Sacrifice: Stratos Mission 2

For this mission, Stratos provides...


Vortick
600 Mana, 2 Souls

The Vortick is, uuuuh, mixed.

On the one hand, Vorticks can be legitimately amazing. They do splash damage that disrupts targets in a surprisingly large area, and are one of the most likely units in the entire game to launch enemies out into the abyss, which is of course fantastic to have happen. Groups of them can continuously juggle an enemy wizard such that they can't do anything (And shield spells are no protection!), freeing you up to steal souls unmolested, and indeed they're prone to disabling fairly sizable numbers of units at once. This makes their peak utility much greater than, say, the Necryl, and in fact used well they're arguably the clear best of the level 2 unit options.

On the other hand, their whirlwind is completely indiscriminate. If you're using Vorticks, your melee units are not going to be getting much work done if you're not bothering to micromanage things so the melee units are targeting units the Vorticks are not targeting, and even with micromanagement your melee will be blocked off from helping as eg enemy numbers drop. If you're going to go heavy on Vorticks, an argument can be made you shouldn't bother with melee at all. They're also of shaky effectiveness against air units (Air units will still be briefly disrupted, but much more briefly than ground units. Critically, a Vortick can't abyss a flier), and of course the indiscriminate nature of their whirlwind can launch your units into the abyss too!

As such, Vorticks require a certain style of army and overall play to be leveraged effectively, and outside that situation they can outright backfire with fairly catastrophic results. This is particularly true in campaign play where they're potentially launching a hero to their death -which means their acquisition is inconveniently timed since this mission is providing you a grounded melee hero who is very useful and whose death will also instantly fail you the mission. It's one of the worst introductions to a new unit in the entire game, possibly the worst.

As usual with ground ranged units, Vorticks are notably weak to melee damage.

I personally like Vorticks a lot, but I tend to go for range-spam armies anyway and often find enemy wizards to be the most annoying part of their forces. Other playstyles may well find them worse than useless, which is too bad since they're paired with...


Air Shield
400 Mana

Air Shield is the best overall shield, full stop. It halves the damage you take from attacks, it lasts a full minute with a cooldown of a mere 73 seconds meaning you spend very little time actually vulnerable (13 seconds), and on top of all that it shoves enemies away from you if they get nearby you, making it extremely difficult for melee units to actually attack you.

Other shields have niche advantages over Air Shield, but if you're picking level 2 based on your shield and you don't want a specific advantage (eg Skin of Stone's even greater damage reduction) Air Shield is your go-to choice. Period.

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The mission is... odd. You actually need to let that Sac Doctor start carrying off Lord Surtur -it was lucky I fired Lightning off such that it got caught on terrain that first time, because I'm pretty sure I'd have actually failed the mission otherwise.

You start with no souls at all, just your Manahoars and a Vortick, but then you get a giant pile of Persephone units and also Acheron's forces will be free for the taking, so in actual terms you have fairly overwhelming force, especially since Surtur himself is a very powerful hero (90+% resistances to all damage and based on a decently powerful mid-end unit) able to stomp Acheron and his forces nearly singlehandedly.

And then there's the Boon condition, which the game kinda hints at if you do get it -you need at least one of the Persephone units to survive... though the Scarabs don't count. It has to be a Ranger or Druid. That's why you see me twice trying to send off a Persephone unit to my Altar, though in actuality what I should've done is kept one in the initial Surtur battle site because Acheron will never go there of his own volition.

The overall result is that in some ways the mission is really just a straightforward 1v1 with you having overwhelming firepower and yet in other ways is just weird. Like the fact that you have a massive Persephone force even though this is a Stratos mission.

Regardless, it's pretty easy. Just remember that zapping Acheron with spells is a waste of time and mana, and also be careful to avoid any possibility of Surtur being launched into the abyss by a Vortick. Frankly, you would be completely justified in outright killing your starting Vortick for safety's sake. It's not even hard; just order Surtur to attack it. (T is the default shortcut for attack/attack-move orders)

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Narratively, we've discovered Abraxus is married to, uh, Surtur. We'll find out what Surtur is later, but Abraxus herself is who-knows-what, so... cross-species romance, yay?

This bothers me a little as it's that thing fiction does of tending to make a point of going 'look, even though this female character is able to kick butt and take names she's still "girly" in some sense or another'. The only male wizard whose love life ever gets touched on is Buta, and it comes up in reference to Sorcha and in fact it does not come up in Buta's introduction but rather Sorcha herself, with Sorcha being the other female wizard who is presented as being in a position of serious power. (Empress Sorcha, ruler of Pyroborea, where Buta is an ambassador and Hachimen are mercenaries. Contrast this with Shakti being the new kid on the block, and Seerix and Charlotte being the junior wizards of their gods) It's a relatively low-key example, but it still annoys me, especially as there's a voyeuristic element to it. Male wizards' romantic lives are private, period, but badass female wizards' romantic lives are worth gossiping about. Since wizards and gods are largely handled by the narrative as the only people that matter, the way the game elects to handle them is far more significant than eg your hero list, let alone faceless civilians.

There's also the other trend of body shape issues. Buta is fat. Surtur is some weird monster creature with trees growing out his back and his face in his chest and spikes for arms and all. Sorcha is... aside her yellow skin, a tall and thin human woman with a large chest and yadda. Abraxus is a bit less blatant -her outfit isn't outright stripperific like Sorcha's is- but she still cleaves to a more humanoid body plan that's tall and thin and with breasts clearly existent. This double standard is fairly typical of fiction, where inhuman beings that are treated as people and who are male are allowed to significantly deviate from even a humanoid body plan let alone an attractive one, while female examples are... not.

The fact that there are individual examples doesn't bother me in and of itself, but Sacrifice doesn't have exceptions. Just swapping Charlotte and Grakkus as far as which one is James' prime wizard and which one is his errand boy would help on the topic of the game having powerful women who the plot directly treats with less respect and it wouldn't even change much of anything -it's honestly easy to forget which is supposed to be the senior wizard since it never matters- and would incidentally buck another trend I'm going to be criticizing down the line. Similarly, touching on the romantic life of one of the male wizards, where said male wizard follows a basically-human body plan and their love interest is outright monstrous, would have me more inclined to go 'okay, Sacrifice is just a world where species and body plan isn't terribly important. It's not a sexist thing'.

But... they are consistent patterns, and they do tie into a thing I'll be covering later. So... this stuff bothers me.

Oh, and we're properly seeing in action that Persephone and Stratos are working together as early as mission 2. That matters, I suppose.

See you next Stratos mission.