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.

Xanadu: I expect you to buy

Curbed-stomped by birds.

Xanadu isn't playing around any more and it's obvious I'm not going to survive by my current combination of stats and gear. Magic is great and all - the deluge spell kills most things, but not everything. One of the first monsters I find on level 2 is a mutant lobster person who is immune and forces me to rely on the much weaker needle spell, and occasionally I'm just going to have to fight things that spawn up close, so I'm screwed if I can't even stand toe-to-claw against a three pound corvid.

I wish I could go back to town and train more stats; I could easily afford to max out STR/DEX/AGL, but there's no way back as far as I can tell, so I'm only going to get better through leveling and buying better gear.

The weak link in my gear is definitely armor - I haven't found a single upgrade from my cloth gambeson, and I've been wary about buying any from the shops. There are so many armors to choose from, and with gold being a finite resource, I certainly don't want to waste money on the leather armor only to find out that by the time I needed it, I could have afforded the studded leather. But I need something better now.

I return to the shopping mall on level 1 and buy the best armor I can afford - ring mail for $3600. Armor also has skill points which are tracked individually and go up as you take damage - another good reason not to upgrade your armor too frequently - so I pick fights with the few remaining denizens of this level and allow them to hit me repeatedly for minuscule damage.

It's not long before they stop doing damage altogether, so I continue the pain training on the weakest monsters of level 2, who do a number on my health but also raise my ring-armor skill considerably - at least until it reaches 100 points. Then, the level's enemies are sharply divided into "enemies that can't hurt me at all" and "enemies that will do thousands of cumulative HP damage before the armor skill goes up by even a single point."

But by this point, I'm immune to all enemies except the krakens and  ravens when attacking them head-on. And after a few more armor points gained, I'm immune to the krakens too. Ravens, with a weirdly high strength rating of 2000, remain suicidal to engage in melee. This doesn't mean I can be careless fighting anything else, mind you - most enemies can still inflict grievous injuries if they hit me from the sides or behind.

Red spots = Invisible, silent teleporters, which can be confusing until you realize they exist.

 

I'm able to clear out the map, purchase roughly 20 keys, and level up considerably (which then jacks up the key price to $720/per) before storming the towers, one of which must be entered by digging through a blocking wall with a mattock, and another, the boss tower, by backtracking to level 1 and re-entering level 2 by way of a different, less easily-accessible door.

Getting there takes some cursed jumping techniques.

 

The towers don't reveal anything except several treasures, so I move on to level 3. 

The self-contained region dominating the left column has to be reached by way of an alternate level 1 exit.

 

Monsters in level 3 aren't too bad at first, with one exception - Beholders teleport and pelt you with rapid-fire Mittar spells, and Xanadu's clumsy controls don't make it easy to close in and hit them without having massive amounts of HP whittled away first. I use up a Demons Ring to clear a pocket of them. Lizard Men are also hard-hitters and more advanced varieties of them cast magic, but Deluge makes short work of them.

There's also a ghostly enemy "Uinal" who teleports around and spams needle spells, but they don't do any damage to me at all. And they drop more Demons Rings, which is great, except killing them also brings you bad karma. Lots of bad karma.

 

Walking around them is really annoying and it's real tempting to just smash them.

When the time comes to take on the towers, I come to realize something about how they're laid out. All of the towers in any given level occupy the same space; a grid of 64 rooms, laid out in a 4x16 pattern:

0	1	2	3
4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31
32	33	34	35
36	37	38	39
40	41	42	43
44	45	46	47
48	49	50	51
52	53	54	55
56	57	58	59
60	61	62	63

Going east from any room increments by 1, going west decrements by 1, going down increments by 4, and up decrements by 4, and if the end result falls outside the 0-63 range, add (or subtract) 64 to find out where you wind up. Not all of the rooms are meant to be accessible, and not all of them contain anything interesting, but they're all there, and they all obey the same wrap-around rules except for a select few containing the tower exits.

Ultimately, I have a plan to deal with everything I meet in the towers. My short sword, ring mail, and small shield (soon replaced with a small shield+1) are enough to take on most foes with acceptable damage, though the stronger varieties can withstand numerous hits before they go. For the Lizard Men, I use magic. When I encounter Uinals, I walk around them. The few Beholders can be destroyed with a Demon's Ring, though I do worry about running out.

Well, almost everything. There is a boss kraken here, and I can't inflict a single point of damage on him, but he can one-shot me.

Guess I'll come back later?