Sacrifice: James Mission 3

I have Sirocco: GG, no re.


Taurock
700 Mana, 2 Souls

The Taurock is class-equivalent to the Netherfiend, but showing up earlier than it did; a ground melee unit that's primarily notable for its durability. In the Taurock's particular case, though Zyzyx inexplicably claims it's especially good at killing Manaliths (No idea why), its actual defining trait is that it takes less and less damage from attacks the more damage it's already taken. This makes it very difficult to wear down with many weak attacks, but very strong hits can potentially eg kill it when it's at half health. The gimmick is pretty weird and I don't get the point of it, but it does make the Taurock one of the best units to initiate healing on when it's closing in on death instead of when it's just started taking damage, since all healing in Sacrifice (Except Charnel leaching) is over time. As such, whatever the Taurock's exact numbers are, when it's very low on HP and taking a pounding the effective HP value you're getting out of healing it is several times greater than whatever the baseline healing value is. It's also one of the better units for hurling at eg Guardianed artillery with the assistance of a Speed Up -it can take damage comparable to much higher level units while having a base HP that's low enough for Speed Up to last an actually useful period of time.

It's also got slight base resistance to range attacks and a more noticeable 30% resistance to melee, making it surprisingly good at killing basic melee attackers. At this stage, it's really only fliers and wizard spells that are much of a threat to it, honestly.

I'm personally not very fond of the Taurock on the whole, in no small part because it has by far the worst damage output of its class of units. As Sacrifice is not a game where placing units at key locations can be used to reliably blockade enemies -this isn't King's Bounty here- a unit with the Taurock's unreasonable durability doesn't actually get any particularly great battlefield niches to fill. In fact, since its damage is low and its movement is slow it's entirely practical to basically ignore a Taurock or three in favor of focusing on the real threats in enemy forces. In a mono-James force, Troggs will distressingly frequently be the more useful choice in spite of being two levels lower. (For one thing, they're not quite as painfully slow as the Taurock)

It could certainly be a worse unit, but I don't think it's very well-designed, and I'm not entirely sure its gimmick was intended to fill any interesting gameplay role. Just something someone came up with and coded in as a weird idea. Alas.


Soul Mole
50 Mana

Soul Mole is the cheapest spell in the game after Manahoars.

This is good, because it's terrible.

Soul Mole targets a blue soul -whether one of your own souls or a freestanding soul- and drags it to you. This trip, bizarrely, will always take 10 seconds, regardless of whether you're standing right next to the body or immediately Teleport to the other end of the map, and every enemy that is encountered on the way back will be knocked down, interrupting anything they were doing. The targeted soul in question becomes a freestanding soul if it was attached to a corpse initially, which means if an enemy wizard gets atop it you've outright given them one or more souls at the minor cost of momentarily stunning them.

The manual presents Soul Mole as a useful way to retrieve souls from dead units of yours mixed up in enemy forces, but for this purpose it's godawful. Its only good uses are for retrieving freestanding souls -even if the enemy still picks it up, you got to stun them for a moment, and it's not like they couldn't already pick it up- and for trying to knock down units. Not wizards, because even interrupting something like Death is generally not worth giving the enemy souls for free.

Soul Mole's awfulness is, ultimately, the biggest reason I'm not a fan of the Taurock; the Taurock is eeeeh, but Soul Mole is inarguably the worst non-creature spell at this level, and by a wide margin.

To be fair, Soul Mole is particularly poor from a campaign perspective; there's exactly one mission in the entire game with freestanding souls, and it's not possible to have Soul Mole when you do it. Multiplayer-wise, maps tend to have at least a few freestanding souls, and using Soul Mole can be a way to either get the soul advantage early on (grabbing king-of-the-hill souls before the enemy) or increase your early-game efficiency overall. (eg if freestanding souls are down a path, instead of diverting to pick them up you just Soul Mole them) Even the fact that Soul Mole requires you're Level 3 isn't a lethal flaw with this point; you can adjust the starting level in multiplayer, and there's several maps where the default setting is Level 3.

I'm skeptical it's valuable enough on that basis to make up for the Taurock's flaws, mind, but it really is the case that the campaign makes it look even worse than it actually is.

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The mission itself is a joke. You've got a 2v1 against an enemy wizard, their defenses are limited, their Altar isn't very far away, oh and if you did the previous James mission you have Sirocco. Sirocco is, as I touched on in the previous mission, a dragon but even more powerful -among other points she has more than 90% in all her resistances while having just under 7000 HP. If Sirocco ever dies without it being because of something like Death being cast, you are a screw-up on an epic scale. And you can see her two-shotting Manaliths in this video! She's insanely lethal. (When her melee flier AI is being cooperative, anyway) And she has Breath of Life, which lets her revive friendly corpses exactly as per Animate Dead, so even though this is going to be a mono-James run I can still basically treat other heroes as disposable and so on, just as I did in the Charnel run.

And if you do things right, she'll stick with you throughout the entire game. As it happens, I'm not doing things right in this run -you need to build up more Persephone 'karma' than I'm getting in this run, whether by doing Persephone missions or getting Boons from Persephone, such as the one I didn't get on James' first mission... but I want to show off something odd to do with Sirocco.

'Karma' is an odd mechanic exclusive to the campaign. The main thing it does is control which gods you can choose missions from in the early portion of the campaign; you start with a certain amount of karma with each god, and each time you take a mission it makes that god happier with you and tends to make all the other gods unhappier with you. Eldred isn't kidding when he says, after the first mission, that he'd earned the favor of one god but the ire of four; that's an actual mechanic! Once your karma with a given god drops far enough, that god stops offering you missions until you reach the portion of the campaign where karma stops affecting mission access entirely. (In theory you could get your karma back up, but the way things are constructed it isn't feasible to anger a god and then make them happy enough to give you missions again prior to the point where karma stops influencing mission access)

Beyond that, karma gets pretty fiddly. The exact values you get per god for doing a given mission is actually specific for each mission; most of them are '+2 to the god you worked for, -1 for everyone else', but sometimes a mission will anger a specific god more than usual, sometimes a god won't care either way about you doing some other god's mission, and in a handful of cases you'll actually make another god happy by doing the mission -humorously, though James is the god who tries to get along with people most and Charnel is the maim-torture-kill god, karma-wise Charnel is the god who has the most cases of making other gods happy automatically (3 full missions; there's only two cases of a non-Charnel mission making a god other than the giver happier with you, and they're not even on the same god), and he's one of the better gods at having his missions not anger other gods. Don't believe me? Check the wiki's tables yourself.

Boons also factor into karma; the wiki is somewhat inconsistent on this, with the karma page making a blanket statement about how you get +2 karma to whichever god granted you the Boon, while the Boon page itself only lists karma modifications on some of the Boons. I'm not sure if the Boon page is simply incomplete or the karma page is inaccurate or misleading, but it's not super important because the fifth mission onward is the point where karma stops affecting mission access, making it so there's not really numbers worth crunching; like I said earlier, it's not feasible to lose a god and then get them back karma-wise, because there's only one case where you can have a god withhold Mission 3 and it's not possible to get a karma boost with that god in any possible third mission.

Karma also matters for a handful of specific other things, such as how Sirocco will leave you if your Persephone karma drops far enough (I think Gammel has something similar going on with James karma?), but also back in Charnel Mission 4 I mentioned that the Persephone units could potentially join you; this was based on your Persephone karma. Have it high enough, and there you go they like you enough to work under you. (Now kill them anyway so you can get the Charnel Boon) There's... not many examples though. It's a mechanic I suspect the developers intended to make fairly pervasive, and in actuality its influence is so limited I was quite surprised when I ran across the karma page on the Sacrifice wiki -it wasn't an 'aha!' moment, but rather a 'wait, this is a mechanic?' moment. Which is to say it's fairly easy to play through every mission of the campaign multiple times and never notice its influence.

Anyway, Seerix herself is one of the more underwhelming wizards. Her entire thing is she slaps in a few Persephone spells based on which mission she's in, only one of which is particularly good. (And it's not one she has in this mission) No stat bonuses. No seriously out-of-depth spells. Worse, one of her usual bonus spells -though she didn't seem to have it in this mission- is pretty clearly worse than its Charnel counterpart!

I was frankly expecting this video to be literally 5 minutes long, between Seerix being underwhelming and Sirocco being insanely overpowered for this stage of the game, and I wouldn't have been far off if Seerix hadn't interrupted that first Desecration attempt without me noticing.

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Plot-wise, the game has, surprisingly, let us see Jadugarr with a sympathetic angle. Not... much of one, as we're not really getting details, but he's not simply an enemy wizard. Though do note that he's already using the Marduk/Ashur team color, which for a first-time player wouldn't necessarily mean anything. You'd have to have done the first couple of missions such that you saw all the god default team colors to be able to go 'wait a minute'. And even then, it would be easy to think Jadugarr just has a different team color because he's not aligned with a god. Realistically, the first time you might make this connection is after you've played a later mission where you saw Ashur cultists, or Hachimen working for Marduk, or the final mission with Marduk himself.

Importantly, we've gotten an idea of why Jadugarr sided with the literally apocalyptic demons; he thinks the gods are bad news and would rather have a godless world, which requires a fair amount of power. One has to wonder if Marduk's arrival isn't connected to Jadugarr's issues with the gods, given what we saw in the Charnel route...

See you next James mission.