This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4785: CogneatoSwitch's NES Nobunaga's Ambition "17 Fiefs" in 23:24.39

Wow, this is a far faster time! Good to know that switching to the highest difficulty revealed a much faster strategy, as a result. Would you like to go ahead and cancel your previous submission? Also, just to clarify, optimizing by seasons is the slower of the two options?

The old one has been cancelled. Yes, optimization for seasons would be much slower, as starting a war would save a few seasons, but each war takes about 25-40 moves, or 3-5 minutes. The resulting video would showcase much more the war strategies, such as bait-and-conquer, ambush, or even gaining fiefs by killing the leader (some of these are seen in the first video). Because of the drastic difference in presentation, I propose that the type of optimization be a separate branch.

Great! Glad to see this! :)

Apparently, giving peasants rice is the only way to find quality ninjas!

Link to video Temp encode. For the record, yes, there's no sound for a vast majority of the video. It was disabled in the TAS itself (around 0:27 in the encode... y'know, when the sound stops) to reduce lag.

Samsara, thanks for encode. Short movie looks like Storybook. CogneatoSwitch, You thought about subtitles (don't know possible in Bizhawk)? Are you planning make more KOEI strategy? For example SNES/Genesis Genghis Khan.

I really enjoyed this run and I'm glad someone has decided to tackle it. I have a *lot* of questions about it though. For stats, is it necessary to spend the time getting them all to 109? Or could you get away with lower values for all but Char and save the frames? You seem to slow yourself down by giving various amounts of rice/gold to peasants. For example, at some points I saw you give 1 rice to the peasants to get your Char point, but other times you'd give around 25%. You mentioned it was automated for 25%, but was there a reason for this? This also would be in places like when you'd have the option of sending say 80 gold to another fief but you'd do 75 for example--requiring four extra inputs. Another thing was you didn't manipulate plagues either not to come or not to come to your fiefs. That plagues have come uses time but the extra message from them striking you takes even more. Were you unable to stop that for some reason? I did notice you seemed to optimize the fight better compared to the first video, where often your own units would bump up against each other because they weren't ordered properly. I don't remember the mechanic very well, but would it be helpful, or a waste of time, to reorganize your armies so that you only have two units? You'd have far less menuing. Could you overbid for fiefs to save frames? I.e. bid 40 even if 36 would be sufficient? You often send men and rice and gold places that it seems may not be entirely necessary. Of course the only such one I can point to specifically is at the very end. There are 1,582 men in Fief 4 but you only have 744 gold so you can only send 744 men. Surely you didn't need to spend the time sending the other 838 men to Fief 4? You also have them take 403 rice when they use less than 200. Even just taking 400 instead of 403 would save three inputs. I agree that subtitles would be fantastic especially for people who have not played the game before. Thanks for your efforts!

Sure, I will add subtitles next time! So to understand the oddities in my run, first recognize how I'm making it. I've generated a series of scripts that execute specific commands quickly. Thus, when I make the video, I merely execute the scripts in the right order. When I initially made the GPR script, my goal was to improve wealth and loyalty, which is useful for gaining more money. By default, I had it give 25% of total rice. I can move the number down to 1, but it messed with other scripts down the line, and occasionally changed the RNG. Thus, changing the default rice value meant redoing the whole video. Since I plan on remapping it anyway, I went ahead and submitted it on the off-chance I run out of energy to do this TAS. Stats: Drive is the only one that isn't necessary. Luck and IQ both play a part in assassination, but I can't seem to manipulate them as well as I can Char. I suppose a moderately high health score would be acceptable, as long as I didn't die from sickness. Also, changes to this area also affect the RNG "seed", which means remapping the entire game. I'm not inclined to change this because the savings is so small and I already know this seed. I haven't figured out the random events or the next-season turn order. My only solution for them is to adjust my actions. I've found the choice of action, rather than intensity, makes the most difference. For example, choosing "Send" instead of "GPR" might change the outcome. I also noticed that the event happened anyway, it just changed where it landed. I don't think there is much savings to be had there; maybe a few seconds at best. In a battle, unit movement always goes from 1 to 5, with 2 and 3 being the most powerful units. I typically send the 4 or 5 to get killed by the enemy's 2 or 3, and save my 2 and 3 to kill the enemy's leader. In this particular video, it didn't matter. However, I agree that changing the assignments before the battle will greatly enhance speed, even if it costs a whole season. The biggest bottleneck I've found is not using grants. The granted fiefs deliver 1 Char 50% of the time, so if I granted them all, it would take twice as many seasons but 1/3rd the time, with an estimated savings of 7 minutes. The next biggest is the GPR values, which were used 81 times and could easily save 2 minutes. Making assignments before the last battle may save a few minutes (assignments are slow, and the whole season will have to go by). Changing the bids might save 15 seconds and being looser on the stats selection might save 8 seconds. So I guess I predict a better video that is 13 minutes or less in length.

First Start with this: View > Display Subtitles Subtitles within BizHawk requires right clicking the game screen itself, a menu will pop up. Choose Add Subtitles to place subs in at that said frame. To modify the subs do the same thing as before but select Edit Subtitles. To note: Subtitles will be converted to an .srt format, so if you do have your subs placed around in "random" areas they will be set straight to the bottom. See Langrisser 2's TAS for example. Edit: Looking over your TAS it's fairly sub optimal. For starters 'cause it's my favourite part, is that you're end input could be ended my sooner than where it does. (84374 not 84388) The second notable part, is that you're doing input like this: Down,*Lag Frame*,Down Your input won't register since this happens. This occurs quite a lot in your TAS. Even if the case is meant to be like: Down,*Lag Frame*,Down,*Blank*,Down. You still have the chance of that blank frame being the frame you want to hit down on instead. This last one probably gets factored out due to RNG. Terrible startup to the game. Please don't use the Autofire in your input.

CogneatoSwitch, to elaborate on what Spikestuff addressed, using auto-fire isn't the best method to use when TASing. You'll want to get into the habit of using frame-advance and manually attempting to advance menus, and such, at the earliest possible frame. I made a brief test run, up to the stat creation screen, that saved 6 frames just on optimizing input. Also, and I don't know how this would affect your scripts, but I saved over 300 frames at stat creation by getting values that were just below the max allocation of 109. I stopped before deciding on IQ since finalizing from there will determine the initial RNG seed (otherwise, the AI sent a Ninja toward my fief for the game's very first move!). Anyhow, this isn't necessarily grounds for rejection; just me chiming in and sharing tips for better TASing. I'm still in the process of judging your run, and should have a final decision made later on in the day.

om, nom, nom... om, nom, nom... nom nom

In a battle, unit movement always goes from 1 to 5, with 2 and 3 being the most powerful units. I typically send the 4 or 5 to get killed by the enemy's 2 or 3, and save my 2 and 3 to kill the enemy's leader. In this particular video, it didn't matter. However, I agree that changing the assignments before the battle will greatly enhance speed, even if it costs a whole season.

I communicated what I was trying to say poorly. There is a mechanic in the game--I'm going to look it up--that lets you reassign your army units, and you can assign 4 and 5 out of the picture entirely, meaning you have fewer input spam to deal with. Yes, checked it out and it's the assign command on the second page. Now what I can't remember is if that affects a "worldwide" change or if it only makes a change in the fief where you do it. But it's possible that getting rid of units 4 and 5 prior to the final battle in Fief 4, with all the other fiefs on direct, would save time in the long run because of both larger quantities of men in units 1-3, and also not having to move as many units each turn.

Edit: Looking over your TAS it's fairly sub optimal. For starters 'cause it's my favourite part, is that you're end input could be ended my sooner than where it does. (84374 not 84388) The second notable part, is that you're doing input like this: Down,*Lag Frame*,Down Your input won't register since this happens. This occurs quite a lot in your TAS. Even if the case is meant to be like: Down,*Lag Frame*,Down,*Blank*,Down. You still have the chance of that blank frame being the frame you want to hit down on instead. This last one probably gets factored out due to RNG. Terrible startup to the game. Please don't use the Autofire in your input.

Yes, in the future I shall end it sooner. I thought it would make for a better show, rather than worrying about the absolute shortest. What on Earth is Autofire? I hand-crafted every script, and autofire wasn't one of them. What is the effect of it, and how can I avoid recreating it? It sounds like you want a minimal input style, rather than a stream. That is, when I need to press "down" to change numbers, I should press it for exactly 1 frame and wait until the lag frame passes (3 frames, typically) before pressing again, rather than press-and-hold for 4 frames, or toggle on/off every other frame. Is that correct?

CogneatoSwitch, to elaborate on what Spikestuff addressed, using auto-fire isn't the best method to use when TASing. You'll want to get into the habit of using frame-advance and manually attempting to advance menus, and such, at the earliest possible frame. I made a brief test run, up to the stat creation screen, that saved 6 frames just on optimizing input. Also, and I don't know how this would affect your scripts, but I saved over 300 frames at stat creation by getting values that were just below the max allocation of 109. I stopped before deciding on IQ since finalizing from there will determine the initial RNG seed (otherwise, the AI sent a Ninja toward my fief for the game's very first move!). Anyhow, this isn't necessarily grounds for rejection; just me chiming in and sharing tips for better TASing. I'm still in the process of judging your run, and should have a final decision made later on in the day.

The opening sequence is the least optimized, as it is the rarest script used. Also, I purposefully wait frames in the beginning to speed up the stat selection; the RNG seed starts as soon as the game begins, and so waiting frames earlier results in faster stats selection. I believe you are correct that I can save some time by ignoring Health and Drive to an extent; Health leads to sickness and (I think) plague, and Drive keeps enemies from attacking. Luck is tricky, because it's difficult to change after the game start, and if it is 30 less than the enemy's, ninjas will fail. Since Fief 13 has the highest luck and is one of the quickest killed, I believe it is faster to spend time at the stats screen rather than use seasons to increase luck. Char+IQ are directly needed to assassinate. I spend a majority of the time increasing Char so I can assassinate Oda. Thus, spending extra time at the beginning to maximize the stats saves me a huge amount of time later in the game. Overall, 6 seconds are not worth "saving" if only to spend 6+ seasons recouping the lost stats. Similarly, "saving" a few frames at the beginning isn't worth having to wait 10+ seconds for the better stats. That said, I only checked the first few wait frames (I've dubbed them "seeds"). It may be faster to wait longer on the title screen so the stats maximize faster.