{massive unformatted image-less text block about optimization using math and hex editors in an anime game about girls that fly and shoot bullets with their mind}
so i was having fun with my slick item combinations, right? well i realized with the offensive one that "hey this is like. really good at killing things fast. how much faster is this than a normal run?" so i go to speedrun dot com and see what other people are doing. basically every category is empty but i feel like trying it out so i whip up a 22 minute or so showcase of the strats with sakuya, who i have decided is the best shot type
it's like sakuya b from pcb, except you can move forward and back to widen and narrow your shots. fully narrowed? highest damage in the game
since you shoot things to kill them, thats a pretty good deal. the versatility in being able to shoot any part of the screen is just a bonus for annoying stage fairies
after i drop my run on the leaderboards, i realize some more are popping up on easy and lunatic that use a completely opposite strategy. i've got a slight modification to the set i used in the last post, replacing the center card with remilia's, the vampire fang. it's a charge item that deals tons of damage to enemies right in front of you for a second or two. less constant than the other one, but waaay more damage overall.
but the prevailing strategy didn't use any of the cards my original offensive build did, nor sakuya. it picks sanae, who is a very good shot type for 1ccing normally, but has the lowest damage out of anybody, even marisa. the tradeoff is usually "oh but the shots basically autoaim so you don't need to worry about positioning" but the real boon is her bomb. it's just as good as it was in lolk, and it basically skips every non-survival pattern in the game. combine that with the vampire fang and two other strong charge items, and you've got a constantly-invincible luigi throwing herself into bullets as soon as she runs out of bombs. eventually, people realized that reimu strikes a nice balance between super-strong bombs and shot power so she's also used, but its a cutthroat landscape for us (me, alone) sakuya players who can't drop a single life or bomb without losing the massive 1.8x damage buff. i'd held the wr in normal difficulty for over a month but yesterday it was taken by a solid minute by an extremely optimal reimu player
i've had my eyes on extra for a while since it has the distinct sakuya advantage of "bombs don't work during spellcards", planting sakuya at her deserved first place in dps.
the problem being that i have to do extra no miss where every mistake costs two bombs (very hard). i've done it two or three times, but not with good enough times. and to really be competitive, i've gotta replace the autobomb and just do it perfect
i have not actually played the game in the past few weeks because there is always new business but i intend to eventually reclaim it all for sakuya.
currently my biggest scheme is using a modified save at the start of each run in any category. this would be very blatant cheating in basically any other speedrun game, but since unlocks are minimal and you have to do all six stages anyway, what's the difference?
But with each bit of info I hear about this game, it sounds less and less like Touhou, and more and more like The Binding of Isaac.
i have been playing a bit of binding of isaac with my pal recently since it has a very interesting and, while sometimes dumb, robust modding api and we are always looking for new places to try out codestuffs
a massive majority of the items in isaac are not available from a fresh install, so the pool from which you can draw in any given run increases with the amount of achievements you have.
there are a lot of very powerful items you do not have access to in a new save... and a fair amount of very bad items.
speaking pragmatically, gaining access to those items weaker than the average is a permanent downgrade to the pool from which you get stuff from, since they could show up instead of something awesome.
by intentionally not fulfilling certain achivements, i've had a noticable increase in a few items i wanted to find over others. (only rune i have is jera lol)
and unconnected marketeers? very similar.
a bunch of cards you only add to the shops after purchasing them from a special shop slot that is always the same per-boss. so i won't ever see michael's card outside of michael's shop if i never buy it.
there are also some for beating the game with each character, but that's still not the majority of cards. and the majority of cards, i don't want for going fast. there's just a few that are super good for it, a few that are alright for it, and a bunch that, while very cool normally, are basically wasted space.
so let me introduce one more mechanic: card rarity
each card has a weight attached to it that influences how frequently it shows up in shops, from 1-4. it's not necessarily that the stronger ones are less frequent, since mokou's (instant 3 lives) have the highest frequency of 4, but some of the ones i would like to find on my journey are not terribly prevalent.
but, this system has an addendum in order to promote unlocking everything. cards that you've never picked up before have a greatly increased weight in shops, from 6-9.
to increase the frequency of the items i want and be less likely to find those i don't, i should have never picked the ones i want and have previously picked the ones i don't.
yeah well that takes too long. it would take a bunch of playthroughs that i can't get some of the coolest items on, and might accidentally unlock some extra equipment cards or whatever.
what is more viable is probably installing a command line diff tool for hex files so i can compare two saves that have different things unlocked, thereby finding the position in the files that unlocks are stored, and being able to generate a perfect save file that has the triple card slot for main game unlocked, without any of the not-terribly-optimal boss or equipment cards (some of the equipment card unlocks are good though i compared all of their damages and marisa's unfocused one is the best).
and that's like, in-progress. haven't finished it but when i try going fast again i will. maybe i will even make a save editor tool? right, i'll just pop open visual studio, spend four hours realizing that c# is not javascript or gamemaker, and ask my pal for help until its done
anyway, yeah, pretty cool touhou game. i've never done nearly as much gameplay research on the other ones as i have this one. i don't even know how the weird dream bar in mystic square works but damn if i'm not getting at least two significant digits on the drop rate of okuu's card when all my strats are in play (its 31.10%)
