Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday: Final Rating

Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for Amiga, C64, and DOS; 1991 for Sega Genesis

Date Started: 7 December 2013
Date Ended: 24 December 2013

Total Hours: 18
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 46
Ranking at Time of Posting: 102/123 (83%)

Ranking at Game #455: 411/455 (90%)

I wonder how my opinion of this game would vary had I ever watched the Buck Rogers TV shows or film serials or read the comics or books. Lacking any of this history, I didn't feel particularly invested in the setting, and I couldn't fill in the edges of the game with a solid understanding of the oeuvre.

It seems like a strange setting for a role-playing game, mostly because the franchise doesn't seem to be about the setting so much as Buck Rogers himself. The world, its factions, and its technologies have changed quite significantly from the franchise's inceptions, but the core appeal seems to be the fish-out-of-water story in which Buck, a man from our time and with our values, has to adapt to a very different world--or make it adapt to him. A role-playing game has to allow for other characters within this world--characters who aren't part of the same dynamic. For those characters, then, the setting is what really matters, and I found Buck Rogers to be a little anemic in this area. Sure, it has futuristic weapons and space travel and whatnot, but it lacks a real "core" to its mythology and technology.

It seems clear that the role-playing game only came about because Lorraine Williams ran TSR and owned the rights to the Buck Rogers franchise at the same time. When the tabletop RPG was issued in 1988, the television series had been off the air for seven years and it had featured a different universe anyway. I wonder how much of a market there really was for a generic sci-fi RPG in which the titular character was, at best, an NPC. I'm having trouble finding any information on how well the tabletop RPG was received at the time, but modern reviews are lukewarm at best. Blogger Julian Perez notes quite fairly that:

It's not like the character has a built-in fanbase the way Indiana Jones or the Marvel superheroes have. Buck Rogers is one of those characters, along with Paul Bunyan, where everybody's heard of him, but nobody really cares about him.

In short, it was an odd choice for an RPG and thus an odd choice for a computer game based on the RPG. Almost everything I liked about the game was due to the Gold Box engine rather than anything specific to Buck Rogers. Even in the few episodes in which Buck Rogers appeared, he seemed like a boring character. For this reason, I expect the GIMLET to come out a bit below the D&D Gold Box titles. (Check out my final ratings of Curse of the Azure Bonds or Champions of Krynn for comparison.)

I thought Buck Rogers was supposed to be something like a reckless cowboy. This is just embarrassing.

1. Game World. I spent most of the above paragraphs discussing this, so I won't belabor it here. I praise it for offering a thorough back story with some original elements, but I criticize it for being a somewhat boring setting without terribly interesting technologies. The one exception is the "digital personalities" who were not well-described or integrated into the game. I never even got to directly encounter the putative bad guy, Holzerhein. Score: 5.

2. Character Creation and Development. We're basically looking at the standard AD&D system with different races and classes plus the addition of various skills. The skills were not particularly well-implemented. Too many of the important-sounding ones were never used, or were used only once in the game, with success or failure dependent on a single roll, with no option to try again. I'm a bit baffled why the franchise doesn't feature more weapon-specific skills (the warrior gets some weapon proficiencies, but no one else does). Despite the game's assurance that I would find "etiquette," "sing," "fast talk," and "act" useful at various bars and such, I never encountered any use for them. Ditto "tracking," "shadowing," "repair weapon," and "mathematics." I don't doubt that there were individual occasions in which they were helpful, and perhaps I just missed them, but the point is that skills that require so much investment but come into play only once or twice in the game are somewhat useless.

In general, the lack of spellcasting or other special abilities (e.g., turn undead) makes the AD&D system poorly-suited to this setting, and the skills don't compensate for it. I also only found one place in the game (the Desert Runners' village) in which the choice of race, sex, or class made any difference. Score: 4.

3. NPC Interaction. Not bad. There are some NPCs who join you at various points in the game, including Buck Rogers himself. Some of them, like the Sun King, are memorable. There are a few locations in which you can have almost entire conversations with NPCs, with dialogue options that offer role-playing choices, and significant consequences for the party in terms of how the subsequent maps progress. Score: 5.

I rather hope he was caught in the explosion.

4. Encounters and Foes. Like many of the other Gold Box games, Buck Rogers does a reasonably good job offering frequent encounters with some light role-playing choices. Some of the choices are pretty obvious (save the children from drowning or walk away) but still better than nothing.

I didn't love the enemies offered by the game. There aren't many different types, and lacking spells and (with one or two exceptions) special attacks, they mostly appear to me as a series of faceless mooks. There aren't many ways to adjust tactics and strategy to specific enemies. On the plus side, there's a good balance between random and fixed encounters, and plenty of opportunities for grinding. Score: 5.

The Gold Box games are some of the few to offer options like this.

 

5. Magic and Combat. As I discussed extensively a few posts ago, the Gold Box engine remains a great tactical combat engine, but this game doesn't offer enough options and equipment to benefit from the engine's full capabilities. You understand that I'm not suggesting that a science-fiction RPG ought to feature spells, but rather that both the AD&D rules and the Gold Box engine are optimized for a world in which spells exist. Their absence in a sci-fi RPG is entirely sensible, but the game needed to offer something else in replacement, such as more special equipment or more options with the weapons.

The one real tactic in Buck Rogers is the ability to shape the terrain with chaff grenades and aerosol mist grenades. For 99% of the game, I didn't understand how they worked properly and missed out on those options. It makes me feel a little better about the game but not great.

Space combat is an interesting addition to the engine, and I think it works better here than in most of the other sci-fi RPGs we've seen on the blog, but it's still not a great system. The options are too few and the course of each battle is too predictable. Score: 4.

The enemies always threw the defensive grenades on themselves. I didn't know that wasn't how you were supposed to do it.

6. Equipment. Also a bit disappointing. There are a sensible variety of weapons and a small selection of armor and accessories (e.g., goggles that protect against dazzle grenades). Again, since this is a sci-fi RPG, I didn't expect scrolls, wands, potions, and whatnot--but I did expect some analogous replacements, and they just weren't there. What about force fields to protect against explosive weapons? Gravity boots to compensate for low "Maneuver in Zero-G" skills? Stims to temporarily increase attributes? Med kits? Ship upgrades? With some more thought into equipment, the game could have compensated for the otherwise-limited tactics dictated by the loss of spells. There also aren't any cool "artifact" weapons or any major equipment-related rewards for quests and tough combats. The lack of imagination in this area is a little baffling. Score: 3.

I wish every game had a table like this.

7. Economy. I hold out hope that one day the Gold Box series will get it right, but this game didn't even come close. There was absolutely no purpose to either of the dual-economies that the game offered, mostly because none of the stores sold any equipment worth buying. Every battle produced more and more credits, and they only thing I ever spent them on were some ammo reloads and an occasional drink. Salvage credits, which you get from space combat, are similarly worthless because everything they buy you can get for free on the Salvation base. Score: 2.

8. Quests. The game excels here. The main quest to destroy RAM's doomsday device is suitably epic and features enough original elements that I was always interested to see the plot unfold. There are no options for the quest's end, but there are plenty of options as to how you approach each of the key maps and the decisions you make at each stage. I liked that you could approach each of the three main stages (the Mars base, the Venus base, and the asteroid base) in any order. I particularly liked the large number of side-quests, and judging by the walkthroughs I consulted post-game, I didn't get to experience more than half of them. The SSI Gold Box games remain some of the few of the era to offer true side quests. Score: 6.

I love the juxtaposition. "You must save the children from the fire. In the meantime, have a cocktail."

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. All quite good. The cut scene graphics in the series continue to get better and more artfully composed, and the enemy and party icons were better than we typically see in the D&D games. The corridors remain bland and featureless. The sound was good enough that I didn't turn it off. The keyboard interface remains very easy and intuitive. Score: 6.

I wish the text in the game had offered as compelling an atmosphere as the images.

10. Gameplay. The game was almost the perfect length, and although I eventually found combat a little boring, I can't say I was ever bored with the game overall. Between the opening sections on Earth and the endgame on Mercury, there was a satisfying non-linearity, and the side-quests give it some additional replayability. Though I was frustrated by a few tough combats, on the whole the difficultly level was pitched just right. Score: 6.

The final score of 46 sits 14 points below Curse of the Azure Bonds and 10 points below Champions of Krynn. As I said before, most of my satisfaction with the game comes from the Gold Box engine itself, but this setting didn't make the best use of that engine, and it simply doesn't strike me as a great setting for an RPG in the first place.

I'm not the only one to think so: even SSI seems to have had some qualms. In Dungeons and Desktops, Matt Barton quotes SSI technical director Keith Brors as saying that "the company was pressured by TSR into developing their Buck Rogers computer game against their better judgment." Barton praises certain innovations in the game, like the skill system and the weapons logistics, but I found both to be good ideas that were poorly-implemented.

In 1992, we'll see the story continue in Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed, which only came out for DOS and apparently got quite poor reviews. I'll try to avoid learning anything else about it before I play.

Next, we'll check out the Hellfire Warrior adaption of the Dunjonquest engine before I have to head back to my Amiga emulator for Lords of Chaos.

Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday: Won!

The Earth is safe but Atha the Desert Runner isn't. Such are the vagaries of life.

In my last post, I announced my intention to pursue a side-quest to rescue Atha. RAM forces apparently abducted her from Mars after my successful raid on their Mars base. They threatened her with death unless my party presented itself on a RAM asteroid. Commander Turabian forbade it, but Buck Rogers encouraged me to disobey. He didn't volunteer to come or anything.

Despite the obvious trap, my party found the right asteroid and entered the RAM base. We had to fight a tough battle against a party right at the entrance. As we explored the base, a "Commander Gilbert" taunted us from a loudspeaker.

I sure hope Commander Gilbert is a woman.

It soon became clear that we were over our heads. The battles featured multiple rocket-launcher-equipped RAM bots that took multiple reloads to luckily defeat. There were also numerous traps that damaged the party while leaving no recourse for healing. There was no way back to the ship without first conquering the base.

Ultimately, I found myself in a situation where I had low health and the only explorable avenue was a corridor blocked by an unavoidable combat with four combat bots. After 12 tries I gave up. There was just no way I was going to defeat the enemy.

Unfortunately, "giving up" wasn't that easy. I have the bad habit of just using the same save game slot over and over, and the most recent time that I'd used another was way back on Mars, before I'd finished the RAM base there. I had no choice but to suck it up, repeat those sections of Mars, and get back to Salvation base. This time, I ignored Buck Rogers's advice. RAM had a doomsday laser ready to fire on Earth, after all.

I neglected to mention it in a previous post, but journal entries had indicated that the doomsday device was composed of two parts: the laser itself and an advanced lens, constructed by the Venusian lowlanders. Scot.DOS had suggested that the lens would have to be near the sun to provide enough energy to reach Earth, so it makes sense that the working weapon would be on Mercury.

The Mercury base consisted of a large "merchants' area" at the base and then a tall tower--the "Mariposa Core"--extending upward from one of its corners. The putative ruler of the area was some lunatic calling himself the "Sun King," apparently enamored with French history. I guess RAM was just leasing space for the doomsday laser from him. To even enter the base, I needed the blue passkey from Mars. Once inside the base, I needed the "retinal lockpick" from Venus to get through one of the final doors.

Wilma Deering has been a character in the franchise going back to its origins. She serves as Buck's love interest.

Shortly after entering, I was greeted by Wilma Deering, who told me that the weapon was at the top of the Core. She gave me some advice for navigating the base, but I disregarded it almost immediately and went the opposite direction from where she had instructed. In a corridor, I met a man who challenged me with the phrase "ONE IF BY LAND...." I hadn't encountered the countersign in the game, but knowing my U.S. history, I responded "TWO IF BY SEA." The old man--whose affiliation still mystifies me--suggested I get to the core by infiltrating a parade. I took his advice and made it through the rest of the map with no encounters. This was faster, but I missed mapping most of the area.

Mercury was a melange of odd themes. I wonder if the tabletop RPG makes its culture clearer.

In the lower levels of the Mariposa Core, I found three coins that were necessary to give to the Sun King for his help. An odd plot dynamic, but whatever.

The Sun King himself was a weird character, presiding over a court of followers wearing "outlandish costumes from the French and American revolutions." He greeted me in a powdered wig, waving a French tricolour and insisted that I speak French. I'm not sure how pre-Internet youths navigated this portion if they lacked high school French.

The party admitted that we weren't "the dancers," but he agreed to help us anyway. Apparently, he had grown envious of the RAM doomsday device and wanted it for himself. I took a chance and (lying) agreed to help him take control of the weapon. There was an amusing bit where the Sun King mixed up French with a bit of Spanish and Latin.

That's "trés bon," vous âne.

With one of the Sun King's lieutenants tailing me, I headed to the upper areas of the Core. Scot.DOS indicated I had limited amount of time before the laser fired.

 

I first shut down the power to the laser so that they couldn't fire. This bought a little time but knocked out the elevators, so I had to use a back staircase to ascend.

I made my way to the chamber housing the doomsday laser and activated its self-destruct mechanism. I'm not sure why RAM built such a mechanism into the device in the first place, but it sure came in handy.

Both in the room and on the way out of the room, I faced battles against RAM gennies and robots. They were reasonably difficult but not overly so--the arrangement of forces facilitated the use of explosive weapons. In general, the entire endgame was very combat-light, and there was no clear "final battle" with a boss-level foe.

The last battle of the game.

When I activated the self-destruct, the Sun King's servant flipped out and ordered me to deactivate it, shrieking that the Sun King "doesn't want the doomsday device to be destroyed!" When I refused, he ran off, warning that "the wrath of the Sun King is upon you!" I thought this meant I'd face his forces on the way out of the base, but I never heard anything about it again.

The self-destruct initiated a countdown, and I had just enough time to make it to the pod bay on the level below (fortunately, I had scouted it first), hack the computer to assign my party to an escape pod, and blast my way out of the base. Behind me, the doomsday weapon blew up.

Wilma Deering picked up my pod and returned me to the ship. We returned to Salvation for a series of congratulations from Wilma, Buck, and Commander Turabian. Here's the full end-game text:

Wilma embraces you all. "You've succeeded in the most important mission in NEO's history," she says. "You've saved the Earth, and crippled RAM. They've lost their allies as well as their doomsday device. No one will be fooled into trusting them again. You are all heroes to NEO, and I hope that you'll stay with us for a long time. Your mission is over."

As you exit the airlock, you are greeted by a large mob, led by the base commander. He hushes the cheering crowd and speaks: "Welcome back You have saved Earth from the evil scourge of Holzerhein and his RAM confederates..."

Buck Rogers appears from nowhere and interrupts Turabian: "I just wanted to shake your hands and thank you for saving Earth and all her people. With people like you, RAM doesn't have a chance."

The crowd cheers and you are led to a celebration party.

And that was it. The game let me continue to play, and I suppose I could have tried to clean up some of the side-quests. My party never did make it to Level 8, so it wouldn't have been wasted time (assuming I'll use the same party for the sequel).

I had fun scanning the adventurer's logbook to read the fake entries. There were a large number that would lead the player to think that Scot.DOS was actually a RAM spy, or even Holzerhein.DOS in disguise. Several others would have led the player to make poor choices with key NPCs. The journal was frankly showing its age in this game. So much text, including long passages, was presented on-screen that a separate journal seems superfluous.

After winning, I also consulted some external materials and discovered that Holzerhein.DOS isn't just a computer AI but rather the downloaded consciousness of Simund Holzerhein, who while living was a rich Martian. Because Holzerhein can be literally anywhere that there's a computer, he can direct much of RAM's operations personally, without the need for a lot of bureaucracy. The game was very vague about the nature of Holzerhein, but perhaps it fleshes him out in the sequel.

GIMLET time!

*****

Futher Reading

• My first, second, third, fourth, and fifth postings on this game.
• The Wikipedia entry for the game setting. It better outlines what's going on with Holzerhein.
• The Museum of Computer Adventure Gaming History has the clue book for the game (large file size).

 

Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday: 2

An enemy ship blows up.

Ship-to-ship combat is Buck Rogers's primary innovation with the Gold Box engine, and its turn-based, logistical nature is well within the tactical spirit of the series. I don't love it, but it has some strong elements, and I find it preferable to the all-action approach taken by Starflight and Space Rogue.

It is almost entirely optional. There's one place--on the approach to Mars--where it's necessary if you can't bluff your way out of it. Other than that, the combats occur randomly while traveling through the solar system. I've never had "flee" fail when I didn't feel like fighting. The experience rewards aren't high enough to make it clearly preferable to melee combat as a way to grind for experience, and the financial rewards--salvage credits--can only be spent on ship repairs, fuel, and ammunition, all of which are free at the Salvation base. (The only advantage to the credits is a small amount of time savings, allowing you to refuel and repair wherever you want instead of having to return to the center of the galaxy every time. It isn't even terribly dangerous to run out of fuel, as a NEO cruiser will inevitably come by and give you some.) In this sense, ship combat isn't terribly well-integrated into the game.

Part of the post-ship-combat victory screen. The crew repairs damage to the party's ship while looting the enemy wreckage for fuel and salvageable material.

 
Space combat begins with a quick encounter session in which you learn the type of ship you're facing, and you have the option to hail or attack. Hailing presents the ability to intimidate, bluff, or ask for aid. I have never had any of these options work. Once in combat, you're on a screen with the enemy ship's status on your left and your ship's status on your right. More information about the enemy ship can be gained with the "Sensor" command.

Assessing the enemy ship with sensors.

Each character has a number of options each round depending on his or her class and whether he or she is the ship's pilot. Technically, any character can take (C)ommand of the ship during a round, but it only makes sense for someone skilled in piloting (which I've only given to my rocket jock) to be in the captain's seat.

The pilot is the most important person in space combat. Only the pilot can close or withdraw, choose to ram the enemy, or give the command to board a crippled enemy. The pilot is also the only character who can fire all of the ship's weapons in a round--the K-cannons, missile mounts, and lasers. He's capable of 280 points of damage to the enemy every round (100 from each of two K-cannons; 40 from each of two missile blasts) as opposed to every other crewmember's 10 points of damage with a single laser shot.

When firing, the crewmember has the option to just (F)ire and hit a random part of the enemy or (T)arget a specific system. This choice is well-implemented. I don't know what the specific trade-off is mathematically, but based on experience, I suspect that you sacrifice about 50-60% of your chance to hit if you choose to target. If you didn't trade so much accuracy, it would be an easy choice: just target the enemy's hull repeatedly until the ship blows up.

The engineers theoretically play a major role in combat, as only they can (J)ury rig (temporarily repair) damaged systems and (B)oost engines to improve the chances of escaping or catching up to a fleeing enemy. But these options aren't implemented well. First, jury rigging depends on the associated skill of the same name, which takes a long time to build to a level that it actually works a majority of times (having two engineers has helped a little). Second, it hardly repairs the systems at all. Even at a high skill level, I might only get 5 or 10 points out of a jury rig, which a single enemy shot can undo. Third, you can only successfully jury rig each system once in a single combat. So in a typical scenario, the enemy will successfully whittle my "control" system from 150 down to 0. I successfully jury rig and it goes up to 7. The next round, the enemy shoots it back to 0 and I can't jury rig it again.

An engineer's combat options.

 
Fortunately, jury rigging does work repeatedly, and completely, on damaged weapons systems, and this is where I get the most use out of it. 

In a similar vein, boosting engines has such a high failure rate--which consequently damages the engines--that it's almost never worth the risk.

The measly 10 points of damage that the non-pilot characters do is still enough to destroy weapons systems, but it's pretty useless against other systems. Thus, I've found that a good strategy in ship combat is to have all of my characters except the pilot target the enemy's weapons systems. They miss 60-70% of the time, but if I can knock out even one or two enemy weapons in a single round, it gives me a lot more time for my pilot to blast away at the other systems.

 
Victory in space combat means destroying the enemy's hull. Destroying other systems theoretically has some effect. When the sensors reach 0, you can no longer see anything about the enemy ship. When control reaches 0, you can't close, withdraw, or ram. If fuel or engines reach 0, you can't go anywhere. I don't know what's supposed to happen when life support hits 0

I've only attempted to board a ship a couple of times, and I don't really think it's worth the hassle. First, you have to get the enemy's engines down to 0, which involves a lot of targeting and missing. Then, you have to fight a series of long, difficult melee battles as you invade the ship and capture the bridge. In the end, the only result is a higher salvage value, which you don't really need anyway.

One of six combats I had to fight when taking control of this enemy ship.

Different enemy ships--classified as light, medium, and heavy--start with different values for their various systems, and in general I've found that enemy ships are either easily defeated or absolutely impossible. I suppose with luck and skill, I could eventually destroy a cruiser with a hull of 2000, but I don't see how it would be worth the time.

Fighting RAM forces and "guard dog" combat gennies.

 
To understand melee combat in Buck Rogers, you first have to understand equipment. There are 20 different types of weapons in the game (though more if you account for "Martian" and "Venusian" variants) organized into seven categories:

• Melee weapons: knives, mono knives, cutlasses, swords, polearms, mono swords
• Bolt weapons: crossbows, needle guns, bolt guns
• Laser weapons: laser pistols and laser rifles
• "Rocket" weapons: rocket guns and rocket rifles. Despite their names, they basically fire bullets.
• Special weapons: microwave guns, heat guns, sonic stunners
• Explosive weapons: plasma throwers and rocket launchers
• Grenades: aerosol mist grenades, chaff grenades, dazzle grenades, explosive grenades (including "mini" versions), and stun grenades. The ranges on these can be enhanced with grenade launchers. The manual mentions gas grenades, too, but I never found any.

There are "Martian" and "Venusian" versions of the guns, and I frankly have no idea how they differ from the regular versions. The manual is silent on the matter.

The logistics associated with these weapons are slightly more complicated than in D&D, as each has a different range, damage rating, and rate of fire. For instance, the rocket rifle does the most damage of any non-explosive weapon: 2-16 points. But it only fires twice per round, so you get a maximum of 32 points damage if you make both shots. The rocket pistol only does 1-10 per hit, but it fires up to 4 times per round, giving you a maximum of 40 points of damage. It would seem that the pistol is therefore the best option, but each weapon also has different "to hit" penalties at long ranges, and the rifle is considered "close range" at a much longer distance than the pistol. The upshot is that most characters need to have several different weapon types at hand, and to freely switch depending on the circumstances. This is a little different than the D&D titles, where you basically choose the "best" weapon and keep it readied until you replace it with another.

Elias's inventory shows him capable of fighting a variety of enemies.

Firearms come with a maximum of 250 rounds, explosive weapons with a maximum of 10. You can buy reloads in shops, though most firearms are so plentiful that it's easier just to replace a spent weapon with another one looted from an enemy body.

Post-combat looting.

It's the grenades and explosive weapons that add the most tactics to combat. Plasma throwers and rocket launchers can only be fired once every two rounds but do a lot of damage to groups of enemies, akin to fireballs in the fantasy games. Grenades actually come in defensive varieties: chaff grenades block rocket weapons into the affected area, and aerosol mist grenades block laser weapons. Stun grenades can take up to 9 enemies out of the fight for a few rounds; it particularly hurts when enemies toss them at your party, but as long as your medic is unaffected, he can "de-stun" the others.

This aerosol mist grenade prevents certain weapons fire.

Explosive weapons and explosive grenades are life-savers--one might even say crutches--in difficult combats, so it's particularly annoying that you can't buy them anywhere. (You can pay for reloading of the weapons, but the 10 rounds go quickly.) There are a fixed number that come as rewards for specific combats. This omission makes the game's currency almost entirely useless; other than paying for some reloads of prized weapons, I haven't had a single thing to purchase with all of the thousands of credits I've been amassing.

Targeting an enemy group with a rocket launcher. The combat bot has his own rocket launcher.

Three other factors, not present in the D&D games, affect success in combat:

1. "Leadership" skill. If a character has a high enough skill, he can "take command" of NPCs in the party (and in the area) and directly control them in combat. This only has an effect when NPCs are around, of course. Technically, we did see this in Champions of Krynn, though it wasn't dependent on a skill score.

A pre-combat screen shows the effects of my high leadership skill.

2. "Battle Tactics" skill. If any character makes a successful check at the beginning of the combat round, the entire party gets a +1 combat bonus, equivalent of casting a "bless" spell in the D&D games.

3. "Maneuver in Zero-G" skill. When fighting in space or on an asteroid, each character rolls a check on this skill at the beginning of each combat round. If they fail, they get a -2 combat penalty and can only move three squares in the round.

Each of these things happens automatically, so the only player choice associated with them is how many points to invest in these skills when leveling up.

In combat, aside from the choice of weapons, there aren't many tactics except to use mass-damage attacks in places where enemies group (if you don't mind wasting the rounds) and otherwise concentrate fire on enemies one at a time. The AI in "quick combat" does a pretty good job except in the latter area; it will disperse attacks somewhat randomly, meaning it's not suitable for tough battles where you need to reduce the numbers of enemies as quickly as possible. I've found that protecting the medic is a vital combat goal, since if he's unconscious at the end of the battle, no one can get healed. I've given him the weapons with the highest ranges and generally have him hang out in the rear unless he has to rush forward to stop someone from dying.

The nature of post-combat healing also adds to a bit of frustration and anxiety. You're basically at the mercy of the game's automatic rolls for each character's first aid skill and the medic's various healing abilities. Sometimes unconscious characters don't get revived and quite often not everyone gets healed to the maximum. Since there's no option to heal outside of this one screen (aside from returning to the ship, which on most maps isn't possible until you win), you can find yourself in a situation where you technically won the combat, but your party is in no shape for the next one.

While  very welcome, this post-combat healing session didn't get my characters back to maximum shape.

Characters can purchase jetpacks allowing them to quickly fly to parts of the battlefield if they pass their "use jet pack" skills. I haven't found this useful. The battle maps aren't large or complicated enough to make it necessary for one character to be at another side very quickly.

I've often praised the Gold Box combat engine as one of the most satisfying in the genre. Buck Rogers doesn't do a bad job with the engine, but I like it far less here than in the D&D games. The lack of spells, including pre-combat buffing spells, removes much of the fun of the engine. Buck Rogers has backstabbing with the rogue classes, but I've found that it's too hard to maneuver into place, and the backstab multiplier isn't very high, so it makes as much sense just to have the rogue shoot. Because of the ranged nature of combat, there aren't as many places where the party can make effective use of terrain (such as hiding around a corner), and party formation hardly matters at all. There are no sweeps, critical hits, or special abilities like taunting and turning undead. There are no usable items like potions, wands, and scrolls. With all of this, you can see why Buck Rogers makes far less use of the tactical capabilities of the engine than the D&D series, and is consequently a lot less fun.

It also means that when a particularly difficult combat comes along, there aren't many options to pursue after you die and reload. You can't radically readjust your strategy because there aren't enough tactics to readjust. You basically just have to try again and hope for better combat rolls.

This situation is fairly hopeless.

So far in the game, my most hated enemy are these RAM combat robots capable of firing explosive rockets every two rounds. The damage the rockets do is extremely variable, so if I run into them, I have to pray that I don't get a bad roll in the first round, or they can wipe out half my party. They're immune to some firearms and have extremely high armor classes. The only strategy to stop them from firing the rockets is to disperse the party--ideally right around the enemy--but this is hardly preferable because they then pummel you with nail guns that do 40-50 points of damage per round. There have been a number of combats where I've had to face two of them, and it's taken multiple reloads to get out anywhere close to intact.

It's in these places that I miss the D&D options the most. I can't cast fire resistance spells. I can't "haste" and "bless" everyone before battle and hope for some lucky critical hits early in the combat round. I can't put everything into a Hail Mary backstab. I can't run out of attack range. I can only reload and hope he does less damage this time. Buck Rogers could have restored some of these tactical options with sci-fi analogues to D&D's spells and magic items--stimulants, ointments, special suits, cloaking devices, EM guns that screw-up robots' targeting systems, and so forth--but they just didn't.

The Martian High Desert. All of those blast points are from RAM's tests of its Doomsday weapon.

Since the last post, I've conquered the Martian RAM base. Mars was, like Venus, another area map in which I had to navigate to a couple of key locations while avoiding or destroying random encounters. As I arrived, Scot.DOS, my ship's computer AI, hacked a RAM communication indicating that RAM was about to destroy a Martian Desert Runner village just in the off-chance that the Desert Runners knew any of RAM's secrets.

At the urging of the computer, I got to the village before the attack and made contact with the tribalistic Desert Runners. They scoffed at my warnings, and I had to convince them that the attack was going to come via GLIDERS (by actually typing in that word) to get them to take it seriously.

I guess this is to test whether you've been paying attention to what Scot.DOS had to say.

The Desert Runners decided to hold off the RAM forces while they evacuated their young. The entire map consisted of my running around randomly, fighting battles with villagers, rescuing children from building fires, and performing other acts of heroism. The map was quite large, but as far as I could tell had no fixed encounters. I did all of this until a pre-determined howl from the villagers signaled that the children were safe, and I left the village. RAM destroyed it behind us.

In the Desert Runners' secret camp, there was a gratifying moment as the various villagers recounted my party's acts of heroism.

The Desert Runners' leader, Tuskon, remained suspicious of me. When I admitted to him frankly that I didn't come to Mars to save them but rather to fight RAM on behalf of Earth, he seemed to respect my honesty while admitting, in turn, that they cared nothing about Earth. They told me that RAM has been recently test-firing a giant laser that's been melting bits of the planet's surface, and they directed me to the secret base. Tuskon joined me, gave me RAM disguises, and led me into the secret base.

Thankfully, the answer was "no" to this. RAM was going to attack the Desert Runner village anyway. I think perhaps my series of truthful answers is what led Tuskon to join.

The base consisted of four relatively small levels with only a few special encounters. The key dynamic was the acquisition of a series of passkeys that allowed me access to certain doors. I had looted red and green keys from enemies in the Desert Runners' village, which got me into certain areas. Eventually, I found a white key that opened a vault, in which was the high-level blue key.

My exploration was punctuated with random combats against RAM forces and a series of computer terminals where I used my "bypass security" skill to shut down the alarm every time the base became aware of my presence (I did this by filing false reports of my team's demise). I also used my "library search" skill to get intelligence about RAM. There were more journal entries in this section than in the rest of the game combined, though most of them were just security alerts relevant to the current base. There was some indication that the blue passkey would get me through the security doors on the Mercury base.

Elias uses a computer to shut down the base's alarms.

Ultimately, with the blue key, I made my way up an elevator shaft to the top level and found RAM's prototype Doomsday laser. In a scripted encounter, Tuskon shot a technician working on the laser. His body fell on a control panel that caused the laser to overload and get ready to fire.

Apparently, the RAM base and the USS Enterprise use the same contractors.

My party rode the laser's platform down the elevator shaft and had to fight a close-quarters battle against two very difficult combat robots. This was exactly the type of combat I described above, where there were really no tactics that could make a difference and I just had to keep reloading until everyone survived.

This combat sucked.

After the battle, I fled the base as the laser self-destructed behind me, blowing everything to hell and back. My primary take-away from the experience seems to be the blue keycard, which should get me into the Mariposa 3 base on Mercury. I assume I'll find the endgame here.

Shortly after returning to Salvation base, we received a message from RAM indicating that they'd captured Atha, Tuskon's wife, on an asteroid. They were threatening to execute her unless I presented myself. Commander Turabian prohibited it, but Buck Rogers grabbed me in the hall and encouraged me to rescue her, saying that "individuals are more important than orders." I'm assuming that this is a side-quest, but none of my characters have reached Level 8 yet, so I think I'll take it before heading to Mercury.

That's a nice sentiment, but we are in the midst of a countdown to doomsday.

I haven't read any walkthroughs yet, but it strikes me that there were probably a lot of ways to have handled the Mars map. I could have ignored the Desert Runners' village entirely and just headed for the RAM base. I could have refused to help the Desert Runners, or fled before the battle was complete. I could have declined to meet Tuskon before entering the base. If Tuskon hadn't been with me, or had died, the scripted bit with the Doomsday laser would have been different. I think there was even a different way to approach the floor with the laser on it. I'm curious how these choices would have affected the experience, and I like that the game offers so many different avenues. We saw something similar on the Venus map, though I neglected to comment at the time.

I expect the next posting to be my last. Funny how that worked out.

*****

Futher Reading

• My first, second, third, and fourth postings on this game.
• My review of the Gold Box combat system in Pool of Radiance. This post in my Curse of the Azure Bonds series talks a little more about the tactical nature of the engine.

Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday: 3

The party's fame grows.

 
When I was around 12 or 13, I fell in love with the V television and book franchise. (I've resisted watching the two miniseries again for fear that they won't hold up to my recollections.) The series concerns the takeover of Earth by a race of aliens who initially appear as friendly "visitors" but eventually turn out to be bent on stripping Earth of its water and other resources. There's an almost heavy-handed use of Nazi symbology and themes in the series, with children encouraged to join "Visitor Youth" programs, scientists subjected to a kind-of Holocaust, and jack-booted troopers slowly infiltrating local law enforcement. Eventually, a Resistance forms.

The moments that I liked best were those in which the Resistance makes incremental gains against the Visitors through use of guerrilla tactics. An old woman tosses a Molotov cocktail in a parked scout ship. A high-ranking officer is stalked and assassinated. A group of vandals breaks into an office and destroys all the equipment and documents. There's a juvenile appeal to the idea that you can slowly erode an enemy this way; that if you kill enough soldiers and destroy enough vehicles one-by-one, eventually the enemy won't have any left. The evil empire will collapse for lack of resources.

I'm not an expert in military history, but I suspect it rarely works this way in real life. Guerrilla campaigns have been successful, of course, but usually because they've inflicted enough losses to make the enemy feel it just isn't worth it to continue (e.g., the American Revolution, Vietnam), not because they actually depopulated the enemy enough to bring the government to its knees. Also, the entire fantasy requires a state of total war against an irredeemably evil enemy; otherwise, it's hard to justify an explicit goal to kill such a high percentage of enemy soldiers and support personnel.

Another incremental win for the good guys.

But sci-fi and fantasy games can indulge this fantasy, and Buck Rogers does a better job than most in capturing that juvenile appeal. The enemy isn't some lunatic wizard holed up in a tower but a truly evil government, with ships and troops and control of entire planets. The enemy is depraved enough to build a Doomsday weapon to destroy the entire Earth, which removes any moral qualms one might have about annihilating its soldiers and ships. As the game progresses and the party invades various RAM bases and outposts, and destroys the odd heavy cruiser in space, there's a strong sense of whittling away the edges of RAM's power base and making the galaxy safe for democracy.

In the game, "whittling away the edges" occurs quite literally, starting with the outer ring of asteroids. When I last posted, I had discovered that the dread pirate Talon had a secret base somewhere in which he was keeping dangerous gennie (genetically-engineered warrior) canisters, and that an ex-crewmember named Garrity, last seen on Pallas, might have an idea as to the base's location. I had to look up on Wikipedia that Pallas is an asteroid. Nine asteroid clusters form a ring around the explorable solar system, and I had no idea which was Pallas, so I picked one at random and began working my way around them, counter-clockwise.

Arriving at an asteroid port.

Some of the asteroids had "menu ports" where I could visit various bars, shops, and the occasional training academy. Others had explorable bases belonging to RAM or RAM-affiliated pirates. On the Pallas base, I did find the ex-pirate, who gave me a password to Talon's secret base, but he didn't know what asteroid it was on. Continuing to work my way around the circuit, I found a mining asteroid that seemed to fit the bill:

The gennies had escaped their canisters and had killed most of the miners in the base. It was a small base, and it culminated with the discovery of a time bomb that I set to destroy the asteroid. Satisfied that I'd solved that little quest, I continued working my way around the asteroids rather than head to Mars, the location of the next major plot point.

On the next asteroid, I found a hidden RAM base that clearly had been monitoring NEO's communications. The entrance to the base was guarded by a single robot, but it was the most difficult enemy I've faced so far. It was capable of firing explosive rockets and was immune to most of the weapons that I had.

The only way I could defeat it was to fan out and minimize my losses from explosions, and to use my own explosive grenades. This was a bit painful because explosive grenades are as rare as they are useful. I haven't found any place to buy them (or, indeed, any of the more advanced munitions in the game). I had to waste nine or ten before I was able to destroy the robot without losing any of my crew.

The rest of the base was a series of encounters as I chased the base commander from room to room before I finally trapped him behind some communications equipment and made a bit of an evil role-playing choice:

NEO congratulated me and rewarded me with experience for neutralizing the base.

On the next asteroid, I found the real pirate base I had been trying to find at the outset; apparently, the mining base had just been an optional map. After I entered the passcode provided by the drunk ex-pirate, I entered the base to find it swarming with RAM soldiers upset about Talon's failures, waiting for him in ambush. They didn't seem to mind that I wasn't Talon.

Reminds me of that imperial legate at the beginning of Skyrim.

Just as in the communications base, I ended up chasing the commander from room to room before he was killed by one of Talon's robots--the same type of enemy that had given me so much trouble on the communications base. I had to waste a bunch more explosive grenades.

He's also vulnerable to melee attacks, but his low armor class means that I rarely hit.

With the last of the asteroids explored, I now set my sights on the planets. My next official mission was to search for a RAM base on Mars, but operating under the principle of whittling the edges before striking at the core, I decided to check out Mercury and Venus first. Mercury had a single base whose door I couldn't open, so I figured I'd have to come back later.

Venus provided a different experience. Instead of just taking me immediately to an indoor base, the game had me land on the planet's surface--a jungle populated by flowers, trees, and mushrooms.

Somehow, the top was successfully terraformed to the bottom.

Navigating was the same as exploring the outdoor areas of Pool of Radiance or Champions of Krynn, although in this case there were far too many squares to make me want to methodically explore all of them. There were only a few key locations punctuated with numerous encounters with RAM soldiers and local fauna.

Fighting RAM agents in Venus's tropical environment.

Early on, I found some reptilian Venusian "lowlanders," saved them from a RAM attack, and got an NPC companion named "Leander" for my troubles. Leander was helpful, but ultimately I lost him when I had to retreat to my ship for healing and he insisted on staying on the planet.

I don't know, in the game's mythology, where these creatures are supposed to come from.

A prominent acid lake in the middle of the map was inhabited by acid frogs. I'd received some scattered intelligence about them in a bar, including the fact that it was possible to befriend them. Unfortunately, I hadn't given any character points in the "befriend animal" skill, so I just ended up pissing them off, and they dogged me across the rest of the map.

In the northwest portion of the map, I found a decimated lowlander village where I killed the RAM occupants and assisted the few remaining survivors.

Some more role-playing options.

From the Venusians, I learned about their dealings with RAM. Apparently, the lowlanders produce a drug called "Gravitol." I'm not sure what it does, but a rumor I received at a bar says that space travel wouldn't be possible without it. The lowlanders' monopoly on the production of Gravitol was threatened by the continual terraforming of the planet, which would have allowed other races to set up shop there. RAM promised the Venusians that they would halt the terraforming if the Venusian scientists would assist in the construction of a giant lens for RAM's doomsday laser. But once the lens was completed, RAM turned on the Venusians and slaughtered them.

The lowlanders told me the location of the RAM base to the south, and I left the village after rescuing a child from the rubble. For some reason, the child, Zane, stuck with me as an NPC even though he had only 4 hit points and couldn't fire a weapon to save his life.

The RAM base on Venus was fairly small and had several special encounters that led me to destroy a hanger full of gliders and free some imprisoned lowlander scientists (one of them took Zane off my hands). Like the other maps, there were numerous encounters with various choices. While I like these encounters, as I said last time, I think they all lead to the same basic result.

Here's one of the more bizarre "role-playing" choices I've experienced in any game:

I ended up taking it, but I never found a place to use it.

At the culmination of the Venus base, Scot.DOS discovered that the Doomsday device is located "on the third Mercurian mariposa." I don't really know what "mariposa" (Spanish for "butterfly") means in this context, but in any event it seems that the device is in that locked base back on Mercury. Other than that, the only thing I got out of the base with that I didn't have before was something called a "retinal lockpick."

The Mercury base remains as closed as ever, so I guess the next stop is Mars. I know I said I'd have a big combat and equipment posting this time around, but I'm saving it for next time because I wasn't in a good place to video a combat in this last session.

Some other miscellaneous notes:

• There are actually two economies in the game. The first is the standard "credits" received after each battle and from selling equipment, as in a traditional RPG. The second is the "salvage account" that increases as you defeat enemy ships and sell their parts. Salvage account credits are used to repair and refuel the party's ship at the various ports in the solar system; they are technically optional, since repairs and refueling take place for free at Earth's Salvation base.

Spending my "salvage credits" on fuel.

• Ordering drinks and food and talking at bars and restaurants occasionally, but not often, produces some kind of rumor. I don't know if these are based on skills like "fast talk," "etiquette," and "act," but I haven't otherwise found any explicit use for these skills.

I'm going to assume this is a lie.

• Ports also occasionally have libraries, where my medic's "library search" skill sometimes produces a bit of intelligence, rarely all that helpful. It does also provide a modicum of experience to the medic, though.

• Some of the rumors I've received in bars have pointed to an artificial intelligence named "Holzerhein.DOS" in charge of RAM. I thought this was silly, but later on the Venus base, some wall decorations seemed to bear it out.

• All of the maps since the last post have been fairly small. I was worried that every map was going to be as enormous as the one in the asteroid base.

• The game's various "gennies" seem to be a manifest attempt to introduce some D&D-style monsters into a non-fantasy setting. Each has special attacks like poison or extra speed. I'm surprised I haven't found any that can turn me to stone. A quick gallery:

 

My characters are now Level 7 out of a maximum of 8 levels, so either there's not much more to the game or you're going to get a bit of a rant at the end.