Hints for playing MegaTraveller II
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You may not want to read this if you are a purist and enjoy this
game a whole bunch, but I imagine most of you who have this game
have it sitting on a shelf yet to be completed.
These hints are not going to ruin the game for you, they will just
make it easier. They are not things like "to win the game, go to
Aramis".
Possible Spoilers ahead.
When you first create a character, make sure you get a starship.
Classes that give starships as a bonus are:
For Humans,
Aristocrats, Belters, Hunters, Nobles, Pirates, Scientists, Scouts.
For Vargr,
Aristocrats, Belters, Corsairs, Explorers, Hunters, Leaders,
Loners, Merchants, Rogues.
Get some characters with money as well, or get more than one
character with a starship and sell the other one. Classes with
money are fairly easy to recognize, ie Doctors, Aristocrats, Navy,
etc.
Make sure you have a Human Navy and Human Scout character. Vargr
won't cut it. You need these two to get onto some planets without
hassle.
Train all of your characters in energy weapons, and train one of
them with a high stealth so that he can smuggle all of your weapons
onto the planet. Or edit your characters to give all of them a
good stealth so you don't have to give one guy all of your weapons
each time you land on a planet, then distribute the weapons out
again. . . I don't think this is cheating, just avoiding tedium.
The key skills in this game from what I can tell are Stealth, to
smuggle in guns, Interrogation, to interrogate bad guys
(necessary), ATV and Grav Vehicle, for planetary navigation in a
reasonable amount of time, Energy weapon, to fire FGMP's and
PGMP's, and Bribery. The others, even Piloting, Turret weapons,
and Medical did not get much use. Trust me on this one, I know it
sounds arbitrary in a space game.
You may want to use Norton Utilities or some other hex editor and
give your characters like a 4 in every skill in the game. This may
seem like cheating, but it's not, because you are going to come
across parts of the game that require you to have a certain obscure
skill, and if you don't have it you are screwed. This isn't hard
to do. Look at your numbers for your characters, write them down,
go into Norton, convert these numbers to hex, and search for their
hex equivalents in the save game file. Then change that hex number
to the hex number for 4 or 100 or whatever you want your skill level
to be. Norton comes with a hex to dec converter so this is no
problem. (You can change a whole lot like this btw, so always always
keep backups of your saved games when you do this.) Write me if you
need help with this.
There is a Jump 4 ship that doesn't have to be refueled orbiting
the gas giant in the Ylaven system. It's quite good in combat too
apparently. It is a little tricky to get to. You need fuel cores
from the Ancient Site on Patinir to pilot it.
Unless you are pressed for cash, don't go running back to Rhylanor
each time you find an Ancient artifact. The artifact won't affect
the slime (unless it is *the* artifact, and you'll know when you
have it) and you may not have enough time to complete the game.
There is nothing to the 'joining the other side' part of the game.
Basically you just do some assasinations and get paid for them.
Not a whole involved plot or anything.
Well, that's as far as I'm going to go with hints in this file, so if
you want more explicit ones, write me and I'll give em to you.
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INTERNET: [email removed] (John Driver)
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