Spelljammer: Shipwreck

I believe this is the beginning of the main quest.

        

Let's pick up the story where I left off. The crew of the Meandering Beast was building fame, experience, and wealth doing a bunch of fetch quests, but they were having trouble with melee combat, such that as this session began, I gave up the pirate quest and went back to hustling people and goods around the solar system. But after a few more cargo missions--a couple of which lost me money because of taxes that exceeded the reward--I was ready to try again. On Anadia, I met an ex-trader named Quall D'ord, whose mutinous first mate, Eloom Blackleaf, had made off with his ship and cargo. The ship was bound for Karpri, and Quall wanted me to intercept it. I buzzed around Karpri until I encountered the ship, then closed and grappled.

         

Bit by bit, I make my fortune.

       

Instead of pirates, the ship was full of undead, including skeletons, specters, and mummies. The problem was, mummies and specters only respond to magic weapons, and I didn't have any. Their levels were too high for my clerics to turn (and see my note about turning), and collectively my mages didn't have enough spells to destroy them that way.

      

Unfortunately, I can't really do anything to mummies.

      

We were also attacked by some Neogi. These creatures apparently keep umber hulks as pets, and the umber hulks tore through us without stopping. From these two battles, I became convinced that my crew's problem was a lack of good gear. I specifically needed magic weapons in the hands of at least a few party members.

  

Before I could make the purchases, another galleon attacked me in wildspace. This one had regular human fighters on board, and I'm pleased to say that we were at last victorious. The galleon had 6,266 gold pieces and enough cargo to get us another 4,000. The morale boost was more important.

        

About to win my first victory.

       

During this session, I met several friendly ships in space. When you hail them, you have several dialogue options, most of which are just generically friendly. If the other captain doesn't respond, that's a good sign the ship is hostile. If he does, there's a decent chance that he gives you a rumor. These rumors seem to be drawn from the same database as the ones you can hear in bars. I've been keeping track of them:

 

• There is an asteroid field near H'Cathha made of pieces of glass. Sailors call it "Shredder" because it will tear your ship to pieces.

• There is an item that disguises your ship on Garden. Clive's said to have it.

• Don't trust ships that don't respond to your attempts to hail them.

• There sure have been a lot of Neogi attacks lately.

• Mind flayers are offering top dollar for sharp-minded boys like you. Ha! ha!

• We were sitting by the aft rail looking at the stars when the biggest ship I've ever seen showed up. Twas like a giant bat and moved like we were standing still.

    

I did a few other random quests while looking for shops that sold magic gear. During the process, Woodes gained another level. This must have triggered something, because when we arrived at the next port, we were met by a government agent named Count Eldacar. He said the combined governments of Waterdeep, Hissta, and Umbergad were concerned about the number of Neogi in the system lately. Usually belligerent to each other, they have lately unified and seem to be operating out of a large, mobile base that disappears every time someone sees it. He promised 100,000 gold if I could find and destroy this base.

   

I wasn't sure where to even start, but I got some help on that front. Not long out of port, a mysterious ship hailed us. We responded, and the captain of the other ship invited me to his cabin. He represented Clive the Fearsome, ruler of the planet Garden, who wanted to see us. We made our way to Garden.

        

The dread pirate Clive.

       

Clive knew about the quest we'd been given by the Council of Lords' agent. Clive--who is clearly some kind of gangster--also wanted the Neogi out of the system. He gave us a map that supposedly led to the treasure trove of Drach Barrachas, a dwarven pirate who had a magic device that would disguise his ship to appear any way he wanted.

   

I still hadn't found any magic gear, but I seemed to remember a magic shop on Toril, so I headed back. On the way, we were attacked by another pirate, and I accidentally destroyed his ship in ship-to-ship combat mode. I still don't fully get it--particularly what "Target" does--but you basically point at the enemy and fire your ballistae, arrows, and other heavy weapons with a single click. Then there's a cool down as they reload. Weapons both damage enemy ships and kill or injure crew. There are also buttons to "shear" and "ram," but my vessel is too flimsy for such maneuvers.

         

Firing at an enemy ship in space.

       

Eventually I got to Toril and managed to buy +1 or +2 weapons for everyone except my mages; there were no magic staves or daggers. Here, I discovered something annoying about the interface: there's a command to "pool" all gold to a single character, but none to distribute it. This means that when you're purchasing expensive items, one character has to do all the buying and then trade the items to the intended recipients. Why, by 1992, is gold still being assigned to individual characters? Has that ever made sense?

         

Woodes distributes purchased weapons to the party.

        

We lifted off from Toril and made our way to the ruined dwarven fortress ship, which showed up on our "special places" map. Soon we found the behemoth lurking dead in space. There was no one living on board firing weapons at us, so we didn't fire anything at it as we approached and grappled.

          

The dwarven fortress is a ghost ship, drifting in wildspace.

       

The ship turned out to be two large levels full of undead, including skeletons, zombies, revenants, and a lich. I ended up fighting this battle five times and felt pretty good about my combat mastery by the time it was over. The first time, I actually won. The lich was surprisingly docile, refusing to cast any spells or even make melee attacks. The second, third, and fourth times, however, he came busting out with "Cloud Kill" and wiped out half the party. The fifth, I won again, but it was a lot harder than the first time because the enemies were harder. Every time you reload, the game re-stocks enemy ships, and on this fifth run, there were much more revenants as opposed to skeletons and zombies.

    

I'll cover why I had to win twice in a minute, but let's talk more about the combat. I said last time that it was recognizably rooted in the Gold Box, but with additional features and more intricate environments. In fact, with enemy and ally "stacks," it essentially bridges Gold Box tactical combat and strategy game combat. 

      

This battle begins on the rear deck of the ship. There are three doors from here.

        

Battles are a lot longer than Gold Box battles. The dwarven fortress took up to two hours per combat. Mage spells exhaust relatively quickly, so fighters take on a prominence here that they never held in the Gold Box. So does in-combat healing.

  

My long experience with this one fight revealed a lot of quirks about Spelljammer's approach to combat--some good, some annoying, some just confusing. Here are the highlights:

   

• As I noted last time, the combat maps are much more detailed, taking place in large areas with lots of doors. Sometimes, these doors are locked. You have options to smash or pick them open. ("Knock" might also be an option, but I didn't memorize that.) The annoying thing is, the door doesn't remain smashed open after the character succeeds. The next character has to try to pass through the door by making his own smash/unlock roll. I was often trying to bring multiple characters through a door only to have the first make it through and the trailing ones get hung up by a weaker character who couldn't open it.

• Enemies can't target or hit you in doorways! They act like you're not even there. This was true of Knights of Legend, too, which this game often reminds me of. Thus, a good strategy is to smash open a door and stand there in the doorway, attacking anyone on the other side with impunity.

       

Two characters stand safely in doorways and take turns attacking a stack of zombies.

      

• But if you do this, only that one character can attack. Other characters cannot shoot or cast spells through doorways even if another character is holding it open. (This is true if the doorway has a door, at least. It may not be true if the doorway is open.)
  

• If you realize you're inevitably going to lose, you can't quit combat and reload. You have to kill the emulator.

• The AI on your random crew is pretty poor. The dwarven fortress started us on a balcony and required us to penetrate deep into the fortress. None of the enlisted members of the crew managed to find their way through more than one door.

• The spellcaster who pilots the ship has all his magic power converted into movement. There's no point in having him memorize spells because he just forgets them. This means that, functionally, I have only one cleric.

• Clerics are extra important, too, because healed characters will stand up in combat and continue to fight, unlike the Gold Box where you had to wait until the end of combat to revive them.

• As for spells in general, there is no "rest" mechanic. You simply pull up the spellbook and "learn" the ones that you want. Unfortunately, there's no quick way to re-learn the spells you've already cast. And there's no way to cast spells outside of combat except for healing.

• There are thus no opportunities to buff before combat. You have to do your best at the beginning of the battle. For me, that usually means holding everyone in the starting area with the "Wait" command until my cleric's turn comes up and I can cast "Prayer."

          

My cleric casts "Prayer" around the party at the beginning of combat.

       

• "Bless" now only applies to individuals, not the entire party. "Prayer" seems to be the "group Bless" spell. I don't think stacking them does anything.

• Sometimes characters act on their own in combat even if you didn't set them to computer control.
  

• "Turn Undead" doesn't make them flee or destroy them. It just sort of puts them out of commission for about four rounds. You can only turn a single stack of foes per round.

     

In the end, I have mixed feelings on whether I think it's better or worse than Gold Box combat. It has most of the same strengths--in particular, the creators have done a good job implementing the D&D spells (at least, the ones that I have cast). It is far more tactical with its terrain. Instead of accommodating four warriors abreast, the narrowest corridors here just allow for one enemy, meaning you have to be careful with who leads the exploration and where you allow yourself to get pressed into melee combat. Enemy AI is smart, and enemies will attack weak characters, so you can't stick your mages or low-health characters into the fringes of combat and hope the AI ignores them. "Bandaging" fallen characters takes on new importance, because you can't trust that the battle will be over before the fallen character bleeds out. You also have to be immediately adjacent to him (a nod to realism that I don't mind, I guess), meaning you rarely want individual characters out there exploring alone. Either way, you probably want everyone carrying a healing potion, which I hardly ever used in the Gold Box. These are all mostly good things.

Tight corridors make missile weapons and spells extra important.

            

On the other hand, you have the poor friendly AI. All those miscellaneous fighters I'm paying for aren't very useful if they just crowd around the starting area. They often block doors, too, which hasn't put me in an unwinnable situation yet, but I could see it happening. I'm not a huge fan of very long battles because I don't like re-fighting them when things go wrong.

    

That brings us back to the dwarven fortress. The reason I didn't accept victory on the first try is that the game crashed. When a battle is over, the main character appears on the map alone, free to wander around if you want to. There are three options: "Heal," "Flee," and "Loot." The first two don't make any sense to me. You can heal more thoroughly out of combat, so why do it here? As for "Flee," why flee after you've won? Anyway, "Loot" is the only sensible option to choose after winning the dwarven fortress, and for me, it crashes the game. I've won twice now, investing over five hours in both won and lost battles in this one location alone.

   

Thinking my game might be corrupt, and wanting to try some other things anyway, I downloaded a fresh install of the game and created a new captain. I figured if only the lead character ever advances, I'd make it a mage, and thus get to try some advanced mage spells. I create a female half-elf mage named Hortense--don't ask me where the name came from; it was completely random.

       

I used a spreadsheet to track what I had and what I needed.

   

The game must have decided that because I created a female character, I must want an entire female party, because that's what I got: two clerics, three additional mages, a fighter, a paladin, a ranger, and a thief. This time, I paid a lot closer attention to each character's selection of weapons and armor and made incremental upgrades every time I could afford it. My clerics, for instance, both started with nothing but robes, even though they're capable of wearing plate mail. A lot of my characters capable of wearing shields and helms started with none. I even bought better boots and cloaks for those characters who started with none or inferior ones, even though I don't think those items do anything.

   

I started with the usual fetch missions, but once I had everyone but the mages upgraded to magic weapons, I felt comfortable taking on a quest to destroy a "ghost ship." I found it in the space above Coliar and engaged in a short battle with zombies and mummies. Victory was swift. But then the game crashed when I went to loot the ship. I tried again with a new installation of DOSBox and it still crashed after this battle.

          

This battle was relatively easy because I could stick a character in the doorway choke point.

           

I also identified these other bugs during play:

         

• There's a mission where a man says he wants to go to Glyth, but you don't get the reward if you take him to Glyth. He really wants to go to Waterdeep.

• Mages can equip short bows. I haven't tested to see if they can actually fire them.

• Characters sometimes unequip their weapons in the middle of combat.

• The game sometimes forget that you already know the properties of a magic item. So a longsword +3 mysteriously just becomes a "longsword" in the character's inventory, and you have to identify it again.

• After one battle, the game shouted that my second helmsman was dead. She wasn't.

      

My second helmsman was not dead.

       

• Enemies who don't exist sometimes take action on the battle screen. For instance, the game might say, "Zombie, who was guarding, attacks," even though there aren't any more zombies.

       

If anyone has any suggestions, I'll take them. If you have a copy of the game for which you never had this problem with crashing after combat, please send it along. Otherwise, I think I may have to mark this one as unwinnable and move on.

Time so far: 14 hours, but only about 7 "preserved."