The alien armada is closing in on your Mother Ship. You're awesomely outnumbered, and they attack and attack... Flick on the situation map and analyze your position. Dispatch a fighter squadron toward the closest alien cluster. You're smarter, a little faster, and you're going to let these aliens know they've got a fight on their hands. Flick back to a cockpit close-up view. Here they come! Aim lasers... fire!
Objectives
- Uses hardest difficulty
- Heavy luck manipulation
- Ends input early
- Genre: Action/Shooter/Strategy
ROM choice and difficulty
The ROM selected is the later "Space Network" release which added the hilariously dubbed
SUPER ADVANCED difficulty, after the public perceived the game to be too easy.
These images show that the ROM used is the later release. Super advanced difficulty was selected here. It increases the speed of everything and the frequency of alien laser shots on the battle screen.
The Alien Armada
The alien attack formation is determined by the frame the game is started. In this movie, frame 11 was selected and is an excellent formation (for us) because:
- There are only 50 total fighters. I have seen patterns as few as 49 and as many as 67. These numbers were obtained by taking the sum of Main RAM addresses 61-65.
- The closest two squadrons are made up of only 8 fighters.
- The first count of 49 alien fighters is not until starting frame 66. Though there are less fighters here, this pattern grants an immediate loss of 55 frames plus additional losses because the closest two squadrons are both farther away and have 8 and 9 fighters. The ship count of and distance to the closest two squadrons is imperative for a fast time, as explained below.
Radar screen strategy
Blue and White squadron are immediately dispatched to meet the closest squadrons of 8 alien fighters. The moment the first two alien squadrons are cleared is when the possibility of ending input early is realized. Therefore, they must be cleared as soon as possible. When they meet, the squadrons engage in a dogfight and begin to flash. The player may enter the battle screen at this moment by pressing the 7-9 keys.
While ships are in a dogfight, the Radar screen reduces to half speed. If the player decides to not enter the battle screen, the computer automatically plays out the fight. In this manner, the manual claims that 1 player ship is lost for every 3 alien ships on average. At 9 player ships total, the odds are still against the player in automatic fighting mode.
The fastest way to clear these two alien squadrons is to enter the battle screen—but not immediately. While radar screen dogfighting usually happens slowly, sometimes the computer randomly destroys enemy fighters faster than they would've been shot inside the battle screen. In this movie, two were shot before Blue squadron entered the fight and none were shot for the White squadron because a more optimal sequence which incorporated this could not be found.
Battle screen strategy
Enemy ship shrapnel trajectories are random when they explode and can be used to chain multiple hits together, and was used to its fullest extent here. The CLEAR key on the controller can be pressed at any time to exit the battle screen and return to the radar screen. Similar to the above paragraph, the battle screen can be exited early in the hopes that the computer randomly clears some fighters faster on the radar screen. Blue and White squadrons clear a single alien fighter in this manner. Only 12 of the 50 alien ships are destroyed on the battle screen.
Ending input early
Now that the first two alien squadrons are cleared, the three player squadrons can be assigned to the three remaining alien squadrons at the press of a button, and this could be the last set of inputs in theory. If we cross our fingers hard enough, they just might destroy the 34 remaining alien ships all by themselves. This demands godly luck. Ending input at its absolute earliest required some crafty RNG manipulations:
- Telling Blue squadron to attack the northeast alien squad at a very specific time
- Telling White squadron to attack the southwest alien squad on the other side of the map at a very specific time
- Telling Gold squadron to attack the southwest alien squad, then telling them to return to base, then telling them to attack the east alien squad on the other side of the map all at specific times...
Unbelievable, they actually did it... very much by the skin of their teeth! They deserve the highest honors since their commander just abandoned them 27 seconds in lol. Input ends 1m11s before the "All Clear" message appears.
Suggested Screenshot: Pick your favorite frame from the battle screen (cockpit view)
feos: I had to read the entirety of
the game's manual to understand why this run is impressive. The game has quite some aspects to strategically play with (which is why the manual is so big), but just like more modern strategy games, it's hard to fully appreciate what you're seeing without knowing the mechanics. Especially when most of the time we're looking at the radar screen and object movement is really slow there. I haven't explicitly asked for feedback on this one, but I really don't believe there'd appear enough buzz to send this run to Moons. Otherwise it's a nice TAS! Accepting to Vault.
