http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/11268918161853103
Next test run is up and it is five minutes faster! This time I stopped at the Abyss since it would be about the same from that point. There are a lot of changes based on things I found out and random battles are more strongly manipulated.
A big change is not getting Mariah. This leads to some creative battle strategy in Deceit. It probably helped that I have been playing strategy RPGs lately. Anyway, the fights worked out fairly well but are still quite a bit slower than tremor. Going solo also means more pacing to save up MP. On the other hand there is a lot of savings from magic and other dialogs, only ordering one person in battles where I trick the enemies into killing themselves and random battles will always have at least two enemies when I have a partner. I tried to add up both sides and it is close enough that I will need to try playing through with Mariah on the new route. One possibility is getting her to die earlier, maybe after Deceit.
Other big savings come from changing the route. In the initial grind I concentrate on saving gold for a +1 sword instead of buying several cheaper items. I make an otherwise unneeded stop at Serpent's Hold because the beggar there is by far the fastest. Taking the balloon to Cove instead of the whirlpool saves me from needing to get another ship. I spend a little less time sailing too because the encounter rate is so low. Shame and Despise are both faster from the entrance rather than the altar room, partly because I can get some random battles on the way to the entrance.
For random battles I always get just one enemy. I also favor enemies that die in one hit to the bow. The battles also have different setups; either party vs monsters across a field or a scattered setup that suggests an ambush though you still get to go first. I favor the scattered setup because it puts the enemy closer and my shot or spell doesn't need to travel as far. Using the bow instead of magic saves about half a second of dialog and getting the scattered setup also saves half a second or so. Every eight shot of the bow misses so I try to get that out of the way at convenient times. I keep the sword that I start with until Minoc so I can miss with the bow and fall back to that. With 49 encounters needed, this saves a ton of time over the course of the game.
To manipulate things it is easiest to walk on swamp. The RNG gets an extra poll to decide if you get poisoned or not, regardless of whether you are already poisoned. I need to run down my hp at the start anyway so I just get poisoned right away. Conveniently, swamps and forests also have the highest encounter rates. After leveling up it gets more difficult because spawning and movement of pirate ships uses the RNG.
There is a neat little tweak involving moongates. The moon phase changes every 8 time-steps (one step or the same time if you stand still). If you enter a town or otherwise leave the outer world, that 8-step counter resets. So to move the moon phase along when I want to use the moongate near Yew, I wait until just after a phase change to enter town. Same thing with setting up the shrine of spirituality.
Between the extra fights near Serpent's Hold and a few other changes that added random encounters I line up my Valor almost perfectly near the end. That's good, the fights with demons near the shrine of humility are not as efficient as it might seem. You don't need to wait, but it is difficult to get just one of them and you need 22 MP for energy. Even then the fight is not as fast as most of the battles I fight.
I have a few more ideas for when I start the final run besides even stronger luck manipulation. For one thing, I noticed that I never use ginseng. It is used in cure spell but even if I need that I start with enough. So next I'll be deciding whether or not to team up with Mariah and then I can start the real run on this game.
Edit: Oh yeah, about wind: A counter counts down while in the outer world and when it finishes the wind shifts. Or it doesn't shift if the new direction that gets picked is the same as the old one. The counter also gets reset to a random value. The wind spell sets the direction but the duration counter is random. So I tweaked my luck a little bit to get the wind going my way. It isn't practical to totally avoid using the wind spell but it is definitely possible to cut down how many times you need it and get some useful shifts.
