When does it end? How many planets are in the game?
The system generates random bases, so in theory, it never ends. In practice though, nothing last forever.Each base is identified by a sequential number that indicates the shape of the base and other factors such as the level of difficulty and which encounters to allow. The number has a maximum value of 65535 and that is the number of available bases. If you divide this number by the number of bases per mission, which is 11 when we include the space station, that makes 5957 missions.
Unfortunately, a bug in the map generator locks up Captive on base #1 of mission 2316. Although the last possible base to be generated is 5957, it is impossible to go beyond mission 2316 unless cheating to skip this base.
Note that this is for the Atari ST and Amiga version. It has been said that the PC version of Captive doesn't have more than 256 mission as it loops back to mission 1 when reaching mission 257.
I landed on the planet, but I'm surrounded with water!
When you land on a planet, you must make sure that the destination point is touching the dot on the planet. To make sure of that, you can look at the information box under the main view where it will read "Land-Levx" where 'x' is the planet number. If it doesn't say that, you will land on a tiny little island on the planet (lucky you!).
Do NOT touch that water because it causes enormous damage to the droids. By the time it takes for each droid to be damaged from touching water inside a base (a damage of 8 points), each droid is inflicted 7 hits of 20 damage points while touching water outside a base. That's 17.5 times more damage.
There's nothing to open the door
Shoot it, or punch it if you're low on ammunition.The lander bounces back when trying to land on the space station
In order to land on the space station, all bases of the current mission have to be blown up. Until then, a force field securs the space station and the lander will automatically return to the mothership when trying to land on it.I'm stuck on a planet of the PC version
The PC version of the map generator in Captive has a bug that will sometimes make a base impossible to complete. Oddly (but fortunately), this always happen at the beginning of the base. It has been suggested that loading the game in EGA mode instead of VGA will, for some unknown reason, often solve the problem. Once you have passed the problem, save your game and reload it using VGA to continue.
This has somewhat been proven by Cédric Avril who contacted me about planet 5 of mission 7. In his e-mail, he was asking me how to start the base since the only thing you could do when entering the base is to move one single square away. No doors, no panels, no lifting walls, no holes, nothing. After trying this same saved game on his laptop, he discovered a correct base. From this, we can conclude that the bases may vary between computers, but seem to remain the same on a single computer.
If you wish to see the problem mentioned above, click here to download 2 saved games for the PC version of Captive. Slot 0 has the bad labyrinth and Slot 1 has the good labyrinth. Same planet, same mission, different labyrinths. Thanks to Cédric for sharing those files!
There a tiny 's' next to the item I wish to use. What does it mean?
You do not have enough skills to use the item. You need to gain experience
points and transfer
that experience to the skill.
Why do I get a screen "Link Broken"?
Nobody knows and the programmer doesn't remember why, as he says "I think this was just a gimmick... I used to add test cards to my games,so for a change I opted for the Amiga ERROR message :) ". I guess this mystery will never be solved.
Michaël provided a possible explanation, one that the programmer does not support; "I remember playing the demo of Captive on Atari ST and after a little moment playing it, this message box appeared. When I clicked on the left mouse button, the game ends. It was the end of the demo. So, as I can see, this message was originally in the demo version and wasn't removed in the original one." Indeed, in the demo version, you do get a screenshot that looks like that, but the message is not identical. You decide!
It could also be to prevent droids' electricity to completely drain in case the player left without hitting pause, considering this "feature" an automatic pause.
Will there be a version using today's technology?
A project called "FreeCap" was created in September 2006 with the idea of redoing Captive using today's technology under the GNU license. The project was announced on SourceForge and it never went any further than an announcement.Captive's programmer is also against the remake of Captive; "I am not keen on anyone doing a remake, this goes against copyright and future plans I may have with it."