ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list)

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Giest118
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Giest118 »

I have a query about deaths, and the rank decrease resulting. Specifically it's about the powerups that fly from your obliterated corpse as you die.

Does re-collecting the powerups you drop on a death increase rank the same as if you'd picked up those same items from the ground?

I ask because this would add another dimension to why you'd want your suicides to be with few life stocks remaining. If you suicided with a maxed out stock, for example, re-collecting your powerups would pretty much cancel out the rank decrease from it.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Shepardus »

Yes. You'll notice, for example, that Kamui doesn't recollect her options when doing the multi-suicide at the start of stage 4 but instead collects options throughout the stage.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by CloudyMusic »

Does anybody happen to have any advice they can share about how to handle the Mad Balls' spiral twinbullet attack consistently? Sometimes it's trivial to dodge and other times I just get trapped, and it's hard to tell which it's going to be until I actually get into the pattern. I've experimented with my positioning when the attack starts (to the side of the boss, directly below the boss, directly below the boss but slightly off-center, etc) to see if there's some trick to make it cooperate consistently, but I can't really find anything that works 100% of the time.

It's the single biggest cause of failed runs for me right now, since even a single death neuters the amount of points I can get from them, due to my shrapnel damaging the inner parts prematurely.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Shepardus »

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You can macro-dodge the end of the attack by circling around clockwise ahead of the pattern when it spins around the second time, but for the rest I have no idea.
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Icarus
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Icarus »

There is no hard and fast way of dealing with it, as a lot is dependent on how DerpBall moves around. Generally though, once you get into a gap, you can tap towards the right to get through the rest of it.

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Once you bypass the first set, you can very quickly move up to the top-left corner to avoid the return set.

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For KappaBall2 though, the top-left corner safespot is only viable if your rank is around C9x,xxx or lower - the closer you are to BFx,xxx, the more likely you are to have to dodge through the attack twice.

Replay: https://youtu.be/74M7kxdjT5A?t=316
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by CloudyMusic »

Thanks! It's at least good to know that there's not some simple trick that I'm completely ignorant to. I do typically approach that attack by attempting to simply tap dodge through it to the right, and I know about macro-dodging the second part. Occasionally, though, I still hit some snags once in a while when there's no clear safe route to take once I'm in the middle of the pattern. I have some ideas for things to try to deal with those situations, though, so I'm going to do some savestate grinding tonight and see if I can improve my consistency.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Eaglet »

As Icarus says it's all pretty dependent on the positioning of Mr. Fuckball.
Watch out for when he heads down towards the bottom/middle of the screen and fires the spiral attack, especially if you're down in the right corner, where the bullets are usually the most dense.

Lots of practice is the only solution. You've got to get used to how the pattern works.
moozooh wrote:I think that approach won't get you far in Garegga.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Shepardus »

Do changes to rank affect the durability of enemies that have already spawned, or does it only affect enemies that spawn after the rank change? For example, if I die several times during a boss, will the boss have reduced HP from the rank decrease?
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by trap15 »

My guess is no. If it were so, then dying could drop the boss's HP below zero and kill it.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by CloudyMusic »

That's right, it doesn't. Buried in an old post on page 7:
Twiddle wrote:* While rank changes for enemy firepower and aggressiveness are effective immediately, enemy hitpoints are not. To explain:

-Spawn a few enemies [we'll call this enemy group 1]
-if you raise rank very sharply, [enemy group 1] will have more firepower but are still weak, armor-wise
-Dispatched [enemy group 1]
-The next wave, [enemy group 2] has increased hitpoints and firepower
-If you lower rank very sharply at this point, [enemy group 2] will have tamer firepower but the same increased hitpoints.
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Icarus
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Icarus »

Some fun safespot stuff in SDD-Kaede's Garegga stream this morning.

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Also, casual H.75 ALL.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by CloudyMusic »

Put together a clean version of the hitbox reference table.

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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by ProjectAKo »

You guys might want to update the basic game setup section of the guide because it's no longer accurate with how mame roms are grouped and it took me a good 30 minutes to get it sorted out.

First of all the romset is now bgaregga, and battleg and battlega don't seem to work at all anymore. You can't change the region anymore in the dipswitches menu either. Now you have to hit tab and go to the Game Configuration window and change the region to Japan from there. Then you have to reset, and finally you will be able to set the extends to 1000k.

You might want to mention the code to access all the ships as well. Even when I found the code somewhere, mysteriously, it didn't work. My mame config had some left over player 2 buttons on A and S. Basically you need to unset all these random buttons because player 2 button presses mess up the ship unlock code.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Eaglet »

Good work on the hitbox picture, Keres!
Definitely needs to be pinned to the OP.

Good to see you getting into this, AKo. I had the same issue with the unlock code when i started playing this way back and found the same solution you did.
moozooh wrote:I think that approach won't get you far in Garegga.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by ProjectAKo »

Well I wouldn't expect too much. I'm casually learning this game and aiming for a scrubby clear.

I'm not sure if this info has been posted before, but I did a little poking around in the rom of Garegga today. I didn't really find what I was looking for yet, but I did find out a lot about how rank affects enemy life. I found this out from analyzing the function at 00BB9C which actually sets the life value for newly spawned objects.

TLDR version
- It seems only the high byte of the rank value is used for stuff. Example: Rank starts at like 0xE4E1C0. Calculations only concern themselves with the E4.
- This probably means that rank changes only have an effect after the values changes by 65,535 in either direction.
- Life is based on rank, and a multiplier. Each enemy has a life multiplier buried in some data tables.
- Enemies have a base life value of 0x300, or 768. After division, it's basically enemy base life = 3
- Enemy life on spawn formula in hexadecimal: ( ( 0x300 - ( RANK HIGH BYTE * 2 ) ) * enemy's life multiplier) / 0x100 = enemy life value
- Enemy life on spawn formula in decimal: ( ( 768 - ( RANK HIGH BYTE * 2 ) ) * enemy's life multiplier) / 256 = enemy life value

So what I learned is that "rank" counts down instead of up because it's a measure of restraint. It subtracts from enemy's base strength, in this case the life. Rank = enemy restraint / pacification. Rather than track how aggressive the enemies are, they decided to track how passive they are.

More importantly here's the function which sets enemy life

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That's the whole function and really all there is to how enemy life is assigned. I haven't found them but other functions which use rank probably do similar calculations, namely subtracting the high byte of the rank value.

Example, the 10 jeeps at the start of stage 1

Base enemy life = 0x300
Rank in stage 1 = 0xE4 ( doubled it becomes 0x1C8 )
Life multiplier for the jeep = 0x2
( ( 0x300 - ( 0x1C8 ) ) * 0x2 ) / 0x100 = 0x2
The jeeps have 2 health.
It would take a huge shift in the rank value to change the health value of a jeep due to the small multiplier.

Example, The small round central turret of the stage 3 boss

Base enemy life = 0x300
Let's say rank at stage 3 boss = 0xC6
Life multiplier for the turret = 0x14
( ( 0x300 - ( 0x18C ) ) * 0x14 ) / 0x100 = 0x1D (29)
The turret has 29 health.
At stage 1 rank it would have 24 health. This multiplier is still pretty low.

Welp, back to practicing rather than somewhat pointless reverse engineering.

Oh yeah, I actually have a question. Anyone know exactly how I should do the flamingoes in stage 2 with Grasshopper? I'm really lucky to make it out of there with over 1m points. There's a lot of good videos for most of the ships but I didn't see one for Grasshopper. Same for Stage 2 boss actually. How should I maximize score when taking out madball? Grasshopper's bomb seems very unsuited to the task.

Edit: Fixed an error pointed out by Trap
Last edited by ProjectAKo on Sat Sep 12, 2015 12:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by CloudyMusic »

That's really interesting information, thanks for sharing, AKo. I've always been sort of curious about the actual mechanics of how the rank value influences enemy properties, but it's not the sort of thing that would really make a difference in how you play the game too much. It's just fun to learn more about how this game is put together.
ProjectAKo wrote:Oh yeah, I actually have a question. Anyone know exactly how I should do the flamingoes in stage 2 with Grasshopper? I'm really lucky to make it out of there with over 1m points. There's a lot of good videos for most of the ships but I didn't see one for Grasshopper. Same for Stage 2 boss actually. How should I maximize score when taking out madball? Grasshopper's bomb seems very unsuited to the task.
Here's a pretty good Grasshopper replay that might be helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uvQpcr17-I

EDIT: And here's another, from the first page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-NgQBrEv_8
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by trap15 »

Great find AKo, I'd been wondering about how that worked!
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by ProjectAKo »

Thanks. And thank you for that vid, I'm not sure how I didn't find that, probably because I wasn't searching for the subnames of the ships... It seems grasshopper just isn't great at farming those flamingoes since the bomb is channeled and only semi piercing, although he is consistently getting 200k higher than me by positioning farther back I guess.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by CloudyMusic »

Haha, yeah, it can be tricky to find stuff on YouTube sometimes, because things could be titled under several different potential names, per language even.

---------

Some concrete examples related to your findings:

For this first example, let's pretend we're talking about an enemy with an arbitrarily large amount of base health, like a large boss. (Let's pretend that the "enemy life multiplier" is 992.25, just to make the minimum-rank health value a nice round 1000.)

Minimum rank (0xFF0000): ((768 - 255*2) * mult) / 256 = ~1000 health
Maximum rank (0x200000): ((768 - 32*2) * mult) / 256 = ~2728.7 health

So, if spawned at maximum rank, such an enemy would have ~2.73x the amount of health that it would have at minimum rank. All rank values in between follow a linear slope (e.g., the halfway point, 0x8F8000, is ~1.86x health).

For very weak enemies, the accuracy of this ratio goes down a little bit, but it's still in the ballpark. Let's say that the "enemy life multiplier" is 2, such as those jeeps you mentioned:

Minimum rank (0xFF0000): ((768 - 255*2) * 2) / 256 = 2.02 -> 2 health
Maximum rank (0x200000): ((768 - 32*2) * 2) / 256 = 5.5 -> 5 health (2.5x)

And like you said, you need to raise the rank quite a bit to see any actual change in the actual health value of the enemy (in this case, C0xxxx would push this enemy up to 3 health).

Does that all seem right?
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by ProjectAKo »

The way most CPUs are doing bitwise math, it can get a bit weird... to divide very quickly it does a bitshift to the right, so the remainder is completely cut, and no rounding is done with bitshifts, so something like 5.9 would be cut to 5. But keeping that in mind yeah that's correct, in fact I just tested it by forcing my rank to be C0 as the game started, and the jeep now took exactly 3 bullets to kill instead of 2.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by trap15 »

I believe you made a mistake when you wrote 0xFF instead of 0x100 for the division.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Eaglet »

So recently I've been taking rank much more into account and what I've found is the absolute most important factor is keeping an AF rate that doesn't change frame rank up until Nose 2 approx..
If you use a ship that greatly benefits from higher AF for scoring purposes(Miyamoto for an example) try to raise the AF to where it doesn't effect frame rank too much and use as few options as possible during the stages.
AF changes made in stage 6 doesn't effect much at all unless you crank it way high. Routing your shot level is also important with ships that have a piercing main shot. Try to keep away from 2+ piercing shots except for milkable bosses and you'll have a much easier time in the later stages where you want to save your lives for the final bosses.
moozooh wrote:I think that approach won't get you far in Garegga.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Eaglet »

Also, to my knowledge Flying Baron is the only ship that has to wait all of the first 5 attack cycles of Mad Ball in order to score successfully (all parts destroyed correctly).
I think the Mad Ball frustration is greatly exaggerated with all of the other ships even though the game sometimes (I'd say 1 in about 25 runs) gives you shit RNG.
moozooh wrote:I think that approach won't get you far in Garegga.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by ProjectAKo »

Anyone ever get this random plane in stage 7 hanging out in the deadzone? It was pretty funny. I was sad when he timed out. http://www.twitch.tv/project_ako/v/22088774
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by Eaglet »

That has happened to me before, yes!
Have you seen the graphics glitches on the birds yet?
moozooh wrote:I think that approach won't get you far in Garegga.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by ProjectAKo »

Yeah. Ground textures color got quite messed up for some reason. I've had that game crash there as well. Thankfully I was just doing some savestate grinding there at the time so whatevs.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by MintyTheCat »

I have my monitor tate'd but the controls are now flipped 90 degs to the left too.

Can this be changed so that UP is UP etc?
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by CloudyMusic »

MintyTheCat wrote:I have my monitor tate'd but the controls are now flipped 90 degs to the left too.

Can this be changed so that UP is UP etc?
What version are you playing, and can you explain more? On Saturn, setting the screen mode to TATE (see the first page of this thread) should handle it automatically, I think. On MAME, I can't imagine why your controls would change.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by MintyTheCat »

Keres wrote:
MintyTheCat wrote:I have my monitor tate'd but the controls are now flipped 90 degs to the left too.

Can this be changed so that UP is UP etc?
What version are you playing, and can you explain more? On Saturn, setting the screen mode to TATE (see the first page of this thread) should handle it automatically, I think. On MAME, I can't imagine why your controls would change.
This is the Saturn version. The controls were rotated.
I shall have another look as I may well have made a mistake.

Edit:

Yes, I had selected the wrong option, it works fine now - cheers.
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Re: ST: Battle Garegga (20.7.14 - edits, record replays list

Post by horaceappleton »

I'm trying to experiment with the Saturn port's rapid option cycling control feature. Kamui mentions in her Special Demonstrations #8 commentary that she cycles all the way through her options every time she destroys a carrier in Cloud, but I can't figure out what use it has for her. Do we know the rationale for it?
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