Interplays StarTrek games: does mission evaluation impact space fight difficulty?

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a.borque
Posts: 44
Joined: Thu Jun 19, 2008 10:00 pm

Interplays StarTrek games: does mission evaluation impact space fight difficulty?

Post by a.borque »

Hi everyone.
I recently listened to a podcast about retro games hosted by two well-known games journalists.
In one episode they are talking about Interplay's StarTrek 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites.

At one point, they say that the original manual states that Starfleet's "adventure mission" ratings (the message and percentage you get after each mission) affect the difficulty of the game's space battles. Better ratings lead to better crew performance (repairs, reloading weapons, ...).

Both authors say they never noticed this, and I agree with them. Since the Interplay engine has been reverse-engineered here, is there any indication in the code that this information from the old manual is true?

Thanks
A.Borque
digitall
ScummVM Developer
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Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2012 1:40 pm

Re: Interplays StarTrek games: does mission evaluation impact space fight difficulty?

Post by digitall »

The Startrek engine is still incomplete, but there is no code as far as I can see which uses the missionPoints to adjust difficulty in the code state. See:
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/blob ... e.cpp#L863
invwar
Posts: 70
Joined: Mon Jul 28, 2008 11:35 am

Re: Interplays StarTrek games: does mission evaluation impact space fight difficulty?

Post by invwar »

Mhhh, interesting, to be honest I never noticed. But in Judgement Rites fights become anyway trivial, while challenging in 25th Anniversary. But as they definitely have all ratings saved, its quite possible they can do that. This might also explain why my first playthrough the battles were quite hard, as I never had a really good rating. The next time i was for 100% and the battles felt easier, but I was also more used to them. It is likely quite subtile, but wouldn't be too hard to program to have a multiplier tied to it.
hpp134
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Dec 17, 2023 1:03 pm

Re: Interplays StarTrek games: does mission evaluation impact space fight difficulty?

Post by hpp134 »

Caught that podcast too, and it got me digging into the game code. Surprisingly, no smoking gun on the manual's crew performance theory. Maybe it's one of those gaming myths or a subtle nuance we missed back in the day.
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