Comprehensive Level 5+ 1 Million Barrel Board Guide

[dnickolas]

Couple Questions/comments:


1. Why "jump once" before jumping blue barrel #1? As long as you land your jump a pixel or more past "perfectly lined up" you're golden for the immediate ascent. You even have a few pixels of wiggle room. Does it somehow induce different and more productive barrel behavior to do the jump?

2. What is meant by "rushing the transition"? Clearly steering 5 barrels away and skipping a 300 or 500 point jump opportunity is costly, but skipping like 2 to get up top for grouping earlier is probably a better play?

3. While I understand that it's possible to get a million without grouping, it seems like you'd be cutting it close. Bad deaths or bad rivet/conveyor levels will end your chances, and then you'll be on level 20 needing to score 60k+ on 2 levels and your strat won't allow that. So then you start trying to group without having practiced it for a while and you won't even killscreen it. I don't feel like grouping is all that unsafe. I die less there (and it's always avoidable) than I do, say, waiting for the bottom hammer when I feel like the universe is conspiring against me.

4. I'd like more to be said about when to grab the bottom hammer. Sometimes I panic grab and get screwed because he starts to ascend the broken ladder as I run out of hammer, and since I grabbed it at a bad time there are still a few barrels to deal with - not fun when there's a fireball in the mix. Should I instead try to grab as soon as the first "set" has been released, so that no matter what I'll have fairly smooth sailing if I have to outrun a fireball? There's also a bad spot to be in when you're waiting for barrels and the fireball bolts to the short ladder right around the time a barrel is rolling past the "grab now" hammer. And he's starting fairly far left of the "grab" window in the pic. It's a sort of no man's land where if you grab it you're potentially landing on the fireball, and if you don't you're basically on the run with a barrel array coming at you and are skipping the bottom hammer.

5. So we're looking to score how many points per barrel board? This strat feels like 10k averages. My gorilla math tells me that over the 17 levels we're getting 510k from barrels with this strat. Start will be like 100k with this amount of skill? So I need 390 from conveyor, elevator, and rivet. 7950 for those? That is a rough average on those boards imo. Way harder than doing some grouping and getting 11.5k averages on barrels. Where am I screwing up my logic? Are we just hoping to get a bunch of 10k conveyors to get the average around a free pass? I've never had a game that didn't screw me into at least one 4k conveyor.

Maybe I'm falling into the trap of only relying on being able to control what I score on barrels, since the other levels kind of force me to score whatever they want me to score. Barrels can definitely screw you, but an utter screwing is either a death or a 9800, which this seems to be targeting as a goal. Or are we just hoping to get a few 800 smashes in every other level?

Summary: I think it would be very difficult to eke out a million without some more points on barrels than we're targeting here.

[WCopeland]

Be careful about overthinking 1m pace. With solid mechanics you should easily be able to do it with zero grouping. If you have to group to hit 1m pace, you're dropping points somewhere and there's a major flaw in your game.

Unless your target score is 1.15m+, I recommend making the panic grab an integral part of your bottom hammer strategy. There is no reason to put yourself in additional danger when you're still working on your fundamental gameplay mechanics.

Your first target smash with the bottom hammer is the first blue barrel. If the fireball comes up, immediately grab the bottom hammer. If you have a difficult group to jump or feel like you're in danger, grab the hammer. During your transition, steer every single barrel away. Play every other screen the way you do to run boards. Shoot for 10,000 point barrel boards and a 110,000 start. Your level average should hover between 52k and 54k. Doing all these things should easily net you million-point pace.

Also, try not to get too caught up in the math behind the score. That's a bad road to go down and can lead to a lot of frustration. Work on your mechanics and let the math take care of itself. It's better to get a natural "feel" for pace than shoehorn or force the numbers in. Scores of 1.15m and less are very formulaic / textbook. Once you have that formula down, the pace will take care of itself.

[tilt]

Really, unless you are going for 1.15m+, your main priority should be survival. If you have to take some sort of large risk to get more points for a simple 1m game, you are doing something wrong.  In my first million game, I only took 1 bottom hammer per level up until level 15 I believe, and at that point I took all hammers.  I still hit a million without grouping or even using conventional structure.  The way I managed it was by ensuring all the other boards in which you can mostly control are as optimized as possible.  6500+ springs, 7000-8000 pies if possible, and whatever the rivets will give you.  It's not as difficult as you may think, you just need to be efficient.  This will also help you later on as you attempt to go for larger scores.

[dnickolas]

Be careful about overthinking 1m pace. With solid mechanics you should easily be able to do it with zero grouping. If you have to group to hit 1m pace, you're dropping points somewhere and there's a major flaw in your game.

Unless your target score is 1.15m+, I recommend making the panic grab an integral part of your bottom hammer strategy. There is no reason to put yourself in additional danger when you're still working on your fundamental gameplay mechanics.

Your first target smash with the bottom hammer is the first blue barrel. If the fireball comes up, immediately grab the bottom hammer. If you have a difficult group to jump or feel like you're in danger, grab the hammer. During your transition, steer every single barrel away. Play every other screen the way you do to run boards. Shoot for 10,000 point barrel boards and a 110,000 start. Your level average should hover between 52k and 54k. Doing all these things should easily net you million-point pace.

Also, try not to get too caught up in the math behind the score. That's a bad road to go down and can lead to a lot of frustration. Work on your mechanics and let the math take care of itself. It's better to get a natural "feel" for pace than shoehorn or force the numbers in. Scores of 1.15m and less are very formulaic / textbook. Once you have that formula down, the pace will take care of itself.

Thanks Wes,

I'm really just trying to get used to the right instincts and I conflated that with pacing for exactly a million, which is clearly an error on my part. I'm still sometimes fighting muscle memory from 30 years ago on a colecovision where you're invincible with a hammer and just mow things down, so I'm concerned about limiting myself unless it's absolutely necessary.

And since you seem to not do the jump on the first girder it's probably not messing up anything to not do it either.

And yeah, I have many huge flaws. I'm considering starting a "don't do this" thread to share the thousands of new and interesting ways there are to die that I seem to find.

I think that another error in logic I made was that 1M pace is really 1.1M and if you get screwed on a ton of pies and rivets you still get 1M. That's not the case.

[WCopeland]

Yes, 1m and 1.1m are really separate entities. On a certain level, my first 1.1m game was harder than any of my WR games due to the volume of learning it required... I pretty much had to reconstruct my entire game. The only difference between a 900k and 1.02m score is efficient bottom hammers. The 1.1m threshold you really have to be concerned with every board and start thinking about optimal starts.

[muscleandfitness]

?

[xelnia]

?

Exactly.

[GILLYKONG]

That's what I thought too Jry. Don't think he'll ever quite get it 

[QAOP Spaceman]

                    
              
                 
                     
                                   
             
             
             

             
           

[Flobeamer1922]

[muscleandfitness]

spacie lol classic ^^^^^^

[muscleandfitness]

Whts a fire Fox , is that like a Fire Fly..?

[dnickolas]

Fireball on riviot.

[muscleandfitness]

im starting to read all about barrells boards mates.. lit.. thank you.. SPACIE PLS.. classic. ? lol 

[muscleandfitness]

SPACIE COME BACK I MISS....HELLO SERPIE LIT