Can we add the different difficulties as their own thing? Similar to how it is setup for Army Men: Sarge's Heros here https://www.speedrun.com/amsh1

i really wouldnt know im a ps2 runner of this game so all difficulties really change is how hard an bad the ai is. same with ng+ it wouldnt make too much of a difference. difficulties do sound fun for speedrunning single stages but not full game.

Yes, difficulties make a difference, at least in the PS2 version that I ran. Primarily, it doesn't really make the AI more competent in my experience, but it does increase their damage output pretty noticeably. As such, while you can tank bullets on Easy, thus allowing you to speedrun more efficiently, just bringing it up to Normal means most "tank and run" strats that work on Easy will get you slaughtered on any higher difficulty.

I'd agree at first that if difficulties are added that they only be for IL runs, but I'll defer that to anyone who has actually run the game on the higher difficulties (Hey, @Rathin, you have thoughts on this?), because SH2 isn't even my bread-and-butter speedrunning game; AA2 is. I just started running SH2 just because I had the game and was already in an Army Men mood, and because I never actually beat SH2 100% as a kid and wanted to finish my unfinished business.

Hey @zewing & everyone else reading!

I'd like to point out a few things and would like to know what everyone's thoughts are.

1. As of right now, the IL leaderboards are separated by platform and not by difficulty. It's assumed that the runner is using the Easy difficulty. The reason we have it like this is because, thanks to 3DO, AMSH2 is different for each platform. For example, Refrigerator's design is very different between N64 and PS2. This would mean that one platform would be faster than the other. While not impossible, it would be confusing to have an IL leaderboard that included each platform and each difficulty.

2. This would (triple?) the amount of ILs available to speedrun in. We're a pretty small community and not many people run the game. Our current ILs aren't even completely filled right now as it is. If we compare this to AMSH1, hardly anyone runs Normal or Expert difficulties. We just need to make sure there's enough interest for this.

3. While not IL related, we could add difficulties for the any% category runs. To my current knowledge, this wouldn't be hard to set up. We would also have to create an additional rule to any% runs that would require the runner to show the difficulty settings before the run starts, but I don't think that's a big deal. All the existing runs would be thrown under the Easy difficulty as I believe they're all on Easy anyway.