[thanks to Adrian Hurt for info on Novagen and Mercenary III]
DAMOCLES was written by Paul Woakes and a bunch of other people too.
(C) 1990 Novagen Software and all that.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Introduction: A Guide to the Guide
II. First Things First: The Five Ways to Win
III. A Mercenary's Guide to the Gamma System: An Exhaustive Almanac
IV. Getting In to Where You Shouldn't Be: Keys and Locked Doors Located
V. Getting Around in the Gamma System 1: Vehicles
VI. Getting Around in the Gamma System 2: Hantzen Teleport Cubes
VII. Rules Were Made to be Broken: For Your Amusement
VIII. Build Your Own Virtual Reality: How It Was Done
IX. As If One Solar System Wasn't Enough: Mission Disks and MIII
I. INTRODUCTION
Basically, this file tells you everything I've found out about Damocles
in nearly a year of exhaustive playing: coordinates of every interesting
building, how to solve all the puzzles, where to find the keys -- everything.
So, tread lightly if you don't want to be massively spoiled. And with that,
we begin with the biggest spoiler of all...
II. THE FIVE WAYS TO WIN
1. Find all eight explosives and the timed detonator. Go to Damocles. Drop seven explosives and set the eighth to detonate. Depart posthaste and collect reward: $10,000,000. Note that you can bargain the State President
up to $25,000,000 by turning down her first offers.
2. Ditto, but blow up Icarus instead before Damocles passes it. Without Icarus's gravitational pull, Damocles's course is altered so it misses Eris by a good margin. Collect $10,000,000 from the State President and $25,000,000 from Lloyds' for solving the problem without destroying Damocles.
3. Using the Nova Bomb instead of explosives, repeat #1 or #2 above.
4. Use the Magic Wishing Crystal on Midas and wish that Eris (or both
Eris and Damocles) would be saved. (the "Wishes Solution")
5. Using the Author's Computer, blow up Damocles (planet #29.)
III. A MERCENARY'S GUIDE TO THE GAMMA SYSTEM
ICARUS (first planet)
~152/417 = MINING COMPLEX
02/01 = HQ: Red Herring (worth nothing special)
ACHERON (moon of Midas)
~836/324 = ACHERON RETREAT
One of the four "hidden" pyramids contains a communications console.
* The key to the Acheron/Midas puzzle is in either sphynx. Go in the
hidden side door at the sphynx's knee. On the front wall is a pyramid
number, but you can only read it if you're carrying the reading glasses
from Lucan. Translate it into planetary coordinates:
1. Divide by 4096 and drop the fraction. Call this PX.
2. Get the remainder from step 1. Call this PY.
The pyramids are arranged in a large square, 4096 pyramids on a side.
PX and PY locate the pyramid in this grid.
3. Divide PX by 4.096 and drop the fraction to get the planetary X coord.
4. Divide PY by 4.096, drop the fraction and add 250. This is the
planetary Y coordinate. Now go to Midas.
MIDAS (second planet): THE MIDAS PROJECT (16 million identical pyramids)
* Pyramid 68-09-20-33 located at 577,341 contains the Magic Wishing
Crystal. You can wish for anything in the Wishful Thinking of a Mercenary
book: while holding the crystal, show the wish in the little message
window, then hit * and it shall be granted. Note that a lot of stuff in
here you can also do for free by fiddling with the Author's Computer.
DION (third planet)
~793/574 = BIRMINGHAM ISLAND
03/14 = Dion Verdant Party HQ. Parked outside: Targ Tourer (car)
1: Teleport Cube 2
9: Door Key "E"
00/07 = Lawson-8 Bank
02/12 = GUM Department Store. 1: Rug
01/11 = Bank of Gaea branch
00/10 = Office Building. G: Bed, Table, Notepad (stating that Prof. Hantzen's new address is Ur City 07/01)
02/11 = Novagen Offices (requires Door Key "D" for entry)
G: Rubbish Bin (filled with Damocles release dates)
1: Novagen Files (with random remarks), Table, Ansafone (noting
that everyone's on holiday, and you can buy a Blue Beacon
Detector at 02/01 Mentor), Novagen Safe (blast open with explosive set to 0, and then read various clues)
2: 1, Dion Verdant Party HQ, 03/14 Birmingham Island, Dion
4: B, Government Hall, 04/06 Vesta
5: B, 11/08 Capital City, Eris
6: 4, 04/02 Logos
?: Offices 08/08 Chaldea Metropolis, Dion
8: Outside 02/08 Bacchus
9: Outside 09/07 Mentor
?: 9, 00/06 Metis
VI. FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT
- Once you've figured out how to destroy a planet, try the technique on
various planets. Especially Gaea, Dion, and Eris.
- Blast the lock off the door of the Author's House and steal his computer
and his chair. They both have actual uses, and do quite interesting
things.
- Blow up the Author's Computer with an explosive. Then get well clear...
that is, well clear of EVERYTHING.
- Each planet and/or moon has some information and history associated with
it. Benson (your computer) doesn't always present it upon your visit to
said world. Keep trying until you do get it.
- Try to land on the sun (Dialis).
- Crash your spaceship in the ocean.
- Land on the roof of a building, get out, then stroll over the edge...
- Get yourself locked into the jail on Metis.
- There are lots of nice vantage points to watch Eris's destruction from.
Vesta is quite decent. The best place, of course, is on Eris itself. If
you're on the right part of the planet, you'll get to see the comet
plunging through the atmosphere directly towards you.
- Watch the control towers at spaceports; they change color to warn you
when your ship gets near.
- Lots of the stuff in Damocles is quite closely related to British politics,
although the passage of time since its release has obsoleted some of the
jokes. For example, the Lawson Banks are named after Nigel Lawson, the
chancellor of the Exchequer at the time Damocles was being written (although by the time it actually came out, he wasn't any more...) You can
find the Prime Minister's proposal for the poll tax in the basement of the
Hall of Government on Vesta; she predicts it will be well-received...
- The Novagen offices are full of inside jokes and hints on the game. You
will find the keys in a pub on Dion East.
- Noticed the road signs near the Novagen building on Dion? Novagen's
real offices are on Alcester Road, Birmingham, England, and the one in
the game bears an intentional physical resemblance to the real one.
The same goes for the Author's House.
VIII. HOW WAS IT DONE?
This bit is basically my guesses on the broad outlines of Damocles's
programming. It doesn't contain any spoilers, but read it if you think you
might find it amusing (or you know better and want to chuckle at how far off
I am...)
The really clever thing about Damocles is the way it does more with less. The
basic idea is to keep as much stuff off-stage as possible, so that only the
smallest amount of actual 3-d drawing is done -- but, on the other hand,
through clever tricks the player is convinced that exactly the opposite is
true. For example, you get the impression of large, crowded metropolises and
populated suburbs, but in fact, the cities are carefully designed so that you
never see more than one building or house at once! Of course, you can see the
entire street grid from high altitude, but lines are cheap to draw, and this
gives the impression of a large city for very little expense. Between
buildings in the cities, the roads are lined with easy-to-draw streetlights,
trees, and road signs to make them look less sparse.
As well, the area of land in Damocles that is populated, or even detailed, is
extremely small compared to the empty areas, but you are carefully led from
one city to the next to belie this impression. Other goodies such as the tiny
islands and huge oceans on major worlds and the descriptions of settlements
as "small bases" on the moons help "misdirect" the player as well. And, of
course, once you've actually landed in a settlement, the scale turns out to
be quite big -- try walking from one building to its neighbor to see what I
mean -- and the settlements "feel" satisfactorily large.
Once a way of keeping time-consuming drawing to a minimum is found, the rest
of the game is (relatively) easy to work out: settlements are located on a
world's major (1000x1000) grid, and one building and/or road tile is tied to
each minor grid point in each settlement. Thus, large maps can be stored with
relatively little expense, especially if object definitions of buildings are
re-used as extensively as they are.
The hidden-surface routine I am almost certain was used is the (in)famous Painter's Algorithm. This relies on the fact that when you draw a filled polygon (or an entire object), it covers up whatever was behind. Thus, all
you have to do is order the polygons or objects to be drawn according to how
far they are from the observer, and then put them on the screen in that
order. Glitches are possible with the Painter's Algorithm (try parking a
spaceship between the wings of an L-shaped building, then seeing it "through"
the building) but on the whole this is a speedy and generally accurate
algorithm.
IX. THE MISSION DISKS, AND A LOOK FORWARD AT MERCENARY III
Two "Mission Disks" for Damocles have apparently been released, each
with five "missions" (saved games set up such that you have an additional
task to perform as well as stopping the comet.) Disk 2 includes, as one
of its saves, a guide to executing the "wishes solution," and also a series
of "silly saves" which the producers found amusing.
And, despite the sincere lack of optimism about Mercenary III that abounded
all through Damocles, MIII is in fact in the final stages of production. It
is a straight sequel, still set in the Gamma System, called _Mercenary III:
The Dion Crisis_.
The major difference: you are no longer alone -- there are
other people in the game! They "talk" to you using the one-line display
previously used only by Benson. The control panel and general graphic style
seem no different, but rumor has it that the A-to-Z Computer might be
permanently installed in it. (yay!) The plot concerns the tranquil planet of
Dion in the Gamma system, formerly a verdant green paradise, now being
destroyed by polluting heavy industries. Presumably you have to do something
