YMMV / Sacrifice

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Zyzyx the imp. He will have something to say for whenever you get hit, run low on mana, try to target something out of your range, have a creature get hurt, or lose a creature. This results in a lot of fights where Zyzyx talks constantly and it can get highly annoying. You can turn him off, but this is not recommended as Zyzyx also gives extremely helpful information like seeing the enemy and if an enemy wizard is approaching your altar.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Sirocco, the hero dragon, is accessible on James' second mission. Provided you stay in good graces with Persephone, she makes the first half of the game ludicrously easy with her incredible attack power, speed, and tankiness. She can no longer take on armies by herself in the late game, but remains an incredibly useful unit.
  • If you can get Frozen Ground and Bore then that's a complete Game-Breaker, freezing a group of enemies in place then dropping them off the world for a mass instant kill. The developers had the sense not to let anyone get both those spells in the campaign, but you can make custom wizards for multiplayer.
  • Casting a well-placed Tornado spell and following up with a targeted Cloud Kill will end up killing every single unit caught in the Tornado. And if one of those units is the enemy wizard, you've practically already won.
  • The raise dead spell costs as much as the cheapest spell in the game, casts quickly and without freezing the player in place and has a fairly long range, making it ridiculously easy to keep your army in the fight. Compounding this, the only real way to win, most of the time, is by capturing souls from your opponent — and a quick trigger finger with Raise Dead makes that almost impossible by bringing them back to life near-instantly.
    • Mind you, Raise Dead does come with what is probably the worst or second-to-worst melee fighter in the game and a necromancer's shield spell has a short duration and long cooldown, making necromancers the easiest wizard to kill or disable.
  • The Troggs are probably the best basic melee unit in the game, due to their simple but potent ability of being completely immune to magic allowing them to totally invalidate an enemy's plans. Combined with them being already super tanky, they are overall good to summon and in single player one of the only basic units you will likely use in the endgame.
  • All titans are incredibly good creatures, but three in particular stand out.
    • Stratos' Silverbacks are the fastest creature in the game and can freeze enemies in place with their breath, they are especially good when attacking a wizard as multiple silverbacks can potentially stunlock them for a bit.
    • James' Rhinok is the only titan that can't fly and are perhaps the slowest unit in the game, otherwise though they are terrifying to fight. Not only because they look scary, but have absolutely ridiculous health and their basic attack is creating a powerful earthquake that hits several enemies at once. Even Flying creatures will get hurt if they get too close to the ground, and the Rhinok can launch boulders at them if targets are too far high. A single rhinok can plausibly take on a group of creatures on its own with its incredible defense and damage output.
    • Persephone's dragons are arguably the best titans. They are the only titans without a ranged attack, but completely make up for this by being extremely fast and said attack having a chance of trapping an enemy in one place. They also have an excellent ability with Breath of Life, which allows them to revive allies. A whole squadron of dragons is a terrifying and almost unstoppable force.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Most of the so-called ultimate spells you get from the gods are impractical and hard to use right, ironically their penultimate spells tend to be far more useful. The worst ultimate spell is likely Charnel's Death. On paper it sounds awesome: you summon an invincible monster who will immediately go after enemy monsters and kill them in one hit. The first big problem is that this aspect of Death is an idiot, since once it sees an enemy it will go after it single-mindedly. An attentive wizard will send whoever Death is focusing far away, making Death run off after one creature miles away and forcing it to make a long trek back. The other big problem is that the one thing Death can't target is enemy wizards, aka the thing you want Death to target the most. The other ultimate spells are also unwieldy, but a lot more useful and harder to counter.
  • Persephone’s starting creatures, the druid, ranger, and shrike, are overall completely outclassed by all other starting creatures. Pyro’s starting creatures are powerful Glass Cannon shock troops, Charnel’s starting creatures hit hard and have great longevity due to their health drain, James’ starting creatures are crazy tanky for being early creatures (the troggs especially are outright broken), and Stratos’ starting creatures have great abilities that make them good for surprise attacks and wizard harassment. Persephone’s starting creatures are just too well-balanced for their own good and can’t really be used effectively outside of the tutorial missions.
  • The Scarab is an infamously niche creature. Their quirk is that they are the only unit in the game who can heal allies without needing to use an ability, however this has the steep cost of them being unable to attack enemies. Given Persephone’s creatures already have better hp regen, the scarab is already pretty meaningless and they are completely outmoded when you get better healing spells. All this said, the scarab does have some specific but handy uses: if you are going mostly Charnel or Pyro creature-wise. Charnel’s monsters have no regeneration outside of attacking, so having scarabs to heal them when not in battle is actually incredibly useful. Pyro's creatures meanwhile are the squishiest in the game, so having medics to constantly attend to them greatly helps their survivability.
  • The Squall is not a good sniper; not only is it a slow moving unit but its damage is weak, basically defeating the purpose of being a sniper unit whose who specialty is doing a lot of damage at long range. The only real use the Squall has is that its attacks push enemies back, but moving enemies around is something most of Stratos' units already do and with more efficiency.
  • The Netherfiend is regarded as one of the worst melee units in the game for their quirk: they start out super weak, but get stronger for every blue soul they eat. This is already a hard sell with how valuable souls are, but in order for a Netherfiend to have even decent stats they need to eat twenty souls. You are far better off summoning a group of lower but more useful monsters rather than ever bothering with Netherfiends, if it weren’t for the game giving you Animate Dead alongside them almost no one would ever play Charnel’s fourth mission. Charnel's titan the Hellmouth have the same ability, but only need 2 souls for a good stat boost, and even ignoring that are just more useful due to already being strong without needing to eat souls. The Netherfiend is a bit better in skirmish mode where there is at least the option to freely drop excess souls to feed the Netherfiend, but still retains a reputation as one of the worst units in the game.
• Most Wonderful Sound: *screaming souls* *music changes* Then:
  Zyzyx: "Enemy sighted."
  • As well as the Hero Unit selection lines.
    • This is Thestor.
    • Faestus reporting.
    • Gammel's the name!
    • I am Toldor
• Narm: The Ents' attack cries are bizarre, but in one of them, they're making some goat bleating sound ("Baaa!"). Considering that they're the second most powerful units of Persephone (behind Dragons), it's unintentionally hilarious. Toldor uses the same attack cry, only with a deeper voice filter, so his attack cry is a 'deep "Baaa!"'.
• Player Punch:
  • As sympathetic as she gets, Shakti never ends well. (With the possible exception that if you serve James, you get no indication that Persephone or either of her wizards died, so she could still be alive then. More likely, though, the news just hasn't come through yet.) The most sadistic punch is on Stratos' 6th mission. Compared to the others in this list, Shakti is probably the most profound because she is your Player Character for the Tutorial.
  • Poor, misguided Sorcha. No matter who you serve, she's going down, and unless you're serving Stratos, you're the one who snuffs her. If you serve Pyro, you even kill her just after she finally Defects from Decadence.
  • Charlotte fares no better. She dies in the final mission of James' campaign, is killed by the player in Stratos, Pyro or Charnel's campaigns and presumably dies offscreen in Persephone's campaign.
    • Considering Eldred was using her altar at the time, she most likely survived in Persephone's campaign since James would be using both his champions to defend Agothera.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: A popular way to play the single-player campaign is doing a one-god run, going through all missions supporting only one god. The difficulty of these runs varies a lot depending on who is chosen.
  • Persephone is likely the hardest overall, being stuck with only well-balanced monsters that have no real strengths and spells that focus more on support makes the early to mid game incredibly tough. Good news this eventually reverses since Persephone's late game units and spells are very good, especially once you get access to her dragons which are one of the best units in the game.
  • James probably has overall the easiest one-god run thanks to his strong selection of tanky monsters and a quality spellbook with both great defensive and offensive spells. Your armies will take forever to get anywhere, but they will be so insanely strong and durable it won’t matter.
  • Stratos has fairly moderate difficulty. Your early and late game units will be good, but mid-game you will be struggling with far more mediocre units while all your enemies have far better choices. As a result you will be relying a lot more than usual on your spells. It is a good thing that many of Stratos’ spells have both low cooldowns and low mana consumption, though try and get as many mana boons as possible to help keep up the spell casting.
  • Even with an easier early game, Pyro has a tough time not unlike Persephone. With his units and spells you will deal absurd amounts of damage with both powerful spells and lots of monsters with fierce DPS... The problem is a stiff breeze can easily take out your armies, and with zero support abilities your creatures will be dying a lot.
  • Charnel is, fittingly enough, the opposite in difficulty curve when compared to Persephone, his early and mid game is strong with his hard-hitting units and curses. His late game though is dreadful; with most of his spells focusing on debuffs and having almost no support abilities, you won't be doing a lot of damage and your armies will have awful survivability. Animate Dead may be broken, but it only helps so much when most of your army isn’t doing much damage and constantly needs being brought back to life.

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