Centauri Alliance: The Perils of Precociousness

This game has been full of one-way trips.

      

To combat an insurrection or invasion, the agents of the Centauri Alliance have assembled the remnants of an ancient weapon called the Fractyr Fist (thus keeping it out of enemy hands), plus a suit of armor and a helmet. Ancient ruins on the moon of Veladron II gave us access to a teleporter which took us to the forbidden planet of Keppa Var. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do there for the time being, so we took a ship (you can book passage from Keppa Var, but not to it) back to the Lunabase to level up. There, we were alerted to an invasion at Epsilon Indi.

    

As this session began, we hopped a ship for Epsilon Indi as ordered. We didn't make it. On the way, a pirate dreadnought attacked our transport and pulled it into its own hull. "You will be boarded in moments," the game warned. The party decided to escape out the cargo hatch.

    

Over the next few hours, we had to navigate four levels of the pirate dreadnought, each of them a little smaller than the standard 16 x 16 because they were in the shape of a ship and thus tapered to a "nose." Early in our explorations of the first level, we found an elevator that offered to take us to the other three levels plus a "Control Room" that we never found a way to access. I'm not sure there was one.

        

And there's no way to get clearance, apparently.

         

Based on my notes, I think we had to go to Level 4 to find the information needed to use the escape pod on Level 3. But in between, we found a guy on Level 3 who said he'd recharge an item for us. I gave him a gravity belt and he recharged it for 1 charge, which my technic is already capable of doing just fine on his own. The guy disappeared after that, and I couldn't believe that he existed just to recharge a single random item, so I went through my inventory and noticed that the "Mattermit Pass" that I had received in the alien ruins, allowing me to access the teleportation platform, had no charges. When I gave him the pass, he said, "I'm going to need a chunk of plenadium to recharge that one."

     

I had no idea where to get plenadium. I had found plenocarbon earlier on Level 3, but that was it. Eventually the only place I hadn't explored on the four levels was the irradiated section of the engine room on Level 2. I poked around there, healing myself constantly and resting for long spells to recharge psi power. Eventually, I'd explored the entire thing and still found nothing. But later, I happened to notice that my chunk of plenocarbon had turned to plenadium, probably because of the radiation.

      

The graphics artist and the librettist needed to collaborate better on this one.

     

Anyway, I got the pass recharged for 5 charges. So I guess that allows me to use the teleportation platform 5 more times. I hoped I didn't need to use it more than once.

 

Elsewhere--I think on Level 4--I ran into a room with 5 mechanoids set into niches in the wall. A control terminal would let me power up one of them and add him to my party. I had the choice of Dragonmech 7, Dreadnot M101, VII Mandrake, Redwraith XL, and Mindscare KIL. I had no idea what the capabilities of any of them were. I don't know why I didn't go with the "Dragonmech" one--that sounds the coolest--but I went with the VII Mandrake instead. I think I figured they were either listed in order from best to worst or worst to best, so by choosing #3, I'd get a decent one either way. He's not as useful in combat as the Fractyr Mech who joined last time, but he occasionally lobs a bomb into an enemy party or blasts someone with a psychic attack, so that's cool.

   

I don't know where my head was. If a game offers you a dragon anything, you take it.

      

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see him in action until much later. On all four levels of the pirate dreadnought, I failed to win a single battle. Every one I fought left the party in tatters and most of the characters dead. Clearly, I was meant to have done a lot more grinding (or perhaps less fleeing) on previous maps. A lot of enemies were capable of summoning "guardians," easily the hardest enemy I've fought so far. They almost always went first and killed my characters in one hit, sometimes killed all my characters in one round. With double the number of hit points, I don't know how I would have defeated them. A lot more shield belts, I guess.

    

The good news is that there were no fixed combats on the entire ship, so when I died, I just had to reload. That's been true of most of the game, frankly. I can only remember three or four fixed combats, most involving holders of the Fractyr First, so my characters were able to move through the game faster than they probably should have.

     

A records room on Level 4 had a printout with the keywords INVASION and ESCAPE POD. I fed the former into a computer on Level 3 and got: "The Daynab invasion of Alliance space continues on schedule. Alliance star base over Epsilon Indi is currently under attack. Our special agent in the Alliance government is very helpful."

      

I look forward to unmasking the enemy agent. But since there aren't any named NPCs in the game, it can't really be a surprise.

   

ESCAPE POD got me off the ship and into Port Minkar. I explored the starport there and found nothing of interest except for the usual services. I hopped a shuttle for Lunabase to level up (I had gained experience from random battles on Minkar), then headed back to Epsilon Indi again. This time, I made it safely. At the Alliance Headquarters, an officer informed me: "Daynab forces have taken Starbase VI, which orbits this world. We can take your group up in a shuttle and sneak you onto the maintenance level."

 

I explored the surface of Epsilon Indi before taking the shuttle, and I'm glad I did, because in one of the rooms in the southeast part of the city is another teleportation platform. That means to get to Keppa Var, I don't need to go through the whole process of crash-landing on Veladron II's moon again, which I don't even know for sure is possible.  

     

This will come in handy.

      

I should have spent some more time grinding, but I took the shuttle instead, hoping that the enemies in the pirate ship had just been unnaturally hard. That was not the case--I was incapable of surviving anything on Starbase VI, too--but again there were no fixed battles, so I could just reload if I died.

 

The starbase consisted of 3 levels, but they were all quite small, most of the 16 x 16 areas unused. The purpose of the area is solely to find a guy at the end of a hallway on Level 3. The party roughs him up a bit, and he tells us that the Alliance traitor is in the dungeon of Keppa Var, and that the password is CASTLE-FIST. 

    

If all our enemies are as tough as this commander, we have nothing to worry about.

     

To get off the starbase, you have to access computers on Levels 1 and 3. Both of them require the same passcode. The passcode is found in a manual of almost 2000 pages in a corner of Level 1. You can feed the game one page at a time, and it will tell you what's on the page, except that most pages have nothing interesting. Only about four of them give you codes to use on the computer.

 

How do you know what pages to reference? The computer on the same level tells you, except that it also asks you to log in. If you don't know the login, you're stuck on the computer forever, as far as I can tell. It regards your attempts to log OFF (the usual command to leave computers) as an attempt to enter a password. So you either have to access the computer, note the pages, reload, and then go find the manual, or you've got to type in all of 1,982 page numbers to find the right parts of the manual. It's a minor problem, since reloading is so quick, but it's still either a bug or bad design.

       

Getting code words from the technical manual.

    

When I was done finding stuff on the base, I launched the shuttle back to the surface. Although I had not in any way stopped the Daynab invasion of Epsilon Indi--I hadn't even won a single battle--the Alliance officer was now telling me, "The next stage of your mission lies on Keppa Var."

 

Fortunately, the world below is an alliance starport.

    

I took the teleportation platform to the planet and used the CASTLE-FIST password to enter its dungeon. Here, I soon got stuck. There are fixed battles with guards in this dungeon, and I'm nowhere near the point where I can even survive the first round with them, let alone defeat them. If I could survive the first round, I'd have a decent chance, since my two robots always go at the end of the round, and they have pretty devastating attacks. But until they go, I'm facing 9 guards, each capable of blasting every member of my party for 20-30 points of damage.

   

The annoying thing is that at the beginning of these battles, one of my characters suggests that we "fan out!" This made me think that I'd been missing something in combat this entire time. It would make perfect sense if you could split your party into multiple groups; for instance, sending melee characters to engage enemies while other characters fired at them. Enemies can certainly do it. It would make more effective use of the hex terrain. But I've been through the manual multiple times and tried every option on the screen, and I can't find a way to make it happen, and I don't think it's possible. If anyone knows otherwise, please speak up. 

    

Daynab guards utterly destroy me in one round.

     

I clearly needed to grind, but finding good grinding spots in this game is harder than it seems. None of them are terribly convenient, partly because you can only level up at Lunabase, which itself has no dungeons. Enemies in any of the starports themselves are too easy, and leveling would take too long. So you have to go find a planet with a dungeon and grind there. Second, a lot of the game's areas are inaccessible after you've explored them. For instance, the last place I was reliably able to beat enemies was the alien ruins on Veladron II, but once you've taken the ship there once, you can't go back.

   

Thus, I've been doing most of my grinding in the medieval dungeon on Kevner's World, which you'll remember I explored quite some time ago, but it reliably delivers 200-300 experience points per battle for minimal risk. I got bored after a while there and moved on to killing rats on the two derelict ships accessible from Veladron II. The combats seem to come faster there. If I get bored there, I might move to the Andrini dungeon.

     

The perfect grinding foe.

     

The final issue with grinding is a weird one, and I'd be interested if anyone can help me parse what is happening. In The Bard's Tale II and III, you could just spin in place and enemies would come to you until you got sick of it. That doesn't work here. It is possible for an enemy party to attack after a turn, but they won't do it inevitably. And if you've just defeated an enemy party, you can spin in circles forever in the same square, and it doesn't seem that you'll ever encounter another enemy party. Nor can you just walk back and forth between the same spaces. It seems like the game enforces a minimum amount of time and distance between battles. Normally, I'd praise such a system--the number of battles in The Bard's Tale series got to be way, way too much--but not when I'm deliberating trying to find enemies to grind against.

    

I'm embarrassed to say that this period of grinding is the first time since the opening hours that I've bothered to check out the powers of my metamorph. I let him take on a Stonewalker form early in the game, found it unimpressive, and never really bothered to visit the other forms even though I continued to level him as a metamorph. It doesn't help that the manual tells you nothing about the forms. From 1 to 10, they are: Stonewalker, Andromedan, Gorn Warrior, Gamma Goblin, Beta Wolf, Zon Dragon, Drak, Far Spectre, Atomic Ant, and Devastator. Mine is capable of only the first five levels right now. But through experimentation, I found that starting at the Gamma Goblin level, the creatures actually start becoming useful, capable of long-range attacks against multiple enemies per round. The problem is that you can't target what the metamorph does. Once morphed, he acts as if he's an NPC. However, whatever he does is generally more effective than if I had just had him fire a Beretta, which is mostly what I've been using him for.

    

The grinding process has also taught me a bit more about how experience points work. It turns out that the number of points you need for the next level is based on what you took on the previous level. If you went from Melee 1 to Melee 2, for instance, you only have to wait a few hundred points before you can level again. Going from Sidearm 8 to Sidearm 9 requires about 20,000 experience points before the next level. Beyond that, I'm not sure of the exact formula because the game apparently does give you credit after your required experience level hits 0, but it hides the actual number that you're earning.

       

My Fractyr Mech is still more valuable than any regular party member.

   

The priority is to grind spell levels. Only towards the end of this session did I finally get Level 8 "Body" and "Mind" spells, which among other things gives me a spell that damages every enemy on the board ("Meta-War"), and one that paralyzes every enemy on the board ("Paral"). That last one alone would get me past the fixed guards on Keppa Var if they didn't always go first. I'm not sure what factors determine initiative. I hope level has something to do with it; otherwise, I don't see how I'm ever going to beat them.

   

There are two entire spell schools ("Matter" and "Energy") that I haven't even had access to. I assumed my psionics would get those options once I reached a certain level in their existing schools. Maybe I have to max out at Level 10 first.

   

I had hoped to finish my grinding and move on in time to write more for this entry, but I started to run up against my deadline for the next entry, so I had to move on to something else. It feels like I could finish this up in one more--Keppa Var, Gamma Base, and Kasdran are the only planets I haven't explored--if I can get strong enough.

 

Time so far: 23 hours

Playing out of: Duty again. This game hasn't really earned the right to require me to grind.