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Superrpgman

Did I miss something big in the Military Base?

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Hey everyone, how's it going?

For those that don't want to read this whole post, here are the questions in advance:

Is there something big in the first hidden level? If there really was something big in the Military Base that I missed, would it be worth it to revisit the level to get the item?

Plus: while I'm here, let me ask another question. From what I understand, you lose most of your weapons and your armor and health reset after the first campaign. Is this a glitch, because if it isn't intentional, I'd like to know if there's a way around this.

Also: I've been playing this on the easiest mode. I'm just curious, besides the game being easier, am I missing out on anything by doing so? I'm considering changing the difficulty if I can do via the console.

Finally: Feel free to suggest another Doom source port that gives you even more options. Also, feel free to suggest any mods to use, and user created levels to try out when I beat the game.

Thanks.

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As for the more social details:

I've had every Doom game available on Steam for quite a while now, and I've been playing the original Doom off and on for a year now, never getting far at all, usually getting sidetracked, or just plain frustrated with different issues with the game. Thankfully, I was introduced to ZDOOM, and I'm just plain loving the game now! I feel like I'm able to do so much more that it's insane!

Anyways, I'm still in the first campaign of the original Doom. Just beat the Military Base, which a friend told me is the first campaigns sorta hidden level. I I had a lot of fun with it and all. Plus, according to ZDoom, I even found all of the secret rooms in the level, and killed every enemy as well!

But the thing is, since it's a secret level, I expected to get a very powerful weapon that I wouldn't be able to acquire from any other level until well...at least until near the end of the first campaign. Instead I found a bunch of the same stuff I got from secret rooms in other levels. I already had a Shotgun, Machine Gun, Chainsaw, and Rocket Launcher prior to the level.

While one one hand I do realize that it would make sense for the Plasma Rifle and BFG to not show up until much later, I expected to see something nice in the level. I guess the partially invisible imps or whatever they're called showing up for the first time(at least I think it's the first time they've shown up.) was kind of cool, but other than that, I didn't notice anything different about the level from the others so far.

So anyways, the question once again is the one in the the topic title. Did I miss something big in the hidden level? If there really was something big that I missed, would it be worth it to revisit the level to get it?

Oh, and while I'm here, let me ask another question. From what I understand, you lose most of your weapons and your armor and health reset after the first campaign. Is this a glitch, because if it isn't intentional, I'd like to know if there's a way around this.

Also: I've been playing this on the easiest mode. I'm just curious, besides the game being easier, am I missing out on anything by doing so? I'm considering changing the difficulty if I can do so via the console. I don't consider it cheating if I'm specifically making it harder for me. Feel free to suggest a difficulty mode you think someone who doesn't play many pure skill based shooters would enjoy.

Finally: Feel free to suggest another Doom source port that gives you even more options. Also, feel free to suggest any mods to use, and user created levels to try out when I beat the game.

Thank you for your time.

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You didn't miss anything. The BFG doesn't show up 'till later because the first "campaign" was also the shareware version, so Id Software didn't want you to have the BFG or plasma rifle until you bought the game. You are supposed to lose your weapons after Knee-Deep in the Dead.
P.S. Those partially visible things are 'spectres' and I really recommend harder difficulties for heart-pounding action!

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Hey man, welcome to doomworld!

For your first question, Military Base doesn't really have anything all that special. When I first played it when I was real young, the most significant things in that map for me were the caged imps, the imps standing on the pillars that you can shoot off, and for some reason, those barrels in front of the switch in the yellow key room.

The map is also not too shabby for deathmatch unlike many of the later maps of the episode, and is the most difficult map in Knee-Deep in the Dead to play on Nightmare mode. Besides that I am a bit unsure what characteristics were thought up to qualify a map as a secret map in the game. If you haven't played Doom 2 yet, the secret levels in that game are pretty special though.

To answer your second question, I don't think there's a way around the episode barriers. A lot of people have speculated that you are somehow killed and reincarnated between each episode or something, but the start of each episode is meant to be played with your bare essentials; pistol with 50 bullets, and 100% health.

For your third question, The easiest skill level (I'm too young to die) and the second easiest skill level (Hey not too rough) are virtually the same. The only differences are that The damage done to the player is half of what it would normally be on other skill levels. The other difference is that you receive double the ammunition from pickups that you're supposed to. You may have noticed that you got 8 shells when it says you picked up 4 shells. The following skill levels usually just increase the volume of monsters occupying the levels. A room that might have once had one monster in it might have three or four on harder skill levels. Sometimes shotguns and other powerups and stuff are in harder to reach places too.

A lot of people around here use ZDoom to play Doom, but also a lot of them use source ports like prBoom and Chocolate Doom for a more "traditional" feeling. If you're new to doom, you probably won't notice the subtle differences between ZDoom and the source ports that are more true to the original Doom engine .exe's. The most significant things about prBoom and chocolate doom are the inability to jump, or look up and down. They also are capable of playing back recorded demo lumps that get posted here every once in a while, that ZDoom is not capable of playing. I can explain further about demo playback if you're interested.

Anyway welcome to the Doom community! We tend to over analyze things here and we don't seem to have much tolerance for wayward opinions (I'm one to talk) but I'm sure you'll enjoy your involvement here anyway.

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Superrpgman said:

Hey everyone, how's it going?

Fine and you?

Superrpgman said:

Is there something big in the first hidden level? If there really was something big in the Military Base that I missed, would it be worth it to revisit the level to get the item?

Nope. It's just a classic map except it's hidden.

Superrpgman said:

Plus: while I'm here, let me ask another question. From what I understand, you lose most of your weapons and your armor and health reset after the first campaign. Is this a glitch, because if it isn't intentional, I'd like to know if there's a way around this.

It's intentionnal, you start every episode with a pistol and 50 bullets. Don't worry, in Doom 2 you will do all the adventure in a row.

Superrpgman said:

Also: I've been playing this on the easiest mode. I'm just curious, besides the game being easier, am I missing out on anything by doing so? I'm considering changing the difficulty if I can do via the console.

Once you feel comfortable, play in Ultra Violence. It has more monsters and I think it's the main attraction with the game.

Superrpgman said:

Finally: Feel free to suggest another Doom source port that gives you even more options. Also, feel free to suggest any mods to use, and user created levels to try out when I beat the game.

If you have ZDoom/GZDoom/Prboom-plus it is a good beginning to play many user-made levels. I'd suggest Requiem, Alien Vendetta, Scythe and Scythe 2 to introduce you to our continuous expansion of the Doom universe!
You may want to play Doom64 with the sourceport Doom64EX.

Superrpgman said:

Thanks.

You're welcome!

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For your first question, Military Base doesn't really have anything all that special. When I first played it when I was real young, the most significant things in that map for me were the caged imps, the imps standing on the pillars that you can shoot off, and for some reason, those barrels in front of the switch in the yellow key room.


It was fun, that's for sure.

The map is also not too shabby for deathmatch unlike many of the later maps of the episode, and is the most difficult map in Knee-Deep in the Dead to play on Nightmare mode. Besides that I am a bit unsure what characteristics were thought up to qualify a map as a secret map in the game. If you haven't played Doom 2 yet, the secret levels in that game are pretty special though.


Not into pvp, sorry.

To answer your second question, I don't think there's a way around the episode barriers. A lot of people have speculated that you are somehow killed and reincarnated between each episode or something, but the start of each episode is meant to be played with your bare essentials; pistol with 50 bullets, and 100% health.


I see. Well thanks.

For your third question, The easiest skill level (I'm too young to die) and the second easiest skill level (Hey not too rough) are virtually the same. The only differences are that The damage done to the player is half of what it would normally be on other skill levels. The other difference is that you receive double the ammunition from pickups that you're supposed to. You may have noticed that you got 8 shells when it says you picked up 4 shells. The following skill levels usually just increase the volume of monsters occupying the levels. A room that might have once had one monster in it might have three or four on harder skill levels. Sometimes shotguns and other powerups and stuff are in harder to reach places too.


Yeah...I should type the following for Hurt Me Plenty, right?

skill 3

A lot of people around here use ZDoom to play Doom, but also a lot of them use source ports like prBoom and Chocolate Doom for a more "traditional" feeling. If you're new to doom, you probably won't notice the subtle differences between ZDoom and the source ports that are more true to the original Doom engine .exe's. The most significant things about prBoom and chocolate doom are the inability to jump, or look up and down. They also are capable of playing back recorded demo lumps that get posted here every once in a while, that ZDoom is not capable of playing. I can explain further about demo playback if you're interested.


Playback demo as in recording your playthrough of a level, right?

Anyway welcome to the Doom community! We tend to over analyze things here and we don't seem to have much tolerance for wayward opinions (I'm one to talk) but I'm sure you'll enjoy your involvement here anyway.


Nothing wrong with overanalyzing. Not sure what you mean by wayard thinking though.

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I'd recommend you go up the difficulties one by one. IE, go to "Hey, not too Rough" or "Hurt Me Pleanty" instead of jumping straight to "Ultra Violence". Ultra Violence is much harder than what you're currently playing because it adds a lot more enemies. If you want to see what I'm talking about, start the first campaign in Ultra Violence and try to beat the first level. There's a lot of enemies there. Nightmare is just crazy, as it has enemies that are double the speed they usually are and they respawn after a minute of being dead. It's for pros only.

When you're done with Doom 1, you'll probably want to go straight to Doom 2. Doom 2 has a more enemy types (like a big fat guy that shoots out fireballs out of his arms), a really cool and powerful double barrel shotgun, and one big campaign. it isn't that much harder than Doom 1's hardest campaign and the difficulty levels scale just as well as the first game. The vast majority of custom levels and campaigns use Doom 2 as a base.

After Doom 2, you can go to start playing custom level sets or try out Final Doom. Final Doom is two 32-level campaigns in one package. The first one, TNT Evilution, is more like Doom 2, but Plutonia places monsters so that it's a bit more difficult than Doom 2, especially on the harder difficulty levels. Plutonia on Ultra Violence is not for the faint of heart!

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40oz said:

To answer your second question, I don't think there's a way around the episode barriers.

There's a pretty easy way around that if you use any MAPINFO-capable port. Like just copying the definition for the ExM8 maps and adding a "next = Ex+1M1" in them. E1M8 next E2M1, E2M8 next E3M1, and so on.

With some work to solve the texture conflicts, you can even then have E4M8 next MAP01!


Of course that just makes the start of each episode ridiculously easy. Well, there's some measure of challenge in E2M1 when you start it with 10 hp or less, as even the zombiemen can kill you quickly, but as soon as you heal up you find out that you've got all weapons except the BFG (after finding the plasma rifle secret), a backpack, and a ton of ammo.

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Darkman 4 said:
I'd recommend you go up the difficulties one by one. IE, go to "Hey, not too Rough" or "Hurt Me Pleanty" instead of jumping straight to "Ultra Violence". Ultra Violence is much harder than what you're currently playing because it adds a lot more enemies. If you want to see what I'm talking about, start the first campaign in Ultra Violence and try to beat the first level. There's a lot of enemies there. Nightmare is just crazy, as it has enemies that are double the speed they usually are and they respawn after a minute of being dead. It's for pros only.


Yeah, Hurt me Plenty is what i'm aiming for. Again, to change the difficulty to hurt me plenty, I just need to type the following, right?

-skill 3

When you're done with Doom 1, you'll probably want to go straight to Doom 2. Doom 2 has a more enemy types (like a big fat guy that shoots out fireballs out of his arms), a really cool and powerful double barrel shotgun, and one big campaign. it isn't that much harder than Doom 1's hardest campaign and the difficulty levels scale just as well as the first game. The vast majority of custom levels and campaigns use Doom 2 as a base.


Really? Nice! All I knew about 2 up until now was that the enemies are taller.

After Doom 2, you can go to start playing custom level sets or try out Final Doom. Final Doom is two 32-level campaigns in one package. The first one, TNT Evilution, is more like Doom 2, but Plutonia places monsters so that it's a bit more difficult than Doom 2, especially on the harder difficulty levels. Plutonia on Ultra Violence is not for the faint of heart!


So Final Doom is 2 parts, as opposed to Ultimate Doom which is 4? Alright, thanks.

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Superrpgman said:

Not into pvp, sorry.


That's okay, there's a ton of user-created doom levels catered to single players. Depending on what you're into, you can find some good classic levels, there are also "slaughterfest" styled levels, which involves arena-like levels with huge armies of strong monsters and tons of ammo and weapons.

Superrpgman said:

[i]Playback demo as in recording your playthrough of a level, right?


That's correct. Doom comes with a built in feature that lets you record demos in the form of .lmp files, a format that only doom can read. It's basically a file that lists all the player actions you made at what time, so that when you load the demo .lmp file, you can watch the game re-enact everything you did while playing. Because the files only record the actions you made, instead of recording the entire display as a video like most people do with other games, the file size of the demo .lmps are very small, which makes them very convenient to share. We have a whole demo recording subforum here at doomworld where people show off demos of themselves completing the game, or a single map in the shortest amount of time (Speedruns), or completing a map while also achieving 100% items, secrets, and kills on the fourth hardest skill level (UV-Max) or just showing a demo recording themselves playing a map for the very first time (First Demo Attempt, or FDA)

You can load the demos from the command line with source ports such as prBoom or chocolate Doom, but they cannot be played with ZDoom because of the various enhancements ZDoom has which makes the demos incompatible. PrBoom-plus is a source port that has received the most ZDoom like enhancements without ever breaking compatibility with these demo .lmps. I think ZDoom is capable of recording demos in it's own ZDoom format, but those aren't nearly as popular as original doom demo lumps.

Superrpgman said:

Yeah, Hurt me Plenty is what i'm aiming for. Again, to change the difficulty to hurt me plenty, I just need to type the following, right?

-skill 3


That's correct as well.

Superrpgman said:

So Final Doom is 2 parts, as opposed to Ultimate Doom which is 4? Alright, thanks.


Sort of. Doom 1 is divied up into an episodic format, which lets you pick which fraction of the game you want to play right from the start. Doom 2 and Final Doom are a little different, as they are just 32-level sets that you have to play from start to finish (unless of course you want to use the IDCLEVxx cheat code to skip levels, or the -warp command in the command line, or a ZDoom console command such as MAP MAPxx) Final Doom is two separate sets of 32 levels that you play from start to finish, the same way you would with Doom 2.

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Superrpgman said:

So Final Doom is 2 parts, as opposed to Ultimate Doom which is 4?

Final Doom is two 32 map wads (set on Earth and one of Jupiter's moons) while Ultimate Doom is a 36 map update of Registered Doom, arranged as four 9-map episodes.

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GreyGhost said:

Final Doom is two 32 map wads (set on Earth and one of Jupiter's moons) while Ultimate Doom is a 36 map update of Registered Doom, arranged as four 9-map episodes.


Basically, he means that Final Doom consists of two separate games; TNT Eviluation and Plutonia, in one package. Each game has one big campaign. Don't worry, the mechanics and gameplay are exactly like Doom 1 and 2. Ultimate Doom is one game with four campaigns in it.

Just focus on beating all of Ultimate Doom's campaigns right now.

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btw, one question I asked remains unanswered.

"Anyway welcome to the Doom community! We tend to over analyze things here and we don't seem to have much tolerance for wayward opinions (I'm one to talk) but I'm sure you'll enjoy your involvement here anyway."

What do you mean by wayward thinking?

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"Difficult to control or predict because of unusual or perverse behavior"

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Military Base does have some places that make it worthy for a secret level. But in any case, just getting to it feels rewarding, considering the complicated sequence of secrets that you need to find to get to it.

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The most powerful weapon in Doom is the BFG 9000. Indeed it never shown up in episode 1 and 2, therefore nope in Military Base since its E1M9. The BFG 9000 first appears in E3M3, and E4M2 in episode 4.

But if you want to get a BFG 9000 in E1M9, there's one method. Doom actually can make use of cheat code, by typing "idkfa" can give you very happy ammo, included all keys and weapons with full ammo. If you type this code, you can get the BFG 9000, but no SSG since it doesn't available in Ulitmate Doom.

And the whole Doom series(Exluding pwads) is followed as:

Ultimate Doom, Doom 2, Final Doom: TNT, Final Doom: Plutonia Experiment

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40oz said:

A lot of people around here use ZDoom to play Doom, but also a lot of them use source ports like prBoom and Chocolate Doom for a more "traditional" feeling. If you're new to doom, you probably won't notice the subtle differences between ZDoom and the source ports that are more true to the original Doom engine .exe's. The most significant things about prBoom and chocolate doom are the inability to jump, or look up and down. They also are capable of playing back recorded demo lumps that get posted here every once in a while, that ZDoom is not capable of playing. I can explain further about demo playback if you're interested.

Superrpgman then said:

Playback demo as in recording your playthrough of a level, right?

40oz replied:
That's correct. Doom comes with a built in feature that lets you record demos in the form of .lmp files, a format that only doom can read. It's basically a file that lists all the player actions you made at what time, so that when you load the demo .lmp file, you can watch the game re-enact everything you did while playing. Because the files only record the actions you made, instead of recording the entire display as a video like most people do with other games, the file size of the demo .lmps are very small, which makes them very convenient to share. We have a whole demo recording subforum here at doomworld where people show off demos of themselves completing the game, or a single map in the shortest amount of time (Speedruns), or completing a map while also achieving 100% items, secrets, and kills on the fourth hardest skill level (UV-Max) or just showing a demo recording themselves playing a map for the very first time (First Demo Attempt, or FDA)

You can load the demos from the command line with source ports such as prBoom or chocolate Doom, but they cannot be played with ZDoom because of the various enhancements ZDoom has which makes the demos incompatible. PrBoom-plus is a source port that has received the most ZDoom like enhancements without ever breaking compatibility with these demo .lmps. I think ZDoom is capable of recording demos in it's own ZDoom format, but those aren't nearly as popular as original doom demo lumps.


If you get stuck in the game, here's a video that compiles demos of all 36 Doom levels, it's a little fast though, hence the title.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNnaUglHT4

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Superrpgman said:

btw, one question I asked remains unanswered.

"Anyway welcome to the Doom community! We tend to over analyze things here and we don't seem to have much tolerance for wayward opinions (I'm one to talk) but I'm sure you'll enjoy your involvement here anyway."

What do you mean by wayward thinking?

This is basically a pun at the Doomworld community, if you look at post hell or search any "Halo 3 vs Doom"(or any other more modern game) thread and you'll find some good examples :P Essentially, don't try to push opinions on people about specific doom ports, don't post about a "best" port because there is none(they all have their own uses) and finally try not to blatantly put things down, constructive criticism works fine if you have the facts to back it up.

I find it's less about your opinion and more about how you word it.

From what I can tell by your posts so far you won't have any issues here, though. I find that the people flamed typically have it coming to them due to not thinking before posting.

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