Hey there guys. So I am trying to figure out an easier manner to get a hawkman early in Crenel Canyon 1. I can only assume that with the group of us here that one of us might of had ideas on how we could force RNG or something to make finding one more consistent early. Especially since Sheen is in a rather difficult mission and the earlier that we can get a hawkman the quicker we can get into the actual speedrun.
As I have only been trying the old walk the roads and plains tactics with all the units and the testing keeps showing me its taking 7-10 Days in game to even get that encounter. That includes not changing out any of the units and keeping it vanilla with the unit setup.
Someone named Arex posted a way to get a consistent hawkman encounter on the ogre battle 64 discord speedrunning channel last year. I confirmed that it worked (on wiiu vc, though I assume there is no difference in RNG seeding between versions) but haven't actually sat down to run the game since the first time I did it. Note that this only guarantees the hawkman encounter. The hawkman could still refuse to join and run away. His post was as follows: "
- Make a new save, beat the first 3 missions.
- Save the game, then reset the console and load the save
- Area investigate Crenel Canyon
This is the important part. The RNG is affected by anything that pauses the game timer; moving the camera to the edge of the screen, menuing, zooming in and out, and so on. To get this consistent, you have to do the next steps as fast as possible.
- Click Magnus, get to the movement order screen. Hit L-to bring up the list of strongholds and click A to select the one at the top right away. Let the game run at this point, as any other menuing, pausing, moving the map will mess it up.
On my emulator, you run into a hawkman at around the 23 hour mark every time! I would love to know if this works on hardware! "
I got a Hard Copy but run this on Emulator for all my runs. Going to be incorporating this into my runs as it should speed things up much faster. Thanks DevlJoe for the info as I thought I heard something about the discord having something on it. But having the hawkman pre Champ Statuette will greatly increase the speed.
I've done some more thought/research on this since it was brought up. It is probably more efficient to get the hawkman after Crenel Canyon II (scene 10) instead of the first time around (scene 3). Having a hawkman after scene 3 doesn't save any time as far as I'm aware, because you can't upgrade it to raven and have it lead a unit until you get a baldr axe from killing the enemy black knight led unit in scene 10 anyway. Getting the hawkman later will also mean getting it around level 9 compared to level 3, which will save a handful of champ statuette animations.
That being said, it's a pretty hefty time difference between scene 3 and scene 10 if you're going to do first try hawkman or bust. Failing to get hawkman and resetting after scene 3 would only be about 25 minutes into the run, while doing it after scene 10 is an hour later. I guess it's just up to how willing you are to spend a lot of real time trying to get optimal rng.
