Had a look at your max cycles stream on Twitch (couldn't watch live due to the time difference, but made a point to check it out afterwards). I'm more convinced now that this is the way to go, but if other people don't like it (or have a better way of ensuring consistency), all good.

1. I think there's still a discrepancy (your "tour" at the start of the game took about 2.5 seconds, compared to around 6 on my computer), but the difference is obviously going to be much smaller overall and overall time will depend more on speed on the keyboard and route optimiziation - which is good!

2. Higher speed reduces the impact of RNG - unavoidable random encounters in the wilderness with stirges, tigers and giant lizards can be dealt with in a few seconds rather than being minute long record killers.

3. Leaning more on Quick combat will be disproportionately quicker, making finding and duping good items early on to be a good time investment.

4. The main potential hazard is the fact that you can rarely hit the spacebar to end Quick combat in time, which can make complex encounters dangerous if you don't remember to turn it off the battle before.

5. If you do choose to upload your run, congrats on getting the first sub-40 time!

Thank you! I made the same observation on RNG mitigation. It does make we wonder if duping a full suit of good armor once it's acquired (Plate+1 or Bracers+Ring, Shield+1, Cloak of Displacement) would be worth a time investment for duping and then just autoing through most fights after the graveyard. The conclusion I came to after throwing in a few auto battle was to say 'Y' at the end battle message to continue the battle and spamming the space bar as fast as possible, after two tries maximum I was able to end the quick combat, wastes a few seconds but at least allows me to go into the next battle safe.

I won't be uploading the Max Cycles until I hear from LordBreakfast and Davidtki about their thoughts on it, in case they do have alternate ideas. But it was interesting to try out.

While it certainly makes a difference to this run, I think it could make an even bigger one to Curse and Secret due to relying more on auto with their characters to begin with, at least based on my runs. Of course, if I remember right you leaned on Necklaces a lot more for your run of Secret, which actually makes sense (my original theory was that since Secret is a much higher level adventure most enemies would have too many hit points and the advanced fighters would do damage more reliably, but since we have difficulty control for that game they actually have small HP pools than I at first thought; also, when I started running it I probably assumed Red Dragons and similar enemies were immune to fire, but only Fire Giants are in first ed). In any case, max cycles making combat faster would make more melee-centric, quick combat-focused parties and routes more appealing.

I think that’s fair about waiting to hear other people’s thoughts first. I’d be interested to know if there’s another way.

My sense was that Secret will have the biggest impact because there’s a lot of unavoidable combat and no dust. My use of the necklace was mostly to disrupt the numerous high level mages where you can’t always rely on your own mage. I’ve settled on a strat similar to Champions where you keep two characters off auto combat. Interestingly, the AI actually gets worse after Pool. Characters will cheerfully blow themselves up with wands if you leave them equipped, which Pool manages to avoid. I haven’t officially run Curse yet, but I’ve been doing a lot of work offline on that, and I have some spiffy new strats that make a huge difference - they don’t bust it open like Pool because it’s pretty linear, but they do make it much easier to lean on auto combat, which even at 6000 cycles, is much quicker.

Champions requires you to lean heavily on the wand, so it makes less of a difference there. I haven’t practiced Death Knights for ages, but my strategy there involves mostly grabbing good items early, duping them and going nuts so we should see some solid improvements there too.

Actually, one more thought on this run (6000 cycles or otherwise) since you mentioned time investments was that I remember once you were wondering about my strategy of fighting the fake Tyranthraxus and picking up his ludicrously powerful items (long sword +5, ring of prot +3, gauntlets of ogre power). On the face of it, it seems like an odd time investment as it's a time consuming trip and a challenging fight at 1st level, but the payoff in my opinion is considerable. It costs about 40 seconds (once you've factored in that you don't have to pick up items elsewhere) and combined with the bracers, it effectively lets you Quick Combat your way through the graveyard, which probably saves the 40 seconds there alone, then after that you only really need the necklace for crowd control. Which saves time there too as you don't have to dupe it as much.

I admittedly haven't tested this out, but it seems the faster way overall to me. Might be worth a shot to see if it makes a difference.

I've not seen the runs so I'm not following. But for max cycles, you should keep the version dosbox in mind, and if it's a main-line build or a fork.

Side note, I just beat Curse on my phone. Magic DOSBox is awesome there.