[NeoLemmix] Lemmings World Tour [Difficulty: Medium]

[Colorful Arty]

It seems Lemmings World Tour is finally showing its true colors. The Legend rank... is getting frighteningly difficult...

[kaywhyn]

Indeed, save for the one or so odd level in the previous ranks that I found harder than the other levels in the same rank, as well as the wonky first rank, Noisemaker, where the difficulty is all over the place, I felt no real challenge with the pack until I got to the Legend rank. That's where solving times finally started slowing considerably for me. I know several hard ones in the rank coming up after where you last left off in your LP, some of which you might had already encountered. So, it sounds like you have reached the point where you will only be able to solve one or a few levels per video and still be able to fit within your half hour video length, with maybe the occasional 4-5 levels solved per video if you manage to catch some lucky breaks in the rank.

At the same time, LWT is one of those packs where it constantly always seems that it keeps going, in large part due to how there's a massive 40 levels per rank (almost the largest amount of levels per rank in a pack, just short by 1 level, second to United in that regard) and a grand total of 320 levels. Indeed, I felt this burnout when I LPed the New Formats version of SEB Lems in the last few months, even though it's exactly half the length of LWT at 160 levels and how there's only half the number of levels per rank (8 ranks just like LWT). It felt like the LP just kept dragging on, but at the same time it's considerably harder, and I got stumped so badly at many different points throughout the pack. However, in your case you LPed the Old Formats version of the pack where it has 175 levels. That's because the Old Formats version includes an extra rank of 15 levels which eventually got removed in the New Formats version. So, even though I ended up playing 15 levels less than you did, I definitely felt the burnout with SEB Lems, especially since hard levels just kept coming up after one another in both the Murder and Rapture ranks and hence the finish line kept feeling so far away.

Now, eventually at some point I would like to LP the New Formats version of LWT, but that's not going to be for some time. I'm pretty sure I will really feel the LP dragging out due to the sheer length of the pack at 320 levels. This is also why I choose to LP smaller packs in between the big ones as well. After I LP a large pack, I generally do a much smaller pack next. Of course, I will also take a huge break after finishing LPing a large pack, just like I did with SEB Lems, which is currently the biggest level pack I have LPed to date, at 160 levels.

Don't despair, though. As I mentioned in your first LP video that you've done in years, you haven't lost too much of your touch with the game after all that time away. You went through the Rockstar rank in a fairly decent amount of time with relatively few problems. I know you can get through the Legend rank too. This pack's got nothing on you, Arty!

[Strato Incendus]

I just want to stress once again that SEB Lems, which Arty has already beaten, is considerably harder than any level in Lemmings World Tour.

Personally, I even think SEB Lems is harder than Lemmings Open Air. But maybe it's just that Flopsy and I mutually can't beat each other's packs ^^. Making hard levels is easier than solving them, after all.

Don't be shy to ask for help, Arty - I just have no clue where your currently struggling. It might be Legend 07 ("Lemmingrad"), but that is another level I'd say was pretty much "made for Arty"...

[kaywhyn]

I just want to stress once again that SEB Lems is considerably harder than any level in Lemmings World Tour.

Says the guy who has yet to beat the pack More to the point, I disagree. There are some levels in SEB Lems that are just as easy as some of the ones in LWT. It is tagged Medium-Hard after all, while LWT is just Medium. You also have two more ranks after Rapture. They both start off easy, where they start off around early-mid Paradise rank, and gradually get hard as you get further in those ranks, with the hardest levels reaching about Rapture difficulty just like Flopsy has confirmed and that you correctly guessed.

Personally, I even think SEB Lems is harder than Lemmings Open Air. But maybe it's just that Flopsy and I mutually can't beat each other's packs ^^. Making hard levels is easier than solving them, after all.

This I agree. SEB Lems is miles harder than LOA, as evidenced by how I struggled even in the Bittersweet rank. In contrast, your LOA pack I felt no real challenge until around mid-late Heavy rank, in a similar vein to how I said that I felt no real challenge with LWT until I got to the Legend rank as mentioned in my above post. Indeed, I would had agreed with you if you had said that SEB Lems is, on average, harder than LWT, but you mentioned "harder than any level in LWT," which I mentioned that I disagree with

Don't be shy to ask for help, Arty - I just have no clue where your currently struggling. It might be Legend 07 ("Lemmingrad"), but that is another level I'd say was pretty much "made for Arty"...

You indeed guessed correctly. I too remember struggling with Lemmingrad, although I will say it's quite a nice level with a great solution that's precise in some places. Just watched Arty's most recent LWT LP video, and at the end it says right after he completes Legend 6

Spoiler

"The next level gets its own video. I'm ending the video now"

[Colorful Arty]

Yep, Lemmingrad is the level I am stuck on. I've tried to beat it for hours and just cannot see any way to reach the exit with the skillset. I swear we are 1 destructive skill short.

A hint would be most appreciated.

[Strato Incendus]

Says the guy who has yet to beat the pack More to the point, I disagree. There are some levels in SEB Lems that are just as easy as some of the ones in LWT. It is tagged Medium-Hard after all, while LWT is just Medium.

That's precisely the point : I couldn't even finish SEB Lems, Arty did. So Arty should have no trouble beating LWT in the end.
Obviously, every pack has its easy levels, but that's not what determines whether somebody will be able to complete the entire pack in the end. I called myself "He who usually only makes it up to rank two" for a reason. By that logic, any pack I have never beaten but only played up to rank 1-2 could be considered "just as easy as LWT".

I didn't say every level in SEB Lems were harder than in LWT; I said that every level in LWT is easier than finishing SEB Lems in its entirety (which is what Arty has already accomplished).

Moreover, the difficulty rating "Medium" vs. "Medium-Hard" already proves that SEB Lems is harder than LWT and purposefully so. I don't even see why we're arguing about this.

A hint would be most appreciated.

Well, I can't see what you're currently trying to do, but let's say your very own favourite trick for skill economics will get you very far on this one. It's just potentially harder to set up here.

Spoiler

I'm talking about the good old "making a Miner go through using Builders" method

[Colorful Arty]

Welp, I solved it so I guess the hint won't be needed after all, only for me to see you post the hint anyways. Thanks for helping.

I'll reveal my full feelings on this level when I show off my solution on video, but fair warning: I raged a lot on this level and the solution should NOT have taken this long. I saw the solution pretty much instantly and then had to spend hours getting the solution exactly perfect with around 20 attempts ending because of ONE $*&%^#* PIXEL. The solution I was trying was the same as the intended solution, but the architecture made it unfairly precise for no reason. I don't even think it was intentional on your part to make the architecture this annoying, but it was.

[kaywhyn]

That's precisely the point : I couldn't even finish SEB Lems

Ah, you're speaking too soon, as you're quite close to the very end of the main pack and still have two more side ranks to go through Granted, you needed hints on several of the levels, but you're definitely way past the point where most give up in frustration on the pack. Honestly, at this point I'm confident that you'll be able to get through the rest of it There are level solutions as well as my LP in case you need more of a nudge in the right direction

I didn't say every level in SEB Lems were harder than in LWT; I said that every level in LWT is easier than finishing SEB Lems in its entirety (which is what Arty has already accomplished).

Moreover, the difficulty rating "Medium" vs. "Medium-Hard" already proves that SEB Lems is harder than LWT and purposefully so. I don't even see why we're arguing about this.

We're not. Based on how you wrote it you made it look like you meant that every level of LWT is easier than SEB Lems, which is clearly not true. Since you clarified that what you meant is how LWT is generally easier to solve than SEB Lems as a whole, now that there's no argument from me there

Welp, I solved it so I guess the hint won't be needed after all, only for me to see you post the hint anyways. Thanks for helping.

Congrats! Yea, I think I remember it being very precise as well. I'll need to check my replay again, as a lot of these solutions I'm struggling to remember a lot of the details. This is especially the case when I'm watching your LP, where I often wonder, "How did I solve this level again?"

[Strato Incendus]

We're not. Based on how you wrote it you made it look like you meant that every level of LWT is easier than SEB Lems

Well, to be fair, I now realize there are two ways to understand the statement "every level in LWT is easier than the entirety of SEB Lems":

1) "the entirety" like "every single level in that pack is harder" (which we agree is not true, and which I never meant to imply)

2) "the entirety" like "the entire pack", and the difficulty of the entire pack is determined by how hard it is to beat the pack as a whole. Because a single super-hard level, even if every other one is easy, can stop you from completing a pack. And completing the pack is simply much harder to do with SEB Lems than with LWT.

Welp, I solved it so I guess the hint won't be needed after all, only for me to see you post the hint anyways. Thanks for helping.

I'll reveal my full feelings on this level when I show off my solution on video, but fair warning: I raged a lot on this level and the solution should NOT have taken this long.

First of all: Congratulations for solving it even all by yourself, Arty!

For the second part: Of course, I'll have to actually see your solution first before I can confirm whether it's actually the intended one, and if so, to what extent. My own replay was fairly precise, but I've seen replays by others where the setup of the same core trick was less precise, because it relied on fewer moving parts. As a consequence, I had less of a bad conscience about it, because I discovered that easier things than what I had in mind originally were possible, and I had no intention of breaking those slightly alternative approaches.

Maybe you're the first one who actually did what I did when I made the level - or maybe you've even done something that's even harder to pull off. I have no way to tell yet.

That said, it's the final main rank, so just like in other packs, if there are supposed to be any levels where no punches are being pulled anymore, it's here.

Sure, ideally that difficulty should be conceptual more so than pixel-precision, and definitely not based on execution difficulty alone. But avoiding pixel precision is usually no longer as much of a concern on levels from the final rank of any pack if the solution necessitates that precision from a conceptual standpoint.

Which is why I'm a little confused about this statement of yours:

I saw the solution pretty much instantly

What do you mean by "instantly"? As soon as you started your next session of attempting it?

Because I'm pretty sure you didn't see the solution conceptually right away when you first looked at the level - otherwise you probably wouldn't have asked for a hint...

Unless this is another case of what happened on Legend 04: That your first instinct was the correct one and you discarded it because you couldn't execute it.
That's always a pity, because rediscovering the correct solution if you've already had it and discarding it is harder than discovering it for the first time.

In terms of "making destructive skills go through in general": I think now we've seen two different examples of how inspiration by other players can easily create monsters accidentally ^^:
- in my first pack Paralems, I had some hidden objects and a couple execution-heavy levels. Then WillLem came along with his first pack(s) and took that to even greater extremes than I would ever have imagined possible.
- in SubLems, in turn, Arty had some of these levels making skills go through each other. That inspired me to make my own, and I've taken that to much larger extremes.

The special challenge with Legend 04 was probably that this was the only combination of destructive skills of which Arty wasn't aware / sure (or at least not anymore) whether it would work in the first place: Miners crossing, Basher and Digger crossing, those were clear because he used them in SubLems himself. When I once asked about these combinations while I was playing SubLems, I also learned in turn that making a Miner and a Digger pass through each other is not possible.

That said, in terms of execution, I had to get these levels right myself - just knowing the solution on a conceptual level is not an advantage in this regard - and if it had frustrated me enough, I obviously wouldn't have included them. In turn, I was also frustrated by some of the levels in SEB Lems which required this "Miner-goes-through" stuff with a lot of setup. It's simply part and parcel of this type of solution: Often a strong limitation of destructive skills is required to even enforce the necessity of making a Miner go through in the first place. Which then becomes precise because Builder staircases are fairly thin, and it's easy for at least one of them to be accidentally cut through by the Miner.


I remember kaywhyn having similar criticism about Legend 04 as you, but for Legend 07, while he mentioned the pixel precision, too, he still called it a "very nicely designed level" overall.

IchoTolot meanwhile had trouble with the crowd containment on Level 04, so that's what he criticised, but I didn't see any criticism of skill crossings in his comments.
Only about lightning traps hidden in clouds ^^, which in turn Arty fortunately appreciated (on Legend 06 ), because he understood the flavour reasons. You know that when in doubt, flavour trumps mechanical fairness for me.

As I said under Arty's video, I always considered the Miner's position on Legend 04 fixed, so I didn't think positional cues in the terrain of what to assign where would help. The issue is when you assign the skills (i.e. to which lemming from which crowd), more so than where. Depending on when you start mining and with which lemming, even if from the same position, that will inevitably influence how you have to make the second assignment. That is the inevitable challenge of levels relying on relative timing between lemmings.

Finally, just because terrain cues are there doesn't mean they're understood by the player as such. I've repeatedly missed them on levels from SEB Lems that required skills going through, for example, and just mistook them for arbitrarily-placed decoration. Unless it's explicitly written as "Mine/Bash etc. here", like in the Practice levels of Lemmings 3D, it can easily happen that the only person who understands that terrain piece X is a position cue is the level designer him- or herself.

With Legend 07, I don't think terrain cues would help that much to begin with, because again the relative timing is the issue. But I'll have to see Arty's solution first before I can confirm whether it's actually the intended one to begin with. I assume it relies on the main trick, but the intended / alternative question is all about how that main trick is set up.

[kaywhyn]

We're not. Based on how you wrote it you made it look like you meant that every level of LWT is easier than SEB Lems

Well, to be fair, I now realize there are two ways to understand the statement "every level in LWT is easier than the entirety of SEB Lems":

1) "the entirety" like "every single level in that pack is harder" (which we agree is not true, and which I never meant to imply)

2) "the entirety" like "the entire pack", and the difficulty of the entire pack is determined by how hard it is to beat the pack as a whole. Because a single super-hard level, even if every other one is easy, can stop you from completing a pack. And completing the pack is simply much harder to do with SEB Lems than with LWT.

Fair enough, although in case there's ambiguity like here then generally things should be stated/written in such a way so that there's no confusion, or if there is a chance that something can be misinterpreted by stating what you meant, which you of course did Of course, I don't claim to be an English language expert or anything despite English being my native tongue, but opportunities to eliminate any ambiguity should be done whenever possible, let's say Obviously I took "every level in LWT is easier than the entirety of SEB Lems" to mean 1), which was what I didn't agree with, but since your clarification we are indeed in agreement that it isn't true at all, hence why I said we're not "arguing about anything"

I do agree with 2) completely, although despite Medium being in the difficulty tag, I think we also agree that they're not on the same level of medium. I would say that SEB Lems is more on the higher end of the medium difficulty, while LWT is generally on the lower end of the medium difficulty. Of course, this is subjective, as I'm simply speaking from my experience with your pack where I didn't really struggle until the Legend rank, while SEB Lems I already started struggling even in the second rank. Similarly, the pack that I'm currently LPing The Lemmings Have Grown I say is definitely on the higher end of the medium difficulty, as even the first rank levels managed to kick my *** so badly When I post my feedback for the pack later on I will let the author know to change the difficulty tag from Easy-Hard to Medium-Hard, as it is so not the former

I remember kaywhyn having similar criticism about Legend 04 as you, but for Legend 07, while he mentioned the pixel precision, too, he still called it a "very nicely designed level" overall.

I honestly didn't remember criticizing Legend 4 until you reminded me with this and I had to look back at it. Now that I think about it, I don't think it's so much that I had to do it so many times until I got it to work with the skills crossing that I was criticizing. I think it's more that I'm not generally a fan of levels where the solution involves destructive skills crossing. Indeed, I quickly deduced that the solution involved crossing of skills from the skillset and I nearly had an instant "oh Strato so did not go there." Of course, being the completionist that I am, I ended up playing it and get it solved by any means possible. To be fair, it is at least a very short level, and the 99RR kind of helps with the execution a bit, as well as enforce the trick that Icho missed conceptually completely on the bottom right entrance. Interestingly enough, I think when I was LPing Sublems a few months ago I had more trouble getting Christmas Crossing 1 to work than I did with getting Christmas Crossing 2 to work. There's a huge difference, though. In the former, it involves placing 4 skills correctly, all of which have to be placed at the right time, while in the latter you only need to place 2 skills correctly at the right time.

Legend 7, on the other hand, is a type of level involving "extending the miner," which I generally enjoy more. Unlike Legend 4, it's not as super precise, as there's still some leeway in terms of the builder/miner placements. From what I remember, I think I had my doubts as to it working just because of how the terrain is on the level and whether setting it up is even possible. Besides that, I think there were just other things I liked about the level that certainly outweigh the criticism of the pixel precision

Just FYI, there is a somewhat tall Sports level in United which involves an extremely long "extending the miner," (possibly the longest I've ever seen in a level, as a matter of fact) although in this case the setup is nearly automatic


Keep up the great work, Arty!

[Strato Incendus]

Thought I'd share my replay for "Lemmingrad", for the sake of completion. The timing I used on my solution isn't required to beat the level, though; both kaywhyn and IchoTolot found easier solutions.

Spoiler

Both used the Bomber at the beginning at the slim blue building - and used the bar next to the exit to break the fall from the Digger shaft. They saved both Diggers until almost the very end, i.e. right before assigning the Miner.

IchoTolot bombed to get enough pixels under the Builder so that the Miner doesn't cut through and used the Stoner on the right side of the statue.
kaywhyn stoned first, next to the blue building, for a few extra pixels, and then bombed, needing no additional foothold on the right side of the statue as a result.

I, in contrast used the Stoner only at the blue building, and then dug on the right side of the statue for just one brief moment to get the "foothold" for the staircase. Instead, I saved the Bomber for later.
This Digger usage then required me to save a Digger at the end, which is what necessitated the timing stunt you see in the replay, where the Digger continues while another lemming mines.
Then I could bash over the exit and bomb to get down to it.

[kaywhyn]

@Arty I thought I drop off my Legend 4 and Legend 7 replays for you so that you can compare. Sometimes, it's easier to just simply watch the replay, as it can be quite difficult to describe the solution at times. As I mentioned before, there's multiple ways to do Legend 4, as I ended up using different lemmings from the ones you used in your solution.

Nice job on solving these two levels. Good luck with the rest of the Legend rank, and let us know if you need further assistance if you get stumped again.

[ericderkovits]

wow, Colorful Arty is very distraught at Legend 7 (Lemmingrad) in his Let's Play video of that level.

Although there are easier, less precise solutions as Strato, Icho, and Kaywhyn showed.

[kaywhyn]

Oh wow, 4 different solutions to Legend 7. Now that I think about it, I might had tried it Arty's way before, especially the stuff with the blue building, but I wasn't able to get it to work. Either that or I never tried it that way. In any case, my replay is attached if you would like to compare, @Arty

wow, Colorful Arty is very distraught at Legend 7 (Lemmingrad) in his Let's Play video of that level.

Although there are easier, less precise solutions as Strato, Icho, and Kaywhyn showed.

I don't think you understand how very difficult it is to LP a pack. Try doing it sometime, then we can talk and see if you still think it's easy. Sure, I might make it look easy at times, but LPing is not as easy as it looks. It's difficult to LP and solve well both at the same time. That's why I often mention that I screw up on camera far more than I do off camera, and this has indeed happened multiple times for every pack I've LPed.

Also, my Legend 7 solution isn't that much less precise, as there's still a lot of precision needed in it. In particular, what I did at the blue building with the destructive skills are very precise. The rest of the solution isn't as timing heavy and precise, but the precision is still there. It's only slightly easier to do just because I was able to save some of the more valuable skills for later.

Indeed, solutions being very precise is exactly what makes one doubt as to whether they will work or not. In such solutions, as can be seen, one pixel too early or too late for a given assignment, and the solution won't work. The problem lies in finding those perfect precise spots for the skills, because if you don't, the solution will not work even though it should otherwise. In the case of Legend 4, though, it was more the question of whether it was possible for two particular destructive skills to cross, which is certainly credible if one hasn't seen it before with those two skills in that level. In my case, I didn't have a problem with that, because from the extremely small and super restricted skillset, I logically deduced that the skills crossing and both continuing must be possible, as the level wouldn't be solvable otherwise. So, it's just a matter of executing it correctly.

Then as Strato mentioned many times before, there's also the very common phenomenon of persistently trying something that doesn't work over and over because the person believes that it can still be made to work. The problem here is in discarding it completely, because it's quite difficult to break away from doing a particular solution that one believes might work but ultimately it doesn't. I fall victim to this a lot, but here it's mostly due to how there's some things that happen in the level that I can't wrap my head around and hence I get sucked into trying things that clearly don't work.   

[Strato Incendus]

I assume the easiest-to-execute solution for Legend 07 would then probably be IchoTolot's (see the New-Formats thread), because he had no complaints about this level whatsoever .

I don't think eric meant to say that let's-playing were easy, just that the solution itself could have been easier . Also, Arty found this particular one off-camera, so the "doing it on camera is harder" factor (which I'm sure is a thing) doesn't apply here beyond the live parts we see in the first video about Legend 07.

Because there are four different solutions minimum to this level, I don't see the need to change anything about it, though. Because it's evidently not like there's one specific precise solution that you have to get right to make it work. The solutions differ vastly on a conceptual level, e.g. the Bomber can go in three different places, the Stoner in two different places, the Digger in several different places etc.

All solutions share a certain need for precision that just arises from the general necessity of making a Miner go through. I've faced similar issues with several SEB Lems levels, for example. In at least one case, this and the surrounding setup required also prevented me from solving the level without help at all.

That level was

"The Call of Lucia"

But "Wild Forever" was a similar candidate

Everything else seems to be a case of "picking your poison": As soon as you decide on e.g. one of the possible Bomber positions, that reduces the degrees of freedom you have for where the other skills can go. And that then leads you towards which solution you'll have to go with if you stick to that particular approach. Depending on which you end up using, the amount of required precision will vary.