I run a YouTube channel over at https://youtube.com/r4nneko where I post videos of the games I play. In general I try to have new lets play posts up every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Sometimes I write about other things too.
With the work we did the last couple of episodes, I've now got more than enough heroes to fill all of my strategic roles. This is great, it gives me a bit of breathing room and time to push out my buildings and research to ensure that I continue to have a decent technological and training advantage over the Cadence.
The real question will be how long this will last, there are still a number of enemies types left to encounter. There are some entirely new ones, but also advanced versions of many of the initial types. I really won't be able to afford to send out undermanned squads in the future.
On an entirely meta level, I really appreciate the way the game keeps throwing me into fights around the half hour mark. It is kind of nice to have that natural cliffhanger built in to this series.
I really like the kind of periodicity you get on a per keep basis. As the regent and the partner age off and become less fertile they mostly stop having children. So each keep has its own rhythm over the course of the game. Definitely important to strike the right balance between enough keeps and kids and enough other structures.
Kind of difficult to know what to talk about with each of these individual episodes. But I guess the key part is that I went into this episode worried that I would basically run out of children and upcoming heroes for this timeline to be viable. But during the episode my keeps really started working for me, feel much more positive about my chances now.
I should also mention that as of yesterday, Massive Chalice has hit early access, which means you can get it for yourself if you are interested.
Sigh, looks like the video took a few seconds to start recording, which cut off the opening to this episode. Something I should really start paying more attention to those details, it is always a bit painful to see stupid mistakes like that when I go back to write these posts and clean things up a bit for YouTube.
A few major milestones this episode, first relic weapon, and first combat casualties. And I don't actually have a particularly effective baby pipeline just yet, so I am kind of stuck with slightly too few heroes to both fill out my strategic roles and still have an effective combat squad. I really need to spend a bit of time ensuring that I have enough heroes doing their duty and having as many kids as possible or we are going to lose this war.
I should apologise for the framerate issues in this video, the game was having some problems at points, but it definitely feels worse watching the recording than we did here.
The AI really does seem to need some work, the enemies just don't seem to remember where you have been. They just seem to have a fairly simple set of rules they follow based on what is visible at the start of their turn. This is fine except that the melee troops are both too clever and too stupid. If they can't get close enough with their move they hide. Then they seem to promptly forget where my guys are and revert to random movement unless I have revealed myself to them again during my turn. Here is the Loading Ready Run episode I mentioned in the video by the way.
I also like the tension between wanting to use my "good" characters for strategic roles and needing to keep some back to fight.I have definitely been erring on the side of pushing them into strategic roles and I can see it coming back to bite me later on in the game as the enemy forces grow in power.
Not an ideal way to finish up a series. The "One Mo" at the end of the video was an interruption caused by my partner getting home, but I am just not interested in going back to this game. The Thieves Lodge puzzle will remain as that one dang puzzle that I got stuck on.
For me it was encountering it out of order and the game not really giving me good feedback on why I failed. What am I supposed to do down there, I cannot fight, attempting to initiate a fight results in an instant death. I cannot talk, the talk icon doesn't seem to show up, I can't walk, I can't climb the ladder. All I appear to be able to do down there is die.
I thought maybe I could get help or some kind of clues by raising the subject with other people, but you can't talk about the lodge directly, you can only talk to NPCs about the thief in your room and they are all pretty unsympathetic or oblivious to that as a problem.
To be clear I am not completely stuck, there are other things I can do in the game, I can explore the map further, I can explore some of the towns a bit more, I can push on to doing some of the other puzzles, the problem here is that I just don't care. The last puzzle I dealt with was obtuse and unrewarding and I have literally hundreds of other games I could be playing. Not finishing Heroine's Quest isn't going to result in me feeling left out of any discussions with friends, it will just be a bit of a disappointing way to have spent my time.
Today we continue with Massive Chalice, my last recording session with Heroine's Quest really drained a chunk of my enthusiasm for that game and I was still quite eager to get to grips with this one.
I am the kind of person who plays XCOM and really doesn't roll with the punches, I will reload to redo a mission because mostly I don't like to lose. It is a character flaw I am aware of and I try to avoid causing me problems but I definitely enjoy winning much more than losing and so I am happy to save, load and reload to get by tricky events by brute force if necessary.
This means that I have lost maybe 2 or 3 soldiers total in my XCOM runs, it is an avoidable portion of the game if you aren't on ironman. One of the really unique aspects of Massive Chalice to me is that hero loss is inevitable, your heroes are mortal, they age, they die and hopefully their children replace them. You have to roll with the punches, even if you are willing to save scum, because no amount of luck will let your first generation live to 300.
That combined with recording my play should make for a pretty different experience for me. I feel that save/load retries aren't that fun to watch so there is additional incentive for me to try out this play style that I haven't ever really done before. I hope you enjoy coming along for the ride.
As a reminder, you can find out more about Massive Chalice at http://blog.massivechalice.com/
I had planned to post the second episode of Ranneko Plays Massive Chalice today, after recording it of course. Unfortunately it looks like I didn't actually press the record shortcut or something. So of the two episodes I recorded I only have the second, which is missing a couple of decades worth of play. It is pretty frustrating and I am kind of hoping I can go back to my previous save and kind of redo most of the decisions and see if things can line up closely enough, but I may just have to redo the whole thing. Just glad I chose to use a new save rather than recycle the old one.
Here is one of my best Spelunky runs
I figure however that now is a good time to talk a bit about The Daily Challenge Challenge, which is a YouTube series I have been doing for about 5 weeks now. The basic concept is that I record my play of the daily challenge of various video games (currently Spelunky and Crypt of the Necrodancer) and put it up online every weekday.
It started as an excuse to practice these games and try to get better at them so that I could reliably score better than Jarenth at the game he gave me. It is also just a fun personal challenge, seeing how reliably I can keep it up, despite travel and other aspects of life just getting in the way. I was able to continue to play, record and upload while I was in New York last week, but I don't anticipate keeping the streak unbroken forever given I have a trip to Australia coming up in December.
One of my best Crypt of the Necrodancer runs
During these videos I of course talk about the game itself, but I it has also become a little bit of an audio diary, I will complain about being sick, or talk a bit about interesting things I have done or come across. I am not sure how relevant it is to my fairly small audience but it keeps me engaged and hopefully avoids there being too much dead air.
In general since it is a daily series I'm not going to be putting every episode, or even many episodes directly up at my blog. The easiest way to keep track of it would be to follow me on Google+, Twitter or subscribe directly to my YouTube channel
