Twilight 2000: Mission: Interminable

Only a tank could kill Rambo.

     

I'm into the thick of the game now, having solved about 18 missions. Once you know what you're doing, missions can take as few as 5 minutes. For instance, you drive from Krakow to the city, talk to an NPC, grab an item, drive back to Krakow, and take R&R for the rest of the week.

The missions have different objectives, but they all proceed about the same. First, you get the mission from your intelligence officer by calling him on the radio.

Then you select the right personnel, based on the skills the mission is likely to call for (you can always swap them out mid-mission if you have a hand-held radio). You may have to stop by the store room to re-supply with ammo, medicine, or other items the mission might need.

Loading up on antibiotics ahead of a medical mission.

    
You then choose a vehicle and drive to the mission's start point. You may have to ultimately drive back and forth between several towns, and you might get interrupted with a tank combat along the way; I still lose most of these and have to reload often.

Once the mission is complete, you return to your base and drive your vehicle into the garage. Then you can rest and heal or just do whatever you want for the rest of the week, when the next mission begins.
    

An animation takes over as you enter or leave the base.

    

I lost track of the specific sequence and number of missions, but it's clear from reloading that many of them are randomized. So far, they've come in seven types:

1. Hostage rescue. You go to the town where the hostage was taken from, talk to the town's leader, and find out where he was taken to. Then you go to that town, clear out half a dozen hostiles, and speak to the hostage. He never comes with you, but he gives you papers to bring back to the leader in the first town. You return the papers to him, then return to base.
      

The town leader congratulates us at the end of a hostage rescue mission.

    

2. Clear out hostiles. You get a report that Baron Czarny's forces have taken over a town. You go there and kill them all, which might consist of vehicle combat, ground combat, or both. You speak to the town's leader, get your reward, and return to base.
    

The party gets a mission to clear out "soldiers and assassins."

    

3. Find the spy. You learn that Baron Czarny has a spy operating in one of the towns that you control. You go there and start interrogating NPCs. Eventually, you find the right one, kill him, report to the town leader, and return to base.
     

"Interrogate" works successfully.

     

4. Doctors without borders. You learn that a group of people in some town are injured or sick. You load up your doctor with medical supplies and drive to the town. You may have to clear out some hostile forces. Then you run around using the doctor's medical kit or antibiotics on the afflicted NPCs until they're all cured. Visit the town's leader, get the reward, return to base.
      

      

5. Vehicle retrieval. You learn that one of Baron Czarny's vehicles was disabled somewhere. You drive there, have your mechanic repair it, and drive it back to your base and add it to your fleet.
       

Cooter repairs a deuce-and-a-half.

     
6. Supplies. One town needs supplies. Another town has them. Drive to the second town, pick them up, take them to the first town. Reward, return, etc.
     

This type of mission is almost insulting.

   
7. Restore the deposed.  A town leader has been ousted by Czarny's forces. Visit him in exile, then go to the town that he used to lead, kill all of Czarny's men, and return to the leader to let him know he can resume office.
     

Talking to an exiled leader.

     

Each successful mission comes with a reward. For the first eight, that reward was a new vehicle. One-by-one, I acquired a HMMWV, two 2.5-ton trucks, an M1A1 tank, an M1A2 tank, an M2 Bradley, a T-72 tank, a T-80 tank, and a T-90 tank. These are all American vehicles except the last three tanks, which are Russian.
    

One of my tank rewards.

     
I began to wonder if my fleet was just going to keep growing until it burst out of the garage, but then the rewards started to change to supplies--things like food, fuel, and ammunition, which improve the meters that I can see on my office terminal.
      

"Population" never seems to go anywhere.

     
Ground combat has gotten a little easier. Once I learned how to use the hand-held radio to call characters with different skills and languages from my base, I stopped dragging my doctor and mechanic on every mission. I replaced them with two fighters with much higher initiative scores. Until the comments on my last entry, I didn't realize "initiative" was a separate attribute that develops during character creation. My medic and mechanic had initiative so low that the slightest wound left them completely incapacitated.

As we've seen from the comments, there are a lot of ways to cheese combat. The vehicle trick takes advantage of the fact that vehicle combat and ground combat don't mix. They're completely separate programs. Thus, hopping into a vehicle makes you immune from ground-based attacks, and you can use vehicles to drive all over the battlefield or to (temporary) safety. Another trick is to have the high-initiative characters act first, then "flee" combat (which ends it) and immediately enter again, which starts a new round with your high-initiative characters going first again. The enemy never gets a chance to act. In any event, with the right party members and weapons, combat isn't difficult enough to bother with these exploits. Occasionally, some enemy manages to one-shot me with a rocket, otherwise I do pretty well.

Vehicle combat is a different story. I can't figure it out for the life of me. On a basic level, I guess you're supposed to watch the radar and fire in the direction of enemies, but I never hit anything and I can never seem to close in on the vehicles shown on the radar. The only way I've won vehicle combats is by letting the computer do the fighting. It loses about 75% of the time, but when vehicle combat has been unavoidable, I've just reloaded a few times until the computer wins.
      

The computer strikes a hit against an enemy tank in auto-combat.

    
There have been a few memorable moments among the missions. Solving both the spy and vehicle missions depends upon having a character with a high enough skill ("interrogate" and "mechanic," respectively). The vehicle missions also require having the right set of tools. When you try to interrogate a suspect or fix a vehicle, the computer makes a roll against the character's skill and reports the outcome.

Apparently, the 4s that my characters have in those skills isn't particularly high. A couple of times when Cooter tried to fix a vehicle, he suggested we radio for Fiona, who has a "mechanic" skill of 5, instead. Upon interrogating suspects, Lacey sometimes lamented that she isn't very good at it, which is too bad, as she's the "best we've got." In both cases, I just had to try repeatedly until I got more favorable rolls and the skills worked. But this is a reminder that if you don't develop certain key skills, or acquire certain items, during the character creation process, you're screwed for the rest of the game.
     

Maybe you could avoid expressing self-doubt in front of the suspect?

     
I had difficulty with one early combat. My party was able to kill 5 out of 6 enemies, but 3 of my 4 characters were disabled in the process, leaving only Lacey, the party leader, to kill the last enemy. She was able to disable him with a grenade, but he was only inert, not dead, and she was out of grenades. Her only remaining weapon was a 9mm pistol. I had her close the distance to the enemy until she was mere feet away, but her skill with the pistol isn't very high. The enemy was incapable of acting, even moving, but round after round, Lacey couldn't kill him. She pumped bullet after bullet into his arms, legs, chest, abdomen, and head, doing progressively more damage, but not finishing him off. She finally killed him with a shot to the head when she had about 3 bullets left. By then, I felt like a war criminal.
     

Lacey is going to need therapy for years.

      
Finally, upon arrival to one of the vehicle-retrieval missions, this is what I saw from the window of my tank:

I guess that vehicle truly is disabled. I just don't know how my intel officer predicted it.

Some miscellaneous notes:
     

• I'm not sure if fuel plays a role in the game or not. Frequently, after succeeding in missions, the town's leader tells me that he's re-fueled my vehicle, but the gauge never actually seems to go anywhere. The manual warns about running out of fuel if you're not careful, but I wonder if that's just one of many things that the developers wanted to implement and didn't.

      

Town leaders are always "taking the liberty" of topping off my fuel.

     

• Similarly, I've not once had to forage or fish to eat, drink, or rest, even though the manual promises that these all play a role.

• If the designated party leader dies, the game ends.

• Both the manual and the in-game intelligence officer suggest that between missions, I could just drive around looking for supply caches in random towns. I've explored a few towns in between journeys to other places, but not once have I found a cache of supplies just sitting around. Again, I'm not sure if this was implemented or not.

   
As the mission types started to repeat, I began to wonder if the game ever actually ends. I'd been assuming all along that they'd ultimately culminate in some offensive against Baron Czarny, but so much is unfinished in the game, maybe the plot is unfinished, too. Maybe the characters just fight randomly-generated missions forever. But towards the end of this session, my intelligence officer had some comments that suggested another "phase" is coming in the game.
    

My intel officer suggests a new direction to our campaign.

    
All of the missions so far have involved cities in the south of Poland, but now I'm starting to get some in the middle of the map. Presumably, we'll progress from there to the north, where Czarny hides.
  
As I keep saying, there's a germ of a good game here: a mission-based RPG that calls a variety of skills and tools into play. But too much of it feels unfinished, too many skills unused. Gameplay is repetitive and boring, and there's still no sign of character development. It's as if I'm playing a light action game with an RPG character-creation process. I can force myself to finish, but I won't lament if there aren't many more missions.
     

Time so far: 17 hours