Hey, nice run, MSKain. And thanks for the shout out. :) I think a few run-throughs of that and some RNG luck and you'll be comfortably getting sub-13.

I've been practicing the Any% run over the last couple of weeks, and I did one which I thought was frankly a bit ragged, and was astonished to see it come in at 10:46 (hopefully the video works this time round - not sure what happened before). While a big part of that improvement is that I'm much more comfortable with the duping than I used to be, it got me thinking with this route at least, how much further it's possible to take it. The sum of my best segments is a 10:31, and with a cleaner run through the Slums, it could go below that. Sub-10? Don't know if that's viable, at least not without an alternate route.

The 100% route I'm less certain about because I've only run it through twice. My best is about 48 minutes or so, but that was more ironing out some of the more obvious mistakes in the earlier 52 minute one. Under 45 is definitely viable. How far under 45 is an open question at this point.

Oh, and I thought I'd add, more as an amusing addendum than anything else, how the game decides whether or not the temple guards let you through. Pool of Radiance has some ridiculously convoluted mechanics, but this one takes the cake.

So the idea behind it is basically this: Mace knows there are hidden treasures in the temple, but he can't find them. So instead of looking harder, he figures the council will probably send some adventurers to fetch them and so he decides to let the party find the treasure and then ambush them afterwards. Thing is, he doesn't know exactly when they're coming, so he sends his men off patrolling the area with the instructions to only attack adventurer looking sorts if they absolutely have to, and then to report back.

So: if you encounter groups of four orcs with a symbol of Bane on their shields and you talk to them or you run away, they'll report back to Mace, the temple guards will be told that you're coming and they'll let you in. If you don't encounter them or you kill them, they don't know you're coming and they'll check for a holy symbol. You can get one either by fighting the Orc Leader in Podol Plaza or by fighting any of Mace's patrols. If you have one, they'll let you in; if not, you'll have to fight them. In any case, the holy symbols seem to be incredibly heavy, so it's virtually impossible to have one anyway.

And the net result of avoiding alerting Mace? Zero. You have a trivial battle with eight orcs and you get attacked by Mace when you find all the treasures, leave the temple or destroy the altar regardless. It's a very complicated mechanic for something with almost no consequences (I suspect it was supposed to be more then got written out), but if you were wondering why you sometimes get stopped at the door and sometimes not, that's why.

Oh, and by the way: why do they rely on the blind orc to look for the holy symbol when there's eight perfectly sighted orcs who could do it just as well?

I'm not sure how much more I'll work on any% unless I get it into a marathon sometime. With my weird attitude, it's not worth it that much to grind a 15 or less minute game. I get more bored running something quick over and over than running something long (in fact, until you came along and broke the any% by doing the things I was always afraid to, I never seriously ran any game that took under an hour to beat). I may play a bit more. Having one mage makes the any% super luck-based, tho; if you only have 1 sleep spell, you have to get real lucky to put out the 5th level cleric with it, as you did in your submission, and beating him at level 1 without sleep is a tall order. I've failed to get him with 2 sleep spells once and wiped real fast.

I've actually been playing with a bunch of things on 100%, although my two best near-full runs thus far have been moot (the first time I forgot to clear Stojanow's Gate after running any% so much and just slipped past it again to kill Ty; the second time I was doing much better and forgot to pick up the diplomatic envelope from Cordona for the Zhentil outpost). But I've discovered that a number of factors contribute to the size of the slum forces, including weapons and hit points. I put the magic shortbows and arrows on a character in the back to more easily shoot down the enemy and suddenly was facing full-sized groups of goblins, including captains; and when my hit points started getting really low, I discovered that I was getting groups of only 4 enemies.

I played around with that a bunch more and found that if you have a party of all 6 HP or less you will only get 4 enemies on the slums random encounters. This makes your characters slightly more vulnerable to being knocked out during the slum fights, but I think it might be worth it to field a party of 4 F/M with 6 HP, keep the last character with no armor so that the enemies will surrender rather than run.

Going to continue working on this today, and hopefully will have my official 100% video up today sometime.

I do know what you mean. I was watching one of SummoningSalt’s excellent WR progression videos the other day and he was talking about how a particular WR is contingent on a single enemy in a 10min run moving left or right because one way saves a handful of pixels. Suffice to say, I’m never going to have the patience to put in the thousands of attempts to get that level of play.

The single mage was a calculated risk - I figured the second mage was pretty much just ballast after the fight with the cleric. I’ve found that battle doesn’t go south too often - I watched the rest of your Twitch attempts and you had shocking luck on that time it didn’t work. Sleep affects 4d4 opponents, and a level 5 opponent counts as 10, so you’ve got around a 75% chance of getting him, once you’ve factored in the other two clerics.

You’re right about the party strength algorithm. The exact formula (which I got from Ssjlee’s fantastic FAQ, a document that was my bible for doing this) is:

0.4 for each cleric level 0.8 for each mage level 0.5 for each THAC0 point under 21 0.5 for each AC point under 0 0.1 for each current hit point. Then round down to the nearest integer for each character.

Random encounters in the slums are two thirds of party strength, rounded down to the nearest multiple of two. Leaders are added once they reach 8. I never thought of trying to reduce it to 4, which could potentially be a big time save, so that’s definitely worth playing around with. Oh and by the way, the number of undead in the graveyard is calculated when you enter, which is why in my 100% run, I unequipped everything before entering.