I had been thinking about TASing this game on and off and watching Jeff's awesome run was the last straw. I've been looking into more things about this game and have a WIP TAS at about an hour. (http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1471&start=40) Anyway, I got a lot of good ideas from Jeff's run and posts on TASvideos and wanted to return the favor with some things that might help an SDA run. Not everything is going to be helpful since in a TAS I can control the size of random mobs, manipulate chest amounts and make tremor hit everything.
First of all, text is displayed one character at a time so you really should give your main a one-letter name. You do not need the skull at all. Dungeon Destard is fastest from the altar and Shame and Despise are faster when done from their entrances than from the altar room. If you have the key and Gate magic it is faster to exit from those two, Gate to Britain and get back to the altar from Hythloth. Even if you do Despise from the altar, you can pick a different route on level 8 of Despise to avoid the room with the reaper that often puts you to sleep in a long and painful fight. Finally, giving every last gold piece to a beggar gives you both compassion and sacrifice which means you don't need to give blood.
About routing, I pick the paladin because he has the highest starting xp and most valuable equipment to sell. He starts in Trinisic too, so you can immediately sell your armor, buy a bow and start fighting. In the TAS I do 11 random fights. The gold from that plus my equipment plus a deathwarp is enough for the key and the xp gets me to level 4. A deathwarp in Zircon's forge is very convenient; you can effectively bank your gold by buying weapons, get the rune and then get back to Lord British with bonus gold. The reason this is so great is because having the key early allows for completely eliminating backtracking. Getting the gold completely from random encounters may not be practical in real time but you could pad it out with town chests for a small and easily recoverable virtue loss.
Now in the dungeons things are definitely going to be different. Level 4 paladin has 23 MP so you can use energy but not Gate or Tremor. I fix that by feeling up some orbs in Deceit. I still need to solo some big room fights in Deceit and I do it by casting Energy and tricking the enemies into killing themselves. That strategy saves a lot of time over straight out attacking because it avoids the text describing your attacks and the enemies' death. You don't get xp but you don't need it. This should save time in many places. If you have other party members you can have them step out of the room while the main hero plays decoy. After the battle you go to where the main ends up so he can't run if you want to progress. About Tremor, the chances to take out 7 or 8 enemies in one shot is probably only 1% or so. No problem in a TAS
Another big route difference is that I use Gate quite a bit instead of sailing around. The encounter rate on the ship is very low so avoiding ship travel speeds things up. With Gate you can warp to shrine of spirituality or black stone when the moons are right. One warning about Gate is that it resets your ships so you will need to get a new one.
For compassion and sacrifice I use several beggars that I pass by and pad the rest out with the beggar in Serpent's Hold who is by far the fastest. Otherwise I don't have anything to add for gaining virtue.
Throughout the TAS I trigger encounters faster by walking over higher-rate terrain. I posted the details on TASvideos but basically the way the algorithm works with the RNG is that a step on higher-rate terrain may actually advance the encounter accumulator more than on lower-rate terrain. Over time it will even out though. The point is that in a TAS I can see the actual numbers and tweak my path to manipulate encounters sooner so you can't do quite as well in real time. I've disassembled a few other algorithms as well, just check that thread.
I've been amazed at how SDA runs are able to incorporate techniques that I thought would be limited to TAS, so good luck using this in your run!
First of all, text is displayed one character at a time so you really should give your main a one-letter name. You do not need the skull at all. Dungeon Destard is fastest from the altar and Shame and Despise are faster when done from their entrances than from the altar room. If you have the key and Gate magic it is faster to exit from those two, Gate to Britain and get back to the altar from Hythloth. Even if you do Despise from the altar, you can pick a different route on level 8 of Despise to avoid the room with the reaper that often puts you to sleep in a long and painful fight. Finally, giving every last gold piece to a beggar gives you both compassion and sacrifice which means you don't need to give blood.
About routing, I pick the paladin because he has the highest starting xp and most valuable equipment to sell. He starts in Trinisic too, so you can immediately sell your armor, buy a bow and start fighting. In the TAS I do 11 random fights. The gold from that plus my equipment plus a deathwarp is enough for the key and the xp gets me to level 4. A deathwarp in Zircon's forge is very convenient; you can effectively bank your gold by buying weapons, get the rune and then get back to Lord British with bonus gold. The reason this is so great is because having the key early allows for completely eliminating backtracking. Getting the gold completely from random encounters may not be practical in real time but you could pad it out with town chests for a small and easily recoverable virtue loss.
Now in the dungeons things are definitely going to be different. Level 4 paladin has 23 MP so you can use energy but not Gate or Tremor. I fix that by feeling up some orbs in Deceit. I still need to solo some big room fights in Deceit and I do it by casting Energy and tricking the enemies into killing themselves. That strategy saves a lot of time over straight out attacking because it avoids the text describing your attacks and the enemies' death. You don't get xp but you don't need it. This should save time in many places. If you have other party members you can have them step out of the room while the main hero plays decoy. After the battle you go to where the main ends up so he can't run if you want to progress. About Tremor, the chances to take out 7 or 8 enemies in one shot is probably only 1% or so. No problem in a TAS
Another big route difference is that I use Gate quite a bit instead of sailing around. The encounter rate on the ship is very low so avoiding ship travel speeds things up. With Gate you can warp to shrine of spirituality or black stone when the moons are right. One warning about Gate is that it resets your ships so you will need to get a new one.
For compassion and sacrifice I use several beggars that I pass by and pad the rest out with the beggar in Serpent's Hold who is by far the fastest. Otherwise I don't have anything to add for gaining virtue.
Throughout the TAS I trigger encounters faster by walking over higher-rate terrain. I posted the details on TASvideos but basically the way the algorithm works with the RNG is that a step on higher-rate terrain may actually advance the encounter accumulator more than on lower-rate terrain. Over time it will even out though. The point is that in a TAS I can see the actual numbers and tweak my path to manipulate encounters sooner so you can't do quite as well in real time. I've disassembled a few other algorithms as well, just check that thread.
I've been amazed at how SDA runs are able to incorporate techniques that I thought would be limited to TAS, so good luck using this in your run!
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