MegaTraveller: A Cool $2 Million

I'm exhausted just reading this.

I can only think of one other game, Baldur's Gate II, that requires you to hit some kind of monetary threshold before moving on to the next stage of the plot. I'm sure there are others, and I'll be glad to hear about them in the comments, but I can't remember this type of challenge showing up so far in my chronology.

The difference, of course, is that Baldur's Gate II made the accumulation of funds fun and interesting, with numerous quests and a couple of related sub-plots. It's a safe bet that most players continue playing that chapter well beyond having achieved the monetary threshold. In MegaTraveller, in contrast, the accumulation of $2 million takes a long time, is mostly boring, and happens in maddeningly small increments. Take the screen shot that leads this post, for instance. You race between three planets to return a flag to the original planet, all for a measly $10,000--expending about $3,000 in fuel in the meantime. It's simply not worth the effort.

A "Jump 2" drive is necessary for traveling more than 1 hex at a time. Thus, you need one to reach the upper-right systems.

The $2 million is needed for a "Jump 2" drive, necessary to get out of the original cluster of systems and to the Boughene system, where an agent named Arik Toryan is waiting. Depending on how many terms your characters served and how you selected their retirement benefits, you might start with anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000, but you also have to buy weapons, armor, miscellaneous equipment, and ship's equipment, so the real amount of money you need to move to the next plot point is closer to $3 million. You can accumulate it a number of ways:

1. Waiting for assassins to attack you, then taking their ID badges to the Imperial Military Security Agency on Alell for the reward. (Fortunately, Konrad Kiefer only hires "most wanted" criminals to bounty-hunt the party.) This is by far the most lucrative of the options, awarding a couple hundred thousand dollars (it varies depending on the assassin) per ID badge. Unfortunately, you can only earn up to around $600,000 using this method in the first cluster of systems, as the rest of the assassins are in areas only accessible with the "Jump 2" drive.

The manual has a detailed description of each assassin.

Grabbing an ID off the corpse of one of them.

2. Gambling. But you need a character with high "gambling" skill to make any money, and the rewards are small.

3. Cargo-trading. Recording prices at each starport allows you to buy low and sell high.

4. Finding miscellaneous items wanted by various NPCs, like gems, pendants, and artifacts. Like the "racing" option above, these provide such low reward value (around $10,000 - $20,000 each) that they're barely worth the effort. There are also a limited number of items to find and return.

These small amounts aren't really worth the trouble.

The first and fourth options are most akin to the quests of Baldur's Gate II, and in a better-plotted game, I would have been happy to run around fighting enemies and solving side-quests to earn the $2 million. But the planets of MegaTraveller are consistently boring, as is the gameplay necessary to move from planet to planet; the combat system is unimpressive; and there's almost no sense of character development (which would be the other reason to do side-quests and engage in combat), so my first attempts to earn money centered mostly on gambling.
  

One of these days, we're going to have to have a long discussion about gambling in RPGs. It's hard to do it well. In the real world, the game itself is half the point, but in a CRPG, you're already playing a game that's presumably more interesting than the gambling minigame, so if the minigame takes too much time and effort, you get impatient. But if it's too simple and fast, the gains and losses rack up awfully quickly, magnifying even the slightest edge towards the player or the house, either breaking the game or making the minigame an idiotic proposition.

Then there's the whole saving aspect. If the game already allows liberal saving, it's hard to make an exception just for the area of the gambling facility, but without such an exception, gambling becomes meaningless.

MegaTraveller manages to solve some obvious problems. Even though gaming is quick--a three-second slot machine spin--the losses and rewards are so small that it's hard to either gain or burn money quickly. Since you can only save in starports, this puts a little distance between the game and the gambling facility and discourages reloads. Since you can only wager exactly $100 at a time, there isn't much danger of catastrophic loss in the first place.

The system is otherwise mostly nonsensical. Even though the only gambling game is a slot machine, somehow "gambling" skill affects the results. Perhaps slots work differently in the future, but I don't encourage any of you to head to Vegas thinking that you can somehow beat the slots through experience or education. To have a chance of a consistent winning streak, you need a character with a skill of 4 or 5, which is relatively hard to achieve. Recall that during character creation, you pick the category that you want to study in, but the game randomly picks the specific skill (or sub-category of skills) from the category list. "Vice" is the sub-category containing "gambling," and for all branches of service, it only shows up one time on one list. To get a skill level of 4 or 5, you have to select the master category containing "Vice" every time and hope that the random roll selects it. I went through 12 or 13 characters before I finally graduated one with a skill of 5.

A winning spin.

I added him to the party and took him to the casino, where I recorded the results of 200 rolls. With results ranging from $0 to $1,750, I averaged a return of about $140 on a $100 investment, meaning the average roll returned $40 in profit. This sounds pretty good--it would be great in a real casino--but do the math. I would have needed 50,000 rolls to achieve $2 million, and at 3 seconds per roll, that's 42 hours.

I wasn't above weighing down the ENTER key while I did other things, but the other complication is that the casino runs out of money after it loses about $30,000. You have to get into your spaceship, take off, and re-land before you can start winning again. In general, then, it was a way to make some of the money I needed while I took a shower or ran an errand, but it wasn't going to get me to my goal.

This is what happens when a casino bases its slot payouts on skill rather than luck.

I ultimately turned in three bounties, and collectively they netted me about $500,000, which was a good chunk of the money I needed. I turned in NPC rewards when they were convenient; for instance, a bartender on Efate wanted a pendant that I also found on Efate, earning me $15,000.

My most lucrative bounty.

Most of the funds came from trading. The most lucrative route that I found was to fill up my cargo hold with water in Efate for $50 a unit and sell it on Louzy for $3,390 per unit. Unfortunately, the cargo hold only carries 20 units of anything at a time. Still, the route earned $57,800 per trip, minus about $5,000 to refuel the ship each time. Once I had a system in place, each trip took about 10 minutes in real time. Supplemented by gambling, about 30 trips got me the $2 million I needed, plus a comfortable padding, and about a third of the way through the first season of The Rockford Files. That show really holds up.

(I should also mention that I was constantly spending money, too, mostly on ammunition, healing, and fuel. Earning money isn't a constant upward trajectory.)

Loading up on cheap cargo for resale.

Reader Gaguum, a big fan of the tabletop Traveller game, has commented several times that the spirit of the game involves playing a party that is usually broke and scrounging for its next meal, taking on any job or mission that it can find just to survive. In that sense, the computer version has done a reasonably good job mimicking the tabletop experience. It's just that the game world and mechanics of the computer version are so uninteresting that it makes this stage of the game an exercise in warding off tedium. Nothing interesting happens on the planets except that someone tries to attack you. NPCs never have anything interesting to say; there are no discoveries. And 1990 players didn't have Netflix to keep them company while they ran dozens of trade missions between the same two planets.

Refueling at a starport saps my hard-won credits.

In any event, I eventually had about $3 million. I bought weapons, computers, and programs for the spaceship, then blasted off on the main quest to Boughene. Before I talk about that, let's discuss the game's approach to combat, which I've mostly figured out.

Missed shots leave a blasted landscape.

There are hostile NPCs on almost every planet, and sometimes--as in the case of the gravitic city bar on Efate--it's not entirely clear why they're hostile. They just start shooting. To respond in kind, you first have to enter the "party" sub-menu and break up the party's single icon into multiple icons representing each character. The game scatters them around the initial location using any space available, sometimes putting them right on top of the hostile NPCs, which creates a bit of a problem.

Once separated, you can enter the "orders" sub-menu, which pauses the game, and issue individual orders to each character, including moving, firing at a target, reloading, and using an item like a combat drug or grenade. Exiting the "orders" menu causes your orders to execute, and characters will keep doing what you told them until you issue new orders. The character's skill with the chosen weapon affects both speed and accuracy. You watch as your character's shots and the enemy's shots criss-cross each other, often missing, sometimes leaving gouges in the floor, sometimes hitting but doing no damage, sometimes hitting and doing damage.

Blasting away in close quarters.

The dynamic doesn't sound too bad, except that:

• Characters don't always seem to do what you tell them to do. In an early post, I remarked that I couldn't get them to fire at all. Lately, I've had problems with a single character never firing his laser rifle despite having a "laser weapons" skill of 3 and plenty of ammo.

• Sometimes, characters do no damage. Minutes will pass in which every fired shot does 0 damage. I'll enter orders mode again, tell everyone to fire again, and suddenly they'll start doing damage.

• Characters often mistake my orders to target a particular enemy to target the enemy's square. The enemy moves and half my characters track him and keep shooting at him, while the other half waste ammo blowing holes in the floor where he was standing a few moments ago.

Perhaps the worst part is that combat is extremely unpredictable. I've had my entire party wiped out by a foe, reloaded, and then had the same party kill him without taking any serious damage.

The only real tactic seems to be to avoid engaging more than one enemy at once. This isn't too hard, as groups of enemies wander around randomly, and with a little patience, you can separate one from the herd. Once you enter "party" mode and start shooting, enemies never enter or leave the active screen, so skillful use of the terrain lets you take them on one at a time. In confined quarters, like a building, this strategy doesn't really work.

Siphoning a single enemy from the larger pack across the river.

One major complaint that I have about the game is that the characters don't seem to be developing at all. I thought I understood from the manual that skill levels increase through use, but multiple combat victories haven't advanced anyone's weapon skills, and hours and hours spent at gambling didn't increase my character's "gambling" skill. I'm pretty sure not a single skill has increased through use. That leaves training as the only mechanism for "leveling." Training areas in some starports offer a relatively random selection of training opportunities (they change with every visit), but at around $40,000 to $50,000 per skill point, it will be a while before I can afford even a handful.

This starport offers training in "laser weapons" and "jack of all trades." I could afford two sessions, but I'm not sure it's a good expenditure of funds at the moment.

At long last, I made it to Boughene to track down the contact that the Transom agent had instructed me to visit in the game's opening scenes. A bartender told me that a man named "Viktor" wanted to meet me on the other side of a bridge. It took me a while to find it. "Viktor" turned out to be another traitor working for Konrad Kiefer, somehow high enough in the corporation that he arranged for Arik (the contact I was supposed to meet) to be transferred to the nearby planet Neaera. He explained all of this in his villain's speech:

He attacked me with five other guys, and I kept dying, so eventually I just walked away from the battle and flew to Neaera in my ship. In the only building on that planet, I found a locked door, so I figured I needed to defeat Viktor to get a key or something.

82 skills in this game and not one of them is "lockpick."

I returned to Boughene and used the strategy described above to engage and kill them one-by-one. Even as singular foes, Viktor's party was extremely deadly, and I had to run back to town to heal and save between each individual battle. Eventually, I killed him and got a keycard from his body.

I end this post back on Neaera. The keycard got me into the facility, but it's crawling with Kiefer's agents, and there are no healing services on the planet, so I'll probably have to take this slow.

If you made a list of the lamest villain names in speculative fiction, "Kiefer" would have to be close to the top, perhaps just under "Malcom Trandle."

In the meantime, a couple random observations:

• Technically, you don't have to pay for fuel. Once you have enough money to buy "fuel scoops" for $25,000 and a "fuel purify plant" for $50,000, you can stop by any gas giant and refuel. Although the manual clued me into this, and I bought the items fairly early, it took me a while to find suitable gas giants. Planets that I thought were gas giants confounded me when they didn't do anything, and it's hard for me to see their color (dark blue or maybe purple) against the black of the main navigation map.

Not a gas giant suitable for refueling.

Here we go!

• Gaguum told  me that Traveller fans refer to the game simply as "Trav." This is, probably not coincidentally, the name of the executable that starts the game.

• My navigation of systems is complicated by the presence of asteroids in a lot of them. They show up on the mini navigation map, but I have trouble distinguishing them from the planets, more because of the size of the dots than because of the color.

It makes a pretty cool picture, though.

• The manual probably explains away some of my points of confusion, but the blasted thing is 85 pages long. It's tough to keep track of that much information. 

• I experimented with buying information for $2,000 a pop on some planets. The intel has been mostly useless, discussing things that I would have found through general exploration anyway, such as the presence of a maze on Sino or the flag races on Alell.

This information is easily-discoverable by simply talking to NPCs in museums.

I hope the game moves at a faster clip now that I'm fully equipped and engaged in the main plot. I have literally no idea what percentage of the game I've experienced. For those who have played: is accumulating the $2 million a significant portion of the game, or is it just a prologue to a much longer plot?