SMS Heroes of the Lance. Some D&D heroes kill a dragon. Six out of eight heroes die to save time.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
  • Genre: RPG
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Uses death to save time
  • Manipulates luck

Comments

The game starts with 8 characters. The goal is to kill a dragon and retrieve The Disks of Mishakal. The story is good for an SMS game.
The front character is the one who has the special weapon that can kill the dragon. Avoiding damage takes lots of time so a hero needs to be switched to the front, so that the important character does not die. At the final room it takes 100 frames to switch to the character who can kill the dragon, so now we have the master plan: In order to avoid switching the position back to the front we must do something else, namely, the most important strategy is to switch the position of the characters and manipulate RNG so that the front members die just before we reach the end. It looks really nice when the correct character switch happens automatically just before the final battle begins.
If you transition a screen by pressing up, then the player faces to the right in the next screen. Pressing down makes the player face to the left. Knowing this saves time turning around.

The minimalistic TAS route plan

format: movedirection transitiondirection, enemy damage/miss
in the first room press down to face left
left down, human 5
right up, dwarf miss
right down, dwarf 8
right up 2nd door, demon 10, human 4
right down, demon 3
right down
left up, human 3, rock 2 (1st death), magic 5, gargoyle 2
left up, arrows 12
right up, demon 8
left up
right up, zombie miss, ghost 1 (2nd death)
right up, switch hero to fly over the chasm and switch hero again because the flying wizard is slow, demon 2
left up, traps 39 (The traps are good for a wide range of damage variations.)
left up
left down
right down, spider 2 (3rd death)
right down, spider miss
left down, zombie miss
right up
right down
4th door
right down, zombie 9
right up, spider 8
right up, spider miss
left up
right up, spider 2
left up, zombie 6
right up 3rd door, spider miss
left up, gargoyle 10 (4th death)
dragon boss
There may be a faster solution, if you try all combinations of dodging attacks and taking damage. I got the optimal health outcome and made no pointless delays, so it is unlikely that a massive timesave can be done without a big route change or a glitch. I did not test all spells at all locations, so there are probably glitches everywhere. I did the whole run four times to finally get the correct health management, but the run could be done a thousand times to save some frames.
The current human speedrun WR by Vriaeliss uses 3 spells: sleep, detect traps(?), heal. All these are skipped in the TAS. The in-game frame is 8 frames, so this TAS can be matched by good human players. Humans probably lose some frames on menuing, which requires more precise input.

Darkman425: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: I had one concern about a doorway transition and facing direction. The author helpfully answered my question about it, as some doorways don't have an option to turn around. With that cleared up, the damage routing and movement all look good to me. While there could potentially be better damage routes, finding the right RNG alignment for that seems hard to find. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard.
fsvgm777: Waiting on clarification at the moment. Once this is cleared up, I will start processing it.


TASVideoAgent
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Darkman425
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There was a small thing I noticed when watching this submission. At around frame 3860 is it possible to face left after entering the doorway, avoiding a turnaround animation? I noticed the inputs when entering that doorway didn't involve pressing Up or Down at all so I'm not sure if that turnaround is avoidable at all.
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I'm interested in taking a look at this submission, but I don't have access to emulator tools at the moment. If anyone could help with providing a temp encode, it would be appreciated. To the submitter, I assume you have studied the currently published NES movie for this game. Any chance you could go through the main differences between the two versions (and in particular explain why the SMS version is around one minute slower)?
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Thank you for your comments!
Darkman425 wrote:
At around frame 3860 is it possible to face left after entering the doorway, avoiding a turnaround animation?
Some screen transitions have only one option, so the direction can't be changed.
ktwo wrote:
the main differences between the two versions
The overall game seems the same, but almost everything is different by a little bit. Most rooms have monsters in different locations, etc. Most notably the final room is longer in the SMS version. To me it looks like the NES version could save time by taking more damage and avoid using some spells, but I don't know about it since I have not played the NES version. In the SMS version I was able to avoid using any spells by planning the health and letting party members die. The completion time is similar for both games but that is a coincidence. The games are different. I was not able to save time by jumping in the SMS version, but maybe there are more tricks for both versions if we fool around more? The biggest possible improvement that I know for the SMS version is to try different health management. This could save some frames. From the route plan you can see that I took 5 damage from the first human. The damage can be avoided by waiting for 8 frames or 1 in-game frame. I did not try this because I want to get damaged (just enough but not too much, so that the lesser heroes die and the main hero will be moved to the front before the final boss), but since this will change all future damage rolls and misses, it might turn out to be faster in the end. So if anyone wants to try it, your best bet is to start by not taking damage from the first human and see what your health situation is 4 minutes later. But then you can also choose to take or not take damage from the next dwarf enemy, etc. Taking damage also loses 8 frames, so we do not want to take too much damage. So it would be better to get lots of damage from a few hits, but again we probably must wait for 8/16/24... frames so in the end waiting for 16 frames to get 1 x 8 damage is same as waiting for 0 frames and taking 2 x 4 damage instead. Tricky, but far from the hardest problem you guys have solved. X-D
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I am more curious why the TAS was done at PAL speed, when it saw a release in Brazil (whose PAL-M mode actually runs at a refresh rate closer to NTSC (i.e. 60Hz) instead of the usual 50Hz). Not that it's wrong per se, just curious, is all.
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Thank you for the comment, fsvgm777! Unless I made some mistake, I did it with the speed that the emulator set by default. If somebody can make it work with the 60Hz version, then please do so. Maybe it synchs or maybe the RNG will be different? Also, the genre may actually be "action-adventure" instead of RPG as I claimed. It feels very much like an RPG, though.
Darkman425
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I tried directly transplanting the submission inputs into an input file set to PAL-M mode and it desynced immediately, even after adjusting the main menu inputs to get into the game proper. Adjusting the inputs to get the game to sync at 60 FPS would be a lot of work, and there's no guarantee if that would work since RNG could work differently with a different frame rate.
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Darkman425 wrote:
PAL-M mode
Does PAL-M mode mean the same as this: Settings --> Sync settings --> Display type: Ntsc Or is there some other setting that I need to change? I can redo the whole run in the other mode someday, but I don't know when it will happen. Might take a year.
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alexheights1 wrote:
Darkman425 wrote:
PAL-M mode
Does PAL-M mode mean the same as this: Settings --> Sync settings --> Display type: Ntsc
Yes, basically. NTSC and PAL-M have the same refresh rate (or at least very close). Considering that re-syncing the run to 60 FPS would require a lot of effort, I'm going to publish this one as is. There is precedent for that.
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Post subject: Movie published
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [6151] SMS Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance by alexheights1 in 05:34.14
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Well, it turned out to be very easy to just record the whole thing from scratch in the PAL-M mode. Because I already knew the overall strategy and had common frame counts memorised. So I just quickly entered the same stuff. I did some different choices because the RNG was indeed different. The frame count is longer because for example this version loses 75 frames before the game is loaded. But it is much faster as the real time is 4:39 compared to 5:34. Gameplay is almost the same, maybe 0-5 in-game frames difference timewise but since the situation is the same until somebody tests all combinations I am not trying to save a few in-game frames by testing a few more options for taking damage at a different spot without knowing the overall RNG behavior in-depth. https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638609820959280581 Sorry for not making the new version before the movie was published, because the epic publisher is a speedrunner at publishing. And I grossly overetimated how hard it would be to redo it in the other mode. XD I would prefer the faster version to be the main movie and PAL version being offered as a side dish, but do whatever you think is the best way to go. Thanks.
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If just changing to PAL version saves you this much while no exclusive gameplay to said version, then it won't obsolete this published run. According to rules, NTSC is preferred but if PAL provides something exclusive to it gameplay wise, it can then be considered over NTSC. So I guess, even if you provide your input, if it doesn't add something different, I don't think it will override this currently published run.
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The main hero Goldmoon does not give the boss-killing weapon away, but if she dies, then we can take the weapon. This could theoretically skip one character switch, but the problem is that it takes time to pick up the item, so almost all timesave is lost already. And now we have just another character in front who must waste a lot of time to avoid damage and survive to the end. Not working. Edit: I discovered two new improvements that probably work. I assumed that the current WR speedrun had the optimal route, so I neglected to test an alternative route possibility. Around 5600 frames the old route goes to the right. We can go left instead to save 48 frames. Unfortunately the damage RNG is bad so the whole run needs to be redone to get this timesave implemented. Another idea I had is that instead of switching the mage away after flying over the chasm we can let the mage get killed. I did not know it could be done so quick, so it is very probably faster to kill the mage but again it requires good damage RNG so that the mage dies from two hits. This will save about 100 frames due to not switching the dwarf to the front. This strat was also overlooked because human WR would not risk it. I don't know what the total timesave can be in the end. Could be 48-160 frames. Not much different from the current run, but strangely complex. Not sure when doing a new run, probably not anytime soon. XD XD