Hi Guys, can I suggest a couple ideas for running Syndicate (1993) and probably Syndplus.

-American Revolt could be a category of its own but I not sure I ever completed it, lol

I was thinking a 100% category split into at least two subs. -atlantic% could also be included in these too

Fixed Cycle - I have been testing at 50k which seems pretty good, game runs fairly well and is much more "as the dev designed" if you need to wait 30 secs for a nearly done research to finish it's doable. I'm not sure technically if this means runners with faster cpu's will have an advantage? I run at 4k, but DosBox only utilises one core from what I understand so yeah.

Unlimited cycles, where the focus is on maximising research time in menu to get mods/equip, this is where peeps can get really creative, sit there and let lvl3 mods tick up, tax maximisation strats etc and a coupletely different vibe to the fixed cycle run.

Let me know what you think,

Cheers,

PercyPrune

just for reference, on my test runs I managed a

02:20:00 for my cycles @ 66% fast in research but not mental, a fast playthrough style and choked at Atlantic haha

And for fixed @50k cycles did a 02:53:14 with not too many mistakes

There is massive room for improvement here but yeah, keen to get this category going as it's such an awesome game, best action isometric ever?? IMHO

can find the vods on twitch under same name :>

cheers,

PercyPrune

Hi, the discussion came up before (the thread seems to have disappeared) about cycles, because runners were going at varied speeds and this didn't look good for the leaderboards. It was suggested to try to match the original hardware performance, as the GOG version defaults to 8k which seems a bit slower than the original.

Do you have any insight into what the 'natural' speed ought to be for this game? I never really played it back in the day, and can't find any footage of the original game being played.

As for unlimited cycles category, that could also be added if runners find the base category too slow. It would also mean I don't have to reject the current run if it's going too fast, and instead can just move it to unlimited.

Hi HexTree,

Yeah I did play it back in the day with a reasonable PC, and you could finish off researching in menu but only if u really cranked up the price, the hours definitely weren’t ticking as fast as a second each, more like 2 or 3 seconds for an hour? That way if the time was say 10pm, you only had to wait a few seconds to tick over and get your tax income at midnight.

Yeah, I tried the cycles set at 8k and it was miserably slow, not really playable IMHO, the 50 ‘feels’ about right, the enemy syndicate waves don’t all attack at once like when the cycles are auto/max, and a longer mission such as the police hunt or an escort mission would finish researching even if at minimum cost I.e, 10 days.

In my runs have started adding the dosbox status window as well just to show I’m not manipulating the cycles as I go..

Now I think about it, the old machine must have been a Pentium I (released same year as the game). On the wiki they refer to the FSB (speeds) as between 50 and 66 MHz. Someone more techhead might correct me here, but this seems right?

Yeah that’s a good idea, the unlimited is pretty fun too, cycles set to auto is easy for new runners, get decent equip and mods much faster, and ‘feels’ like a speedrun, I did a run today on auto/max and managed sub 2 hours :)

Sorry for the essay-length reply haha

So you think that 50k gives a good feel of how the game played back in the day? If so, we could go with that for fixed-cycles. I'll write up new category rulesets at some point soon.

Yes, I think 50k cycles seems to be the closest to how the game played back then. Awesome! Thanks very much :)