Sacrifice: James Mission 2


For this mission, James gives us... a bit of a mixed bag.


Basilisk
600 Mana, 2 Souls

The Basilisk is James' equivalent to the Necryl, and like the Necryl it's a ranged unit primarily meant to support your other units. Its ranged attack, instead of doing damage, turns victims to stone. This immobilizes them, preventing them from moving, attacking, or using special abilities, with fliers outright dropping out of the sky, but it also massively increases their resistance to damage until the effect fades.

In real terms, this can be used in one of two basic ways; to keep a problematic unit out of the fight while your lethal units focus on other parts of the army, or to drop fliers out of the sky over the abyss.

It never cropped up in the Charnel campaign, as Charnel's spell and unit list doesn't offer any good options for this, but units that fall into the abyss are gone. They instantly die and their souls are irretrievably lost. (This is not some kind of perma-kill on wizards, however, as they'll teleport back to land instead) As such, effects that can force enemies into the abyss can be quite amazing for chopping off parts of the enemy army with no need to arrange for them to be separated from their wizard long enough to convert them.

The Basilisk is, however, a bit niche as far as that goes. It's not even that much more of a discouragement to eg attempts to send fliers raiding over an abyss, because if other units kill a flier so its corpse falls into the abyss, that works just as well, and in particular only the Hellmouth and its equivalents are durable enough for the Basilisk to be realistically faster than just lobbing ranged attacks for the kill.

The Basilisk can be quite effective if used properly, but I'm not a big fan of it. To use it properly requires a fair amount of micromanagement, as you need to direct the Basilisk at whatever unit you want to ignore and direct everything else at other units. I have a low opinion of the Necryl, but I do at least appreciate that I can summon one and then literally ignore it and still get meaningful benefit out of its presence. At low levels the Basilisk's micromanagement requirements aren't too burdensome, but it's also not until higher levels that there's much that's worth petrifying, so the Basilisk is never particularly optimal for its time and place.


Skin of Stone
400 Mana

Skin of Stone is unequivocally one of the best of the shield spells. It lasts a long time, 80 seconds, it reduces damage coming in by 75%, and its only disadvantage is that its cooldown is 110 seconds, leaving you vulnerable for a full 30 seconds in a row. It's not my personal favorite of the shield spells, but there's nothing to dislike about it. Skin of Stone should, in fact, be your default choice if you don't want a specific quality on one of the other shield spells and aren't choosing based more on the unit being offered; Stone of Skin really is just that good.

It doesn't do anything beyond damage reduction, but the damage reduction is impressive and the duration makes it by far the best shield spell for fire-and-forget behavior just before a battle to keep stuff like Slime and Blightmites off of you, so it's not like it really needs any other effects to justify itself.

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The mission is not much better-designed than the previous mission. We have Zyzyx telling us we'll have to banish a wizard before we've been properly informed there is a wizard in the area to banish, the mission is ridiculously easy unless you let Sirocco notice your forces in which case you may find your entire army is instantly wiped out and most of it stolen before you can revive and get back to retrieve the souls. If you don't get Sirocco on your case, it's a really straightforward, easy mission. It's also not a particularly good introduction to wizard combat; the Ragman puts up so little resistance that if you avoided Sirocco successfully you're going to win, basically.

The Ragman himself only properly shows up in this mission and one other. In this mission, he has 25% resistance to melee damage. In the other mission, he has 25% resistance to all physical damage. That's it. For a 'lord of terror', he's surprisingly underwhelming.

I don't really get why James' missions are so poorly designed given I have strong reason to believe he was a bit of a favorite of the development team...

Oh, and the Boon is ridiculously straightforward; don't kill Sirocco. Given what a nightmare it is to try to kill her, and that there's even more reason to not want to kill her, this is basically a gimme. Remember how dragons showed up late in Charnel's campaign? Sirocco is a dragon, but way better. It's simply not reasonable to try to kill her with level 2 forces -I've done it once upon a time, but it involved a lot of dying and trying again before she could regenerate the last fight's damage. The game might as well have made it a Boon you get for just completing the mission, honestly.

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Narratively, we helped make Sirocco not crazy by beating up the Ragman.

The game never really tries to justify this -the Ragman isn't even permanently dead, as the game goes out of its way to explain. So... why did beating him up make her sane again? Is it just because he's away from her at all? For that matter, why did the Ragman driving Sirocco insane result in her functioning as an ally instead of turning indiscriminate, given the way her insanity has been described?

It's also a bit disappointing not really getting any new evidence of what made the Ragman a terror back in his day. In Charnel Mission 1, we were introduced to the idea that he can drive people insane with his presence even while locked up inside a cave, which did a lot to sell the idea he's someone to fear. In this mission... we just re-iterate that point, with nothing particularly new to cement that the Ragman is scary. Given we're both Level 2, he doesn't come across as particularly impressive -this is one unfortunate consequence of the game mostly sticking to 'mission number=wizard level', that relative wizard impressiveness can't really be held to consistently except by arranging for them to be biased in how early/late they can show up. Marduk manages to work because -unsurprising spoilers- he never shows up in battle prior to Mission 10. The Ragman ends up suffering because the two missions he shows up in are in the first half of the campaign. (Though it doesn't help that the Ragman's actual bonuses aren't particularly significant, either)

The Ragman also touches on a bit of a weakness or flaw with the campaign's design; it can't do subplots without risking the audience missing them, unless they're placed in the interludes or Astral Realm (The mission-picking space), and the developers seem to have responded to this issue by avoiding doing subplots at all. The Ragman isn't important to the central plot, so even though he's a major historical figure who really ought to be part of a subplot that advances a little bit each time he shows up in a mission... he just kinda gets glossed over by the plot in real terms.

Part of this is that Sacrifice has to be careful in how it references events because of how much freedom it provides you. We didn't do Charnel Mission 1, but the Ragman is free anyway; many of the early missions are handled like this, where the player selecting the mission just changes who handled the mission, but the god has somebody handle the mission regardless and they succeed regardless. So without scripting in variable responses based on what you've done before -something Sacrifice actually does do some, but only a little- the plot can't set up something like having Eldred feel guilty for freeing the Ragman now that he's seeing what the Ragman is actually doing, since there's no guarantee you did Charnel Mission 1 and then James Mission 2. By the same token, when the Ragman plot is resolved, Eldred won't be responding to it in a personal way.

It's too bad, because for all that I like Sacrifice's story overall, it's missing a lot of nuance and depth you'd find in other stories because of these decisions. As we'll be seeing, it makes up for it to some extent by leveraging what it is doing, but... not by a lot, unfortunately.

You might also notice we got a different set of dialogue between the gods at the end, compared to when we completed Charnel Mission 2. A lot of Astral Realm dialogue is going to be the same across the different routes, but not all of it.

See you next James mission.

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