Can't you get two-shot bows in the ice and fire dungeons? Or is the problem that Neo-Dhaos absorbs ice/fire elements?
Regarding Klarth's Maxwell summon, while it's ordinarily very good I suspect it'll suffer from the same problem you mention regarding his Origin summon: if he's underlevelled then it may not do enough damage to compete.
if both Klarth and Chester aren't worth using, then they should be killed off ASAP if only to avoid having to page through "Chester leveled up!" messages at the end of fights. For the test run obviously not such a big deal, but they could be killed off against Volt by adjusting the party's formation.
In the second Dhaos fight, is it at all worthwhile enabling Fireball or Ice Needle on Arche? Why is she alive, anyway?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
If you want to truly understand how a game works, then there's really no substitute for reading the code. However, it can be a lot of work to find out what bit of code does what. Treating the code as a black box and just observing what different values do (especially if you poke in the values you want) can often be good enough.
For example, if you know what address the RNG is in, then you can set its value using cheats, and see how that affects things, which can quickly help you determine what values you need. In most games, you can also generate "future" RNG values simply by letting the game play for awhile and recording the values the RNG takes (I believe Lua scripts can register to be informed of when a given memory address changes, which will help). These two mean you can a) figure out what values you need, and b) figure out when they will occur. That's an awful lot of the work that goes into luck manipulation.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
He's just making a test run for now; the real run will have better item planning and, with luck, a full understanding of the RNG. Though I have to say these boss fights are pretty boss. Looks great, Vykan!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Hooray, this run is still alive! And man, those enemies do not have good survival instincts, do they? They keep wandering into the Handshake of Death!
Afraid I can't help you with your Gens question, but I wish you luck with the rest of the run!
Also, cripes Robot X has a lot of health!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
It seems clear that fight manipulation is going to be where most of the difficulty of this TAS is. Your overall strategy seemed fine to me, but the enemies don't always behave themselves. Par for the course for a test run, of course; the main thing for now is to nail down the route and what items need to be purchased.
There's a few times in these fights where you do running attacks while at relatively close range. This makes Cless run back to his original position after the attack. I suspect it'd be faster to walk up to the enemy soon and start doing standing attacks.
(It's a shame you don't have an option for full-manual control of Cless!)
Regarding those 5 fast hits, that seems to happen whenever Cless overlaps with another enemy. I can't remember if it only happens with flying enemies or not. I've definitely had it happen with normal play though, and it can be very helpful.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Random encounters are incredibly common in this game, and skipping them will save vast amounts of time. It's good to know how holy bottles work, because you're gonna need a lot of them. Figure a given random encounter takes at least 5s to resolve (from fade-in to escaping to fade-out), and a holy bottle lets you skip, at bare minimum, 2 encounters -- thus, any time it takes less than 10s to get a holy bottle, you're gaining time. Arranging the money to buy them all is gonna be tricky, though fortunately they aren't especially expensive, if I recall correctly.
In the time it takes a spell to go off, Chester can fire at least 3 times without having to pause the fight. The party's realtime DPS is way higher by having Chester along than by using a caster. That said, you'll still want to pick up at least Thunder Blade for Arche for the Pegasus segment.
Assuming you can arrange a steady supply of holy bottles, the mist rune shouldn't be needed. Mystical runes also probably won't be needed since I expect Cless's realtime DPS is much better than the casters' in most cases. But I believe there's a rune just lying around somewhere; certainly you shouldn't drop the 65000 on buying one. If nothing else, you'll probably want Arche casting for the Pegasus segment, to wipe out the trash fights before the boss.
If combat experience is split between party members, then I definitely think you'd be best off killing off all three casters for the majority of the game. The amount of damage they can contribute without having to pause the fight is simply not worth it in most cases. Sure, they can end random encounters fairly quickly, but you'll be skipping the vast majority of random encounters.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I was wondering about that myself. It doesn't seem like it would be needed.
The red clone of Lemeza is Shorn, his dad, who was lost in the ruins some time ago. He pops up from time to time.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
This is going to be awesome when it's done. Keep up the good work!
I am curious, though -- in the Graveyard of the Giants at about 6:05, why did you walk backwards before jumping off that ledge?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Does the fact that the SDA run played on Easy have any impact? I don't really remember what the difficulty select in Super Dodge Ball does, but I wouldn't be surprised if it affects enemy defense.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
"Takes damage to save time" is totally applicable here. If you didn't take the damage, you wouldn't have been able to end the movie at the point you did (at the very least you would have had to have moved out of the way of the bomb explosion). The time saved by taking damage is the time to the end of the game, not the end of the movie.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Depends on if you define the normal operation of the meat to be used to solve one puzzle or to be used in the field to distract monsters. :p
I still say the best rule for a 100% run is to be at maximum power at the end of the game (aside from remaining rupees/bombs). It's unambiguous and it gets everything the audience expects you to get. All of the comments on the previous run were basically "Why didn't you get X?" or "Well, I can kind of understand why you didn't get potions but it's still weird." Make the run the audience wants to see.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
So what was the question for, then? You're never going to use the potions in a TAS.
Honestly I think the best way to look at this is "the player should be at maximum power at the end of the game". That seems pretty unambiguous to me. It handles the potions -- you get them because they can be used for healing if, say, a human player decided to take over just before the end. Likewise, you get the meat again because it can be used to control enemy movement (it acts as a decoy, basically) even though the TAS player would never need it. And the magic shield is pretty obviously more powerful than the basic shield, so you get it too.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Why would you ever use potions instead of arranging for hearts/fairies as drops? The refill animation is horribly slow; IIRC watching hearts fill up costs more time than taking damage boosts saves.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The category is "No boss/miniboss", so any item that requires you to fight a boss is disallowed (so Varia, Gravity, Spacejump, Grapple, and Plasma are the standout missable items). Unassisted, you're allowed to fight the Bomb Torizo because you can't really do anything without bombs, but a TAS can skip that fight. Using X-Ray climb is I think technically outside the spirit of the challenge since you can just go out-of-bounds and get all the of the boss items anyway. But it's needed to get into Tourian so that the run can have a proper ending.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
In any event, how are we expected to tell if he used savestates or not? It's certainly possible to beat the game with only the first sword (as Baxter's post shows); I could readily believe that a skilled player could do it on console. That doesn't mean that your particular video is a clean, savestate-less run, but unless he does something that obviously requires TAS-like input precision it's hard to make a case that a given video was TASed.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The judges are not going to be experts on every game they judge, and it's not reasonable to expect them to be. They'll be looking for more general suboptimalities, as well as audience reception.
Ideally the TASer would find all existing information about making runs for the game (including checking on realtime speedrunning techniques), but sometimes they don't, or their research is simply incomplete. As a backup, the audience watching on the workbench can mention known improvements. If both of those fail (TASer didn't know about an existing trick, and audience didn't know either), then oh well, someone can make a more-optimal run and submit it.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
if the game has an ingame timer, measure by it. do SDA time for games that do not.
Are you suggesting that TASVideos universally use SDA timing? SDA's timing system makes more sense for human play, but TASVideos' timing system makes more sense for TASes. In particular, starting from power-on ensures that stuff like choosing the difficulty or skipping opening cinematics is done optimally, which is important for TASes but irrelevant for SDA speedruns.
Then of course there's also things like TASes that end input before the game actually ends (before SDA timing would end); we've had that argument a billion times already. I don't think that the current system here is likely to change.
In any event, I don't think it's unreasonable to note in a movie's description if it's been obsoleted by an SDA run, but as far as I'm aware this is a pretty rare occurrence (Ocarina of Time and ActRaiser are the only examples I can think of), so I don't think it's really worth changing the site code for.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I finally finished watching this. Nice work! It generally felt pretty tight even for a test run, and it's impressive how quickly you managed to tear through everything.
I do have one comment on the running shoes -- it seems like sometimes you'd use them to go e.g. down and then right, when it seems to me it'd be faster to just run normally on a diagonal. The running shoes make straight-line distances fast, of course, but I'm almost certain they're slower if you need to travel diagonally more than some minimum distance.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
For the pausing, I have to say I think the old version is better, mostly because it keeps the pause sound to one big "chunk" instead of playing it over and over again.
For the snake blocks, that's a tricky problem, and I don't know how to advise you. Good luck!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
