Part 9

• INTERLUDE: A little note on the strategy aspect of this game, which we'll be seeing soon enough:

The first step is to find fortresses. You do this by setting a troop's occupation to Espionage (if the option is grayed out, that means there's no nearby fortresses to find). The troop will soon find a fortress and begin determining how many troops there are, and what kind of weapons/skill they have. If the Espionage troop is poorly trained or stays for too long, they're likely to get captured, and will be unavailable unless you successfully attack the fortress they're held.




The skill of the Harkonnens is represented in text - if they're weak (which is what we're looking for right now), the spies will say "I take it they might be dangerous". "They ARE dangerous" means they're out of our league for now. A fortress can be attacked by switching a spy's occupation to "attack" and by moving other troops to the fortress. It's generally wise to save before you attack, and to send 4-5 troops who are trained to Expert skill (by Gurney) at the same time. The attack can be given more chance of succeeding by travelling to the fortress while the battle is going on (I'll show this later). If the battle is lost while you're there, you're dead, but since losing a battle means having to train a whole new batch of military troops, I generally just load and reconsider then.