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I've just been doing a play-along of Double Fine's 2015 tactical RPG game Massive Chalice with some friends. And it brought home a point I've been thinking about for quite awhile now. Video games have a problem with pacing. Pacing in games, as in prose fiction and movies, is the name for the sense of.
There are two things you will learn immediately while playing Massive Chalice: 1) Double Fine loves a good double entendre almost as much as Shakespeare did; 2) putting all your eggs in one basket will lead to lots of broken eggs and not enough hens to make new ones. In short, you should get used to disappointment. You’ll be dealing with it a lot.Massive Chalice is the latest endeavor by Tim Schafer and the crew down at Double Fine, and while it’s still in Early Access Beta, I’m ready to declare it one of the best games of 2015. The combat is much like XCOM, with each hero in your party getting an allotted number of moves per turn. Enemies advance towards your group on maps with randomly generated terrain, and you must be careful with where you position heroes so that they are not placed in harm’s way.
Pretty straightforward strategy, right?It would be, if Massive Chalice didn’t have its key element that sets it apart from others in its class: the bloodline system. This is what threw a wrench into all my carefully laid plans time and time again, and this is what makes the gameplay stand out among its competition. In Massive Chalice, you must become the God of Eugenics and save your civilization from the corruption of the Cadence.
However, you’ll soon find that planning out a good endgame isn’t as easy as you first thought. Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Give Me Good StatsIt’s fitting that the title of this game is an innuendo, considering how much time I spent deciding which of my heroes will make the best babies together. I felt like a matchmaker who had just transcended to capricious god status. The two narrators, who spend the same amount of time insulting each other as they do instructing you, advised that I shouldn’t just think about numbers when picking two partners to start a new bloodline. Marriage isn’t about feelings. I want an army of strong heroes. Feelings be damned.
Teamwork is everything. Don't spread them out too thin.For instance, the primary traits of a hero may indicate a boost of strength, but if their secondary trait is that they are impressionable, then that means they will be influenced by others in the group, either negatively or positively depending on the traits of your other heroes.Then, you have to think about fertility. Heroes will have a higher or lower chance of having children based on fertility, and believe me, you want them to be having lots of children. Some are infertile, which means you’ll be putting those heroes out on the frontline as much as possible.
The main goal of Massive Chalice is to prepare this country for a war that’s 300 years in the making, meaning that your heroes can die permanently in battle or simply die of old age. If skilled heroes die in battle, they leave behind relics to pass onto the next generation that can help your chances in the next Cadence attack.In fact, I found that even as I got better in the battles, so many heroes would die of old age that I would be running low on my roster by the time another cadence attack came around. For this reason, longevity is another great trait for a bloodline, if you’re lucky enough to get that in your starting round of heroes.Along with longevity, another great trait is Quick Learner, which means the hero gains XP faster during battles, which is a huge plus when you’re constantly getting new batches of level 1 heroes that you have to level up.
When you form a bloodline, the children born into that keep will train until they are 15, at which point they can join your roster (usually at level 2, which helps). With those other good traits I'll take it!Accuracy is also extremely important, because heroes that attack use up all their points for that turn, so if one of them misses, then it’s a big loss in damage for that round. Next time I would probably try to prioritize accuracy above all other stats for this reason.Some major status to avoid are as follows: slowness, asthma (which is like permanent slowness), and decreased accuracy. If you create a bloodline with one really good main trait but several bad secondary traits, you’re in for a surprise later down the line, and not a good one. Tough Choices At The StartAfter setting up my regent and their partners to begin my (hopefully epic) bloodline, I had to face more difficult decisions.
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The way the game progresses is through a timeline that you can start and stop with the spacebar. Cadence battles will happen at various intervals of the timeline, and they get progressively harder as you get closer to the 300 year end-goal mark.Early decisions are absolutely crucial, you can only queue upgrades one at a time. This means that I had to make difficult decisions at the start, not knowing how they would impact me until much later. I ended up going with another keep at the start, so that I could get another bloodline going.
Recruiting new heroes doesn't take long at the start, but gets slower to research the more you do it. Basically, it's not meant to be abused.After that, I researched some items because I was confident in the amount of babies my two houses would be pumping out. As it turned out, I was still suffering for a lack of heroes (mostly because by year 45, most of my heroes had just simply died of old age). At the same time, if I had too many heroes in my roster, most of them would just have been sitting there with nothing to do.Crucibles and the sagewright guild are an answer to this.
They allow you to station unused heroes so that their combined experience helps level up trainees at a quicker pace so they can join in the fights. However, building a crucible is one of the slowest options on the research panel, and I have yet to figure out when would be the best time to queue up these buildings.It just seemed like I would be missing out on valuable upgrades in the meantime. However, one of the main problems I found was that as the harder battles kept coming, my heroes were vastly under-leveled, so putting effort into researching buildings that boost XP gain is probably a good idea. Sometimes the quests lead to positive personality traits. This is always unexpected.Oh remember how personality traits play an important role in influencing hero stats in battle? Throughout the game’s timeline, quests that demand your attention will pop up, and you must decide on a course of action. In some of the quest actions, you’ll actually get new personality traits thrown into the mix.
For instance, I opted to allow some visiting school children to go check out the barracks, and as a result my heroes suddenly became “child-adverse”. This lowered their fertility rates significantly. Death Comes Unexpectedly (And Often)Being a god is not as easy as I thought it would be. Massive Chalice forced me to deal with the consequences of the choices I had made earlier in the game. I had to learn to let go and suffer my losses. The biggest challenge was preventing my heroes from losing experience.I also soon realized that it is near impossible to try to level up all the heroes in your roster while on the battlefield. Since battles occur once every three years, it might be a good idea to ration which of your heroes will actually get the extra XP for killing foes.
I got used to seeing this screen.Say you get stuck with an asthmatic alchemist (which would be a great name of a band by the way) that you have to use in a battle. Don’t let them get the killing blow and take away the XP from your star player—the caberjack with longevity, for instance.
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However, what you plan and what actually takes place is another story. In Massive Chalice, you learn to accept compromises on a regular basis.And that means learning to accept the death of your heroes, both from old age and from the battleground. Sometimes the initial placement on a map just sucks. My party of five were placed in the direct sight of three long-range enemies with no cover in sight. Sometimes, you just have to work with what you’re given, which makes planning out strategy almost impossible until you’re in the thick of it, which I love. An example of the kind of cover you want to see when loading into a map.There are three different enemy types to start: Seeds, Lapses, and Ruptures. Seeds are melee units that are deadly in numbers.
Lapses are long-range units that you soon loathe because they often get critical hits on your heroes which will make them lose experience. Ruptures are better handled by ranged heroes because they explode into a pile of corrosive goo upon death. Later, you also get introduced to Bulwarks (ranged units that shield after taking damage in a turn) and Wrinklers (sounding like something from a Tim Burton movie, these add age to your heroes with each hit). You will hate these more than Lapses.How you organize a party will make a huge difference on how effective you are at wiping out the enemies in a timely fashion. I found for me that the best composition seemed to be one hunter (ranged damage), two alchemists (area of effect damage dealers), and three caberjacks (melee and tanks).
Sometimes I would switch out a caberjack for another hunter, but overall this seemed to be a good composition.One of the harder classes to master is the alchemist. Their accuracy leaves a lot to be desired, and they only can fire off five bombs per battle. Going back into it I would try to save their turns for when enemies are grouped together. Their area of effect can be devastating if executed well. Hunters are absolutely vital for effective party composition.Overall ImpressionsIn the end, even though Massive Chalice thoroughly kicked my butt, I had an absolute blast. There’s just so much to tinker with, and due to all the variables, this game has a near infinite replay value. I envision many long play sessions in the future, the kind where I start at 9 PM and moments later it’s suddenly the morning.
I don’t do that with many games anymore, I just don’t. In that regard, it’s up there with Sid Meier’s Civilization V for me as a near-perfect game.
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