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Double Fine's Massive Chalice Uses Mating Genetics for Heroic Bloodlines

Posted on September 5, 2014

Double Fine continues to surprise with how they craft their take on various game genres. With Massive Chalice, the company has unified the turn-based strategy of XCOM and Crusader Kings with the long-term strategy elements of Civilization, looking through the genetics lens of Fire Emblem. This complex offspring of those games explores the concept of the smallest action having an impact in the longer term – a terms as long as 350 years.

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Massive Chalice Lead Animator Geoff Soulis showed us how all the pieces fit together in a hands-on demo at PAX Prime. We’ll start by overviewing Massive Chalice, then describe its classes, explain Double Fine’s flavor of turn-based combat, and tie together combat with prolonging bloodlines.

About the Game

Massive Chalice is a turn-based strategy game that involves a few moving pieces. The core action gameplay takes place on a grid – similar to XCOM. Winning a battle against the opposing Cadence monster race grants the player credits to produce more soldiers and fortify their territories – with 10 interconnected territories in total. The objective is to neutralize the Cadence invasions over the course of 350 years – expressed over an elapsing timeline similar to Faster than Light. Enduring 350 years, and the series of random events and Cadence events that fill them, requires players to strengthen and prolong their heroes’ bloodlines. The way to do that is wisely “mating” heroes (creating offspring), as each hero possesses and expresses a variety of gameplay-impacting traits. I’ll go over this a little later.

Massive Chalice is the second game Double Fine has produced with the help from backers on Kickstarter. Its tactics-focused core gameplay is somewhat of a new foray for Double Fine, although the studio has previously produced real-time strategy gameplay in Brutal Legend. The game actually runs on the same engine as all the Double Fine games from Brutal Legend-on, which is noteworthy given the many different genres the indie studio & publisher has released.

Classes

Massive Chalice starts with three classes: Hunters, Alchemists, and Caberjack. The number of classes can expand up to 12 when players breed together characters from other classes. Our demo featured the three base classes that I’ll overview.

The Hunter is a ranged class that fires projectiles. It has a follow-up ability that fires a second projectile at an enemy if the first shot is successful in damaging it. The Hunter also has a stealth ability that lets him move to a new point on the grid without being seen.

Alchemists offer close- and mid-range skills with a hooked blade and the ability to use that hook to lob explosives. Alchemists deal more damage with explosives than their close-range melees, but they can combine their move points by attacking with a grenade and then dealing more damage with melee. I found Alchemists the most fun and creative of the three base classes.

The Caberjack is a pure melee class. It’s usually the closest positioned to enemies and therefore has more hit points than party members of the same level. The tank.

Combining classes through reproducing will form hybrids of characters’ abilities and will likely increase their powers. For example, producing a Hunter-Caberjack hybrid class will create a follow-up ability for melee combat. This means that the character can enact a strong melee attack and, upon success, follow up with a second melee hit.

Turn-Based Combat Tactics

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Massive Chalice employs a proven overall formula for satisfying, cerebral combat, but it emphasizes tweaks to encourage more elaborate, creative strategies. One of the initial differences a player will notice between Massive Chalice and other turn-based strategy games is that it lets players use a character’s movement points at different instances during their overall turn. For example, a player can move an Alchemist into an attacking position to determine if his attack will do enough damage to bring down an enemy, and then if the enemy requires a heavier attack to be defeated, he can send in a Caberjack or Hunter to do the job while still having one turn left for the Alchemist.

Every moment of every skirmish can have an impact on each character’s bloodline. Battle and wounds can affect the character’s age and health permanently. If a player takes an old character onto the battlefield, regardless of his or her stats, that character can actually die of old age if they take damage even once. Even entering combat can kill a full-health, old-age unit – think of it like a heart attack. This means players will want to use melee and open-map combat at appropriate times so that they minimize the chances of taking damage. Perhaps that’s the reason why there is no dedicated Healer class, although each class has a heal ability.

I did not find the difficulty of the skirmishes to be challenging, but clearly the point of the game is to avoid taking damage to reduce the long-term impact of age and battle wear. And that level of challenge is quite…massive. It’s also noteworthy that this was a demo at an event, so it’ll be a bit easier on us than the full game.

Prolonging Bloodlines

Players prolong their characters’ bloodline in each territory through marrying those characters and reproducing. Each character has a set of traits that will be passed on to their offspring. Many of these traits are behavioral & personality traits that can affect a character’s stats and performance in battle. The corresponding menu shows the stats and traits, and even if the stats look good, players may need to bump traits more than stats because they impact the lineage long-term. These traits affect more than just the battleground, too. For example, training soldiers in a territory with a strong-willed ruler will fortify those soldier’s stats. Soullis even confirmed with me that physical traits show up in offspring as well, so two characters produce offspring that replicate their physical and behavioral characteristics.

The way the genetics engine in Massive Chalice works is much like basic biology – particularly Punnett squares. Characters contain dominant and recessive genes for every trait. Depending on the combination of genes (or more scientifically, alleles), it’s still possible to have two parents with dominant expressions of a trait produce an offspring with a recessive expression of the trait.

Other factors go into prolonging a bloodline as well, particularly age and fertility. A highly fertile character should be successful, but if that character is getting older, the number of heroes coming from that bloodline could run out in the short-term.

Wrap-Up

It’s interesting to see Double Fine developing a game as complex and strategy-driven as Massive Chalice. The various pieces of the game have their own strategic requirements and micromanagement, but they fit together into something surprisingly cohesive and logical. I’m curious to see how the game’s different elements scale as I get further along in the timeline – something that Soulis estimated could take 25 hours to complete.  

Double Fine expects to release a Steam Early Access version of Massive Chalice on PC in late November, and they will release the full version on PC and Xbox One in early 2015. They’re also open to publishing the game on other platforms like Playstation 4 and Playstation Vita, though no plans have been confirmed.

- Nick "stuBEEF" Pinkerton.