Sacrifice: Stratos Mission 10

As usual, let's look back at Stratos as a 'faction', gameplay-wise.

Stratos' options have a key hole this mission does an excellent job of illustrating:

He has no way to bypass raw durability, aside hoping to abyss your stuff with eg Vorticks and Tornado, making eg Guardianed Hellmouths maddening to actually take down.

In the strictest of senses, this description applies to Pyro as well, but Volcano is so absurdly lethal that if you made the lava portion straight-up instant-kill things like Death does it honestly wouldn't change things that much. Furthermore, Pyro can work around resistances, with Pyromaniacs and Bombards setting targets on fire, a facet Pyrodactyls can (I assume) enhance with their oil ability, where Stratos has no equivalent ability. And of course Pyro's units generally have enhanced firepower, whereas Stratos units often have decreased damage;

Frostwolves, Braniacs, Squalls, Seraphs, Flurries, Yeti, and Silverbacks are all poor damage over time for their souls relative to their equivalents. That's seven units out of ten. And no, the exceptions don't have exceptional damage to make up for it -the Vortick is the only one that could be argued as exceptional damage for its tier, and that's really mostly because two of the options can't do damage in the first place.

This combination of points makes Stratos uniquely bad at killing highly durable units. This issue comes to a head with the ultimate units; all the Level 7 units are weak to spell damage or horrifically fragile, so even though three of them are quite durable Stratos doesn't find it that hard to kill them. The ultimate units like the Rhinok, though, Stratos really just plain doesn't have any answers to, since they all take halved damage from spells, Stratos' forces have poor damage, and 'hope it ends up in an abyss' is literally all he can do to bypass resistances+raw durability. Notably, it's nearly impossible to abyss a flier, and Rhinoks are the only ultimate unit that doesn't fly. Yeti and Silverback are also even less lethal than they seem, as an attack performed on a frozen unit will actually break the ice instead of doing damage to the target; while the defrosting does damage itself even if it was caused by the freezing being broken by an attack, the damage is weaker than both the Yeti and the Silverback's actual attacks.

Stratos also has the rather frustrating quality that several of his mechanics discourage melee mobs, yet a ranged blob of Stratos units isn't actually all that great either. You might've noticed in the mission I acquired Yeti I wasn't doing all that much other than spamming the Yeti and letting them murder everything. Fielding Vorticks would just interfere with the Yeti. Fielding Flurries would inflict damage on my own units and randomly pull units apart, and when dealing with Manaliths and the like the Flurries would be outright disabling them. Squalls knocking targets away becomes a problem when I'm trying to charge them with melee, particularly when said melee is slow. Several of Stratos' spells, such as Frozen Ground, don't play well with melee mob-based combat. Etc.

More than any other god, Stratos' options are best off being splashed into armies, not made the mainstay of your forces. It's difficult to even talk about Stratos having an overall strategy, because a mono-Stratos force's strategy is to spend the early game being a kinda poor version of Pyro's forces, albeit with more strategic mobility, and spend the end game wishing you weren't playing Stratos.

The annoying thing is Stratos doesn't actually have many options that stand out as fantastic to splash in. Stratos at first rank is pretty solid, thanks to Lightning being fantastic, Frostwolves and Braniacs staying relevant for a while, and Level 1 units sucking in the mid-game being a property of being Level 1 units rather than Stratos units... and Vorticks can be splashed into a build that's heavy on strong ranged options, with Air Shield being fantastic at that point. Beyond that... Stratos has several decent spells and okay units, but tends to be overshadowed.

This can be contrasted with how eg Animate Dead on Charnel is amazing in any army, just more amazing in armies that are heavy on high-soul creatures. Stratos doesn't really have anything on that level of splashability.

On an entirely different note, notice that Stratos' route doesn't have any permanent heroes at all. You get Surtur in two missions and Sara Bella acts as an anchor around your neck in two other missions. This is a contributing factor to the difficulties you face in the Stratos campaign, particularly in eg this mission where a few extra starting souls can make a huge difference even if the heroes themselves get immediately killed.

On another completely different note, this video is a fairly good demonstration of a bit of a flaw with the campaign's design that is distinctly misleading about how multiplayer functions: how pointless and frustrating a skirmish with your opponent can be.

You might have noticed that Eldred has an experience meter, and wondered what was up with that. It doesn't matter to single player, but in multiplayer wizards level up as they gain experience by their forces killing enemy forces, with level breakpoints providing new spells and additional stats in exactly the same way that advancing in missions in the campaign provides new spells and more stats. This has a host of important implications; it means that in multiplayer, two players clashing where no souls are lost by either player is, until quite late in the match, still a battle that mattered. If one player slew the other player's entire army and wizard successfully without losing as much of their own forces, that player may well have gained a level out of it and be able to leverage their greater stats and newfound options to pressure their foe better. Even if a given battle doesn't give either player an edge over the other in experience, it's still the case that both players gained experience and so the clash changed how the next fight is going to play out.

This also makes the overall rise in quality units experience as you progress more strongly meaningful in multiplayer. If two players repeatedly clash with no souls being exchanged (Or shuttled back and forth in small qualities, either/or), but one player keeps coming out ahead in kills, that player will pull ahead in levels and be able to field stronger units and cast more vicious spells, potentially turning a small edge in skill into a significant edge in wizard capability. This helps offset how the game's economy is unusually resistant to change; in most RTSes, a series of small wins will naturally lead to one player pulling ahead of the other to acquire a crushing advantage simply through the foundations of the economics. In Sacrifice, slaughtering your enemy's entire army without ever taking a soul accomplishes nothing -in single player, where experience doesn't apply. A related point is Desecration; in the campaign, Desecrating an enemy wizard's Altar accomplishes nothing if they snipe the Sac Doctor before they die. In multiplayer, it can push their experience down and outright de-level them, such that even if they pop back and snipe the Sac Doctor the push still pushed things more in your favor.

More subtly, a frustrating element in mono-god campaign runs that isn't nearly so hurtful to multiplayer is the uneven quality of unit progression between gods. For Stratos, reaching Level 3 simply isn't anywhere near as big a jump in performance as for Pyro, and indeed in a Stratos-on-Pyro matchup this is compounded by Firefists being a fairly strong counter to Squalls. In a campaign scenario, you have to either put up with the handicap and win anyway or give up and go take a different mission entirely -and the latter isn't always an option! In multiplayer, you just need to stall until you get to the higher levels where your own good units start showing up.

Mind, that particular point comes with the qualifier that Sacrifice always allowed you to bring completed campaign rainbow run spell lists into multiplayer and at some point patched in the ability to directly build fully customized spell lists, at which point the quality unevenness becomes more of a design flaw for an entirely different reason. (Specifically that if one set of options at a level is garbage that is pretty much directly invalidated by another set at the same level, the garbage set has no reason to ever see use in multiplayer at all)

Still.

Sacrifice's campaign is highly misleading about the core gameplay.

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Narratively... confirmation Stratos summoned Marduk. An explanation that his goal was exactly what this ending achieved; the destruction of all his rivals, leaving things as he touched upon back at the beginning of the game; with him as the only god.

This is the game's big twist, which is a big part of why I put off Stratos for so long. Stratos is the real bad guy of our story, more so than Marduk: Marduk is, narratively, more like a catastrophic storm than like a person, albeit a catastrophic storm that happens to think and talk and come up with justifications for its destructive actions. Stratos is the one who chose to kick off an apocalypse because he thought the dangers and costs were worth it for advancing his own position. This is the single most callously horrific act anyone in the game performs. There's a reason I turned away in this video, where in the Charnel and Pyro routes I had Eldred stay; Stratos is a chronic backstabber who knowingly kicked off the apocalypse, all while styling himself as the sole bastion of civilization in the world, the only god deserving of his position.

There's two frustrating things here.

First of all, the game puts in basically no effort into getting you to dislike Stratos. Charnel and Pyro both provoked a moment of Eldred questioning his current course. Pyro I've already been over the game's repeated attempts to convince you -often poorly- that he's really super-duper hateable evil. Charnel got Eldred outraged over being lied to.

For Stratos, the only meaningful acknowledgments of his awfulness is that he shares with Charnel and Pyro the endgame 'bad guy' signals. (Some of Marduk's dialogue toward the beginning of the mission, the pre-credits stuff including unlocking Marduk for multiplayer, and the ability to choose to stay or go) Eldred never goes 'whoa, wait, hold on, why are we backstabbing good people?' His reaction to Stratos revealing that oh yeah kicking off the apocalypse was intentional to achieve exactly this outcome is strangely understated. Other wizards and other gods don't get used to call attention to how awful Stratos' behavior in this regard is -there's one relevant thing we'll be seeing in the Persephone route, but it's not touching on the whole deliberately kicked off the apocalypse thing, just touching on Stratos being a bit of a jerk in general.

So for one thing this makes it even more irritating how much effort the game pours into trying to get you to hate Pyro. I don't care how much you hate Big Business. I don't care if you want some CEO's head on a pike. I don't care if that opinion is even fully justified. Compared to someone literally trying to end the world in hopes of arranging it so they're the only survivor of note, it doesn't rate.

For another, even if Pyro wasn't around to make it particularly bizarre, it's still a bizarre handling of the whole thing. The game is so soft on Stratos it almost feels like the game is endorsing his behavior. This is particularly striking when contrasted with Mithras earlier telling us the gods never previously sought to actually kill one another no matter how much they warred -Stratos is fundamentally the first violator of this taboo, and there's no course of events that lets one spin it as self-defense or the like. And his plan wasn't to kill one god: it was to kill all four others. There's layers of reasons the game ought, if it has any moral consistency, to be signaling that the audience is meant to hate Stratos. So why is there basically nothing of the sort?

This actually ties quite directly into the second frustrating thing.

The game really seems to intend Stratos' route to be canon. (Or The True Ending or however you want to frame it)

Remember Eldred talking about finding himself enjoying the act of killing a god as a power for its own sake thing? Notice that this is literally the only time in any route where Eldred expresses such a notion, and that the Marduk 'you're serving an evil god' speech involves Marduk hurling that exact accusation at Eldred.

Similarly, Stratos' route is the one and only time Eldred makes a reference to 'always being too late'. If you go back to the first Charnel route video, the one where I actually recorded the prologue of the game, you might notice Zyzyx saying 'We're too late again, Master. All dead'. This line comes across pretty strangely in every route, to be honest, seeming like the prologue was made with a somewhat different idea in mind for what's going on than what the final plot ended up actually being, but Stratos' is the only route that attempts to make that line make the slightest bit of sense.

This is particularly damning given the game has no opportunity to modify the prologue in response to your god, for obvious reasons. It makes the Stratos route the only time this element of the prologue makes any sense, which makes the Stratos route the truest route to the prologue.

This contributes to the sense the Stratos was something of a creator's pet (If in a different way than James), and it makes it even more frustrating to look back at how little sense Stratos' route makes as a choice for Eldred, the creators having clearly prioritized showing off their Big Twist over writing Eldred at all coherently in the Stratos route. There's only one route that makes even less sense...

... as we'll work toward next time, when we turn the clock back a final time and see what constitutes 'justice' in this world.

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Though on a more positive note, it's worth pointing out that in Charnel's route we see that Stratos had control of the Demon Gate of Golgotha at the beginning of the game. Foreshadowing!