A point of note that annoyed me is that his initial teleport seems to be forced by the game. Even if you use petrify or entangle he will still teleport away.

I like what you did with the run, I have been trying a variety of strategies and was having difficulty mostly with the dragon wave that spawns after destroying the castle. I tried a couple of unsuccessful runs with barbs, but I see that the early scouting enables you to get enough out too defend their guilds as they tend to get targeted first before you buildings. I was thinking it might be possible to funnel the individual dragons into wizards with invisibility support to get them high enough level that lightning storm might not be necessary.

I think overall it will always be the most dangerous map due to the lack of gold against the ridiculous power of the dragons. I need to check, but I think the dragon's fire attack hits dodge which is why the skeletons are abnormally strong against them. Ideally adepts could be used against the dragons as they have extremely high dodge, but I think for an IL run it would take to long.

One thing that I have been doing is saving the rangers guild. I'll have to try it out with the remote rogues guild off to the side, but if you can get one or two starting rangers attacking a building it makes for a very early destruction time.

So I just attempted a full run and it was going well until I hit Tomb of the Dragon King, that one is probably going to be a real run killer for me. Doing two attempts at DwD inbetween each map worked well as I was able to get it around the 8th attempt, and the map would take so long normally that its still worth just going with the normal strat I think.

I really need to find a consistent way to do TDK though as its pretty late in the run, and it would be a real pain to lose a bunch of runs to it. Dragons aren't easy to kill for anyone...

What do you think would be the most efficient if resets are allowed?

For full run Southern Run, my thoughts are that a run starts from a map clean of victories and ends when when you hit the complete pop up on every mission.

Interesting, personally it's easier for me to just not mess with the game speed settings as it also gets me used to the approximate timings of things, and then I always know that all my runs are using a standard timing. I think for a full run I will do the same and just not mess with the settings once the run is started.

I can definitely see things like Barren Wastes why speeding up the game would be nice because those sections can be really boring though. One main problem I'm trying to figure out is how to complete Deal with a Demon in a full run because I only have about a 1 in 20 success rate with the Gambling. My thoughts are that before every mission I would try a couple attempts at the mission since it can only take a handful of seconds to fail with a hope that out of 36(?) attempts total between the other maps I would get lucky.

I'm thinking that once I get a better feel for the strategy on each map it might be interesting to try a full any% run of all the Southern Quests.

So what would be ideal as the end point of a full run? I'm thinking that technically the game would think that you are done if you can complete Day of Reckoning since its requirements are all the Southern Quests.

Looking at the times, I think ideally a good full run would hit around 3 hr 45 min. Any thoughts?

I don't know how things function for something like this on the site, so I figured I'd just post here. I'm probably not going to do the Northern Expansion mission until I feel I've got the Southern Missions all to reasonable times, but should they be added somewhere for the sake of having a place on the site?

There is also the Wrath of Krolm extra mission created by the devs, and the demo mission. Personally I don't think the demo mission needs to be included, but thought I would bring it up.

Awesome, that helps me understand some of the variable in that program that I wasn't sure about. I have been looking at that for some of the quests to get an idea of initial spawns. There are some patterns that I have noticed over multiple runs that help identify if its a good spawn pattern for the buildings or not, and the editor saves me a lot of time that I would have spent just reloading over and over to get a view of the map.

There is a lot of information in the files that has helped put more specific numbers to some suspicions I have had about how the mechanics of the game work.

As far as rangers vs rogues, you spend about 20% more to fill a guild of rangers vs rogues. Rangers do have the useful trait of following and supporting barbarians, so I think they are useful in tandem with barbs. Rogues greed factor though being off the charts makes them a lot more responsive to what you want. It just depends on what you need and how much you are willing to pay for it.

For the most part I think they are all reasonably possible given enough attempts at a single level. Its a shame they didn't use a more accurate timing method, but using the in-game time does make it so you can use any game speed you want, making some of the more tedious levels more bearable.

Interesting, well it's a start! I figured it's probably time-based generation

If you look through the Majesty Gold HD files you can find an SDK for modding that shows a bit of how the quests are generated by the system. The most useful thing that I would like to figure out is how the game engine goes about decided the seed for the randomization, because if that could be cracked in a way that is useful it might be possible to manipulate the seed you get. If we could do that, then things would start to go a lot faster!

I am working on researching more data about how the various system of the game work in order to optimize the runs. I have organized the data into a spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RcjGIVDE0EgocmO5I6jm7CSDkWR1XBqBdZucf6QhE4A/edit?usp=sharing

There are still a lot of things I need to figure out, but it is a start

While searching through the steam forum I found a link to the old Cyberlore Forums for Majesty. It seems some people were having competitions back then for Individual Level Speedruns.

http://www.cyberlore.com/Majesty/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=851

There isn't any video to go off of, and they time based on the in-game time of "days" which obviously isn't ideal. There isn't any way to tell if they used the console codes as well, but I figured it might make for some fun numbers to shoot at.

Edit: I don't know when the site stopped being hosted but as of today (01/09/21) it appears that these records are pretty much lost to time. I tried finding the post with the wayback machine with no luck.