Submission #7421: ShesChardcore's NES Cyber Stadium Series - Base Wars in 01:25.84

This submission is for Base Wars, the NES baseball game where you play almost no baseball. Baseball is boring, so they jazzed it up with robots, weapons, and combat. This is more exciting and changes the game from "score more runs" to "kill 1/3 of the opposing team."

The fastest way to kill 3 enemies is to fight motorcycles as they are the weakest units and can be killed quickly in two fights. We also explicitly target the 2nd baseman, 3rd baseman, and catcher as once you round first it becomes a slow mess trying to manipulate anything other than that.

Lucky for us, Toronto has motorcycles at all those positions and are the ideal opponents. We use one of the Edit Teams because the leadoff batter is a tank with a gun which is also ideal for our strats.

The first key to the route is to hit the first pitch to the right resulting in a double. This forces the 2nd baseman to cover 2nd base. If we hit left, the shortstop covers 2nd and he's an annoying flybot with more health and we don't want to fight him. We hit an infield popup to the right, which is high enough to let us get to 2nd base in perfect time. Opening pitches are seeded by frame entry and luckily this one is one of the first ones.

Unlike real baseball where we would be out if the 2nd baseman tagged us, Base Wars shifts to a fight. If the runner loses the fight, he's out. If you win the fight, you're safe and can continue onward. There is a temporary health penalty when you start based on how far you are from the target base. This ticks down and wastes time (which is unavoidable later) but since we arrived basically right after the ball, we get a perfect start.

Robots have a total HP pool and a health bar. When the health bar is depleted, the fight is lost. Because of this, we want to knock it down as low as possible without actually winning, then get into a safe position to do a long charge up attack which results in a huge overkill. Basically we do this to knock their HP down under 80 in the first fight so we can destroy them quickly on the second fight. After we win at 2nd, we go on to third to fight the 3rd baseman, then past him we fight the catcher.

At this point all 3 bots are weak enough to be killed, and we start with the 3rd baseman. After the first kill the AI becomes more aggressive and "harder." Once he's down the 2nd baseman comes to retrieve the ball and we destroy him too. We finish out by destroying the catcher and win by forfeit.

I tried various unit and weapon combinations and gun/tank was the best by a good margin. The tank's charge move is fast and does good damage. I also experimented with other fight routes but again, it was inferior to 2b/3b/C. The edit teams also have more HP, so changing one of them to all motorcycles would be worse than just fighting Toronto.

slamo: Replaced movie with a 39 frame improvement...and judging!

slamo: It's kind of difficult to understand the strategy at first, but obviously you know a lot about how this game works and this definitely beats all known records. Accepting.

despoa: Processing...