I had never played Ultima 2 before. 1, 3, and 4, yes, but never 2. Thanks to GOG i'm playing all these great games again, but I'm not sure I'm doing things right in Ultima 2. I'm about 3-4 hours in, and still struggling to stay alive and fed. In combat I'm hitting enemies about once every ten attacks, and thieves steal more from me than I get back. A typical combat with a thief reads something like this:

Attack - - Miss
Attack - - Miss
The thief stole something!
Attack - - Miss
Attack - - Miss
Attack - - Miss
The thief stole something!

and so on....

Is the game really this tedious?

Sadly, yes. But wait it out, keep playing... and it only gets worse.

...okay, here's a few protips. Your chance to hit is dependent on your Agility. A low one means more misses. How much damage you do depends on both your choice of weapon and your Strength.

Once you get to 1990 A.D., you'll have the ability to purchase stat boosts. But here's the catch: the boosts are expensive, they're random, and you might pay good money to receive nothing at all. So while I don't usually recommend save scumming, it's practically a necessity here.

Save before you enter the city where you can buy stat boosts.

Pay as much as you can afford at a time, in sets of 100 coins, and see what you got. If you got something useful, leave the city and save. If not, exit without saving (by closing the window) and start over. Doing it this way cuts the (very substantial) grinding by more than half.

For more, and if you don't mind spoilers, go here: [url=https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Ultima_II:_The_Revenge_of_the_Enchantress/Table_of_Contents]https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Ultima_II:_The_Revenge_of_the_Enchantress/Table_of_Contents[/url]

Best of luck.

Definitely stack agility in character creation. It helps to increase hit chance. Also find a boat. Great way to grind gold/experience and movement consumes no food.

Thanks. I finally got a ship, and then immediately got killed by another ship and a daemon that hit me when I returned to shore. My agility is only 16, but I'm not restarting now!!

Yeah that's another unfortunately long lasting bug. Boarding a boat does not remove the monster, so it will occupy the same space until you move and kill it. It can also be exploited to your advantage to chain spawn vehicles for yourself and make boat bridges.

I hope to fix that one in a future upgrade release.

Well I finally finished Ultima 2. Whew.

Playing with a low Agility just about killed me. About 2/3 of my gameplay time was spent chasing after pennies, trying to keep my hit points above 0, until I was able to raise my Agility. Once that happened, I finished the game in relatively short time.

Playing a game in the early 80's was such a different experience. You had to really spend time exploring every nook and cranny, gathering every clue, and doing a LOT of trial and error. (I'd also suggest that Ultima 2 has a lot of bad and unbalanced game design)

Now, onto a few Infocom's and then Ultima 3!!