I was wondering if anyone had given any thought to running the two Savage Frontier games. I know MsKain talked about it as a goal some time for one of his videos.

I was playing around casually with Gateway last night and it could be a fun one to run. Quite different to most of the other games in that there are really not that many magical items. It's probably also second only to Pool of Radiance in the Gold Box series for opportunities to sequence break.

Treasures (which I haven't played for ages) doesn't have as many IIRC, but it's considerably less linear than a typical Gold Box outing.

Had a look at your max cycles stream on Twitch (couldn't watch live due to the time difference, but made a point to check it out afterwards). I'm more convinced now that this is the way to go, but if other people don't like it (or have a better way of ensuring consistency), all good.

1. I think there's still a discrepancy (your "tour" at the start of the game took about 2.5 seconds, compared to around 6 on my computer), but the difference is obviously going to be much smaller overall and overall time will depend more on speed on the keyboard and route optimiziation - which is good!

2. Higher speed reduces the impact of RNG - unavoidable random encounters in the wilderness with stirges, tigers and giant lizards can be dealt with in a few seconds rather than being minute long record killers.

3. Leaning more on Quick combat will be disproportionately quicker, making finding and duping good items early on to be a good time investment.

4. The main potential hazard is the fact that you can rarely hit the spacebar to end Quick combat in time, which can make complex encounters dangerous if you don't remember to turn it off the battle before.

5. If you do choose to upload your run, congrats on getting the first sub-40 time!

Hi all,

After a long absence, I've been starting to get back into running the five Gold Box games currently up and I've been doing some offline practice as well as studying some of the existing runs.

Something occurred to me when looking at LordBreakfast's Champions run (very nice BTW) - even with a constant setting for DosBox cycles, it seems to be strongly affected by the CPU speed - for example, I can't break 37 minutes at the moment at 6000 cycles with an effectively identical route, and while there is a lot of room for improvement, I'm not sure there's 5 minutes' worth. The combats on my runs certainly look a lot more sluggish.

Having looked into DosBox's documentation, it seems that it is affected by the speed of the computer you're using. There are also dozens of internal settings which affect performance. It makes it clear that the cycles speed is there to compensate for the difference between slow and fast computers, and while that's great for casual play, it makes any kind of consistency really difficult.

I don't think there's an easy solution, but having looked over some other older DOS games, there seems to be a convention of using the cycles=max setting. I've had a go at Champions with this and it's playable, although some of the strats need tweaking a bit. It would, however, close the gap between faster and slower computers from several minutes to probably a few seconds if that.

I'm not a massive fan of running at max speed because it's nice to actually be able to follow what's going on in combats rather than having them zip by in a flash, but it does seem to be the best way to take hardware out of the equation.

Thoughts?

Hey, nice run, MSKain. And thanks for the shout out. :) I think a few run-throughs of that and some RNG luck and you'll be comfortably getting sub-13.

I've been practicing the Any% run over the last couple of weeks, and I did one which I thought was frankly a bit ragged, and was astonished to see it come in at 10:46 (hopefully the video works this time round - not sure what happened before). While a big part of that improvement is that I'm much more comfortable with the duping than I used to be, it got me thinking with this route at least, how much further it's possible to take it. The sum of my best segments is a 10:31, and with a cleaner run through the Slums, it could go below that. Sub-10? Don't know if that's viable, at least not without an alternate route.

The 100% route I'm less certain about because I've only run it through twice. My best is about 48 minutes or so, but that was more ironing out some of the more obvious mistakes in the earlier 52 minute one. Under 45 is definitely viable. How far under 45 is an open question at this point.

I've just submitted a new run based on a strategy of getting experience from as many treasure hoards as possible, and an early trip to the castle to grab a Wand of Lightning and Necklace of Missiles to mop up any time consuming encounters like the orcs and hobgoblins on Sokal Keep.

I was pretty lucky with RNG on this one (a battle with a displacer beast in the wilderness notwithstanding), but there were quite a few stutters at the beginning and next time, I'm going to start looting some bows and arrows so that I can mop up the 8th level fighters a bit more quickly. I'd say with some luck and some tighter execution, this one could go down to close to 15m.