I've decided that I'm going to make some changes to my approach to the first three screens of the game. The idea is to try to drastically improve my success rate of reaching the first elevator screen while not giving a whole lot away in terms of points. My sessions over the past few months have become borderline useless because I just cannot get through the first three screens of the game. My success rate is currently likely to be WAY below 5% -- this just destroys sessions, especially when I try to squeeze in a game in a limited window of time.
I'd really like to get to the point where my success rate is over 25%. Setting aside AT LEAST half of the failures for unacceptable Level 1 rivet screens (average or below average randomness), this would require Herculean improvement on the barrel screens, ESPECIALLY 2-1 since the time screw is so much more severe when restarting on 2-1 than it is when restarting on 1-1. Getting anywhere near a 25% success rate is probably very unrealistic, but it's a good goal to keep in mind during this phase of each session.
For quite some time, I've defined my minimum benchmarks as follows:
1-1: 9,500 minimum (restart any score below this threshold)
1-2: 18,000 minimum (restart any score below this threshold)
20,000 "good score" minimum (for scores at or above this threshold, adjust my 2-1 strategy to play much safer, in an attempt to protect a good Level 1 score and move on with the game with a decent score.
2-1: No minimum threshold -- but play strategy ranges from "moderately aggressive" to "very aggressive" based on the Level 1 score.
This approach generally yields scores in the 29,500 - 32,500 range, with some outliers above or below this range.
The problem is, as my game has improved, I had been sliding further and further away from the "moderately aggressive" strategy on 2-1, regardless of my score. So, even when getting 22,000+ points on Level 1, for example, I would often tend to "go for it" and stay with the "very aggressive" strategy in an attempt to get a rare huge score going on these screens. So, my scoring range after 2-1 was actually climbing even higher. However, even though my skill has improved, this gradual change in mindset has severely hampered a large percentage of sessions, and many many sessions lately end without ever getting a game started. Even though I agree strongly with the concept of playing extra aggressively on early screens in order to try for big starts where the time tradeoff for restarting the game is relatively low, having lots of sessions run this bad means that things are clearly out of balance and the gains are no longer worth the time.
I'm now going to make some changes to my benchmarks and strategies in order to front load the risk a bit more and to hopefully improve my overall success rate, while hopefully giving up only a small amount of points.
My new benchmarks will be as follows:
1-1: 10,000 minimum (restart any score below this threshold)
1-2: 18,500 minimum (restart any score below this threshold)
20,500 "good score" minimum (for scores at or above this threshold, adjust my 2-1 strategy to play much safer, in an attempt to protect a good Level 1 score and move on with the game with a decent score.
2-1: No minimum threshold -- but play strategy ranges from "moderately aggressive" to "very aggressive" based on the Level 1 score.
The main difference here is that I will force myself to go back to using a safer strategy for any scores above my Level 1 "good score" minimum and that should lead to MUCH fewer 2-1 restarts and should bump up my overall success rate significantly. There will likely be a small drop in my average 2-1 score as a result, and I will never get the really big 2-1 scores with this strategy, but hopefully I'm giving up less than 1000 points with this change and I'll have much more productive sessions.
We'll see.
