Sacrifice: Stratos Mission 5

For this mission, Stratos gives us pretty nice stuff.


Seraph
1000 Mana, 3 Souls

The Seraph's unique quality to separate it from other gods' melee fliers is that it can use Cage Pull on targets. I think Cage Pull does damage over time, and in any event it definitely pulls the target toward the Seraph. It's possible to pull units out into the abyss outright, though this can be a bit tricky since you can't directly order fliers to hover out over the abyss, and of course if you do get them out over the abyss you're risking them getting abyssed by being killed. A better way of trying to use Cage Pull for abyss shenanigans is to try to take advantage of curves or 'lakes' of abyss, so you can pull from solid ground. I mostly don't bother, as it involves a lot of micro, cooperative terrain, and isn't particularly soul-efficient. Maybe I'd appreciate it more against human opponents, but I'm a bit skeptical -I find it more likely human opponents would be more reliable about sniping Seraphs out of the sky before they can pull off a Cage Pull abyssing.

Cage Pull's uneven utility aside, the Seraph is arguably the best of the melee fliers in that the primary usage of melee fliers is Manalith-busting and the Seraph is fast while its fragility doesn't necessarily matter if you're raiding Manaliths with no guards at all. (Or whose guards are melee units -from what I gather, in multiplayer this is common)

As with the other melee fliers, the Seraph is 90% resistant to melee damage, mildly weak to ranged attacks, and takes doubled damage from direct spell damage. (But normal from splash spell damage)

Their utility in the campaign is questionable, but that's true of all the melee fliers so whatever.

On a completely different note, Seraphs are easily the single most annoying unit in the entire game from their combat dialogue. Every melee unit spits out a random stream of lines when in melee, but for many melee units these lines are vague grunts or dialogue you can barely even hear, and it's easy to tune it out. In the Seraph's case, their lines are all too loud and at a pitch that makes them especially difficult to ignore, and their attack rate is significant enough that one Seraph becomes an endless stream of irritating noise once they're in combat. What's particularly puzzling about it is that their regular dialogue doesn't stand out over other units in an equivalent way; they're no Warmonger screaming into your ears.


Soul Wind
500 Mana

Soul Wind is one of the best spells in the game, full stop.

At first glance, Soul Wind is Soul Mole with added functionality and a much higher cost, and I harped on Soul Mole being pretty iffy. However, that added functionality is 'does reasonable damage to all units in an area around it periodically while also stunning them momentarily'. Soul Wind is, in fact, one of the most cost-efficient mass damage spells in the game when used properly, with its only flaw being that you have to target a blue soul and if its one of your own units it will destroy the corpse and potentially let the enemy retrieve the soul -but the risk of retrieval is low. Where Soul Mole knocks over units that touch the mole, and thus a wizard being knocked down by it is probably a wizard who has stolen the soul, in Soul Wind's case the stunning effect is all around the soul, and may in fact prevent them from successfully closing to the soul.

That itself means it is far superior to Soul Mole for actual combat retrieval purposes. The cost difference rarely helps Soul Mole's case in real terms, as 500 Mana is fairly cheap by the time you're high enough level to have Soul Wind at all.

Then of course Soul Wind is doubling as a very effective damage spell, making it more 'slot-efficient' than Soul Mole is. Why have a Spell that's really only good for retrieving souls when you could have one that's good for retrieving souls and for dishing out serious damage?

And, again, it also stuns targets, as a thrown-in bonus!

I usually use Soul Wind over Chain Lightning once that's an option: you can move while casting Soul Wind, its cooldown is essentially nothing, the damage per target is worse but that's only if Soul Wind zaps a given target once and Soul Wind has no target limit and stuns targets and it has such a short cooldown you can spam Soul Wind repeatedly so the actual DPS is much higher. The risk of soul-stealing does mean you should ideally target it on eg dead Manahoars instead of dead Seraphs, but seriously, Soul Wind is amazing. It's so amazing the wiki outright has a note about how you can set a hotkey for manually dropping a blue soul and that you should do so, allowing you to activate Soul Wind on a moment's notice so long as you bother to hold a single soul in reserve.

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This is the worst-designed mission in the game.

First of all, it is completely possible for Hachimen and Buta's AI to work out such that one of them reaches 4 Manaliths off their initial set of Manafounts, no need for them to actually contest one of yours. So basically you can fail the mission in the opening minutes through no actual fault of yours, due entirely to sloppy mission design. I have no idea why they didn't just have the AI start with Manaliths such that this would be impossible.

Second of all, it's a 2v1 at all, and there's no quirks to the mission that help isolate them. Usually they'll both show up close together and incessantly pound away at your forces, scooping up their own souls and refusing to leave. For a mono-Stratos run in particular, you've got the issue that Stratos is honestly fairly bad at killing wizards -your units tend to be oriented toward disruption, not lethality, and while your spell firepower is high wizards take only half damage from spells. I was spamming Storm Giants in a desperate bid to let me kill wizards, and even that was running into the problem that both wizards are Pyro wizards and so are using Fireform constantly, letting them outright kill Storm Giants passively! Brainiac spam is something I've tried historically, but if either of them gets off Dragonfire the Brainiac swarm is just plain going to die -you can see in this video that my Brainiacs never last long, in fact. The only thing that helps at all is that both AI wizards are fond of sending a lone Pyrodactyl to tear down an undefended Manalith, giving you a relatively decent opportunity to steal two souls. Just hit them with a basic attacking spell to one-shot them, and start the conversion.

Once you manage to bleed enough souls off of one of the wizards that they do the AI thing of just hanging out at a Manalith, doing nothing, things turn tolerable and it's just a matter of driving off the other long enough to go Desecrate the first, and thankfully once you have Desecrated one of them you don't have to worry about Manalith count anymore, but... the mission is still miserable. It usually takes me five or so times to beat this mission, and even in this case where I did it in one take it took way longer than it should've.

The closest thing to a good thing about it is that the Boon is automatic instead of adding some additional layer of terrible to the whole thing -I'd hate it if the Boon was based on time, for example- but even that ends up feeding back into the point that Sacrifice doesn't really have coherent Boon design philosophy.

As an aside, I'm really puzzled as to why Hachimen has a teal teamcolor here. I think this is the only time in the entire game a non-Eldred wizard has a teamcolor that doesn't tie into their god alignment, and it's a jarringly weird teamcolor to boot. My best guess is that this is so you can tell at a glance who owns which Manalith, but there's a fair few other missions where that kind of functionality would be a big help so it seems weird they'd do it in this case but not others. I mean, honestly, it would be nice in general to have wizards using identical god forces have different teamcolors, just so you'd be able to tell whether a Cog you just killed is Buta's and therefore he's going to run over and retrieve it or Sorcha's and you killed her a minute ago so it's worth trying to Convert. (Hovering over a live unit tells you who owns it, but not a dead one)

My other guess is it's a really striking oversight. That does happen, and for example Sacrifice actually has two different Boons that are in the code but are not possible for the player to trigger. Not to mention other oddities I might've expected to be caught in playtesting, like what I've covered before of the game attempting to Guardian an AI unit at the beginning of the map and not being able to.

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Story-wise, the game is getting pretty blatant even to a first-time player that Stratos is not really on the up-and-up.

... that's seriously it.

So hey, have you noticed how weird Stratos' design is? He's weirder than you might've already figured -his head is a balloon, and it's a balloon being kept inflated by a gas canister set inside his body, with a horn set to one side that's probably what he's supposed to be speaking through. Plus his fingers are apparently extendable and mechanical. He looks weird-but-humanoid at a glance, but he's probably the weirdest of the god designs if you look closer. A bit appropriate to his character, given he's superficially polite and pleasant-sounding and it turns out his true colors are not so pleasant after all...

See you next Stratos mission.