Sacrifice: Stratos Mission 9

For this mission, Stratos has given us one ultimate creature, of course.


Silverback
1900 Mana, 5 Souls

The Silverback is pretty ridiculous. It is, of course, faster than all the other units at this tier (Making it the fastest unit in the entire game), and more importantly it can freeze enemies with its breath, and in fact its breath is an area of effect attack with no friendly fire. (Though not anywhere near as ridiculous a radius as the Rhinok's) While a currently-frozen unit will be defrosted by being hit, groups of Silverbacks can pretty effortlessly freezelock a target indefinitely. A wizard whose shield is down is basically doomed if you get a few Silverbacks on them with no units in the area, or just a few that your Silverbacks can ignore.

I personally prefer Hellmouths, but Silverbacks are quite useful, and they also have Run Away, allowing them to get wherever you need them on a moment's notice. They're one of the few units I find myself semi-frequently using the minimap to issue orders to. Rhinoks are still more broken, of course, but Silverbacks are quite effective, and notably are one of the few units that could be considered a reasonably effective counter to Rhinoks.

On top of that, they have a variation on the Storm Giant electrical activation effect. They supposedly don't gain stat bonuses from being struck by lightning, but they do start spraying lightning all over the place. This can be inconvenient when you're controlling a large group of Silverbacks and they end up chain-zapping each other indefinitely, but it be helpful at times. I end up incidentally showing it off in this video, actually, which was entirely accidental -I'd forgotten entirely about this quirk of Silverbacks. It's not a terribly important one overall, and of course between the game providing no information on units at this tier and how niche of an effect it is -Stratos' gifts are the only ones that have lightning effects at all- it's easy to overlook it.

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The mission can have a rough start, since Seerix and Acheron both start the mission active and while Seerix's force size isn't very large Acheron's is. Once you've managed to convert some souls and in particular banish Seerix, the remainder of the mission isn't terribly challenging. For the most part, you don't even need any strategy other than spamming Silverbacks.

The one major exception to this is that the Manalith in front of Acheron's Altar has a ton of units Guardianed to it. Throwing your troops at it recklessly is quite likely to get your army wiped out, and from there you may have significant difficulty retrieving your souls before Acheron steals them, depending on what spells you took. (In this case, I have Soul Wind so it wouldn't be too bad) Ideally you'll do something like what I did with Tornado+Cloudkill to clear the group all at once... but even that can end up being a bit of a setback if Acheron is actually hanging around, allowing him to rapidly scoop up the massive number of souls and bounce back into being a real threat to your forces again! I got lucky in this instance with Acheron insistently hiding over by a Manalith, dodging that possibility, but if he's actually hanging out at his Altar this can drag out the mission a fair amount.

But overall? Pretty straightforward and easy mission, especially since for whatever reason Acheron's AI is a bit weird when it comes to your Altar. And his troops locking up at times can help.

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Narratively... Eldred continues to go along with the Stratos train with no real attempt to justify it. Charnel outright provokes Eldred on his choice, and all Eldred gives us is that it's the choice that he made.

This is not helping to sell the idea that Eldred would be psychologically capable of committing to the Stratos course.

I'd like to talk about this more, but it's going to have to wait until next mission.

Speaking of; see you next Stratos mission.