Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 9

We get one spell at this level, and it's our final one.


Hellmouth
1900 Mana, 5 Souls

The Hellmouth is Charnel's ultimate unit -each god has one, and in every case the manual doesn't mention it, Zyzyx doesn't explain it, and you don't get a free copy at the start of the mission you acquire the unit type in, unlike every other level you gain units at. All of them are 5 soul creatures that cost 1900 mana (1900 being the default max mana at max level) and have 50% resistance to spell damage and 25% to ranged damage. Almost all of them are fliers, as well, which gives these ultimate units the unique quality of being flying units that are only susceptible (Relatively) to melee attacks. In conjunction with their massive HP reserves, this makes them pretty generally difficult to kill. Usually the correct solution is to have your wizard break out spells like Intestinal Vaporization that bypass their durability... and not all of the available options for bypassing durability will work on most of these ultimate units for various reasons. All the flying ultimate units are also fast in the air, with a base speed twice that of a wizard's base speed, though they're also a bit odd in that normally they tend to fly so close to the ground that ground melee units can reliably attack them. The Hellmouth will pretty blatantly alternate between jogging and flying when following your wizard around, for example, that's how low it flies.

The Hellmouth's more distinctive qualities start with being a ranged attacker whose reach is sufficiently short it's really not that much better than a melee unit's. (Exception: the game primarily seems to calculate distance horizontally for range limitations. If a flying unit ends up very high above a Hellmouth, you may see the Hellmouth attacking from quite a distance! Same for if the Hellmouth ends up really high above other units) The Hellmouth's attack is to spit out a stream of souls, which each inflict a separate hit and inflict the poisoning effect. This makes the Hellmouth a surprisingly decent Guardian, sorta, since like the Deadeye it benefits from both the improved leech and vastly improved poison damage -this comes with the caveat that Guardian starts out limited in use and gets overall worse as wizards level up and expand their spell list, so that by the time you have Hellmouths you probably have largely stopped using Guardian. A lone Hellmouth Guardianed to a Manalith is just asking for the enemy to use something like Intestinal Vaporization to trivialize it. Still, in the next mission Guardianed Hellmouths can actually be pretty useful.

For whatever reason, the wiki is of the opinion the Hellmouth is the weakest of the ultimate units, and maybe this is true in multiplayer for whatever reason, but in the campaign they're probably the second-best of the ultimate units. (The best of the bunch is, to be honest, basically completely broken. We'll get to that, though) They're tough, they're fast, their attack homes and does poison damage, and being a ranged unit, however short-ranged they might be, is overall to their advantage.

The AI mostly doesn't use the spells that best counter ultimate units, which makes spamming ultimate units disproportionately effective in the campaign. Against actual human opponents, that could go bad places.

Hellmouths also have the Devour Soul ability, just like Netherfiends do, and are arguably an even better abuser of it so long as you have Animate Dead... though against actual human opponents, they may well have tools that make it a really bad idea to try to take advantage. Great, you fed 5 souls to your Hellmouth and then they vaporized the body with Intestinal Vaporization. There goes 5 souls with no chance of getting them back, good job!

You might notice me aggressively ordering the Hellmouths to guard me; due to their sheer size and the fact that they fly and are more than fast enough to keep up with a wizard at all times, Hellmouths have a tendency to get juuust barely into the camera shot, blocking targeting orders, if left in the default trailing behavior. Units ordered to guard the wizard flank them by default, avoiding this problem. This isn't completely unique to Hellmouths, but they're certainly the worst about it, even among the ultimate units.

While we're on that topic, I really wish Sacrifice had made a dedicated attack-move order. In a normal RTS, 'attack targeted at ground equals attack-move' works perfectly fine 99% of the time. In Sacrifice, I hate trying to issue an attack-move order, because it's far too routine for one of my own units to end up in the way of my cursor and suddenly the order is 'kill that friendly unit right there'. This is why you might've noticed I tend to just right-click for move orders and then let my units choose to attack nearby enemies once they arrive, when I bother to try to order my units away from me at all. It's certainly a massive part of why I default to just having my units follow me around and attack at their own discretion -especially since while issuing attack/attack-move orders is the most blatantly screwy example, Sacrifice in general suffers from the over-the-shoulder view not being suited to typical RTS control conceits. You can use the minimap to reduce some of these problems, but then you're having to try to connect what you see in front of you to what's on the minimap, which is not intuitive, and you can still end up with eg issuing an attack order on a specific unit when you meant to issue an attack-move order. (Or vice-versa)

As an aside, the Hellmouth's icon has always struck me as curious. It looks quite obviously like some kind of angel, but there's no angelic unit for Hellmouth's to have a variant icon of and Hellmouths themselves resemble undead dragons more than fallen angels. Did there used to be some kind of angel unit under Persephone (Or maybe Stratos?) that would've shared a base model with the Hellmouth, and whose icon was repurposed for the Hellmouth? Did the artist who made the icon really just do that bad a job of trying to depict a zombie dragon in icon form? What's with that?

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The mission itself is a bit of a fake-out except kinda not. It's easy to think you're coming here to kill Stratos, but when you show up it eventually becomes obvious that Stratos was dead before you showed up... but Jadugarr's list is all Stratos and Hachimen also uses a surprising amount of Stratos stuff here (Though, unusually, they field Hellmouths themselves), so in gameplay terms the only way the fake-out matters is that there's no Prime Altar as a key victory condition. (And there's a mission down the line where clearing out the Prime Altar isn't an automatic victory anyway...)

It's also one of missions that's fairly heavy on blatant scripting -there's the Ashur idol that triggers some talking and turns the Snowmen (Stratos' civilian type) hostile, there's the tornado that spawns in when you approach that one chokepoint, and there's the Storm Giant ambush. I didn't end up showing off that last one properly, but there's a circle of Snowmen corpses nearby your Altar, and when you approach the area the Storm Giants spawn in. If you walk blithely into the extremely obvious trap, your easy souls turns into very possibly mission failure. Jadugarr ended up going for the souls, letting me siphon them without triggering the trap at all.

The mission also has the unusual quality of immediately throwing you into a fight with Jadugarr. You get a decent set of starting forces yourself -and it's worth noting that if you're doing a rainbow run they'll still be the Charnel forces we got this time- so it's not too hard to fend Jadugarr off, and you may well get lucky and steal a bunch of his souls -the nearest enemy Manalith is too far away for Jadugarr to come back and interrupt, and it's also easy to cut him off before he gets close. As I noted earlier, the AI is obsessive about stopping you from taking their souls, but only if it's happening around them; picking a fight with Jadugarr before he gets close enough to your Conversion attempts will distract him.

Those assorted bits aside, the mission is a fairly straightforward 2v1, and Hachimen and Jadugarr will generally fail to properly gang up on you so it's really not much of a challenge... usually. Occasionally the vagaries of the AI can make this fight quite frustrating.

Sara Bella is our fourth hero to be spotted in a Charnel run, and she joins you just fine... for this mission. As you can see at the end of the video, she doesn't follow us into the final mission. This... is kind of understandable, as Sara Bella is a bit special as heroes go. I'm not actually going to cover her in real detail right now, in fact, because she's not important here and she gets used weirdly in the main of her missions. I will point out this Sara Bella is, in fact, the same one Charnel earlier asked Stratos why he didn't use her.

As an aside, I've always found it annoying how the game kicks you directly into the final mission with no chance to save between missions or anything. There is an auto-save function, but the game doesn't call your attention to it, and it's still annoying.

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Narratively, Sara Bella tells us Stratos got betrayed, most likely by... Marduk's followers? Marduk himself? It's not really clear. We just know Stratos was in some kind of alliance with Marduk's people and got killed. The whole thing makes Stratos even more suspicious than he already was -Charnel has been fairly focused on fighting Marduk, and it turns out Stratos claimed Marduk wasn't real while working with Marduk's people.

One nice touch about this mission; you might remember that the last time we encountered Jadugarr, his team color was dark blue. It's dark blue here, too, and so is Hachimen's -that's Marduk's god/team color. Previously when we've seen Hachimen, they had the Pyro yellow team color. The whole thing is a nice bit of meta-signaling that Jadugarr was already working for Marduk per se (Albeit he was calling him Ashur at the time) when we encountered him before, where Hachimen was not some kind of Marduk mole.

Anyway, then the interlude shows off that Mithras was actually Marduk the whole time. That time Mithras coincidentally took a rest in the shade of an idol to Ashur? Yeah, not coincidental at all. Some of Eldred and Zyzyx's dialogue from before also makes more sense in retrospect as them knowing or at least suspecting that Mithras is Marduk, and other dialogue gains new meaning. It's worth pointing out that Mithras and Marduk do actually share, in some broad ways, similar designs -notably, they both carry a staff in the right hand, which is not some stock feature of Sacrifice's wizards. They're even similar-looking staves once you account for the height difference! It's a nice touch -not anything so obvious you're likely to draw the connection before the official reveal, but enough to get you going 'ooooh, I get it now.'

This does raise some questions about what, exactly, is supposed to have been going on with Mithras' prophecy, and unfortunately even once I've shown off all the missions these questions won't be answered. Did Marduk replace Mithras only for the present, with the Mithras we saw deliver the prophecy being the genuine article? Or... did Marduk kill and replace Mithras to then deliver the prophecy that got the gods suspicious of each other? There's some other possibilities, but those are the two main scenarios, and they imply different things about events. If Mithras was Marduk for the prophecy, then the whole thing was a calculated plot on Marduk's part. If not, though, then eg Marduk-as-Mithras insisting 'there are no innocents' is a bit less villainous grandstanding ("Huuuur I did it intentionally you idiot.") and more a legitimate philosophical point Marduk may genuinely believe in. ("Yeah, Mithras has responsibility for how things ended up, too.")

Of course, next time we're killing Marduk and this is all over. Spoilers. I guess. Come on, it's a video game, what else were you expecting?

See you next Charnel mission.