About The Game (From The Steam Store Page)
In this city-building strategy game, you control a group of exiled travelers who decide to restart their lives in a new land. They have only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland.
The townspeople of Banished are your primary resource. They are born, grow older, work, have children of their own, and eventually die. Keeping them healthy, happy, and well-fed are essential to making your town grow. Building new homes is not enough—there must be enough people to move in and have families of their own.
Banished has no skill trees. Any structure can be built at any time, provided that your people have collected the resources to do so. There is no money. Instead, your hard-earned resources can be bartered away with the arrival of trade vessels. These merchants are the key to adding livestock and annual crops to the townspeople’s diet; however, their lengthy trade route comes with the risk of bringing illnesses from abroad.
There are twenty different occupations that the people in the city can perform from farming, hunting, and blacksmithing, to mining, teaching, and healing. No single strategy will succeed for every town. Some resources may be more scarce from one map to the next. The player can choose to replant forests, mine for iron, and quarry for rock, but all these choices require setting aside space into which you cannot expand.
The success or failure of a town depends on the appropriate management of risks and resources.
Previous Playtime
1 minute
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
I don't remember my specific reasoning for getting it when I did, but looking back at my transaction history, it looks like I bought it at 60% off over Thanksgiving weekend, 2014, so this was surely in my more games = better phase. I do remember putting it on my wishlist because I felt like I didn't have enough city-builders and this one looked to be intriguingly unique.
Expectations and Prior Experience
I guess I must have started it up at least once, but if I got anything from the experience, I've completely forgotten about it.
The city-builder genre is a tricky one for me because I love these games on a bone-deep level, but that just gives them the power to break my heart. If my virtual citizens are happy and thriving, then I'm on top of the world. If my mismanagement leads to famine and plague, then that's really going to bum me out. So much of my enjoyment is going to depend on the specific learning curve and the fiddliness of the mechanics.
I'm looking forward to Banished, though. Its barter and resource-dependent gameplay strike me as exactly the sort of infrastructure challenge that tends to capture my imagination.
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Massive Chalice - 20/20 hours
I played a new game in Ironman and was reminded why I should never play Ironman. Thanks to a few bad rolls of the RNG, I wound up accidentally killing half my party with wayward Area of Effect attacks. I was still clinging to life as hour 20 rolled around, but I was forced to send out a group with only two heroes who were, predictably, slaughtered. If I hadn't been playing Ironman, I'd have just reloaded before the disaster and hoped for a better result.
Oh well, let's just say it requires me to stretch some unfamiliar intellectual muscles and leave it at that.
My final impression of Massive Chalice is that it's a good attempt and not something I regret playing, but I can't help wishing it was a fundamentally different game. It turned out to be a series of decent grid-based tactical battles within a greater strategic superstructure that was mostly just window-dressing. I really wanted to live the day-to-day life of the kingdom's people, becoming more involved in their loves and rivalries and just generally being a voyeuristic busybody. Then again, there's a part of me that wishes every game was The Sims.
Still, playing it one and a half times was pretty painless. It was no Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, or XCOM, but it's great to have more games of that type. Even if it's not the best, I enjoy the genre enough that it's been completely worth it.
Oh well, let's just say it requires me to stretch some unfamiliar intellectual muscles and leave it at that.
My final impression of Massive Chalice is that it's a good attempt and not something I regret playing, but I can't help wishing it was a fundamentally different game. It turned out to be a series of decent grid-based tactical battles within a greater strategic superstructure that was mostly just window-dressing. I really wanted to live the day-to-day life of the kingdom's people, becoming more involved in their loves and rivalries and just generally being a voyeuristic busybody. Then again, there's a part of me that wishes every game was The Sims.
Still, playing it one and a half times was pretty painless. It was no Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, or XCOM, but it's great to have more games of that type. Even if it's not the best, I enjoy the genre enough that it's been completely worth it.
Saturday, November 5, 2016
Massive Chalice - 14/20 hours
I made it. I got to year 300 on my first try. I was a little worried for awhile because there was a space of about 60 years where alchemists were completely extinct in my nation, but I just fielded a few archer-heavy teams until I could recruit a new hero to take over the stronghold. Massive Chalice proved not to be as difficult as I initially feared.
As far as the story is concerned, I'm about to spoil the ending, so if you really want to experience Massive Chalice "pure" then you should stop reading now . . .
After waiting 300 years for the Chalice to charge up, it detonates, driving the Cadence out of the kingdom and breaking the enchantment that makes you immortal. Just before you fade out of existence, the voices inside the Chalice decide to tell you that your victory is only temporary, that the Cadence is fundamentally indestructible and that the last three centuries are all just part of a cosmic cycle . . . which seems like kind of a shitty thing to say to someone just before they die, even if you try to reassure them by telling them about the imminent golden age that will only fall after a few hundred years. On the other hand, this does explain why you get to replay the game from the very beginning, which is nicely in keeping with the game's insistence on making its basic gameplay mechanics part of its fictional world.
And that's it. There's no more story. A brief introduction and a brief ending, but only random events and random battles in between. That's the biggest problem with this game. It's trying to be a general activity, a repeatable fantasy strategy board game that's only loosely bound by plot. Unfortunately, the strategy isn't quite deep enough to support this and the story isn't strong enough to be a draw on its own. Overall, Massive Chalice is a decent game, but it's a shadow of the game it could be if its features were more fully developed.
From here, I think I'll go back and play iron man. I definitely won't finish the game again, but if I'm still alive six hours from now, I'll consider it a victory.
As far as the story is concerned, I'm about to spoil the ending, so if you really want to experience Massive Chalice "pure" then you should stop reading now . . .
After waiting 300 years for the Chalice to charge up, it detonates, driving the Cadence out of the kingdom and breaking the enchantment that makes you immortal. Just before you fade out of existence, the voices inside the Chalice decide to tell you that your victory is only temporary, that the Cadence is fundamentally indestructible and that the last three centuries are all just part of a cosmic cycle . . . which seems like kind of a shitty thing to say to someone just before they die, even if you try to reassure them by telling them about the imminent golden age that will only fall after a few hundred years. On the other hand, this does explain why you get to replay the game from the very beginning, which is nicely in keeping with the game's insistence on making its basic gameplay mechanics part of its fictional world.
And that's it. There's no more story. A brief introduction and a brief ending, but only random events and random battles in between. That's the biggest problem with this game. It's trying to be a general activity, a repeatable fantasy strategy board game that's only loosely bound by plot. Unfortunately, the strategy isn't quite deep enough to support this and the story isn't strong enough to be a draw on its own. Overall, Massive Chalice is a decent game, but it's a shadow of the game it could be if its features were more fully developed.
From here, I think I'll go back and play iron man. I definitely won't finish the game again, but if I'm still alive six hours from now, I'll consider it a victory.
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Massive Chalice - 6/20 hours
I don't know why, but I was expecting this game to have a plot. So far, I'm 150 years into the 300 year campaign and it's just been a series of random battles interspersed with the occasional building, research, and arranged marriage. I'm not sure how a story-driven version of the game would look, but I think it would have been nice if you could connect with your individual characters, or at the very least have their noble houses have some kind of persistent generational stereotype.
I think I'd have really enjoyed the alternate-universe inverted version of this game, where there are all sorts of mechanics for managing your heroes' personalities and matchmaking couples of various degrees of reluctance for the good of the kingdom, and the actually combat is perfunctory. Though maybe that game is already Crusader Kings II.
The odd thing I'm noticing about Massive Chalice is that unlike XCOM or Fire Emblem, I'm not fastidious about preserving my characters. I think the fact that they quickly die of old age is making me callous. I can't resist the mindset of "sacrificing this warrior for the sake of victory is the most expedient way to win, and it really doesn't matter because he'll just be dead in 30 or 40 years anyway." Maybe I wouldn't adapt to immortality as well as I always imagined. Maybe I'd be the sensitive tormented vampire for about one, two generations tops before I decided it wasn't worth it. Or maybe Massive Chalice simply doesn't give me a reason to care about the little guys.
I think I'd have really enjoyed the alternate-universe inverted version of this game, where there are all sorts of mechanics for managing your heroes' personalities and matchmaking couples of various degrees of reluctance for the good of the kingdom, and the actually combat is perfunctory. Though maybe that game is already Crusader Kings II.
The odd thing I'm noticing about Massive Chalice is that unlike XCOM or Fire Emblem, I'm not fastidious about preserving my characters. I think the fact that they quickly die of old age is making me callous. I can't resist the mindset of "sacrificing this warrior for the sake of victory is the most expedient way to win, and it really doesn't matter because he'll just be dead in 30 or 40 years anyway." Maybe I wouldn't adapt to immortality as well as I always imagined. Maybe I'd be the sensitive tormented vampire for about one, two generations tops before I decided it wasn't worth it. Or maybe Massive Chalice simply doesn't give me a reason to care about the little guys.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Massive Chalice - 2/20 hours
Massive Chalice makes the curious choice of trying to explain the player's actions in terms of the narrative. Strategy games usually make this delicate compromise with reality, where the player is a disembodied presence, able to influence battlefields and the course of nations, but is not actually a force within the setting. Your successful strategies are the tides of serendipity or an abstraction of an elaborate command structure going on off screen. If the game acknowledges your presence, then it has to explain how one person can have a near-omniscient knowledge of the strategic situation and can endure through the ages. If you're a strategy game veteran, you're used to overlooking this genre convention, which makes it astonishingly clunky when a game tries to subvert it.
Basically, the titular massive chalice is a magical item with exactly the right properties to make you into the typical strategy game commander - your spirit is bound to it so that you don't age, but that means you can't leave the throne room and have to rely on casting your senses around the kingdom with the help of the chalice's clairvoyant waters. Also, it can completely resolve the plot, but it has to charge up for an amount of time exactly equal to the game's time limit. It's extremely silly.
I'm not that cynical about it, though. In addition to being perfectly suited to the mechanics of the game, the chalice is also a character in the game - or maybe it's two. It has a male and a female voice and the voices will converse with each other (and even occasionally disagree), so if the chalice is a single mind, it is a complex one. Regardless of its true nature, the chalice's commentary is, so far, a welcome addition to the game. It will crack the occasional joke, console you when your characters die and offer tutorial advice. I still have about 270 years of a 300 year war to go, and it remains to be seen whether the chalice will wear out its welcome in that time, but for now I'm enjoying it.
I may have to start over, however, because I've been making decisions in ignorance that are likely to lead to problems down the road. I didn't realize that Massive Chalice runs off of a weird Lamarckian evolution and that if you want your next generation of heroes to have a certain class, you have to arrange a marriage between parents of the appropriate class. If I don't turn things around quick, hunters may go extinct. Then again, maybe I'll lose and the Cadence will overwhelm me and I'll be able to start fresh. I'll give it another couple of hours before I make a decision.
PS - I really don't like that the main weapon for the melee fighter class is the caber. I've been known to be whimsical from time to time, but this is too silly even for me. Why on earth would I want to save a kingdom whose great martial tradition is charging at people with sharpened logs?
Basically, the titular massive chalice is a magical item with exactly the right properties to make you into the typical strategy game commander - your spirit is bound to it so that you don't age, but that means you can't leave the throne room and have to rely on casting your senses around the kingdom with the help of the chalice's clairvoyant waters. Also, it can completely resolve the plot, but it has to charge up for an amount of time exactly equal to the game's time limit. It's extremely silly.
I'm not that cynical about it, though. In addition to being perfectly suited to the mechanics of the game, the chalice is also a character in the game - or maybe it's two. It has a male and a female voice and the voices will converse with each other (and even occasionally disagree), so if the chalice is a single mind, it is a complex one. Regardless of its true nature, the chalice's commentary is, so far, a welcome addition to the game. It will crack the occasional joke, console you when your characters die and offer tutorial advice. I still have about 270 years of a 300 year war to go, and it remains to be seen whether the chalice will wear out its welcome in that time, but for now I'm enjoying it.
I may have to start over, however, because I've been making decisions in ignorance that are likely to lead to problems down the road. I didn't realize that Massive Chalice runs off of a weird Lamarckian evolution and that if you want your next generation of heroes to have a certain class, you have to arrange a marriage between parents of the appropriate class. If I don't turn things around quick, hunters may go extinct. Then again, maybe I'll lose and the Cadence will overwhelm me and I'll be able to start fresh. I'll give it another couple of hours before I make a decision.
PS - I really don't like that the main weapon for the melee fighter class is the caber. I've been known to be whimsical from time to time, but this is too silly even for me. Why on earth would I want to save a kingdom whose great martial tradition is charging at people with sharpened logs?
Massive Chalice - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
MASSIVE CHALICE is a tactical strategy game set on an epic timeline from Double Fine Productions. As the Immortal Ruler of the Nation, you'll take command of its heroes, forge marriages to strengthen your Bloodlines, and battle a mysterious enemy known as the Cadence in a war lasting hundreds of years.
Key Features
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This Game
This purchase was after I played Brutal Legend, but before I played Broken Age and Double Fine had earned a lot of trust from me. The fact that it was a strategy-rpg with an intriguing new mechanic was just icing on the cake.
Expectations and Prior Experience
Based on nothing in particular, I'm anticipating that Massive Chalice is going to be a lot like the Fire Emblem games - a turn-based, almost board-game-like strategy game with permanent character death. However, this knee-jerk comparison is really influencing my expectations to an unreasonable degree. Every Fire Emblem game I've played has been really hard and the characters have all been so precious that I wound up resetting the game rather than lose them. I have no reason to think that Massive Chalice will be the same.
Yet, absent that comparison, I have no idea how I feel about this game. I'm looking forward to the eugenics and infrastructure parts, but I'm worried I won't enjoy the battles. But those are just my baseline preferences. A lot depends on execution.
Still, there's nothing for it. I'm just going to have to jump into the game and let it become its own thing in time. I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll like it.
MASSIVE CHALICE is a tactical strategy game set on an epic timeline from Double Fine Productions. As the Immortal Ruler of the Nation, you'll take command of its heroes, forge marriages to strengthen your Bloodlines, and battle a mysterious enemy known as the Cadence in a war lasting hundreds of years.
Key Features
- Bloodline Genetics - MASSIVE CHALICE features an innovative Bloodline system that allows the player to marry heroes together to produce children. The Bloodline system uses a randomized genetic code for every hero. Their children can end up with the best (or worst!) gameplay-impacting traits of their parents.
- Permadeath - The heroes in MASSIVE CHALICE age over the course of the timeline and eventually pass away. This forces the player to engage in the beauty of permadeath and always juggle an imperfect party of heroes with which to do battle!
- Bloodline Relics - If a hero has fought valiantly enough when they inevitably pass away, their weapon has a chance to become a Bloodline Relic. This powerful Relic can be passed down to any character of the same house in order to carry on the legacy of the fallen hero!
- Long View Strategy - Because the war lasts 300 years, players need to take a long view of their strategy. Decisions have to be made dozens of years in advance and long-term planning is incredibly important. That 3-year-old toddler is going to grow up to be your most reliable melee fighter sooner than you think!
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This Game
This purchase was after I played Brutal Legend, but before I played Broken Age and Double Fine had earned a lot of trust from me. The fact that it was a strategy-rpg with an intriguing new mechanic was just icing on the cake.
Expectations and Prior Experience
Based on nothing in particular, I'm anticipating that Massive Chalice is going to be a lot like the Fire Emblem games - a turn-based, almost board-game-like strategy game with permanent character death. However, this knee-jerk comparison is really influencing my expectations to an unreasonable degree. Every Fire Emblem game I've played has been really hard and the characters have all been so precious that I wound up resetting the game rather than lose them. I have no reason to think that Massive Chalice will be the same.
Yet, absent that comparison, I have no idea how I feel about this game. I'm looking forward to the eugenics and infrastructure parts, but I'm worried I won't enjoy the battles. But those are just my baseline preferences. A lot depends on execution.
Still, there's nothing for it. I'm just going to have to jump into the game and let it become its own thing in time. I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll like it.
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
Battleborn - 20/20 hours
I wound up playing pretty close to 21 hours, but that doesn't mean very much, because I'm sure most of that spare hour was waiting in line for the matchmaking. I don't know why it takes so long, but it by far has the longest delay between deciding to play and actually getting in a game of any online game I've ever played (admittedly, my experience is limited to Civilization 4, Starcraft 2, and the Borderlands games). Of course, it really isn't worth it, because I can't stand playing competitively. I always delude myself into thinking this time is going to be different, but it never is. I have neither the killer instinct nor the even-tempered desire for mastery necessary to enter on the bottom rung of the ladder.
So why did I even bother trying PvP? Two reasons - I was at about 19 hours and 40 minutes and needed something with a little less time commitment than a story level (hah!) and I was one victory away from unlocking Toby, the penguin in the suit of power armor. If there's one thing I'm going to take away from Battleborn it's that I love unlocking and playing with new characters. If I could have completed challenges in single-player MOBA-style matches, I could have ground out command ranks for weeks and been perfectly content (the blog notwithstanding).
Overally, I'd say that I love Battleborn. It's a guarded, conditional sort of love, but it's love nonetheless. When the game is at it's best, it is exactly the sort of character-driven casual shoot-em-up that allows me to turn off my brain and just ride a wave of adrenaline into an oblivion of bloodlust. Borderlands 2 does a better job of filling that niche, but hey, something doesn't need to be the best just to be worthwhile.
However, it is a brittle greatness. Everything about the game, even the story missions, is designed around the idea of multiplayer. The are moments, not frequent, but often enough, where it feels like you are wearing too-large shoes - it's obvious the spaces are bigger than you need and the timing of enemy attacks is just a little too loose. It's not enough to ruing the game for me, but I can't ignore the fact that my love is predicated on overlooking the imprecision of the fit.
Which is to say I will definitely be playing Battleborn again, but only when I've got a prearranged co-op game. Single-player is fine, but I don't have to settle for it. If I want a single-player shooting experience, I'll just play a game that is tuned for it. On the other hand, because you level up your characters in the missions, Battleborn does have the advantage of not requiring the same commitment and/or coordination as the Borderlands games. I can join a game with any of my fellow players at any time and only have to rely on my personal skill to keep up. . .
Let's not dwell on how terrible a thought that is.
So why did I even bother trying PvP? Two reasons - I was at about 19 hours and 40 minutes and needed something with a little less time commitment than a story level (hah!) and I was one victory away from unlocking Toby, the penguin in the suit of power armor. If there's one thing I'm going to take away from Battleborn it's that I love unlocking and playing with new characters. If I could have completed challenges in single-player MOBA-style matches, I could have ground out command ranks for weeks and been perfectly content (the blog notwithstanding).
Overally, I'd say that I love Battleborn. It's a guarded, conditional sort of love, but it's love nonetheless. When the game is at it's best, it is exactly the sort of character-driven casual shoot-em-up that allows me to turn off my brain and just ride a wave of adrenaline into an oblivion of bloodlust. Borderlands 2 does a better job of filling that niche, but hey, something doesn't need to be the best just to be worthwhile.
However, it is a brittle greatness. Everything about the game, even the story missions, is designed around the idea of multiplayer. The are moments, not frequent, but often enough, where it feels like you are wearing too-large shoes - it's obvious the spaces are bigger than you need and the timing of enemy attacks is just a little too loose. It's not enough to ruing the game for me, but I can't ignore the fact that my love is predicated on overlooking the imprecision of the fit.
Which is to say I will definitely be playing Battleborn again, but only when I've got a prearranged co-op game. Single-player is fine, but I don't have to settle for it. If I want a single-player shooting experience, I'll just play a game that is tuned for it. On the other hand, because you level up your characters in the missions, Battleborn does have the advantage of not requiring the same commitment and/or coordination as the Borderlands games. I can join a game with any of my fellow players at any time and only have to rely on my personal skill to keep up. . .
Let's not dwell on how terrible a thought that is.
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