Sacrifice: Persephone Mission 8

For this mission, Persephone gives us the usual unit-less pair of spells. Specifically...


Meanstalks
1800 Mana

Meanstalks is loosely comparable to Tornado, in that it's a disruption spell that does its damage solely through fall damage mechanics. It's less capable than Tornado is of disruption -the four stalks have to individually grab units one at a time, toss them, then go for their next target, where Tornado just scoops up everything around it all at once- but it tosses units higher and thus tends to do more damage. It also doesn't wander randomly, so it can be used as a more controlled form of area denial.

It's kinda one of the least impressive of the ultimate spells. It provides pretty significant forewarning to the enemy, since you can see the Meanstalks growing well before they're ready to actually grab at anything, it's just as indiscriminate as eg Volcano is, and it's a bit of a sourspot in disruption/damage. Tornado is much better at disruption while being only somewhat worse at damage, while Volcano, Bore, and Death are all way more lethal -and Volcano and Bore can have similar functionality in disruption terms, with Meanstalks' only advantage of note being that it has a cooldown of 4 minutes instead of the 6 found on those other spells.

That said, it's not terrible, and it's paired with...


Charm
1800 Mana

Charm is basically Intestinal Vaporization or Bovine Intervention on steroids. Instead of gibbing a target, it permanently converts it to your control. That's way better than gibbing, promptly handing you the souls, making it difficult for the enemy to get the souls back, and potentially letting you mix in units that are useful to your army that you can't summon yourself.

(This last point being a contributing factor in why I left Persephone for last; it reduces how much you see unfamiliar units in my hands)

It's an amazing spell, and more than makes up for Meanstalks somewhat limpwristed contribution.

It does have some actual disadvantages, though; it has a cooldown of four minutes where Intestinal Vaporization and Bovine Intervention have a cooldown of a minute and a half. Thus, if the other spells are being used skillfully they're more than twice as effective at pulling souls to your side. Furthermore, Charm has a tremendous casting time at 11 full seconds, and even once a target has been hit with the projectile there's a fairly lengthy period before they actually convert, much like Intestinal Vaporization having a delay before the target is gibbed, and this includes that if the unit dies before Charm completes than congrats you've just wasted the Charm. Furthermore, Charm is unique among spells in that Guardians are immune to it. So where in my Charnel and James runs I was able to deal with some of Marduk's nastier Guardianed creatures in the final mission by directly gibbing them, with Persephone I'm going to have to manually kill them.

(The wiki claims Charm will un-Guardian a Guardianed creature; I assume what it means is that if you initiate Charm on a target and the enemy Guardians it before the projectile arrives Charm will break the Guardian effect, preventing a player from using Guardian as a reactive block)

Still, Charm is uniquely fantastic.

... and yes, that's a 'be mine' valentine for its icon.

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The mission is much as we've seen it before. The only notable differences are that Pyro has four Magnifriers instead of the three seen in other Helios assaults, and that the one village and Manafount has been tweaked to have an idol to Ashur and a scripted Volcano eruption.

An all-Persephone force finds the whole thing a bit of a pain, but being able to spam healing and having standard durability forces does make it less problematic overall to deal with the Magnifriers. (And since James is the only other god to not have below-standard durability, Persephone's forces are really more accurate to think of as tougher than usual) I also got lucky with Teleporting directly atop Buta's forces and wiping out a whole lot of units all at once, cutting short the entire back-and-forth of trying to get enough of his units siphoned away I wasn't having to deal with him on top of the Magnifriers.

But seriously, we've done this twice and there's nothing really new to say about the mission.

Oh, though if you were wondering why I sent Toldor back, it's because my first several attempts at the mission kept getting him killed by Warmongers. I've come to suspect putting a Life Shield on him is doing something like rolling his 95% resistances down to something much weaker, because having four Warmongers firing on him really should not have been getting him killed, yet it did so repeatedly. Either that or resistances work strangely at high numbers in general; this would be consistent with Sara Bella taking real damage even though her resistances are supposed to be 100%. Maybe there's a hard cap where at least 10% of an attack gets through, with resistances higher than that effectively just reducing how much plague and poison do to resistance?

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Narratively, however, we've got more to talk about, because all the dialogue in this mission aside Faestus' usual lies is just weird and out of place.

Pyro's spiel about replacing his weak machines with stronger machines as the weak machines get smashed is bizarrely philosophical and also quite out of line with Pyro's attitude in every other route, where he's just not talking Marduk's threat seriously because he doesn't believe Marduk is real. Why isn't he reiterating that?

Worse, the logic of him inviting Eldred to Helios to kill him makes no sense. Eldred is a wizard in the world of Sacrifice. He'll just be banished back to Elysium. Pyro gains nothing from doing this, while risking everything. Game design-wise, I'm sure the real issue here is that the devs were just throwing their hands in the air when it came to coming up with a good reason for Eldred to pull off a Helios assault now, but that just emphasizes how bizarrely pointless the previous mission was -it could easily have been replaced with a mission leading up to a Helios assault, and not only would nothing have been lost but all kinds of gains would have been made.

Eldred's bit at the end of the mission where he claims Pyro's machines were indeed getting stronger but it was at the cost of his followers' souls is also painfully out of place, being one last jab by the game trying to convince you Pyro is Big Business Is Evil And Soulless. There's nothing to give Eldred a reason to think Pyro's machines had 'gotten stronger' -this would have been the perfect mission to introduce two Pyrodraulic Dynamos, or a single one that fired more often, or something, if they wanted the player to believe that- and the notion of suggesting that Pyro's process is any more 'soulless' than the other gods' is just plain cringe-worthy. This is a game where the fundamental design encourages you to slaughter civilians to effectively gang-press them into your army, no matter your god; the game tries to skirt around the issue by tending to only present convenient civilians when you're serving an 'evil' god, but even then the game has double-standards like it apparently being okay with the devs to slaughter Charnel civilians or anybody who turns to worshiping Ashur; every time you find an idol to Ashur in a mission, the civilians will get to talk for a bit and then the game makes them hostile so your units automatically kill them. Including this very mission!

This mission's case being particularly cringe-worthy since the Slave line is talking about how Jadugarr is promising an end to slavery. Exactly what's so objectionable about that? Going meta for a moment, I'm sure the idea is that Jadugarr is promising an end to slavery because once everyone is dead there'll be no slaves, but as far as Eldred going 'hey, I judge you acceptable to murder'... what are we supposed to take away from this?

I can't even take the Slaves' willingness to turn to Ashur seriously as evidence that Pyro is so bad. Remember back in Stratos' assault on Agothera how there were Ashur cultists right on top of James' Prime Altar? That rather undermines the notion that Ashur cultists are popping up only where people have reason to be dissatisfied with their gods... unless we decide to assume this means that James is actually kinda a crappy ruler for his people and just has better PR than Pyro and Charnel do. Of course, that runs rather contrary to how clearly the devs think James' is great, but that just emphasizes my point that Eldred's dialogue at the end of this mission doesn't work. The devs can't sell all these ideas at once. The Ashur cultists in this mission can't be used as narrative proof that Pyro is particularly soulless, because if we accept that Ashur cultists prove a god is terrible at their job then this in turn proves James is a crappy god, while the plot is trying so hard to make James seem like a decent fellow who does right by his people.

For being a repetition of the usual gameplay-wise, this mission is managing to tread all kinds of new ground at screwing up the narrative.

See you next Persephone mission.