Is that brimstone I smell? It seems like the forces of the underworld are a bit upset we didn’t get any StarCraft news at BlizzCon this year. But Frost Giant, where many veterans of Blizzard’s now-defunct RTS team have banded together, is giving us the closest thing we’ll probably ever get to a StarCraft 3 with Stormgate. And over the last few months, I’ve gotten up-close and personal with its second major faction: The Infernal Host. These are the bad boys of the upcoming RTS, and if you were a Zerg main in StarCraft, I think they’ll make you feel right at home. That home might be covered in spikes and actively on fire, but I’m not here to judge.
Much like StarCraft’s Zerg or Warcraft 3’s Undead, the Infernal Host is Stormgate’s spread-corruption-across-the-map faction, with a new mechanic called Shroud that swirls in a radius around your main base building and defensive towers. Unlike the Zerg and Undead, you don’t have to build on Shroud. You can plop structures down anywhere you want. But Infernal units standing on it will slowly fill up a secondary health bar – what the devs are currently just calling “white health” – that makes them extra tanky. This is a great natural deterrent to early harassment, since even your workers get access to it. White health begins to degrade when you’re not standing on Shroud, though.
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This encouraged me to build up a huge critical mass of troops on my Shroud, then send them in all at once while they were at their beefiest. Little groups of units don’t necessarily do well deploying to far corners of the map where they can’t top up. Though, of course, you can always set up forward outposts if you need a little more juice. These wave tactics are encouraged by other Infernal mechanics, too. For instance, their units build instantly, but each building only has so many spawn charges, which take time to refresh. So if you hold off on building units for a while, you can build a whole bunch really fast.
FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK…
This allows for some fairly brutal timing and tempo pushes, with the demon hordes coming in waves rather than a trickle to the front line. The Infernal Host is designed to be a faction where you don’t sweat the deaths of a couple hundred minions. There are plenty more where that came from, and you have worlds to conquer. In fact, you want to see both sides’ population numbers drop, as this faction collects a unique resource called Animus every time something dies anywhere on the map, which can be used to perform special rituals like summoning this capstone flying unit, the Flayed Dragon. Animus is collected by all Infernal players simultaneously, so in Infernal vs Infernal games, you can expect a pretty chaotic mirror match.
Many Infernal units also benefit from your own side taking losses. The Brute, who reminds me a little bit of the two-headed ogre mage from Warcraft, is a big, tanky, frontline fighter. But if he’s not getting along with his better half, he can literally rip himself in two and spawn two Fiends, who are sort of the Zerglings of the Infernal Host. There’s even an upgrade that causes this to happen automatically whenever a Brute dies. Fiends are fast and deadly, but their regular health bar starts dropping automatically the moment they come into existence. You can keep them alive longer by putting them on Shroud, since their white health won’t decay. But it’s usually not a very efficient use of your population cap, so it’s better to just send them off to fall in glorious battle before time takes its toll.
INFEST THIS
Your other basic infantry unit is the Gaunt, ghoulish little demons with a glaive attack that can bounce to multiple enemies. They’re most effective in large groups, and their unique upgrade allows them to pay a little bit of health to make their glaives temporarily spread an Infest status effect to enemy units. Any unit that dies while Infested spawns a Fiend. You may see where this is going. A frontline of upgraded Gaunts and Brutes can turn into an absolute doom tide of Fiends, even if you’re taking much heavier losses than the enemy, which turns the momentum of the battle around fast.
That’s not the only way to use Infest, though. Remember the Flayed Dragon? It can inhale the Infest effect from all nearby units affected by it, inflicting damage on the infested units and topping off the white health of his nearby allies. He’s kind of like a Frost Wyrm on steroids. The best counter seems to be not letting your opponent get one in the first place.
I got to see a couple more Infernal units, too. This is the Weaver, a big, slow, spidery… thing that can tell an enemy unit to, “Get over here!” like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. They can also see up smaller cliffs due to being so tall. The Magmadon, which gives me Kodo Beast vibes, can charge through most enemy ground units, pushing them out of the way and allowing it to get to the softer back line. The Doombringer is an air transport that creates a radius of Shroud around it when deployed, though it has to touch grass to do so. Kind of like a Warp Prism that’s a bit more vulnerable to counterattack.
STARS OF THEIR CRAFT
The Infernal Host is the kind of RTS faction that takes some getting used to, in contrast to the more standard Vanguard. But it really is a riot once you get the hang of it, with battles that look hopeless to a newcomer turning into a clean sweep as the ground is replaced with Fiends and your enemy winds up completely inundated by death. They share some traits with factions in this team’s past work, but are very much their own thing. If you want to try them out for yourself, the pre-launch page for the Stormgate Kickstarter is now live.
