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

[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]

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]

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]

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.