Comparing scores at Broken Alliance

Hey,

I normally play h2demo but decided to play full version heroes 2 to see my scores. These are my scores after 4 games, which I think are pretty good. But I don't know if they're actually any good - I don't know how advanced the h2 community is, and I'm curious to know.

Some disclaimers: for the worst score I didn't use any saves/loads. For the other 3 i used saves to my advantage quite heavily. But I'm certain I can get the non-save score to below 40 days.

If anyone wishes, I can record a run and publish it.

EDIT: I can't get the picture to work. I Can't post links. Says I need to wait 7 days.

The scores are
28 days at impossible 275 points
35 days at impossible 264 points
45 days at impossible 248 points
49 days at impossilble 241 points

Well, I have serious doubts if there is any need to compete in the non-save mode since Heroes 2 is a game of chance and many things really depend on what is generated in your Mage Guild, what heroes are available at start (since even their skill leveling sequence, starting army and secondary skill tree are pre-defined at start of the game), and at the same time many nearly impossible combats can be won via finding the correct action sequence, i.e. luck contributes to the skill. Basically, all this is considered in offline tournaments where you actually spend the most time calculating properly and reloading to get the ultimate result, so you are welcome to participate.

Anyways, great results!

Thank you so much for the reply! This helped me a lot: justifying the use of save/load just saved me a lot of time!

I assume it is not acceptable to save the game, find all the obelisks, load & therefore be able to dig the artifact at first week? Because I did that in the 28 day "record".

Edit: I'll try to find out about offline-tournament rules, maybe that will answer my question(s). Edit 2: I think I found answers to most questions I was pondering after reading the rules. Interesting!

Yeah, usually the offline tournaments consider most of the game "flaws", prohibiting the "rehired hero" trick to prevent spell spamming and such. The hero chain, though, is considered a "feature" and is a necessary part of every speedrun.

I occasionally provide info support for tournaments here on the forum, but I would prefer if someone else did it. Anyways, people don't seem to care so much. There is only one regular Heroes site which still maintains a set of tournaments every year, and it's mainly Russian. See Tournament Arena subforum for details.

Some 15 years ago we had off-line Round Table Battles, which in many cases did not have starting saves or much any rules, at Celestial Heavens. Broken Alliance was played, but I do not remember the top scores anymore. Found only a later comment mentioning 4 weeks. Considering the map layout and enemies 28 days may be about as fast as one can be. Dunno if the ultimate artifact is really necessary for that, though. Saving and replaying the same save helps a lot to optimize the "random" events in your favor though, as Orzie said.

Pretty sure it's doable much faster. I'm not that kind of a player, though

Pitsu wrote:

Some 15 years ago we had off-line Round Table Battles, which in many cases did not have starting saves or much any rules, at Celestial Heavens. Broken Alliance was played, but I do not remember the top scores anymore. Found only a later comment mentioning 4 weeks. Considering the map layout and enemies 28 days may be about as fast as one can be. Dunno if the ultimate artifact is really necessary for that, though. Saving and replaying the same save helps a lot to optimize the "random" events in your favor though, as Orzie said.

Thanks for the reply.


I was improving my strategy and I did the broken alliance within 25 days without the ultimate artifact, and basically trying to follow the tournament rules. But even with this score my strategy was suboptimal and improvements could be made.

At what difficulty did you and your friends play the map? You mentioned days but not difficulty. I am quite strict with these kinds of mentions, you can play all sorts of mind tricks if you don't mention things like this.

Sepi wrote:

At what difficulty did you and your friends play the map? You mentioned days but not difficulty. I am quite strict with these kinds of mentions, you can play all sorts of mind tricks if you don't mention things like this.

The highest difficulty is the standard in player vs AI games. In these tournaments I told about the score was the first criteria. In H2 it means the least days at highest difficulty. In H3 it was more interesting since score was not solely time dependent anymore. For instance H3 version of Beltway was won in 3 days, but the highest score was in a 6 day game.

3 days for Beltway is surely a sick result even for Heroes 3. Too bad there is a too small amount of gameplay videos showing such fast plays. My favorite ones (because they are the only I know ) are these Pandemonium and Pyramid videos. Pretty sure they also could be made faster, but for some reason YouTube has been always neglected by top Heroes offline players.



Pandemonium should have a better result indeed since we have 6 heroes at start. May need a lot of time for reloading though, and a player would be able to catch the infamous Heroes 2 bug with broken AI fights more easily. Some may consider it a feature though, and there were precedents of using it in tournaments which led to numerous debates on HeroesPortal.net.

Wow that pyramid video! Really opens my eyes about how crude my technique is and how advanced the technique can be. Very nice!

Note that the runner used the Barbarian faction on the first place. Besides being a game of chance, Heroes 2 is also pretty unbalanced, both in multiplayer and in single scenarios. So, basically, Warlock heroes are the fastest thanks to the speed of the Gargoyles; and their starting speed is also adjusted because Centaurs are faster than any other conventional 1st level unit, while Barbarians are generally the mightiest at start and inherit a lesser terrain penalty from their Heroes 1 brethren. So, in the world of speedruns, Knights are the most useless

Hey!

I decided to break my old world record on Broken Alliance while recording the gameplay.

I followed the community rules for doing the run. It is a very long run, 7 parts, 10-15 mins per part while part 7 being 40 minutes.

Result: The game ended on Week 3 Day 6, Edit: so it took me 20 days to complete the game. I completed the run using the demo version of the game.

Here is a video of my run:

part 1 of 7:



part 2 of 7:



part 3 of 7:



part 4 of 7:



part 5 of 7:



part 6 of 7:



part 7 of 7



Feedback is welcome.

Edit: added links to all of the parts

Hello again.

Broke my record, again. This time the game ended at week 3 day 2, meaning I completed the map in 16 days.

Again, I did this record in HoMM 2 demo version.

Here are the videos, 3 parts:

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:



No audio. I was very tired when doing this record and I wanted to listen to podcasts or some useless junk while playing, to help me reach my vision of the run.

Hey,

I just broke my old record, 16 days, on Broken Alliance. My new record is 13 days. This time I used full version of the game, so you can see the score of the run.

[quote="Orzie"]Yeah, usually the offline tournaments consider most of the game "flaws", prohibiting the "rehired hero" trick to prevent spell spamming and such. The hero chain, though, is considered a "feature" and is a necessary part of every speedrun./quote]

I just realized that I can refill my hero's movement speed by rehiring it (yes, I am that noob lol).

I was thinking if it was ok to use the following ruleset:
Edit: I edited the rules because it was against my original idea and had unintended consequences.
RULE: if you rehire a hero (this gets complex). So let's imagine your hero had 2 lives during this turn. first life is before it surrendered and went back to the list of heroes who are hirable (rehirable?). Second life is after you rehire it. You can only attack enemy heroes on 1 of these lives, not both. So if you attacked an enemy hero before it surrendered, you can't attack enemy hero on the same turn you rehired it. But if you did not fight any heroes on this hero before it surrendered (essentially it surrendered by fighting creeps), then when you rehire it, you're allowed to attack enemy heroes, because you did not attack enemy heroes on its' first life.

(other rule is that you can't dig the ultimate artifact unless you visited the obelisks).

I essentially have not done any rehiring on any of my records, not even to refill the movement points. This is because I never realized you can do this (until now). I already broke my 13 day Broken Alliance record, new record is 12 days (I'll put a link). Also on this 12 day record it's the same thing, i did not do any rehiring.



I think I can break this 12 day record and put it to 11 days without rehiring (will be very tough and maybe not even possible), but with rehiring and following the rules laid above, 11 days should be possible, and perhaps even 10 days is not impossible.

Edit: I will start a new record attempt on Broken Alliance (goal: 11 or 10 days), and I'll be using the rules I laid out on this post.

Found an answer to the question regarding rehiring:

"in Heroes II it's forbidden:

to dismiss and hire the same hero on the same day;
to move a hero after he has retreated/surrendered from battle on the day of his retreat/surrender. You may still hire such a hero;"

That is a bit of a conflicting rule. I'll interpret it as you can rehire the hero the same day, but you're not allowed to move it after rehiring. EDIT: oh now I get it. Dismissing and retreating/surrendering is a different thing. I get it now.

I managed to do the run in 10 days using tournament rules.