The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

How fast can you win UQM?

I recently played a game I tried to win as quickly (game time) as possible. I won in six sorties from the Sol system. The remainder of this is VERY SPOILERY.



1: grab the bios at Delta Centauri, 4 pkunk ships, and the clear spindle. Mine out two of the ruby worlds at Alpha Centauri.
Errors: I ran out of fuel with my nose sticking into alpha centauri (literally. Two more pixels would have done it). Very frustrating. Waste of 4 days.

At starbase: sell 3 of the 4 pkunk, buy fuel tanks and fuel, and lots of cargo pods I would never use. Buy 3 Cruisers for the Thraddash, just in case.

2: Fly straight to Alpha Pavonis, then the nearby rainbow world, mine a little bit while waiting for the 17th. Portal to the Thraddash, send them to the Kohr-Ah, grab helix.

At Starbase: refuel, buy more fuel tanks, claim the 3 Skiffs waiting for me.

3: Portal to Beta Copernicus, grab egg case. Portal to Arilou territory to get the juice on the Deep Children (waste of time == ~ 10 days on that one). Trek over to Betelgeuse (no close portals, but I did what I could), present the case to Talana. Grab ships, return. Drop by Mycon home, grab sun device.

At Starbase: refuel, recrew, remove all cargo bays since I have around 10,000 RU I don't know what to do with (and no, I only used about half of one of those cargo bays before; I wasn't wasting time mining)

4: portal to Arcturus to get Burvix Caster, portal to Zeta Persei to sell egg case for rosy sphere, portal to Supox to get ultron, repair ultron, give to Utwig, claim bomb. Portal to middle of spathi space, go to Delta Vulpeculae to get Taalo shield, portal to Arilou space and trek to Umgah to get talking pet

At starbase: refuel, recrew

5: Portal to middle of Ilwrath space, go to homeworld, pull off ruse, portal back to middle of Ilwrath space, free chmmr

At starbase: fleet == Fwiffo, 1 Pkunk (left over), 2 Utwig, 3 Chmmr, 1 Supox, 3 Arilou, 1 Orz

6: Fwiffo takes out Quan, Waste a chmmr getting started (warped in on other side of screen), screw up with my 1 Pkunk, use Arilou to finish off the generators. use Orz marines to cancel away the fireballs. Destroy Sa-Matra.

Finish date: January 6th 2156. I know we can do better than that.

Where can we pare down time?
-- I had a decent amount of bio-credit, so we could perhaps buy the dirt on the Deep Children instead of waiting around 10 days.

-- Also, I never really needed to recrew after that first, utterly necessary sortie; I could have called Greenish by caster if I got it earlier. To save time, call Greenish while on the run when you don't NEED fuel, and only talk if he spawns in front of you. That means the only reason to return to the starbase manually is to pick up the 3 gift Arilou ships.



SO! The contest is open! Tell how you go as fast as possible, and how fast you went. Incredible claims should be backed up by screen shots if possible.

(In reference to a now-deleted post)

This is my fifth time through ever. The first time was about 9 years ago; the second was three years ago; the third about a month after I joined the forums, the fourth about two months ago, and the fifth time was for the past three days.

And if you don't like playing the game and talking on the forum, why are you here so much?

I'm too lazy to search right now, but Kohr-Ah Primat said she finished a game rather quickly once.  She mentioned the date, and its in these forums somewhere...

To shave some extra time:  
Head directly outside of the solarsystem and take two days to destroy two probes (recrew your cruiser quickly after battle).  If you lose your cruiser restart; you just lost some easy RUs.  All those RUs should help get you a few more thrusters early.  Then head directly for fwiffo, then the Starbase and sell your cruiser (fwiffo's not good against probes, but your thrusters should be high now, and probes dont have 100% spawn chance per day)...

Don't know if using the 100% chance for probe spawning is a "cheat", but it's an intended part of the game system, so I'd say abuse it.  Is 1000 RU worth 2 days of time at the start of the game?  You be the judge (it might save future travel time).

The shortest I've ever completed the game was about Jan 2157. However, I wasn't in a rush. So I made a lot of side trips to kill stuff and completed all the side quests. Perhaps I'll run through the game again to see if I can shave some off of that.

Fwiffo is great against Probes if you abuse the AI.
;) I don't think RU is all that important, actually. If you do a decent job on mining Sol, you can buy 60 fuel, full thrusters, and three cargo bays. That's enough to hit Delta Centauri, which has those one-eyed ducks that have about 15 bio each. The entire planet has like 200 bio credits == 400 fuel. That's nearly enough fuel to finish the game.
Sell the Furies to max out turning and get more fuel tanks... you're set!

Ok, I am not sure but here it goes:
I think that when you are in a system, the time "freezes". So the idea is simple: Go into the system of one of the homeworlds or your enemies, and start frying them until you have enough RU. Try Ilwrath when you have Nemesis ships, easy kills. That way you save a whole lot of time mining.
Lets see a plane that can do this quickly....
Do Sol stuff ( mining, fwiffo etc etc etc) and head to Orz to ally with them. I am not sure that you have enough fuel for this but it is ok, you can trade your thrusters for fuel. Then head back and sell Fwiffo + Earthling and head to the Ilwrath homeworld with a brand new Nemesis. Hack and slash until you have like 20000 RU ( or how much you want) and come back to sol. From there... your choice.

P.S For Fwiffo's lovers: you will be an ally with the Spathi, you could buy a new ship with diffrent captian name.

Time doesn't freeze while in system (I made that mistake once while mining a system close to the q-portal), but it does while on a planet.  The rate time passes is different between hyperspace and true-space though.

The above idea takes up a lot of time to build up RUs even if you're assuming that in-system you're frozen in time.  If you travel up to Orz-space, you should have another agenda in the area so that you can make the most out of your time spent.

I wonder which agenda it might be...

In a second run, I finished on Nov. 15th

Sortie 1 was exactly as described before. I didn't mine totally everything, and I kept all of the the Pkunk because I didn't need to sell them

Sortie 2, I went straight to alpha pavonis, then to the rainbow world, then to the portal. I waited 2 days for it to open, not bad. I returned to HyperSpace near the Burvix homeworld to pick up the caster. Then I portalled home to grab my free skiffs.

At this point I was kind of short on cash and had to sell one of the Pkunk.

Sortie 3, I went to Beta Copernicus to pickup an egg case, by way of the vux-yehat-mycon portal. I then portalled to the Thraddash, picked up the rainbow world, and hit the supergiant to buy info from Greenish. I bought enough alien races info to incriminate the Mycon (that was expensive!), then grabbed the aqua helix. I portalled to the one NE of spathi space, went to Betelgeuse, talked to Talana, portalled near the ships, flew back to Betelgeuse in hyperspace, then flew down to Delta Vulpeculae to pick up the Taalo shield (this was the closest I would come). I then took the VYM portal to Epsilon Scorpii to lure the mycon, and hopped over to Beta Brahe to grab the sun device. I then portalled to the Druuge world and swapped the egg case for the rosy sphere. Then I portalled to the Supox and grabbed the Ultron.

Here I made an error and talked to the first Utwig I found BEFORE fixing the ultron. I wasted 2 days finding the next one. I then grabbed the bomb.
I portalled to Arilou Space (due to poor timing, I couldn't catch the 500.0:500.0 portal, there's another 3-4 days). By this time I was critically low on fuel, so I casted, and caught Greenish. I didn't have enough credit to fill up the tanks, but I had plenty for what little was left to be done. This pit stop took 2 days or so. Then I flew to Beta Orionis to grab the pet. I then portalled to the middle of Ilwrath space, flew up north to do my evil god impression, portalled back down south and freed the chmmr.

Sortie 4 is the usual, portal to UQ space and attack the Sa-matra. I got unlucky with enemy ship placement and lost a day to dodging around.

Known trims using this plan: 9 days.
A better solution might be to grab the gamma scorpii egg case and talk to the mycon homeworld. This is closer to the portal and is free anyway.
Of course, bio credit wasn't a constraint, as observed.


Further-optimized plan:

Same, except: get more fuel tanks, don't bother filling them beyond 250. Instead of grabbing second rainbow world and visiting the Thraddash supergiant, get the info from the Mycon. To replenish the fuel, go to Delta Vulpeculae after the first Syreen visit; Delta is right next to Alpha, which will have Greenish. Also, all of that flight time will give the Caster a lot of time to summon a nicely-aligned Greenish.

Estimated savings: 8 days, on top of the other 9 days.
Estimated earliest this could finish: Sept 30th.

Anyone see a faster route?

Whoah, that's some funky smythe. What I've heard my bro finished SC2 back in 1992 or something, when he played it the first time ... oh and he finished it at the year 2157. That was a first time play. For a first time that's damn quick.

I think I have to wait a while after I dare to start playing again. :)

Sell the cannon on your ship at the beginning and you can get alot of thrusters to get you through hyperspace faster, sooner.

Uh, I forgot to mention that I sold my starting cruiser and ion gun for thrusters. I never went outside the system with less than full thrust.

Very interesting thing to do, in fact I'm working on my time trial game.  

For an "essentials only" game I'm finishing in early October 2155 right now in 4 sorties, and am working on cutting it down.

But a good question is what about an "all missions" game?

The first question would be what would doing all the tasks entail?  What are the non-essential tasks?

My proposal is the following (required):
1) Meet and make allies with the Spathi.
2) Meet and make allies with the Zot-Foq-Pik.
3) Meet the Slylandro and obtain the self-destruct code.
4) Get the Lyncis beast and bring it to Zex to get the Shofixti nubiles.
5) Bring the Shofixti nubiles and befriend Tanaka.
6) Build the Shofixti ship (they come back in 2 months, so that shouldn't be beyond the constraints of a "fastest time" game) and start the Yehat revolution.
7) Get the Arcturus caster (if you don't already).
8) Ally with the Syreen (meaning return the third time so you can build their ships).

Targets of Opportunity (I mention these because time constraints might make one sit around waiting for this stuff to happen when you're ready to finish out the game - but if they can happen within the constraints of time, why not go for them?):
1) Save the Zot-Foq-Pik.
2) Obtain the Spathi Caster.

So kind of the challenge now is to complete as many of the agreed upon tasks as possible...I'll post when I get the chance, but for right now I'm just thinking if we can get an agreement on what "non-essential" tasks are, then we can start with equal footing on times.

And what do you think of tasks where corners could be cut, like sending the Thraddash off as opposed to becoming their "teacher"?  Or even arriving while they're fighting the Ilwrath to get the Aqua Helix?

Would you mind recounting what order you did things in?  Was it simply my further-optimized plan, or was it different? You do seem to have saved about a month and a half, which is solid.

No, it was much different from what I see above.

OK, what I have right now:

Starting Date: February 17, 2155

After doing the ordinary base stuff...

Sortie #1:
* Mine Mercury, Io, Pluto, get Fwiffo, return to base.

Sortie #2:
* Set up full thrusters, and as many turning jets as possible - leave
systems in direction you will go, leave with 95 units fuel.
* Leave by Mar 9 for Alpha Pavonis to get warp pod,
Beta Pegasi for rainbow world, mine Beta Chandrashekar 2.  
Arilou portal, get portal.
* Portal #10, return to base.

Sortie #3:
* Leave with ??? units of fuel & capacity for 210 units fuel.
* Direct trip to get to Pkunk.  
* Portal #6 to Arcturus for caster.
* Portal #11 - do fake God impression at Alpha Tauri.
* Portal #9, visit Gamma Scorpii for egg shell & Epsilon Scorpii to
get dirt on Syra.  
* Portal #8 to Syreen to present egg case,
* visit Orz (go directly) at Gamma Vulpeculae, go to Alpha Vulpeculae
to refuel with the Melnorme and Delta Vulpeculae to get Taalo Rock.
* Portal #8 to Umgah space, get toadie.  
* Portal #1 to Druuge, sell eggshell for Rosy Sphere.
* Portal #5 to Camelopardalis to drop shuttle off.
* Portal #8 to Syreen to get Organon instructions.  
* Portal #7 to visit Thraddash (meet one first and tell them to attack
enemy if Ilwrath not there yet) to get aqua helix.
* Portal #15 to Utwig/Supox, go to Beta Librae to get Ultron, repair
Ultron, meet an Utwig in space on trip to Epsilon Hyades (use caster).
Present Ultron, get bomb at Zeta Hyades.  
* Portal #9 to Mycon, tell them about Organon, get sun device from Beta Brahe.
* Portal #11 to Procyon, get returned to base.

Sortie #4:
* Portal #16 to fight Sa-Matra.  

Finishing Date: October 06, 2155.

The line with the smiley should read:

* Leave with 140 units of fuel & capacity for 210 units fuel.

Must be too late/early for me...the numbers are off of a quasispace map I have here.

Portal #10 is the Sol portal.
Portal #6 is the Arcturus portal.  
Portal #11 is the one that puts you in the middle of Dillrat space.
Portal #9 is the one between Yehat and Mycon space.
Portal #8 is the Spathi/Zoq-Fot portal.
Portal #1 puts you in Druuge territory.
Portal #5 is the Camelopardalis portal.
Portal #7 is the Ur-Quan Monoceratosis (NW corner) portal
Portal #15 is the Supox/Utwig portal
Portal #16 is the Crateris portal.

Look for the Beamer Quasispace portal map - that's what the numbers are from.

I searched for it.  I didn't see a specific plan, but she did say she beat the game in November 2155.

I did a better job of tracking down the Thraddash, so I chopped one day off of my time (and yes I have a screen shot).  Can't think of much more to cut off of the plan I posted, so we'll go with October 05, 2155.

Any ideas on cutting this down even more?

hmmm....  Looks good to me, maybe you could mine Delta Touri while you are sending the illwrath away?

I tried that, actually.  I stopped it when I realized that I had enough resources just from mining Beta Chandrashekar 2 and saved a couple of days.  Thanks for the try, though.