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.

Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday: 4

Zooming across the universe.

An interesting comment thread on my last post explored the physics associated with both zero-gravity combat and maneuvering in space when, presumably, humans have invented faster-than-light travel.

We sometimes forget the vast sizes involved when talking about "just" the solar system. Episodes of the Star Trek franchise and other shows will clearly show starships cruising through the solar system at non-warp speed and still able to clear the distance from Jupiter to Earth in a few minutes, when in reality, the two planets are about 391 million miles apart at their closest and would take just shy of 35 minutes to traverse even at light speed. The New Horizons probe made the trip in 13 months in 2007. The distance from the Earth to Mars ranges from 34 million miles to 250 million miles, yet we don't see a scene in Total Recall where Quaid has to wait a few months until the orbits better align. Everyone seems capable of jumping off to Mars on a whim.

Notice that this statement isn't followed by "it'll take him 17 months to get there."

 
It's easy to forget that travel in space is fundamentally different than travel on the surface of the planet. On the Earth, the tendency is for gravity and friction to bring everything to a stop. To keep your car moving on the highway, you have to invest constant energy (via the gas pedal), or the pull of gravity and the resistance of the air will cause you to coast to a halt. In space, the opposite is true. With no friction and no primary gravity source, a craft will travel at its acceleration speed indefinitely and actually requires an energy investment equal to the initial acceleration to stop. (Before you decide to post a comment that begins with the word "actually," consider that I'm speaking in generalities and you're about to be a pedantic pest.) Two ships that decide to slow down, hail each other, and engage in combat are being unconscionably irresponsible with fuel.

I can't wrap my mind around what kinds of technological improvements would have to happen to create a civilization in which ships zoom around casually from planet to asteroid to planet, often stopping to engage in space combat. If not some ability to "bend" space or create wormholes or whatever, such travel, it seems to me, would require three things:

• An absurdly inexpensive and plentiful source of fuel, and a technology able to exploit that fuel
• Technology that counters or alters gravity
• Near-light-speed or faster-than-light-speed travel

All of these advancements are so far beyond current technologies that the physical consequences of them are essentially unimaginable. Hence, as Kenny points out in the thread, science fiction franchises that feature them get a free pass on physics. Why is fuel consumed every round instead of only during the initial thrust? Answer: the anti-gravity drive requires constant energy. Why are ships built with aerodynamic profiles when this makes no sense in space? Answer: such ships have to be capable of both atmospheric and space flight. How can ships communicate with their bases without the communications taking hours in between responses? Answer: the communications actually transmit in "sub-space," the same technology that makes rapid travel possible. I'm constantly reminded of a moment from the awesome film Thank You For Smoking:

• Sam Seaborn: Sony has a futuristic sci-fi movie they're looking to make.
• Harvey Dent: Cigarettes in space?
• Sam Seaborn: It's the final frontier, Nick.
• Harvey Dent: But wouldn't they blow up in an all-oxygen environment?
• Sam Seaborn: ....Probably. But it's an easy fix. One line of dialogue. "Thank god we invented the, you know...whatever...device."

The interesting thing about Buck Rogers, though, is that it doesn't bother to tell you whatever was invented to accomplish all of this space travel--at least, not beyond a vague reference to "nuclear engines." I wonder if the tabletop RPG gets any more specific.

In my last post, I had just arrived at a RAM asteroid base, which was in chaos. Some genetically-modified creatures had somehow escaped their cages and were massacring the base personnel. An evacuation had been ordered. As I arrived, military personnel assumed my party was part of the base staff.

The base consisted of two enormous levels, which put to rest any idea that the game would feature uniform 16 x 16 levels like Pool of Radiance and Champions of Krynn. The coordinates ranged to 62 on the x-axis and 47 on the y-axis, though of course not all of the space was used. It took several hours to map.

My map of the first level.

Most of the squares were empty, but occasionally they served up a special encounter or role-playing option. Like other Gold Box games, the special encounters, in which you have some sort of choice, are quite frequent. On one screen, I'm asked whether I want to try to save some poisoned RAM workers or leave them to die. On another, I have the option to maintain my ruse or reveal myself as an infiltrator (necessary to explore the eastern half of the base). A third gives me the option to console a woman frantically searching for her children or to "remain silent."

One of the game's many role-playing choices.

While I like the options, they don't seem to matter all that much. For instance, in the shot above, if I choose to heal the workers, they die anyway. A couple of times, I've explored both options--just for proper documentation of the game--and I've found that they were illusory--Morton's forks that led to the same conclusions. Other things that seem like options lead inevitably to death if you choose "wrong."

If Buck Rogers doesn't do a great job in this area, it does at least have an interesting approach to story-telling. The game doesn't spoon-feed the player the relevant plot points; the player, rather, must figure out what's going on from scattered encounters and clues. In my explorations, I found a group of hiding children and agreed to escort them to their escape vessel. It transpired that the genetic abominations were freed when one of the kids tried to help some rabbits escape (we eventually saved the bunnies). The kids, impressed with my bravery and not terribly loyal to RAM, fed me several bits of intelligence, such as the password to the base's computers and the location of RAM's secret base on Mars.

The more important revelation is that RAM is building some kind of giant laser to use against NEO. The base held a miniature version of the laser, and some papers indicated that the research team building the real thing had moved to Gradivus Mons, the Mars base. I think maybe the trope of an evil empire using a giant space laser to commit acts of terrorism against a rebel alliance comes from some other franchise, but I can't put my finger on it right now.

The second level produced numerous combats with the gennies, one of which was capable of poisoning my characters. Just as in the D&D games, poisoning means instant "death" until cured by an antidote post-combat. My post-combat medical screens ended up getting a lot more complicated.

One of my less-successful combats with the genetically-engineered creatures.

Combat itself has become much more tactical, with more grenade options and enemies exhibiting strengths and weaknesses to particular weapons. This means that I have each character carrying several weapon types. I've decided to arm my warrior, Austin, with melee weapons primarily. He's deadly with his "Martian mono-sword."

As I explored the base, the AI from my ship, Scot.DOS, kept communicating with me about events on the base and helping me find key items.

In the 25th century, it's apparently impossible to deactivate a missing keycard.

Ultimately, I saw the children, their grandfather, and the rabbits safely to their escape ship and then left the base myself. Some papers in the base indicated that RAM had allied temporarily with a pirate named Talon to help defend the base. Unfortunately, Talon intercepted my ship as I left the asteroid.

There are some nice visuals in this game.

In yet another false choice, I had the option to surrender to Talon or fight his boarding party. I was victorious in the battle, but I was captured by Talon anyway. He was upset that I'd destroyed his "meal ticket" and planned to mitigate his losses by selling my party to RAM.

How did I realize that. Was it the jolly roger flags?

But calling himself a "friendly guy," he offered to fight one of us, hand-to-hand, for our freedom. I chose to fight, but the resulting battle was so one-sided that I can't imagine it's possible to win. Maybe if I'd grinded my characters up to the max level before entering the asteroid base or something. As it was, he absolutely took Austin apart and we ended up in the same place we would have ended up if I'd declined the battle in the first place.

 
Locked in my cell, I was unsuccessful with my rogue's "bypass security" and "open lock" skills, but I was surprised to be freed by none other than Buck Rogers himself. In the resulting journal entry, he indicates that he was investigating the pirate's association with RAM, and my party tells him "about the spy ship and everything [we] know about the Doomsday Device," prompting him to exclaim, "We must get back to Earth and warn NEO of this threat!" Until this journal entry, I didn't know we were calling it the "Doomsday Device," but I guess the title of the game is now clear.

The entire pirate ship episode was indicative of moments in a game that I can't stand: when you really want to return "home" but the game is prolonging you for an uncertain amount of time. It happens often, and it always annoys me even though I understand why it might be attractive to some players for the tension it creates. You think you're in charge of your navigation, able to return to the comfort of shops and training whenever you need to, and suddenly you're spun off into an unknown environment and you lose your tether back to your home base.

In my case, all of my characters were ready to level up and I was overloaded with equipment to sell. It really would have helped to train and increase everyone's "maneuver in zero-G" skill to improve my odds in combat, which had become increasingly more difficult. On the ship, I faced random and fixed battles with space pirates, most of whom threw grenades every round, some of them capable of stunning. Only Buck Rogers' presence in my party saved me from certain death. Armed with something called simply a "gun," he dished out more death than all of my party members with their laser pistols and rocket guns combined.

Note that Buck Rogers has this glass helmet around his head. Why don't any of my characters need that?

Even with Buck Rogers, though, I ended up dying in about 25% of the battles. There were certain paths that seemed deliberately designed to be impossible, though Buck warned me in such cases by noting that we were trying to keep a low profile.

The message you get when your entire party dies. Since Buck Rogers was in my party, I guess I just screwed up the entire Buck Rogers franchise.

The pirate ship consisted of 15 small levels with mostly nothing in them but random combats. I was a bit annoyed when I logged into the ship's computer and Theta Sigma, in whom I had channeled a ridiculous amount of points for "library search," failed at library search. Nonetheless, Buck Rogers again jumped in and saved the day, producing a journal entry that had maps of all the ship's levels, saving me from having to draw them all individually.

Buck also figured out the best place to set explosives to damage the ship enough that I could escape. I'm glad he came along.

In the armory, entered through the only successful use of a skill in the game so far, I found a mother lode of grenades and other weapons:

There was an option to try to attack Talon on the bridge and take over the ship, but Buck considered it "suicide," and the one time I tried it, he ditched my party, leading to a battle against a horde of enemies. Like the one-on-one combat with Talon, I can't imagine it's possible to win it, but then again I said that about the beholder battle in Curse of the Azure Bonds and had to eat crow later. Thus, I'll simply say that I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who has ever won the bridge battle and, if so, exactly how.

It was, indeed, suicide. There are an equal number of enemies off-screen to my left and right.

The successful solution was to set off an explosion on the galley level and, while the ship was in confusion, invade the engineering level and win a very difficult combat against numerous pirates and robots that took me about six tries.

Art imitates life.

With the battle won, I smashed up the ship's controls and made my escape. On the way out, Scot.DOS told me that Talon had stolen some gennie eggs and taken them back to his secret base, and that an ex-crew member named "Garrity" on Pallas might know where the base is.

I returned to the Salvation base and got my commander's congratulations. Buck Rogers left my party. I healed, leveled up, and sold my excess equipment. At this point, I have (I think) three options for my next voyage: the RAM base on Mars, the "manufacturing base" in the "Venusian lowlands," and following up on the lead for the pirates' base. The latter seems the least of the priorities, but as we know, in RPGs you often do the least important things first in case you otherwise don't get to do them at all.

In my next post, I should be able to cover combat and equipment. I'm on vacation for three weeks starting today, so I hope I can pick up the posts over the holiday break.