Category Discussion and Requests
6 years ago
Drenthe, Netherlands

Reactive Drop has a ton of new content. A lot of it is gonna be great fun to route and run. But some of it isn't. Some campaigns are almost impossible to run solo. Most levels are almost impossible to run solo on Brutal. And some things... have changed. That's why I'm going to do the following:

  1. Jacob's Rest will NOT be featured. The campaign has been significantly nerfed in Reactive Drop. Run it in the original Alien Swarm and submit times for that.

  2. I will add campaign categories and IL tables when they are being worked on and/or run. I'm currently running Lana's Escape and Research 7, so I started by posting those. Note that by table I mean one entire campaign done as ILs, not a couple arbitrary levels.

  3. Non-official campaigns, i.e. workshop submissions in the future, may be accepted for leaderboards if runs are done. It's practically a mod pack as is, I don't see why we wouldn't add more.

Because there's so much content in Reactive Drop, you'll have to forgive me for not posting every single campaign and IL table immediately. If you want to feature a run, please post here or contact me anywhere else (SourceRuns discord, Steam, etc).

Edited by the author 6 years ago
Drenthe, Netherlands

With that set out, there's something that might warrant some discussion.

In Jacob's Rest, the IL table consists solely of Brutal difficulty runs. This is for two reasons. One, Brutal has faster movement speed, duh. Two, it's the nature of IL runs to be much higher difficulty.

From my preliminary exploration, it's looking like Brutal difficulty is extremely difficult if not flat-out impossible for the majority of the new ILs. I haven't succeeded at a single Lana's level (though Maintenance has hope!).

This raises the question: Should the IL table be Brutal only? In theory, lower difficulties are slower due to the movement speed. But it might turn out that, in practice, lower difficulty is faster simply because it's less deadly, allowing for higher risk strats. Do we think this goes against the spirit of the IL table? Or are we just going to let speed speak for itself?

Drenthe, Netherlands

I added a rules clarification that bots are not allowed in Solo runs. The point of the category is beating the missions with just a single marine; not just a single player. However, I'm open to creating a third category for runs with bots. They can be pretty useful in saving time, though not nearly as much as a second player. And I presume it'd be interesting to run while giving commands to the AI the best you can.

Drenthe, Netherlands

So now that this is a thing, time to add a 'solo with bots' category? It's easily faster than co-op. Possibly faster than co-op with bots. It's real funny, but can be really finicky. It completely takes away all the challenge of running the game, and replaces it with swift execution and accuracy of super roll launches. Is that really fun to run?

Drenthe, Netherlands

Super rolling is also possible, though more limited, in singleplayer by keybinding "asw_afk" and using that. However, because the afk mechanic takes a while to remove (about 5 to 6 seconds) you can only super roll once in a row, and it's gonna have to be a solid super roll to be worth the time investment.

Pennsylvania, USA

Heres a question. Manually removing load times?

Drenthe, Netherlands

As in, manually counting how long your loading screens are and removing that from your end time. Load times on Source are pretty variable so it's necessary.

There's no autosplitter for Alien Swarm (yet) so it can't be automated.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
Drenthe, Netherlands

Well, the super roll issue has been sorted. They patched it. RIP.

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