Part 5: Theory to Practice

Part 5: Theory to Practice

We have now completely mapped half the game. The first eight quadrants are all connected to each other and the only way to leave them is by flying east from Purple Quadrant into Cobalt.

The fastest route I can build from what we've seen, then, is this:

• West from Home to Red, fighting the Kogalon Star Pirates that guard the exit.
• North from Red to Lime, fighting through blockaders. It's probably less dangerous and higher-scoring to blast through the Attack Group and the Corridor and go south.
• West from Lime to Brown. If we took the fast route through Red, we'll need to fight a Cobra Fleet; otherwise if we've been fast and lucky it might just be Star Pirates.
• Fight the Blockaders in Brown, evade the Wormhole (waiting it out if necessary), then conquer the Corridor so we may fly North to Purple.
• Blitz the Corridor in Purple, or fight two fleets if I'm not feeling lucky, then raid the Zylon planet that blocks the path to the Corridor. Clearing that raid dumps us into Lime Quadrant.
• As long as we're in Lime sector, we might as well take down that Zylon Planet too to top up on lives. Once we do that, we can zip back to Purple by going East.
• Hit the wormhole, taking us to the northeastern part of the map, behind the Kogalon Star Pirates. Defeating them dumps us in Grey Quadrant South.
• Crush the Zylon world in Grey South, then go South back to Purple.
• Defeat the Attack Group and the Blockaders, and head east into Cobalt and the second half of the game.

We have a plan. But we've been missing out on something lately: the part where I suffer for your amusement. Let's fix that!

Videos

Here's the first half of our "real" Solaris run. It's almost 20 minutes on its own, and the total capture time was nearly twice that thanks to needing to reset a ton.

The main highlights on that are in Lime quadrant, where I take out the Cobra Fleet, figure I don't need to save before taking on the Flagship fleet next to it, die, restore, and spend four minutes unable to repeat my initial trivial blast-through.

The most interesting cut content—probably more interesting than the "successful" run, really—is my attempt to get to the Cobalt Quadrant Federation planet to refuel and repair. Cobalt Quadrant introduces an absolutely massive difficulty spike. There's quite a bit of time where the game seems to have noticed that I haven't died in a while and is just in maximum mode.