Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 8

For this mission, Charnel doesn't provide new units at all, though he still provides two new spells. This is true of every god's gifts at this level. In Charnel's case, they are...


Intestinal Vaporization
1800 Mana

Intestinal Vaporization targets a single creature, causing it to slow down and increasingly bulge out. There's a projectile involved in this, but it can't be avoided or escaped and can't get caught on terrain or a unit other than the intended one; the projectile primarily matters for how it gives warning to the enemy. Anyway, after a few seconds, the creature's body explodes, leaving its souls behind, free to be instantly picked up by anyone by walking into them.

Note, however, that Intestinal Vaporization will not detonate a creature if it's killed conventionally before completion of the effect. Ideally, you should target units that are worth multiple souls and difficult to kill, and then arrange for your units to not be targeting them to boot. The best options for targeting with Intestinal Vaporization aren't even around yet as far as conventional multiplayer leveling, though in this mission there were Yogo's dragons as potential options.

Intestinal Vaporization is fantastic for no-questions-asked stealing some enemy souls, which is appreciated given how obsessive the AI is about taking out your Sac Doctors. It's only mildly useful in this mission, but is very much appreciated in coming missions. It's one of the better spells in this tier, with no real weaknesses or disadvantages outside of it being annoying when your units interrupt it by killing your target. Even its range is surprisingly long!

Keep in mind that enemy wizards can still pick up the souls with a touch themselves, however. It's not too frustrating -for the most part- to 'waste' Intestinal Vaporization if the enemy picks up the souls, as Intestinal Vaporization cools down quicker than a lot of the spells in this tier and straight-up murdering a unit without regard for its durability is still useful in its own right. A related point is that Intestinal Vaporization is one of the best spells in the game for dealing with Guardians, as Guardian damage reduction is irrelevant to it and they're unlikely to be killed by your units beforehand. This is particularly appreciated in the campaign, where conventional conversions of AI Guardians tend to be interrupted by the wizard, and the AI has tons of souls tied up in nasty Guardians as you get deeper into the campaign.

Note that Intestinal Vaporization doesn't work on wizards. That would be ridiculous on a design level. Nor on buildings, which would be ridiculous for somewhat different reasons.


Death
1800 Mana

Death is one of the more unique spells in Sacrifice, and easily misused. When you cast Death, you summon an indiscriminate reaper at the targeted location which proceeds to run down and one-hit kill a series of units. (The wiki claims it hits eight times, but when I've counted it's always been 7) It doesn't care who summoned it, slaughtering friend and foe alike, with its only parameters being that it picks a target based on proximity and that it completely ignores wizards and structures. (I'm not sure it's willing to target Sac Doctors; regular play doesn't give much of an opportunity to smoothly test that. I suspect it can, but I don't actually know) The HP and resistances of units are irrelevant to Death; they just plain die when struck.

The only exception to the death effect is the campaign-exclusive Zyzyx, who Death can target and will even reduce Zyzyx's HP meter to nothing with a strike, but Zyzyx won't fall over dead or anything. This is slightly exploitable, allowing you to protect your actual creatures by getting Death caught on Zyzyx until it's made enough attacks to be satisfied, as Death doesn't lose interest in Zyzyx just because it reduced his HP to zero. It's a bit of a weird oversight, to be honest.

The overall result is that Death is fantastic for wiping out armies of high-end creatures, but can be reduced in its effectiveness by distracting it with weak creatures (Manahoars are ideal), or even potentially baited back into the caster's own forces so that they're worse off instead of better off. The worst-case scenario -one that in the campaign can only crop up in the form of the player using it against the AI- is the intended targets being Teleported away so that Death's caster's army is the only one in reach.

Like Intestinal Vaporization, it can be a useful tool for clearing out Guardians, assuming there's enough tough Guardians clumped close enough together it spends itself largely or entirely on the Guardians instead of running down your forces. After all, it doesn't care about Guardian's damage reduction, can't be killed, has a surprisingly far range it can be summoned at...

One way to minimize the danger in using Death is to simply order your army to stay behind. It's got its own flaws, but it is an option that works.

And on a different note, Death's handling is one of my favorite things in the entirety of Sacrifice. It feels like you're a wizard summoning the incarnation of Death itself into the corporeal realm, hoping it does more harm to your enemies than to your own. Fantastic concepts rarely get executed so... fantastically.

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The mission itself is fairly straightforward. Fight a James wizard, then fight a Persephone wizard. The only two wrinkles are the odd little island with a Manalith and a Shrine you own, encouraging you to actually try out Teleport by being a (pain in the butt) source of some free souls, and that Charlotte will eventually spontaneously die if you don't desecrate her Altar yourself.

I deliberately stalled some for LP purposes -this way, you get to see Eldred talking about how Marduk must've killed James during the assault. If you banish Charlotte yourself, the game never explains why James' portal is ruined when you go back to the mission selection area; you're just plain left in the dark.

It's still important to engage Charlotte, if only so you can maximize how many souls you siphon off her in preparation for fighting Yogo.

Charlotte herself is a bit of an odd wizard -she gets a small bonus to her mana supply, modest physical resistance (20%), and throws in the Slime spell even though it's a Charnel spell. This last point is probably meant to represent her being a spider-lady tossing webs, but it's never really acknowledged. The physical resistance point also comes with the caveat that in this mission and one other, Charlotte actually doesn't have the ranged portion of it, only giving her a bonus resistance to melee damage. (Which is nearly useless at this point of the game)

Yogo can be a bit of a pain. He's higher level than you, summoning nastier units than you can get equivalents to, and he's still getting his stock boosts to max HP and HP regeneration, so even when dumping your army's firepower on him it's not unusual for him to end up scooping up a bunch of his units' souls before he finally expires. I tend to try to push for the Prime Altar and get the Desecration done instead of trying to siphon souls from him -his durability makes it such a pain, and the AI is sufficiently incompetent at fending off Desecrations (They tend to obsessively heal themselves over by a Manalith instead of interrupting the Desecration) that once you've gotten it started he'll probably die without much further trouble.

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Narratively, we've killed another god, had a third god killed off-screen, and Stratos has gone quiet. After all these filler-y missions in which nothing important was happening, it's a bit frustrating to have the plot zipping right on through these significant events, and largely glossing over them to boot. It gets worse when you collate information from other gods' missions, as for example one of Eldred's lines in one claims it's impossible to get to this spot without fighting through another area, and this mission didn't even acknowledge that.

Though it is nice to get Charnel providing an actual reason for killing Persephone, and it's a surprisingly practical one -that she's convinced Marduk isn't real and so will just keep causing problems until she's killed. It's part of a larger, low-key trend that Charnel is genuinely focused on Marduk as a threat, treating him seriously, rather than trying to win the inter-god war for its own sake. It does contribute to it being frustrating that we betrayed Pyro without a proper explanation, though.

It's pretty obvious there's not much room left in the plot, of course...

See you next Charnel mission.