An incredibly long writeup, I admit. Damn it, I didn't think it'd be this huge! My apologies.
This is the story of a twenty-year-old computer game to which, over the past few days, a number of consenting adults, having all missed it the first time it came around, have still become addicted.
M.U.L.E. was created for the Atari 800 home computer, though ports were available for the Commodore 64 and Apple II. Later ports were produced for the Japanese MSX computer and even the Nintendo Entertainment System, but none of these versions were as good as the original Atari and Commodore software. Mindscape's NES version, in particular, should only be played as a last resort.
What other option could there be for playing this game in the 21st century without a great deal of eBay diving? It depends on if you have access to a Sega Dreamcast. There is an acceptably accurate, full-speed with sound homebrew Atari 8-bit emulator for the Dreamcast that can be played without any more investment, in money at least, than a blank CD-R. Plus, the Dreamcast's four controller ports, conveniently matching those on an Atari machine, make it a natural fit for M.U.L.E. It plays almost absurdly well, and you don't need the Dreamcast keyboard controller to play. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that M.U.L.E., the Atari 800 game, all by itself, is enough reason to get a Dreamcast and four standard controllers. It's not as if they're particularly expensive on eBay. Yet. (If you do attempt to play M.U.L.E. on a Dreamcast, make sure to go into the emulator settings and select to emulate an "OS/B 56k Atari." This will enable all four controller ports.)
I'm going to go into almost painful detail on how to play this game, and a fair bit of strategy too, some of it advanced. It is not my intent to scare anyone away from playing. Really, it's not as bad as my multi-page, hopelessly complete writeup may make it seem. I suggest that you give it a shot, if you have the time to put a disk together that can play it and have a Dreamcast up in in your closet gathering dust. The ownership rights to M.U.L.E. are sufficiently uncertain at the moment that it looks like emulation may be the only way to experience it for a long while.
Overview
M.U.L.E. is a four-player game of resource management and economics set on an undeveloped alien world. The game always has four players; if there are fewer human participants than this the computer will fill the remaining slots. The players are "planeteers," colonists on the planet of Irata. Over the course of six or twelve turns, the players select parcels of land, bid on land auctions, develop them using the game's namesake M.U.L.E.s, robot animals that do the actual work for you, watch them produce, then buy and sell their goods at the monthly colony auctions. After all the turns have passed, the player with the most net worth in cash-on-hand, goods and land is declared "First Founder," but only if the colony comes in at over 60,000 "dollars" in total worth. If it doesn't, the colony fails and no one wins.
It is entirely possible for the colony to fail.
So the players are pulled by conflicting goals. The colony must achieve at least a minimum level of success overall, but everyone also wants to be the winner. We observe that it is worse, in M.U.L.E. at least, for there to be no winner than for there to be a winner that isn't you. But different people will draw that line differently. An interesting thing about M.U.L.E. is that, while there is a lot you can do on your own to ensure your own success, much of your wealth will come directly at the expense of the other players, and not just from charging them high prices.
The Map
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The main view of the game is a map of the colony, which fills the screen. Basically, the colony consists of a lot of plains land, with a river running down the middle of the map, a town halfway down the river, and mountains scattered all over the place. The map is divided into plots of land, which are initially invisible, but as land is claimed and bought by the players their borders are marked on the screen as colored boxes coded to match the color of the owning player. In the Beginner-level game, there isn't enough time for all the land to be claimed. In the Standard game, the board will typically be completely owned by the final turn. In the Tournament game, which has colony-run land auctions in addition to the monthly land grants, the board is usually full with a few turns left to go.
Playing the Game
Each turn is divided into a number of phases. For most phases, all the players play together, but for the longest and most important phase, Development, the players take turns.
1. The Land Grant
At the beginning of every turn, the players are granted one free plot of land apiece. A box will start moving from left to right along each row, and from the top row down, typewriter-style. On harder difficulty levels, and as more turns pass, the box gets faster. It's also faster because it skips over all land already owned. When the box gets to a plot of land that you want, press The Button to claim it. (The Atari 800's joystick had only one button! On the Dreamcast Atari 800 emulator, The Button is the red 'A' button.) While you're trying to get that perfect plot of land that fits in with your plans, the other players are claiming their own plots.
If two players try to get the same plot, the one with the quicker trigger finger usually gets it... unless one of them is significantly behind in the game, in which case the game will decide in his favor. There's no message or other cue that this has happened, the game will just invisibly intercede on behalf of the underdog. M.U.L.E. does this a lot, and oftentimes you'll never notice that it has played favorites. However, while it must be said these elements do have an effect on play, it's very finely balanced. The benefits to being behind in the overall standings are almost never enough to purposely get yourself in a bad situation. A listing of ways the game helps the last-place player is at the end of this writeup.
When choosing land, it's often good to try to get land that's adjacent to one of your already-owned plots, so as to take advantage of the adjacent-plot production bonus, listed below under "Production."
2. The Land Auctions
In Tournament-level games only, after the grant, the Store may randomly decide to sell off additional pieces of land at auction to the players. These affairs are handled in a way similar to the goods auctions that are held at the end of each turn, and the way they are run is described in full there.
In the leaderboard tally at the end of each round and the game, a plot of land is valued at $500 plus about $100 for a MULE on it along with its outfitting cost. So if you have the cash, then a chance to buy land at less than $500 is a no-brainer. Values at over $500 are often good as well. It's difficult to gauge how much you should pay for a piece of land, as you need to take into account how many turns of production you'll get out of it, the price of a (possibly expensive) MULE and its outfitting and energy supply, and even the decrease in the production of your opponents that comes from denying them the land. In general, land is most useful, and thus valuable, at the beginning of the game, and a difference in one plot from turn one, even if it gives you financial problems at the time, can make a huge difference by the time the ship returns.
3. The Development Phase
The Development Phase is the meat of the game. In it, each player gets some time to develop land and do anything else that needs doing. The players take turns during Development, and they do not act simultaneously. A bar at the right side of the screen shows how much time the player has to do things. As it shrinks, it'll start to make little warning noises that get faster and faster as the last few seconds run out. When the bar depletes the player's turn ends, regardless of what he was doing at the time. If he was leading a MULE somewhere it'll run away and be lost.
If the player didn't have enough food to meet the food consumption requirement on the previous turn, his time bar will be shorter than usual. Note that food consumption starts at three units per month, slowly increasing to seven on month twelve. If the player had absolutely no food at the end of the last turn, his timer will be in the warning period at the beginning of Development, and he'll have practically no time to do anything except run into the pub. Players generally get lots of time to do things in Beginner mode, and a bit less on Standard and Tournament. Also, players playing the beginner Flapper character get extra time, and players playing as an expert Humanoid get less time.
The Development phase is when MULEs are bought, outfitted and installed on plots. It is a major limiting factor in that, if you're producing smithore on twelve plots and suddenly want to make something else because the price of smithore is in the commode, there is simply not enough time to get them all changed over. It takes time to switch MULEs from one product to another, so you can't react instantly to market conditions. If you learn how to foresee what the market will do in a turn or two, in order to give yourself enough turns to fully react to changes in the market, then you're on your way to becoming a M.U.L.E. expert.
In the Development phase, the following things can happen:
a. The Random Event
Before the player's turn starts, there's a chance that something unexpected will occur. This is usually a cash penalty or benefit, but you can also lose or gain small amounts of goods, a MULE, or even a plot of land. For the most part these events cannot be predicted, but the game seems to include a bit of a balance factor here behind the scenes. Bad events never happen to the player in last place, and good events never happen to the player in the lead. Additionally, it seems that the game may have a slight bias, when a good event happens to the last place player, toward giving him something that'll resolve a deficiency, like the bonus Food and Energy effect when the player is low on those commodities. If the player gets a negative food event that puts him below the "critical level," then it'll affect the time he'll have to do things exactly as if he never had that food in the first place. If he gets an event that sends energy to below critical level, then some of his MULEs won't produce, again, just as if he was short on that commodity.
It's important to note, however, that for the most part the Random Events don't change the game that much. The bonuses and penalities are scaled according to how late in the game it is. A typical bonus at the beginning of the game is from fifty to a hundred dollars, at the end, between $200 and $400. In both cases, this is not enough to catapult any player too far in the standings. Probably the worst bad event is the one that costs you ownership of one plot of land, and the best good event is the one that awards you a random plot, but both really only make a huge difference if they happen in the first three turns.
b. Visiting Town & Developing Land
Each player's turn begins in town. Town is where most of what you can do is located. It's home to the MULE corral, the various outfitting shops that you use to prepare MULEs for production, and the pub where you should try to end your turn as often as possible.
Usually, a player will have at least one new undeveloped plot of land from the grant and auctions. The usual thing to do at this point is to get it developed and contributing to his financial standings. This is done by buying a MULE, getting it outfitted, and installing it on-site. Buying one is as simple as walking into the corral. When you walk out, if you had enough money and if there was one there to buy, you'll come out leading a MULE behind you. You then walks into the appropriate outfitters to configure the MULE for whatever production you want, be it food, energy, smithore or, in the Tournament game, crystite. Those are the only choices, and one must be selected, for the game won't let you leave town with an un-outfitted MULE.
After getting it set up for production, you walk out to the plot of land, position both your onscreen character and the MULE inside the borders of the plot, and press The Button to install it. It's important not to hurry this along too much. The ever-present timer encourages players to be quick about their tasks so as to squeeze more actions into each limited turn, but if the player or MULE isn't inside the plot when The Button is pressed the MULE will simply run away, which can be very depressing if there's a shortage of smithore and MULEs are costing $500 each.
A player will typically do this once for each undeveloped plot of land he owns. This takes time. It takes a little time to do things in town, outfitting a MULE takes several seconds, walking out to the plot takes even longer, especially if the plot being developed is in one of the far corners of the map, and walking through the river and through mountains takes much longer. Entering and leaving town both take about a second, too. If the player is short on cash yet really wants to develop a plot, even at the cost of the development on another plot, he can pick up a MULE already out producing and re-install it at the new location. It'll produce the same commodity it was in its old home, however, unless you take it back into town and into another outfitter's. If the player would rather have cash at a given moment than a MULE, it can even be put back into the corral, in exchange for its current selling price.
About the outfitters, it always takes a couple of seconds to configure a MULE for production, but it also costs an outfitting fee. Food costs $25 to produce, energy $50, smithore $75, and crystite costs $100. It appears as if these outfitting costs are included in the MULE's value in the overall standings. But while MULEs can be sold back to the Store, the costs of any outfitting are forfeit in that event.
c. Hunting Wampuses
Another thing you can do on your turn is wampus hunting. Sometimes when you are out on the map and a MULE isn't following you, you'll hear a faint chirp-like noise, and a small light dot will appear on one of the mountains. If you manage to reach the dot before it vanishes (and it doesn't take long for it to disappear), you may earn a cash reward between $100 and $400. You earn more money the further you are into the game. It seems like your character must be directly over the wampus to catch it. The wampus starts out on one mountain, and it may, or may not, switch mountains before you catch it. Sometimes it'll play nice and stay at one mountain your whole turn, and sometimes it'll appear all over the map. Catching wampuses is by no means a sure thing, and it's impossible to get even somewhat good at it. It's hard enough to add uncertainty to the process, but it's easy enough that you still succeed once in a while.
If you need to develop that turn but don't have the cash, catching wampuses is really your only hope besides selling back MULEs.
d. The Pub
In the middle of town, on the bottom row, is the pub. Entering will instantly end your turn and award you cash depending on how much time you had left, from "gambling." The pub is worth a base amount of cash that increases as the game proceeds, plus some extra dollars for anything left on the development timer. The base amount is the big prize here. Anything extra from ending your turn early is gravy. The only penalty for not ending your turn in the pub, it must be said, is the lack of reward.
If you're severely strapped for cash, catching wampuses and the pub can give you a slim, but still useful, income that you can use to get back into the running.
e. Searching for Crystite (Tournament only)
One of the special things about Crystite is that it isn't obvious which plots will yield the most. At the beginning of the game, three plots are randomly chosen that grant "high" crystite, the plots around those produce "medium" crystite, and around them you get "low" crystite. All other plots conceal "no" crystite. The only ways to find out the level of crystite production will be on a plot are to go ahead and try to develop crystite there and see what turns up, and to take a soil sample from the plot in to the assay office.
To search for crystite, first you walk into the assay office. You'll be told to go out to the plot and collect soil. You do that by going to the center of the plot in question and pressing The Button. You can do this on any plot, including unowned plots and even those owned by other players, though you might not want to do that as time is tight and you'll only be helping them out by doing so. After being told you have the sample, return to the assay office and they'll inform you as to the crystite content of the plot you visited.
Searching for crystite costs no money, but because you'll have to walk out to a plot and back, it can be time consuming. It is easy to get so caught up in searching for crystite that your plots don't get developed.
It is possible for additional crystite deposits to get created during the game. Watch out for the Meteor Strike event when playing on Tournament level.
Oh, you should also know that, while there can be high crystite in the river valley, and the game will even let you search for it there, you can never actually mine it in the valley. The instructions say it's because the land is too soggy for mining, but I strongly suspect that the Irata Environmental Commision is protecting the fragile wetland ecosystem.... Oddly, however, producing smithore is okay in the river.
f. Selling land (Tournament only)
We don't do it much ourselves, but it is possible to sell your excess plots of land to the other players. To do so, go into the land office, then go out to the plot you want to sell and mark it. It'll be up for sale to the other players in a special auction during the Auction Phase. When you're marking your plot for sale you cannot do anything else, but the game timer will temporarily halt.
4. The Production Phase
The Production portion of each turn is racked with tension, but not because of the player's actions during it. The players cannot interfere with production at all! The MULEs do all the work, and the players just sit back and watch. First, there's a chance for a colony-wide random event. When these occur, most often they influence production in some way, but a few special events can radically affect the outcome of the game. The "Fire In The Store" creates an instant shortage in all three important commodities. "Meteor Strike" produces a new supply of crystite on its plot of impact, but destroys any MULE that may have been stationed there. "Planetquake" not only halves all mining production, but it can also move a mountain from one plot to another, and destroy MULEs in the process. And the dreaded Pirates either steal all smithore or crystite in the whole colony, depending on the difficulty level. Two of the colony-wide events, "Pest Attack" and "Radiation," are actually plot-specific. Pest Attack destroys all the food production from one food plot, and Radiation makes one MULE out in the field go crazy and escape the colony. These two events, it would seem, are considered "bad things" by the game, and thus never happen to a plot owned by the last-place player. (Also, the Pest Attack event occurs after production, if it happens on a turn, so you can see how much food was lost.)
None of these random events can occur more than three times in a game. The Pirates event usually occurs only once a game, and never occurs more than twice.
Once the event has happened (or not), it's time for production! The colony map will sprout little dots in each plot beside the symbol for that plot's production, that show how much of that commodity the plot is producing. Each plot has a "base production," determined by its location on the map. The river plots, always two above and two below town, have a high base production in food. Plains plots, which are empty except for the marks of ownership and production, are best for producing energy. Plots that contain mountains produce the most smithore, with more mountains resulting in a higher production. All of these plots have a minimum base production of one, but the terrain on the plot can push production as high as four. Crystite is a special case, and base production of it in a plot ranges between zero and three, depending on invisible, but not entirely random, factors.
Once a plot has produced for one turn, tiny dots get placed beneath the production-type symbol of the plot. These dots indicate what the base production of the plot is for its current commodity. Now, you should be told that what I've been calling "base production" is actually only set in stone on the Beginner difficulty level. On Standard and Tournament levels, what actually gets produced is a random quantity of goods that averages out to the on-screen base production.
In addition to this minimal production for each plot, you also get production based on two other factors that add a lot of the strategy to plot selection. If you own three plots anywhere on the map that produce the same commodity, they will each receive an extra point of production in this phase. This production is cumulative for every three plots you have making that commodity. So, if you have six plots making the same thing, they each get a +2 to production, nine plots get a +3, and twelve plots get a +4. If you have a lot of plots making the same thing, you see, you can turn even ill-placed plots into big producers, even crystite, but you have to have most of your MULEs making the same thing to do it. There is a big advantage in specialization, but in pursuing it you'll open yourself up to shortages in the other commodities.
Second, every plot you have that's adjacent to another plot making the same commodity gets a +1 to production. This bonus is cumulative with the every-three-plots bonus, but not with itself. A plot will never get more than one +1 for this on a turn. So, clustering your like-typed plots on the map will give you a bit of extra production. It's not enough to make smithore pay off in the river valley, but it can add up if you cluster all your like-producing plots.
MULEs, when they are doing the producing in each plot, need energy to operate. During the production phase you lose one energy for every non-energy MULE in operation. (Energy MULEs automatically make enough energy to power themselves.) If you have a shortage of energy, left over from the previous turn, then some of your MULEs won't produce anything, regardless of the above factors. The "critical level" sale protection in the auctions applies to your current number of MULEs. If you expect to gain land the next turn, you should always make sure you have one or two extra for the new MULEs you'll be acquiring.
The rules that determine what gets made where are a little complicated, but all you see on-screen is a bunch of dots appearing in your plots. After the Production Phase comes the final portion of the turn, where fortunes are made.
5. The Auctions
So long as there is one unit of a commodity potentially for sale anywhere in the colony, then there will be an auction in that commodity. They occur in the order: crystite (not in Beginner games though), smithore, food, then energy. If one of the players chose to sell land during his turn, then the land auction will come first, but they're very infrequent in the games we've played.
Auctions are handled with a unique interface that takes a very little getting used to at first, but once you see what's going on is very intuitive. It abolishes all that mucking about with numbers and consecutive bids. The screen layout changes to a special auction screen. Across the screen at the bottom from left to right are the players, placed according to their joystick positions in the controller ports along the front of the Atari 800 (or Sega Dreamcast). A bar appears, showing their pre-existing quantity of that commodity, allowing the players to compare with each other at a glance. Below the graph, the precise number of units is displayed. Then, any of the commodity used that turn is subtracted from the amount, with aural accompaniment. (In the case of food, this is between three and seven units, slowly increasing throughout the game. For energy, this is the number of non-energy producing MULEs the player has out in the field.) After that, more commodity is lost due to spoilage. (For energy, this is a quarter of the player's remaining supply after consumpti |
