Sacrifice: James Mission 6

For this mission, James provides...


Boulderdash
1100 Mana, 4 Souls

The Boulderdash is a sniper, like the Deadeye, firing in more or less a straight line at extreme ranges. It's placed in the slot normally reserved for artillery, just as James' artillery is placed where normally snipers are, and honestly the Boulderdash tends to function as artillery in spite of its lack of technical splash. It's still a good idea in a mono-James build to mix in some Flummox for the knockdown effect, but Boulderdash fire three shots (Which lets them hit multiple targets anyway), are reasonably accurate, and are usually at least as effective as artillery is at actually killing things, oftentimes far more so such as with wizards.

Unlike the Deadeye, the Boulderdash doesn't really do anything interesting. Firing three shots at once is its entire gimmick. It's a plenty good gimmick, and in particular Boulderdash lines aren't very susceptible to a handful of melee units trying to get in among them because that just leads to the melee being shotgunned to death. The actual shot mechanics are a bit surprising; what the Boulderdash actually does is fire a single shot that, after traveling a very short distance, splits into three separate shots. This is always a horizontally-spread split, with a middle shot staying on course and the other two shots drifting to the left and right. This is very advantageous behavior, as it's fairly rare for an enemy to be nearby the original target but displaced significantly vertically; basically the only time you'll see that happen is when there's a very large number of ranged fliers, as they can potentially end up stacking vertically in an attempt to get line of fire on targets, and there will still be units horizontal to the target in such a situation. Notably, from what I can tell getting within the pre-split range just seems to result in taking damage from all three projectiles instead of preventing the split. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it results in taking additional damage from the pre-split projectile itself, though I've never done any kind of thorough testing on the topic.

Regardless, the Boulderdash is quite reliably good, and its splitting projectiles also make it hard for targets to actually dodge its shots. Even if the central shot misses, whether due to the target changing its direction or due to the Boulderdash rolling poorly, it's not unusual for the target to end up slapped by one of the side shots anyway.

As is typical with ground ranged units, the Boulderdash does take a fair amount of extra damage from melee attacks (4x) if they do manage to get close enough to start slamming them, but seriously it's pretty hard to actually pull that off against a dense enough line of Boulderdashes.

It's worth reiterating that even though artillery units fire in a parabolic arc, they still use straight-line-of-sight to determine if they can shoot units like other ranged units do. This is a big part of why the Boulderdash tends to displace Flummox in a mono-James force; the Flummox don't leverage their arcing fire to attack over walls, through trees, or even at targets partially obscured by hills. In conjunction with the Boulderdash being more accurate, firing faster-moving projectiles, having comparable range and far superior lethality... the Flummox is relegated to a supporting role.


Wall of Spikes
1200 Mana

Wall of Spikes is James wall spell, and unlike Wailing Wall it's actually a consistent barrier to non-fliers, inflicting damage and knocking down units that wander into its range. After a given unit has been hit by Wall of Spikes, there's a delay before it can be hit again -for units with particularly long recovery animations, they can outright end up stunlocked by Wall of Spikes, but for units with reasonably fast recovery animations and decent speed it's potentially possible for them to accept a hit and keep going. If you can get them to try anyway, which is pretty hard.

It can also catch fliers for damage. Melee fliers and ultimate units tend to fly low enough to be caught just on that basis, but even basic ranged fliers can end up getting clipped if the Wall of Spikes is, for example, placed up a slope. Flying units just don't change their vertical height that quickly in Sacrifice.

Wall of Spikes is an okay wall. It has one of the longer widths of the walls, and thanks to the knockdown effect even tough units (eg wizards) can't just casually stroll through it. I find Wailing Wall a lot more useful in the campaign, but Wall of Spikes is probably the second-best wall in the campaign, and possibly the best against human opponents.

This spell level set is, in fact, one of James' best ones.

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The mission itself is another godawful James mission. It's directly equivalent to when we attacked Pyro under Charnel, only for some reason the Manalith with a bunch of Guardians in the middle of the Magnifriers starts the mission as an unused Manafount and the village lacks a scripted Erupt while having some actual villagers, making it more worthwhile to bother with the area. Sounds like it should be easier, especially since Troggs are completely unaffected by the Magnifriers, right?

Unfortunately, James is pretty uniformly in a bad matchup against Pyro. Pyro's damage advantage tends to more than offset James' durability advantage, Pyro has multiple options that substantially bypass damage resistance (Making eg Taurock's climbing damage resistance nearly worthless when dealing with Pyro forces), and the map's hugeness makes it all the more frustrating to do anything. Not to mention the Magnifriers quite clearly have more range than in the Charnel run, for whatever reason.

The result is that the mission is tedious at best and more likely to be infuriating. I had to take four stabs at this mission to get it done, partly because Gammel and Faestus -and yes Faestus still turncoats and gives his godawful advice, though in a mono-James run it might help you stumble into an intelligible strategy- kept dying but mostly because the mission is just obnoxious. Notably, Buta is activated by attacking his stuff, including the Magnifriers, so even though I could throw a few Troggs off to handle the Magnifriers effortlessly in theory, in actuality I had to deal with Sorcha first if I wanted to avoid a 2v1 situation, and critically Buta has an obnoxious habit of interrupting Trogg attempts to take down the Magnifriers. Since the Magnifriers have such extreme range, high damage, and James' forces are slow, not being able to cleanly deal with them with Troggs is incredibly frustrating, especially given I'm almost completely certain 'use Troggs' really is meant to be the optimal solution here.

Also notice that if you do James mission 5, you're locked into this mission and the next one. It's really annoying, and it limits your options for prepping for this and the following mission even in a rainbow run.

You might also notice that Sirocco isn't around. She'd still be here if I'd gotten the Boon on the first James mission -it's from Persephone and increases your karma with her- and of course in a rainbow run I could've done a mission or two under Persephone to bolster my karma with Persephone, but in this run we're done leveraging her wacky overpowered-ness. To be fair, I'd have eventually just sent her off with Gammel and Faestus simply due to Pyro's forces including too much hard-hitting damage over time effects, but it still would've been nice at the beginning of things...

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Plot-wise, we killed Pyro, and then learned that Mithras has been captured by Charnel for whatever reason.

This latter point is never explained, by the way. What was the goal? What prompted this? Is Charnel just fulfilling his kill the blasphemer/torture has its merits threats, or does he suspect Mithras has a connection to Marduk? Is he wanting to do something to Mithras because of the Ashur cultists using his prophecy to recruit people?

It feels like a plotpoint that got decided on the basis of Charnel being set up as a lolevil character and then the fact that Charnel generally has more to his actions than that didn't get applied here.

See you next James mission.