RQ: Does ANYONE understand Sengeki Striker's scoring system?

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Zelikazi
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RQ: Does ANYONE understand Sengeki Striker's scoring system?

Post by Zelikazi »

See title!
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DEL
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SSScoring

Post by DEL »

I'm afraid I don't understand it either. People have mentioned before, that sometimes you can leave Stage 1 with a massive score and never know how it was gained.
Perhaps Bloodflowers has an idea?

I just play Sengeki Striker for fun and distance. Its one of my favourites & a tad hard to 1CC :wink: .
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system11
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Post by system11 »

I'm afraid not - I never worked it out either. Rumour has it causing big enemies to crash onto small tanks is involved.

I also never worked out how to reliably trigger the green train in Cyvern.
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Ed Oscuro
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Post by Ed Oscuro »

babump

I've been spending some time with this one, as far as I can make it out here's some scoring elements:

- Yes, bringing flying enemies down on top of ground based enemies is a part of it. The flying enemies can be small, like the yellow ones near the beginning of the game that fly into the screen from the right, over a line of tanks. You can also crash the third wave of planes (coming from the left) onto the tanks to the left, earlier still.

- Using the secondary weapon (by letting go of the fire button for a moment after charging it by continually pressing fire) seems also to be critical to good scoring, though it doesn't seem to work reliably for me. Anyway, I've noticed that very often bringing down the big flying enemies will show a number above them in red - if you did badly that number (for the big enemies at the beginning of stage one) might be in the 300K+ range, but if you do better it'll be more like 780K or even 991,240. I've tried to determine if your position relative to the flying enemy makes any difference, or how long they've been onscreen, but they don't seem to.

- And if you get more points from bringing down an enemy, that also seems to be tied to the amount you get from the crashed-into ground enemies. For the tanks, I've seen it go from the usual 96,000 to 192,000 points.

- The final real important note: There is at least one major scoring possibility in Stage 1, where the tank miniboss can give a big bonus when destroyed. A sound plays at the same time so I wonder if this isn't related to picking up a powerup or something. A couple possibilities for the tank miniboss score are: 2,606,200, 28,947,840, or 48,169,600 points. Obviously this makes a huge difference to your stage score!

- Other odds and ends: Picking up extra secondary Vulcan / Laser items of the same type as yours when you have four gives you 50,000 points, as does picking up powerups when at max power. Not a big deal but every bit helps.

- This game seems to have Raiden syndrome, where shooting the same enemy even with normal shot may give different amounts of points. See the very beginning of the game - it may be the case that shrapnel hits that ground enemy that spawns the first Vulcan / Laser item, though.

None of this is guaranteed to be true but it's a starting point.

Edit: How about that, should've seen this post too. Still no explanation for the multiple "levels" of kills, though I have been wondering if it's related to the percentage of damage done by the secondary weapon.

Basically, with Sengeki Striker, you sit your butt to the side and ride out all the shot patterns you can, instead of point blanking. And the better I do, the worse I score...

Edit #2: Also forgot to mention the little "20" and "10" (seems rarer) marks...an insignificant number of points, but I see it from time to time.
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Re: RQ: Does ANYONE understand Sengeki Striker's scoring system?

Post by mjclark »

I love the way that there are still so many unknowns in the scoring systems, making room for research and discovery by anyone who plays the game.
As when i was looking for records of the original Hudson Caravan high-scores, I naively imagined that this kind of information would be easily accessible but even after emailing Hudson I'd got nowhere and this forum was the only place to get any pointers.
Presumably the team at Warashi who developed Sengeki Striker could provide scoring mechanics information if anyone could identify, contact and understand them and they could be bothered to reply.
I'd love to see a shmups Research thread listing the unknowns for various shmups (I remember no-one has ever worked out what the "Junk Bonus" is for in Flame Zapper Kotsujin, nor what triggers the blue pancake in Final Soldier) where people could have some fun researching mechanics and submit their discoveries. A shmups mechanics wiki might be interesting too. Like discovering new species of butterfly in the rain forests, it's nice to know that there's still plenty to find out :D
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Re: RQ: Does ANYONE understand Sengeki Striker's scoring sys

Post by Kyper »

Guess I'll just summarize/document stuff (re)discovered during TRP-STGT for future reference:

Here are a few basics to know: first, killing larger enemies with your option attack (Laser/Valcan) will grant you 2x the score and the font used to display the points gained will be bigger and flashing. Second, enemies that are on the ground will grant more points if you can kill an airborne enemy and have it land on the ground enemy (don't know what the multiplier is if there is one, but the point increase is huge). Combine these 2 things together for a crapton of points! Note that the enemy can be of any size that you drop onto the ground enemy, as long as you kill it with your options then the 2x bonus will apply.

The Laser option is pretty much required to use, as you can control what the lasers hit and they do more damage than the Valcans.

This sounds like a pain to plan out your route, but there are basically 3 key spots that give you a bunch of points:
- Stage 1 "miniboss" tank: drop a plane on it and you'll get roughly 125m points
- Stage 2 5 red ground planes: drop planes on these, each worth 25m
- Stage 5 Boss bonus: it starts off with 200m, aim to finish it off around the 160m mark

The stage 1 tank can be destroyed for around 125m, giving you both life extends in one shot. To pull this off, you'll need to keep a large blue plane alive that appears shortly before the tank. It shows up on the right a little after a diagonal bridge. I don't know the best way to approach this, but my personal route is to sweep across the screen from left to right and right to left while firing a Laser blast, killing any small enemies and hitting the plane briefly as I pass it by. Once the tank comes, all it takes is a final 3rd Laser burst to drop it. Unfortunately, the tank can have a mind of its own at times. I find the most success in killing the plane right as it passes by the tank's bottom X-axis line.

Stage 2 has 5 large red planes on the ground. The last plane isn't too hard, but the group of 4 planes before it are kinda tricky to get safely. Fortunately, when you arrive here you should have the maximum stock of 5 bombs. Consider planning out a route that lets you expend bombs to get these bonuses, or at least until you find a way to get them consistently and safely.

The first red plane can be destroyed by using your Lasers to destroy the wave of planes that come from the top. Be careful that your left options don't destroy the red plane itself; it should be fine if you only have one option hitting it while the others take out the smaller planes.

For the 2nd plane right after that, I find that using the large blue plane that flies in from the left works well enough. Don't kill it too fast though, wait for it to slow down near the red plane before dropping it.

The 3rd plane appears with a large brown plane hovering close to it. Try moving all the way to the left and firing a Laser blast. This'll put you in a really bad position against the enemies that appear from the right though, so you'll probably need a bomb to bail you out of trouble.

The 4th plane can also be destroyed in a similar manner to the 2nd, with the large blue plane from the left. However, there's also a bunch of planes that fly in from the right side. If you fire a Laser to the right of the red plane while the blue plane is in front of the red plane to block your left options, you might be able to get a small plane destroyed off-screen to drop on it. Consider falling back on the latter method if the blue plane doesn't work.

The 5th plane also has a large blue plane for you to drop on it. Destroy the smaller enemies to keep you safe while it flies into position.

And the final boss, simply go for a speed kill, using your bombs and overlapping it to do as much damage as possible. You'll want at least 3 bombs when you arrive at the final boss. The tricky part is trying to kill the boss with your options...


Some miscellany stuff:
- on the 2nd loop your options will never die, this definitely helps to block bullets and you don't have to make risky grabs for option powerups anymore
- there seems to be an infinite scoring trick or some bug (Gemant's scores compilation notes "this game hasn't an official WR because a score concept bug is detected during the game"), the best I could find is on stage 5-1, you can hit the very top of the ship infinitely as it scrolls into the screen (the part you're supposed to attack after destroying all the turrets), however the points gained is very small
- Jaimers' 2-ALL from TRP-STGT 2014, 1.1 billion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdUGxq-xV8
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Re: RQ: Does ANYONE understand Sengeki Striker's scoring sys

Post by trap15 »

I believe the multiplier for dropping aerial enemies onto a ground enemy is 32x.
@trap0xf | daifukkat.su/blog | scores | FIRE LANCER
<S.Yagawa> I like the challenge of "doing the impossible" with older hardware, and pushing it as far as it can go.
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