Cool name
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2012
- Messages
- 2,147
Released before I was even born and designed, according to MobyGames at least, by one Joe Ybarra of Starflight fame, Alien Legacy is game that could be described as a somewhat plot centered and small scale 4X game with heavy micromanagement. It is quite similar to Millenium 2.2, Deuteros, Merit's Galactic Reunion, and 92's Maelstrom, in case these names mean anything to you.
That little excerpt from the manual pretty much sums it up. What it does not say, however, is that the game is quite hard. I have yet to win it, myself, and thus this Let's Play is half blind at the very least. I may somehow manage to win it or I may be utterly anihilated, and even in the first case what you will see is not a heavily metagamed playthrough executing an efficient and carefully planned strategy that takes into account all the plot twists and events later on. My intention mostly is to shed some light over a very unknown game and entertain you with the chronicles of my uphill battle against the inevitable. If you enjoy this one I may go on to make a Let's Play of some of the other games I mentioned up there when I get slaughtered.
Such is the way in which the plot is presented to us on the game manual. Our primary mission is thus to explore and colonize the Beta Caeli system while looking for any clue as to what happened to the UNS Tantalus and the colonies it was expected to have established on the twenty one years since its arrival, and all we have to work with is the UNS Calypso itself as well as four underarmed multipurpose ships, a small bridge crew, two thousand frozen colonists, about three hundred robots, and a small resource stockpile.
Most events are scripted to happen either on completion of a given objective or after a certain number of turns have gone by, giving us hopefully enough time to actually prepare and establish ourselves before things get ugly. Some events, like disasters, happen seemingly at random, and while we can slow the flow of time the so-called turns are constantly moving forward as long as we aren't reading our PDA or exploring a planetary sector.
To make things worse, while it is true that time does not flow while on the planetary exploration interface the time will always go forward a single turn when we leave it, yet only the number will do so: If a given research project was five turns from completion, for example, it will still be so. And if one of our ships was two turns away from reaching its destination it will still be so, however the planet will have moved forward along its orbit. While to my eyes this feature seems to be at least partially bugged the game would break badly if we could explore all of the sectors on a planet in a single turn, so I don't mind that much.
I feel that's enough of an introduction. Let's start.
I. Arrival at Beta Caeli.
This is our chief scientist. The game has a pool of two characters for each of our officers, one male and one female, from which it picks one at random when starting a new game, leaving the remaining one as second in command of that department. Given the game lore is quite chauvisnit and has all the male officers be of a higher rank than their female counterpart we can thus have a amusing things as commander being second in command to a lieutenant.
The background information of each character is only present on the manual, though, so it is not a big deal.
If we are really incompetent the science advisor and executive officer will relieve us of command by means of shooting us dead with a laser pistol and take over, so this guy's biography is quite spot on.
And this is the bridge, our main menu interface. Everything we have to do we will do by means of talking with our officers or interacting with the main screen and the console on the far right. The first thing we do here, however, is to press the "1" key. This will reduce the game speed to the minimun and let us talk with our advisors without having a couple of months pass us by. Every turn in the game amounts to half a month, since we are at it.
Then we talk to the robot to the right.
Speaking to him lets us access the options menu allowing us to save, load, quit, and manipulate the game speed. He also lets us access our PDA, in which our current objectives and the reports we have so far received are stored. Right now, however, we will ask him for advice.
I reckon they should have labeled the button as "speak" instead.
We move on to the PDA.
Our PDA is one of the few interfaces on which time does not pass. The first option, the Log, is where our currently active objectives are listed. Right now we have two of those: Sending 5 robots to the colony we start with and probing all of the planets in Beta Caelis.
The second option, Library, allows us to review all the reports we have received so far. Right now we have three of those waiting for us. We read them from top to bottom.
We just began the game and already got our command taken from us. Talk about a good start.
Someone on TV Tropes did some calculation based on the dates the CALYPSO and the TANTALUS left Earth as well as the estimated time of arrival for both ships and the difference in engine power and reached some surprising conclussions.
I hope I can also look like a twenty-something when I am ninety thousand years old.
The last two options are Stats and Damage. The former screen shows our population,discovered technologies, total number of facilities and vehicles, and both our total resource stockpiles and the balance of their growth. From the top the resources are Ore, representing all consumable building materials; Energy, representing all forms of consumable energy, Life Support, representing things like food, water, medical supplies, space suits, and oxigen; and robots. The later screen shows how many casualties we have both caused and suffered, in the later case from disasters as well as attacks.
Now we return to the bridge and talk to our science officer.
He only gives us access to the Technology interface. Before seeing it, however, we ask him for advice.
That was informative.
This is the Technology screen:
The icons below represent the scientific resources in each field, which from left to right are Astronomy, Chemistry, Electronics, Geology, Biology, Mathematics, and Physics. The number below the icons representi how many minor discoveries and advances have our scientists accomplished, which are used to pay for new technologies. The numbers above the icons is the price for the currently selected advance.
Presently we have a single project available to us and enough to pay for it, so we do so and are informed the research will take ten turns. We then proceed to speak with the Navigator.
This is our Navigator, from which we can review all of our ships and plan missions for them.
They forgot "And die horribly."
As usual we first ask for advice.
The Vehicle interface will not even let us send humans to a colony without a habitat, This is particularly bothersome as we will not be allowed to load them on a ship until after we have picked a destination with a habitat already built, which is not funny if you are like me and prefer to first load the ship and then give them the mission.
Speaking of the Vehicle interface, this is the first screen of it.
It shows all of our ships and allows us to filter them. Nothing fancy. The second screen we will see shortly.
We move to the next officer.
Our head engineer allows us to review all of our colonies and jump to any of them.
We ask for her advice.
As if I could.
This is the colony interface:
As you can see the Calypso has a colony built on it. Just as it happen on the colonies built on space stations it can't be completely self sufficient as there is nowhere from where to take ore.
There's just one more officer to introduce ourselves to.
This is the chief of our military forces.
We can do naught but to ask for his advice, and I do so.
That's one hell of a typo for someone who graduated high school early and with spectacular success, though given we have not point of reference it could as well mean by the twenty second century not introducing your pencil point first on your nose to see how far you could push it will be considered particularly bright. Seeing the current trends on the west that wouldn't be surprising.
Anyway, the unoccupied console on the far right of the bridge takes us straight to the Calypso's own colony, which begins with a habitat, a factory, an energy plant, and a lab already built. I will take this chance to introduce the colony interface to you, the one place in which we will suffer the most.
From this interface we can go directly to the second vehicle interface, the one from which we give missions to our ships. Going from here will take you directly to the first ship in the current location.
Vehicle 1 was on the Calypso and doing nothing so it was chosen for the dangerous and exciting mission of taking some cargo to our little ghost town. By left clicking on the five big icons we load cargo on the ship, and by right clicking we unload it. The numbers on the right tell us how much of each resource there is on the current location, and above those is the pilot as well as the current and total load of the ship and its fuel levels. By clicking on the pilot we can pick to have a robot, a human, or one of our four officers command it. For now we will leave the robot. The two buttons at the top allow us to pick the mission and the destination, and it will only let us pick destinations that are compatible with the chosen mission. Below the picture it will tell us how long will it take the ship to reach its current destination and how many fuel units will it consume doing so.
After sending the ship on its way I use the Colony interface to jump to New Terra and look around for a good place in which to build the habitat. After finding a spot I like I decide New Terra is not a good enough name for the one destined to be the cornerstone of our budding civilization, the first among peers, the step that's small for
After a short ceremony in which the works of one of the greatest artists in the history of mankind bless the ears of all of the Calypso's crew, awoken and frozen alike, we leave the colony interface. This takes out straight to the Mercator map of the current world, Gaea. It is a shame the game does not allow me to rename the planets, moon, and asteroids.
Gaea has much more than twelve, uhm, let us call them columns as the proper name escapes me now, but the interface is only able to show this many at a time. All of the many things that can be done from this screen are currently unavailable to us, so we do little but to wait for Vehicle 1 to arrive to Hyomin. As soon as it does a small interface appears on the upper left corner of the screen, telling me that both the Navigator and the Chief Engineer want to talk to me. By clicking on their buttons we are taken to their reports.
Something that's worth saying is that if we were to try exploring any of the planetary sectors in which something relevant to the plot waits to be discovered, like E7 in Gaea, before triggering the event that tells us to go there we will find the sector empty.
We return to Hyomin by clicking on it on Gaea's Mercator map and order the construction of a habitat on it. It is worth mentioning that the requeriments of the different buildings are not constant: Building a structure consumes a certain amount of resources as well as occupying a number of robots and humans, yet to keep it working a different amount of resources needs to be fed to it each turn and a different number of robots and humans will be kept occupied for as long as it is functioning. Upgrading a building will, again, require a different amount of both resources to be consumed and personel to be occupied for as long as the upgrading process takes, and from then on it will take an amount of both resources and personel different to the one before to keep going. Moreover, I believe, though I might be mistaken as it has been some time since I last played the game, shutting down a facility resets the production timer instead of freezing it.
Micromanaging all those changing requeriments is necessary if we want fast growing and efficiently functioning colonies, and it is hell once we have many different colonies and need to remember what were we doing on each of them and how long was it going to take. The game is not particularly generous with its feedback.
Anyway, while the habitat is being built we order a new mission to the creatively named Vehicle 1.
An exploration mission takes the chosen ship to the Mercator map, allowing it to use the instruments it has equiped to localize places of importance as well as traveling to explore planetary sectors.
Our ships currently have three options available to them: The minecart allows it to spend energy locating places on which ore deposits it can exploit on its own are to be found, and the lightning works exactly the same way but for energy deposits. The icon with the construction vehicles allows us to build a new colony on whichever sector the ship is currently in.
Right now we ignore all of those options and travel to E7. This consumes some of our fuel.
This is the exploration interface. Every "step" we take here will consume a little bit of our fuel, and the same will turning do. The four icons next to the arrows allow us, from left to right, to switch to the overhead view, which gives allows us to see all around us in exchange of distance, scan the area for points of importance, use a bomb which damages everything in an area around the ship in exchange of some energy and the destruction of all resources around us, and view the ship's inventory. Scanning works just as it works on the Mercator map, consuming more energy and scanning further away the longer we are pressing the button. The minimap shows us the entirety of the sector, with all points we have scanned marked on it.
In this sector it is pretty simple to orientate oneself so I explore it manually in order to save fuel. Before long we have found a place of mathematical importance and a blue crystal thing.
The importance eludes me, but that's +1 Mathematics for research.
The crystal is a plot item, which will later on make new research available to us.
Further ahead we find a point of Astronomical importance.
I didn't knew Copernicus was potato, but I still don't see how doing that gave us +1 Astronomy.
A bit later we come across the last two points of interest in this sector, +1 Physics and +1 Astronomy.
Okay.
I reckon Scientists are weird people.
As soon as we exit the sector we leave the Mercator map, sending the ship back to Hyomin. As soon as that's done I go and order another Gaea exploration mission for it. It takes off just as I am informed my chief scientist wants to speak with me. Or vice-versa.
Good to know.
Afterwards I tell the ship to scan for ore deposits. Keep in mind every time a ship returns to a city it consumes a little bit of energy to fill the tank, so in the next screenshot you can see how much energy scanning consumes even when covering only such a small area.
We travel to E2 and find quite a lot of ore right at the starting point.
We fill the ship with ore and return to Hyomin, adding 30 to its ore provisions.
As you can see in the next screen building of the habitat has not advanced at all. However, the game time did advance forward a single turn for every sector we explored.
Since we are at it this is the solar system interface, which we see on our way out.
It allows us to see all the local planets, move around either as a free camera or as a camera anchored on a given planet, etc. It's main use is to see how are the planets currently placed in order to pick the best moment for a ship to travel between two places, which not only saves fuel but may also make a ship be able to for a short time reach a destination that's usually outside of its range from its current location.
And that's enough of a beginning.
pretty nice lp of a cool game. Hope you get to the end.
