Massive Chalice EP29 - The Massive Finale

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Here we are, the final battle. My heroes, wave after wave of enemies and one giant cup that I need to protect. Honestly at this point it isn't even a challenge.

Large numbers of enemies are met with rage, explosives and the ability of most of my heroes to flat out vanish before the enemy can come looking for them. We are in the best of all possible timelines here my heroes have been at high level for ages, every item they have ever needed is at their fingertips and they can even replenish their explosive flasks straight from the chalice!

I don't even get to show of the cool thematic stuff that happens when you lose heroes in this fight, or at least I wouldn't if I hadn't also recorded this cool bonus footage. Other than the difficulty, which I must admit is at least partially due to this particular run stemming right from the initial backer beta, I really love the thematic content of this fight.

It is a last stand where your heroes ancestors ready to help them should they fall. Standing guard of the chalice you zoom into at the beginning of every fight, beating back the demons of time as they advance on this most important of objects.

I really like the idea behind the very final twist, in some ways it undercuts the player's success but it rams home that this game is about the inevitability of time, at some point all things will come to an end and all we can do is fight to ensure that end is pushed back for as long as possible.

The inevitability of loss is the thing I have enjoyed most in this game, in other tactical games I am the kind of player who will reload and replay a fight because I lost a squad member. Here I am willing to face the loss and move on because even if they survive the battle, the loss of heroes is inevitable, they cannot and will not live forever, eventually even without ever losing a battle the loss of land and keeps is inevitable. Time cannot be stopped.

I had a great time playing and recording Massive Chalice and I will definitely continue to track its progress through to its release and probably will play through it again at that point. I don't think I will do another Lets Play of it though, I am very happy to let this one stand.

Tune in next week for a series of one of episodes where I try out games sitting in my Steam library.

Massive Chalice EP28 - Setting Up the Finale

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Just one last fight before the game is over.

I have to say that I was not exactly surprised to find out we need the cadence present to finish the game. It would have been pretty disappointing if we just hit the end of year 300, the chalice charged and zap, the game is over. It wouldn't feel complete with a finale fight.

Plus of course there have been threads on the Doublefine forums talking about the final fight, which also gives it away somewhat. The final fight brings in a rather interesting and cool hook which I will go into more next time on the blog.

When recording this episode I was kind of impatient to get to the end and get to play out that fight, most of the strategy level decisions have lost their impact knowing that I no longer need to shepherd future generations towards the final confrontation. It renders a lot of things that previously felt very satisfying to kind of pointless busywork as I let my keeps and other buildings fall empty and direct my research down deliberately fruitless aims.

It seems oddly appropriate given the entire aim of this society from my time with it has been holding out against the Cadence, as victory and relief grows closer the struggle itself loses the same appeal and intensity it once had.

On Friday it all finishes and these people can work out what to do with their lives.

Massive Chalice EP27 - Forgetting Your Rage

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Despite having researched the equipment that lets me ignore special damage like the wrinkler and lapse attacks, I've never really bothered using them. The goal has been to try to put down lapses and just stay out of range of wrinklers.

The special damage does mean that they are always a threat though, I am never really comfortable with the idea of ending my turn visible and in range of any of them.

This is especially true at level 10 because there is there is no XP buffer one hit from a lapse and suddenly you lose your awesome special level 10 skill. It is pretty painful and  I have no idea how forgetting the skill will work for Mad Bomber and Chalk One Up, would I lose the damage boost I have built up or would my alchemist suddenly lose 5 vials?

Regardless, we are getting ever close to the end of the game, this series will finish up on Friday.

Massive Chalice EP26 - Enforcers Suck

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The sad news is that enforcers, just not good enough compared to the Hunters and Trickshots, they basically only deal comparable damage with close range shot, which is exactly where I don't actually want my hunters to be.

Give me a trickshot with the ability to hit multiple enemies with the same attack or the hunter with follow up any day over an enforcer.

I guess it is worth noting that I am comparing these guys when fully kitted out with the best weapons, armour and equipment that I can possibly have, but from what I have seen on the doublefine forums, enforcers only really become useful when using one of the cadence bows. Weapons which for the most part are significantly outpaced by relics, so I am not so sure it is worth the effort, especially with the other hunter bloodlines and relics I have available to me.

Massive Chalice EP25 - Revisiting the Marshlands

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Back to the same map as last time, but from a different angle and against different opponents. As a cost saving approach I like it, the maps do feel different enough, as long as you don't see them back to back anyway.

I really enjoyed using kill rage here, if I could get a bit more damage up I would probably use caberjacks a lot more. Maybe I should think about using that Winter's Bone relic for a while.

This series will end on Friday week. If you have any suggestions as to what you would like to see me play next, please let me know.

Massive Chalice EP24 - Keeps Exposed

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After the attack this episode I am left with all 5 of my keeps exposed to direct attack by the cadence. This, given that I now face only 3 region attacks, is the most vulnerable period I am likely to have remaining in this game. I could potentially lose most of my keeps over the next few episodes, which will greatly reduce my ability to gather reinforcements.

Fortunately there are only 40 years or so left in this game. My youngest heroes should see a day where either the cadence are defeated or the fight has been truly lost.

Either way, when this run ends I will move onto the next game, this series should finish up next week, I am happy to take suggestions as to what to play next.

Massive Chalice EP23 - BOOMstriker!

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Okay, Boomstrikers are a lot of fun. The high accuracy, free aim and area attack results in the ability to kill off enemies groups of enemies at quite a distance and they retain the alchemist's high damage.

They would probably feel a bit less awesome at lower levels due to the 5 flask limit, but at high levels they are really mobile from having free throw and boom and zoom, 2 high damage attacks in the same turn, with each success letting you advance or retreat as you please, yes please!

Definitely running out of things to say outside of the videos though, good thing I should finish off this game fairly soon.

Massive Chalice EP22 - Tricky New Hybrids

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I really like the different feel of the new classes, the Shadowjack being able to sneak up on enemies for massive sneak attack damage is great, though it does mean they can't get to the fight quite as fast as a regular caberjack.

The area effect of the Flash arrow does seems harder to use compared to regular flask attacks, because enemies only tend to cluster when they are charging and I try to avoid being visible long enough to let them do that and arrow are not free targeted, you must directly attack an enemy.

I am definitely approaching the end game and those 3 region attacks are going to start costing me pretty dearly. I am pretty sure those are all I will face until the end and as a result I am definitely going to start losing regions and most of my keeps are on the outer edge. If this happens too early I could basically run out of viable heroes before year 300 rolls around.

Only time will tell I guess.

Massive Chalice EP21 - Massive Noir

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Little bit of weirdness after the battle here, no idea what happened there, definitely going to report it as a bug.

For me one of the major differences between XCOM and Massive Chalice's tactical combat is the emphasis on line of sight. In XCOM I spend a lot of time managing cover and overwatch. Trying to lure enemies out into the open and ensure that mine are never either caught out of position or flanked.

In Massive Chalice there is no cover or overwatch, the goal is to ensure that my heroes are never spotted by an enemy they can't kill. In an ideal game I should never end a turn with a hero visible to an enemy who is not stunned or dead. Once I got veil armour and flarrow I have historically been very good at this. My heavy hunter usage has allowed me to ensure that my enemies have never really been able to see me, either through stealth or being blinded. In general I have had at least half a dozen of those shots available to me every fight, enough to almost never be worried about being caught too out of position.

As a result, the removal of flarrow's blinding ability has resulted in some actual tension in my battles, this game doesn't let me repick, so I haven't had a chance to actually use blinding shot. Instead I have had to fall back on pure positioning and damage to try to sort out these problems and that simply has not always been enough. My heroes have been hit and damaged, enough that I have actually had to deploy healing. I think today's fight is the first one that I have actually had the chance to lose a character in for several in game generations. One more advanced bulwark hit and Roderick could have died before first aid arrived.

It will be interesting to see next week how I go having blinding shot available once more, between that, stealth and veil armour however I really do not see myself ever investing in flarrow again. Especially with level 10 heroes, genetics, dead eye and veil armour means that I have a ridiculously large sight radius and I can invisibly scout ahead.

Next time we get to play around with a couple of trickshots and a shadowjack. Looking forward to seeing how they play.

Massive Chalice EP20 - Experienced Relics

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Unfortunately none of the new hybrid classes have come of age yet, so I stuck with the pure ones. Hopefully I will have some new heroes to play with next time. Meaning I can fight with them in episode 22.

This isn't that big a deal though because at this stage of the game I am trying to level up relics that the my older heroes are carrying. They are the only things left in the game I have that have some space left before they hit their XP cap.

I spent way too much time getting to this screen

They are also a key source of interface frustration. I keep having to duck into menus in battle to keep track of the XP value of the relic, I think I did that at least half a dozen times in the fight this episode and it is at least 3 or 4 clicks each time. Not a fast process.


It seems like it would be very easy to fix this too, the heroes weapon is shown in the bottle right, so you could pretty easily just add the XP bar to that, possibly coloured differently so it isn't confused with the hero XP bar on the bottom left.

Something like this

It is also interesting to note that because all of my heroes are now at level 10, even the ones that never enter combat themselves, my vanguard are starting to almost entirely age out. I don't feel the need to promote them to standards or regents because all I do then is lose a soldier, one of the younger heroes is almost always a better candidate because they have they don't have relics and I can focus purely on what traits I want to pass on.

In fact I am likely to keep my current vanguard until they either die and pass their relic on, or a space opens up in the Sagewrights guild. The relics are easily the most important factor right now.

Massive Chalice EP19 - A Slight Pause

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My hiatus was not planned at the time I recorded the intro to this episode, which lead to a little bit of awkwardness at the start. But now that my holiday is over and I am back home and, most important of all the Hybrid class patch is out I can resume this series again.

This patch has brings some really significant changes along with it, but most of them completely fail to show up in this video. Pre-existing heroes maintain their old skill trees and class, so I need fresh babies before I get to see any of the new sub-classes.

It also looks like the new relic appearance isn't applied retroactively, and I am no longer actually generating new relics, instead I am focusing my efforts on levelling up old ones so I am pretty much stuck with the boring non-distinct ones I already have.

All I have are the relatively minor tweaks to existing skills and combat rules, most of which have no real impact on my play style, save for a sudden inability of my hunters to blind my enemies, meaning I need to play it a little more cautious until my new wave of anklebiters show up.

This is all pretty much a flow on from my decision to try to have one single massive chalice series as a lets play, rather than multiple timelines, I think the game would simply take too long and I would have to either show only highlights, significantly increase episode times or increase the episode release rate. None of which I am very keen on, for the purpose of this lets play I will follow this timeline to its conclusion, whatever that may be.

If you are interested in playing Massive Chalice for yourself, you can grab it on Steam right now, or if consoles are more your thing, it will eventually be released on Xbox One as well.

Massive Chalice - The Hiatusing

I am going to take a break from this Let's Play until probably mid January. The primary reason for this is that I am travelling back to Australia for Christmas and New Year and I won't have my desktop or headset in order to record, nor will I reliably have sufficient bandwidth or time to edit episodes together.

It was this or try to record the rest of the game and get the bulk of the editing done before travelling which definitely seems possible, but the other reason for not pushing ahead is the Hybrid Class patch that is coming early next year. It looks like it will have some pretty significant changes coming with it, not just the new classes and I really would like to have the full remaining 95ish years to play around with the new classes and balance changes that are coming down.

Not planning to put up a different let's play series in the meantime, because of the same time and editing commitments that would require, but if you want something a bit different, a friend of mine has been doing a text based Civilization Beyond Earth let's play over at Ninja Blues.

Hopefully I can write up a couple of posts over the break, but no guarantees, have a great holiday season and see you again next year.

Massive Chalice EP18 - The Best Timeline?

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So I am just past year 200, I have only ever had 3 or 4 heroes die in battle, the rest all lived long and hopefully happy lives and these days my training program means that practically every child that makes it out of training is a warrior out of myth and legend. Right now I think things are going pretty well, but then I still have 94 years left for things to go wrong.

In fact, given that most of what I talk about in this video I mentioned in my previous blog post, instead why don't I talk about how this could go all wrong, here are the major threats I see on the horizon:

• Random events: I have plenty of heroes, so I am not actually worried about these injuring or damaging heroes, but they can add corruption to regions. Tech and hero level doesn't appear to factor into these events either so they can and have imperilled regions.
• 3 region attacks: Even when I win these, the net effect is that corruption goes up and regions end up closer to destruction.
• 2 region attacks on my most corrupted regions: This forces me to pick which region I want to keep, both this and the previous point ultimately stem from the same larger threat
• 4 of the 5 exposed regions are keeps: The loss of a keep is not only the loss of the heroes and trainees, but effectively eliminates a hero household from the future usage.

If I start losing regions and thus start also most of my keeps too early I may see my heroes dying of old age without any replacements arriving before year 300. Thanks to random events and 3 region attacks this can happen without ever actually losing a battle save the last one.

I should also note that as of version 0.86 all cadence attacks in years 250-300 are 3 region attacks. This is why I am still a bit nervous even with how well everything has gone. Those last 50 years promise to be pretty brutal.

Massive Chalice EP17 - AI Problems

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I really love the newton's cradle thing at the start of the episode I suspect it would have been significantly more effective if I had just used a regular attack given the ramcap caber's built in knockback ability. I really don't know what could possibly get me to stop using that caber without it having a fairly significant damage nerf.

That same fight also shows that the AI really cannot handle the increased range of a Dead Eye hunter. It feels really goofy because they seem to react to being shot at from from outside their sight range. Instead it follows the standard no target in sight procedure, which is apparently move randomly and occasionally hit the scenery.

They would feel a lot less silly if they retreated, looked for cover or at least tried to head towards the source of the attack. But stand there being shot at is just very daft, I am sure there are many different ways to fix it, but I wonder if just in-engine giving enemies free sight of the character that attacked them would fix it. My expectation would be that melee enemies would head towards the attack/find what cover they can on the way, and ranged enemies would attempt to move to within range and then attack. It would make cradles significantly more dangerous since I assume they have the same kind of indirect fire alchemists do, but I can't help but feel that that also would be better.

I really have to keep in mind that I am definitely over levelled for this stage of the game, I think the expected year to start having level 10 heroes is probably more around the 250 to 275 mark, rather than the early 200s. High level heroes also means high level researchers so I am also ahead on the tech curve. This basically all stems from the timeline starting before the patch that increased building costs, I was built out and up much earlier than the game expects. If I were to start new game now, things would be pretty different.

Massive Chalice EP16 - Defend the Keep!

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New fight type, Keep Defence, while the game did wait until the back half of the game to throw this at me, these can actually happen at any time to a keep on the outer ring, they can also attack Sagewrights and Standards.

Not sure that the cadence actually gets a special goal, I suspect my understanding shown in the video is simply wrong and they just have to kill all of my heroes to win. Mostly because I don't really get any information about that from the Chalice itself.

They certainly are a welcome change by now though. They include more enemies but also really different stakes, instead of gambling on realm status, you effectively are wagering the entire building and line, I am pretty sure you lose the building and everything in it. A weaker version of losing the entire domain to corruption. Finally I am pretty sure that the keep defenses all take place on different maps than the standard map pool. Overall it is a nice change once in a while.

The other thing these missions do is show that while the game is built around 5 hero squads, it does a fairly good job of adapting to larger squad sizes. It only really struggles in the Results screen where the UI expectations are most visible.

5 Heroes

7 heroes

You can see that the extra heroes pushes over the end of the page, meaning we suddenly require scrolling. I do appreciate that they have put some thought into this situation. It can't be an accident that the sixth hero is partially visible which tells the user that hey, there is more information available, you just have to scroll down to see it. I think it works well as a solution to a relatively infrequent but expected event in this game.

Massive Chalice EP15 - Why Won't You Have Kids?!

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Those Vaughns, heck not just them but everyone who has occupied that keep has been mysteriously infertile. Not sure what is causing it but kids are exceedingly rare in that keep, even when the game tells me that the regent and their partner are both bountiful and their chances for children are super high.

I guess this is what adoption is for though, to try to get past this point and to hopefully push through into a more reproductive regent and family later on. I really want to keep those caberjacks around, and given that they are on the outer ring of regions, they are relatively easily lost to cadence attacks. Fortunately the game even handed me a second child for them to raise through the first fight in this episode.

We finally get to see the Ramcap caber in action, it is so freaking awesome. I love being able to hit enemies into one another and now I can, repeatedly and easily. Takes the main hook of the caberjack and amps it up to 11. Really looking forward to getting to use it in future fights.

Also these are difficult weeks for me due to my intent to have the videos mostly match up with the current state of the game when they are released. It means I can't play too far ahead of the posts (currently sticking with up to a week). So the cliffhanger at the end of this episode affects me too, I won't get to play the next fight until probably the day this post goes up, i.e. a week since I actually hit this point in the game. I was so very tempted to go for just one more fight this time.

Massive Chalice EP14 - New Trees and New Choices

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We get to see the new alchemist skill tree this episode and I really like the choices it offers because now they are far from easy to make. I mean Dart of the Falcon is great for making alchemists more effective at longer ranges, but maybe I want to make them a more effective team medic with thrown ultralixors? Similarly I love acid and have used it a lot in these combats, but I am pretty sure sometimes I would rather the flexibility of the second item over the 6 extra points of damage on the enemy turn, even from glancing blows.

What I am even more excited by is the implementation, the skill tree reshuffle was only for future heroes, it did not affect existing heroes at all, which implies that hero skill trees, both the current skills selected and the overall structure is stored with the hero information. This opens the way for a mod or new game plus option along the lines of Training Roulette from XCOM Enemy Within which was a mode I really enjoyed.

So just randomising the skill trees and allowing non-class skills that still make some sense to show up would be pretty interesting, but combining it with parents and standards could make it even more complicated but also even interesting. Imagine becoming really attached to an alchemist household specifically because that family all are able to learn charge, or a hunter household that know how to apply acid to their bolts.

I am really hoping that modding is supported by the final version of this game.

Massive Chalice EP13 - Midpatch Ramifications

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We have officially hit the mid-point of the game and thus hopefully this series as a whole, given my plan is to play this only until I win or die. The game should start throwing some new things at us to help ensure that life stays interesting.

Given that this game is in early access, and I actually started playing before it even hit that point I expect patches to hit while recording this series. It is one of the reasons why I only record a week at a time, ideally I want to keep the videos as representative as possible of the current game, without restarting each patch.

The patch that hit last week is pretty significant, though I avoid the full ramifications of it by being halfway through the game already. The key strategy changes are increasing building costs and reducing the effectiveness of the building region buff, a slight reduction in Standard XP rates and some more minor changes to Sagewrights and the intuition stat.

The building aspects are made completely irrelevant for this play through because I already built out the map, I literally cannot build anything else in this game, so that change has just come in too late to affect me. Likewise with the change to Standards, I have already benefited from about a century of better standards, my heroes are approaching the higher levels and I think the brakes have been applied too late to stop me there. All that is left is a slight research reduction, I might get one or two fewer items by the end of the game.

The skill tree changes though, they are more interesting. This episode they haven't really taken too much of an effect, but logjam feels like a much more directly useful skill to me with these changes, the area stun just never seemed useful enough over the alternative but it was so great to pop both ruptures near me with a single attack during that fight.

I will talk a little more about the implementation of the skill changes and what I hope it means on Wednesday.

Massive Chalice EP12 - Interfacing Incompetence

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I enjoyed the fight a lot more in this video, but I did need to cut about 5 minutes near the end which consisted purely of me equipping my heroes to the next fight, including fully kitting out a hero and then completely forgetting to hit the replace button, or forgetting I had already adding them to the party.

Ultimately I am not sure if those issues are just mine, or possibly the games. Probably a mixture of both but I feel that I should take the majority of the blame there.

The random event this week is thematically interesting. One of the most terrible choices a real person can face, but significantly neutered by the knowledge that this is just a game and ultimately every "person" involved is a bunch of numbers inside RAM. Makes it very easy to say "Well, they can and hopefully will have many more, so we can sacrifice this child", not a choice I would want to have made for me either in real life.

Next week I will get to deal with a pretty significant set of changes from the most recent patch, but I will talk more on that next time.

Massive Chalice EP11 - The Silliest of Fights

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The fight in this episode is pretty dumb. Even 34 seeds isn't actually a challenging or interesting fight at this stage of the game, despite sending in what is one of the worst match ups against that enemy. It pretty much felt like a mop up operation from the very start of the map. If I had paid a little bit more attention when I picked the battles I could have anticipated this and sent in only alchemists to make it even more of a cakewalk.

I suspect that this encounter is either meant to fire much earlier, when groups of 4 - 5 are a threat,  or to fire a little bit later with some advanced seeds that can actually create a cradle. Without that it was just kind of

In the strategy layer I am definitely having a slight problem with hero gender balance. It looks like one of my families has a pretty strong presence of Queenmaker as a pretty common trait which has resulted in too many ladies. It isn't too much of a problem yet, I haven't had a situation where I need a man and there are none around but it has certainly limited my choices and I will definitely need to keep an eye on it to ensure that I don't run out of men later down the track.

Finally I should note that one of the features I have been looking forward to the most, hybrid classes, is definitely at least still on the agenda, the team recently asked for class name suggestions on the forum. It is kind of hard to know how much impact the hybrid classes will have on the game.