Awesome, looks great. Thank you Adam. I'll start running next week or so, if not for anything then to at least have some runs on the boards.

Cheater% is not for me :)

I agree with everything Daniel says.

Assuming we enforce the HD+ ban the problem would be that almost every run recorded uses HD+. We can’t keep any runs as HD+ per default does the RNG-thing covered earlier. It’s a shame, but a fact nonetheless. As far as I can see that leaves us with two possibilities:

1. Purge everything that uses HD+ pretty much leaving the leaderboards empty and ready for new conquistadores.

2. Split the leaderboards into a strictly HD with limited tweaks and an HD+ with all tweaks allowed. This way we have the best of both worlds and we don’t have to abolish any runs. I know it’s suboptimal to have ~20 categories in a game 3 dudes are running, but it’s the only way I see possible if we want to ban HD+ and still keep old runs around.

Fair enough. Home-stuff should be prioritized after all :)

Sorry for the timing-thing. I broke that rule too, just realized it was a thing before posting. Luckily it’s not that bad, it probably only adds a second or two to all runs.

So, we should decide on whether every tweak should be banned or not. As far as I can see these are the relevant tweaks available:

• HD+ (According to documentation-site it adds multiplayer-stuff, replayable battles, fixed RNG-calculations)
• Sys.CPU.ReduceUsage (Self-explanatory. Unsure if it affects anything relevant)
• UI.AdvMgr.SkipMadMsgs (Skips some messages like warnings when buying stuff)
• UI.ClipCursor (Mouse cannot leave the game window while holding down the Ctrl-key, really useful when playing in windowed mode and trying to scroll the map)
• UI.QuickArmyManagementode (Better army management. I am not completely sure what this exactly does)
• UI.RecruitDlg.Autoset (When recruiting creatures it decides what the initial number is set on)
• UI.Tavern.InviteHero (Enables you to choose what hero will join your tavern next)

It appears all the controversial stuff comes from the HD+-mod. I’m for banning it completely. The other tweaks seem fine, safe for InviteHero that was discussed before.

Yo. Could we get back to this?

I just returned to doing some HoMM3-runs. I pretty much routed LLtK and will probably do Liberation and the last one next week, before the ultimate full campaign run.

BUT before all this shit, I need to have a sound ruleset to adhere to. The problems I see highly relate to the thread some months ago, that ultimately led to nothing. Let me start this again as it is pretty crucial for future HoMM3-speedruns. I have two objections; one minor and a biggie.

• Timer start:

Either do one of two things:

Change the timer start to the first dialogue skip of each scenario.

Or stay true to the current rules and actually moderate, i. e. retime, runs that start the timer too late (it appears everyone does that, myself included). My vote is on this one.

It doesn’t really matter which one, consistency is the key. It just surprises me that timing is explicitly defined one way, but is practiced in another way in all runs.

• HD vs HD+ mod:

Is HD+ mod allowed or ONLY HD mod? Further down this path are tweaks allowed? There are some legacy runs that would get purged by the disallowance of HD+, including J0hna’s as he uses the “Replay Battle”-function which is not possible in an non-tweaked version of HD mod. As the HD mod is still being updated fairly regularly this puts us in a position where we are at the hands of the modders. They could integrate every tweak by default tomorrow and we would be forced to use them.

I understand and agree with your opposition of tweaks, but the problem is, as @snDRY posted in the previous thread, that the HD mod greatly interferes with vanilla version anyway. The worst crime of them all probably is that HD mod actually manipulates every single RNG-calculation. What I’m saying is that the “this is not vanilla”-argument is not valid, because we’ve already stepped so far away from vanilla that the bread crumbs we spread to find back has been eaten by nasty birds years ago.

My point isn’t that we should ban all HD mods altogether, but I am really curious as to how tweaks breaks your rules more than HD mod haven't already done. As far as I can see in earlier posts the mod got accepted as a QoL-thing, which turned out to have a shitload of side-effects that is generally frowned upon in most speedrunning communities. So we could either accept all these side-effects in their full glory or try to make a nice subjective ruleset carefully picking out the tweaks we like. This would require an exact and up-to-date guide to set up the game and in principle require all runners to show their tweaks-code before each run (... but let's use the honor system for that).

So, please make a decision and enforce it so I can run this game. Pick my poison, so to speak.

Agreed, however it seems like you gain control of Herc at the start of fadein to each level. The scorescreen starts ticking at fadein start too. So I would argue that it should be from fadeout start to fadein start.

With that the stuff we define as loads would be fade-to-fades and whenever the game explicitly states it’s “LOADING”. This leaves 3 blocks of loads per PS-level (1 block per PC-level), which with the relative few levels in the game is tolerable.

With your Crash-experience in mind general timing should stay as it is now, yes.

Hm, yeah, it's true. I just looked at Javasaurus', Joker's and Skullbot's PBs. If only "LOADING"-screens were taken off, Joker's PC-run would still have a ~3 secs advantage. Taking Skullbot's run that's another seconds faster (for whatever reason). So just eliminating loading-screens is obviously not enough.

What Joker suggests works fine for me. Imo timing should be paused at fadeout on all levels and not winning animation, but that's minor stuff. Alternatively we could unpause time during scorescreen-stuff, but the time you can waste for bad button-mashing is really not that significant, so it might be a big price to pay for a 0.1 seconds time difference at worst.

No harm no foul. I do have multiple assloads of time, so I'll gladly use one of them to retime the runs.

The whole problem stems from different emus not having the same loading times, so subtracting the same times from each run will effectively do nothing. Manually, unfortunately, is the only viable method I see.

I would say every time "LOADING" appears on screen should be subtracted (so not the scorescreen, any accidental movie clips, the title screen before each level or fadeouts). We could make timing start when gaining control of Herc, to skip 1 loading screen, but there would still be 18 of the bad boys per submission, so that might just confuse more than do any good.

I assume it's only the PAL-PS that is slow. NTSC-version should be somewhat up to speed with emus. But since most running the game are European the chance of someone having an American Herc-game is low. But yeah, it sucks that PAL is this slow and painful to play.

Well, deciding on a "best" emulator would be nice and all but won't really do anything. To me it's ban or no ban, and no ban includes everything being fair game - excluding in-game manipulations and stuff. Especially now when 0 second loading time is the upper boundary.

That being said my vote is on loadless time. Everything appears to behave identically in-game, so it really is the loads that is the problem. There is a total of 19 loading screens with each submission (10 if we include the score-screen as "loading time" even though it isn't), so it might be an annoyance to submit in the future, but the leaderboards will at least depict the truely fastest time.

I spoke with Javasaurus about this some time ago. Tested some things and timed loads on some runs (compared my pb, Java’s and Mlie’s WR as we all use different emus). Not surprisingly loading times from emulator to emulator is very different. There is a ~6 seconds load difference between each level from "worst" to "best" emu. Luckily I found no in-game difference.

If fairness is the goal I can see two approaches. Either, as Joker suggested, we rank by loadless time where each runner has to retime his/her run before submission until loadless timer is made (if ever). This will involve retiming the ~30 PB-runs on the boards. If manpower would be an issue I’ll gladly help retiming.

OR we can require all future emu-runs to be on the same emulator. I don’t know how that would be checked or verified. I guess we would have to rely on the honor system. This would still split PS and PC runs, though.

Ofc there’s secret option number 3 to just leave the board as it is atm. That works too.

@snDRY : "Random game calculations, such as moral/luck proc, creature damage and their special abilities proc does not affect the course of combat anymore. This means that with the same conditions, actions taken by players on the same map, the course of the battle will go in the same way."

So, if I understand this correctly, the result of a quick battle should be exactly identical no matter how many times you do it. In fact, what they’re saying is that all battle-die-rolls are predetermined. I guess I knew this, but I always thought it was the quick battle-system that was badly implemented in vanilla. If it’s intentionally modded into the game it’s a major issue - or at least a major difference from HD to vanilla. It probably won’t really affect speedrunning as we optimally only should see every battle once, but still.

@DanielMauritz If I’m not completely wrong the army/artifact-management still is in the pure HD mod. So we can just disallow HD+ mod, but that will effectively mean banning replaying quick battles (or any battles) and iirc some of the runs on the leaderboards use just that. So this will create an unnecessary hassle of rejecting old runs. Or we can accept HD+. To me it’s a choice of either one or the other. And I guess neither of them is optimal.

I mean sure, we can just ban the invite hero to tavern tweak and leave the rules as it is, but then we’re left with a very vague ruleset having to decide whether each and every tweak/plugin/setting/whatever is accepted or not. And on what grounds other than convenience would you ban invite hero and not replayable battles?

I like the idea of a separate category for HD+, but I don’t really know if it’s necessary. Not yet at least. It will solve the problem of old records being deleted, though.

While I completely agree with you (Adam) in principle that a game should, if possible, always be vanilla (or any official released patch and/or DLC) the problem is that we already took the step into the HD Mod-world. And we, as you mentioned, already have accepted the use of neat small things like army/item management and easy town hiring. This is non-revertable stuff that is used in every single accepted run uploaded to this page.

This whole thing problems originates from allowing the HD Mod and not having a stricter ruleset. While I don’t think it should be disallowed it does bring the aforementioned problematiques. I understand the romantic argument, and in every other case I would be on your side. But since the HD mod is fully up and running I can’t see this feature being any more hacky than some of the others, i. e. replaying battle/quick battle seems just as non-vanilla as inviting to tavern.

And I’ll repeat: What happens when/if the HD modders decide to make “Invite Hero to Tavern” a default thing? Then is it allowed? Or do we have to tweak the game in that case?

But you still need to farm for Advanced Water Magic, right? I mean that's an infinitely lesser struggle than doing casual or safe strats, but still.

To me the rules regarding versions and mods should be something like this:

"HD and HD+ mod (updated to their latest versions) and all their features and tweaks are allowed unless a specific feature or tweak is explicitly banned in the game rules or by mods in the forum. This includes but is not limited to; quick combat, invite hero to tavern, better army and items management, (...) ."

The whole "includes-but-not"-shenanigans can be omitted if it gets too tedious and ugly. And, you know, feel free to define your own rules and stuff. I'm just here pretending to know shit :P

Ha. I thought Gem was disabled in Liberation like any other exploitable spell seems to be. I tried what seemed like forever to get her in my so far failed attempts to route Liberation.

Regarding your suggestions I think that HD+ should be allowed. We’ve already taken the step to allow the HD mod, so the debate of whether to allow HD+ or not seems trivial to me. Tbh I think I’ve used HD+ in some of my runs.

However I think we need to be cautious about allowing the tweaking thing. To me it’s customising just a tad too much and moving too far away from the game’s core. BUT when we already allow the HD mod (and HD+), why shouldn’t we be allowed to use all of its features? And if we do ban it, what do we do when/if it is implemented by default by the HD modders?

So, for clarity, I am against adding the mechanic itself, but in this specific situation where it is a part of an already accepted mod I actually think allowing it would be the right thing to do. If not for anything, then to have a more sound and well-defined ruleset. But keep in mind that this will also allow adding any other and any future tweak that might be added to the mod in question, unless it's explicitly stated otherwise.

I see no reason why it shouldn't be allowed. Sure, restarting indefinitely to eventually secure yourself an optimal setup might seem a bit hacky, but it's at the expense of timeloss.

imo the rules should simply require you to complete every subcampaign in the given full campaign in any order and way you find fitting (without cheats ofc).

This.

I've tried routing some of the RoE-campaigns with no runs (D&D + Spoils of War), but haven't really gotten a run in Spoils of War that I'm satisfied with as of yet. It would be pretty cool to eventually route them all and do full campaign runs.

Unfortunately only Niofalpha can delete/rename his own youtube-video. He never will be - and never was - accepted on the sr.com leaderboards with a run of that nature.

I’m changing the rules to the Any% category. @niofalpha submitted a run that technically followed the rules but achieved the “endscreen” by simply quitting the game. According to the current rules this would make for an easy 0 second speedrun and eliminate the competitive nature a speedrun should have. This change will have no effect on other accepted runs.

So, just for the record, niofalpha did have WR according to old rules by 4 seconds. His run has been rejected in respect to new rules.

For reference, this was the run in question:

I made a Discord-server for any former, current or future members of the EU4-speedrunning community.

Use this link to connect to the server: https://discord.gg/BVXu7yw

Jump in there if you want to help us make a complete EU4-glitchlist and want to have your say in the decision whether to ban each glitch or not. Or, you know, if you just wanna talk with me FeelsLonelyMan

No harm no foul. I just got a bit annoyed by the missing response. All is good :)

Yes, I'd like to be mod.

So, I found a glitch in Big Olive birds the other day and thought I’d share it. If you trap 3 or more birds you can complete the semiboss on the first wave. The glitch itself is pretty straightforward.

I think it’s the left building that’s glitched and somehow makes the birds respawn at the same spot they were killed. It works on both ePSXe 1.9 and 2.0 and on PAL-playstation. I don’t own non-emu-NTSC- or PC-versions, so can’t test it on there.

Enjoy the luck dependent glitchy-glitchy fun stuff.

Cheers.