Kentucky, USAIn Big 20 #18 we had the goal of "Score 25 points". This was a fairly unique goal compared to the others on the leaderboard because it didn't require running the clock -- in fact, running the clock was bad!
I am looking at playing all the games from the Big 20 in a speedrunning sense, but there don't seem to be any categories for this game that don't involve running the clock. 25 points might not be the best option but any category that would involve people playing the game but not running out the clock after hitting the point threshold would be a welcome change. The "49 points category" is close, but at the end you still need the clock to run out.
If I made and provided a romhack of this that just allowed you to go straight to the title screen would that be allowed and/or appreciated
There are a multitude of categories that could exist for this game, but very few have played it all the way through to know what they could be. Because of its historically low activity, I'm open to categories being created that are shorter in nature compared to the full game, which can be several hours. If you have an idea for a category and are willing to run it, let me know and I can create a category for it if it is appropriate.
Suggested categories could be:
- Any% - Complete both main missions. This was suggested by the developer for TMR during his NESMania project. This run could be over 10 hours long, though it could also be much shorter for someone who routes the game out. I am 100% fine with this category allowing for breaks in the stream and/or pausing the timer due to the incredibly length of the game.
- Complete a Mission - Complete either of the main missions
- Achieve specific rating. There are different ratings you can get by playing the game and destroying ships (e.g., "Dangerous"). These are concrete goals that are a bit more targeted.
- Achieve a certain amount of currency (e.g., Millionaire, Billionaire, etc.). This is a trading game so it can be a category on its own.
- Complete a Bounty. There's bounty hunting in this game! Completing one of these tasks would involve improving your ship, finding and completing the bounty.
I'm also open to other ideas people may have, such as gathering the best equipment for your ship, becoming a pirate, etc., there are many partial goals available. As I have time I will explore some of these myself and maybe make the category and run myself.
The "primary" category for now is Training as it is the only created category. It is short and introduces the game and controls. This is a PAL game that doesn't play well with Everdrives, so it is likely emulator only for most. As more categories are created, they would become the primary category. The primary category would be whichever run is most competitive and the most complete game -- ideally Any%, completing a mission, or achieving a specific rating.
If TMR and Dugongue, who have both completed a casual playthrough of Elite, wanted to submit their runs as Any% runs I would be accepting of this and use their runs as a baseline for the ruleset in terms of breaks.
1 million points
When you get 1 million points the score resets
That is all
When starting from a fresh file (with the waterfall cutscene), you can immediately soft reset and save about 10 seconds of time.
Why is this not allowed for "Any%"? I would like to not lose 10 seconds of my life D:
I played this a long time ago and stopped because the intro bothered me between resets
Yogi won't let me make a romhack that allows skipping the intro
so now I want to get two NESes and two copies of Solstice running and just switch the A/V cables when I die
is this legal
Playing online multiplayer, I was seeing "waiting for players" anywhere from 4 seconds to 20 seconds.
How should this be compensated for in timing? IGT seems like an easy solution, but isn't currently being used for other runs.
Anyone know what might cause this? This game is part of this year's Halloween Spooktacular but one of the runners experienced this on his powerpak intermittently.
When making this game's leaderboard I decided on only using "Normal", as the 2 and 5 minute are just score-based runs. I'm not opposed to making score-based runs if there is a large enough interest in them as misc categories as a rule, but SRC generally avoids them for a reason so I plan to avoid them as well.
I made "No Turbo" the default category as it is more "traditional" and uses default hardware, but have a turbo category because playing Any% can cause actual physical damage to your hands using an NES controller for long periods of time. The mashing is brutal!
If you are super interested in doing a challenge-type run for this (e.g., Pacifist), let me know. If approved, I'll make the category after you have a run recorded.
Just wanted to note, I updated the rules for each category to clarify the start and end time, including individual levels.
I used existing runs to determine what the start and end time was.
Existing runs that didn't use a timer, stopped at a different time from other runs, etc., are staying live. If you submit a run that you believe beats a run that doesn't have a timer running, let me know and I'll framecount both to determine the difference (as silly as that sounds for Coloring a Dinosaur).
Runs whose videos are "dead" will eventually be removed if the runner can't replace the video / can't be contacted.
Are all gems necessary to submit a run for Any%?
Is the oneshot code allowed? (Gives you shoes/magic pot once in the run)
Can a mod add "you must finish each hole without forfeiting" to the rules for clarification if that is a rule?
It's slower to forfeit than to just finish holes anyway, but Vriaeliss mentioned that he was told he had to complete each hole despite it not being in the rules.
I don't care one way or another whether it is allowed or not, just thought the clarification would be useful for runners since failing a hole to move on is essentially the golf equivalent of a death warp and, should this game be in a marathon setting, might be a legitimate strategy for some holes.
A few important glitches and timesaves for people interested in running this game:
1. Laughing Kettle
The Laughing Kettle can be killed fastest via a "Scroll of Conjuring". This costs 3,500 gold from Boltac's shop. If you get an Air Elemental (preferred), Greater Demon, Djinn, or Golems you can potentially kill the kettle. This gives an obscene amount of experience, taking a character from level 1 to level 14 if they are on their own!
2. Thieves Guild
The Laughing Kettle can be revived for 6,000 gold. Your party needs levels to survive the rest of the game anyway, so if you can get gold quickly you can kill the kettle multiple times if your mage learned Socordi. You can open the door to the thieves guild with your thief or mage after leveling up at the kettle.
3. Ghost Grind
The ghost grind in this is not for XP, but for gold! Stealing from them gets you several high profile items (including the Ring of Frozz, a one-use invoke that gives your mage full spells!) that sell for a lot. You can also buy a special cursed sword called the "Soul Stealer" for 33,750. There is another sword with the same cost you do not want, so it's random chance if you get it.
You can run from the combat to potentially visit another ghost to steal/buy from for speed, but it is good to kill a few to get their items. After identifying them, sell them for the rest of the money you need in the game.
4. Soul Stealer and Demon Statue
At such low levels, it is impossible to reliably deal damage to the big enemy groups you run into. To fix this, we use the Soul Stealer and Demon Statue glitches. By invoking the Soul Stealer (not equipping!) with your fighters, they get large bonus rolls. Having strong weapons is preferred, but not necessary, for your fighters. The Soulstealer CAN break, so be careful to save before using it.
The Demon Statue, when invoked, lowers your VIT by 1 to a minimum of 3. It also increases your HP! By increasing your HP to around 800-900, you should be able to reliably survive throughout the entire game. You can get multiple Demon Statues by returning to the blood pool.
**5. The Clones **
You have four very difficult clone fights. The "clones" aren't exact duplicates -- the mage will have tiltowait even if you don't! One advantage you can have is to remove members from your party by quitting to town, restarting your party in the maze, but only selecting one or two members. A fighter with the soul stealer glitch can be very useful here.
6. The Sorn
This is the most difficult fight in the game because The Sorn likes to kill your entire party if they aren't buffed by the demon statue to have obscene HP. You have to use Socordi and then wait for the Gatekeeper to remove his shield! If you manage to survive, not get paralyzed, petrified, etc., you are often poisoned at the end and still need to make it home!
To remedy this situation, I'd suggest picking up a Scroll of Latumofis to cure poison before doing the endgame sequence. Alternatively, you can leave one party member behind (like a cleric with Latumofis) and then pick them back up after the battle.
If you're really lucky, you get a potion of Madi. Using one of those to heal your fighter to full after The Sorn is dead is a near guaranteed victory.
7. Text speed
Text is pretty fast, but you can move it to "1" to speed up text quite a bit. This has some disadvantages as you can't read what's happening most of the time, but the option is there!
8. Early Game Gold
No one knows the best way on average to get gold in the early game. The vampire bats, stealing from ironnose, stealing from G'bli, forced door combat, or regular combat grinding are all good strategies with varying amounts of RNG. You want to get to the kettle as quickly as possible and you get the most gold by stealing from G'bli, but need to be a higher level to have a good chance. To get to a higher level you want to kill bats, but the possibiltiy of poison and the length of the combat makes it inefficient at the first sign of trouble. Each reset takes ~15 seconds and you can finish two regular combats that gives you 120+ gold within that time if you're lucky, so save scumming for G'bli might not be the best strategy in general. Someone who spent a lot of time on this could find a lot of timesaves here.
Edit: The now fastest Kettle Kill is 50 seconds from town to Kettle falling off the bottom of the screen! It's rare, but possible.
9. Solo leveling
XP is split amongst your party. Currently, we use a party of 6 to level up as the limiting factor is not XP, but gold, in the early game. That said, reducing your party size to level up the thief faster could be a good way to get more reliable steals which could increase the speed at which you get the scroll of Socordi. Even with reduced HP, with good RNG you could then kill a kettle which would let you into the thieves guild and drastically speed up the early game. That said, you often need cleric levels to heal, the wizard to identify items to sell, and the mage to kill large groups quickly, and fighters are needed early game for sure, so it's difficult to know who to remove from your group and how helpful it will be without doing several runs.
The main "time saves" from leveling are:
Fighters killing things more regularly Cleric being able to cast Dios more (and having more HP) Mage being able to cast Melito (great for killing lizard groups) Wizard being able to cast Dios
This board is currently only hosting runs for the SNES version of the game, which has some large differences compared to the others. If you would like to run Wizardry V in one of its other releases, let me know and I'll create an appropriate category if need be.
Currently Wizardry V supports both the Famicom and SNES versions. If significant differences between Famicom and SNES are found (e.g., significant glitch differences, Malor bounceback differences, etc.) I will likely split the categories.
I do not currently support the translated Famicom version as I haven't been able to ensure nothing else has been changed. If you would like to help me do this, please contact me with your rationale.
Milliseconds are only used for Reset % and are not considered for other categories.
Any% (no char creation): This is the default category and involves using the default party. It was chosen as the default due to the large time investment it takes to create characters with proper stats. Character rolls can be as high as 60 bonus points -- getting 6 of those would take hours, if not days. Timing starts from the "enter maze" selection to allow players to rename characters and organize their party without it affecting their time; this makes for a more personal and enjoyable run.
Any%: If this becomes the most popular category I'll transfer it to the default category. Character creation was not part of the timing to prevent a lucky roll from saving ten minutes or from making the run "reset until a good first roll", making this run more tolerable.
Laughing Kettle Run: A shortened version of the normal categories, similar to FFIV Paladin runs or FFVI Narshe runs, that gives a taste of the full game. Killing the Laughing Kettle is one of the fastest ways to level up in the game. Finding a way to kill him quickly is important! This category can have some changes due to there being no need for experience -- just a good scroll of conjuring.
Reset%: A fun meme run, but also instructive on how to reset your progress in Wizardry V, which isn't obvious at first glance.
Credit Warp: Credit Warping is possible using ACE in real time. (This category does not accept TAS)
Glitchless: I have not created a Glitchless category yet as I do not believe there is any interest in running this, as it has been several years without a single run of Wizardry V in the first place. If you are running this category I will happily create the category for you. Glitchless would not allow for ACE, Soulstealer glitch, Demonic Figure HP buff, or other obvious glitches and developer mistakes.
No Reset%: I have not created a No Reset category yet as I do not believe there is any interest in running this category. If you are running this category I will happily create the category for you. This would be Any%, but not allow for resets of any kind. At the cemetery screen after death, you would need to press a button to allow the death of your party and then continue gameplay.
If you have another category you believe is necessary or interesting, let me know once you have a recording of the run available. I do not plan to create arbitrary stopping point categories other than the Laughing Kettle Run.
How is end% timed?
Chardcore and I have been frame counting the runs and thought we were accurate, but it currently has us both with the same timing with different frame counts.
I'm also not sure where the 4.292 came from; 211 frames is 3.516 (TAS) 257 frames is 4.283 (one frame faster than my latest run) 258 frames is 4.300 (my latest run) 260 frames is 4.333 (chard's latest run)
Just a moderator note, it is perfectly acceptable to have one run played up to level 30 be used to submit a time for level 10 and level 20 categories.
The game can be very long and difficult, so I thought it'd be good to have different tiers of difficulty rather than just an empty board of "beat level 30".
Here's some codes for the game you can use for fun and practice: Change Slot Patterns and Increase Difficulty (Two-Players) When you enter the two-player mode menu, hold Up and press Start. This will change the slot patterns in the game, and also increase its difficulty.
Change the slot patterns At the title screen press B five times, then A three times, then hold Up and press Start. If done right, the patterns in the slots will be changed and the game will be harder.
Level Select At the title screen press B five times, then A three times, then hold Down and press Start. If done right, you'll be able to select all levels.
Any possibility of a solo character misc. category? (e.g., all other 3 characters level 1 and not revived on death)
I know Solo character and "four of the same" character runs are meme categories, but I was planning on doing a solo run or two in the future and figured I'd ask if it could become an actual category on its own.
There's no video for the only run?
I plan on running this in 2019 if I can find the time, but don't really want to compete with a mystery video. Can the video be replaced, or the run removed?
When asked about how retiming runs worked I was told to make a forum post, so here it is!
Current runs between WH and myself are within .01, from my timing I'm ahead by a bit over .01; framecounting may be needed. Above are images showing the timing changes based on our split timing. Very close!
