Post subject: Warcraft II: The Dark Saga
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So, there may be 4 possible runs, Dark Tides & Dark Portal as both Orcs and Humans (AFAIK, each is a separate campaign. ) I am getting irritated with Final Fantasy 8, and I was curious what this game would look like TAS'd, so here is a quick test run of the first two Dark Tide Orc Levels. Link to video also, LOADING
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Would it be possible to TAS the DOS version using JPC-RR? I would think that would be better since you could use the mouse instead of a D-Pad. Or does JPC-RR not record mouse movement?
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Looks interesting. Maybe you could put the grunts near the base/mine to make the peons spawn closer to the mine/base? (Oh, it's only a test run...) This version looks OK, but can't you move the cursor any faster? I remember recording something with the DOS version using DOSBox and a mouse. The mouse cursor was the fastest thing I ever saw. Actually, it was so fast that I didn't even see it! (Oops, the game was actually Warcraft 1...) Maybe some of these real-time runs are helpful: http://war2.ru/research/dq/index.html If you TAS this Dark Saga, DarkKobold, please post WIPs for each level! By the way, what kind of Lua scripts are you planning to use? A script that shows the paths and current targets of enemy units might be useful. I bet there will be many opportunities for abusing the AI's path finding and targeting systems.
Post subject: Re: Warcraft II: The Dark Saga
Joined: 2/15/2009
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DarkKobold wrote:
I am getting irritated with Final Fantasy 8, and I was curious what this game would look like TAS'd, so here is a quick test run of the first two Dark Tide Orc Levels.
:(
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I would watch a TAS of this. And I wasn;t aware there was a Dos version of Warcraft II. I know there's a WIndows 95/98 Version, cause I have it.
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Kitsune wrote:
And I wasn;t aware there was a Dos version of Warcraft II.
Wow...really? The first version had an installer for Win but it still just ran the DOS version. When BNE came out I played the hell out of that, and even now, so many years later, some of my maps are still popular on Bnet...
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N._Harmonik
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Ah... Childhood memories of Dad and my cousins playing this on the computer... I demand more!
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Post subject: Re: Warcraft II: The Dark Saga
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exileut wrote:
DarkKobold wrote:
I am getting irritated with Final Fantasy 8, and I was curious what this game would look like TAS'd, so here is a quick test run of the first two Dark Tide Orc Levels.
:(
I too think it would be a shame if you quit your FF8 run! On the other hand, i would also enjoy seeing more of WC2, though still less than a FF8 run.
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True wrote:
Wow...really? The first version had an installer for Win but it still just ran the DOS version. When BNE came out I played the hell out of that, and even now, so many years later, some of my maps are still popular on Bnet...
Yep. Mine runs in windows, not DOS.
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The later Battle.net versions probably required Windows, but the original version was made for DOS.
Post subject: Re: Warcraft II: The Dark Saga
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McBAIN wrote:
exileut wrote:
DarkKobold wrote:
I am getting irritated with Final Fantasy 8, and I was curious what this game would look like TAS'd, so here is a quick test run of the first two Dark Tide Orc Levels.
:(
I too think it would be a shame if you quit your FF8 run! On the other hand, i would also enjoy seeing more of WC2, though still less than a FF8 run.
Don't worry, I'm still working on FF8. I just need something interim when I get frustrated.
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I might recall this wrong, but can't the other peasants help with raising buildings? IE "repair" them while the main builder is building it or is that ability for humans only? If you/someone would continue doing this I would follow it! I think I would prefer if it was on the psx too, as I assume that the cursor would move way to fast to be comprehensible on the dos?
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I would love to see a run for this as well. But please, allow a patch to skip the loading screens. It got me mad right from the start.
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Nope. There is no external assistance in construction, for either side. And the 'exit points' for newly-trained units leaving a building starts in the top-left corner and moves counter-clockwise until an empty spot is found. It's a bit different for units mining gold, but I think it chooses locations more 'down' first. But that was for the DOS version. May not be true.
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Are you certain, Kofiman? Try erecting two farms next to each other, but tell additional peasants/peons to repair one of the two while it builds. You need extra resources to account for the repair action, but I think you'll find that the repaired building is built much faster. In the DOS version of War2x 1.5, having a single peasant repair a farm while it is being built completes the construction ~5 seconds faster. Two repairers complete the construction ~16 seconds faster, and four peasants can complete one farm before a lone peasant can build half a farm. :) It is definitely a boost to speed, but it requires additional gold and more importantly, lumber. I think in the run for level 1, it would be detrimental to repair the buildings, because of how long lumber takes to harvest. Later levels might allow for this strategy!
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It looks to me like you could probably save a few frames from having a peasent repair the last farm, but I could be wrong, chopping lumber does take a lot of time.
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I guess the "repairing" bit would be more important in later levels, not in such early ones where getting wood is a bigger problem. This is assuming that this repair-thing works. Can anyone verify? edit: According to this http://www.gamewinners.com/playstation/WarCraft2.htm you can. I know for sure you can do it in the win95 version but further verification would be nice.
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Yeah man, it's the oldest trick in the book
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I would rather see a test run of the DOS version over psx.
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Link to video I did a bit more of this TAS. I really think this can be improved, however, each level takes a really, really long time to do. Also, the resulting time is going to probably be 2-3 hours. I don't know how I could make down-time more interesting. Also, it would be good to see if levels are hexable. Additionally, people keep clamoring for the DOS version, but JPC-rr is fairly difficult. Oh, and in level 4, I manage to kill one of the enemy boats without taking a hit of damage! Yay for crappy AI aiming.
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Apologies for the Great Wall of Text, but I have quite a lot to say here. Assuming you get what I'm talking about, future comments will be a lot quicker. I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say it's great to see this being worked on again, I for one am excited to see what a TAS of an RTS would be like. With games like this though, it's certainly annoying to see the repercussions of every single action you take, to see which ones actually do end up saving time. What you need to consider for these levels is what event are you actually waiting for (IE which events take the longest), and only focus on trying to reduce the time of that particular action; since everything else happening meanwhile is almost irrelevant. Here's my take on the levels so far: Level 1: Now, we need a total of 4 buildings, but does producing farms/barracks enable us to hasten our goal of producing more buildings? The answer here (on level 1 at least) is 'no', since we don't need grunts nor do we need more farms to produce peons. Since the level is only complete once the 4th building is done, it essentially renders it totally irrelevant when buildings 1-3 are contructed. Delaying those buildings will not effect your final time, that's what you need to understand. After all, 1 peon making 1 building per minute, has the same outcome of 4 peons making 4 buildings in the 4th minute. The final time is still 4 mins, so to work out which strategy is better you gotta consider what else is happening meanwhile. The thing is, what's holding us back right now is resources. Oddly enough we can only build once we have the cash, and by sacrificing a peon for construction, you have now effectively lowered your income rate, thus delaying the earliest opportunity available to build the final farm. I'd say it's much better, to have the peons gather ALL of your resources first, and then get them all to build. (Naturally this is a bad idea on future levels, since you'd need more income for other things, and no doubt you'd need to train grunts, and thus need barracks early). But like I said, try to figure out what you're actually waiting for, and what can be done to improve it. For example on level 1, I notice the final resource you collect is lumber, so that's our current time blockade that we need shifting. Very easy solution, considering you only started collecting lumber quite late into the level; so just send a peon a bit sooner. Level 2: OK, get Zul'jin to the circle of power, so it's only him you need to worry about really. Make sure he takes the most efficient path possible (it's nice how going diagonal doesn't change speed), and everything else which is going on won't matter that much. The rescue so far looks kinda clumsy, since all the other ugly trolls get in the way of his escape, and he has to linger around his prison walls for a bit. It seems you don't get much use out of the grunts either, apart from using some to destroy the first wall. I would say for an improvement to this level you need to create another escape route, so here's 3 suggestions How about getting the grunts to destroy not only 1 wall section, but the adjacent one too? It'll automatically be weakened by the destruction of the original section anyway, and it's provide an ever so slightly faster escape for ZJ. Maybe you could even use the new trolls to destroy the wall once acquired? Naturally there's not a big time window there, gotta make ZJ move, while commanding the other trolls to attack, and then coordinate ZJ again to get through the new gap, while the payoff is only a mere 1 square saved, but there's one idea. Another would be to send the remaining grunts (and again, trolls once active) to destroy the top left corner of the prison. Get 3 grunts to destroy the first wall, and then claim the trolls, while you send the other grunts ahead to destroy the top wall. You could then even use the trolls to help destroy that wall section, while ZJ moves closer to it. No doubt that could be faster than using the right hand exit, then scrambling all the way around? Thirdly would be to sent the grunts to the end, to destroy an Orc wall. You gotta admit, that first wall you come across would be more convenient to go straight through rather than go around it. Level 3: When you built the final oil rig, you had 1500g. That's 1500g too much as far as I'm concerned. Clearly you weren't waiting for resources at that point, so that's not the problem. You weren't waiting for any previous buildings to be completed, or waiting for a nearby oil tanker to be ready, so that's not the problem either. What was slowing you down here was the fact there was a human oil platform there, and so to improve the time what you need to do is figure out a way of destroying it faster. But considering you had 1500g, I'm sure that could have been put to good use. When you have enough gold, reassign a few workers to get them to chop instead. Then train another demolisher, and get that platform down quicker. Level 4: It was mentioned earlier that you could put your units at the spawn location for the great hall, forcing peons to appear slightly closer to where you want them, did you look into that? I know at the start you use your army to destroy ships, but may I remind you that your shipyard isn't up yet, and so the ships are in no way a threat to you. You can delay killing them for a bit without consequence, so using your army in this way could give you faster income. When you finally did start your shipyard, you had a hell of a lot of gold, and a lot of peons. No doubt you could assign more than 1 to 'repairing' it? The more the better, since resource is not your limiting factor here, so make full use of it. I saw you always had at least 100+ lumber up, and so you can assign another peasant to repairing I reckon. Building Barracks on the island? Genius. Getting spammed with 'not enough gold' when you have idiotic peons gathering 1000+ lumber that you clearly don't want? Stupid. Reassign some lumberjacks to gold miners later on, and that wont be a problem. Also, there was a lot of lingering on the island, what gives? You have an army, USE IT. Ogrim Doomhammer would be ashamed.
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I've played through this game on the PC version (Battle Net version), but I'm not certain how many special tricks can be used on the Playstation version. Flip seems to have covered the most so I won't repeat them. On the third mission, as your Destroyers are attacking the oil platform, you just had them sail over to it and let them attack as they wish. The only problem though is that they're then programmed to stop attacking the platform and target the closest enemy as they come close, which makes you lose loads of time as the enemy oil tanker sails past them over and over as your ships tries to retarget it. Easiest solution would be to just order your ships to attack the platform. This kind of behaviour should be common in all offensive units; taking longer time to attack when it has different "choices" to choose from, no matter whether it's a building or enemy unit. Most obvious on mission 3 with the oil tanker and in the beginning of mission 4 with the enemy ships, taking time to either attack or "retreat" when suddenly faced with several possible targets. This delay should be as long as the time between attacks. I'm not sure how well it would work, but with this principle you could be able to have one of your units attack an enemy and in some way or another have another unit walk in and out of its attack range to make it "hesitate" as it's choosing from who to attack and not loose one hit point at all. I have never tried it to its full extent though so you'll have to experiment if you want to try it out. Another thing about ships too, which I'm not sure if it'll work in the Playstation version or not, is that you can move your ships diagonally (if I remember correctly) to "dodge" the enemy cannonballs, either partly or completely avoiding the damage as it didn't hit you straight on and then shoot the enemy ship and dodge again. This I have done alot before so I know it works on the PC version, but it isn't the easiest to put in practice. That said, I must say I would really love seeing this game TASed and how well the enemy gets wiped out before they even have time to take a second breath.
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Flip wrote:
After all, 1 peon making 1 building per minute, has the same outcome of 4 peons making 4 buildings in the 4th minute. The final time is still 4 mins, so to work out which strategy is better you gotta consider what else is happening meanwhile. The thing is, what's holding us back right now is resources. Oddly enough we can only build once we have the cash, and by sacrificing a peon for construction, you have now effectively lowered your income rate, thus delaying the earliest opportunity available to build the final farm. I'd say it's much better, to have the peons gather ALL of your resources first, and then get them all to build. (Naturally this is a bad idea on future levels, since you'd need more income for other things, and no doubt you'd need to train grunts, and thus need barracks early).
Actually, for this level, you are forced to finish with those buildings - so it is best to build them all last - otherwise, you'd have peons standing around doing nothing as the last building is built - they don't need to harvest, obviously. This is why each peon starts building after he takes the last needed trip for his resource. This one is actually fairly optimized. Oh, and the barracks are first, due to their build time.
Flip wrote:
Level 2: OK, get Zul'jin to the circle of power, so it's only him you need to worry about really. Make sure he takes the most efficient path possible (it's nice how going diagonal doesn't change speed), and everything else which is going on won't matter that much. The rescue so far looks kinda clumsy, since all the other ugly trolls get in the way of his escape, and he has to linger around his prison walls for a bit. It seems you don't get much use out of the grunts either, apart from using some to destroy the first wall. I would say for an improvement to this level you need to create another escape route, so here's 3 suggestions How about getting the grunts to destroy not only 1 wall section, but the adjacent one too? It'll automatically be weakened by the destruction of the original section anyway, and it's provide an ever so slightly faster escape for ZJ. Maybe you could even use the new trolls to destroy the wall once acquired? Naturally there's not a big time window there, gotta make ZJ move, while commanding the other trolls to attack, and then coordinate ZJ again to get through the new gap, while the payoff is only a mere 1 square saved, but there's one idea. Another would be to send the remaining grunts (and again, trolls once active) to destroy the top left corner of the prison. Get 3 grunts to destroy the first wall, and then claim the trolls, while you send the other grunts ahead to destroy the top wall. You could then even use the trolls to help destroy that wall section, while ZJ moves closer to it. No doubt that could be faster than using the right hand exit, then scrambling all the way around? Thirdly would be to sent the grunts to the end, to destroy an Orc wall. You gotta admit, that first wall you come across would be more convenient to go straight through rather than go around it.
I found that trying to micro manage in this game just causes more difficulty - for example, destroying that wall just causes orcs to get in the way. The game doesn't respond as quickly as the DOS version.
Flip wrote:
Also, there was a lot of lingering on the island, what gives? You have an army, USE IT. Ogrim Doomhammer would be ashamed.
Level 3 and Level 4 are pretty suboptimal, as I noted. However, there are a TON of enemies in that village, and they are on a weird patrol. What happens is one of my units gets attacked, the enemy retreats, and my units auto-AI causes them to follow that unit. I went with a giant army, so that my loses would be minimal, speeding up the town destruction. I didn't actually beat level 4- there is an oil rig protected by an enemy ship far away. I need to retry level 3- if I can kill the boats with AI abuse, then I can start firing from the start of the level.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
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I went back and redid level 3 - Over 1 minute saved! Link to video Watch for the suicidal grunt, the cannon-less ship, and the peon uprising.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
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Nice! That went much more smoothly now, and I enjoyed watching the enemy ship struggling with trying to shoot you. Eagerly await upcoming missions. :)
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