Wizardry 8 Retrospective, Continued

Tales of the Rampant Coyote's Jay Barnson continues his Wizardry 8 retrospective, this time covering his experiences in the town of Arnika.
Arnika is a lot more fun than my last session. There are people to talk to. There are abandoned houses to clear out. There's a rogue named Myles whom I found myself grouped with. Since I already had a rogue, it enabled me to turn my rogue into a bard. I'm not positive how long Myles will stay with our group, but for now, he's with us.

The big quest Myles had for us (though he's talked about robbing the bank) was to rescue some girl by a crashed space ship. We had to fight off a group of Savant Guards - robots with blades on their hands. Definitely challenging, and they don't scare easily. There were also some bandits - Higardi raiders - monkeying around outside the ship that we had to fight our way through. Fortunately, they do scare fairly easily. We had to use every bit of tactics I could come up with to defeat them without losing anyone in our group (I actually took them on before bringing Myles on board).

One bummer about fights in Wizardry 8 is that the enemy can flank and surround you, but you can't really do the same to them. You can, however, dictate a lot of the terms of the fight - maneuvering with your back to a wall (or better, a corner) to limit their frontage, force them to come to you while you pelt them with ranged attacks (especially magical area-effect attacks), and use temporarily disabling spells like fear spells or sleep spells to disrupt them from attacking.