Hey Everyone,

So I'm going to finally give the Ultima series a try and thought I'd start with I.

There's a few quips I seem to be running into:

1 - Is there a way to save and load outside of 'q' for saving and quitting the game then restarting to load?
2 - Attacking. I've tried hitting 'A' and I never seem to attack. Do I need to use it in combination with something else. My weapons are equipped, but I never seem to get any indication that an attack is performed (hit, miss or otherwise).
3 - Magic: Can I repeatedly cast the same spells? Is there a form of MP/Counter involved I can't seem to find evidence of either.

I'm sure there's other stuff once I get a bit further, but I'm definitely not having a smooth start haha.

When you attack, you need to specify which direction you are attacking in, except when you are in a dungeon.

Spells are single-use; buy one Missile spell and you can cast it only once. By 32 Missile spells and you can cast it 32 times. Of note, in the case of Missile, certain weapons will increase the damage inflected, potentially allowing it to out-damage the most powerful weapons.

Prayer is an exception: It produces a random effect and can be cast as much as you want to. (Useful if you are in a dungeon and have run out of ladder up spells.)

One other early tip: At the start, once you are ready for adventure, the first thing you should do is go into the nearby dungeon. The enemies on the first floor are manageable, food consumption is reduced in dungeons, and when you leave, you gain HP based off how many enemies you killed. This makes early game survival much easier, as you don't need to spend as much money on food/HP, and can spend it on other things.

It looks like hitting Q just saves the current game for me, without actually exiting. To exit, I have to hit Alt-Tab to reduce the game to a window, which I can then close. (I'm running Windows 7, if that makes a difference.)

Back when the earliest games were released, you didn't have multi-tasking OSes that had to be shut down; instead, when done playing, you just turned off the game. To reload your save file, you did, I believe, have to reboot the entire machine.

Fortunately, you can now just close the DOSBox window to quit the game. Unfortunately, you have to restart the game in order to load.

Ultima 5, I believe, was the first game in the series to allow you to exit to DOS without having to reboot.

Almost, it started with 6.

Actually, Ultima 5 (DOS version) actually does has an undocumented Exit to DOS command; I believe it's Ctrl+Q. (There's also the Ctrl-K command, which lets you view your current karma, which is supposed to be a hidden stat, but that command was likely left over from debugging.)

Speaking of karma, interestingly the Commodore 64 version of Ultima IV had an undocumented hotkey to check all your virtue statuses, which isn't available in the PC version (on the other hand, the PC version has Ctrl-K in Ultima V, but not the Ultima IV virtue-check key ...).

Other things for Ultima I:

* Sign post landmarks (except for the Eastern Sign Post, which does nothing, and one that I'm forgetting the specific name of that yields weapons), in addition to being quest objectives for some of the kings (note that all the kings that send you to signposts are optional; the only required quests are the ones to kill enemies in the dungeons), give permanent increases to stats. You can do this as many times as you want, with the proviso that you cannot use the same landmark twice in a row (i.e., once having used a given landmark you must visit another before you can re-use the first one).

* It's said that it's possible to roll stats over to 0 if you use the landmarks excessively (i.e., exceeding 99 in the related stat); I'm not sure whether this is a bug or feature or which specific versions it happens on.

* The most dangerous levels of the dungeon are seven and eight. DO NOT LINGER ON THESE LEVELS unless you're on the quest to kill a Liche (who reside on these two floors); one of the enemies here is the Gremlin and in this game they're the deadliest enemy in the whole game (even Mondain himself is less lethal). Use the ladder spells and pass through these levels QUICKLY.

oh god
those greedy gremlins always steal my food
they are so mean!!