Sacrifice: Stratos Mission 1

As per usual with the first level, Stratos provides four spells specific to him in this mission, but first there's the matter of Stratos' general statline -his units uniformly have 80% of normal HP (Like Pyro's forces) and with one exception uniformly move 25% faster than equivalent units on other gods. Aside James' forces, of course, which Stratos' forces move nearly twice as fast as.

The specific spells are...


Frostwolf
300 Mana, 1 soul

The Frostwolf's one unique quality is having inherent access to Run Away, which works much like it does on Flame Minions -you click the ability and your units with the ability burn some mana to dramatically boost their speed for a while. In the case of the Frostwolf, it's a lot more inherently useful, letting groups of them charge into melee with enemy ranged forces and helping offset their fragility. They're obviously pretty terrible at melee-on-melee fights, but they're probably the best of the basic melee units for clearing out enemy ranged units -with good timing and maybe a little micromanagement, you can even use them to deal with artillery blobs fairly effectively! Furthermore, since Sacrifice uses a fairly physics-y approach to ranged attacks, Frostwolves being a very small unit means ranged units can have a surprisingly difficult time taking them out in spite of their poor durability. Being slightly resistant to ranged damage is just a bonus, honestly.

This means they actually stay relevant for longer than you might expect, unlike eg Scythes, particularly since they don't really have any competition aside the player using Speed Up on a middling-strength melee unit. They're also quite a good option for Manalith raiding, albeit as previously covered this has limited utility in the campaign.

I prefer other basic melee units, personally, but Frostwolves are not remotely bad.


Sylph
300 Mana, 1 Soul

The Sylph is fairly terrible. Their 'stealth' special ability doesn't do what you might expect of making them invisible -it makes them untargetable, but only to spells and ranged attacks. This means splash damage, terrain-targeted spells, and of course melee units are all perfectly capable of killing them.

More importantly, while they have a longer range than all the basic ranged units we've covered so far, they fire a slow-moving projectile with eeeeh accuracy, and their projectile isn't particularly large or anything. They will be missing a lot.

I don't consider them to be the worst basic ranged unit, but that's because Persephone's is even more awful.

As usual for ground ranged units, they're painfully weak to melee damage. (x3 damage)


Brainiac
300 Mana, 1 Soul

The Brainiac is a stupendously effective anti-wizard unit and groups of them can easily stunlock individual large units, allowing them to stay relevant all the way into the endgame. This is thanks to their attack knocking down impacted units, interrupting spellcasting, attack animations, and temporarily immobilizing the target, which makes it easier for follow-up strikes to hit to boot. They also have the longest range of all basic fliers, able to fire from typical middling ranged unit ranges where other basic fliers are all harshly limited in range. They're fragile, of course, and eventually it becomes risky to actually field large groups of them due to splash attacks becoming increasingly accessible, but I've had swarms of Brainiacs prove effective up through the fifth mission in the campaign. It's only really once artillery shows up that they're relegated to a supporting role, something worth investing a handful of souls into and directing at enemy wizards and no more.

In conjunction with how bad Sylphs are, it's pretty normal for me to not even bother summoning Sylphs, having Brainiacs fill the role instead.

Brainiacs are my personal favorite basic flying unit, really. They're good, they stay good for a long time, and their poor HP doesn't matter much as a disadvantage since all level 1 fliers are effortlessly one-shotted past the extremely early game -and even at the beginning, every basic flier is one-shotted by every basic attacking spell, not to mention fairly trivially killed by basic ranged fire.

As with other basic fliers, they take double damage from ranged damage, and are functionally more or less immune to ground melee because they largely refuse to fly low enough to be punched.


Lightning
200 Mana

Lightning is amazing.

It's the cheapest attack spell, as you can see, costing 2/3rds what every other basic attack spell costs. Indeed, Soul Mole and Manahoar are the only spells in the entire game that cost less than it does. Not only that, but it has the highest damage of all the basic attacking spells, and by far the shortest cooldown at 5.5 seconds. The usual cooldown is 13 seconds, and Rock's shorter-than-usual cooldown is still double Lightning's at 11 seconds. On top of all that, the strike comes out more or less instantly and intervening obstacles are almost never an issue -it can get caught on other units but it will almost never actually happen, and due to how fast it comes out it's fairly difficult for it to get caught on terrain.

The one and only caveat to this is that Lightning is the only basic attacking spell that has zero splash damage. This isn't much of a caveat; as you've probably noticed by now, while the other basic attacking spells do have splash, even against closely-clustered targets it's actually pretty uncommon to catch even two units, and stupendously rare to hit three, let alone any number above that. Fireball's somewhat larger splash radius is really the only one that's significant enough to matter -after all, if Rock or Insect Swarm does happen to catch two targets in one cast, Lightning will catch up to that with a second cast. Fireball is the only one of the bunch that semi-reliably catches 2+ targets at a time and so is meaningfully competitive with Lightning.

Even that stops mattering much as you get into higher levels. In the early game, basic attacking spells are a useful tool for dishing out damage to the enemy's army outright. As unit quality rises and other damage spells are acquired, they tend to be relegated to sniping Sac Doctors and maybe pounding heavy melee like Jabberockies if the enemy has it, and Lightning is the best there is at those jobs. Period.

As such, if you're picking your god for level 1 based solely on which basic attacking spell you want, Stratos is your guy. The main reason Pyro is at all competitive isn't so much that Fireball is somewhat competitive as it is that his units are overall a better set, which makes Fireball being second-place an acceptable trade-off for bolstering your basic unit quality.

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The mission is, like most of the first missions, a gentle introduction to the mechanics of the game. Relatively.

It's one of the less gentle introductions, since it actually is possible for Sara Bella to die here if you're careless., and therefore possible to fail the mission It's highly unlikely since her resistances are all 100% and there's very few enemies that do damage over time, but not only is there a Deadeye at one point, with poison of course bypassing and lowering resistances, but her actual HP is fairly low so the fact that some shred of damage manages to go through even her basic 100% resistance is enough to potentially get her killed. As such, even though there's no possibility of your Altar getting Desecrated, failing is actually a genuinely realistic possibility, particularly for a first-time player who eg sends Sara Bella on ahead because there's no enemies visible as yet.

The Boon requirement is annoying but kinda naturalistic to stumble into. If Sara Bella takes any damage at any point in the mission, you don't get the Boon. If she goes entirely untouched, you get the Boon. This is why I insisted on keeping her in back until I'd cleared a given area.

I personally prefer to take the Speed boost just so I'm not holding my Stratos forces back so much in a Stratos run. The fact that a wizard being fast is generally useful for scooping up souls, hurrying to Manaliths, etc, is also nice, and indeed if you're doing a rainbow run I consider this mission one of the best choices to open with, giving you a decent set of level 1 units, a fantastic basic attacking spell, and of course the movement speed boost will serve you well in all further missions, even if you're doing something like otherwise playing mono-James.

Anyway, so long as you keep Sara Bella out of the fighting, the mission is pretty trivial, and the game is nice enough to not spawn any ambushes in response to Sara Bella starting an analysis -or finishing one, for that matter- so you're never forced to have her in danger.

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Yeah, Stratos is kinda blatantly suspicious if you check out his first-mission briefing. (And it's worth pointing out that while I've beelined to a particular god in all these videos, the expected behavior is for you to listen to every briefing and then make a choice) Sure, talking about how any halfway civilized world would have him as the only god could be taken as just a puffed-up ego, but honestly even if we didn't already know about what a backstabber he is this would be an ominous introduction to him.

The mission is interesting, narratively, in a weird way. This is the only time ghosts crop up in the campaign, and it's never explored why there's ghosts here and not elsewhere. We just get Sara Bella informing us that ghosts are unusual, and that's that. That Persephone's decree that no one visit here for a thousand generations is actually upheld is also interesting -you'd think one of the other gods would've hopped in and taken it over since Persephone no longer wanted it, after all. Unfortunately, this too goes unexplored, beyond vaguely describing what Persephone did as a 'curse'. Same for the gods being outright unable to communicate here, though the topic is revisited. Sorta.

Similarly, Eldred's commentary about how he'd felt spiritually empty back in Jhera thanks to there being no gods there is interesting, but goes unexplored as well. It's most interesting to me for the point that the game itself seems to feel that a terrible god is better than no god at all -even though Jadugarr raised the question of 'hey, maybe the world would be better if there were no gods in it' back in that one James mission, he's not only treated surprisingly villainously by the game but more importantly it's only a minor spoiler at this point to explicate that a god always survives to the end of the story. You've already seen that even Pyro survives in spite of how much the game wants you to hate him. The game just plain doesn't do a storyline in which all the gods die, let alone treat such a scenario as a decent outcome.

There's... another piece of evidence for why I suspect this is a part of the game's philosophy, but it's over in the Persephone chain of events, so I'm not covering it just yet. I'll come back to this topic, though.

Anyway, see you next Stratos mission.