Sacrifice: Pyro Mission 10

No new stuff, as usual. The mission is the same as ever mechanically, though this time I ended up accidentally showing off the Megalith zapping your stuff if Marduk has any Manaliths. I was trying to see what happens if you manage to destroy all the Manaliths before tripping Zyzyx's speech and... now that I think about it, I think what happened was I got inside the range that would trip Zyzyx's speech, and then Marduk summoned his Manalith. Normally you don't get zapped because the zap range is less than the cinema trigger range. Which would also explain why the cinema didn't provide my units invulnerability like these cinemas usually do.

So instead I'll be taking this opportunity to talk about Pyro as a 'faction', same as the prior two gods.

The mission itself actually serves to illustrate one aspect of Pyro; not only is Pyro very offensively oriented in general, but a Pyro-heavy build places a lot of your firepower on your wizard, and indeed your wizard can't do much other than spit out damage. This gives a Pyro-heavy build a particularly difficult beginning for this mission since Marduk is so resistant to spell damage it's not worth trying to hit him with them, with even Volcano unlikely to actually kill him unless he insists on being really stupid. (Which is, admittedly, totally possible) It also means Pyro-centric wizards tend to perform a bit better at lower soul counts, where army strength is less influential.

From a campaign perspective in particular, this makes a Pyro-focused build fairly strong. The campaign generally places you with a noticeably lower soul count than your opposition, but a Pyro-heavy wizard is pretty dang good at killing armies with just their wizard. The one tricky bit is that since wizards are heavily resistant to spell damage, it can be a problem to actually kill off the enemy wizard so you can successfully steal souls -you might have noticed over the course of the run I trended toward picking units particularly good at killing wizards, most notably Pyromaniacs and Warmongers. Since my wizard could handle a lot of the anti-army damage output, it made sense.

By a similar token, Pyro's units tending to be fragile but hard-hitting tends to help a lot at getting a foothold on the soul game. Once you have overwhelming force it's fairly inconvenient -you'll still end up with units dying and needing to be replaced where other gods' forces would survive- but that's not too bad given the initial portion of a mission is usually the hardest part.

It's also worth pointing out that Pyro's forces as a whole are more fragile than you might think relative to other gods in spite of having no units deviate from his god stat pattern. While a lot of unit archetypes are found on every god (eg artillery, basic melee, basic ranged, basic flier), there's a portion that aren't; in Pyro's case, he doesn't have anything equivalent to the Jabberocky, which is a representative of the second-most-durable unit archetype in the game. Then there's more unusual abilities to consider; Charnel also doesn't technically have a unit equivalent to the Jabberocky, but Charnel not only has leeching in general but Netherfiends can Devour Souls to boost their durability, allowing them to potentially fill such a role anyway. Similarly, the Firefist is a representative of an archetype that is normally quite durable, but where the Netherfiend and Taurock both have durability-enhancing qualities (Devour Soul for the Netherfiend, the rising resistance as HP drops for the Taurock), the Firefist instead has an offense-enhancing quality. (Rising damage as HP drops) Pyro's forces are, in statlines, actually tied for the position of 'worst HP', but the other god who shares the 80% base HP value has their secondary qualities include some propping up of durability.

Unlike some of the other gods, Pyro doesn't really have any individual spells that are heavily defining in and of themselves. It really is the trends in his stuff, not the details of individual spells or units, that matter.

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So. Pyro narrative stuff.

I've been ragging on how the game keeps trying to get the player to hate Pyro in Pyro's own route, and mostly keeps botching it. The incompetence of the handling bugs me all by itself, but what makes it worse is that the drive behind the whole thing is that the dev team seems to have intended Pyro to be a Captain Planet villain, Big Business polluting the land and Using Up The Little People and so on. His enmity with Persephone, who is presented in some ways -and I do mean some ways, it's so minor it took me until halfway through making these posts/videos to have this aspect occur to me as being relevant- as being a 'nature god', while Pyro is heavily an industrialist who demolishes woodlands to make way for factories and so on.

The problem is Pyro is in the middle of the world of Sacrifice. Pyro is a pretty terrible person and I wouldn't want him ruling over the world if this were all real, but out of the gods he's morally squarely in the middle, or even second-best, yet no one else bar Marduk gets as much effort put into demonizing them as Pyro does. Trying so much harder to get the audience to hate Big Businessman than to hate Kill And Torture For Giggles Man is demented. And the other god I place as firmly worse than Pyro is arguably even worse than Charnel!

If Pyro was placed among a different set of gods, a set where everybody else is less awful than he is, I'd still be bothered by the mishandling of various bits, but it would be a 'learning your craft' sort of problem. I find it a lot harder to forgive outright trying to argue that Big Business is worse than torture-murder-for-lulz, let alone the other god we'll be getting to.

At least it's funny having Zyzyx be all 'you're going to be emperor again?' at the end. That's... something.

So... death, earth, fire. How about air, in pursuit of knowledge?