CasualSpeedRunner's impressive new record has captured my attention, but I noticed right away that he didn't simply improve on my route, he made his own from scratch, I think. Because while he saved time in some big ways in places, there were a lot of little things that my route did better.

This means if we combine the two routes, we can push the time down HARD. I've made a comparison step-by-step, which you can see here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IIdEM28tqlyVdcau6jRS5wnfv8EnQPi-IzKwuOpqOjc/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Times which compare directly are marked in green (faster) and red (slower), such as when we attack the same base. I tried as much as possible to compare apples to apples, and exclude execution mistakes and focus entirely on the route. Where you see start/end times highlighted in blue, that's something that was different enough in our routes that I had to time the entire thing, whereas normally I just compared time spent on the ground controlling marines. So if I used a missile attack and CSR didn't, then I logged the time from one "attack" command to the next one.

I still need to calculate risk on all of this. I have the chance of failure for my own route's attacks, but I need to calculate CSR's attacks to see how much risk he took on.

Notable differences:

• CSR very often found ways to attack only bases with a single marine, in such a way as to avoid killing anything else and sacrifice the marine at the end. This is something I had done a little bit in later missions, but he really increased the potential. That alone is saving minutes.

• We spent a lot of thought on Eurostorm I, how many missiles to upgrade, comparing the times, but CSR just saved a little more energy and double-marine'd that front base. It turned out slightly faster than six single missiles, but I need to time it against the three doubles idea we had.

• CSR's Kingdom is a really neat idea, and I bet it can be improved further. His framing on the center base is cleaner, and he avoids the need for a north missile.

• Marlion has me confused, it seems like CSR is taking a massive risk here, and I want to run the numbers. He just skips killing the radar.

• I was surprised to see CSR go for the ridge defenses in Chinglong, and then not surprised when my route turned out faster. But there are some ideas in his version that I want to dig into.

• CSR found an amazing way into the nuke base in Sunrise. I don't think I would have found this, he gets the enemy marine stuck in such a way that he only ever attacks the base.

Since placing the marine landing zone can be tricky for some maps, and reading through text notes is also not as natural, I got the idea to make images to show the route I use. I'll give a brief explanation of some of my choices with each image as needed.

1. GAEA

Select AT-POD first, and place it first as shown by the green numbers. This marine can be controlled immediately to skip attacking the pod, and the closer marine has NORMAL weapon, which will cause it to attack the base first.

I've had this game on my radar for a while, and just happened to check this board a few days ago... so I made a thing you might find useful, or maybe someone will. The blue crosshair is where the base placement cursor starts before each mission.

It's at game resolution, so open the image in a new tab or download it.

(This post has been updated, and the maps should now be 100% accurate, as well as now showing marine starting weapons, where blue is NORMAL, yellow is AT-MMR, and red is AT-POD.)