Meritous is one of my favorite open-source games. It is programmed in C using the SDL. Because the game is open-source, I could obtain much information from the code.

Strategy guide

There are three skills:

Shield: the size of you shield
Circuit charge rate: the speed of which your psi circuit charges
Circuit recharge rate: the speed of which your psi circuit recharges after a psi shot

The three skills can be upgraded for an increasing price, dependent on current skill level and mode. For this formula and prices, see below. Increasing shield level is more expensive then a circuit (re)charge upgrade. Circuit charge and circuit recharge upgrade cost as much. The maximum skill level is 24. The Agate knife takes all your skill levels to 24.

The maze is generated at random, so there is no need to post a map
You do not need waste time to pick up crystals: a crystal generator gathers all crystals in the maze in one room
When you have enough crystals to upgrade one of your stats (Reflect shield, circuit charge, cicuit refill), these words are highlighted
A good tactic is to fight monsters until one of your skills is highlighted. Then find a teleporter to the main starting room. Use the crystal generator there and buy your upgrade
Collect all the non-essential artifacts first. When you encounter a compass, the dark-grey arrow points to a non-essenstial artifact. When there is no grey arrow, you have found all non-essential artifacts
When you finish a boos room, save your progress before opening the chests. In one chest, there will be an artifact. In the others, there might be a shield/charge/refill improvement. Wait with collecting these until you cannot make these upgrades by gathering crystals anymore. In other words: a level one shield upgrade costs only 50 crystals, a level 10 upgrade about one million, so let those upgrades ripen
Each time you kill a boss, all monsters get tougher. Kill the bosses after exploring all rooms
Clear all rooms to obtain the Agate knife. Kill the three bosses last, so that at the third boss, you will obtain it. You do not need to kill all creatures in the dungeon
You do not need to kill all creatures in the dungeon
There is no cheat-mode (it is commented out of the source code)


shield price = ((100 - 50*m) * s) + ((5*2^s) * (5 - 2*m))

s = current shield level

m = mode = 0 for wuss mode, 1 for normal mode

Shield level	Wuss mode	Normal mode mode
0	15	25
1	80	150
2	160	300
3	270	500
4	440	800
5	730	1,300
6	1,260	2,200
7	2,270	3,900
8	4,240	7,200
9	8,130	13,700
10	15,860	26,600
11	31,270	52,300
12	62,040	103,600
13	123,530	206,100
14	246,460	411,000
15	492,270	820,700
16	983,840	1,640,000
17	1,966,930	3,278,500
18	3,933,060	6,555,400
19	7,865,270	13,109,100
20	15,729,640	26,216,400
21	31,458,330	52,430,900
22	62,915,660	104,859,800
23	125,830,270	209,717,500
24	419,432,800	251,659,440


circuit (re)charge price = ((100 - 50*m) * c) + ((5*(2^c)) * (5 - (2*m)))

c = current circuit (re)charge level

m = mode = 0 for wuss mode, 1 for normal mode

Circuit (re)charge level	Wuss mode	Normal mode mode
0	10	20
1	60	120
2	120	240
3	200	400
4	320	640
5	520	1,040
6	880	1,760
7	1,560	3,120
8	2,880	5,760
9	5,480	10,960
10	10,640	21,280
11	20,920	41,840
12	41,440	82,880
13	82,440	164,880
14	164,400	328,800
15	328,280	656,560
16	656,000	1,312,000
17	1,311,400	2,622,800
18	2,622,160	5,244,320
19	5,243,640	10,487,280
20	10,486,560	20,973,120
21	20,972,360	41,944,720
22	41,943,920	83,887,840
23	83,887,000	167,774,000
24	335,546,240	167,773,120

External links

Meritous homepage

Go back to Richel Bilderbeek's games page.

Go back to Richel Bilderbeek's homepage.

(C++ game) Meritous

Strategy guide

External links