ST: Full Extent of the Jam - Playing Shmups Competitively

[The Armchair General]

Hey Prometheus do you have a strategy for dodging the 2-6 boss's final pattern? If so what is it?

[PROMETHEUS]

I try to gain time of easy dodging by tapping upwards while staying in the center vertical line, you cant really get hit but as you go further up it gets more dangerous and at some point you need to start going down again, likely have to improvise dodges to get back to bottom at which point you can repeat. The twitch dodges you make are pretty hard and you can't predict how exactly because the aiming of the blue lines is randomized slightly. But if you manage to get back bottom center and the lines are not above you you can start again to go up very slowly and gain a few seconds of safety while damaging boss. Im not sure other players do the same, with this technique there is a high risk moment at the point where you reverse your movement from top to bottom, bit too close to the blue aiming turrets, I bombed often.

[Erppo]

I would never actually try to dodge it if I have bombs there, it's easily one of the riskiest things in the game. I've occasionally dodged it when forced to though with just staying low (not fully at the bottom edge but a little bit above) and just mainly going sideways. With bombs it's best to just go up in the middle until you're too close and forced to bomb.

[The Armchair General]

Ok, thanks for the advice

How many points would you say bombing that pattern loses?

[Erppo]

How many points would you say bombing that pattern loses?

None. There is no end bonus for bombs.

[PROMETHEUS]

you could say you only lose some probability % for end of stage no miss bonus or for an extra life remaining after hibachi
definitely recommended to bomb when the boss life is red to get 100 extra hits

[Gus]

While we're on the topic of Dodonpachi, what's the most realistic strat to beat 2-7 in 3 bombs that likely could have been used by WTN in his no miss of the game?

[Bananamatic]

1 or 2 bombs on the big bee, one or two bombs on the 2nd pattern of the 1st phase, somehow dodge the rest

[PROMETHEUS]

I think the big bee huuu maybe you don't need to bomb it if you can dodge the pink double spiral consistently and yeah 2nd pattern of 1st phase of fire bee likely would need 2 bombs for seeing it twice then maybe 1 more bomb for last pattern in case.. don't know though, would have to go to Ebicen and watch the record see what he did^^ there are quite a bunch of things at hibachi that change quite a bit in difficulty depending on randomization so maybe you don't want a fixed pattern for bombing, with some luck you can dodge that freaking 2nd pattern of fire bee too, some bad luck or whatever and you end up in a bad spot in some of the patterns..

[Aldnox]

Just wanted to say thanks for this guide. It has definitely helped me a lot. So yeah, thanks

[PROMETHEUS]

thanks you're welcome glad I helped :]

[Saikyoh]

I too want to thank you for making this guide. I'll make sure to take full advantage of it in my journey as a noob.

I also just want to ask you because I might know a couple of people who would find this alluring to make them check shmups out, do you prefer linking them to this thread or linking them straight to the guide?

[PROMETHEUS]

You're welcome, you can do as you prefer!

[The Armchair General]

How long did it take you to get your current best Doj BL score? Just curious.

[PROMETHEUS]

hey, about 300-350hours play time including practice + runs, had played some 50-100h of WL previously which helped me start and experience on DDP before without which I would never have made this fast I'm sure. In the end I was lucky to get this score on 14th attempt after the last practicing phase haha (few months ago I made about 140 new attempts and didn't beat it). I think these ~350hours were over two years but not sure

[Gnomepowered]

So I have just been getting back into shmups, which I have found help a lot with work stress and such- Bloodborne worked the same way for me, have to buckle down and focus and ignore the rest of the world. Very healthy!

That being said, does anyone have a suggestion for a more general/less game focused skills review? Guess I'm saying I need something even simpler. Maybe I'm just old and my reflexes are shot (although I'm not THAT old), but I've been having a hard time surviving, let alone scoring. I eventually settled on Mushihimesama Original for a while, since it seemed like scoring and survival were pretty similar there, but I haven't managed to 1CC novice yet, even. I have a lot of fun trying, but feel like I might be missing out on some pretty basic movement styles, etc. Even watching things like STGWeekly makes me feel like I'm in a little over my head, with references to techniques that everyone seems to be pretty familiar with, but I'm not sure the role of.

I've poked around a bit, but this was the most common suggestion for a starting point. Maybe I'm not starting from 0-- maybe I'm starting from -1? I might have some bad habits to break, or something.

Any suggestions would be helpful- I've loved SHMUPs since I was a kid in the arcade, would hate to think that now that I have the time and energy to put into them I might just be irredeemably sucky!

[okerlo]

Does anybody has a backup-link for the pdf? Thanks!

[PROMETHEUS]

Hey @okerlo for me the link works right now but here's another : http://www.mediafire.com/file/uyp9acn48 ... m.pdf/file

@Gnomepowered Have you looked into bullet herding?? This helps a lot if you don't know it yet

[okerlo]

Oh, maybe it was my browser with its countless addons, on another browser it worked for me as well
Thank you very much!

[Queen Charlene]

Hey @okerlo for me the link works right now but here's another : http://www.mediafire.com/file/uyp9acn48 ... m.pdf/file

i would like to archive this guide on my webspace and refer to it in my shmup wiki that i'm developing. would you be okay with me uploading and hosting your guide on my webspace?

[PROMETHEUS]

Hey @okerlo for me the link works right now but here's another : http://www.mediafire.com/file/uyp9acn48 ... m.pdf/file

i would like to archive this guide on my webspace and refer to it in my shmup wiki that i'm developing. would you be okay with me uploading and hosting your guide on my webspace? :D

Yes for sure no problem nice!!

[samspot]

Thank you so much for making this guide and answer questions.

How do you decide when you have practiced a stage enough? Do you look for a certain % consistency? When do you know that you need to go back to practice again? I have these stupid deaths that make me wonder if I need to go back to stage practice or just take it in stride and keep making attempts.

[marus]

For me personally, if I notice I'm messing up often at the same section, I'll go back and practice that part some more until I get more consistent at it. A general tip that helps me is: anytime after a failed run, I'll take a mental note on what parts I messed up or died on. That helps me a) focus on not making the same mistake again the next run, and b) gives me a mental tally of what parts I'm messing up on. After repeating this process for a while, I'll have a good idea if there's specific problem sections that I need to work on.

The flipside is, no matter how much you practice, you're always going to have stupid deaths sometimes. That, and some challenges are going to be harder than others - for example, going for a really optimal score is going to be harder than just a typical 1CC. If you're aiming for a goal that's more difficult than what you've done before, you just have to accept that you're going to mess up a lot along the way lol. The most important thing in that case is staying motivated and not getting upset. This video has some additional good tips on getting better at shmups, particularly the last section which talks about how to maintain a positive attitude, focusing on the small victories as you shoot for the big 1CC/score, when to take breaks, ect.

[samspot]

Right on, i will start taking those kinds of notes. I’ll check out the video too. Thanks!

[PROMETHEUS]

Thank you so much for making this guide and answer questions.

How do you decide when you have practiced a stage enough? Do you look for a certain % consistency? When do you know that you need to go back to practice again? I have these stupid deaths that make me wonder if I need to go back to stage practice or just take it in stride and keep making attempts.

Absolutely I would advise having general awareness what your consistency is (success rate % per stage) and you can easily calculate what your chance of success is on an attempt by multiplying your success rate % stage per stage. If not you could kind of trap yourself making attempts struggling to reach your target which has certainly happened to me and then I definitely had to go back to stage practice after burning myself out a bit at attempts even :D Maybe your game has 12 stages, your possible success rate might be quite low even if you can do a lot of things very nicely half the time.. because they multiply, so it quickly gets like 0.5*0.5*0.25*0.33*0.6 = barely over 1% already.

[samspot]

Thanks for spelling that out. I'm really glad I stopped to calculate, as I actually had a zero percent chance of making my goal based on my last ten runs!

For Mushihimesama Arrange, I need to clear the TLB in 6 lives. I figured out the bare minimum performance I need is to No-miss the first three stages, then lose one life each in 4 & 5. Even with 4 lives left my TLB percentage is only 20%. And I am losing only one life in Stage 5 zero percent of the time.

My last ten runs calculation: 1 * 1 * 0.2 * 0.3 * 0 * 0.2. I thought I was close because I can do it in 8 lives sometimes, but it would actually be a complete miracle to do it based on my recent performance. I fiddled with some numbers and found that to get a 5% chance I need this sort of performance:

1 * 1 * 0.8 *0.4 *0.4 * 0.4 = 0.05 ⇒ 5% Chance

So if i'm really serious about this I need to stop doing full runs for a while and go back to practice in Stages 3, 4, and 5, as well as the TLB. And I thought I just needed to work on Stage 5 and the TLB. While 5% is still pretty low, it seems good enough to do attempts. And If I can get to 40% on Stage 5 and TLB I will have improved a lot compared to now. Hopefully by the time I get this done Maniac will be a cinch

[PROMETHEUS]

Yeah you got it. I think it's normal to need more practice on earlier stages, in these cave games the details are hard to master and there is always some amount of variations that you need to react to, and then account for your inaccuracies. Doing perfect on the first stages is already pretty hard, let alone consistently. But if you manage to get to a ~5% overall success rate, I would say that is a high success rate as you'd expect it might take you only about 20 runs to succeed which isn't a lot I think. I'd say it's a good target if you don't want to struggle in the attempts.