Sacrifice: James Mission 8
As with Charnel, James gives us two non-unit spells for this mission.
Bovine Intervention
1800 Mana
Mechanically, Bovine Intervention is basically the slightly-mechanically-worse version of Intestinal Vaporization, replacing slowing the target down with a knockdown shockwave when the target is killed. (Bovine Intervention also takes 2 seconds longer to cast) In real terms, it's probably better in multiplayer, as Intestinal Vaporization's leadup is really obvious, with the projectile being generated over the casting wizard's head and then spinning around the target as it gets bigger and more distorted-looking. Bovine Intervention's casting can easily be missed outright, and if you're not looking up -let's be real here, you're not- you'll have no idea anything is coming until the instant before the target is gibbed. Even if you do catch it being cast, there's the issue that it's difficult to tell what is being targeted up until it's basically too late to act on that information.
The similarities include that killing a target before Bovine Intervention hits prevents it from destroying the body. In Bovine Intervention's case, this can lead to jarring visuals if the cow was just about to hit, unlike Intestinal Vaporization where it just vanishing without fanfare isn't too jarring.
From a campaign perspective, Intestinal Vaporization is better, but I would be quite surprised if the opposite weren't true in multiplayer.
It's worth pointing out that Bovine Intervention -or Intestinal Vaporization works just as well here- actually boosts the utility of Soul Mole some. Contrary to what you might expect, Soul Mole can grab souls that are way up in the air and still falling, albeit in the rather silly manner of teleporting the soul(s) to the ground level once it gets below its target. This can let you gib a unit flying fairly high and then retrieve its soul quicker than you would if you had to wait for it to fall, making it more likely you avoid the enemy intercepting the souls.
Bovine Intervention is, of course, furthering the James-as-Earthworm-Jim reference (The Earthworm Jim series has a thing with cows, for whatever reason), in addition to being a pun on divine intervention.
Bore
1800 Mana
Bore targets a location, from which a buzzsaw spawns from and starts spinning around, eventually causing a decent-sized area of land to fall away. (This occurs in segments) The purpose of this is, of course, to dump enemy units into the abyss, instantly killing them and removing their souls from play, though it also has limited utility as a way to stall for a time as a kind of alternate wall spell. It's pretty much completely worthless against fliers, as even if they're currently landed they'll just take off before being gibbed, but against slow, high-soul-count creatures stuck on the ground Bore can be devastating if used well. The audio and visual cues for it are also sufficiently easy to overlook that if you're careful it's possible to get a good chunk of the way through it before your enemy notices they need to respond.
Unlike other abyssing spells, one use of Bore is that it can be used to dump corpses into the abyss. If you suspect the enemy is going to get back before a Sac Doctor can make off with a body, Boring it instead can be a good idea, especially if there's more than one high-value corpse in an area. This use is pretty limited in the campaign, in no small part due to Bore's late placement, but it's something unique to it.
As the video demonstrates, infrastructure has a surprisingly large area around it that can't fall away. This is particularly significant for the fact that it limits Bore's utility against Guardians, which would otherwise theoretically be easy targets thanks to their leash, but it also means you have to pay attention to such obstacles when targeting Bore in general. Even something like a random tree can block off a surprisingly large segment of terrain from falling.
In my experience, while Bore is a really cool spell, it's not actually a very effective one. The AI is dumb enough to occasionally let you get a good Bore off, but units don't tend to sit in large clumps for extended periods even when nobody is specifically managing them, and even slow units have plenty of time to move on. Even against the AI, the best way to convince enemy units to hold still is to have enemy melee ganging up on your own melee, at which point you're sacrificing some of your own souls. And generally it's easier, against the AI, to kill the wizard and Convert a bunch of bodies than it is to get a good Bore off, and more productive. I have difficulty imagining multiplayer being particularly favorable to it, bar maybe being a way to troll low-skill players who aren't able to pay enough attention to their environment to avoid the Bore.
It's too bad, because in terms of conceptual execution Bore is one of my favorite spells in the game, right behind Death.
As an aside, I find it vaguely amusing that Bore is a James spell best-suited to killing James forces, due to their poor movement speed, not to mention how nice it is to be bypassing their Health advantage.
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The mission itself is our first view of a capitol assault on Charnel. It's... also a very misleading one, as the other versions are noticeably harder. For whatever reason, in James' version in particular the Manalith by Acheron's Prime Altar begins the mission with no Guardians -in other versions, it has a massive blob of Styx and Abominations right out the gate, forcing you to punch through them if you want any chance of Desecrating Acheron's Prime Altar. It's kind of irritating, because such a massive number of Styx would be a perfect opportunity to show off Bore, even considering Bore's difficulties with Guardians. Instead, the mission is basically designed to make Bore as difficult to leverage as possible.
At least Bovine Intervention was being useful.
Speaking of Acheron, this is the first time we've seen him in battle. As Zyzyx says, his thing is that he's severely resistant to spell damage -in fact, except for a couple of specific missions, he's just as resistant to spell damage as Marduk is, at a full 90% resistance! (Though he's got no bonus HP) It's not really worth the mana to hurl damage spells at him unless they do something else that's your real goal; you'll have to rely on your army to kill him. It also means that Desecration damage is nearly irrelevant against him; where other wizards will generally be taken out eventually by a high-soul Desecration all on its own, Acheron doesn't care. You're going to have to hunt him down and finish him with units.
It's cropped up already, but it's especially obvious in this mission that Faestus hasn't been firing rockets for a few missions. I... don't really get the exact mechanics, but sometimes Faestus will inexplicably be patterned after one of Persephone's units instead of one of Pyro's units, replacing a rocket that sets the target on fire with a hitscan shot that has poor accuracy made up for by being hitscan. It was... pretty obnoxious in this mission, twice interfering with Bovine Intervention attempts...
Anyway, this version of the mission is really just... easy. If you're used to being able to finish off wizards who are near death with a spell, Acheron might give you trouble, but overall? Easy. And boring. It's kind of a disappointment, and I don't get why there's not a single Hellmouth anywhere on the map. Back when we assaulted Persephone under Charnel, the game was willing to give Yogo dragons early, why not the equivalent here?
At least it's not a broken design like so many of James' missions have been. Just... boring and overly-easy.
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Plot-wise, we see Eldred cottoning on, too late, to the fact that Charnel probably wasn't lying about Astaroth, as well as
This pisses me off for reasons we're not going to be getting to for a long time.
Regardless, we're far enough in the campaign I feel comfortable commenting that part of why I went with James as the second god is that from an outside perspective James tends to come across as an ineffectual whiner, whereas from an internal perspective we get to see that he's just focused a bit more internally and also was doing some investigating into Marduk-related matters. Stuff that you're just not going to see in other routes, because they don't provide a reason for a different version of Eldred to get into conflict with James. So I wanted to show how James looks from the outside and then show that it's not quite accurate. It's a nice little touch of how the writing is handled, one of the stronger examples of the game leveraging the expectation that you'll play through the game multiple times trying out different routes. A subtler, broader-scale version of stuff like the Astaroth bit, where you only know James is wrong to mistrust Charnel on this topic if you did the relevant Charnel mission.
There's better examples to come, too.
See you next James mission.
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