Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos

While I do think that gathering party members could possibly be neat in practice, I really don't like the idea in theory. You're going to wind up with un-leveled characters in unbalanced parties. Plus the whole first couple section of the cave is going to be harder. It can already be super annoying if you have minimal healing.

It would be best if you could figure out a way to just allow for party switching. Maybe add spawn points to the towns and let you fiddle with parties if everyone is there or something?

I like the balancing changes that are to come, and I think the xp curve would balance the endgame content, as just having more hp and more damage would be really helpful overall.

In regards to the new party members not meshing with the team, I don't think it's that big of a deal. In a regular game, there's always forced parties, whether it be by the game design, or by the fact that sometimes there are exactly 4 characters at the lowest level, and I therefore have no choice in who to bring(at least, that's how I play it). Despite this, my parties generally do fine, and I can come up with some strategy to use. I can't foresee any major differences between that and Speed Cave.

In regards to the difficulty of bosses, I think that the 5 bosses should still be randomized, but not objectively buffed. The reason for this is because on the whole, I foresee most of the difficulty being generated from exactly what equipment you find in the cave, and not things like levels or skills(given all of the high power attacks that are normally dealt with by elemental shields). As such, if you have bad equipment, you're basically screwed against the bosses, whereas if the difficulty is lowered, lack of equipment may be made up for with levels or skills. On another note, this also applies to Speed Cave runs that aren't races, because it doesn't matter how thorough I search for stuff, I can't get what hasn't been randomized into the seed. Thus, I can still be screwed if, say, there's no Ice absorbing equipment to deal with Doom.

In regards to the lower starting number of characters, I don't think this is really a bad thing. After all, the characters you do have will be a higher level. Although, this does inherently create a larger gap between the party members you gain and the party members you have in terms of levels. In addition, balancing by party average may be tricky if one party is way ahead of the rest, as the new party members will be dragged down by the other two teams that are behind. This could be offset if they were guaranteed to join +2 or +5 levels above average, I suppose.

It would be best if you could figure out a way to just allow for party switching.

I think Abyss should try something easy first, like a Kaizo Mario World Blindfolded challenge. >.>

@Cecil My problem is less that the change will make things undoable than the fact that we're removing a great deal of strategic options.

Access to healing: I've made item shops and espers more common in the early parts of the cave, so that shouldn't really be a problem. You have a 2/3 chance of finding an item shop in the first zone, unless one of them was changed into the colosseum.

Access to treasure: The "treasure buff" that I did was partially a tweak to improve item coverage... which means that items that haven't been added to the cave yet will get priority over duplicates. It is by no means guaranteed, but the odds of getting a particular elemental shield or even a Paladin Shield or an Illumina are much greater than they have been in the past.

Another point I'd like to make... I personally think that races should allow the use of a guide. In vanilla speedcave you can easily trade up your items for an elemental shield or a Red Jacket because you might already know the colosseum wagers. That's one of the reasons why I added the colosseum, so that players have access to a means of controlling their equipment pool and can stockpile the stuff they need to get through the cave.

Party levels: Personally I thought that having variation in levels is a good thing, because the exp curve is such that the requirements for early levels are vastly reduced which means it doesn't take much time to get a new recruit up to speed. It helps protect against the "Lv5 Doom" problem, and encourages players to build up characters one at a time. I like it because I don't have to get to know 12 characters all at once; the initial party select screen drives me crazy. Also to note... I do have the option of level averaging new recruits, but I decided against it. In any case, if I do end up creating a third code, I'll probably keep the 12 characters in that one.

I wouldn't mind trying the race with the guide as a variation on the default at some point (like doing a run with unrandomized monsters as Jackimus mentioned earlier), but I don't really like that as the default unless others are all for it, in which case I would be alright with switching.

I dislike the idea of the guide. It basically defeats the purpose of randomization if you know all the random elements before hand and can just look anything up.

If it's not about a race i'd play 100% both speedcave and ancient cave(i'll stream them after i finish ROTDS) the reason of doing it here and not keep playing ancient cave is because i potentially don't mind playing speedcave multiple times and also discover all the super secret items, that would also cost me few time compared to ancient cave; This one instead i'd hardly play it twice without any new update between the 2 runs.

On a second thought it's not that bad starting with 6 characters, after all you get twice the exp due to having just 2 members and gameover before the first shop won't be terrible as before, since party planning at the beginning is way more faster.


Here i might say something new:
We might consult the guide, with a simple restriction: only the colosseum item list.
Without knowing any item that you might want to search, no one(except me ) would use colosseum in a speedcave race unless you want to farm some tonic/dried meat at the beginning. (but Abyss said he will fix healing item problem)
At this point if it's not a great problem for the code(and not a problem for the other racers), Abyss might make generate a separate text file which has only colosseum datas inside, that would avoid unwanted spoilers while scrolling the text file...

You could just Ctrl+F Coliseum. The only other thing you'd see is Terra's name and some base stats. There isn't anything there that would really affect what I would do in a run.

Not exactly, if i accidentally see who's character 1, first of all i know if terra is char #1 or not and in that case i'll know that char #1 must be a leader so that i'll get 50% female discount if i'm lucky, and that's something, expecially if Abyss is going to expand the number of items sold in speedcave shops

Not exactly, if i accidentally see who's character 1

Copy "Coliseum" to clipboard -> mouse over guide.txt -> close your eyes -> double-click -> Ctrl+F -> Ctrl+V -> Press "Enter" -> Success.