Xanadu: Pick poor Robin clean

Another Ultima trace job.

 

One of Xanadu's most agonizing decisions is figuring what to spend your money on and when.

In most RPG-adjacent games this isn't that much of a dilemma. You have spare cash, you can afford something that will make your party incrementally better, whether it be a superior sword, a new suit of armor, a new spell, some training fees, or whatever. The investment makes you stronger and able to take on harder, better paying challenges, and the cycle repeats until you've bought best-in-class gear for your entire party and money becomes useless, unless the game has a bottomless money sink that you turn to for infinite upgrade potential.

Not so here. Money is a limited resource, and if you've farmed all the enemies you can currently handle, you'd better hope your next upgrade is enough to take on the next level. In Wizardry, you might spend your last piece of gold on suit of plate armor, but if you do that in Xanadu, then you might have doomed yourself to a walking dead scenario where you can't harm anything on the next level, all so that they do slightly less damage to you. Or maybe you buy a new spell and find out it's borderline useless. Or maybe you upgrade to a longsword, large shield, and banded mail, and then find out that you needed the plate armor after all because with anything weaker you get stunlocked. Or maybe what you really needed was keys, since you can't open doors with a sword upgrade. Damn keys - never seem to have enough of them!

Compounding the dilemma here is the fact that every time you level up, keys get more expensive, and therefore you buy fewer of them with the money you do have.

To an extent, it makes sense to prioritize buying keys before leveling up, but without knowledge of what awaits you, this is risky. Will I face more locked doors than I have spare keys? Almost certainly - so better to buy as many keys as possible before the price goes up, right? An expendable "bottle" item also temporarily raises my charisma which lowers the prices on keys and gear, allowing me to buy more of them (or afford a better upgrade). But what if the next level introduces something too nasty for my current setup and I regret not having a bigger sword?

A quick visit into level 4 shows that this is, in fact, not the correct decision, as a number of very scary monsters do await there. In particular, there are Liliths, teleporting ghosts who are immune to my physical attacks and shoot lighting bolts for 1000+ damage a piece, and "Ustilagors" who appear in groups of 9, spam the hell out of unavoidable deg-needle spells, and hit for 2000-3000 points of damage up close.

I'll need some group-targeting magic, and the best I can do is "deg-fire" which requires a bottle item and still uses up most of my cash. It's significantly weaker than the deluge spell, but it hits everything on screen instantly and is spammable.

It's boring, but do you have any better ideas?

Level 4 is very twisty and annoying to map out, but the enemies for the most part pose very little threat as long as I keep out of their line-of-sight when spamming deg-fire. Probably the most threatening enemies are an octopus monster whose magic resistances vary depending on the respawn count; when they have fire resistance I must engage with deluge and risk eating return fire; and "Shriekers" who to be fair only do any damage to me because they are among the few enemies weak enough to fight with a sword and shield.

 

The towers are, overall, somewhat easier to manage, as the monsters don't respawn with greater strength.

But sometimes damage is completely unavoidable.

Alas, I run out of keys exploring the larger of the towers. And while I could go back to the thieves' guild and buy more at $1200/per ($850/per with a magic bottle), I can't help but feel I might be able to do better and have a less frustrating experience in the long run with a different build strategy.