Since there is a fair amount of interest in the Pokemon GC games, I thought I would start a discussion thread for planning a possible run of Colosseum.
From my current speedrun of Colosseum, which is close to finished, I am on target for a sub-8 hour run for snagging all Pokemon. That sounds like a lot for a TAS, and it is. With a TAS, there is obvious a lot of room for improvement coming from manipulating crits, Quick Claw for outspeeding faster Pokemon, move selection from TMs or Pokemon use, which Pokemon to purify and use, and so on.
As I have shown with my speedrun, getting Feraligatr gives you more than enough coverage for getting through the various parts of the game. Bite is great for the early fights, even as far as Realgem where I learned Hydro Pump. Slash with its high crit rate is not bad, and before purifying having Shadow Rush with its typeless base 100 attack pretty much rips through most things. As for Surf, it gives you an early boost in damage, and plus after purifying it allowed me to solo the Mt Battle section pretty much, dealing with Dakim handily and giving me some needed early exp.
I bought Blizzard for Feraligatr in The Under, and Earthquake was available after beating Ein for the first time. This helped me round out my coverage and take on Feraligatr's weaknesses easier - Ice for the Grass types, and Ground for the Electric types. As for the damage itself, I was lacking a bit in SpA (IV was around 20ish) but everything else was great. Manipulating the IVs of the starters and whatever else you want to use would be a good start inevitably. (Helping Hand support can come from Espeon and Plusle).
I'm not sure about how to manipulate the RNG from various methods I tried with the gamecube version, but I'm sure the accuracy, damage and IVs shouldnt be as hard as any other Pokemon games, in theory. Of course, this is Genius Sonority making the games and not Game Freak, so who knows what differences there are. I'm reminded of an incident where I couldnt get Umbreon to crit after well over 100 tries, so that suggests the RNG was having a bad cycle or something (base crit chance is 1/16, so I should have had around 6 crits in that time. Incidentally, Espeon performed 5 crits in that time within the same battle, which is just below average).
TASing also gives you greater flexibility about when to snag, even for an any% run sometimes snagging a Shadow Pokemon can be faster than defeating it (although this does mean you generally gain less exp overall, unless you have to refight the same trainer). For example, I left the snag of Suicune until the third Venus battle because it would be replaced by the ever-annoying Milotic, scaled up with the rest of the team and difficult to take down with Recover in its arsenal. Getting the Master Ball means I also didnt have to weaken Pokemon before capturing, and also gives me a free hit on whatever replaces the snagged Pokemon. And of course, you can duplicate any Pokeball including the Master Ball, as long as there is more than one ball type in the inventory.
Unfortunately I dont have a computer that can run this effectively yet, but I can at least use my own experience from doing a non-TAS run to help anyone willing to TAS this game, and possibly XD as well (although I am not running that yet, I may do so in the future).
