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Posted: 8/22/2008 6:28 PM
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TheAxeMan
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I agree, the key rooms would definitely be useful for dungeons. However, we need to consider all the options from getting from one stone to the next: -The exit past the stone takes you out of the dungeon. From there you can cast Gate to get back to Britain. But maybe in some cases there's reason to walk somewhere? -You could go back down to the key altar and go for another stone. -You could die, probably by touching an orb. You'd end up by Lord British and you could jump back into Hythloth. This might get you some useful stats. The effect on gold could be good or bad. Popping out of the dungeons may be good if we need to stop by towns and build up virtue. We can always get back to the key altars quickly by warping to Britain and jumping into Hythloth. Squish and Tremor are both likely useful, but I don't know if it would be great in combination. Squish damages all enemies by half and Tremor kills a random number of enemies. If we get one manipulation wish each battle then we'll probably want to use it to have tremor kill everything. Squish would probably be followed by some cleanup attacks, maybe with quick. I guess it really depends on how much MP we have too. If we get multiple party members and pump stats then we could cast multiple tremors in a row and kill all enemies. One thing I'd like to figure out about multiple party members is how they affect random battles when you leave them in the British hostel. If that cuts down the number of enemies in random battles, then it might be useful to put together a party for the dungeon part of the game and then say goodbye afterwords. As far as the Tremor flag, I'm pretty sure about it. I did a memory poke to change just that one bit and that was enough. I also wandered around enough to see it on the list after talking to him, though I had talked with others too.
Posted: 8/22/2008 10:06 PM
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Twisted_Eye
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Mmm. Oh is that how Tremor works? I thought I remembered it just doing a whole lot of damage. Yeah if it just one shots things then nevermind my addition. Good thought about party gathering for the dungeon section, I wonder whether the extra steps will make up for it...maybe just picking up the Mage if Paladin or the Druid if Mage would be good enough? In my notes, I figured that having Trinsic be the last stop before briefly walking into the nearby Destard would be good: There's a treasure corridor right on the path that has 19 chests in it, and just popping back into it after the battle room that you'd have to take to keep going down to the key rooms will reset all of them! Here's what I figured out: DESTARD: Money 2000+, Red Stone COURAGE COVETOUS: Orange Stone COURAGE SHAME: Purple Stone TRUTH WRONG: Green Stone TRUTH DECIET: Blue Stone HYTHLOTH: Exit, Balloon then blank space that I hoped to eventually fill Cove:candle if not yet? SHRINE COMPASSION SERPENT'S SPINE: White Stone DESPISE: Yellow Stone LOVE: KEY HYTHLOTH TRUTH: KEY SHAME COURAGE: KEY HYTHLOTH: Exit, Balloon is reset CODEX SHRINE: land outside get boat SEA: Bell, Skull ABYSS: use bookbellcandleskullstones Win game And that was my plan. Note that when you die, boats and balloons don't travel to Brittania with you. If you start as Mage, it is impossible to get the Black Stone at the very start of the game :( So working that in will require timing. You could just gate to Moonglow just before double new moons grab the stone gate out but it'd've been nice to have been done an easier way. Yeah I believe that the number of enemies in battle only depends on the number of people you have at the time, and your level determines their strength but it's worth a test. Good that you won't need Fungus. Manroot is easy from Buccaneer's Den just gotta gets da money. Might as well get 99 of the other reagents while there. The Treant is great for Justice Honor Spirituality and Humility and is quickly repeatable--the Flame in Yew that speaks is a quickly repeatable Honesty booster. Compassion and Sacrifice can be spread throughout the run (oh there's a beggar/nurse in town let's pop in) and Valor will just have to happen as it goes. Main problem now is just figuring out the route! Looootsa testing now augh.
Posted: 8/23/2008 6:08 AM
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Twisted_Eye
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I couldn't get to my computer, so I played this game on my Wii's NES emulator. Made a paladin, sold his Chain mail and barely bought a Bow (if you sell at half price or lower, four virtues improve, the only one of which matter is Sacrifice--which also seemed to improve from some of my random battles so that's a good thing to find out), popped into Destard and was destroying random battle enemies easily at one shot each. Valor up! Got to level 4 really quickly this way, so pirate ships aren't a problem with this path. Problem arose when I tried to do the treasure loop--the treasure wouldn't respawn. I tried to go down a ladder and return, but I didn't have enough herbs to use Heal and the monsters finished me off. Even tried reloading the save states and going through the key rooms to find a working fountain, only to get poisoned and die. So anyway point is that making a treasure loop respawn requires more than just fighting one battle room. If going up and down a ladder does the job then fine, but if you have to go all the way into another dungeon and back through a key room then we have lots more route planning to do, augh. okay I tested and going up and down a ladder doesn't bring treasure back. Now to test for going into and out of a key room...and then into and out of another dungeon...augh Okay, just entering a key room is enough to cause a treasure respawn. I'll assume that using Exit to leave the dungeon does the same, too, pff I'll have to check if entering a Stone room does it, too. So anyway, now I'll have to measure the paths there to find a decent enough loop. At first glance, Shame's 6th floor looks good--two stairs and just one fight to worry about. Using Exit to respawn works best in Wrong, but that's half the chests gained and unless herbs are acquired it can only be used 6 times. My time for work is up for tonight, BUT I'm beginning to think that gathering partners and selling their equipment is looking profitable...:/ --haha nevermind that even; selling the starting equipment of all 8 partners is only 2614 (half that if you don't want to lose Sacrifice virtue) and almost half of that comes from the Paladin, with Shamino and Geoff the only other ones worth a darn. I'd say augh again but I already sound like Charlie Brown or something --edit: path update: don't go into Trinsic. Go to Paws and get 90 of all 6 reagents and then go to Trinsic--after using Fire and Missile to win a couple random battles and gathering 100gp or more from the chests, we can sell the Sword and Chain at full (sorry, sacrifice virtue) to buy a Bow and a +1 Sword, which does 50-55 damage to enemies, enough to one shot the creatures (like the phantom sword/shield creatures) that the Sword alone couldn't. Go into Destard, hit the money loop, feel up the two Balls the floor underneath to gain 10MP, get the stone and exit through the back. Then reenter, hit the money loop and the orbs (Max MP is now like 30 or 40 or something, might need more orbs to cast Gate with) and go to the key room. Get the other stones and stuff. (How much gold exactly do we need again? Just two times through the loop gave me the 2000 needed for a Key. If so we can skip the whole exit-reenter part and find more orbs elsewhere, like Hythloth). Balloon to Vesper for the key, and then...path out from there. Sounds like a reasonable start? Only problem was that I popped into Moonglow and the Mage didn't think I had enough virtue to be worth joining (stupid lying to the blind reagent seller and ripping him off of a couple thousand golds! I wonder if buying just one ash honestly would be enough to pump it back up haha)...
Posted: 8/25/2008 4:35 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Looks like you figured out the dungeon treasure respawning. Indeed, you need to either exit the dungeon to the outer world or go into the key altar room. That makes it much more difficult to get treasure from dungeons. Also, getting to the treasure usually involves getting past some powerful rooms of enemies. If you get to the bottom of shame, there's only one room of enemies between the key altar and the treasure. Unfortunately, it's packed with dragons and hydras, the toughest enemies in the game. One thing to consider is that if you could put them to sleep you could just walk by. Then 22 chests! If this is possible, we could buy all our herbs legitimately, saving tons of time building virtue. I believe you have honor and sacrifice switched. This is true in some of your other posts as well. Winning a battle raises valor and honor by one point each. So the big challenges are still valor, compassion and sacrifice, all of which have only one way to get raised. If you do the math, that means we need to give blood 9 times, give to beggars 10 times and win 49 random battles. The blood and beggars may not be bad if we can figure out a good way to reset the flag that lets things work again. Power cycle does NOT work but moongates seem to have an effect. Also, you talked about touching the orbs in destard to raise MP. But they only give strength and I believe you need to raise int to get more mp. That means you need to be in deceit, wrong, shame or hythloth. When you get people to join it looks like they have some virtue requirement. But there's also a limit by your level. The number of people that will join you is the same as your level. So at level 4 you can get a full party of 4. It's time to reveal how this game randomizes things. There is a type of linear feedback shift register in $0036 to $0039. $0036 is the value that's actually used for things like damage and gold from chests. So that's what you want to memwatch. However, it always seems to do an update before getting the random value so it's hard to tell from it. When you are walking around, the LFSR cycles once a frame. But when the menu comes up it stops. Unfortunately, the menu comes up on a 16 frame rule which means that we can only effectively change luck every 16 frames. In battle it doesn't change at all except when a value is used for something. This is bad, it means that the level of luck manipulation possible is similar to Final Fantasy rather than Dragon Warrior. So don't assume that you can make the enemy miss every time or do much of anything with a low probability. But we should be able to manipulate well enough to make sure the first round of tremor takes out a larger number. When you enter the menu to open up a chest, look at $0036. Take that value and multiply by 2. Subtract 256 if it overflows. Take the remainder after dividing by 99 and add 1 or 2. That's how much gold you get. Because it's a shift register, it's hard to predict at a glance how your luck will change after a certain number of frames. But it's not difficult to do programmatically. edit: Here is how the timers work that prevent you from doing good things repeatedly too fast to get virtue: When you do one of these timed things, it starts a counter value in one of the memory bytes around $68E0 to $680F. If you memwatch this, it becomes clear how to turn this to our advantage - the counter starts out at 16 and goes down one every step in the outer world. At 0 you can do whatever it was preventing you from doing. Note that this memory location is in the WRAM, the savegame battery, so saving and power cycling will not affect it. Anyway, this helps get compassion and sacrifice faster. All you need to do is leave town and walk 16 steps. It's still annoying but this does shrink the bounds on the problem. Now we just need a better way to build valor... Here are some counter locations: -Beggar - 68e3 -Sell weapon or armor - 68ea -Buy herb - 68eb -Give blood - 68ec -Talk to Hawkwind - 68e2 As you noticed, some things don't have any restraint. In particular, we have the reaper in Lord British's Castle that gives 5 to justice, honor, spirituality and humility and the flame in Yew that gives 6 honesty. So for these five, the answer is clearly to use those. Those five virtues cover the penalties for selling weapons at higher price, shorting the herb seller and even opening chests in towns and castles. So it seems that there's no reason not to go crazy with all of those early on. There is a ghost in Jhelom near the rune of Valor that gives you 5 Compassion. However, afterwords it disappears and will never reappear. The flag that gets set for this is packed in with the spell availability flags that are set permanently.
Posted: 8/25/2008 10:42 AM
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Twisted_Eye
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*Turns out that if you just go through the dungeons and get the stones at once, there are enough chests in the three or four side rooms throughout that could be manipulated to give about 6000 gold pretty easy, which is enough to be a key and the strongest bow a Paladin can use, which'll do roughly 45 damage per shot, making battles after you level up for the pirate ships remain a breeze. *Oops I think you might be right about Honor and Sacrifice being reversed, I'll have to fix that! That explains it *I'm in the middle of a path test semi-TAS, and the two orbs in Destard each raised my MP by 5 noticably without raising my INT--that confused me too but hey no complaints here! *Yeah I know about the level limit--I was just baffled because I've NEVER had the first party member refuse me straight out! You'd think I smelled too much of dragon crap from my adventuring or something, MARIAH. *Awesome! Randomization info! You amaze me at your finds. Yeah I know how much of a pain the in-battle non-manipulation problem is--I did some looking into of a TAS for AD&D: Pool of Radiance and it had the same problem; very discouraging, but here it won't be much of a problem. Only monsters that have given me a problem yet in non-tas play were the ones that put me to sleep. *16 steps to reset the counter? Sounds like primo-Valor boosting material with random battles! Three birds with one stone if the right area can be found. Not so ugly, in the end --Exploring the gold's randomness more: To make it easier on myself I figured out how the values fluctuate as per your instructions, backed up by tests. For every one value it increases, gold increases by 2. Starts at 0, goes to 49 for 98, and then back to 0 gold at 50. At 100 it goes back to 0. At 128, though, it jumps back to 0, so that loop can only get up to a max of 57 gold (127). This repeats all the way up to 255 for 57 gold. So the odds of getting more than 57 gold is lower by almost half! Jerks. To add to counters: 68e1 -- How many steps you have left to take until you can meditate again Starts at 60 times the number of cycles you meditate for (obviously, one cycle will do). Works like the other counters, so overworld hiking is what relaxes you enough to meditate again.
Posted: 8/26/2008 2:17 AM
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Twisted_Eye
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The Valor problem has been defeated: In front of the shrine of humility are squares that create battle when stepped on. Normally, you blow the horn to shoo these demons and devils away. However, if you instead fight here and win, you *do* gain a valor point! When the battle is over, you are shifted safely one square north--and you can step back on that square immediately to call forth battle, victory rewarded with another point in Valor! No more having to wait for the random counter to surpass 255, providing that the Shrine of Humility is one of the last things you do. However, what this means is that the magically inclined partner of mine will need a long distance weapon, and unless I can give the Druid a level or two (or make her feel up a couple Balls) that means I'll need another 6800 gp for a wand! I wonder how easy it would be to buy a crapload of Oils (or, more accurately, Molotov Cocktails) or if I should settle for a sling... Actually, if this is the main way that I'll rack up the valor points, then I could probably pick up the Mage AND the Druid, giving the latter a Bow or XBow to make these battles fly by--The enemies are forcibly demons and devils (some of the strongest in the game), and their numbers are always at least six or seven. Hmm! Having four party members with bows would be fantastic for sea travel, which also is somewhat unaffected by having the extra characters. Paladin, Mage, Druid, Ranger, for lots of Heal and lots of Bow damage? That sounds devastating... Suddenly, having two or three characters for the starting dungeon sequence sounds better, if only to keep the hero from falling asleep to the eye of the Beholders! I'm almost done with my test video. I discovered this juicy tidbit as I was getting ready to finish the game--I just realized that I forgot to get the yellow stone. Durr. I figure now that with this path, I could just add that stone back i--oh wait, I need to get the keys anyway. Ha! oops. Well I'll still finish the video from here but the path will deviate from it. Beginning a run worthy of publication is in sight!
Posted: 8/26/2008 3:55 AM
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Twisted_Eye
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http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1194553117/Ultima%20-%20Quest%20of%20the%20Avatar%20%28U%29.fcm K, it's done. Two and a half hours long--the actual TAS could probably be shortened to a little over an hour. This run WILL desync at the 8 Partners battle in the final level of the abyss--I ran out of herbs to do heal, and they just owned my ass. That battle's going to need either a good Tremor or an Energy backed by Quick. So anyway, I activated a cheat right before the battle to permanently set 687B to 255 so that nothing could kill me, so anyone who attempts to watch this will need to remember that. And don't turn it on at any time before that or I'm sure the run will desync. Still, I think it went rather well! There are definitely going to need to be some strong changes in the hows and whats but that's why I did this .fcm in the first place. So now: Should we pick up four Bowmen for the party? Just the Mage and give her the Wand? Probably the former. Pick up the Mage for easy Gate and Tremor and just give her a sling. Paladin should still get the +1 Bow, though, for the Abyss. Unless the X-Bow can one shot some of the same creatures and only require one more hit on some of the stronger creatures--it might be a worthy trade off, considering the amount of treasure hunting that will already be required. Never made it into the abyss before, the puzzles there were very impressive! Man I love this game even more now.
Posted: 8/26/2008 11:46 AM
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LagDotCom
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I'm looking forward to this one. I did some preliminary planning for it a while back, but you have surpassed that. A little over an hour? Can't wait. :)
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Posted: 8/26/2008 3:10 PM
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grazzt
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Wow, very good for a first run, Ive also been looking forward to this for a while. Maybe consider building up your valour more before leveling up? The pre-level up fights are much easier, I see you got lots of liches, etc, while if you fight at level 3 you will get much easier and faster fights. (or if possible abuse the RNG so all random fights are "easy" fights, dunno if that can be accomplished). Or at least delay leveling up? Dunno if this screws up other things though Hitting B while talking to the reaper in LB castle is the same as moving down and selecting no. nothing major, but will improve a little. :) It sucks that the book and avatar weapon are in the same castle, if it was the armor you could get both at once, as I think the armor has its advantages in the Abyss (would definitely save on heal spells). The avatar weapon compared to what you have now is not really worth getting. I really dont think you should change your party, as you just got a little unlucky to run out of herbs, if you manipulate things a little better (for fights, etc), you will have enough herbs at the end there. Might want to consider buying a sling for Mariah, would at least help in some of the fights you have to do, even if just a little. (and save some herbs as well) Im totally impressed though. :) keep it up. (I did a solo shepherd non TAS run, its on youtube, took me just under 4 hours to do it)
Posted: 8/26/2008 3:18 PM
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LagDotCom
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Might I also suggest you use FCEUX to record the next run? The more people who jump to FM2, the better. :) Watching now.
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Posted: 8/27/2008 4:01 AM
(Edited: 8/30/2008 5:50 AM)
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Twisted_Eye
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FCEUX is a good idea. grazzt: Many of those things were simply because I wasn't putting any effort into TASing this, with the exception of save stating for obvious reasons, and testing the treasure huntin'. The herbs will most likely not be as much of a problem in the full run since they'll be much better managed (and I won't be using Light so that'll save a few Ashes). Worse comes to worse, though, if nothing else I can snag more in Buccaneer's Den, like I did with Silkweb in the run. As far as fighting more random battles early on is concerned, yeah, that's a good idea. It can perhaps be manipulated to get random battles MORE often (now THAT'S something you don't hear everyday on a TAS board). Still, I unfortunately believe that a third of the game's Valor increases will come from that area right in front of the Shrine of Humility. It would make sense, then, to use the deathwarp as late as possible into the run; however, the Castle Brittania is where you get 1)Tremor, 2)the Rune of Spirituality, 3)the Reaper, and 4)easy access to the Balloon through Hythloth. So I'll have to go here before I go to Moonglow to actually 'learn' Tremor and Gate, which are great to get as EARLY as possible, so that's a nice little balancing act. Since the deathwarp can be done anywhere in the world at anytime, it allows for some creativity. Perhaps getting the Rune of Valor and then dying on those damage squares to save myself the long trip back out, for example. This game is amazingly flexible while being sickeningly rigid. Thanks for the support! I would think that a Shepherd would be nice to watch--using Shepherd would qualify this TAS as 'Plays on Hardest Difficulty' for sure! I found another counter: 68E7. This starts at 100 and counts down every dungeon step. It's Light! When this is positive, you can see. Sadly, however, the run desyncs during the second dungeon battle with this cheat on--that means no easy way to see where the party is going while making/watching a TAS of the game. Would've been a neat touch to add to the resulting avi, perhaps but alas and alack.
Posted: 8/27/2008 7:39 AM
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TheAxeMan
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The shrine of humility is a good idea for maxing valor. If strong enough at that point the enemies aren't hard. But it's still a limiting factor. Especially because if we can get valor quickly we could use the skull to plow through the dungeons. I don't think shrine of humility will be fast enough to allow that. Ok, I zipped through your run. Very interesting. It looks like with one person there are 1-3 enemies in random groups but with two you get 2-6. So if you could always manipulate only 2 then it's all right to have multiple people. Otherwise I think it's crazy to have two people for most of the game. In general, I believe the formula for number of enemies is N to 3*N where N is number of people in your party. Need to figure out more about this. The dungeon fights in rooms with lots of tough enemies take a lot of time and are very painful. To really rub it in, you don't get valor. But you can escape without losing anything. Here's my idea for a solo mage run: Start at Moonglow. Steal herbs and maybe chests in Moonglow. Moongate to Britain. Walk to Minoc and get the rune. Walk to Vesper. If there's not enough gold to get the key, steal more chests. This would be a great time to get random battles in to get more gold. Now walk or gate to Trinsic. If possible get the paladin and sell his stuff for 1000 gold. Farm the 10 chests repeatedly until there's enough for the wand, or close to it. Go back to Britain. [ditch the paladin if he joined] Get the rune, learn tremor and max out with the reaper. Go to hythloth and the balloon. Take the balloon to everywhere it's necessary to fly. That means Cove and Serpent's spine, but maybe some other locations on the way. Hit Buccaneer's den too, refreshing the herb collection and picking up mandrake. Get the wand too. Now get back to Moonglow somehow to learn the spells. This might also be a good time to grab book of truth. After this we can assault the dungeons much more easily and not worry about side paths for gold. At some point after getting 400 exp, use death-warp to Lord British and get the levelup. Level 5 as in the test run is a waste as it makes the random battles harder. After getting all the keys, grab whatever other runes and items are needed and meditate for avatarhood. Eventually it will be necessary to get a ship and sail to the last few: the bell, horn and shrine of humility. There use the effect to fight enough enemies to pad out valor. Visit shrine of valor last. Then sail to abyss and finish up.
Posted: 8/27/2008 11:19 AM
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grazzt
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Im still amazed on how little wasted time there is (minus the errors that are easily fixable, walking into walls, etc), I thought there would be a lot more. Ever consider the druid instead of Mariah? Yes theres the loss of MP, but if you get Jaana a simple bow, the fights might even go faster, and youre going up to talk to Flamis at some point anyways. Maybe even have both of them. Quick + your +1 bow, Jaana Bow and Mariahs magic/sling could make battles go much faster. So you are planning on doing the Humility fights instead of walking around on Valours Island? I guess you just have to figure out how many fights you have to do to optimize it perfect... not easy eh? ;) I wonder which dungeon fights it will be possible/faster just to walk to exit instead of fighting if nothing is lost by running.. I just pointed out the B button thing 'cause I wanted to sound like I knew something. :) And Auto in fights will always do hand to hand if theres a monster adjacent to you, another thing that could save some frames. :) Anyone not named Katrina or Geoff (and maybe Julius, if he cant cast heal from the beginning) should be doing the dungeon chests in the dungeons, getting gold just from stealing and random fights will take too long, I found that out in my solo Katrina run. Even a solo Mage with just a sling and heal should be able to handle the dungeon.
Posted: 2/3/2009 10:21 AM
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Twisted_Eye
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After over five months of stagnation, I am reserving this post for revealing the final test-run before the full TAS is made. The path in this version is nearly complete, and it was made to be 80% TASlike--turboing was used, a couple oopses that took less than 100 frames to fix were left in, etc., but mainly this test-run is a giant taste of what the final run will look like. I discovered so many more things during this that I'm very hyped to be getting this close to the beginning of the final stretch! At the 32 minute mark (!), I'm now entering the dungeons w/white stone in hand, and I won't leave until I have all of the stones and keys. I have 3 pieces of avatarhood, the rest are at 99 except valor, and after the dungeons are completed it's simply a matter of grabbing the two shrines in the northeast, the black stone, the items at sea, the shrine of humility and the rest of the valor points, a trip to Jhelom and its nearby shrine, and then a stop off at the shrine of justice not too far off course to finish it up for the Abyss! I used the start of your plan, TheAxeMan, to develop this path, but of course it's far from set, it all may change if we come up with any ideas. Thanks for the help so far, all!
Posted: 2/6/2009 6:23 AM
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Twisted_Eye
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Posts: 632
Location: Seattle, WA
http://thatdenny.googlepages.com/Ultima-QuestoftheAvatarU.fm2 Here it is, my mostly TAS-ish final testrun through the game. I stopped after 74 minutes, since the run is just some boating, some fighting, a couple of shrines, and the Abyss, and it'll look just like it would in the final TAS. Don't feel like I want/need to do that extra work. Anyway, I discovered so much more during this testrun. The path is pretty much set, with some overworld fidgeting. When I actually gate to Moonglow will depend on what the moons are doing after I exit the dungeons. If I have to wait a long time, I may put off getting the Book in the Lyceum until then. I need to do a certain test--get the sextant from Vesper and use it to find the exact coordinates of the places I need the balloon to get to and carve out a quickest path that way. I'm probably going out of my way to go to Lyceum first but that's just what the wind was already doing when I hopped in. Plus, I should be in the balloon as little as possible because it stops the random battle counter from increasing. Manipulating the random battle counter is an interesting process. Every type of tile has a different range that it can increase the counter by, and it seems to go slower when standing still. However, sometimes choosing to walk onto a Plains tile instead of a Lumpy tile will make it go up more, and USUALLY it doesn't have an effect. Checking out all of these combinations during every walking trip will need to happen, though, because maxing out the counter as OFTEN as possible is highly desired in this run, so as to have to hit up the Shrine of Humility's devils as little as possible. Which will be a very hard part of the run--manipulating Tremor will be very difficult there, and aiming for perfection could easily require a half a minute for each battle! In the dungeons, it's far easier-standing in front of a doorway beats the otherwise-omnipresent 16-frame rule, and allows for much more malleable manipulation. During the dungeon part of this testrun, I got very lazy with the TAS-ness, but now that I've figured THAT juicy tidbit out, I feel that the stones and keys hunt will be much noticeably faster in the submitted run. Still seems like 1:10 will be roughly the target time. Interestingly, the deathwarp I use in this run actually increases my Sacrifice virtue by 2! This in fact lowers the number of Healer visits I need to make by one--a great time saver. Unfortunately, the method I use to deathwarp, while quick and humorous, lowers Compassion by 2, meaning that I'll have to visit a Beggar one more time. To counter this, I just need to die in battle somewhere else--keeping the Sacrifice rating boost but not losing to Compassion (actually, I should test if dying to Poison increases Sacrifice--I doubt it, but it's worth looking into because that would be much faster) Various notes: *Should I use the name i? I think it's funny for about 10 minutes, but its better than the other non-frame-wasting alternatives: A, B, F I dunno. i has 12 golds sounds like funny to me. I forgot that I did it in the 2 1/2 hour run, though, so it's way old. *I'll get the three chests in Moonglow in the final version, and also use the moongate to get to Minoc. Getting over to those Wizards as soon as possible to maximize EXP will be the fastest way, but it'll cut down on the number of chests I pick up. *I use Yew to power-raise Compassion and Sacrifice--my first big thought was to use Skara Brae, since it also has an herb store, but Yew was so much faster and easier and, as this run shows, with manipulation herbs aren't as much of a concern. *Should've done a Beggar in Minoc while I was there. *While the trick to exit a Room Battle by just walking out of it is a nifty one I NEVER knew about before, manipulating Tremor will blow all of those wasted minutes out of the water. *I'll use Heal in the dungeons intermittently--if there are long walking spells without battles, then the MP raising per step will give the viewer something to look at. *Augh, that one battle in Despise with the four Reavers and three Dinosaurs...MAN. Those are high level creatures, so Tremor hits less frequently for them, so manipulating Tremor to destroy them will be horrrible. Also! Paste this into a txt file and open it in the Memory Watch feature--it's got the more important variables viewable there 680C Honesty 680D Compassion 680E Valor 680F Justice 6810 Sacrifice 6811 Honor 6812 Spirituality 6813 Humility !6827 Money !68b9 EXP D9 Encount|Count 0036 Random 681F Ash 6820 Ginseng 6821 Garlic 6822 Silkweb 6823 Moss 6824 Pearl 6826 Manroot | | | | 68e3 Beggar|counter 68ec Blood|counter 68e1 Meditate|counter
Posted: 2/7/2009 10:41 PM
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TheAxeMan
Ambassador, Experienced player (709)
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
Awesome, this is starting to look like a real TAS! I like the overall plan and with a little more work on the dungeon battles it will be fairly watchable. The long wait by Vesper seemed out of place but it looks like you have some plans for that. I'll be looking forward to seeing the full version.
Posted: 3/4/2009 6:35 AM
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Twisted_Eye
He/Him
Active player (398)
Joined: 10/17/2005
Posts: 632
Location: Seattle, WA
Another 'teaser' TAS here: This one is full-on TAS, and in the process I discovered that I should again change my route. I'm now skipping Britain and taking the moongate over to Minoc so that I can get battles with multiple Vampires ASAP. This will balance out the 250xp gathering and the 10-or-11 battle maximum requirements (for gold, 75-99 per chest) real well. So, since this little mini-TAS is obsolete, I'll post to show progress and that the run is still being worked on. At the time that this run ends, it's about 10,000 frames ahead of the previous run! http://thatdenny.googlepages.com/UQotA.fm2
Posted: 3/14/2012 6:19 AM
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chrstn
Joined: 3/14/2012
Posts: 13
Location: San Diego, CA
Was this pretty much abandoned then? :/
Posted: 9/11/2012 11:10 AM
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feasel
Joined: 4/18/2009
Posts: 3
I've been doing some work on this game for a non-TAS speedrun, and I figured I'd post some of the things that I discovered in case some of this information is useful for whoever eventually comes along and picks up this project. In addition to the beggar counter, blood counter, and meditation counter, there are at least 2 other counters that work similarly: A counter for accepting half-price (or less) when selling an item, and a counter for giving the proper amount of money (or more) to the blind Herb salesman. Both counters are 16 steps and will only run down in the overworld. Both will give you +4 honesty, +4 justice, +2 honor, +1 humility. There is no counter for cheating the weapon/armor or the herb salesman (-2 honesty, -2 justice, -2 honor, -1 humility) so you will lose these virtues every single time you do it. I believe party members will only join you if your virtue in their particular area is 40 or higher. The WIP TASes in this thread are just single-character, but in case somebody decides to grab party members for purposes of selling off their equipment this information may come in handy (paladin, ranger, and fighter being the most lucrative). Chests in the dungeon will respawn if you enter a stone room. I saw it mentioned above that they'll respawn when you exit the dungeon or when you enter a key-room, but i didn't see stone rooms mentioned. The stone room is potentially more exploitable than the other two respawn methods. For example, in Shame you can hit the treasure room twice without any extra encounters beyond what you'd have to do anyway (assuming you're coming in and out of the dungeon from the bottom floor) since you pass the treasure room on the way up to the stone and then again on the way back down. Despise is the same way. There are also some really short loops that can be exploited to gain treasure fast. In Destard you can go back and forth between the stone room and the treasure room on level 4 with only 2 short encounters each time. In Covetus you can also go between the stone room and the two level 5 treasure rooms with just 2 encounters each time (the two encounters on level 7 only need to be done in one direction but not the other, since there is a one-way staircase from 6 to 7). Despise also has just 2 encounters in the loop, though there isn't a heck of a lot of treasure here so I'd probably not hit this one repeatedly. Not sure if it's helpful, but it's worth pointing out that avatarhood in a particular virtue is indicated by setting the virtue counter to 100. Normally the virtue counter is capped at 99, then when you meditate for avatarhood you get bumped up that 1 extra point. So if you could somehow circumvent the code that caps you at 99, you could maybe gain avatarhood without needing the rune or the shrine-visit. I haven't investigated this (it's probably just a pipe dream) but it's at least worth somebody taking a look at simply because the potential time savings is huge if the game could be broken in this regard. For starters, I'd recommending finding all the characters and actions that raise virtues and using each of them while your virtue is at 99 just to see if any of them fail to enforce the cap. Also worth testing if the low-end cap is broken anywhere (doing all the stuff that lowers virtue when you're already at 0), in an attempt to get a wrap-around. Food for thought.
Posted: 10/14/2013 4:14 PM
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TheAxeMan
Ambassador, Experienced player (709)
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
http://speeddemosarchive.com/Ultima4NES.html Congratulations on beating this game under two hours! Druid is an interesting choice and clearly works out well. That got me thinking about this game again. Here's my new plan: Pick paladin. Sell the sword and buy a bow. Walk around and end up in Minoc. Could go through gates and pick up black stone but nothing else is really productive because we want to avoid visiting anywhere twice. At Minoc have 675 gold saved and have 400 xp. That will be 7-9 battles depending on gold and monster manipulation. Now at Minoc buy three Axes. Jump into the furnace, pick up the rune and then die. This could be sped up by getting poisoned earlier. Of course this deathwarps to Lord British. We get 400 gold and keep all the equipment we bought. Since we have 400 xp we can hit level 4. On the way out of the castle, talk to the tremor mage, pick up rune of Spirituality and the three chests by it. Now we can get a ship. Do it and head to Buccaneer's Den. Besides the ship we need 1-2 more random fights to get enough gold. At the Den we sell our chain and the three axes to get 2000 gold and change. We now have the key and a full reagent pouch at level 4 in very short order. Plus we have already collected three runes and the only weapon we need. At level 4 paladin has 23 MP so he can cast Energy and Ice. This is a TAS, so we can manipulate every battle to be one enemy (the first set of battles will need 2-3 to get enough xp). Anyway, depending on the sea creature it will fall in one shot to bow, Fire or Ice. So we can start collecting stuff. I say collect stuff first so that we can get our virtue back up to get Mariah to join. Not right away though, wait until we are ready to hit the dungeons. At very least we want to enter Hythloth through castle Britain and get the balloon. Then visit Cove to get candle and learn Gate Travel and get the white stone. It would be convenient to max virtues early seeing how we don't need to cheat anyone anymore. Then we can stop by shrines while collecting other items. The definite part is that we would eventually sail to Verity Isle and get the book from Lycaeum. Then we hit Moonglow exactly once to get Tremor, Gate, the rune and Mariah. Reason for getting Mariah is that she has 50 MP despite being only level 2 and so she can cast every spell. Still, we only want her for the dungeon crawl as our pally can manipulate one-on-one fights and one-shot them. But when we have big rooms we want to tremor them. Now we can either head straight to Deceit or visit some shrines - maybe Spirituality with Gate then get a ship and do Sacrifice and Honesty on the way to the dungeon. Now it should be possible to manipulate all or almost all enemies in each room dead from Tremor. Deceit is a pretty fast descent and there are three orbs. With some healing our level 4 pally can power up. After the stone room we can get a fourth so that we have 43 MP and two chars that can tremor! Even if it is not difficult to manipulate full-room kills having two tremor users will save a lot of recharge time. With Gate we don't have to get all the stones at once. Not sure if this is good for many dungeons but we can exit, Gate to Britain and enter Hythloth. We already have white stone so we can collect the rest and get the keys. On the way out Mariah tragically dies. Now we get the rest of the items and visit the rest of the shrines with valor last of course. For that we do repeated fights by the shrine of humility. Unfortunately, the easiest fight we can draw there is one daemon. We can take it out in two bow shots sometimes and we can also use ice for one-shots. Still, triggering battles with one step gets us to 49 a lot faster. The necessary steps to meditate at all the shrines gives us a lot of other random fights too. Of course they will all be 1-1 one-hit fights. The end of the route will be picking up the rune of Valor in Jhelom, visiting the shrine for the last virtue and heading to the Abyss. In the abyss we should be able to one-tremor most fights with two tremors as a fallback. For some small rooms it may be advantageous to save MP and break out the bow. So yeah, had a lot of ideas but less sure about having time to actually do something high-quality. If anyone wants to help or take this up then go for it.
Posted: 10/15/2013 5:03 AM
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caitsith2
He/Him
Player (47)
Joined: 3/26/2004
Posts: 194
Damn you autocorrect :)
Posted: 10/16/2013 12:42 PM
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TheAxeMan
Ambassador, Experienced player (709)
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
One more big discovery is that when you give away all your gold to a beggar you get 5 compassion and also 5 sacrifice. So there is no need to give blood. That's very convenient because healing the 100 hp back is annoying. It works well with my paladin route here because I am done with gold early on. Also, I found the whirlpool at 117, 120 and it was invisible. Whirlpool is interesting but with getting the key so early I can get balloon easily and do cove along with Serpent spine.
Posted: 10/16/2013 4:02 PM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I'm not especially familiar with this game; is it possible to drop most of your gold in a pile, then pick up 1GP at a time to give to beggars? Alternately, give away all your gold, sell one small item (perhaps a spell reagent?), give the resulting money away, etc?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 10/16/2013 11:32 PM
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TheAxeMan
Ambassador, Experienced player (709)
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
Derakon wrote:
I'm not especially familiar with this game; is it possible to drop most of your gold in a pile, then pick up 1GP at a time to give to beggars? Alternately, give away all your gold, sell one small item (perhaps a spell reagent?), give the resulting money away, etc?
You cannot drop gold. Only weapons and armor are sellable and some are pretty cheap (10G for a staff). Now you do need to take at least 15 steps outside of town between handouts and you need 49 random battles throughout the run anyway so that is why I am thinking trigger a random fight for the treasure. It also helps that unlike RTS it is possible to tweak battles to come sooner and be easy enough to finish in one turn. One way to work this in without actually going broke is to buy some equipment and then give away the rest of your gold. If you don't mind the virtue hit you can sell it later for full price when you need the gold. Banking your gold this way also preserves it across deathwarp, a trick I planned on using anyway. Edit: More on this - if you give away all your gold to get compassion and sacrifice, then sell something and do it again, you will get sacrifice but not compassion. You need to take outer world steps to clear the flag for compassion. About the RNG, I am looking into how far I can push Tremor. Maybe pretty far. In the outer world there seems to be a limit to luck manipulation because everything works on a 16-frame rule. Only thing I found to break the rule is casting magic. Extra steps before exiting towns gives more options for luck than just tweaking your walking path. In general I use the terrain to control when battles happen because it is the timing that is important. The terrain where the battle happens can be significant too. Anyway, in a dungeon if you are stopped you can move on any frame, improving chances for luck manipulation quite a bit! Problem cases will be when there are two rooms in a row because then we are subject to frame rule again.
Posted: 10/21/2013 2:38 PM
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zrflbr
Joined: 1/28/2009
Posts: 6
Location: USA
Just weighing in to say that I loved this game as a kid, enjoyed feasel's SDA run, am following the thread closely, and can't wait for the TAS.
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