Hi all,

After a long absence, I've been starting to get back into running the five Gold Box games currently up and I've been doing some offline practice as well as studying some of the existing runs.

Something occurred to me when looking at LordBreakfast's Champions run (very nice BTW) - even with a constant setting for DosBox cycles, it seems to be strongly affected by the CPU speed - for example, I can't break 37 minutes at the moment at 6000 cycles with an effectively identical route, and while there is a lot of room for improvement, I'm not sure there's 5 minutes' worth. The combats on my runs certainly look a lot more sluggish.

Having looked into DosBox's documentation, it seems that it is affected by the speed of the computer you're using. There are also dozens of internal settings which affect performance. It makes it clear that the cycles speed is there to compensate for the difference between slow and fast computers, and while that's great for casual play, it makes any kind of consistency really difficult.

I don't think there's an easy solution, but having looked over some other older DOS games, there seems to be a convention of using the cycles=max setting. I've had a go at Champions with this and it's playable, although some of the strats need tweaking a bit. It would, however, close the gap between faster and slower computers from several minutes to probably a few seconds if that.

I'm not a massive fan of running at max speed because it's nice to actually be able to follow what's going on in combats rather than having them zip by in a flash, but it does seem to be the best way to take hardware out of the equation.

Thoughts?

I too prefer to run on at least somewhat perceivable speeds, which is why I never even bothered changing the cycles on my runs until other people started showing an interest in the games. But having settings be as fair and competitive as possible definitely trumps small bits of personal comfort. If the best way to get DOS games to run consistently similar across machines is to go max settings, I'm willing to accept that across the Gold Box games

Cool. I'll have to start working on some strats that take advantage of it. :)

I'm not sure it is the best way, but it's the best one I can think of - happy to be corrected by someone more tech savvy. The way I figure it, if it's lightning fast on my plodding old laptop, the difference between a fast and slow machine can't be that much, even over a full run.

Is it worth creating different categories? I'm ultimately fine with whatever is decided but I haven't seen it come up in discussions so curious if that is something worth exploring. Also will be interesting what if any changes the steam releases make.

I wondered the same thing, although ultimately, I'm not sure if there's enough of a difference in the way it's played across cycle speeds to justify it. Having played a bit on both speeds, you do need to tweak your strats a bit, but not really all that much.

One thing that would make a difference (and render the computer speed discrepancies moot) would be to ban autocombat, but as that would make all the current runs invalid and probably make me want to rage quit, I'm not particular keen to go down that path! ;)

I agree too about the Steam release; if that plays significantly differently, that will require a new category.

The large number of battles in the sequel that involve casting Haste on the fighters and letting them go wild make me inclined to never ban the Quick option.

Me neither. It would be infuriating! Although curiously enough, I find DKK the one I lean on Quick the least. Too many battles with multiple level drainers in the final section. 😬

Your equipment is so powerful and combined with haste I generally just don't worry about it. The thing I'm worried with DKK at max cycles is it becomes so quick that the most competitive strat will be to quick every battle and rely on RNG. Bothering to cast haste might ironically be too slow.

Again not a deal breaker for me, and it doesn't apply to either champions or dark queen (once I finally get around to running that), but DKK in particular would not be fun to run at max cycles competitively.

I've personally found the trick is picking which battles it's safe to use Quick, which becomes more important at max cycles, because it's too fast to bail out if things go pear shaped. DKK has a lot of battles with high level mages and level drainers where quick combat is dangerous, especially because the route I use gets virtually no armour bonuses, so I'm going through the entire game with my starting armour. Haste still makes a difference.

One thing I really like about DKK is that Quick doesn't carry over between combats so you can pick and choose which ones you use it for.

My party has four elven fighter/clerics (bonus to hit with swords, Kiri-Jolth faith gives an extra THAC0 point and Enlarge can mitigate the lower max strength for the key fights), which helps a lot for the earlier battles, but it does make the many undead fights in level 2 of Dargaard dicey, as the AI will try to turn undead, which usually won't work, and effectively gives the enemy a free round of attacks. I might have to play around a bit with party composition and see if some better combinations can be worked out.