It was time to venture down into my first cave and find the golden goblet. It was not the goblins that lurked down in the cave that I was so worried about. It was everything else that remained unknown to me at the time.
Caves in Might and Magic are dark. Thankfully I have two sorcerers that have the light spell unlocked and acquired. While they just have a basic light spell that is all I need to be able to see down below.
While some areas of a bit more of a proper name. The game was a bit lazy in the way they named the caves under each city. This one is simply The Cavern below Middlegate. Like all the other ones below different towns.
The entry point is about in the middle of what feels like a maze. I’d make quite a lot of short-terms while trying to map this place out. I’d get into a couple of different combat situations and flee to the surface to rest and save my progress.
There was also as expected in a game like this further getting killed. This is why I don’t go on massive grinding episodes without going up and just saving at the inn. One death and all progress till the last save is lost.
Sometimes I'd make my way up to the surface just to run over to the training grounds and see if anyone could level up. The biggest struggle sometimes in combat is if anyone is knocked out or even worse dead, they don’t get any experience once the final creature in the pack I'm attacking is defeated. This overtime would lead to some rather larger gaps between experience and even levels. Even more so for the sorcerer who ended up joining late to my party and had some bad luck in getting killed and missing out on experience.
While walking around the cavern below the city there are a lot of little clues. Since this is my first time playing this one, I have no clue what most of them are even trying to indicate. The only ones I could somewhat guess are the clues that are giving an X and Y location.
After spending some time pondering different writings on the walls. I decided since I lacked the game knowledge at this stage of the game to make any use of such information. I was best just moving on and not putting too much thought into it. I could always at a later point in time return to this cave and walk around seeing what clues I could take advantage of by that point.
One of the more annoying things is understanding that I could win a battle but the cost would be too high. I’d end up in a situation where two of my characters would get killed. Contently having to run back up and spend large sums of gold to revive them was just not worth it. In situations like those, I'd have to toss the battle, take the group's death, and lose whatever progress I had yet to save.
The gamer in me hated having to use such tactics. Gold was, however, in quite short supply. Even more so when I'd loot an item upgrade along the way and then barely make it alive out of the cave. I was many times overpaying more in revival costs than the upgraded items in value I looted. They were, however, badly needed upgrades at the time and sometimes you just got to take the loss to move forward in such a manner.
Perhaps one of the more fun things while clearing out this cave was that they reset every time I went up to the surface and the inn. Was coming back down and finding a new pack of undead creatures.
My cleric has a spell that can only be cast once during a battle. It has a chance to eradicate a random number of undead monsters that I'm fighting with. My cleric is, however, not usually the first one that can attack. So sometimes I must play it smart and use my other characters to target non-undead or cast buffs instead.
Sometimes my cleric would eradicate an entire pack of creatures right before me, making it quite an easy battle. Other times he would only get a single kill or none. It was quite satisfying when he could take down an entire pack by himself. Also, quite disappointing when he did not get a single kill since the spell only works Once per combat situation.
There were also combat situations that I learned to run away from. Anytime I ran into jugglers or any creatures that exploded I’d try and escape that fight. Jugglers as the name might imply did juggle but instead of items, they moved your entire party’s position around. Putting your melee in the back out of range and your soft casters up tanking. Along with anything that could deal area of effect damage to my group could take out my lower health casters sitting in the back leaving me with quite a heavy revival bill and a slow battle down a few characters. All these situations I'd rather just avoid by running away from them.
Naturally, you don’t know till you run into a pack of monsters. There appear to be spells you can cast that are supposed to show you from what I can gather about them around you. I, however, don’t have them yet, at least not the one for underground use.
While down in the cave there were also some rather insane but winnable battles. I recalled hitting this 46-creature pack and thinking I better just run now. Then I noticed it was an entire pack of Blood Suckers. Any of my characters could one-shot them, and they did barely any damage to my party. This ended up being a long but worthwhile battle to engage in instead of running away from.
After a while, I found a Goblin Lair that had some goblins instead and the golden goblet I was looking for. I then had another quest after this to find some people down in this cave and rescue them. It did not take me long to finish that quest.
Final Thoughts
I must have made a few dozen trips down into this first cave. Some valuable lessons were learned and some were not so valuable as well. I ended up getting a couple of levels and a few upgrades along the way. Making it all worth my time.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Might And Magic II.