Why do these level runs all use in game time?
This is supposed to be a Speedrun. Using in game time encourages the runs to take longer real time since you can adjust the speed during campaigns. This makes no sense.
I agree that you should not be able to speed up or slow down the game. This is not a TAS, this is a real-time speedrun. On the other hand, in-game time is convenient to measure. I think that in-game time should be used in order to make it easy to measure the time taken, but that the default game speed should be enforced, you should not be able to change the game speed from the default.
Most games have abandoned in game time because of some of these same issues.
Standard speed is still slow. Real time will force players to increase to very fast speed, which also forces players to actually be good at the game (think and perform faster) to have better times. The top time is 6 mins for the first Greek scenario and has a 12 min real time video. Something has to change here.
This is literally preventing me from wanting to run the game. Years of online play make it impossible to sit there and wait for standard speed to finish anything. Wouldn't be fun to try.
I've thought about this a lot, and I have come around to mostly agree with your point of view.
I think that real time should be the main way in which records are compared, but I think that the in-game time should also be measured.
There are some significant drawbacks to doing this, though.
This would make all current runs in the leaderboard obsolete. We will no longer have any runs for the game that have a reasonable time from the perspective of real time. This is a big problem. The existing runners, especially Onin, put a lot of work into their runs, and it would be sort of unfair for all that work to be wasted.
Therefore, before making this timing change, we would have to have a lot of good runs using this new system on the leaderboard first, in order to replace the old runs.
Therefore, I recommend that you start speedrunning and submitting your times to the leaderboard. Don't worry if they have a worse in-game time, just worry about the real time. Then, if the community later decides that there are enough of these speedruns to replace the old speedruns, and they are of sufficient quality, then maybe there will be a change in the timing method. I can't promise you anything though, I don't have the authority to do that. It depends on what the rest of the community thinks, for example it depends on what Onin thinks.
I tried out the first Greek campaign one tonight.
Surprisingly I wasn't too far off the top IGT at 6:33. It's 4:32 real time Video here:
Well after a few more attempts I cleaned it up to 6:18 IGT and 4:21 RT.
WR either way
Yeah, I don't think the Empire Earth records are that optimized, not many people have run the game. Congrats on the WR!
There are a few things I would like to point out.
Firstly, you seem to be playing on 1.5x speed. Is that deliberate? The game goes up to 2.5x speed. But 1.5x speed is the default, it does make sense to play at that speed. It's just not optimal if you are trying to minimise real time.
Secondly, I just want to make sure that you know that by default, Twitch deletes VODs regularly. You have to do something to prevent Twitch from deleting your VODs. You might already have done something to prevent this, but I just wanted to make sure you knew. https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/6sz4na/stop_twitch_from_deleting_my_past_broadcasts/
Lol. You are right! It seems my + button was broken on my keyboard. Been clicking it every time to speed up and it wasn't doing anything. I thought it was already set at highest, and still felt a bit slow. Lol. I changed to my other keyboard and it went a lot faster. I'll have to redo them for real time, since I already WR the 2nd one too. I probably never would have noticed if you didn't say anything, Thanks!
Second point, I know that already. Twitch just deletes the raw broadcasts after a few weeks. If you clip out sections of the broadcasts (these videos) then they stay forever.
Tried this 5-6 times. It's much more fun going this fast and should be more fun to watch.
Did it in 2:51 RT. 6:45 IGT
Ok. So I got WR in all the Greek Scenarios without changing the speed, then did a full run of the Greek Campaign using Real Time (since it is already set to RT).
My conclusion is that the IGT does help a bunch with keeping pace, but RT adds a lot more precision with things like selecting civ points that pause the IGT. It is also a lot harder to do these on 2.5x. I still think everything should move to RT, but I'll probably go through them all the same way. This won't change unless other people run this game anyway.
Here is the full Greek Campaign if you're interested:
The IGT is very useful for individual missions (as in e.g. "The Settlers 4"). It's good to compare. The game clock is the most accurate there. But real-time should definitely be used in a full campaign. For me it wouldn't be a problem if the rule was changed and "real-time" was used for everything in the future. A sub-category for "speed manipulation" would also be optional.
By the way: Nice run @SpagetiMetbul
I just found out that the tribute glitch can be done while the game is paused with F3 key. We can easily get infinite resources on our leisure without advancing any IGT.
Even without the tribute glitch exploit, you can still give commands while game is paused to make it easier in micromanaging your troops.
Nobody have use pauses to manip IGT on the IL runs yet. But given how easy it is to abuse the IGT, I think RTA should be the default.
Since most runs was done with 1.5x speed, I propose we split the IL leaderboard into two categories: 1.5x speed & 2.5x speed. The 2.5x speed IL board can be filled with the times from SpagetiMetbul & AD586's full-game runs, so that the board isn't empty.
Alternatively, we can ban pauses instead. My opinion is that we shouldn't ban pauses, cause it's a legit way of helping you micromanage your troops, and RTA rules will also penalise you for pausing too long. Although I noticed AoE 2 leaderboards does ban pauses while still use IGT.
Also, since currently there's no one else outside of AD586 who are still interested in doing runs, there might be no urgency to change the timing rules. Still, I doubt anyone will enjoy doing or watching runs with pause abuses.
@Onin I can help retiming the runs if you want to. There's not that many runs on the board yet, so it shouldn't take too much time if we split the retiming work.
