Sacrifice: James Mission 1

So we've turned back the clock and gone to check out what happens if we commit ourself to Earthworm Jim's rustic divine cousin.

For starters, we get a different set of basic units -aside Manahoars, of course- and a different basic attacking spell. For another, James has a different god statline effect -where Charnel's stuff replaced regeneration with leeching and was slightly less durable than normal, James' stuff is slower but tougher than baseline. 120% of normal HP, 75% of normal speed, specifically.

At this level in particular, we get...


Trogg
300 Mana, 1 Soul

The Trogg is unique in the game for being a unit spell damage simply has no effect on whatsoever. Note, however, that this is damage in specific. Troggs can still be knocked around by spells, killed by spells that don't do damage per se such as Intestinal Vaporization and even Death, slowed down, and otherwise have Bad Things done to them by spells.

Nonetheless, being immune to spell damage gives them a unique niche all the way into the highest levels of power, particularly against wizard builds that focus heavily on using the wizard as a source of firepower rather than the army. They're also tough and hard-hitting for a level 1 creature, and so are fairly useful even outside the spell immunity, albeit their poor speed can be inconvenient when it comes to eg successfully countering ranged attackers. As with all other basic melee units, they're also slightly resistant to ranged damage, which is nice I guess.

Unfortunately, the campaign does a fairly poor job of showing them off, overall. There's a couple of missions where I wouldn't be surprised if they're kinda meant to show off the Trogg, but even those don't do a great job at that.


Earthfling
300 Mana, 1 Soul

The Earthfling is pretty much the James version of Fallen, or if you want to go by the manual descriptions it runs the other way. Regardless, the Earthfling's special ability is functionally identical to the Fallen's one; become invisible to the enemy and regenerate. The only difference is that the owning player sees them disguised as rocks instead of lying down dead. I have no idea why Zyzyx presents it as if it's some kind of damage reduction effect.

The Earthfling is perfectly solid a unit, though fairly boring, and it's actually probably less effective than Fallen are, with slightly worse damage per hit and a noticeably worse attack rate. The HP advantage is partially offset by Fallen leeching in combat (It takes about four successful attacks for a Fallen to leech the difference in max HP, and early in the game it's realistic for a Fallen to be taking damage and manage those four hits anyway), and of course Fallen are better able to keep up with your forces. Earthflings aren't bad as such, but they're middle of the road -two basic ranged units pretty much outclass them, the other two basically are outclassed by them. It's not significant enough to be a big influence on which god you pick for your basic options -stuff like Troggs being immune to spells is a lot more significant to that process.

As is typical of most ground ranged units, Earthflings are seriously weak to melee damage. They're actually noticeably less weak to it than Fallen are (Taking 4x damage instead of 6x damage), and in fact the Fallen is the anomalous one here. This fact means Earthflingers being less vulnerable to melee than Fallen are isn't much of an advantage; if you care that much about being less vulnerable to melee, there's alternatives.

Earthflings also suffer to a notable extent from the fact that James' stuff is slow. Just like the Fallen, their attack range is fairly short. At the beginning of a match this isn't much of a disadvantage since there's not exactly a lot to outrange Earthflings, but once longer-ranged units start showing up the Earthfling falls out of relevance much more thoroughly than other basic ranged units. (Unless you're willing to invest the micro into leveraging their special ability, I suppose) To be fair, none of the basic ranged units holds up particularly well once snipers and artillery show up, so in the long haul it barely matters, but there's some fairly early ranged options whose existence mean it can stand out as a flaw in a substantive way.


Gargoyle
300 Mana, 1 Soul

Where the Locust was defined around leeching, leeching, and more leeching, the Gargoyle is a flier with short-ranged splash damage. This isn't very useful in the earliest of missions as soul counts are simply too low, but is quite good at lower-mid-levels before stuff like artillery has shown up to take over the role of splash damage. Assuming the enemy makes a mob of weak units... which the AI likes to do, so that works. Gargoyles are also slightly tougher than the James statline should provide, though not enough to really matter. Like Locusts, they take double damage from ranged attacks, and fly high enough ground melee units are almost never able to attack them.

Basic and straightforward, but solid. Probably the most straightforwardly good of James' basic units, though in my opinion they're largely inferior to another god's equivalent, but we'll get there. And unlike the Locust, they're not overly-specialized.

No, I don't have any idea why they seem to be basically a Mutalisk but spitting rocks instead.


Rock
300 Mana

Rock is, when it comes to just looking at its basic parameters, one of the better basic attack spells. It hits hard, it has some splash to it, it cools down faster than most of the other basic attack spells, and it doesn't have any obvious disadvantages.

Unfortunately, as I manage to illustrate the very first time I cast it in this mission, it has an obnoxious habit of smacking into your own units. It won't hurt them, but it still wastes the spell entirely, and it's a pain to avoid it happening, especially as unit size tends to climb with soul cost and so at higher levels your units are more prone to catching the Rock. Fliers are especially guilty of catching your Rocks, but ground units are perfectly able to do so. It's also easy for a Rock to get caught on objects like trees, smack into terrain, or even just hit a unit other than the one you wanted hit, which notably means that it's the only basic attack spell that can't really be counted on for sniping Sac Doctors.

I feel it's not actually the worst of the basic attacking spells, but it's not much better than what is the worst, and even the worst one remains useful for sniping Sac Doctors so an argument can be made Rock actually is the worst just because at higher levels sniping Sac Doctors is the main thing basic attacking spells are particularly good for.

Overall, James set of basic spells isn't the worst of the bunch, but it kinda boils down to 'do I want Troggs? If yes, takes James for level 1, if no take a different god.'

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The mission is... better at trying to tutorial the player than Charnel's equivalent was, but it's actually a lot more obnoxiously designed overall. The baby dragons hit insanely hard, and your wizard will flinch when hit to boot, so if a couple of them get on you they can kill you pretty much instantly with no chance to respond. They're also obnoxiously durable... but really slow and melee, so they're pretty crap at actually fighting your forces.

Worse, the Boon's condition basically encourages you to play the mission in a maximally-boring way: you earn the Boon in this mission by having at least 5 baby dragons alive when you finish the mission. In real terms, this boils down to 'send Gammel out to solo the caves, controlling him via minimap'. After all, the baby dragons can't attack Gammel, and unlike Gargoyles he won't run out of mana and have to come back for a refill, not to mention Gargoyles having area of effect means they could incidentally kill a baby dragon while trying to bust up a cave. And there is no hint from the game that avoiding killing the baby dragons has any possibility of being rewarded.

The whole thing is a mess of a design.

Anyway, Gammel is based on a James unit we'll be getting to eventually, but the main thing is he's straight-up busted. He has over 3000 HP -wizards only start with 1550, and you've seen how hard it can be to kill a wizard at low levels- and all his resistances are above 90%. For the foreseeable future he's basically invincible and he hits much harder than anything is supposed to at our level, and unlike Gangrel we'll actually get to keep him. This right here makes the James campaign obnoxiously easy for a bit, and it's going to get more ridiculous.

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Story-wise, we got to explore the Ragman issue from a different angle; him driving Sirocco mad didn't just hurt her, it's been having knock-off consequences elsewhere. The Ragman is a bad dude. We also see that where Charnel's first mission was about adding to his forces, James' first mission is about protecting his people from danger.

We also get to kinda explore the worldbuilding of Sacrifice a little, which is something that largely didn't crop up in Charnel's campaign. There's not a ton of worldbuilding in Sacrifice, but there's more than Charnel's route might lead you to believe. Mind, much like how Charnel's route never really explored what a demon is in the world of Sacrifice, so too is James' route not really going to do anything with the notion of dragons having specific nesting grounds and laying their eggs in caves and so on.

Though on a different note, this mission makes it seem fairly ridiculous that twelve Fallen was adequate for dealing with a cave of dragons. The performance of baby dragons in this mission makes it seem like the expected result would be twelve (re-)dead Fallen. And yeah, it would be obnoxious for Charnel Mission 1 to force you to summon 20+ Fallen, but honestly I don't even get why it's Fallen in the first place. Locusts or Scythes would both make more sense!

Anyway.

See you next James mission.