Sacrifice: Stratos Mission 3

For this mission, Stratos provides...


Squall
700 Mana, 2 Souls

The Squall is actually Stratos' representative of the sniper archetype, showing up surprisingly early. Its damage isn't particularly good, and in particular mobs of them don't work nearly so well together as mobs of other snipers do, as the Squall knocks its target down and knocks it back, which means if a group of Squalls fires on a target usually one hit lands and then the rest miss because the target was shoved out of the area they were targeting.

This is a contributing factor to my tendency in the campaign to use mobs of Braniacs; having a few Squalls is good for disrupting enemies, but large mobs of them are outright interfering with each other.

This also illustrates a bit of a frustrating issue with Stratos' units, in that a lot of them are anti-synergistic with other Stratos units. You don't really want Vorticks and Squalls and Braniacs in your force; the Vorticks and Squalls end up interfering with the other units' ability to do damage and the collective combination of knockdown/knockback/launching does not stack in any kind of favorable way. If a Vortick launches some units in an area Squalls are firing on, not only are the Squalls unlikely to even land hits in the first place but if they do manage to catch anything mid-air the unit won't actually suffer knockback -if they did, this would be a useful combination for pushing enemies into the abyss. As-is... they just play poorly with each other. And we're not done meeting Stratos units that don't play nice with each other!

In a rainbow force, though, Squalls can be quite nice. They're reasonably accurate, the knockback can particularly help keep melee units off your ranged line, and using this level to get a disruptive unit can open up options at other levels.

As usual with ground ranged units, they're quite weak to melee damage, taking triple damage.


Freeze
500 Mana

Freeze is a fairly quirky spell. For starters, its duration is actually variable based on the target's maximum health -a Rhinok will only stay frozen for slightly longer than 2 seconds, whereas the theoretical upper limit on duration is 40 seconds on Stratos' and Pyro's basic fliers. More HP equals a shorter duration, which among other points means it's generally most useful against Pyro and Stratos forces and least useful against James forces.

You'll almost never see the basic flier scenario of 40 seconds for two reasons. First of all, Freeze also instantly ends if the unit takes damage, which means it plays poorly with splash damage units and plays poorly with not bothering to micro your army. (This is a recurring theme with Stratos; micromanagement is essential. It's fairly annoying, honestly) Secondly, when used on units that are mid-air, the Freeze effect ends once they hit the ground, with flying units dropping right out of the sky.

Freeze also actually does do damage, though it's easy to overlook because it does it when it ends rather than when cast, and also because the damage amount is trivial.

Freeze is mostly useful for its lockdown effect, though, as a frozen unit is completely unable to do anything. With good timing, it can also be used to interrupt enemy wizard spells -this is most useful once you hit level 8, as Freeze's 4 second casting period is only really quick enough to reliably interrupt spells from level 8, which tend to have casting periods on the order of 9 seconds, giving you plenty of time to notice they're being cast, have a cooldown finish, and then use Freeze to interrupt it anyway.

A secondary use of Freeze is that it can be used to drop fliers into the abyss. As with the Basilisk's petrification effect, this is of limited utility -often, a damaging spell could be used to achieve the same result, particularly since most of the tougher fliers are actively vulnerable to spell damage. Still, it's something to keep in mind.

Another effect of Freeze that's easy to overlook is that it blocks certain friendly target behaviors. You can't Heal a frozen unit, for example. It's easy to overlook because it's not very useful, and several of the best beneficial effects tend to ignore it. I haven't discussed it yet, but Persephone's Rainbow is an example; you can't have it target a frozen unit, but it's perfectly able to target them on its own past the initial target, right through a Freeze. I dunno, maybe there's some way to leverage this particular aspect of Freeze I'm overlooking, but I genuinely considered not mentioning it because it's that irrelevant.

Being a spell for disabling targets, Freeze is naturally blocked by wizard shields.

I'm personally not very fond of Freeze, particularly in the context of a mono-Stratos build as Stratos has a ton of area-of-effect options, making it hard to avoid accidentally breaking the ice. Still, it has its uses, and notably you can cast it on the move.

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The mission itself is kinda interesting in concept but fairly straightforward in execution. You have a 1v1 with Sorcha, and then you have a 2v1 with Buta that's a complete joke because seriously it's a 2v1 and his forces are not remotely large enough to favor him. The only interesting wrinkle is that since Abraxus and Buta's fight is off on its own little island with no land route to your Altar, you'll have to set up a Shrine if you want to steal Buta's souls for yourself. This is... probably unnecessary, so whatever.

The Boon is fairly straightforward; banish Sorcha quickly. If you're quick, you get a Boon. If not, you don't. It's really not that hard, particularly since the game is kind enough to have various non-Sorcha-aligned Pyro forces lying around for you to murder and steal the souls of, making it fairly easy to reach an overwhelming number of souls.

That portal actually is the way you're meant to reach Abraxus and Buta, but I hadn't remembered that for sure and honestly it's way less of a pain to just Teleport to one of Abraxus' structures than it is to herd your troops into walking into the portal to join you. Your land units get really confused once you're on a different chunk of terrain from them, and trying to order them through the portal if you're on the other side of it is a pain.

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Narratively, we got to be voyeurs on Abraxus and Surtur's reunion, with an uncomfortable sexual undertone to the ensuing dialogue I only showed off because I'm shooting for kinda-sorta-not-really completionism for these videos.

That's really about all this mission has. Fight Pyro, creepily listen in on two lovers reuniting. I'm... not a fan of it.

See you next Stratos mission.