There are a few things I would like to point out.

Firstly, you seem to be playing on 1.5x speed. Is that deliberate? The game goes up to 2.5x speed. But 1.5x speed is the default, it does make sense to play at that speed. It's just not optimal if you are trying to minimise real time.

Secondly, I just want to make sure that you know that by default, Twitch deletes VODs regularly. You have to do something to prevent Twitch from deleting your VODs. You might already have done something to prevent this, but I just wanted to make sure you knew. https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/6sz4na/stop_twitch_from_deleting_my_past_broadcasts/

Yeah, I don't think the Empire Earth records are that optimized, not many people have run the game. Congrats on the WR!

I've thought about this a lot, and I have come around to mostly agree with your point of view.

I think that real time should be the main way in which records are compared, but I think that the in-game time should also be measured.

There are some significant drawbacks to doing this, though.

This would make all current runs in the leaderboard obsolete. We will no longer have any runs for the game that have a reasonable time from the perspective of real time. This is a big problem. The existing runners, especially Onin, put a lot of work into their runs, and it would be sort of unfair for all that work to be wasted.

Therefore, before making this timing change, we would have to have a lot of good runs using this new system on the leaderboard first, in order to replace the old runs.

Therefore, I recommend that you start speedrunning and submitting your times to the leaderboard. Don't worry if they have a worse in-game time, just worry about the real time. Then, if the community later decides that there are enough of these speedruns to replace the old speedruns, and they are of sufficient quality, then maybe there will be a change in the timing method. I can't promise you anything though, I don't have the authority to do that. It depends on what the rest of the community thinks, for example it depends on what Onin thinks.

I agree that you should not be able to speed up or slow down the game. This is not a TAS, this is a real-time speedrun. On the other hand, in-game time is convenient to measure. I think that in-game time should be used in order to make it easy to measure the time taken, but that the default game speed should be enforced, you should not be able to change the game speed from the default.

I have now created a speedrun.com page specifically for Castle Crashing the Beard HD. You can find it here: https://www.speedrun.com/castle_crashing_the_beard_hd#Any

Just got an un-recorded 2:42:811

Edit: now 2:41:259

Edit: if you stay back and spam attack and don't let him get close enough to activate his beard attack, it seems that he skips activating his beard attack and moves onto the next phase. May be good because his beard attack makes him invincible

Edit: Also, if your feet are on the ground, you don't get lifted into the air by hitting the beard unless you are in super-form, in which case you get lifted into the air regardless of whether or not you hit the beard. May be good to avoid being lifted into the air in which case you might be lifted too high to hit the beard. If you are holding left next to a ledge and you move up onto it because of an attack your feet will end up on the ground on the ledge.

Edit: I just somehow managed to bug out the skull so that he fired fireballs immediately after I killed the cat, skipping the animation where he slowly spins around the place on the left. If we could make this consistent, it would make the run faster.

Edit: rather than just mashing, perhaps it's better to time attacks so that each attack is after the animation of the last attack has finished?

Edit: Once I managed to defeat the first stage at about 1:00 with blue and 200xp. Also once I managed to get to blue within the first 20 seconds, although I'm not quite sure how I managed that. In that run I knocked the tombstone on the left off the top and focused on tombstones and I guess Tom too or something

Edit: won in 2:33:255, killed the first stage before getting to the right hand of the screen, like at 53 seconds or something? Maybe earlier? I remembered before, but I don't remember now. If I had got that fire bug, that would have been quite good. I imagine the fire bug probably occurs when I make the skull summon Sherbert just before the skull is about to shoot fireballs.

That's cool, it's always good to have more people :)

I have now recorded a 2:49:718

I have submitted it to the leaderboard, but it doesn't show up because I already have a run for the original game, which is faster

Edit: I have now created a speedrun.com page specifically for Castle Crashing the Beard HD. You can find it here: https://www.speedrun.com/castle_crashing_the_beard_hd#Any

maxis2417's run of the remaster of this game looked interesting, so I gave it a run.

How are we going to deal with the remaster? It'd be cool to have a leaderboard somewhere. I've got a run of the original and I plan to run the remaster as well.

After quite a few attempts, I got a 2:58:581. I considered Iris instead of Sam, since you don't get experience while in super-form and Iris can interrupt Tom's eye-laser during which he is normally invincible, but I ended up deciding that Sam is indeed probably the fastest choice.

I don't currently have a recording but I'll probably try to record an attempt

(Then again, maybe the rules on when a game can be added to speedrun.com are different for games in a series, since it seems that there are hardly any runs of Empire Earth 2 and Empire Earth 3)

Art of Conquest*

I'm not aware of any runs of the expansion.

I do think they would be cool to have. If we had some runs, then maybe we could ask Onin to add it to the series.

In general, speedrun.com says that they need a full-game run of any game before it is added, although sometimes an overwhelming majority of the Individual Levels can be acceptable.

I did a glitchless speedrun on the original game in 1:52 RTA (which is equal to 4:23 IGT)

I used a seige ram to destroy the buildings and my citizens to kill the units.

Could still be improved significantly.

Will this speedrun be on the original game or the expansion? I imagine the biggest difference would be the existence/nonexistence of civ powers.

Are glitches such as the tribute glitch allowed?

In my opinion, I don't think there would be enough competition to keep it interesting. I don't think enough people run this game, and I don't think enough people would be interested in running that category.

Also, how would you decide which settings to use? It seems that there is a vast range of settings, and you could choose hundreds of different settings to create hundreds of different speedruns.

I would recommend speedrunning the campaign.

On the other hand, I don't control you. Do whatever you think will be the most fun. Maybe post your times/videos here on the forums.

Also just wanted to record the following:

The advantage of using names such as "any%" and "glitchless" is that it follows the conventions for many other games.

The advantage of using names such as "pre-1.16" and "1.16+" is that it makes it very clear what is considered allowed and what is banned.

I agree that there should be separate leaderboards for 1.16+ and <1.16

1.16+ could also be known as post-1.16 or glitchless.

<1.16 could also be known as pre-1.16 or any%

Since I am a <1.16 runner I think that the default leaderboard should be <1.16, but obviously it should really be on whatever category is run most often.

Just as an interesting aside, glancing at the leaderboards, in my uninformed opinion, I think that most of the 1.16+ runners have probably left already. It seems to me like most of the runs occurred 9 months ago, and one runner in particular catches my eye, MrLlamaSC. He is a reasonably popular diablo 2 streamer/speedrunner I used to watch, and I think that he started to stream starcraft, which is why all of a sudden there were a whole load of starcraft runs made. Then when he made his last run 9 months ago, everyone stopped running starcraft again. To reiterate, this is my uninformed opinion.

An alternative theory is that maybe that is when remastered came out (though I can't even be bothered doing the research for that lol)

I don't actually know why there are two separate any% categories in heli attack 3, I didn't even deliberately put a run in the other one, must have done it accidentally. I will remove one of them later. But I don't want to tamper with anything until HugeTurban is gone, so as not to mess up the logs and stuff. He has taken down my runs multiple times already, and it is annoying having to put them back up repeatedly.

I put my youtube channel into social, but I don't have accounts for any of the other listed sites (Twitch, Twitter, SRL, Discord)

HugeTurban just stole my heli attack 3 run, pls remove him as mod.

(Presumably you can see edit history and stuff)

Also, how to message him directly?

So, a while ago I was made mod for Heli attack 3, because HugeTurban wasn't accepting my run. I verified my own run, but he has taken down my run twice, for no reason, or at least I don't think he has tried to tell me why.

https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Warcraft_III/Tricks_and_Glitches#Tricks_and_Glitches