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+--- Thread: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos (/thread-2950.html)
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - Tenkarider - 10-09-2015
Oh, you really never played Speed Cave? Then who said that Ancient Cave was hellish compared to Speedcave?
@MrEntity: why you keep talking about searching for towns? you have to search for shops!
I believe Abyss said that the switches are the half point of the cave, which means that there are 6 shops until that point and 6 shops after...
Now, exploring is surely encouraged but indirectly necessary as well:
I saw you racing for something like 40-50 minutes in the "safe" part of the cave and you died sometime, even suddenly... honestly if you don't explore you don't even have chances of reaching the switches, so exploring is not the actual problem.
If you say people might not even reach a 7th shop, well... the tie is solved with the first one who reach the 6th shop... but just a second: did you found 6 or 9 shops?
Anyway i'd like see that happen once at least if you don't mind...
Let me make my considerations after i see you race one whole official speedcave race, then we'll see which changes might be necessary, ok?
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - MrEntity - 10-09-2015
I've found 9 shops every time I've gotten to the Guardian buttons. There are 3 on each path: 500, 2000, 8000.
I meant shops. My brain just seems to want to call them towns because they contain all the things a town normally contains.
Sometimes you die randomly, yes. Because sometimes there are very singular enemies that suddenly cast pearl and poison as their only actions, or sometimes you just screw up. That's why there are save points. The only problem is that sometimes you forget to save. Deaths are also made more common by an artifact of how I've set up my parties sometimes.
Exploration is only really required to find the two switches (which is already annoying), unless you say you need to get all the shops which involves a LOT more forced exploration. If I didn't have to find all the shops I could probably cut an hour off the race time due to the inevitable backtracking necessitated by accidentally finding the next area.
I'll stream a solo race or one against Jack if I can convince him to do yet another one (unlikely). I'll just have to find some time in the nearish future.
Oh, and I've never played the actual ancient cave - just the speed one. I can't really compare them. But my guess is that the main difference is that you wind up fighting the Guardian stuff at level ~20 in speedcave and the bosses all do more damage per attack than your characters have health. That is the main reason you'd need to grind. There has also always been a MUCH bigger step up in encounter difficulty than there is at any other music-switch.
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - Cecil188 - 10-09-2015
Yeah, simply put, the bosses are not balanced. Like, at all. I never fight Atma(except once when I had R-Chaos, so I just ate him or something), and if the dragons aren't exploitable, they're basically impossible unless you grind and go back for them. Similarly, Guardian is pretty brutal because of how early he seems to show up, as well as Inferno, who shows up even earlier. The statues and final boss aren't too difficult because sometimes you can just wall them with equipment, but everything before that can be really ridiculous.
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - abyssonym - 10-09-2015
I'm about to push a new version soon (version 60). Actually, it's already up, but my blitz fix didn't work, so there's going to be a "60.1".
The split before and after the "halfway point" is more like 60-40. The rest stops are split 9-3. The idea is that by the time you reach that point, you'll have enough resources to handle the difficulty spike. I deliberately curved it so that there's a slow ramp in the beginning because the game only really starts getting fun once you've picked up a good amount of treasure and have developed a few characters.
As for me, I'm pretty sure I could reach 11, maybe all 12 shops in 4 hours. It depends on whether I'd have to fight any of the endgame bosses to reach the last shop. I'm kind of surprised that Cecil thinks the last few bosses aren't that hard, they tend to give me more trouble than Guardian, who I can usually rush with powerful elemental attacks (or rods or fixed dice or something). Also, I don't usually have trouble with the dragons, as long as I save before checking which one it is.
I always raise a tank character (LV + 50%, LV - 1, HP + 100%), a DPS (MPwr + 2), and a support character (Speed + 2) in each party. Something else I've been doing: After hitting the three switches, I take the center party back into the earlier parts of the tower, so that I can use the cheap save point for the other two parties while they fight the Triad, and so I can keep my supplies up.
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - Tenkarider - 10-09-2015
9 Shops? that explains a lot of stuff... well of course there's a difficulty spike: it's the endgame part, and so the enemies(and so the items).
Yet i wonder how you forget to save so often, this time you also have to pay to do that and you really want to do it, since you never know what it might happen...
On a side note i'm that kind of player which save twice without an apparent reason and which sometimes saves x times through the world map after a couple of fight, so i cannot even imagine a case in which i forgot to save...
If the goal wouldn't be searching for shops, then you'd do exatly what i hate of your Narshe runs: skip most of treasures and enemies... this is the final and i wanna make it become special, it's sad that you consider exploration that much annoying
Quote:Deaths are also made more common by an artifact of how I've set up my parties sometimes.This and many other small things you said before are answered from a simple concept: all those thing you have to care about... which party formation? which equip/spell/esper/etc. are all stuff you have to plan in your mind and elaborate a balanced solution, you have to quickly react to randomization's surprise attacks...
Luck will always affect the result, but that's the same for the other races.
After you consider all those details, you can make the proper choices and earn your victory... it's like a final exam test, it evaluates all your gamer skills, which is why i consider it perfect as final stage.
The fact that you're almost at the end of the cave after 9 shops makes me think that here is where the most skilled player can beat someone faster/luckier than him...
Another question, if i still remember you start with 12 characters and 2 are found in the shop... have you ever considered to see what they can do? i mean... if you're stuck before the last part, at this point it's worth to check all what you left behind, isn't it?
PS. if you keep make test races of course you and jackimus will start to hate 'em!
except doing it for a couple of times just to know what you're going to face, nothing will ever prepare you enough to face a whole new randomization.
EDIT: what Abyss said is exactly what i'm talking about, he use pretty good strategies.
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - abyssonym - 10-09-2015
Quote:If I didn't have to find all the shops I could probably cut an hour off the race time due to the inevitable backtracking necessitated by accidentally finding the next areaOh I forgot to address this. It's probably not advisable to go into the next area without finding the shop, unless you grind more than usual. Looking for shops forces you to walk around more, so you'll be more prepared for difficulty spikes. If you do skip shops, you'll at least need to have one party stationed by a save point so you can save before you go into every new area.
I'm not totally against the idea of doing a half-speedcave race, but I do think that requiring the shops as checkpoints would help keep everyone going at relatively the same pace, which would make for a better race. If the problem is just that 4 hours is too long, maybe we should reduce the time limit to 3 hours.
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - MrEntity - 10-09-2015
I always check what they do by pulling out the mimic and seeing what new skills have shown up. Unless you find them immediately they are rarely worth going back for - primarily because you have to find the buttons all over again (ARGH! the first time I worked that out I decided to never go back to the ship again once I'd got past them) and redo the whole thing up until that point.
Espers are nice, but they are also of completely random usefulness and a lot of the time you spend half the race with minimal stat bonuses.
And the reasons I've done a whole bunch of seeds is to figure out what all the weird abilities do, which rooms are dead-ends, to test various ways of stacking parties, whether its worth returning to the airship, and so on. Every one I've done has made subsequent ones easier.
Also, Jack and I only skip the chests on Abyss's Narshe run. In Dessy's Narshe run it is almost universally useful to get most of them and weigh that against how far you are behind and ahead. In Abyss's there is rarely anything even remotely useful (or equipable) in the chests and there are infinitely more (and more dangerous) monster-in-a-boxes than in Dessy's. This makes it not only a waste of time to open them, but also grounds for a party-wipe (especially in single-character sections). Also you always run from most monsters in FF6 afte a certain point. Levels are basically unnecessary in this game (past about level 10) and there are sooooo many fights that I inevitably get bored of the fight system, just like in every other RPG.
I wouldn't do that in the speed cave because all the treasures are useful, and you actually need to level up to survive. That is the main difference between the two races: Narshe you run from everything because there's no reason not to. Speedcave you deal with everything you come across because not doing so is pretty deadly.
(10-09-2015, 02:21 PM)abyssonym Wrote: If the problem is just that 4 hours is too long, maybe we should reduce the time limit to 3 hours.
I'm really not that concerned about the time limit. I am simply concerned that neither Jack nor I has gotten more than a few screens past the buttons on any run ever.
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - abyssonym - 10-09-2015
I just want to mention that I didn't really intend for BC to be used for Narshe races. I have been developing some support for racers in the speedcave, but I was mostly focusing on vanilla speedcave until now.
Something else to consider: It's often not worth it to level up your whole party at the beginning. If I only have one esper with a good level up bonus, I'll often kill off the rest of my party and just level up one character until I get more espers. Also, the Gogo character can't equip espers, so he's handy for when you're starting out and have few espers to distribute.
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - Tenkarider - 10-09-2015
Quote:I just want to mention that I didn't really intend for BC to be used for Narshe races
That's probably why i don't like Narshe run very much: if it was only for me i'd just make speedcave race as first stage and ancientcave as final stage
RE: Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos - abyssonym - 10-09-2015
Ancient Cave would definitely take way too long. You have to take your time and backtrack a lot in that mode. When I play Ancient Cave, I have to take notes, lol.