My feelings on The Demon Rush
Game Page: Doesn't exist yet.
Mike 'grndino' Arnold's Kushan run
Verifier Responses
Decision: Accept
Reason: Another good RTS addition to the site.
Mike 'grndino' Arnold's Kushan run
Verifier Responses
Quote:
Here's my evaluation of the Homeworld run.
There were no quality problems: the audio and the visuals are nice and fluent. The High Quality download (640x480) was not ideal, just barely enough to see every detail. This is due to the high resolution recording (1024, maybe more) and the small text. Side note: I see almost no point in a LQ or similar 320x240 resolution video of this run.
I found no signs of consistency problems between segments, or any sign of cheating. It's not an exact science because it's hard to keep track of every swirling pixel-size participant, but there's no obvious inconsistency. The openness of the runner (he detailed his progress every step of the way in the HW forum from the beginning) also makes me think he has nothing up his sleeves.
Running HW is hard, because *playing* it is hard. The battle ball makes it a lot simpler than it normally is. The game comments make it obvious that the runner tried various mission strategies before arriving at the fastest method. I know of no other HW runs out there so he had to work from scratch. Game control is quick, viewers have to pay attention to keep up with the runner. In particular, battle ball management was perfected to great efficiency. It's amazing how efficient a fleet he could maintain with the bare minimum of resources collected. Research was also kept at a minimum and tailored to the run: an almost straight line from scouts to capital ships.
Overall I'm very impressed with the end result. PC Strategy games are few and far between and this one is a great addition to the list of PC games represented here. Completing this HW run was the right thing to do.
While watching the run, I did write down some possible strategy improvements. I expect that some of those already occurred to the runner and might not have helped the total length, while others could actually speed up the run a bit further. But this is for a different discussion. Kudos and well-deserved front page fame to the runner. No matter how we look at it, Homeworld completed in just over 2 hours is awesome!
Accepted.
There were no quality problems: the audio and the visuals are nice and fluent. The High Quality download (640x480) was not ideal, just barely enough to see every detail. This is due to the high resolution recording (1024, maybe more) and the small text. Side note: I see almost no point in a LQ or similar 320x240 resolution video of this run.
I found no signs of consistency problems between segments, or any sign of cheating. It's not an exact science because it's hard to keep track of every swirling pixel-size participant, but there's no obvious inconsistency. The openness of the runner (he detailed his progress every step of the way in the HW forum from the beginning) also makes me think he has nothing up his sleeves.
Running HW is hard, because *playing* it is hard. The battle ball makes it a lot simpler than it normally is. The game comments make it obvious that the runner tried various mission strategies before arriving at the fastest method. I know of no other HW runs out there so he had to work from scratch. Game control is quick, viewers have to pay attention to keep up with the runner. In particular, battle ball management was perfected to great efficiency. It's amazing how efficient a fleet he could maintain with the bare minimum of resources collected. Research was also kept at a minimum and tailored to the run: an almost straight line from scouts to capital ships.
Overall I'm very impressed with the end result. PC Strategy games are few and far between and this one is a great addition to the list of PC games represented here. Completing this HW run was the right thing to do.
While watching the run, I did write down some possible strategy improvements. I expect that some of those already occurred to the runner and might not have helped the total length, while others could actually speed up the run a bit further. But this is for a different discussion. Kudos and well-deserved front page fame to the runner. No matter how we look at it, Homeworld completed in just over 2 hours is awesome!
Accepted.
Quote:
a/v quality: very good. too good, in fact. it's recorded at a higher resolution than my laptop monitor. 
cheating: nope
I played the game a lot back when it was still A Thing and tried to help grndino with planning for this run, so as I was watching it I tried going over improvements with him. I learned some things! This game has a lot of triggers that aren't necessarily visible in a speedrun: while it might look like he could kill the raider fighters faster in 4 to make the ions hyper in sooner, the ions are actually on a timer. Something similar goes for the last needleship in 8; once it starts retreating, it's not invulnerable to damage for a while (it still racks up) but it can't actually die until it finishes retreating, which is some time soon after the khar toba cutscene. He talks about that one in his comments, actually.
In short, a lot of the things that look like execution mistakes actually aren't, or at least don't matter. There are some possible improvements, but most everything major gets thrown into chaos by the game's rank system. The game scales difficulty up and down by checking the total strength of your army as you jump into a mission, and then throwing different numbers of ships at you based on how strong it thinks you are. How to react to this is still uncertain, because while we know it happens and we have a vague idea of how it works, we don't know any of the specifics. grndino thinks he might have built too much and scaled difficulty higher than he should have; I think he built too little, because more ship means you get to kill faster. Neither of us know who's right. Any improvement would need a much better understanding of the scaling than we have currently.
None of the above, of course, means to detract from the run we have right now. A couple of the levels are kinda rough (although a lot of people might not even notice), but the vast majority is really good. Enemies are manipulated well, shit is killed extremely quickly, only the actions required to complete a level are taken, and absolutely no time is spent harvesting money at the end of a level. This run is pretty good. Most viewers, when they see 5, are going to go "wtf, you can do that?!"
in fact, I think my biggest nitpick is with his run comments. :p bballs weren't panned in multiplayer. They're too easy for a human player to disrupt and have a very hard time killing fighters if you can't just park them around defenders. bballs were mostly just used to kill frigs or motherships when a player had a total strike craft monopoly. The tactic I was talking about when I said it was banned or discouraged was called evil scouts, and it involved switching between formations extremely quickly while mashing the z speed boost. Or something. I never really learned whether or how it was different than regular formation switching, since nobody did it.
verdict: easy accept, and grats.
cheating: nope
I played the game a lot back when it was still A Thing and tried to help grndino with planning for this run, so as I was watching it I tried going over improvements with him. I learned some things! This game has a lot of triggers that aren't necessarily visible in a speedrun: while it might look like he could kill the raider fighters faster in 4 to make the ions hyper in sooner, the ions are actually on a timer. Something similar goes for the last needleship in 8; once it starts retreating, it's not invulnerable to damage for a while (it still racks up) but it can't actually die until it finishes retreating, which is some time soon after the khar toba cutscene. He talks about that one in his comments, actually.
In short, a lot of the things that look like execution mistakes actually aren't, or at least don't matter. There are some possible improvements, but most everything major gets thrown into chaos by the game's rank system. The game scales difficulty up and down by checking the total strength of your army as you jump into a mission, and then throwing different numbers of ships at you based on how strong it thinks you are. How to react to this is still uncertain, because while we know it happens and we have a vague idea of how it works, we don't know any of the specifics. grndino thinks he might have built too much and scaled difficulty higher than he should have; I think he built too little, because more ship means you get to kill faster. Neither of us know who's right. Any improvement would need a much better understanding of the scaling than we have currently.
None of the above, of course, means to detract from the run we have right now. A couple of the levels are kinda rough (although a lot of people might not even notice), but the vast majority is really good. Enemies are manipulated well, shit is killed extremely quickly, only the actions required to complete a level are taken, and absolutely no time is spent harvesting money at the end of a level. This run is pretty good. Most viewers, when they see 5, are going to go "wtf, you can do that?!"
in fact, I think my biggest nitpick is with his run comments. :p bballs weren't panned in multiplayer. They're too easy for a human player to disrupt and have a very hard time killing fighters if you can't just park them around defenders. bballs were mostly just used to kill frigs or motherships when a player had a total strike craft monopoly. The tactic I was talking about when I said it was banned or discouraged was called evil scouts, and it involved switching between formations extremely quickly while mashing the z speed boost. Or something. I never really learned whether or how it was different than regular formation switching, since nobody did it.
verdict: easy accept, and grats.
Quote:
Hey Mike.
I watched this video a couple of times and although I did used to play Homeworld a lot, I find myself at a loss for the runner's use of a scout death ball.
I don't feel particularly qualified to judge this run because of this technique, which is very unfamiliar and new to me.
Since most of the run relies on this strategy, I feel I can only comment on the Audio, Video, and whether they cheated. All of those are fine.
As far as gameplay, route, and overall strategy, I must admit that I feel pretty unqualified to judge. I could research the technique, but that would require lot's of other videos to watch and reading strategies. Usually I'm up to that, but I do have school to worry about.
But, like I said, Audio: fine, Video: fine, Cheating: none.
Oh, and it was fun to watch someone barrel through the game with mostly scouts.
I watched this video a couple of times and although I did used to play Homeworld a lot, I find myself at a loss for the runner's use of a scout death ball.
I don't feel particularly qualified to judge this run because of this technique, which is very unfamiliar and new to me.
Since most of the run relies on this strategy, I feel I can only comment on the Audio, Video, and whether they cheated. All of those are fine.
As far as gameplay, route, and overall strategy, I must admit that I feel pretty unqualified to judge. I could research the technique, but that would require lot's of other videos to watch and reading strategies. Usually I'm up to that, but I do have school to worry about.
But, like I said, Audio: fine, Video: fine, Cheating: none.
Oh, and it was fun to watch someone barrel through the game with mostly scouts.
Decision: Accept
Reason: Another good RTS addition to the site.
Thread title:
