First off, saving with no food (or little food) is a sure-fire way to render your character useless and to make you have to go through the headache of generating a new character. (Back when Ultima II was released, you had to use a new disc for each new character, and completely reformat the disc when the game saved a dead or nearly dead character.)

Since making a virtual diskette is a pain, here are a couple things you can do to make the opening game easier.

1. Play with the moongates to find the one that gets you to the US in 1990. Go to Hotel California (In San Antonio) and offer the clerk 0*100 gold. He is dim enough to accept this as a payment, and he will quickly raise all your stats.

2. Once you have become superhuman (or superdwarf, or superelf etc.) head back to the age you started the game in with the city in Italy. Go down past Italy to Africa and find the small town.

3. Enter the town. The first person you meet is a thief. Go ahead and clonk him. Don't feel bad, he's a thief who sells cheap stolen watches, and you really only knock him out since people in cities can't really be killed in U2. They always are regenerated.

4. After you clonk the thief, run south and leave town. If you do this immediately, the guards will not catch you.

5. Repeat many, many times. You will get enough money to buy a lot of food (he drops from 1-20 gold pieces each time you clonk him) and it's very easy to escape before the guards come. Of course there is no real AI in Ultima II, so the guards always forget about what you did the last time you were in town. After you clonk the thief many times, check your inventory.

6. Remember: thieves drop goodies, and this one's no exception. You will find many useful items including coins, blue tassels that let you hijack pirate ships, boots, cloaks, tri-lithiums, etc. Also, you can come back any time during the game and do it again.

Enjoy!

Two things here:

One, the clerk in the Hotel California that raises your stats. The trick with offering him "0" GP does work to raise one of your stats to 99, but you have to do this six times in all to raise all of your stats. You need to go up to him, offer 0 gold, then immediately [P]ass one turn and repeat the process. Do this six times and you'll be virtually unstoppable. (The way he picks which stat to raise is determined by how many steps you've taken; it's a predictable pattern that repeats after every six steps you take.)

Two, the easiest way to get food fast is to [S]teal it. The best place to do that is actually right there in your starting area, in the village of Le Jester (located in Africa in 1423 BC). Simply trudge on over to Alfred's Fish and Chips, stand outside the building (this is important) in front of one of the text tiles, and [S]teal in the direction of that tile. If your Dexterity score is high enough (and if you're a Thief class it should be) you have a high rate of success, and it takes a long time before the Guards notice your larceny. Even when they do, you can easily take a few steps to the east and exit the town with minimal risk, then re-enter and try again. Each time you steal successfully your Food meter goes up 100 points, and I've been able to routinely make off with 800-1,000 Food at a pop in this fashion.

Just need to point out, the offer 0 gold trick does NOT work with this version of the game. He will say "Alakazam!", but your stats do not increase.

That's odd... it worked for me.

Nice find! That looks like a bug introduced with the U2 Upgrade. I'll make sure that gets fixed in the next release. :)

Just to add to what's been said, the first part of the game is all about finding a blue tassel and a ship. Once you have this the rest of the game is a breeze. Think of the ships in this game like cruise liners with an endless free buffet of food, so you don't have to waste your own food. Cruise liners with cannons, which also helps. :)

It did seem to good to be true. I wondered a bit if it was a bug in the original -- or even intentional, as the manual talks about a way to get your stats up to 99. Thanks for confirming.