that limits the utility of Charnel leeching.

On the other hand, for a mono-Charnel force it's legitimately an important unit because a mono-Charnel force is generally much more heavily ranged-oriented than other gods' forces are and the Styx is, for the moment, your best option for shielding your ranged mob from melee attackers.

Note that Styx are technically vulnerable to melee attacks, like most ranged units. (4x damage) Fending off melee attackers is still very much their primary role, but they do die quickly to melee once it gets to them. Of course, they're fairly fragile in general, so unless you've got them Guardianed they tend to die quickly period...

An odd point is that in spite of their melee weakness, it's probably more accurate to think of the Styx like a flier as far as the game's core rock/paper/scissors system. They can be killed by melee, but unless they're Guardianed ranged units tend to be the more problematic threat; after all, a wall of Deadeyes and Abominations can kill a group of Styx before the Styx ever get a chance to fire, a mob of Netherfiends will be getting shot up as they close, and Styx are fragile enough the damage bonus melee gets isn't terribly important. Thus, Styx are a ranged unit that tends to die horribly against grounded ranged units and hold up much better against melee -just like flying units.


Plague
1500 Mana

Plague drops intermittent globs of blood down into a fairly decent-sized area, which do splash damage and inflict a plague effect like the Necryl's. Unlike the Necryl's, Plague's plague does real damage over time and self-stacks, which together means it's surprisingly lethal.

Do to the lengthy casting time and the fact that it immobilizes you, Plague is generally best used as either a form of area denial -discouraging enemies from entering a region because they'll be killed by Plague- or to do egregious harm to groups of Guardianed units. Its range is fairly decent, and since the blood globs fall down in a roughly circular region centered on the point you click at you can potentially land hits on enemy units that technically have equal or slightly greater range than the spell by targeting the ground in front of them.

In the campaign in particular, Plague is a pretty good way of softening up a wizard's army. Unlike Wailing Wall, the AI won't make any effort to avoid the region you're targeting until after the spell is active, and their path tends to be fairly predictable in general. This makes it easy to get in damage with minimal opportunity for the enemy to attack you in spite of taking 7 seconds to cast, if you can get the timing down.

As an aside, I think Charnel units are immune to plague -but not poison- and I know for a fact that your own Charnel units will only take initial impact damage from the Plague spell. I've never experimented with it much, though.

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The actual mission is, by some metric, probably the second-worst-designed of the entire game. The initial bit isn't so bad, just you against Sorcha with a frustratingly low number of souls to start with and no civilians to get souls from. Usually she'll come at you with her force strung out and it's entirely practical to snag some souls as a result, but sometimes the vagaries of the AI lead to her hitting you all at once and things go very bad very quickly -I once had a run take over an hour, with more than half of it spent on frantically defending against Sorcha and trying to prevent her from getting my souls while trying to snag hers and largely failing because she'd taken my forward Manalith and so could get back into the fight too fast for me to get stuff converted before she was in range to kill the Sac Doctor.

But usually it's pretty straightforward, if a bit tedious, to defend against Sorcha 2-3 times while siphoning souls and then go on the offense and desecrate her Altar.

Then it's time to deal with Buta and his Magnifriers, and that's where things turn stupid.

Faestus joins you at the beginning of the mission and tells you to rush the Magnifriers with 'lesser creatures' to take advantage of their minimum range. This advice is godawful. The minimum range is not that large, and all three Magnifriers cover each other anyway so even if a unit gets within the minimum range it'll just be killed by the others. 'Lesser creatures' also makes it harder to scoop up and resummon -or Animate Dead- the units as they die, and makes it easier for Buta to swoop in and steal some souls since lower-end units are converted faster. Furthermore, any units that die within said minimum range will be a nightmare to retrieve without, yourself, dying -and this is all compounded by the Magnifriers being covered by Guardianed Pyro artillery thanks to a Manalith that's nearby the Magnifriers.

No, what you should do is make an army heavy on snipers and/or artillery, so they're able to attack without all the Magnifriers getting to fight back and so you don't have to worry about the Guardians and it makes it easier to retrieve/reanimate your dead and you'll suffer fewer losses if you decide to abort an attack and leave behind some dead.

Even then, it's easy for things to go badly wrong by virtue of Buta showing up and adding his firepower to the Magnifriers. This mission is one of the few where I've occasionally bothered to save mid-mission, because it's just obnoxious to handle Sorcha perfectly and then end up re-doing the entire mission because dumb luck let Buta steal half your army.

Once you've got all three Magnifriers handled, you probably only need to trounce Buta once before strolling effortlessly over to the Prime Altar to banish him.

While his advice is boneheaded, Faestus himself is a decent unit, if a bit odd to be joining us. He's a variant of a Pyro unit, and... he's actually one of the lower-quality heroes, as he's got no protection from melee and so can die pretty easily, where most heroes are uniformly 90~% resistant to damage. No big deal to a Charnel run -just use Animate Dead on his corpse- but most heroes have much greater survivability. Of course, most heroes are also melee, so that's a point in Faestus' favor. From a mono-Charnel perspective, he's also our first hero unit who actually sticks with us, which is good as the endgame is honestly balanced under the assumption you've got at least one hero to prop up your forces early in a mission.

Good use of walls to separate the AI from souls is particularly important to this mission overall, which is a bit of a trend for the last few campaign missions.

... and no, I don't really get the point of that scripted explosion in the village around that one Manafount. The campaign occasionally does this, where a wizard spell will occur for no particular reason in response to your approach or occasionally some other trigger, but usually these scripted events are designed so they can meaningfully threaten you and your army, or at least plausibly happen when you're already in a fight and so complicate it. This one is out of the way, too weak to be likely to kill any of your troops, and just briefly delays you overall. There isn't even any dialogue in response to it!

On a different note, this mission doesn't have a Boon... because Boons stop being passed out after the sixth mission. This is true in all routes; you can potentially get a Boon in every possible version of the first six missions aside bugs making such impossible, and you can't get any once you're past that. As such, I won't be making commentary about Boons in the following missions.

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Plot-wise, we're... finishing our betrayal of Pyro by killing him. Even though we never found out why Charnel wanted to betray him in the first place. What happened to wanting a pawn? Shouldn't we have, like, killed James and then backstabbed Pyro once he was no longer necessary?

This is a chronic issue with Charnel's campaign that we don't get proper explanations of what's going on and the overall arc doesn't properly add up. It's frustrating, because Charnel is easily one of the most entertaining characters in the game, but his 'story' seems to have been given little attention.

The bit with Mithras is one of those things that seems sort of pointless at the time but makes more sense in retrospect.

See you next Charnel mission.