It's difficult enough trying to play through these ancient and primitive games with their strange mechanics and wacky game concepts, but where is all of the information needed to play the game?

It's absolutely mind boggling how difficult it is to get the required information necessary to play these games. If you read the manual and reference cards you are still missing so much information. Even worse, if I had paid for one of these so called strategy guides or Ultima books when these games came out I would have wanted my money back. Even the "complete" books of Ultima just regurgitate the manual, make up conflicting lore, and have very little useful information in them. I have never seen anything like this in many years of gaming. The only way to get information is to search the internet for information on each topic, and I wonder where these websites got the information from, since I can't find any of it in documentation.

Other than the poorly written manual and reference cards, was there a play guide or some other documentation that came with Ultima 1?

only other thing i remember getting in the box was the maps for the 4 continents


i think the only thing GOG is missing is the reference card
that has the keyboard commands an description of the spells

Apparently, ports of Ultima 1 did a better job with the documentation than the original Apple version and the PC ports. I found some information in the Commodore 64 and Atari documentation that would of saved me a lot of grief. Still, there isn't nearly as much information in those documents as you would expect either.

Online websites have the best information. I don't know where they got it. I'm guessing they must have got some of it from going through the actual code in the program.

I'm in space now, and I'm still trying to figure out how the combat works when you fight the Tie-Fighter like ships. Once again, it seems very strange. It really doesn't appear as though I do any damage when I hit the ships with my lasers.

the lasers 1 shot kill the enemy ships but you need a direct hit on the cockpit
which isnt easy given how they always move away from your target cursor

I just figured that out, but after I destroyed 2 ships there were no more to fight. I used hyperspace to see if I could find some more but I could not find any more enemies. So now I'm stuck again!

V changes the view mode from cockpit view to a top down system view
I shows a map H = enemy ships, + = stations diamond thing is stars and a bunch of dots is empy space

i think i listed them in the order of prirority and the planet is always in the centre of the map

Thanks.