While real time vs game time is game to game due to timing differences, I feel it's important to have consistent rules regarding difficulty and speed, and possibly resolution/ini editing.

¤ Difficulty

The is probably the most important one. Nearly everyone on the leaderboards here use the easiest difficulty, while the majority of runners on YouTube use the hardest. It sort of feels like they're being written off which isn't right, yet having separate categories for the hardest difficulty would serve to clutter the leaderboards in what is already not a popular series to speedrun. The last thing I want to see is a divided community over this. Still, in my opinion I see the categories as Any%, using whatever means to beat the campaigns or missions the fastest, and in most cases the easiest category allows for that.

¤ Speed

This pertains to the first three games in the series as the rest have fixed speeds AFAIK. In Tiberian Dawn and Tiberian Sun, the fastest speed is an unlocked framerate which is unnecessarily difficult and makes the run dependent on the CPU speed of the runner. Tiberian Sun already caps to higher and Tiberian Dawn will likely do the same. However, Red Alert 1's fastest speed is not uncapped and is even possible to control. Would it still make sense to clamp it to higher to be consistent with the other two games?

¤ Resolution/INI editing

Through INI editing, you can give yourself any resolution in Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2, and Generals. Fan patches let you do the same with Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert 1. Having a larger resolution lets you see more of the battlefield, giving better control. As mentioned in my RA2 thread, for multiplayer the developers put in a option to clamp the resolution to the options giving in the game, giving credence to that they didn't want anyone having an unfair advantage through a bigger resolution. Limiting the resolutions to what is given in the game itself would let each run be more consistent with each other.

Hi, a member of this community asked me some weeks back to post my opinions on this as I have speedruns of TD and RA on my YouTube. These are my opinions:

1. Difficulty It came as a surprise to me that speedruns can actually be categorized by difficulty cos coming from the RA community (and knowing how the pros there can be very judgmental of anything lesser than commonly accepted 'pro' standards) and also my own personal character that a feat is achievement-worthy only when the most difficult of obstacles are resolved, my personal opinion is that only games at the hardest difficulty level should be considered legit. As I don't take the game very seriously I'm of course fine if people still wish to categorize them by difficulty, but by common sense if a speedrun of a mission at normal level has a shorter time than the same mission at a harder level, it cannot be considered 'superior' due to its inferior difficulty. Leaderboard-wise, the harder mission should take precedence. I can't speak for every experienced player in the RA community but honestly, having played there for nearly 2 years I can say with confidence that showing off a speedrun at normal and easy levels would get you trolled there, should there ever be a contest on this.

2. Time There's division on this and both camps have valid points. In-game time supporters think it's lame for instance to run the game at max speed, wait for an air strike to get ready and then bomb everything flat and hey mission accomplished in 2 mins cos the air strike wait time was so short. Real-time game supporters such as myself feel it's lame if one isn't skilled enough to swiftly micro and macro manage units across the map and slows the game down so he can control everything better, then claim he's still as good as the player who is fast enough to multitask. For this my suggestion is to go by real time since it takes a lot of skill to do things fast - really, I just scoff at people who challenge me online but "hey let's play at a slower speed cos I can't control my tanks properly on speed 7 / speed 7 is gay, we truly experience the finer details on speed 2!" BUT this will not apply if the mission is complete after an in-game timer ticks down to zero (cos you could just speed up the game to max to make the in-game timer tick off faster, Allies mission 8 is one such example). One is also not permitted to speed up the game at certain parts of a mission (back to the air strike example, covert operation mission Blackout is a good example) and then go by real time.

3. Speed This is very closely related to the time issue. In-game time supporters may play the game at a slower pace and the opposite applies to real-time players. Again as I value skill, the fastest speed (except for those timers air strikes etc) should be given priority. For RA and TD, humanly-possible speed would be one bar just before maximum, as the max speed is CPU-dependent as you pointed out, and unless one is still using a 486 the game just blazes off at this level. By 'human consensus' then, this speed should be used as a benchmark unless if someone can play at max speed and getting everything right, we will kneel down and kiss his butt.

4. Res I agree with you that hi-res might be a little lame as multitasking skills become null, though at the same time hi-res actually slows down production as the distance between sidebar and target area to move/place buildings is greater. You can probably guess my gut sentiment on this now - in missions where multitasking is essential, I think using a hi-res isn't legit. Of course all this is highly debatable so I'm very open to hearing views on why I may be wrong.

All this is just my 2 cents, let me know if you have differing views. Also for contribution to this site - do I just attach links to my YouTube here or upload the video from my pc?

Difficulties can now be added without cluttering the leaderboard (as bad). The admins added subcategories: http://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/lac6h . We could have two subcategories, one for any difficulty and another for the hardest. The best example of a game with different categories for difficulties is the Halo series: They have two for Easy and Legendary. Legendary makes you maneuver around to avoid instant death where as Easy you can walk right past them.

Personally, I'd have the speed be clamped to faster and timed in real time. Loading times are now almost non-existent in older games.

As for posting your videos you'll have to wait for CornfordCaster to add individual levels for TD and RA, which then you can post your YouTube links. The main leaderboards are for single segment campaign attempts.

Thanks for adding them, this will give a more accurate breakdown of skill, I'm also with you in putting the speed to the fastest possible and measuring it in real time, it can't be a speedrun when they game is so painfully slow!

Some input/thoughts from someone that doesn't run this game with plays around a bit with age of empires II.

1. Difficulty I agree with RC1985 that the game should be ran on the highest difficulty, if that is runnable. I can understand it is too difficult in some games to manage it, but on the other easy is often too easy and less interesting.

Running both options divides the runners and would be best to decide on either easy or difficult. So more competition exists in that category

2. In Age of Empires 2 you can perform actions while the game is paused, which it also does when opening a menu. For this reason real time is the best option. Only downside is that you can lose some time when your pc can't handle it, which only seems to happen when streaming requires too much from your pc and you should use lower settings for streaming.

This game is run on 2x speed, and forbids higher speed which came available in the HD release of the game. It seems like your series has different problems with availability of much higher speed. In my opinion it is important that you can perform actions/micro and playing on too high speed reduces that. It will depend on the game what works best. You want to have ingame time to be as fast as possible (optimal route) but doesn't necessarily use it as timer.

4. Using higher resolutions (which was standard introduced with HD release, and considered standard in the competitive scene on the original game) is completely fine for Age of Empires 2. It allows to play the game more optimally, which leads to better and more interesting runs. I wonder if it really hurts your series to play on higher resolution, or whether it gives viewers a better overview and also less annoying scrolling of the whole screen constantly. The "scrolling" skill part isn't something that contributes to anything and you should be moving around with hotkeys anyway.

I made a thread addressing the problem with categories for difficulties. It applies to these games too: /The_Site/thread/7z7du

I've been thinking about speed again for a while. The sliding speed scale and the fairly imprecise in-game times makes this difficult. C&C1's and RA1's in-game timers are in whole minutes, but is also tied to the number of rendered frames. If game time is chosen, what's to stop someone from going at the slowest speed to the effect of almost TASing? If real time is chosen, then not only is the CPU speed a problem, but imagine someone who beat another with game time, but not real time (like with the Airstrike mission mentioned before). Okay, we can limit the max speed to 6 (except for auto-scroller ILs), justified partly because of CPU limitations for each PC. There's still the problem with game time and the slowest speed. Should the minimum speed be 6 too? Not to mention the save & load problem which can greatly skew the game time. Seems like there'll be differences for each game. C&C1 -- FG: RT/GT - IL: RT/GT RA1 -- FG: RT/GT - IL: RT/GT TS -- FG: GT/RT - IL: GT/RT RA2 -- FG: GT/RT - IL: GT/RT Gen -- FG: RT - IL: RT (No In-game time)

I'll bring this up per game when I'm able to speedrun again.

I've changed my thoughts on resolution. Any res should be fine. I don't see it making a huge impact.

Edit: Actually, going over Renegade, it may be viable to use real time (no loads) to resolve problems between real time and game time, at least for Tiberian Sun and upward. I'm just not eager to have three time columns.