Marvel Ultimate Alliance - Starting A New Game

Starting A New Game in Marvel Ultimate Alliance (for PC), Turning Off Autospend, and General Hints

This is one of our Marvel Ultimate Alliance walkthrough / cheats / mods posts. For an index of all Marvel Ultimate Alliance posts, click here.

Starting a New Game and Turning Off Autospend
Before you start a new game, you may want to consider modding it a bit, or doing certain things to prevent having to replay the entire game from the start.

1. Adding Colossus and Moon Knight
1. You can download a mod to add these two heroes, from here or here.
2. More complex mods to add or change your available hero roster can be found at MarvelMods.com.
2. Turn off AutoSpend
• When you gain XP, all characters get some XP, even if they are not one of the four actively being played. So, they can level up and gain Skill Points.
• MUA defaults to having the "AutoSpend" option on at the start of the game. This means the game will decide how to allocate all available Skill Points for a character. You can turn this off by inspecting a character and pressing the Space Bar on the skills tab to toggle AutoSpend.
• If you start a "Hard" game (available after completing the game once), you can choose either the characters you already have, or level 30 characters. They also start with the AutoSpend option on but you do have access to the hero roster at the very start of the game.
• When you first start a game, you do not have access to the hero roster.
• You cannot therefore access characters other than the four you start with (Captain America, Thor, Spider-Man, Wolverine) to turn off AutoSpend.
• You can rush through to the first SHIELD Access Point before anyone gains a level, but this is actually quite hard to do since you have to stop to defeat Scorpion and you may gain enough XP to level everyone up.
• Also, any characters that get unlocked later will have Skill Points spent for them already.
• To access the hero roster from the start of the game, find the file ...\scripts\act1\heli\heli1\heli.py and change the line that says setRecallActive("FALSE" ) to setRecallActive("TRUE" ). You can now use the Portal from your game menu to go to Stark Tower and use the SHIELD Access Point there.
3. Unlocking Characters
• There are various characters that are normally unlocked over the course of the game, or that require a lot of tedious replaying of the game. You can skip all that with either a cheat code or do it right from the start by adding the following lines to the end of the file ...\scripts\act1\heli\heli1\heli.py

# unlock various characters
unlockCharacter("Blade", "" )
unlockCharacter("BlackPanther", "" )
unlockCharacter("DareDevil", "" )
unlockCharacter("DrStrange", "" )
unlockCharacter("NickFury", "" )
unlockCharacter("GhostRider", "" )
unlockCharacter("SilverSurfer", "" )

• If you made changes to ...\scripts\act1\heli\heli1\heli.py, you will need to go back to the starting map to run the script again.

General Hints
We have hints everywhere throughout our walkthroughs. These are just some hints that don't belong anywhere else.

• Don't use your Popup attack unless you need to get away from your target for some reason or you can attack them while they are airborne. Otherwise you have to wait till they drop and in the meantime it's troublesome to switch targets. Also, not all attacks and powers will hit targets that are airborne.
• Once you have a power fully charged, you cannot be knocked down although you can be pushed around by an attack.
• Watch for respawning containers. Some respawn every time you load the level. If you are stuck somewhere with no healing but access to a SHIELD Xtraction Point, save and reload and look for these respawning containers. Smash them and hope for health orbs.
• After a while, an area you visited in a previous Act respawns except for puzzles and unique items like stat bonuses. You can get quick cash from visiting a respawned area that has a few Weapon Caches (the chests). You can also fight some bosses again (like Ultimo 2, for example) and get the Reputation increase from them again.
• When upgrading your outfit, choose carefully which one you want and go for Defense first.
• Don't spend SHIELD Credits on skills unless you badly allocated your points and want to get one skill but don't have any Skill Points for it.
• You can buy a skill level when you are allowed to upgrade the skill but don't have enough Skill Points to do so.
• Each time you buy a skill, subsequent purchases cost more -- sometimes tens of thousands more, so think carefully about what you are buying and who you are buying it for.
• Once you have unlocked the powers you use most, which will generally be just one or two types of attacks, you can start focussing on developing only those. And once those are at the maximum level, you really don't need any more skill points.
• An outfit has 3 powers and will cost 135,000 SHIELD Credits to fully upgrade. If you find some of the solo simulations really hard, you will probably want to upgrade the outfits for those characters having a hard time -- and they may not be the ones you are playing the campaign with. Overall, SHIELD Credits are better spent on outfits. Although you can farm for credits by doing simulator missions, it's tedious.