In A Deal with the Demon, the winning strategy is to use a Gambling Hall to boost your money from 5k to 100k in 24 seconds.

Wouldn't some other quests go a lot faster if you started with 100k?

Just today I went for Gambling Hall on Clash of Empires and improved my time from 15 minutes to 10 minutes. I also improved the Brashnard's Sphere record from 14 minutes to 13 minutes.

I feel this applies to any quest where you build 2+ marketplaces: instead of waiting for your economy to grow, just gamble it away. 80% of the time you'll lose everything and restart. But 20% of the time you'll magically go from 5k to 20k. This gives you a HUGE head start of several days over the traditional strategy.

So, don't you think the following quests can be improved by using Gambling Hall?

1. Tomb of the Dragon King
2. The Dark Forest
3. The Fortress of Ixmil
4. Legendary Heroes
5. Darkness Falls
6. Spires of Death

I think Gambling is indeed a lot better than people coming from Cyberlore stragies made it out to be...

It seems to me that they were under the impression you needed to get lucky multiple times in succceson, but really you only need 1-2 wins before you have the resources needed to quickly barbarian crash a level

As for the improvable levels -

Money isn't a problem for Ixmil... someone once did a analysis of the Cyberlore forums, (now lost) but with the SDK files we can re-explain the problem of how long teleport vs short teleport works.

I feel like while Ramsrock's 6 day clear prepares a large economy, he doesn't really use it, while in your 6 day clear, while your gambling hall makes you build a far larger kingdom in the same amount of time... due to luck with hero response to the flag you don't get the effective value of your gambling hall gold - only 1 guild's worth of barbarians respond of the 18 that could be there.

For Tomb of the Dragon King - The money would allow a small improvement to be made by adding some wizard offense, but I honesly think that a larger one could be done via more intensive use of the Barbarians defending Guild on Rangers AI to immediately get them on monster lairs (faster than their attack flag AI does) - I use it on 1 of the three lairs --- but hadn't fully commited to it as I wasn't sure how well it worked. It also takes about 2 minutes to set up the elves and then 40 seconds of build time for an 800HP Krolm guild when you can just find them in the wild within half the time with aggresive Leading of the Ranger.

The other ones have fairly obvious benefits to the gambling hall - I would add to them the upcoming Balance of Twilight (Paying to ressurect the wizard from Mausoleum is mandatory and costs almost as much as Deal with Demon)

I feel like basically every level could be improved with use of the gambling hall, but I honestly feel like that should be a separate category. I didn't use it out of principle for any of my runs, but I guess it's within the rules so go for it

I feel like while Ramsrock's 6 day clear prepares a large economy, he doesn't really use it, while in your 6 day clear, while your gambling hall makes you build a far larger kingdom in the same amount of time... due to luck with hero response to the flag you don't get the effective value of your gambling hall gold - only 1 guild's worth of barbarians respond of the 18 that could be there.

I agree - the big kingdom helped, but not 100% as much as it could have with better unit management. I also sat around waiting for the first teleport when I probably could have attacked much earlier with 1-2 Temples to Krolm. Now that I think about it, the optimal strategy might be to rush with Rangers + Krolm immediately and not bother with money at all.

With Tomb of the Dragon King, you're right that it could be improved by better management of the barbarians, getting them to destroy buildings instead of Rogues. I feel Gambling Hall would still help some, as there are plenty of times when your kingdom does not have 100% full guilds and Rage of Krolm, and both of those would definitely help.

Legendary Heroes: definitely would help, since the first half of the quest is getting money to build wizard towers. In theory you would gamble up to 60k+, but the odds of that happening are pretty slim (5%?). Still, we could get a big improvement by gambling up 20k and using that to jump start a big economy - 3x level 3 marketplaces. This would definitely shave off a few days.

Darkness Falls: I just did this one, definitely helped.

Spires of Death: This is the longest, most expensive quest by a long shot. Similar to Legendary Heroes, you theoretically could fund this entirely with Gambling Hall but more realistically you'd want to use it to get a foothold early on. Anyway none of that matters because right now any time is a WR!

with the SDK files we can re-explain the problem of how long teleport vs short teleport works.

I saw you post about this earlier, how are you decoding these SDK files?

I have some disassembly experience so I'm curious. But I've never done it in Windows so I don't know what tools to use or where to look.

@Torquesthekron

I feel like basically every level could be improved with use of the gambling hall, but I honestly feel like that should be a separate category. I didn't use it out of principle for any of my runs, but I guess it's within the rules so go for it

That was my first thought - isn't this so broken it should be banned? However the above 8ish quests were all I could come up with that could be improved with Gambling Hall.

Keep in mind to use Gambling Hall you have to:

1. build Rogue's Guild
2. build Marketplace
3. build Inn
4. upgrade Palace
5. build Elven Bungalow
6. wait for up to 1 day for Gambling Hall to appear
7. THEN buy whatever you wanted in the first place

On most quests, it's faster to build what you want immediately rather than build out all those buildings. Gambling Hall isn't useful on quests completed in <6 minutes, which is most of them.

Timer quests aren't helped much either since you have a huge amount of money by the time the final objective appears.

So Gambling Hall is only effective on "grow a barbarian army" quests and not "blitz" or "wait" quests.

I do agree that a leaderboard that's basically "who got luckiest" would be pretty lame. However on most of these quests, you can stop gambling as soon as you reach 20k. This happens about 20% of the time when starting from 5k. So it just becomes part of the strategy, like resetting if you get bad spawn positions.

And as always, if it's considered boring enough it can be banned or spun out into a different category.

For SDK 90% of the time I just use a few resources

1: Checking Scripted Events Majesty > Properties > Browse Local Files > SDK > OriginalQuests > GPLMX > Rules > Epic Quest Scripts for scripting on southern maps, Quests 1-3 for Northern maps

2: Checking Map Spawn Patterns Majesty > Propetires > Browse > Local Files > RGSEditor From Editor - Open > (Questname.q) NOT Questname.mqxml - Go to Quests tab - Check Force Patterns to see potential Layouts (Pre-rotation) if a location is set to 1 and their are multiple 1s on the map, it can spawn at any of them.

3: Checking specific unit designs and specific building timers Set -gpldebug as the launch option Press _ underscore during any level, I mostly check specific buildings in the Tracking menu as their stat page tends to contain all milisecond values and such.

I can't give you a comprehensive guide on how to use the tools for levelmaking or mods I mostly use it to get information

Of course even with the knowledge, a lot of levels I still use Brute Force luck to handle (or the revelation restart map 20 times until I have a mental "feel" for it method) It is most helpful with things like Trading Posts found in the wild which tend to have few locations (once you find enough landmarks to orient what your current in-game "north" is relative to the unrotated force pattern map. In the levels with the most spawn variation (Brashnard's Sphere and Legendary Heroes) I still find it helpful to know that the game operates with 25 internal "grid points"

Thanks for the explanations, those are both pretty useful! While these don't reveal 100% what to do to some robot precision, it is helpful to know the rules. I spent some time reading over the Spires of Death scripting, and it was pretty interesting reading about how the spires step up their attacks.

That was my first thought - isn't this so broken it should be banned? However the above 8ish quests were all I could come up with that could be improved with Gambling Hall.

Keep in mind to use Gambling Hall you have to:

1. build Rogue's Guild
2. build Marketplace
3. build Inn
4. upgrade Palace
5. build Elven Bungalow
6. wait for up to 1 day for Gambling Hall to appear
7. THEN buy whatever you wanted in the first place

On most quests, it's faster to build what you want immediately rather than build out all those buildings. Gambling Hall isn't useful on quests completed in <6 minutes, which is most of them.

Timer quests aren't helped much either since you have a huge amount of money by the time the final objective appears.

So Gambling Hall is only effective on "grow a barbarian army" quests and not "blitz" or "wait" quests.

I do agree that a leaderboard that's basically "who got luckiest" would be pretty lame. However on most of these quests, you can stop gambling as soon as you reach 20k. This happens about 20% of the time when starting from 5k. So it just becomes part of the strategy, like resetting if you get bad spawn positions.

And as always, if it's considered boring enough it can be banned or spun out into a different category.

I definitely agree with this. It does seem like a lot of the majesty runs won't benefit from it, and basically every level is very reset heavy already if the RNG isn't right. I mean just look at my Rescue the Prince. That entire run is basically one big roulette wheel. You're making me want run my Dark Forest using G-hall and see what can be done. I bet it could be done in less than 10 days