Sacrifice: James Mission 5
Ikarus (Yes, it's spelled with a K)
1000 Mana, 3 Souls
The Ikarus is James' flying melee unit, like the Blight was Charnel's. It's overall stattier, and its resistances are more favorable, with only a modest weakness to ranged attacks and direct spell damage and a resistance to splash spell damage, in addition to significant resistance to melee. It's one of James' faster units, and it hits surprisingly hard when melee flier AI is bothering to cooperate, which isn't often as you can see in the videos yourself. Still, it's probably the overall best melee flier at being a melee flier, being the hardest hitting for the souls and all-around toughest, not only through James' HP advantage but because its spell resistances are more favorable than literally every other flier. Its poor speed can be a bit of a limitation for it, but the ease with which other melee fliers can be shot down means in real terms the Ikarus tends to perform better in actual combat, and it's still faster than wizards so one of the key things melee fliers do well the Ikarus can still pull off.
Its special ability, Stickbomb, just slows down a single unit. I... almost never bother to invest the micro into it, given how limited the effect is. Particularly since shield spells block it.
Gammel, incidentally, is an Ikarus. A bit ridiculous to get a souped-up version of a level 5 unit on the first mission...
As an aside, while I'm not particularly fond of the Ikarus as a unit, as a visual it's fairly fantastic. It's easy to overlook it most of the time, but the Ikarus is really meant to be pretty much exactly what its name might suggest -a regular ground-bound humanoid of some kind that's flying using 'wings' that are literally just regular human-type arms with feathers glued on and a wooden framework. Sacrifice leans in a comical direction overall, but the Ikarus is one of the few cases where when I noticed what was supposed to be happening I just about burst out laughing, having spent ages dismissing them as some generic bird-thing.
Halo of Earth
1000 Mana
Halo of Earth summons 6 Rocks that spin around the casting wizard for a while and will autonomously launch themselves one at a time at nearby enemies.
Halo of Earth is basically your go-to replacement to Rock. It's not nearly as bad about being intercepted, it's something you can cast shortly before combat is properly engaged to then autonomously dish out solid damage to whatever gets nearby, it still does some splash damage, and it can actually be Shenanigans-ed into brutally ripping through Guardianed Manaliths by casting it while you're right up against the Manalith to dish out a shocking amount of damage the instant the spell is finished.
It can be a bit awkward if you're not using it right, but it's one of James' more straightforwardly good spells with only minor qualifiers.
One thing worth pointing out is that so long as one rock is in pursuit of a target, the other rocks won't launch at that particular target, but Halo of Earth is perfectly happy to launch its five rocks at five different units at once. This means its burst damage against individual targets tends to be poor, but its potential to for example tear apart a mob of fliers is actually quite solid.
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The mission itself is fairly obnoxious. If you want the Boon, you're actually supposed to Desecrate Buta's Altar and then go after the Pyrodraulic Dynamo, which wouldn't be a big deal if this were like the Charnel version I showed off before where you have to banish both wizards and also destroy the Dynamo. Unlike that mission, in this mission the Pyrodraulic Dynamo can directly target you deliberately if you're in certain parts of the map, which is likely to kill you and much of your army with no real warning. That would suck, but destroying the Dynamo also just plain ends the mission, unlike every other 'destroy the Pyrodraulic Dynamo' mission in the entire game, something the game fails to properly convey.
It's not even all that hard a mission, with Buta taking forever to get around to attacking you and various unattended small combat groups hanging out to harvest souls from, but the Pyrodraulic Dynamo is just obnoxious to deal with, and it's ridiculously well-defended, even before you consider Buta cheat-teleporting in front of it to defend it.
This is also the first mission Sirocco and Gamel are in real danger of dying -this mission is what made it extremely clear to me that damage-over-time effects do, in fact, not respect resistances, as a good number of the Pyro units on this mission lean heavily on damage over time to deliver damage. My first stab at this mission actually got aborted when Sirocco went from full health to dead in ten seconds or so during the attack on the Dynamo itself.
On the 'plus' side, this mission serves to 'prove' how useful Soul Mole can be -its range is huge, and so when dealing with something like the Pyrodraulic Dynamo where there's a huge area that's not safe for anyone to approach it actually can be legitimately useful for retrieving souls. I suspect this is, in fact, the entire reason this James mission alters the Dynamo's behavior; to try to show off Soul Mole's utility.
... as an aside, I hadn't realized until drawing up these posts how James' missions are pretty consistently a mess on a design level.
Anyway, as a bonus video here's my second try at the mission where Gamel died.
Also note that my very next mission is locked as James as well. This almost never happens in the campaign, and it's pretty much always annoying when it does happen.
Anyway, you might also notice in both videos I make something of a habit of keeping some souls on hand and summoning when I'm about to fight. This is a useful trick for reducing how problematic James' stuff being slow is, though obviously it's not okay or practical to hold your entire supply of souls in reserve.
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Plot-wise, we learned about a Pyrodraulic Dynamo prototype, destroyed it, and promptly learned -as is supported by other missions in this game- that doing so was more or less completely pointless. Okay? What was the point of this?
Oh, and Stratos made a comment in response to James' humanitarian concerns that wasn't terribly humanitarian in tone. We already know from the Charnel route that in at least one version of events he's secretly working against Persephone and probably also James... but it's still worth noting that Stratos is either genuinely a bit clueless about James' actual meaning or is playing the fool and pretending to misunderstand, expecting no one to call him on it.
See you next James mission.
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