Let's Play: Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters

Whatever that thing on Pluto is, I'm sure it's nothing important, and certainly not the best character from the best race in the game.

When last we left the SCS Nomura . . .



. . . We had discovered a strange craft consisting of several colorful balls connected by tubes. Touching the craft . . .





. . . kills eight crew members.

BONUS: Listen to the Spathi music!

So: Spathi homeworld at 241.6:368.7, and the Spathi cypher is Huffi-Muffi-Guffi.



We're given these conversation options. I don't believe any of them lead to a fight except the last one. I opt for the least threatening path:

Yehat still around, fighting for the Ur-Quan, Syreen slave-shielded on BugSquirt, or something similar. Got it.





Well. That probably crosses the Shofixti off our list of allies.

In other words, this alliance with Fwiffo does not, in any way, shape, or form, constitute an alliance with the Spathi at large. Fwiffo has joined the Coalition of the Willing!

With a song in my heart and a mollusk at my side, I return to the starbase to offload minerals and refit my ship.



I accidentally fell out of the Solar System more than once trying to maneuver the old ship configuration, which had great acceleration but crappy handling. A couple more turning jets will help with that a bit. Since we're heading out for some serious resource gathering I added another cargo bay. After filling up the gas tank and bringing about some more eager meat shields, I prepare to lay in a course for adventure.



Here's the star map, where we'll be doing a lot of our planning. Note the brown circle labelled Spathi and the purple circle labelled Ilwrath. After you speak to a race for the first time, their sphere of influence will be drawn in on the star map. This indicates the area of space they control, and thus where you're likely to run into them, whether in hyperspace or in systems. The light gray sphere represents our maximum range with our present fuel load. Note that the outer border of that sphere indicates the point at which the gas tank empties and the engine dies, NOT the point of no return. When you consider the fuel cost of landing on planets, our effective range such that we'll be able to return to Earth is less than half the range the map indicates.

Sidenote: The game originally came with a neat glossy map of the quadrant. The map had all the spheres of influence drawn in as of when your mission crashed on Vela II. What was great about the map was that it wasn't accurate. It gave you a sense of where the races used to be, but you had to discover on your own whether they were still there. It was neat because it was a source of unreliable information.

In later editions of the game they included a "Deluxe" map of the quadrant. This one was in black and white on a giant sheet of folded white paper. It had all of the spheres of influence that you would eventually discover drawn in, including races noone had contacted yet, plus it marked all the stars where there was something interesting to be found. The only way it could have spoiled the player more would be if it had actually numbered the stars in the most efficient order to visit them in order to complete the game.

Back on topic: The next question is where I want to go searching for minerals, now that I've strip mined the Solar System. That brings me to a larger point about my Let's Play philosophy. One of the essential problems with Star Control II is that it becomes broken once you've finished the game. You already know where everything is, and locations don't change from game to game, so future playthroughs lose the sense of discovery that a first play has.

Along those lines, a Let's Play in which I say "First you go to X, then Y, then Z" eliminates that feeling of exploration. Thus, my goal is to make this playthrough largely group directed. I'll focus the group by giving options based on my notes about the clues we've found in conversation, but within those limitations I'll let Talking Time voters guide the voyage. That also means there won't be any sequence-breaking (for now; I have a quick-and-dirty speed run planned for after the main playthrough). If we haven't heard anyone mention that the Intergalactic Frungy League Cup can be found on Omicron Persei VIII yet, we won't be going there (unless, in the course of our wanderings, we should stumble across the International Frungy League Cup on Omicron Persei VIII).

Now, for our first expedition outside the Solar System. We don't have the fuel or resource reserves yet to start following leads, so for the first couple of expeditions we'll just be gathering resources. But where?



On this map I've marked the stars and constellations most ripe for early exploitation. Our options are Sirius right next door, Canopus to the East, Rigel and Saurus to the Northeast, Wolf the the Northwest, Lyrae to the Southeast, and Centauri to the Southwest.

So what say you, Talking Time? I have a tall ship; what star shall I sail her by?

Go see that Centauri, why don't you?

I'd say things are getting... Sirius.

The first time I played this game, I somehow completely missed Fwiffo. I guess I wasn't paying attention during the energy scan and thought he was just some minerals or perhaps I didn't even bother landing on Pluto. Such a shame!

how do you even proceed without fwiffo?

why would you do that to yourself?

Damn you Boron for making me download UQM again, although I've never actually finished a game. Too time intensive and notebook intensive to really play during my college/work schedule. Sigh, time to go kick some tentacular monster behind I guess.

The last time I played through the opening gambit I plundered Beta, Delta and Zeta Centauri before making for our star-shaped friends in Alpha and then heading home.

Eta: VA in this game is hilarious, and hilariously bad at points.

The Ur Quan theme is still fucking amazing.
and terrifying. especially when it comes up randomly in your ipod after a particularly slow and chill song.

I don't know if I should be voting since I vaguely remember the best way to play the start of the game, but Centauri sounds like the way to go!

@#$@! UQM just fucking corrupted my audio drivers after I tried to set it to the OpenAL decoding scheme, since I have a SB Live! audio card.

Sigh. Now to re-dl my sound drivers and do the ol' uninstall/reinstall.

EDIT: Compy is fix'd and I tried it out by Fwiffo'ing a particular Ur-Quan D'nought.

Well, it is more difficult as the Spathi ships rock, but you make do with earthling cruisers. As for the information he gives you, you can get all of it, including the secret password to Spathiwa from the Melnorme.

I didn't do it on purpose! I just didn't know he existed. As I said, I either mistook his energy signature for the white minerals or I ignored Pluto entirely wanting to get on to other solar systems.

I never really used spathi, preferring yehat, arilou and pkunk, but i thought you could only get huffi from fwiff.

I now remember that the melnorme had it too. Oh you silly cyclops! (they should call themselves Mael-Num still).

Looks like 2 (maybe 3) votes for Centauri and one for Sirius. Since Sirius is right next door, I'll visit it on the way out. Next update tomorrow, hopefully before noon.

Shh!

SPOILER KWESTION: Which theme, the Kzer-za or the Kor-ah? I think the latter is far creepier than the former, and the same goes for the voice acting. The Kzer-za VA's are way overblown, but the Kor-ah's VA's are suitably efficient and curt. There's never a doubt in your mind that this is a merciless race that cannot be negotiated with...with the exception of a stay of execution following "The Words," of course.

The first time I played Star Control II, my Captain was Brannigan and my ship somehow ended up being called the Turbogoat.

kzer-za. Their theme is undeniably martial and hard fucking core. The other beings are frightening as hell, but their music isn't nearly as OMG WE'RE GONNA DIE.

I know someone who writes Captain x Vux slash fanfiction.

I've never been a big PC gamer, but I used to play the shit out of Master of Orion and MOO II before getting my hands on Star Control II. I think I was so used to MOO's battles that I never got the hang of Star Control II's conflicts. I just muddled by.

So what makes a Pkunk ship so awesome?

Their pilots, mainly.

The fact that they're hippy kender in space? That, and i had an uncanny ability to get them to resurrect every freaking time.

and their ships have amazing control despite their short range.

Assuming you are just talking about the ship and not the species...

They are extremely fast and extremely maneuverable. Their projectiles shoot out from the side letting you strafe another ship. Or you can fire a ton while spinning creating a barrier of bullets around your ships. Recharging their guns is actually kind of fun (and due to their speed and maneuverability, not difficult). They make really good Ur-Quan killers because you can easily get away from and destroy the fighters they launch and then when they are very weakened just do one run-by to kill them. Oh, and they have a random chance of resurrecting when destroyed.

Blargh. Sorry for the late update. Life was busier than expected today.

When last we left the brave crew of the SCS Nomura, they had finally realized Mankind's fondest dream since time immemorial: they had sucked every last usable resource out of the solar system. And in record time! Now, like the aliens in Independence Day, they turn their eyes to nearby star systems in search of new planets to plunder.



It's Hyperspace, Star Control II's handy mechanism for circumventing the laws of relativity! Hyperspace travel is where you'll burn the vast majority of your fuel and fritter away most of your game time (time passes during intra-stellar travel, but much more slowly than inter-stellar travel). In theory you can run into other ships in Hyperspace and get pulled into conversation and/or combat. In practice that won't happen very often with maximum thrusters.

To get you in the Hyperspace mood, have some Hyperspace theme music



It's Sirius, the dog star, which I am appropriately visiting on this, the first dog day of summer.



Unfortunately, Sirius I is hella hot. Combined with its high tectonics and the relatively expensive fuel consumption to land there, it's not worth pillaging. Just barely, though; green dots are Rare Earth elements, meaning they're worth 5 RUs per unit. It's a pretty valuable planet, but too hostile to be worth it.



Sirius was a bust. Let's see if Delta Centauri, on the outskirts of Ilwrath space, is more bountiful.



If nothing else, it has more planets



Delta Centauri I is at the opposite extreme from Sirius I. There's nothing dangerous on the planet whatsoever and it's cheap to land on, but it has nothing of value on it.

The key to resource gathering is understanding opportunity costs. An econ teacher once explained opportunity costs to me using a dubious example involving Bill Gates and a $100 bill. The gist of it was that if Bill Gates sees a $100 bill on the ground it isn't worth his time to pick it up, because he could make more money in that same amount of time running Microsoft. Obviously the example is based on several false premises, but the idea is pretty clear. In the present case, common elements, worth 1 RU/unit, aren't worth the time and energy to gather. Meanwhile, if you do gather low-value elements, be prepared to treat the effort spent gathering them as a sunk cost and jettison them if you run out of cargo space and have the chance to grab something more valuable. There isn't enough time to gather every element in the universe, and getting more RUs right now is more important than minimizing your waste.



Hey, Delta Centauri II has a moon, and not just any moon, but an orange moon. Orange planets tend to be relatively resource-rich. Since I'm anal retentive about the order I visit planets, though, I have to visit Delta Centauri II before I go to its satellite.



And I'm pleasantly surprised to discover that it has some precious metals (yellow dots), which are worth 6 RUs/unit. Noticeable but not severe tectonics. High fuel use, but the resources gathered will make up for it. A solid, though not ideal, planet.



Delta Centauri II-a, though, is the real prize. It's a radioactive world, which means it's loaded with high-value radioactive elements. Low tectonics, low temperature, no weather, fuel cost higher than I'd like, but what're you going to do? As an added bonus, it's packed to the gills with vacuum-sucking radioactive hellbeasts, begging to be brought about the Nomura.



Here you can see all of the planet's native fauna. The round, blue tentacled things move slowly and damage your lander pretty badly when you run into them, but they run away when they see you and generally aren't much threat. They're also barely worth any bio units when collected. The goofy green cyclopses, on the other hand, are fast, run away hard when they see you, take two hits to capture, and give you about half a lander's worth of bio units when you bring them in. The bee swarms are the planet's only actively predatory life. They move at medium speeds, come straight for you when they see you, but aren't super-damaging when they make contact. When you shoot a creature enough it turns into one of those grey mechanical hamburgers you see just to the right of my lander there. You pick up the hamburger to gather its precious life-essence. Note that you should be careful when on safari on a mineral-rich world, because your lander's blaster will destroy any minerals it hits.

Delta Centauri III is a disappointment after the haul on II-a. It's a redux world, which I suppose is the opposite of an acid world. Still, it's full of corrosives, worth only 2 RU each, and requires a lot of fuel.



Delta Centauri IV, a Halide world, is slightly better only because it's got a few radioactives and is small enough that the fuel costs are low. I grab the radioactives and enough corrosives to top off the lander's cargo hold, then take my leave of the world.



Delta Centauri V is a noble world. Noble worlds are quite pleasant; generally low gravity, non-hostile, and filled with noble gases, worth a decent 4 RUs/unit.



Delta Centauri VI is even more pleasant. It's a treasure world, with abundant precious metals and, somewhat unusually, low temperatures. A lot of times you find treasure worlds orbiting really hot stars, making them valuable but hostile.



On the way to Delta Centauri VII I encounter an unidentified starship. I wonder if it'll be friends with me?



I feel as though Encounter at Delta Centauri VII should be the name of a book by Poul Anderson, or maybe a Star Trek episode.



Oh, excellent! For a second I was worried this might turn unpleasant. That is to say, I was worried it might get even more aggressively unpleasant than your theme music







Jigga-wha? This is how every encounter with these probes winds up, at least for the time being.

I send Fwiffo into battle against 2418-B. The Spathi Eluder (nee Discriminator) is an excellent match for the Slylandro Probe. Eluders have a, frankly, crappy main gun, but pair it with an awesome secondary weapon, the Backwards Utilized Tracking Torpedo (BUTT). It's a small purple projectile that moves quickly and homes in on the enemy fairly well. The Eluder's also quite fast and maneuverable, so the dominant strategy when piloting the Spathi ship is to fly relatively close to an enemy, quickly turn around, and run away while firing BUTTs at them. This works especially well with the Slylandro Probe, which has only a short-range lighting attack and whic you can fairly easily trick into following you, allowing you to take it out pretty quickly with BUTTs.



I'm a little out of practice and wound up bumping into a planet while dodging the probe, but I still took it out fairly easily. The other nice thing about the Eluder, as compared with other fast ships, is that its large crew size gives you a nice margin of error.



Defeating enemy ships gives you a nice resource bounty. Here I lost 30-odd RU worth of crew, but gained 550 RU in scrap metal. Who says you can't place a value on human life?

Second half of this update tomorrow. Spoiler alert: I end up with more Resource Units than I know what to do with.

Actually, since I'm kind of wired right now and there isn't a super amount to say about the rest of the resource gathering trip, I may just wrap this up right now. Also, a couple more posts and the next update will be pushed onto the next page, which will somewhat assuage my bandwidth concerns.

Filler-Post side story!

What would have happened if I'd skipped the starbase entirely at the start of the game?





Once in Hyperspace, a bogie appears in short order.



Why, it's a Slylandro Probe!



. . . And after dealing with it, another one appears a day later!

To understand what's going on here, you have to understand how Star Control II does Hyperspace encounters. Basically, every day that you spend in a race's sphere of influence there's a certain percentage chance that a ship of that race will appear somewhere on you radar and start pursuing you. Encounter generation only happens at the start of a new day, and all that matters is where you're located at the start of the day. Start the day right outside Ilwrath space and nothing happens. Start it just inside Ilwrath space and you may have spiders coming after you.

Encounter probabilities stack when you're in multiple species's turf. So if, for example, the Ilwrath are attacking the Pkunk (which they are) and the two races have overlapping spheres of influence (which they do), and you are in both of said spheres, the game will make two separate rolls, one to determine if a Pkunk ship is generated, another to determine if an Ilwrath ship is generated. That's why you'll occasionally see two encounters pop up at the same time on the radar.

All of space is Slylandro territory. Under normal circumstances, at the start of the game every day there's a 2% chance a Slylandro Probe will be generated. Every half year this chance gets bumped up 2%, to a maximum of 8%.

Unless you don't go to Earth. As a subtle way to encourage players to go to the Starbase and get the game's introductory plot hooks, the game's creators futzed with the background odds. If you haven't activated the Starbase yet, each day you spend in Hyperspace there is a 100% chance a probe will be generated.

I'm a big fan of Star Control II's early game; it gives you a gentle tutorial in things like resource gathering, hostile planets, space combats, and energy scans without being too difficult or too obvious that it's guiding you through it, all while subtly dropping hints and plot hooks to explore later.

The Slylandro futzing, though, may be too clever by half. I know the first time I played the game I hadn't read the manual, wasn't sure how to control the ship, and didn't know that I wanted to go to Earth. I hit the Up button and watched as my ship slowly crawled in one end of the Solar System and out the other, only to wind up in Hyperspace and get massacred by probes. I very nearly brought the game back to the store at that point, thinking it was too weird and complicated, and didn't pick it up again until months later. I've met quite a few others who had similar experiences, though most of them never went back to the game.