RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

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pieslice
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RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by pieslice »

What are the pros and cons of each weapon?
Are there sections where certain weapon is dominant?

It seems a lot of enemies are bullet sponges and really like to go up close and personal on you, so what is the best weapon vs. the more durable enemies?

From what I've observed:
* Green seems to pierce smaller enemies, does this have the best DPS vs. larger foes?
* Blue does not seek to smaller enemies but will obliterate them; it also has great reach when fully powered up. But it seems to be less effective vs. larger enemies
* Red feels the most effective when you pitbull enemies

I know the Extend targets require specific weapon.
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mycophobia
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by mycophobia »

for the first half of the game, right up til the speed section in stage 3 you'll want to use a mix of red and green, but mostly red. Green is needed for the 1up in stage 1 and it's not bad for the midbosses right before that. Green will also obliterate those enemies that come down in horizontal rows that show up after the lightbulb section in stage 2, and so will blue, but green is good to have for the following midboss too. from the speed section in stage 3 forward the zako get pretty relentless so it's best to have level 2 or 3 blue from then on and just bomb bosses and tankier enemies as needed.

edit: i believe point blank red will do more damage than green, as long as we're talking about the same power level
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Flobeamer1922
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by Flobeamer1922 »

Green and blue also destroy those glass bulbs in stages 2 and 3 in one hit, whereas red doesn't.
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ShootTheCore
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by ShootTheCore »

I run Red most of the time since the spread gives it good crowd control, while still doing decent damage to bosses.

Green definitely knocks out bosses quickly though.
pieslice
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by pieslice »

Thanks for the info!

Played couple of runs yesterday and observed couple of thing:
* It seems red bullets lose DPS over range
* Game is actually very memorization heavy and methodical; the main threat being ramming to enemis
* You really need to have speed up and use all available screen space to herd bullets
* This game gives you a ton of bombs and looks like many waves are designed to crowd controlled by a bomb
* Speedkilling stronger enemies in space sections spawns nasty waves of small enemies
* Bosses are actually quite simple as they do not actively try to ram you etc. At least the 3 first bosses have just simple spread pattern and couple of turrets you can knock down with green shot quite easily.

What I've heard is that in most of the Toaplan games powering up adds actually mostly visual flavour to make player *feel* to be more powerful. Like with the red shot, DPS seems not to be directly relative to the # of bullets; like the first level 3-way weapon does a lot of more damage per shot than its powered up cousins.
XtraSmiley
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by XtraSmiley »

Interesting thread, thanks for posting.

I'm just now getting into this game for the firs time ever (posted my all time high score of 190k!)

Anyway,

That's interesting about the bullets losing DPS over distance. How were you able to measure this?

Also, do you guys recommend getting ALL the speed ups? I feel like the last one makes it riskier to play, or am I just not good enough yet? (if ever!)
pieslice
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by pieslice »

Use the speed level you are comfortable with. But at the max speed the excess speed up pickups will give nice boost to your score (5000 each). You get them aplenty at stage 3.

For the DPS loss over distance, it's just an observation; it seems that when point blanking with red, you need definitely less hits to take down tougher enemies. It is easily noticeable with the "train" things before st2 boss
XtraSmiley
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by XtraSmiley »

OK thanks, still haven't made it to stage 3!

Is point blanking mean like point blank shooting? Like right up on an enemy?

Also, what is the general consensus with using auto fire with this game? I tried about 50 games on manual, but man...

Turbo fire is waaaaaay easier, but also makes point blank firing kill the bigger enemies way easier, is this the way it was meant to be?
pieslice
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by pieslice »

Autofire is must; but you need to have it toggled somehow as blue weapon will not shoot if autofire is enabled.
Megadrive version has extra button mapped to full auto.
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6t8k
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by 6t8k »

I think the previous contributions make for a fine summary already. As for choice of weapon, my approach is essentially in accord with mycophobia's outline. Previously, I used blue for a while to deal with the 2. midboss and part of the following canyon in stage 1, but switched to red eventually, which seemed more natural (though the dance around the two ships was cool). The same applies to the barrel section before the stage 2 boss.

Also worth mentioning is the strategy to delay usage of Lv3 weapons until the beginning of stage 3 for the purpose of rank control. Otherwise the barrel section can get pretty unwieldy. For the longest time I had committed to a fixed route on the basis of Lv3 for that section. But that was somewhat inconsistent - Vludi's run during 1CC Marathon 2019 then brought me around to incorporate that rank management squiggle.
pieslice wrote:Like with the red shot, DPS seems not to be directly relative to the # of bullets; like the first level 3-way weapon does a lot of more damage per shot than its powered up cousins.
Interesting observation; I had suspected that for a while but didn't bother to investigate, so this reinforces the assumption.
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Sengoku Strider
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by Sengoku Strider »

pieslice wrote:Use the speed level you are comfortable with. But at the max speed the excess speed up pickups will give nice boost to your score (5000 each). You get them aplenty at stage 3.

For the DPS loss over distance, it's just an observation; it seems that when point blanking with red, you need definitely less hits to take down tougher enemies. It is easily noticeable with the "train" things before st2 boss
It isn't that the shots lose power over distance per se. It's a common thing in a lot of games that you can only have a certain number of bullets on screen at a time. This is especially noticeable with the auto fire, as it fires in bursts.

But if you're point blanking an enemy, your shots are disappearing as fast as they're coming out. In practice this has the effect of boosting your maximum rate of fire, as you never hit the bullets-on-screen or mandatory-gap-between bullets limits.

This goes all the way back to Space Invaders and Galaga, and eventually just became a convention that programmers stuck with to reward high-risk play.
SMC
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by SMC »

pieslice wrote: * Blue does not seek to smaller enemies but will obliterate them; it also has great reach when fully powered up. But it seems to be less effective vs. larger enemies
For what it's worth, larger enemies usually have different amounts of health with different weapons.

It always goes, red < green < blue.

This is what makes blue less useful in areas with lots of these large enemies.
This only comes into effect when an enemy appears so it's possible to wait for a strong enemy to appear before switching weapon, so that it gets less health than if you already had the weapon.
It also works in reverse so switching from blue to red just after a large enemy has appeared can be dangerous.

source: the game
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Angry Hina
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by Angry Hina »

Got a 1cc (and a 2-all in easy) in the MD version last year and sadly I would say, that you never really need the green one. Its a bit nicer to fight the first boss with it but the sections before and after are a bit easier with red so.... its better to stick with red most of the time. Blue is simply necessary for level 5. Enemies attack from the sides and start to shoot really soon. But its useful after the bomb rush section of level 3.

I don't think, that there are many moments where you should use bombs outside of level 5 for smaller enemies.
For my runs, I haven't used rank control. It was nor so important for me.

If you are interested in some strategies, here are my runs:
1cc normal: https://youtu.be/zLvZPOMQ2A0
2 All easy: https://youtu.be/6m0YCUVZj3I
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Sengoku Strider
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by Sengoku Strider »

SMC wrote: For what it's worth, larger enemies usually have different amounts of health with different weapons.

It always goes, red < green < blue.

This is what makes blue less useful in areas with lots of these large enemies.
Some enemies seem to react to it differently, too. At the beginning of stage 2, five disc-shaped enemies come on screen. If you hit them with blue, they'll kamikaze you (and the game trolls you by offering a blue pickup right before that). With a different weapon they'll stop in formation in the middle of the screen.
Angry Hina wrote:Got a 1cc (and a 2-all in easy) in the MD version last year and sadly I would say, that you never really need the green one. Its a bit nicer to fight the first boss with it but the sections before and after are a bit easier with red so.... its better to stick with red most of the time.
I like green for the first half of stage 2. Its narrow fire means you don't have to worry about shattering those glass tubes that fire at you if destroyed.
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Angry Hina
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Re: RQ: Truxton weapon effectiveness

Post by Angry Hina »

But they break instantly with green. I like it more, if you can hit them a few times by accident. for my rout I destroyed all of them on the left side and in the middle and dodge their explosions. Didn't need more precision ^^
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