Cool name
Arcane
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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.
"Officer on Deck!"
The crew snaps to attention.
"Welcome to the Bridge, Captain," says your Science Officer.
"As you were," you say as you return the salutes of your Bridge officers and turn to view the Space Map. The star centered in the display is larger than Sol, and its harsh bluewhite glare makes you squint despite the Space Map's heavy liters. This is Beta Caeli, over 55 light-years from Earth. It is to be your new sun.
You're freshly awakened from many years of cryogenic sleep. As the rejuvenating vitamin injection returns your body to real-time, you realize you can spare only a few moments to enjoy the view. You must start making vital decisions here, and quickly. You have just resumed command of the United Nations Ship Calypso. Your bridge crew awaits your orders. And as you are soon to find out, far more than your career is now at stake.
Welcome to Alien Legacy. The seedship UNS Calypso is an ark packed with the human refugees of a horrendous interstellar war. Your mission here, in this unknown quadrant of the galaxy, is to continue the human race. The challenges facing you are truly awesome, as are the odds.
You must explore planets and moons to discover viable colony sites in potentially hostile environments. To ensure the survival of the colonies, you must locate critical resources such as ore and energy, and establish reliable supply lines. You must direct the growth of your colony sites, balancing population growth against production capacity and resource consumption. You'll have to make hard choices between essential priorities: building habitats for life support, power plants for energy, factories for robots and vehicles, or esearch labs for the advanced technologies and knowledge that will be your ultimate salvation.
And those are the least of your challenges. Beta Caeli is lethal to the unwary, and a harsh teacher to the unwise. You may be facing cataclysmic natural disasters, hostile life forms, and even colonial rebellions if you start losing control. What's more, the blackness around you teems with ancient, sleeping mysteries: some that can save your fledgling civilization, and others that can totally annihilate it. You are racing the clock to find out about them before they find out about you.
From the bridge of the Calypso, you will control, guide, and pnspire the activities of thousands of people. But with this power comes grave responsibility. These people may represent the last tiny remnant of humanity. You must lead wisely to maintain their confidence and assure the success of the colonies. While you may be able to delegate some tasks to your expert Advisors or trusted Planetary Governors, you bear ultimate responsibility for the mission at all levels. The clock is ticking. There is no alternative. And there is no going back.
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.
Historical Briefing.
This section quickly recaps the origin and intent of the Calypso's mission and your directives.
Human history in the first half of the 21 st century differed little from the centuries before it: always more people competing for always fewer resources, with technology playing an ever greater role in the pace and magnitude of events. Most developed countries launched exploration and colonization missions into near space in the perpetual search for new resources and living space for their swelling populations. Even in the asteroid belt, however, national rivalries and territorial conflicts kept humans spending much of their energy battling each other rather than the harsh realities of this ultimate frontier.
But then, in 2043, everything changed forever. What first was thought to be a previously unknown comet was suddenly discovered to be the vast "light-sail" of an alien probe apparently originating from Alpha Centauri. The U.S. scout ship Friendship was diverted from a mining survey of the Neptunian moon Titan to intercept. The first Friday in October, 2043, after days of repeated attempts to contact the visitor, the Friendship closed to within 200 miles of the alien probe. Suddenly, without any sign of acknowledgment, the alien ship locked on to the unarmed U.S. ship and opened fire with powerful energy-beam weapons, destroying the Friendship within seconds.
Despite subsequent counter-attacks by other vessels in the following weeks, the probe drove on relentlessly toward Earth. The probe survived several missile barrages and finally fired missiles of its own. Most of these missiles were successfully intercepted by Earth-based ABM systems, but one struck on the reclaimed croplands of the Sudan, killing millions with a murderous viral weapon. At heavy cost to all of Earth's governments, the probe was finally destroyed. Thus began the Human-Centaurian War.
This first violent contact was the catalyst that finally joined the great governments of the Earth under the leadership of the United Nations. They realized that only by combining their strenght would they be able to mount an effective defense against this obviously advanced and ruthless alien menace.
The attack also ignited a furious technological revolution, causing explosive growth in human technology. Transcendent breakthroughs came quickly in the fields of electronics, super-construction, and propulsion, including the first working Bussard ramjet. This innovation used a gigantic scoop to capture and store the trace hydrogen in the interstellar medium as fuel for fusion engines. This meant an almost endless fuel source for long voyages, and allowed the design of huge new ships with few limits on size or mass. Previous space classes that had to carry all of their fuel could never accelerate for long, while ramjet-equipped starships could accelerate halfway to their destination before having to turn and decelerate.
Within just a few short years, the United Nations was ouilding the first interstellar battle cruisers, intended to take fight to the Centaurians and destroy them before they could destroy Earth. In tandem with this great war errort was the attempt by mankind to persevere in the face of potential extinction. The great Odessa-class seedships were designed as gigantic arks to carry mankind from the cradle of Earth to systems known to contain M-class (Earth-like) worlds.
In 2119, the Odessa Class 3-B seedship UNS Calypso was launched towards the Beta Caeli star system. At over 17 Darsecs from Earth, Beta Caeli was the farthest colony yet attempted. For that reason, it was considered to be the colony with the best ultimate chance of success at evading the Centaurian's genocidal wrath. The UNS Tantalus was launched in 2135, also to Beta Caeli. Thanks to its new Ramikin fusion engine, the Odessa Class 4-C Tantalus was expected to arrive at the Beta Caeli system some 21 years ahead of its older sister ship.
Preliminary scanner reports from Navigation reveal no evidence of the Tantalus or any of the colony sites it is presumed to have founded. Further reports will be forthcoming from your Advisors as soon as possible. Despite this troubling news, you must proceed with the mission with all possible dispatch. Time is of the essence.
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.
Earth-like world on which one of our probes impacted. The probe's telemetry indicates the current location is an excellent place to start our first colony.
The probe has already initiated the colony at grid coordinates D-2 on the Mercator map. We should send the resources Engineer Antonelli requests to that colony as quickly as possible.
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.
Name: Hausmann, Otto
Rank: Commander, Science Staff
Date of Birth: 2090 (Biological age: 28}
Education: University of Munich
Previous Positions: Lead Science Advisor for UNS Prague, Asst. Department Head at U.N. Medical Research Facility II49
Personality Profile: Otto has a checkered service record, reflecting both his excellent command decisions and contributions to the U.N. Science Program, and his unfortunate difficulties dealing with authority figures. Otto was transferred off of the UNS Prague after he almost assaulted its Captain. When asked why the near-attack took place, Otto broke into a rage, screaming the word "Incompetent!" and then would speak no more of it. After a sterling record of service os Assistant Department Head at U.N.Medical Research Facility 1149, Otto has returned to service in space, his past difficulties behind him.
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.
While en route to Beta Caeli, we flew through a magnetic storm. I am in the process of rebuilding our main memory core. I will alert you as each section is brought back on-line.
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.
she deems fit.
Your new orders are to rendezvous with Captain Johannson of the U.N.S. TANTALUS. Captain Johannson is your superior, so you will relinquish command of the CALYPSO to her when you reach New Terra headquarters.
We thank you for your excellent service to this point. We trust that Captain Johannson will be able to fully utilize your proven capabilities.
Signed by Nguyen Kahn. Secretary General, U.N.
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.
According to this troper's calculation, the Calypso travelled for more than 90000 years to reach Beta Caeli. Sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that the Tantalus took about 37 years less while only being 0.04% faster.
I hope I can also look like a twenty-something when I am ninety thousand years old.
life is present on the planet.
Distance from Star: 2.54.06x10(8) kilometers.
Period of revolution (Terran): 793.98 days.
Period of rotation (Terran): 22.32 hours.
Equatorial diameter: 12,224 kilometers.
Mass (Terra=1): 0.97.
Density (water=1): 5.4.
Atmosphere: Nitrogen, Oxygen.
Mean temperature: Visible surface; Celsius): 20 equator/-2 polar.
Surface gravity (Terra=1): 0.96.
Inclination of axis: 27.24 degrees.
Inclination of orbit to ecliptic: 0.0
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.
Engineer Antonelli will know what resources we will need for your first habitat. You may want to confer with her.
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.
Name: Wu, Mai-lin
Rank: Lieutenant, Navigation Staff
Date of Birth: 2080 {Biological age: 38)
Education: U.N. Astrophysics Academy at Singapore
Previous Positions: Assistant to the Head Astronomer, Mt. Lick Observatory
Personality Profile: Mai-lin has always felt a deep attraction to space, and spent the years of her youth watching the sky and identifying constellations with her homemade telescope. It was natural for her to pursue a career in astronomy, and her interest wos strong enough to attract the attention of her teochers, who recommended her for a scholarship to the Astrophysics Academy. She graduated with honors. After completing an internship at the Mt. Lick Observatory, she rose on her merit to become Assistant to the Head Astronomer. Moi-lin applied for a space assignment with the hope of getting closer to the stars that she loves.
They forgot "And die horribly."
As usual we first ask for advice.
One ship has enough room to transport the robots we need to construct our first habitat on Gaea. We should not send any humans to a new colony until there is a habitat there to house them.
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.
Name: Antonelli, Gianna
Rank: Lieutenant, Engineering Staff
Date of Birth: 2104 (Biological age: 22)
Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Previous Positions: None
Personality Profile: Gianna has always had a happy, positive outlook on life and a desire to help others. At the age of 18, Gianna decided to become an engineer and try to improve the world and the lives of its people through the use of technology. She was an apt pupil and graduated near the top of her class. Fresh out of college, Gionna is eager to provide a home for the future generations that the Calypso has brought to space.
We ask for her advice.
Our pre-seeded colony on Gaea seems to have all of the necessary materials except robots. At least 5 robots should be sent to the Gaea colony to begin constructing a habitat. We should not send any personnel until we have provided shelter for them.
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.
Name: Romanov, Dimitri
Rank: Colonel, Military Staff
Date of Birth: 2115 (Biological age: 31)
Education: West Point Military Academy; Sun Tzu Academy of War; U.N. Strategy and Tactics School
Previous Positions: Commanding Officer, Zweibrucken Air Base; Commander, 5lti U.N. Armored Attack Group; Commander, U.N. European Defense Command
Personality Profile: Dimitri has been considered very intense since early childhood, and both teachers and his parents have always found him to be somewhat aloof. Graduating from high school early with spectacular success, Dimitri was nominated and admitted to the West Point Military Academy. His exceptional performance there earned him a recommendation and finally an invitation to attend the prestigious Sun Tzu Academy. After completing his schooling, he joined the U.N. Military Forces ond rose rapidly through the ranks. He was assigned to the UNS Calypso with the task of assuring the survival of the colonies which could well be humanity's last bastion of civilization.
We can do naught but to ask for his advice, and I do so.
When we get the chance, sir, I suggest we attempt a few recon missions on Gaea. I hope we can discern something of the TANTALUS'S fate -- assuming it arrived here.
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.
We should investigate any possible signs of the TANTALUS or its colonies. I'm concerned that there has been no contact with anyone, and that there is no visible trace of them ever being here, sir.
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.
Mathematics Find: A meteor streaks across the sky, creating a straight line of fire as it burns up while entering the atmosphere.
The importance eludes me, but that's +1 Mathematics for research.
You have located an obscure rock formation radiating high magnetic pulses. This may help our scientist to understand Gaea's surface, and allow us to find optimal areas for colonization.
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.
Astronomy Find: You name this area Copernicus, in honor of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
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.
Physics Find: A mineral outcropping contains radioactive elements.
Okay.
Astronomy Find: You find a semi-circle of rocks which form an accidental solar calendar.
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.