Lemmings Redux [Easy-Medium]

[Proxima]

namida and I, with help from DireKrow and WillLem, have finished looking through Lemmings Redux for the "skills you can't live without" challenge. We've also (with help from ccexplore) looked through the pack for the max saved challenge.

This has confirmed that there's nothing major that requires fixing, so I stand by my decision that the 18/1/20 revision is final, except for a couple of small things:

* Now that we've decided on changes to trigger areas of traps in the official styles, the trap used in "Electric circuit" can be moved up one pixel so it's more visible (which was, after all, the main reason for the trigger area change!)
* We may want to add more talismans. The max saved and SYCLW challenges include a lot of individual challenges (every skill type on every level), so we have to be careful not to go overboard, but we definitely found some interesting solutions along the way, and some of them might be worth including as talismans. I'll ask for opinions here especially from the people who took part in the challenge, but anyone is welcome to give feedback.

I'll leave this for a while until I've had time to look over our results before I can give my own opinion on adding talismans.

[namida]

Copy/pasted from Discord:

- something on Going Their Seperate Ways, there's a few options here. no floaters was quite messy IIRC, but no climbers might be a bit more interesting
- Snow Joke with 1 basher maybe? although it's a bit on the tedious side
- Worra Lorra Old Blocks with no digger
- quite a few things to choose from on Rocky Road
- i don't remember which one would be most interesting, but i found a few things all of which i remember being quite tricky on Upside Down World
- Watch Your Fingertip, 100% might be a good talisman
- With A Twist Of Lemming Please, no climber
- Fix The Road, Quick - a builder limit, maybe not necesserially 8 (that's a bit messy) but 9 or 10 perhaps?
- Sega Four, no climbers - purely because this is a heavily climber-dependent level so the "whoa, you can do that?!" value of it
- Lemmings' Ark, 1 climber

Also - Acrophobia, 3 builders. (I achieved 2, but 2 is basically just an insanely optimized variation on 3 - and 3 is still gold-worthy as it is, IMO.)

[Proxima]

I had a go at all of the above today, and solved most of them. Replays attached. (Note: I haven't ruled out talismans other than the ones in namida's post; I'm just looking at these first. In particular, max saved results and my own SYCLW replays may provide some worthy challenges.)

Feedback

Going Their Separate Ways: Both fun challenges! If we decide to allow multiple talismans per level, we could have both, in which case I'd say no floaters is bronze and no climbers silver. If not...  could just have a talisman for max 20 skills, allowing the player to choose which of these two solutions to go for.

Snow Joke: Fairly easy since I knew the bash-under-the-level route from other challenges. This could be a good way to include a talisman for the bash-under route. (I still need to look for the 100% solution on this level.)

Worra load of old blocks: Unsolved. I can save 20 with no digger, but the requirement is 24 and there are no leftover skills to hold back the lemmings who die.

Rocky Road, Upsidedown World: Didn't look at these. Both already have a talisman for saving 100%, although we might decide to allow multiple talismans on some levels; we could also consider dropping the UDW 100% talisman in favour of a skills challenge (probably no-climber). I'll have a more detailed look at these two levels another day.

Watch your fingertip: 100% is pretty easy, I just had a huge blind spot here earlier. Could be a bronze talisman if we need one more.

With a twist of lemming please: Nice solution but extremely precise. Still, that's not an absolute strike against it.

Fix the road, quick: 8 builders is a neat challenge and I didn't find it messy. I've also investigated fewest builders for 100%, and attached a replay using 10. Namida tells me it's possible with 9, but 10 is already talisman-worthy in my opinion.

SEGA Four: Unsolved, though I could do it with one climber, or with none if I had another blocker or destructive skill. I'll keep looking!

Lemmings' Ark: 1 climber is really just the normal solution except one lemming does most of the work -- not possible on the original Genesis level as it has a 4-minute time limit.

Acrophobia: I found an extremely precise solution for 3 builders; namida tells me his solution is different. I don't want to include a talisman for this in case the player stumbles on my route first and doesn't enjoy the precision. This level has other talisman possibilities: save 100% for bronze, or no diggers for silver.

[Proxima]

Got the two I was missing.

Worra load of old blocks (no diggers): Only just achievable, but not that demanding in execution. Could well be a silver talisman.

SEGA Four (no climbers): The specifics of the terrain near the exit allow a much more skill-efficient trick here, saving enough skills for the rest of the solution. This is a good talisman (probably also silver).

[Proxima]

We currently have 36 talismans, and there are definitely at least five from the list above I am interested in adding (Going Their Separate Ways, SNOW JOKE, Worra load of old blocks, With a twist of lemming please, SEGA Four) so I think we will go past 40, in which case the next "nice" number to aim for is 48. That doesn't seem unrealistic, as the max saved challenge and my own contributions to SYCLW will provide other ideas.

Since I like the bronze-silver-gold split to consist of "nice" numbers as well, there are two main options I'm considering: keep the current 1:2:1 ratio (so, 12 bronze, 24 silver, 12 gold) or go for 8 bronze, 24 silver, 16 gold. I think I'll decide first on exactly which talismans we are adding, then choose one of these ratios and then consider the rank of each talisman, but feedback on both the selection and ranking is welcome at any point.

[Proxima]

I was going to post this in "Talisman Ideas", but that got locked, so here we are.

"Flow Control" is an obvious candidate for RR talismans (if they were to be re-added); both "solve without changing the RR from its initial value" and "solve at constant RR 99" are interesting, difficult challenges that require puzzling out how they might be achievable, not just repeating the usual solution with more fiddly execution.

However, that is only one level, so I agree with namida's assessment that this talisman type will probably continue to have low usage and not be worth re-adding. In any case, "Flow Control" already has a talisman for saving at least 15 (and in fact, the initial-RR solution achieves this).

[namida]

Another possible candidate, if boosting the numbers is desired, is of course fewer diggers on I Am AT. I don't suggest making a talisman for 8 - that relies on a LOT of precision - but the same general concept could be done, with a bit more leniency, with perhaps 10 to 12 diggers.

[ccexplore]

How come multiples of 8 is a "nice" number for total number of talismans here?   (Or is it just multiples of 4 for each of gold/silver/bronze?)

[DireKrow]

Highly divisible numbers are aesthetically appealing.

[Proxima]

Well, the simple answer is that it fits with Redux having 32 levels per rank.

I remember that at some point, probably in my teenage years, I did an experiment. I had noticed that when it came to things like tempo markings in my musical compositions, I would choose the nearest "nice" number to the tempo I wanted, where "nice" meant a number like 32, 40 or 48 -- I couldn't exactly put my finger on what made some numbers "nice" and others not, but I instinctively knew which numbers were "nice" to me. So I drew up a list of "nice" numbers up to about 200 and tried to see if I could find a pattern.

It turned out that my "nice" numbers were almost exactly the practical numbers -- numbers such that any smaller number can be represented as the sum of some of its factors, so they must have a prime factorisation with predominantly small primes. I was very happy to discover that my aesthetic sense had a hidden mathematical basis

[Proxima]

- quite a few things to choose from on Rocky Road
- i don't remember which one would be most interesting, but i found a few things all of which i remember being quite tricky on Upside Down World

ROCKY ROAD already has a talisman for 100%, which eliminates bombers and blockers. Each destructive skill is fairly easy to eliminate separately, and I wouldn't consider any of these talisman-worthy.

2 builders, however, is very hard -- it's obvious enough where the builders go, but then you have to work out the skill allocation for the rest of the route, with the final linchpin being that the crowd should not be controlled, but kept out of danger by bridging the gaps while they are heading back towards the left.

I would consider this level the strongest argument so far for occasionally allowing multiple talismans per level.

I'll have a look at Upside-down World later.

[Proxima]

Upside-down World already has a talisman for 100%, which can be done with or without the blocker, but "100%" and "no blocker" are closely enough related that I wouldn't have a talisman for both.

No digger is trivial, and "1 basher" and "1 miner" are fairly simple rearrangements of the normal solution.

No builder is a little harder, requiring a trick with the one-way wall. No climber is the really interesting skill reduction; I don't think I would drop "save 100%" in favour of "no climber", but if we allow multiple talismans per level, we could definitely have both (and I would rate both as silver).

[namida]

If 100% vs No Blocker are closely related enough, but No Climber would just be a second silver: Would having "no blocker" instead of "100%" (thus allowing a lose-1 blocker route) be Bronze-worthy, without losing too much of what makes the talisman interesting?

[Proxima]

I guess so, but is there a reason against having two talismans of the same standard on the same level? (The two I'm considering on ROCKY ROAD, "save 100%" and "2 builders", would both be gold if we have both.)

I've started going over results from the max saved challenge, and solving for myself the results contributed by namida and ccexplore.

Feedback

Tension Sheet, Good Idea: Saving 100% requires timing the basher and miner relative to each other and a very fiddly trick with the blocker. Definitely not a talisman.

Flow Control: Save-17 is just a rearrangement of save-15 with a couple of extra tweaks. I think it makes sense to keep the talisman at 15 even though this isn't the maximum possible; since NL tracks personal records, the player can always challenge themselves to save more than required anyway. Interestingly, this matches the DOS max saved even though the DOS result requires a glitch. I presume the NL method won't work in DOS because it requires a lemming to explode earlier than would be possible with timed bombers.

Watch your fingertip: Discussed a few posts up. Could be a bronze, could just give this one a miss.

Temple of Love: Requires some thought to go from a regular solution to save-29. This could definitely be a talisman.

No hurry, relax: There are a couple of different solutions to this one, and one of them is good enough for save-14 as-is. Not a talisman.

[Proxima]

Okay, the talisman update isn't ready yet (I still need to match ccexplore's max saved results and then take a look over my own SYCLW achievements), but since roundthewheel is playing Redux at the moment, I decided to slip in a small update.

* Lunatic 15 "Evil whisper": Enlarged the long vertical steel area to prevent a backroute.
* Lunatic 16 "SEGA Four": Changed the music to the title screen music from the SMS version (provided by namida).