Wondering if any folks have been messing with this game? I've only been slowly going at it casually (miserably clunky as it is), and I already have some advice on strats. Put as much points into speed and jumping as possible, more speed percentage allows for more jumping percentage.
Secondly, though it's rather glitchy, I discovered that the "special moves" key is OP. You can hurt and even kill yourself with this against walls and weird world geometry, but alternately it can be great for killing some enemies if you pass on weapons (heck, given how terrible weapons are in this game, it is often times better, provided you keep your health high). I found that enemies will be hurt by being knocked against walls or cliffs. Definitely useful against the guys holding cogs in level 1.
You just hold the special moves key down and thrust the mouse forward, while pulling back on the mouse crouches you. You can still thrust forward while crouched, and I found this occasionally mitigates damage, but larger enemies can be risky to take out with this trick (some of the bigger enemies will hurt you with their hitbox alone when bumping them with special moves). Need to have open space and a certain wall/cliff to knock them against. However, it's quite useful for knocking that one dude off the teleporter in level 1, provided you jump out of the range of him initiating talking w/ you.
I'm currently messing around in level 2. I don't think it's useful at all, but the beginning room with the open ceiling showing a sky can be jumped through, allowing you to walk/jump around out of bounds. Not much of use here, though I did learn that the interaction field with enemies (to talk with them) extends high above them, which is weird.
I've not quite grasped using magic yet, but apparently none of it except healing (and maybe ethereal) is useful. Besides that, I've not yet tested a glitch that is apparently only available in version 1.3 of the game. You can cheat getting extra skill points somehow (this page explains it: http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Battlespire:Hints#Class_Creation_Cheat ), and that may be useful but I'm not sure yet how we all want to approach the rules of running this game, when it comes to exploiting the character creation system.
One more thing: Not a strat per se, but some folks have found that binding the movement to the arrow keys or numpad arrow keys mitigates that infamous "skewed walking" issue that I'm sure most of you have experienced before. Reducing that issue is ideal because I think running and jumping (as well as run jumping, where you walk forward while holding down the jump key, gives more jump distance) precisely will be a big part of runs for this game. Seeing as we all likely use DOSBox to play this game, I can tell you that after you bind the ingame keys to the arrow keys, you can externally with DOSBox's keymapper rebind the arrow keys to WASD to make it easier on yourself. That's what I did, and it works better than before... Which isn't saying a whole lot as movement still sucks in this game.
If anyone who has beat the game and has been working to route/glitch hunt has any suggestions, share them here or we could join together on discord or something.
Oh right, and one more thing, don't forget to enjoy some: http://vocaroo.com/i/s137GQJtwVxW
Yooooo!
This is probably my first post in an actual game's forum, and I'm excited, so hello!
I've been playing Battlespire again for the sake of getting involved with runs, and I've come up with a small few details to look at.
The first is looking at class builds. I put most of my points into Intelligence, Speed, Jumping, Restoration, Destruction, and Spell Absorption. The idea is that I'm partially immune to the most powerful attacks in the early game, and to some degree the late game, and then use the magic points you get to heal myself or attack opponents, while also offering mobility and speed. Paired with the "Special Move" attack, I got to lvl 4 in about an hour and a half.
I noticed that if you pump your points into some combination of Agility, Speed, Strength, Jumping, and the ability Athleticism, your Jumping becomes absurd and the large chasms found in lvl 1 become paltry. Augment that further with the Jumping spell, and you blaze across distances with ease. I've not gotten to lvl 5 or onward with this set up, but I can imagine the open level nature makes this ability incredible.
With Athleticism, you also run faster. You also run faster if you run diagonally, just like you do in Morrowind.
The most obnoxious obstacle has to be the Sigil Wards. In the first level, the Doht Sigil by the bridges can be completely circumvented with the aforementioned jumping, even completely bypassing the bridges themselves. A neat little timesave. Additionally, the Sigil Ward's hitbox is pretty big, but doesn't extend upwards infinitely. Some can be jumped over.
For the route on lvl 1, I find that venturing down the southwest corridor from the starting room, and the looping back up around the southeastern corridor picks up 4 cogs, closes 3 anchors, with the other cog being considerably isolated with Dremora Rathine, and Anchor 4 being just by the Star Galley's Door. I used the UESPWIKI's map and list objectives to help with planning: http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Battlespire:Level_1
I've tried to find some OOBs but I've only shown up largely empty handed. 1 OOB trick I found when playing casually is when in water, if you travel fast enough in particularly tight tunnels, you can clip OOB. To get that speed, you need to be treated as walking underwater. Do this by either clinging to the walls, or by being too weighed down to float. Issue is that when you're OOB, you're likely to sink if you used the latter method, and so need to drop some gear. Issue then is picking up sufficient gear to weigh you down, without slowing your route. I don't know what else you can do OOB, and I can't remember if getting back in bounds is possible or not, but it's worth investigating.
Another small strat could be using a recall spell/enchantment to mitigate long journeys. I'm also wondering if there are any ways to OOB/clip with it.
One fun little trick I noticed in my casual playthrough is when you meet Dagon at the end of the game, and have the Moon Reiver, you can select 1 of 2 dialogue trees. The story wants you to select the 1st tree, and go through this long back-and-forth with Dagon, like naming his Protonymic/Neonymic/etc. Aferwards, Jaciel Morgan shows up, you stab him with the Moon Reiver, you win. But if you select the 2nd tree, wherein you swear fealty to Dagon, you can still stab him with the Moon Reiver and get your end cutscene. It's got fewer text boxes, but requires you navigate menus. I don't know if it's faster this way, or if it's faster to just spam left click to fly through all of dialogue in the 1st dialogue tree, but it's something to note.
But yes, a discord would be baller B) We could actually get a run going for this game:
https://discordapp.com/channels/341585707149688833
PS. I did a quick Speedrun of lvl 1, just to get the ball rolling. The video's here:
It might also be worth it to define the rules for the run. Like when time should actually start.
Hey, seems you have found a ton of cool stuff yourself. My progress ages ago kinda fell to the wayside as I got distracted with other games/personal stuff. I am really impressed with what you have so far, and I'm hoping we can perhaps work towards optimizing movement. I've had experience with another XnGine game, Terminator: SkyNET (I developed most of the strats and found most of the glitches for that game), so I figured I'd tackle Battlespire to see if it has similar glitches. For sure, OOB in this game isn't as easy as you've noted, but I'm hoping we'll find a use for it somewhere. Bit dissapointed w/ that very easy rooftop OOB in level 2 that is absolutely useless.
Also, I never did find a way to get back inbounds. It's pretty difficult to do in all the XnGine games it seems, though it's not impossible in the Terminator XnGine games.
And so we have a run!
http://www.speedrun.com/run/zxv6n6qy
We can definitely start making headway on this B) I'm wanting to upload a 2nd, commentated run, so to go over the run and what tricks/routing were used. I can also make a more condensed document of everything we're figuring out here, and that can serve as a go-to guide.
Regarding that OOB you mentioned on level two, can you pass on how you do it? I'd like to fidget about with it and see if we can't make the most of it. I've noticed in a few situations you can get knocked out of bounds by an enemy, when it's lagging and there's knockback on the attack. In theory, if the AOE Destruction Spell the player can cast does knockback to the player, we might be able to abuse that.
Another point is we might look into defining some rules for the matter. For instance, will we make the required version for the run the GOG version? There's time too, when it starts/end: I personally think that, like all the other DOS TES games, we start time when you click "Start New Game"; Either that, or when LVL 1 Loads.
I only learned about Dosbox's cycles after I completed and submitted the run, so that's worth looking into. As I understand it, the GOG download works at 3000, and can be boosted to a max of 105% with the CTRL + F12 shortcut.
The GOG download also allows multiplayer, which in turn lets you play on any of the games story mode maps. I wonder if there's something there...
Anyhow, it's late here, so I'll cut this short. Hope ye enjoy the run (flawed tho it may be) :)
I think it's a bit taboo to mess with dosbox frames while playing the game. Set it to what gives you optimal performance with no glitches, and keep it that way. I noticed you had your resolution in game reduced, so I assume you've had performance issues playing this game. Not surprising seeing as it's one of the more complex software-rendered 3D games of the time (shame this game didn't get the same 3DFX XnGine treatment as Redguard, a much less interesting but much better performing game thanks to the glide support). As for that OOB you were asking about, here's some footage I got:
It's really one of the easiest OOBs I've seen in a game as you wouldn't think they'd be so foolish as to leave a skybox texture as a non-solid. However, I promise you I managed to explore alot of Level 2's lower floor w/ this glitch (though I haven't beaten level 2 yet and your speedrun was the first time I saw how to beat level 2 :P), and I never really found any use for it. Not to mention it's seemingly impossible to get back in bounds, because as you probably noticed in that video getting stuck on awkward OOB geometry actually killed me.
I don't think you need to get too in depth w/ any commentary on your first run. Just focus on important things regarding what you need to do in each level, any shortcuts you found, etc.
Also, I checked the dosbox config for this game, and GOG didn't set any specific cycles, it's just set to auto. I think I've read somewhere of an optimal cycle limit to set for the game, but this is the rare dosbox game that I haven't had to go in and change the cycles for it, it runs good for me. Really comes down to your CPU, because dosbox hasn't been officially updated in so long to account for the insane boost of recent CPUs.
Well be grand so :P I just thought that having it set as "auto" would create inconsistencies across runs, but I'm not savvy enough to be sure, sooooo yeah, no fuss.
Also, it took me long enough, but I got around to commentating a run. It's not good, and admittedly it'd be better if I just created a text for it, but yes, enjoy:
