gilbahat

Well, as it turns out you don't really need to fight those cobra ships. only if you want to.

Here's my stuff for solaris: 1. Looking in the manual, it says "cobra ships are sent to persuade you to vacate a cluster". well, if you block a combat group's path from moving and then go back to the combat view, voila - cobra ships appear out of nowhere. this can unfortunately happen during another unrelated fight, with devastating results. 2. if you do that while on a planet, you will get invaders instead of cobra ships. if you plan well enough, this can happen inside a corridor. fun. 3. quadrants are ranked by difficulty - you know the quadrant's difficulty by the amount of gates on a corridor or cadets on a zylon planet. it's not linear, too - some maps far along in the game have a difficulty rating of 2. case in point is when you try #1 on the first map - you will get cobra ships that can't shoot at you. 4. you can tunnel through enemies in 2 different methods: * if you move exactly when they move, you may be able to pass through. * if you attack a combat group, then locate yourself on another combat group (but not engage it!), then win the fight - you can pass through the other, unrelated group. if it was a map edge, you'd even get to the next map. you can see it here in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JLdalkHLW0 5. there's a tiny time gap between being winning an extra life and the zylon planet being destroyed. if you abort fast enough, you can re-engage the planet and get more lives this way. 6. for reasons not entirely clear yet, sometimes combat groups will move a lot more than once. perhaps this is a discrepency between moves happening while on the combat view and on the quadrant view. 7. even when your rader is broken, it is fully functional, as you can see the distance to the target and whether it's left/right to you by the indicator, so nothing is lost.

If you played 'the last starfighter' (the prototype precursor), a quadrant does not turn into a red zone if the fed planet is destroyed. this suggests (without looking at the code) that Q15 is designated to be such a quadrant. unrelated but speaking of, there are also other interesting concepts in the prototype that never made it to the real game: * a quadrant with invisible combat groups. they appear until you engage one. * wormholes that can redirect you to arbitary locations (not just corners). there's a bug in the game where a wormhole redirects to itself, causing an endless loop. * you can engage an enemy attacking a fed planet in-space or on ground * minefields behave very differently (short mine sequence and then a standard battlegroup) * zylon planets don't add lives * finishing a quadrant adds 2 lives (still max 4 reserve) * there are enemies inside corridors (it's a hard mess) * no cobra ship battlegroups. they are, however, still present in the game as per their original designation from the manual. speaking of enemies inside corridors, there is a way to recreate this in solaris per se.

just for kicks, I have tried to get into Q15 'the wrong way', hoping to thwart timing and get to rescue a fed planet. no go.

youtube, search for solaris speedrun. one could argue it's not a 'clean' speed run, but it's without savestates and without any life hacks.

just fyi, PAL solaris does exist. I played the game on my PAL TV something like 22 years ago...

aside from Q15, you can finish the game without having to kill any fed planet. as noted above, if you beat an enemy while it's attacking a fed planet, you can then pass through it. that's generally not considered cheating. however (and this probably is a bug/cheating), even if you beat an unrelated enemy, you can still pass through a fed planet (or a wormhole, or another enemy). this is demonstrated in my speed run above. if you 'tunnel through' enemies and wormholes, you can finish the game without ever having been to Q15, so you could say that the fed planet there is saved the reason the fed planet is destroyed is more of a misdesign than a bug. the only way to really save a fed planet is to clean the map entirely of enemies (not sure, perhaps planets don't count). this way, they stick forever. otherwise, they will be gone. here's another funny solaris curio for you to try: on the first map, go to the sector right next to the mechanoids and engage it. there's nothing there alright. go back to the tactical map and wait for the jump timer to go down to about 7 or 6. then, leave the tactical map and go back to space view. double surprise * the reason 'this' appeared in the first place is that the mechanoids are trying to move, and you're blocking their path. * the reason 'this' behaves as it does is due to quadrant ranking. every quadrant has a hardness ranking - 1,2,3 or 5. in quadrants having corridors or zylon planets, this directly translates to the number of space cadets or corridor gates. 'this' doesn't actually exist in 1-ranked quadrants (of which there are only 2... Q1 and Q3)