I’m of two minds on this

I do believe it’s unreasonable to ban the use of any modifier, and considering the effects of Botched Requsition it should be separated from runs without.

Considering the performance penalty - especially in missions where it’s most useful - I do believe that if it is allowed it should have it’s own subcategories so that those with less powerful systems that can’t reasonably use Botched Requsition aren’t forced to compete against those that can use it to their advantage.

As for managing category bloat thats an entirely different story as adding a BR variant to all the current IL categories would add another 8 categories when 6 of the existing combos are almost entirely unpopulated already. And as HIlimii laid out, the number of missions where BR even offers an advantage is very limited and even then RNG based.

It kinda feels like this (and to some degree Gun Runner and other 'challenge runs') belong on a category extensions board but the main board isn't popular enough to warrant that in my opinion.

As for the remaining modifiers that aren’t represented I believe they don’t need subcategories as they don’t provide any advantage to the player.

I would reccomend seeing what you can do with the tatical map - in my full game run (which was not well optimized) I set my wingmen to sink the first DD while i went and dealt with AA on the land.

Hi,

Interestingly, I actually was using the legacy UI in my runs - though I do a decent chunk of the run with the HUD turned off and this carries over when restarting the mission, so was behaving more like the new HUD. I did notice that 'sometimes' when restarting with my HUD on, the HUD would flash up early - I just never put 2 and 2 together.

I definitely agree that we need to work out a more consistent point to start timers. In the past - including my obsolete tunnel run - I would start my timer when pressing start on the loading screen. My theory being that since the level is allegedly loaded that any time from there would be consistent across machines, though I've never tested it before as I don't have a second capable machine. I changed my timing method after watching the other runs in the category and seeing everyone else was timing from the first non-black frame.

A quick analysis of my two runs showed the tunnel itself (from 1335km/h to enemy spawn) was virtually identical, yet there is around 4.3 seconds difference.

Below are time measured from pressing start to first non-black frame (new HUD).

Having now done testing, it seems conclusive that these times are consistent, at least on one machine across three completely separate days. With the difference in time between my two runs aligning with the times measured today - all of which was done manually with livesplit so includes my reaction times.

As an interesting result, while it appears the times within a mission is consistent and largely similar within a campaign, it seems the two campaigns have distinctly different times with F59 having a 0.5s shorter black screen than the original campaign.

Obviously, testing on other machines is necessary to confirm whether this is a viable timing method.

I've re-routed the second half to swap in faster missions:

Mission 1 Black Flag: 12 skips into Mission 3 takeoff Mission 3 Takeoff: 18 skips into Mission 6 Menu Mission 6 Proper: 12 skips into Mission 9 Briefing Mission 9 Proper: 18 Skips into Mission 13 Mission 13 Proper: 15 skips into Mission 17 Menu Mission 17 Takeoff: 25 Skips into Campaign Completed game state