Here follows my initial experience with heretic until the battle with the Iocrym (which I haven't beat just yet).
Ptaravores: AAAAAAAAAAARGH. I hate the little buggers. This is an awesome enemy.
The minigame is quite clever, it took me a while to figure this out, but:
Conceptual solution:
The more damaged the brain is, the faster its resistance goes down. However, the more virus you input, the quicker it adapts to the virus and you have to use more. It is trivial to bring the damage back to 10 very quickly. Therefore, you need to find a balance between maximum brain damage, and minimum virus input.
Full solution:
increase virus to 1. The brain damage will increase to 50. Hold the damage steady at 50 until you see the left and right red arrows. This means the reistance is about to fail so you need to let down your virus and bring the damage down to 10. You don't need to get there right away, so let it of semi-slowly. We *don't* want it to start repairing. Once you have it at 10, your virus count should be larger than the resistance count, at which point you simply have to hold damage between 8 and 10.
The xenophobe mission can be made very easy using a known exploit:
The AI has an unwillingness to shoot each other, but simultanious desire to swarm you. You can then blow up the ark as desired. This is a bug in the AI that's been around for a while that I would like to see fixed.
At first I had a lot of trouble defending the stations. Although I had Lamplighter and an unenhanced Tailkon 200, my ship felt very lightly armed against these ships (a good thing IMO). The attacks got very difficult very quicly, even with the best weapon in the game (lamplighter), and a large load of green strelkas. This was very demoralizing, but only because I thought I *needed* some of these stations to survive. I didn't know that the sentinels will never attack the researchers on the Iocrym station. A plot explanation for this would be nice, as well as some reason to believe that you won't loose the iocrym research base (a large company of foot-soldiers for instance).
I then realized my best bet was to make sure that I did only the very easiest and shortest missions. This means the neurohack one for sure (it takes up very little game time), and then whatever other easy one I could do (the xenophobe one with the exploit is definitely fast, but its an exploit and I should try others).
I agree that it is really annoying that the game doesn't suggest you look up the locations of the stations beforehand. Perhaps a system map rom should be given to the player?
After retrieving the Sisters and Xenophobe data, they shut off the star-modifiers. You only need to complete 3 missions (including the initial pteravore-protection one) to suceed.
Something which was unclear to me was that you didn't need to kill yourself upon loosing some/all the stations, or even the research ship. If you complete the neurohack and petavore missions, then the idea of mass-slaughter of the sentinels is not revealed to you untill all the reasearch stations are destroyed (at which point you feel utterly defeated, and don't think to talk to Kate about it). Perhaps Kate should mention hunting sentenals earlier, or perhaps destroying an Iocrym station, but still suggest doing missions, because they are faster, and probably easier than hunting for roms. Perhaps add a line to Kate's inital request to get missions from the research stations like: "We'll figure this out eventually, whatever else happens."
I then engaged the Iocrym command ship in battle (but died). I will probably have more on that later.
1. The Iocrym AI did say that they did not expect the quarantine to last forever. Isn't it plausible that the scientists at Heretic would have broken the quarantine eventually, even without the player's help? In that case, then Domina did not really affect the quarantine that much.
No, but she has sent many pilgrims to try. This makes me believe that domina (or oracus impersonating domina) really, really wants the quarantine broken.
If the being responsible for the pilgrims doesn't really want the quarantine broken, then that being is sadistic, and enjoys using power for its own sake.
Therefore, either Domina is very, very evil, or this option is untrue.
2. Does the quarantine have to be perfect? Perhaps exterminating 99% of humanity is enough to foil Oracus's plan. In fact, it would be implausible otherwise. So allowing a few pilgrims to escape would not harm Domina's greater plan.
It could be that Domina wants most of humanity to die. However, wouldn't it have been easier to send the Iocrym to wipe most of us out the first time?
3. There is a difference between buying a gun to kill a potential intruder and actually pulling the trigger. Perhaps the Iocrym (Domina?) are preparing to exterminate humanity just in case, but have other less drastic options as well.
If the being behind the Iocrym's actions is the same as the being behind the actions of the pilgrims, then this is the only solution that I can see.
4. Perhaps it is impossible to tell Oracus and Domina apart. Let's assume that Domina and Oracus communicate via some kind of projection of consciousness. The ideas that they want to convey appear in your mind. Maybe there is no way to tell who planted the idea (unless they told you--but then they could lie).
This is what my mind instantly thinks is going on here, and what I think is most likely. Compare Heretic.xml 2957 with 3913 and 3944. Is the Iocrym following Oracus, or the Humans? If the Iocrym are with oracus then.
This places everyone on two very neatly separated sides, the side quarantining and getting rid of humanity, like the penitents, and the side trying to escape the Iocrym's quarantine. This is the simplest answer.
Since the Iocrym have been around longer, it is more likely that they know the truth. Therefore I come up with this model:
Domina wants to foil Oracus, so she tells the Iocrym to buy her some time by instituting the quarantine. Next she tries to get rid of Oracus' main weapon, which is, apparantly, humans. However, she doesn't want to just kill the lot of them, so she decides that population control is the best idea. She isn't killing anyone any more than you would say someone killed chickens by destroying unfertalized eggs. She isn't destroying life, just the potential for it.
Oracus wants the destruction of everything. Since for some reason is is largely confined to controlling only humans, he needs them to expand. To this end he starts up the Sisters of Domina (an ironic touch to the name) to send pilgrims to the core. Once humanity has expanded enough, Oracus can turn humanity in on itself.
EDIT: @ Atarlost. A way to think of the Penitients without someone playing both sides is this:
Domina sets them up as a voluntary suicide organization to appeal to humanity's good side. Kill yourself and spare everyone death and destruction. When that doesn't go over very well, she converts the penitents to an organization that kills some others as well. However, penitents don't leave their stations very often (and thus still don't kill very many others, yet), so Domina may be planning the penitents as a tertiary backup plan (after sterilization). Give them more advanced dark acid weaponry and try to destroy humanity from the inside-out, or at least give the Iocrym an opportunity to do so. Otherwise, Domina will dismantle the penitents if sterilization works. This means that, aside from Oracus impersonating domina (which is quite in character for him), all the story lines up.
The only thing that is inconsistent is the penitents having a power named "Oracus Harass" (never mentioned in-game), which would have to be supplied by Domina.
5. Is it plausible that Domina is not a perfect predictor of the future? In that case, it is possible that the actions of the player will result in outcomes that Domina did not expect.
Absoulutely, but even then Domina must have some sort of goal. The question here is what is the nature of that goal and what is Domina willing/able to do to achieve that goal. Domina must have some productive (even if that just is to satisfy sadism) reason to send you towards the core and help you along the way.
