Extended power-ups guide.

Disclaimer: If you haven't read the general strats guide, please read it first.

UPGRADING PART:

Hunting for the WR recently I realized it's best to prioritize the cheapest upgrades first.
The 4 top (and therefore "useful") upgrades are: Speed shot, Scorpion, Color Cloud and Fireball, more details on why the other power-ups are worse in the section at the bottom of this guide

Suggested upgrade order(for Easy):
1. Speed Shot 1(40g) - best all-round power-up, especially helpful when the line of spheres is at the very top of the screen
2. Fireball 1(50g) - why not scorpion? By the time you get enough coins to get this, purple spheres shouldn't be appearing yet, so you won't be getting any scorpions in your levels, simple, right?
3. Scorpion 1(50g) - you should have purple spheres by the time you accumulate enough coins for that
4. Speed shot 2(80g) - the least expensive, currently useful power-up, so it's an obvious choice
5. Fireball 2(100g) - following the rule of "cheapest" you can either get this or scorpion, HOWEVER, on a decent coin path, you should get be able to buy fireball 2 around 5-1 or 5-2. Stage 5 has TWO river crossing levels which can lose you a lot of time, so getting a bigger fireball
6. Scorpion 2(100g) - not much to say, cheapest available upgrade at that time
7/8. Speed Shot 3(120g)/Color Cloud(50g) - now this is the first crossroad in terms of shop purchases, on a good coin pattern, you should be able to get speed shot 3 before white spheres start appearing, and in that case you should take it first, but if for some reason you got to whites and you can't yet buy speed shot, just get a color cloud and put speed shot next. The cloud is pretty big anyways.
9. Color Cloud 2(100g) - the only exception to the cheapest rule because SS3 before is more expensive than this
10. Scorpion 3(200g) - it's better in lategame than fireball
11. ... - you will probably buy the 3rd scorpion upgrade late into stage 10, or in early 11, so it's possible you won't be able to afford anything (and getting an upgrade on 11-4 won't save you any time probably) even if it's just 40g, but if you are in stage 11 BEFORE the river crossing level, get yourself a Reverse 1 (40g)
While in normal levels Reverse is rather useless or even negative, in River Crossing it's very powerful because it's able to clear the entire river for a while, so I decided to upgrade it to make it better.

RNG MANIPULATION PART:

Upgrade colors(number of pluses indicates how good a certain color tier is):
Red+++ - Speed Shot, Fireball
Green - Reverse, Net
Blue+ - Lightning Bolt, Slow
Yellow+ - Wild Ball, Stop
Purple++ - Scorpion, Color Bomb
White++ -  Color Cloud, Color Swap
Black - Match Highlighter, Pyramid Blocker
Cyan+++ - Color Sorter (insanely strong power-up, not relevant on Easy though)
Orange+ - Sandstorm
(More explaination on "why is that tier so good" in the "proper use" section below)

Ideally, you want to force the drop of power-ups that you're upgrading (the top4) so just prioritize these colors as the third combo shot if you can. If I get a red sphere, I usually "store" it (by swapping to whatever other sphere I have) and try to get a combo x2 with anything else I get; that way, I'm guaranteed to be able to get a red power-up if the other 2 spheres have a match on the board.


PROPER USE OF POWER UPS (Tier 4 is best, unlike regular tierlists, don't @ me)
Tier 0
Net - Don't [actually, Net is the WORST power-up in the game because with it you will catch everything, so you can't skip a falling stop or reverse which will lose you time]
Match Highlighter - bother [doesn't do anything if you're even semi-decent at the game]
Pyramid Blocker - catching [useless, might help you in]
Stop - them. [on some levels it can be ok, on some it can block you completely for 2 seconds, either way it loses time]
Tier 1
Reverse - usually it's garbage, but if caught during the roll-out (when a new line of spheres enters the level it's always at a much bigger speed) it can help you aim, and reverse is kinda OP in River Crossings. These 2 things however aren't enough to make it worth it.
Slow - it's eh, will slow you down but helps aiming, can also be very helpful during the roll-out but
Wild Ball - it's ok, but not much more. Use it to clear singled out spheres, clearing two nearby single spheres with a wild ball saved you 3 shots. Apparently if you shoot a wild ball between red and yellow as the 3rd combo you can get the orange power-up, happened to me but I'm still not 100% sure.
Lightning Bolt - also ok, try to aim for single spheres on horizontal-only levels, you can take out two if you aim it properly. On levels with vertical paths, shoot at the vertical segment when it's "full" (it's often even worth to wait). The weird spiral on 5-1 is a great example of a spot to use lightning on
Tier 2
Fireball/Color Cloud - Same idea with both, try to aim either for big groups of different colored spheres or into spots where you can hit the biggest amount of spheres (sharp corners, crossings, insides of bends)
Color Swap/Color Bomb - Bomb is a bit better, but both effectively eliminate a single colour from a train. With the swap, the best target are spheres that are next to the color you're swapping to
Tier 3
Scorpion/Speed Shot - these two don't need explainations, just get them as much as possible
Tier 4
Color sort - holy macaroni is this one OP. On easy you can only have it in certain survival levels, and you should use it to farm some extra Ankhs, but in other difficulty levels prioritize it over anything else. It doesn't need any upgrades and it makes you clear levels FAAAAAST

General strats for Luxor 3 speedrunning.

Aside from having a good grasp of all luxor mechanics and well-trained accuracy, there are a few things to keep in mind when running this game:
- making a mistake, like firing a wrong-colored sphere between two that are already matching, costs you more time than it would to take a second and reconsider what you're about to do, ideally the higher your accuracy the faster you'll clear the levels
- Higher difficulty levels are slower because you get more colors to deal with throughout the run (not to mention there's a higher risk of losing a level). However, medium has a small potential to be faster then Easy because of Color Sort in lategame.
- activating Bonus Levels WILL lose you a lot of time, and you absolutely don't need the points, therefore, suppressing the reflex to destroy all the jars whenever they appear is really important (and surprisingly difficult)
- skip all the puzzle levels - [UPDATE] - the fastest way to lose a puzzle level is to shoot a sphere off-screen, the moment it leaves it you get the "level failed" prompt
- score is IRRELEVANT to your run; in theory, getting as few rank ups as possible is preferable because every prompt that you were promoted loses you like 2s, so feel free to ignore any gems that are falling
- try to catch all the Ankh coins, you'll need them to upgrade your powerups
- Early Survival Levels are good for farming coins for upgrades, since you can't clear them any faster than the time limit you can play around and try to set up 5+ long lines; ideally you don't want to have no more than 2/4 canopic jars at the beginning of a survival level, so that you can destroy the 3rd one there and then make profit of "endlessly" spawning golden scarabs (more coins = more coins) without risking a bonus level
- Onslaught Levels - my strat involves forcing all the statues to spawn on the left side of the screen, giving me as much free space on the right side
- Crossing the River - your reload speed is slower than usual, keep that in mind; a LOT of time can be saved on these levels if you're lucky, probably the only gamemode where Reverse is useful
- Mirrors - the floating boots or whatever that appear on some levels might seem useless if you play the game casually, but on certain levels they can be a lifesaver, helping you reach spheres in unfavorable spots, knowing how to use them is an important skill
- Upgrades and Powerups - the most useful powerups for clearing levels quickly are Fireball, Scorpion, Color Cloud and Lightning Bolt. IF you are a skilled player already, Speed Shot will be the ultimate and most important tool for clearing levels. In general, you should prirotize these 5 power ups mentioned above, but if you want to know more please refer to my extended power up guide.

[NEW]
- "RNG Manipulation" or: forcing a specific type of power ups (there's no official name) - it's a technique that's very recent to me, I only know about it because of alex's vague post in his Luxor QoTA "guide"
Basically, whenever you get combo x3, the third shot will drop you a powerup in the color of the sphere that caused the combo x3.
Maybe it'll be easier to understand with an example, you shoot a yellow into 2 yellows, they blow up; then you immediately shoot a black into two blacks, they blow up, that's combo x2. Then you get white, you shoot it into 2 or more whites and you get combo x3. There's a 100% chance that the powerup will be either color cloud or color swap because these two are white tier power ups.
You can use this technique to get more favorable for clearing powerups, more about colors of powerups and their usefullness in my extended powerup guide, however, most of the colors are pretty obvious.
It's also important to not how combo works: you need to have consecutive matches with SINGLE shots, so if you shoot something into a single sphere (i.e. they don't blow up) your combo resets, so you want to set up a few spots with (at least) 2 spheres first and then take them out one by one to get more power ups.

Name	Author
Extended power-ups guide.	wortex 4 years ago
General strats for Luxor 3 speedrunning.	wortex 4 years ago