Hard Nova: Won* (with Final Rating)

It was sad to genocide the Typhons. They look kind of cute.

    
Hard Nova

United States

Spaceport Malibu (developer); Electronic Arts (publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS; 1991 for Amiga, Atari ST
Date Started: 24 January 2015

Date Ended: 7 February 2015

Total Hours: 19

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 36
Ranking at Time of Posting: 70% (118/169)

Ranking at Game #458: 349/458 (76%)
            
The main quest of the game turned out to be the defeat of the Typhon invasion. The Typhon are introduced in the prologue as denizens of a planet orbiting a dying star. They don't actually show up in the game until after the halfway point, though before that, the player encounters their probes wandering around the Four Systems and centering on the planet Rouyn. Eventually, one of your quests involves finding out where the probes are coming from (the miners on Rouyn incorrectly believe they were sent by "Desiree" scientists on the planet Tikkor). In the midst of that quest, the invasion begins in earnest, with probes replaced by battleships.

Every yellow (?) dot on the mini-map is a Typhon battleship.

It took  me a long time to figure that I needed to board one of the battleships to figure out their plans. I fought through three levels of the ship to find two data disks, unhelpfully written in the Typhon language.

Fighting Typhons on their own ship.

The Typhons turned out to be working with Damien Altron, the computer dictator of Ariel, whom I defeated by bringing a Lanta computer scientist to his main base. Once Altron's program was destroyed, I used his computer to decrypt the disks and figure out the Typhons' plan. It basically involved the Typhons taking over Rouyn while Altron took over the rest of the Four Systems to ensure their safety.

The Typhon gambit is spelled out in the translated data disks.

With the disks decrypted, the Desiree scientists helped me hatch a plan. The Bremer navigators, headquartered on an asteroid-ship near Rouyn, could use their skills with navigation and gravity to move one of the wormholes near a planet and send it hurtling into Typhon space. I could position this in such a way so as to ignite a gas cloud and give the Typhons a new sun (I was confused about the physics of this one), or in such a way as to accelerate the destruction of their existing sun. Feeling ugly about the game and not really liking the Nova character, I chose the "evil" option.

Nova picks up the "kill ROM" instead of the "save ROM."

The Bremer weren't anxious to assist me until, in the last and most inane quest of the game, I brought them some old lounge lizard and made them believe she was some "chosen one"--a prophesied human who could sing like the Bremer--that they had been looking for.

The galaxy's real hero.

Meanwhile, my boss, Gerard Kendall, convinced the Typhon invasion force that I was pursuing option one, which sent them all excitedly home. They arrived just in time to see their sun go supernova and destroy the entire race.

The game lets you keep playing after the ending, and you can have conversations with various NPCs about the morality of your actions. This is admittedly a nice feature, given that the standard of the era (and even today) is to head right for the DOS prompt once the end scenes conclude.

The mercenary leader questions my morality.

I also give the game credit for the choice of endings, another rarity. A YouTube series from "The Obscure Title LP's" let me see the "good" ending, which really only varies by one screen...

...and a couple of post-ending dialogues.

I'm skipping over a lot of stuff in the middle, including one sequence in which I needed to recruit a droid into my party and use the "scout" ability (in which a droid or Darcator separates from the main party) and take on a bunch of robots solo. I'm also skipping a bunch of NPCs that I recruited for absolutely no reason because they were redundant to both my ship crew and ground party.

I'm also skipping over a maze I had to navigate in which the barriers didn't appear until you tried to walk into them.

   
Hard Nova isn't actually very long in quest steps. The length is artificially padded by three factors. The first is the need to backtrack a lot to figure out what to do next. The next stage of a quest isn't always clear, so you find yourself flying around from planet to planet, re-talking to every NPC. For instance, after I had the data disks, it wasn't really obvious that I needed to return to Altron (who I thought I'd already defeated) to decode them. It also was pretty obscure that, at that point, I needed to go find the Desiree scientists to tell me what to do next. The last bit, where I had to bring the chain-smoking Orai Volamar to the Bremer, I might have never figured out. I barely remembered her from the first conversation I had with her. I confess I used a walkthrough to help me at that point; hence, the asterisk.

The second prolonging factor is the need to constantly return to shops to buy ammunition. Each character has an individual inventory and the party has a collective inventory, but both have a maximum and ammo goes quickly. I routinely had to leave an enemy base to go restock. I don't mind games that make you buy ammunition, but I hate games that make you buy ammunition and then give you a limited carrying capacity. I especially don't like that only certain stores stock certain ammo, meaning that you have to travel across entire star systems to find reloads.
          
The final problem was something I didn't experience until after the last posting: respawning. A few bases respawn every time you enter the SAVE screen, so you have to wipe them out all in one shot. But even if you manage that, the base will respawn when you switch levels or exit and re-enter, and some bases have to be traversed multiple times. Hard Nova's analog to the interminable raider base in Sentinel Worlds is Damien Altron's base, which I had to traverse four times, back and forth, wiping out a ridiculous horde of soldiers each time.

The length of the game (which isn't really that long in total) wouldn't bother me if I liked the mechanics better. The interface, with a confusing blend of numbers, letters, and F-keys, some annotated on the screen, some not, was a constant annoyance. The combat mechanics aren't just sophomoric (basically, you repeatedly hit ENTER) but actively evil, with the SPACE bar taking forever to cycle through dozens of enemies on screen, whether they're actually in range or not.
              

Of all the enemies on screen, the game targets one in a room I can't reach.

            
Most of these problems were also present in Sentinel Worlds. Hard Nova has a better plot, but it doesn't do any better than its predecessor in dialogue. This is particularly disappointing because I love dialogue choices in RPGs, and it's distressing when a game offers them but then makes them obnoxious and stupid. I don't want to roleplay a rude, loudmouthed idiot.

Let's see how this comes together in the GIMLET.

1. Game world. Perhaps the best part of the game. Hard Nova offers an interesting universe with a variety of races. They're broadly written but still fun. The plot developments aren't as good as Starflight but not nearly as amateurish as Sentinel Worlds. The world responds to the characters' actions, right through the post-main-quest period. Dialogue options change as the plot progresses, and the types of encounters and enemy ships vary depending on the world state. Score: 6.
        

Mercenary quests are sensibly suspended while the Typhons invade the sector.

      
2. Character Creation and Development. There's no "creation" in the game--just a selection between two characters, with no real consequences later on. Development consists of fairly frequent level-ups, which give you the ability to channel points into a variety of skills. There isn't much strategy associated with leveling, just your own preferences for weapons and ship positions, but leveling is rapid and the rewards are instantly palpable, making this a satisfying, if unsophisticated, system. Score: 4.

3. NPC Interaction. I have high praise for the mechanics but criticism for the content. I like full-sentence dialogue options, and this and Sentinel Worlds are two of less than five games to offer such options so far in my chronology. However, just as Bioware's dialogue choices are often criticized as boiling down to "angelically good" and "psychotically evil," the choices here often boil down to "needlessly obnoxious" and "boorishly idiotic."

You do learn a lot about the world from NPCs, and there are an interesting variety. I just wish the interaction had been less cartoonish. Score: 4.
       

One defining characteristic of Darcators is that they like to fly around and defecate on other races. Ho ho.

           
4. Encounters and Foes. There really aren't any puzzles in the game, and the enemies are just little interchangeable icons with no particular strengths or weaknesses. Their AI is ridiculous, essentially causing them to bumble around in a drunkard's walk during combat. There's plenty of respawning if you want to grind. Score: 2.

5. Magic and Combat. Another big F. Combat is simplistic and boring, and Hard Nova doesn't even have the "magic" that gave Sentinel Worlds a few more options. Keeping enemies on the other side of a door isn't my idea of tactical combat. Space combat isn't any more advanced, consisting primarily of hitting the "G" key as enemies zoom past you, and once you have the most advanced laser, even that happens automatically.  Score: 2.
         

Space combat is basically just flying around and letting the lasers fire automatically.

6. Equipment. Functional but not fantastic. There's a modest selection of weapons, armor, healing liners, and special items. For the ship, there are missiles and weapon upgrades. The book offers tables that explain how much damage they do, or protect against, which makes it relatively easy to evaluate items against each other. Score: 3.
          

Nova chooses her active weapon.

         
7. Economy. You need money for ammunition, equipment, fuel, repairs, and occasional plot points. The game makes it far too easy to earn money through smuggling missions, rendering it mostly a non-issue. Normally I'd complain about this, but I wouldn't have wanted to spend a lot of time grinding for cash anyway. Score: 3.
         
8. Quests. We're getting into "better" territory here. Hard Nova has a main quest that progresses in several stages. Early in the game, I had the impression that it would be an expedition-and-return structure, with Gerard Kendall handing out missions of increasing difficulty. But there are really only about five of these. Instead, each quest spirals into something more elaborate that goes well beyond Kendall's original mission instructions. Some of them aren't even resolvable.
      

Kendall makes an off-hand inquiry about a long-forgotten side quest.

         
The main quest has two possible outcomes, though they don't make a huge difference except for a little text. There are a couple of side quests, and more than a few side dungeons. Score: 5.
         

The party makes a fateful decision.

          
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. Adequate graphics. Sound effects are bare-bones and inseparable from annoying repetitive music every time you enter a new area, meaning I played with the sound off. As I said before, the interface is difficult and inconsistent. Among other things, I didn't even figure out how to use grenades until towards the end of the game. Score: 2.
          

The graphics arriving at planetary bases aren't so bad.

       
10. Gameplay. The GIMLET wraps up reasonably well. Although certain plot points have to occur in a specific order, there's a general sense of non-linearity. It's replayable only in the sense that you might want to try Stark or the other ending, but that's more than most games. The difficulty level and pacing are just about right. Score: 5.

This gives us a final score of 36--yet another 1990s game that can't crack the 30s. I'm actually surprised to see it score the same as Sentinel Worlds. I remember that game as being a little worse, though looking over my GIMLET for it, I guess it did have slightly more variety in monsters and a better economy.

Contemporary reviewers seemed to like it a little better. Dragon panned the game with only 5 out of 5 stars, but in the April 1991 Computer Gaming World, Scorpia considered it "much better than Sentinel Worlds," highlighting improved graphics, better story, and more interesting NPCs. She didn't have the same problem I did with the dialogue, which she describes as "on the snappy, wiseguy side," but she did criticize aspects of the interface (in particular, she agrees that targeting is an "aggravation when there are many opponents on screen").
         
Oddly, Ken St. Andre offered a review in the same issue in which he actually praises the music and, even more astonishingly, praises the way that enemies move about randomly in combat: "The program keeps track of positions of over 100 moving targets at all times, and continues moving them around without missing a beat." Contrasting it with Starflight, he opines that "ideally, a good space opera game should have the Hard Nova game graphics in the Starflight universe." I thought Starflight's graphics were just fine.
           
Karl Buiter will have one more chance with me: Sierra's Shadow of Yserbius (1993), his last game as designer. The screenshots look very different from Sentinel Worlds or Hard Nova; they actually look quite good--kind of a Might & Magic aesthetic. He has two other games as programmer after 1990--SpellCraft: Aspects of Valor (1992) and Casper: Friends Around the World (2000)--but neither are RPGs.
           
Fairly soon, we'll see if Space: 1889 can satisfy me in a way that neither MegaTraveller nor Hard Nova could, but in between we have a few other games. You may next see a posting on Moria, or I may postpone it yet again and skip right to Mike Riley's Quest for the Unicorn. Either way, we're one step closer to ending 1990.

Hard Nova: The Neverending Quest

This joke wasn't even old in 1990.

After I finished the first quest, my handler, Gerard Kendall, told me he didn't have anything new for me. He suggested I head out and smuggle for a while. I liked this approach. With most RPGs, you have to suspend disbelief to engage in side-quests and exploration. After all, some demon is actively trying to take over the world; why are you helping some kid collect flowers for his girlfriend?

While there are occasionally lulls in the main plot of such RPGs, giving the player at least some role-playing excuse to wander the wilds, I can't think of many games in which the player is expressly encouraged, during the main plot, to head out and do a bunch of side quests or random exploration. It happened in Morrowind, when Caius Cosades kept telling the player to get some more experience in between main plot points, and in several games where achieving a certain monetary threshold is part of the plot (e.g., MegaTraveller, Baldur's Gate II, Dragon Age II; we just talked about this a few posts ago). Here's another example.

It is not, however, a great one: no sooner had I left the Starkiller base when I got a message to return immediately and get my next assignment. Since I already had plenty of money from my previous smuggling attempts, I didn't bother to delay my return.

Well, that was awfully brief.

         
Several things happened in my next conversation with Kendall. He gave me two quests. The first involved increased attacks by the planet Ariel on the planet Ciberan. (You may recall from the backstory that factional warfare has broken out in the Four Systems.) The mission was to stop the attacks, ultimately by assassinating the dictator of Ariel, Damien Altron, and his top general, Camede Rodgen. I was offered $40,000 for the mission, and both of Nova's potential replies drive home that we're not really role-playing a "good" character here.
 

Since I can make this much money in 2 smuggling missions that take 10 minutes, I think the second option is the most accurate.

The second job was on Varon, where one faction of Lantas (the lizard-like alien species inhabiting the planet) wanted me to kidnap the head of the other faction and bring him to a parley.
    
Kendall also gave me leads on two new NPCs for my crew. One of them, Janai, was in the next room. When I previously spoke to her, she said she was assigned to a different crew, but I guess she's mine now. She has high communications skills and at least moderate ground combat skills, so I was able to replace the useless Bremer navigator in the ground squad slot. If you'll recall from my previous post, you can have up to 6 crewmembers performing duties on the ship, but only Nova plus two others in the "ground squad." There's a third slot in the ground squad for a "recruit"--an NPC that you pick up while you already have a full squad--but that person leaves the squad the next time you return to the ship.

The second NPC was named Rogers Amaro, and Kendall gave me coordinates to his house on Holbrook. Since I was already on Holbrook, I decided to start there. I flew my hovercraft to his small house and landed. Despite what Kendall said, Amaro intimated that he wasn't interested in adventuring, as he was busy trying to finish his collection of rare fish (the house was lined with aquarium tanks) and he still didn't have a "male hanky grobbler."

Clearly, I needed to help him finish his collection. An empty fish tank on the ground was an obvious clue, so I grabbed it and headed back to the Mastass base, where I had seen fish tanks in the casino. Sure enough, the game alerted me to one of them that stood out from the others.

Grabbing a fish.

                   
It took me a while to figure out how to grab it. It turned out that the aquarium tank needed to be in the inventory of the lead character before an option to "get exotic fish" became active. This is true of a lot of inventory-based puzzles in the game, like keycards; they have to be in the lead character's possession to use them.

I returned to Amaro with the fish and he gladly rejoined me. He was a much better fighter than Janai, so her service in the ground squad turned out to be quite brief.

Assigning new positions in the ship and on the ground squad.

Ciberan and Varon are both in the same system, but Ciberan was swarming with enemy ships and Varon wasn't, so I decided to do the Lanta quest first. Unfortunately, I bollixed it up somehow. There were two bases, one with the group I was supposed to be supporting and one with the group whose leader I was supposed to kidnap. I ended up killing everyone in both bases and never got the option to kidnap the leader. I hoped it wasn't too important and went on to Ciberan.

I really screwed up this mission. I don't know what the picture of the egg was about.

Ciberan had a bunch of enemy ships flying around the planet that attacked me every time I approached (there's an option to counterfeit your ship's signature, but I kept forgetting about it). While I could get past them by zooming right for the planet and immediately hitting (A) to orbit or (B) to visit the starbase as soon as the options came up, I eventually got sick of the ships and decided to destroy them. I accomplished this with a bit of "repair scumming." I flew around shooting at the enemies until my ship took too much damage, then immediately visited the starbase and paid for repairs. By repeating this process about 11 times, I was eventually able to destroy all of the enemies. This wouldn't have been possible, of course, if smuggling missions didn't pay so well and I thus hadn't been able to amass a small fortune early in the game.

Just a random shot of landing on a planet. I didn't know where else to put it.

              
At Meridian City on Ciberan, I met with Sebastian, leader of the forces resisting the Ariel invasion, and got from him a set of coordinates to a research center currently under attack.

There was also a store at Meridian City where I was able to upgrade my "advanced medical lining" (AML) to a more robust version. The AML is the inventory item that allows each character to continually regenerate health in combat; everyone comes with a standard one. The new ones promise to regenerate faster. The store also had ammo for some of the more advanced weapons I'd been picking up. Eventually, I stopped leveling Nova in firearms and started leveling her in "special weapons," which include laser guns and blasters.

I flew to the research center, cleared it of attacking Ariels, and got the coordinates to the next facility that they were striking. This process--clear out one base and get the coordinates to the next one--proceeded several times before I finally found myself in the facility where General Rodgen was directing the forces.

Getting the coordinates to yet another base.

Like all the combats in this game, those in the bases were bereft of tactics except to try to isolate enemies in groups of 3 or fewer. That was sometimes difficult, as in the case of this base, which had no doors to the rooms. I basically just waited in the starting area until the random walk routine brought one of them to me, killed him, then waited for the next one. Occasionally, I got impatient and ventured out, only to have a character die when they ganged up on me. There was a lot of reloading here.

Attacking a level swarming with anti-like foes.

I was quite literal when I said "random walk" above. Each enemy seems to move in a completely random direction every couple of seconds, regardless of whether he's currently engaged in combat, and regardless of the presence of the party. It's annoying when you get one down to 10 health, only to have him wander off the screen or into a room full of his compatriots, at which point you have no choice but to abandon him and let his health regenerate.

The other major problem is targeting enemies. I might be missing something in the interface on this, but there doesn't seem to be any way to click on an enemy to target him. Instead, the SPACE bar cycles through all visible enemies, until you finally land on the one you want to target, at which point ENTER fires at him. The problem is when there are dozens of enemies on screen, as above, and you have to cycle through them all before you land on the one closest to you. He's shooting at you in the meantime. If you accidentally press SPACE too many times, you accidentally pass him and have to cycle through everyone again. This is only a concern for Nova, since the NPCs in the party will shoot at the closest enemy no matter who's targeted, but since Nova seems to do the most damage, it's very annoying and dangerous.

I want to fight the guy in the upper-left next, but I have to hit SPACE a bunch of times before I'll target him. At least they can't shoot at me from behind the door.

Aside from these problems, the blunt nature of combat doesn't bother me as much as I would have thought. It's fast enough that even in enemy-heavy areas, it's over quickly. Leveling up is rapid (Nova is Level 22 as I write this) and the benefits associated with increasing skills are instantly noticeable.

Nova is starting to max in some of her skills.

Occasionally, a group of enemies--usually "boss" enemies--will occupy fixed positions. Such was the case with General Rodgen, who stood fixed in a small room with three warriors in fixed positions in front of her. They were tough. I couldn't survive sustained combat with them, so I adopted the tactic that I had to use against Taylor in Sentinel Worlds: run up, fire a few shots, then run away. Fortunately, enemies regenerate slightly slower than the party members, so the tactic works over a long period of time.

General Rodgen waits behind three other enemies as I try to figure out how best to approach them. She's blue, meaning she has some dialogue before I kill her.

"General Rodgen" turned out to be a white-haired woman in earrings and civilian gear. She bragged about taking over Ciberan and said that she and Damien Altron would eventually control the four systems. I killed her after a short conversation. This cleared the bases on Ciberan, so I moved on to Ariel to try to find Damien Altron himself.

At this point, I should mention that I played this section over a week ago, but I got busy with work and didn't have a chance to blog about it until now. I don't remember some of what I did. To the best of my recollection, I visited Ariel's main city, stocked up on some equipment, and talked to a few trivial NPCs. A spy or rebel gave me the coordinates to a rebel base, where I spoke to a rebel leader named Jared. He, in turn, gave me the coordinates to Damien's base and told me he'd keep Damien's forces occupied while I took on Damien himself.

The rebel leader exhibits poor trigger discipline.

In Damien's base, I spoke to him and tried to shoot him. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a hologram. In his dialogue, he indicated that "Damien Altron" was in fact a complex AI that had been created by General Rodgen. He said that his program was everywhere, and the only way to destroy him would be to destroy the entire planet. I told him I'd find another way regardless and stormed the base. I didn't want to post this until I'd finished the quest, but I'm stuck in the base, swarming with Altron's soldiers, and I keep running out of ammo and having to go back to a city to buy more.

Trading threats with the Dictator of Ariel.

Altogether, the quest to kill Altron has occupied about six hours. I hope there aren't too many of these.

A few other notes:

• One thing I like about the game are the brief descriptions you get when entering a new area, or even among the various rooms on a larger map.

• It's tough to find locations where you go up and down. They're not signaled iconographically. You have to wander around until you notice the "go up one level" or "go down one level" options on the screen; sometimes, they seem to appear in random rooms.

• Many of the bases I needed to access during this mission were beneath a "drop shield," meaning I had to drop my hovercraft somewhere else and fly to them. In a couple of cases, it was difficult to do this without running out of fuel along the way. If you run out of fuel, you automatically abandon your hovercraft and have to buy a new one. This also happens if your hovercraft is destroyed in combat.

• Earlier, I mentioned that in the robomaze, enemies respawned when I visited the "save" or "load" screens. This doesn't seem to happen elsewhere in the game, but enemies do re-set to their default starting positions when you visit these screens.

• Based on comments I received and my own observations, the game seems to award experience based on damage inflicted rather than enemies killed. Thus, if you spent a while firing at an enemy and he successful wanders away and regenerates, it was still worthwhile, as you get experience for the shots.

Sorry for the long delays. It's another busy work period. I hope I can win this for the next post.

Hard Nova: Hard Start

Preparing to enter a stargate as hostile ships approach.

The beginning of Hard Nova is difficult enough that I feel like I must be missing something, though I've pored through the documentation several times and I'm not seeing any hints. The essential problem is that the first quest is nearly impossible for an early-level character, but I've found only one opportunity for grinding experience, and no opportunities to upgrade equipment even though I can make plenty of cash.

When I closed the first post, I was prepared to spend some time in the "robomaze" on the opening base to grind for experience and gold. It turned out to be a decent place for experience grinding, but there was really no way to make money because I spent way more on entry fees (which increase with every level) and ammunition than the "bronze flags" restored.

After I gained a couple of levels and was almost out of money, I decided to head to the Starkiller base for my first assignment. I landed at the base (the "D" key was what I was missing before), which was a small structure with a shop and three NPCs: a human communications technician named Janai, a "Darcator" (flying species that looks like a manta ray) named Leod; and the "highest visible official" in the Starkillers group, Gerard Kendall.

Kendall ribbed me about the way I've been treating the ship he gave me and then gave me my first quest: a water tanker was hijacked somewhere near Ciberan and was last seen heading towards the stargate. He wanted me to get aboard and wipe out the thieves without damaging the ship.

Accepting the first quest.

(Incidentally, I got the impression from the backstory that Nova had joined the Starkillers after they rescued her from the disaster that killed most of her crew. But the dialogue makes it seem like Nova was already a member, and she was on a Starkiller mission when it happened.)

The Darcator Starkiller member indicates that he knew me before the disaster.

The map showed that Ciberan was two stargates away from the opening Mastassini system. I followed it to find the location of the gates and jumped through with no problem. The Ciberan system was swarming with hostile ships that surrounded and destroyed me if I went too far from the gate.

This really didn't work out for me.

I located and boarded the water tanker, which is when it became clear that I would need to do a lot more grinding before I'd succeed at the mission. The enemies killed me almost instantaneously, and even when I tried to isolate them and take them on one-by-one, my weapons damaged them slower than their bodies healed the damage (more on that below). I was also nearly out of fuel by this point, and didn't have enough money to re-fuel, so clearly I needed a new strategy.

I got this screen a lot in the first few hours.

Let's talk about the combat mechanics before I get into the rest of the adventure. Neither ground combat nor space combat have advanced significantly since Sentinel Worlds, where they both sucked. In ground combat, you basically use two keys: SPACE to select your target and ENTER to fire. NPCs attack automatically. Or, at least Ace does. A'kri's only skill is with melee weapons, and since characters never break formation, you have to walk right up to an enemy before he'll attack.

Combat occurs in real time, though the PC, each enemy, and each NPC, has to take a timed break between attacks dependent on his or her "Agility" score. Health—both yours and the enemy's—regenerates quite quickly in real-time (it did in Sentinel Worlds, too, but you had to have a doctor in the party), so combat is only dangerous on an individual-enemy basis. Essentially, you have to do enough consistent damage to overwhelm his regeneration process to kill him, and he has to do enough damage to overwhelm your regeneration process to be dangerous to you. If you can survive a single enemy or group of enemies in the same area, you just have to wait a bit to get back to full strength. Since enemies (and the party) can't shoot through doors, if you can put a door between you and the foes and stand right next to it, they can't enter and you can heal as long as you need to.

I'm safe as long as I stand behind this doorway.

Thus, the only "tactic" I can discern is to try to isolate enemies. This is hard, because they wander around randomly even when engaged in active combat (this is the second game in a row where this happens) and will happily wander on- and off-screen while you're trying to kill them.

Enemies don't seem to respawn when you move on- or off-screen, but they do respawn if you hit the F10 key to save the game, at least in the robomaze. Sometimes, they respawn right next to you, in large groups. In the case of the robomaze, where I'm trying to gain experience, I guess this is a good thing.

Your ability scores affect two major combat factors: how often you can fire (there's a small delay between moments where you can press the ENTER key) and your accuracy, represented as a score between 0 and 100%. Damage seems to depend solely on the type of weapon. I've noted that increases in both the "Firearms" and "Tactics" skills increase my accuracy. A higher "Agility" reduces the delay.

This shot shows that at my current ability level, I hit 55% of the time and do 4-12 damage. I don't know how the speed actually translates to seconds-between-shots, but more speed is better.

Space combat isn't much more sophisticated. You use SPACE to target a foe, G to fire lasers, and ENTER to fire missiles. Lasers consume fuel; missiles are in limited supply but cost only a small amount to re-stock. The prime difficulty of space combat is that the window is extremely small and the enemies move extremely fast. It's nearly impossible to keep them on the screen, and I can't even begin to target missiles effectively. [Edit: As Redleg_FAO reminds, there is a "shadow" option that keeps your ship flying close to the target. This does make tracking ships a bit easier.] (Missiles always fire from the front of the ship, but lasers just automatically target the enemy.) The "Star Gunner" skill for anyone assigned to the "gunner" position seems to govern accuracy in space combat.

The ship is damaged a lot in space combat, and so far I don't have an engineer to effect quick repairs. Fortunately, repairing at a space station doesn't cost very much—considerably less than replenishing fuel. So far in the game, I've defeated a couple of hostile ships in combat (and had to reload after getting killed by a lot more), but you don't get any money for it, so I'm not sure if there's any point until I get an explicit mission that requires me to fight ships. I guess maybe the gunner gets some experience.

Buying repairs at a space station. Everything but "Avionics" needs to be fixed.

I'm a little confused about how experience is allocated. The manual only says that each character gets experience by "succeeding in combat" or "in the performance of duties on the spacecraft." The former is the more obvious; it seems to be awarded to the character who makes the kill. The latter is a little more nebulous. A'kri's one duty on the spacecraft is to navigate stargates, but he doesn't seem to gain experience when we go through them.

Leveling up allows you to allocate a handful of points to your abilities. The number of points you get for each level seems to be governed by the "Aptitude" ability, so I've been putting one point into that at each level and then distributing the rest as makes the most sense, mostly in ground combat skills. I'm trusting that I'll eventually find another NPC with high "Mechanics" and "Electronics" skills, or else I'm in trouble.

Nova after this session. I really hope I didn't need to be investing in some of the other abilities yet.

Based on my failure in the first mission, I knew I'd need to increase the accuracy and speed of my guns. It also would have been nice to get another NPC—someone who could relieve the useless A'kri on the ground party. And I would have liked some better weapons and armor. The problems were that a) I didn't have any money for better weapons; b) the only two shops I've found, on the opening base and the Starkiller base, don't sell better weapons or armor; c) I don't know where to find more NPCs; and d) the only place I know to grind against enemies is in the robomaze.

The only one of these problems I was able to successfully solve is the first one. Each space station offers a group of lucrative "smuggling missions" by which you agree to accept a certain cargo, then fly it to a specified set of coordinates on another planet, at which point you're immediately paid. These are analogs to the "science foundation" quests of Sentinel Worlds.

Accepting a smuggling mission.

The most lucrative of the bunch pays $29,000 to smuggle fuel cells to Ciberan. I had already been to the area, so I knew it was hard, but not impossible. The only danger comes once you exit the second stargate and hostile ships start attacking. My strategy was to ramp up to max speed, blow past them, and quickly enter the planet's orbit. At that point, you're "safe." The specific set of coordinates where I had to drop the supplies was blocked by a "drop shield," but it was easy enough to go to a more remote set of coordinates, drop, and then fly to the supply zone. 

Reaching the drop point. There's nothing visual there, but the text at the top tells me to press...something...to unload the cargo.

 

After the mission, I had to spend a lot of money on fuels and repairs, but I still made about $24,000 net. I repeated this a few times, interspersed with less dangerous missions, and soon had more than $100K—a nice bank for ship upgrades and equipment upgrades, if only I could find a store that sells the latter. I did buy an "A7 comet beam" for my ship, which is supposed to be the best laser weapon.

The obvious thing to do was to explore random worlds looking for NPCs, combats, and shops, but the worlds are quite large, and it seems unlikely that I'll find anything by flying around randomly. From space, there don't seem to be any beacons that show you the locations of settlements (or maybe I just need a higher "Star Comm" skill first?). Also, in a comment, Dariel says that visiting locations before the plot sends you there can break the game. I scoured the documentation looking for some list of coordinates for cities and bases, but I don't see anything.

With nothing else to do, I just spent a lot of time grinding in the robomaze, especially since I have plenty of money for ammo and entry fees. Leveling slowed down quickly, though, and the robots were insanely boring even with The Rockford Files playing in the background. By the time Nova reached Level 7, I'd had more then enough. I decided it was time to try the first quest again.

Grinding in this area is very boring.

I flew back to Ciberan space, found the tanker, and boarded, saving just inside the door. It took me several re-loads, but I was finally able to clear out the opening area, which had 3 enemies, which gave me some breathing room to engage the rest of the ship. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that I didn't have nearly enough ammo for the mission. I had to abort, head back to the opening base, and fill every empty slot in both individual inventories and the party's "pool" inventory with magazines.

Returning to the ship, I was surprised and happy to see that the enemies already slain hadn't respawned. The rest of the enemies, while not impossible, were very annoying. They kept ducking into single-square rooms in the middle of combat, regenerating health while I was powerless to kill them. The enemy AI in the game is maddening. They just move randomly. They don't advance, so you can't lure them. They don't retreat. They just bumble about. In an area with a lot of doors, which cut off your ability to hit them, it's infuriating.

Enemies hiding in little cells where I can't get them.

But eventually I picked them off, and on the bridge, I found my first weapon upgrade, a "SMG-70X," along with a belt of ammo.

Equipping my new, slightly-better weapon.

The captain of the hijackers was by himself, unmoving, in a room where only one character could fit through the door. With my new SMG, I was able to kill him with only about 5 reloads. Once he was dead, I had the option to take his head as proof of completion of the mission.

I returned to Kendall, who was unhappy with my choice of "proof," but he gave me the $5,000 reward and told me to "go smuggle or something" until he called again. I hope that's soon, because otherwise I really don't know what to do except go out and make a lot of cash that I can't spend.

A somewhat realistic reaction to being given a bloody, severed head.

A few other notes:

• Death is gruesome and permanent. Since there are a limited number of NPCs in the game and you want to preserve those with special skills, it's also an occasion for an immediate re-load.

 

• Dariel mentioned that there are abandoned military bases on Holbrook that you can explore. Flying my hovercraft randomly, I did discover one, but it just contained rooms full of ammunition for weapons I didn't have. Easier to do smuggling missions than to pick up and sell all of these.

Okay, granted, this would come in handy now, but this was before I found the SMG.

       

• When I entered one sector of space, the "Glorious world of Ariel" demanded a $16,508 tribute. I refused, and I didn't notice any changes in the number of hostile ships.

The second game in a row where navigation success rests on differentiating between colors of tiny dots.

Thus ends my first quest in Hard Nova. Given the sophomoric combat system and facepalm-inducing dialogue, I don't have a lot of high hopes for this one. (Leveling up is, admittedly, satisfying and instantly-rewarding.) Here's hoping the plot, at least, turns out to be better than Sentinel Worlds.
           

At least this game avoids the trope in which you're wondering why your character is running around doing side quests when there's a pressing main quest to do. Now, if there were only some side quests.

     
In other news, I was going to offer a bonus post on the Intellivision Swords & Serpents (1982). I saw that if I completed it, I would have played every western-released RPG, computer and console, through 1982. Moreover, there aren't any more console-only RPGs in the west until 1987, and there's only one that year; the next one is in 1990. [Edit: As the discussion made clear, I was misreading my own data. I should have said "there aren't any more console-only RPGs released by a western developer," not "released in the west."] Anyway, I downloaded it and played it for a bit, and it appears to me that it's not an RPG at all. It offers no character development, combat seems to be all action-based, and the only "inventory" is treasures that you collect for a score. It's basically an arcade game or an early version of Gauntlet. If anyone has any experience with the game and can refute this, I'm listening, but otherwise I'll conclude that I have played all western RPGs through 1982 (barring ones that no longer exist in playable form). [Ed. Many years later, I offered a BRIEF on Swords & Serpents.]