Thinking Through Encounters

[baja blast rd.]

I thought it would be cool to play some encounters and go through the thought process that led to an approach.

 

I am playing Haste a bunch lately, so I'll probably start with some encounters from that. 

 

My goal is to find approaches to fights that are much better than whatever my natural near-FDA outcomes would be. So if it's an easy fight to simply survive in a first-time play but still hectic and dangerous-feeling, I want it to be basically free. If It's a hard (but not super hard) fight that might kill me a few times before I get my first survival, I want to beat it 80%+, or even 95%+, of the time. If it's something very cursed, like the hardest parts of Dimensions or Okuplok, I'll take figuring out how to survive it at all sometimes. :P

Also an important note is that even the most difficult, restrictive encounters tend to have many approaches that work -- so whatever I write about is not the Right Approach to the fight. No such concept exists (or if it does, it is very rare). 

 

 

This fight from Haste map06 is not difficult to survive, but natural approaches vary a lot in cleanup outcomes (such as having to deal with the cyb awkwardly at the end) so I wanted to minimize that.

 

We have a cybie mostly confined to the lower nukage area, some HKs, pinkies, and revenants. Usually the first big question I like to ask is not "what do I kill first?" (I feel this is a very limited question) but instead "what enemy interactions can I take advantage of? or "where do I want crucial enemies to be?" So the pairing of cybie and HKs is indicated because of infighting.

 

 

What happens is that the HKs easily leak out the back of this area, though, preventing said infighting (red in the above picture). The way to prevent that is to hang around the opening of the room doing basically nothing in order to lure the HKs that way (green). This seems partly counterintuitive because the pinkies and revenants are flooding the room and we're doing nothing to counteract that. But those enemies look a lot scarier than they are, and we can BFG spam them down quickly. It is valuable to be able to identify the true threat levels of enemies and call fights on their bs so to speak. 

 

What happens after that is the cyb will probably win infighting against the HKs by a lot, so it's more convenient and elegant to take advantage of the infighting to sneak in a point-blank BFG shot, a little detour before we get rid of the other pinkies and revenants. 

 

With all of that, this encounter is smooth and cake.

[baja blast rd.]

The start of Haste m15 done quickly (first two areas combined) is by far the hardest part of the map. It's not very hard to just survive, but it is very difficult to do in a way that feels you have control over what's going on. Half the time I survive it has felt like I'm just reacting to a completely novel configuration of enemies and it just works out, but I'm getting the hang of it. 

 

While you do have some objectives you want to accomplish in a sequence, enemy behavior is so random that strategizing is more like coming up with a gameplan of stuff you can do given specific cues. 

 

Main ideas here: 

 

- I want to get to the first switch intact

 

Waking up everything with an immediate pistol shot is a must because the mass paths closer to where I want it to be. 

 

Clearing out the arachs is important here, but as I am writing this, I'm thinking it might be very handy to fire just two rockets at some of them, because a low-HP arachnotron wandering around eats up space that might be used by the other enemies and lets you target it as a fail safe in case you get cornered. 

 

- I want to get that huge pile of revenants to infight with cybs -- both the two roaming cybs and the turret cyb

 

It can be tempting to simply rule out something as bad without consideration (like standing in damaging lava), but this shows why it is so useful to understand whether sources of danger are truly dangerous or not. By standing in the lava you get the turret cyb to see you and shoot at you, hitting a lot of the revenants, which is more than worth the trade-off.

 

 

- I want to get the BFG+cells and megasphere 

 

This goes well in the video I post but I often lose half the mega here. Losing half your mega seems bad but at this point of the fight, if you get the BFG and cells, you're in the clear completely, and the rest of the map is easy enough you don't need to hoard it. Resource management is funny sometimes in that there are some setups where you want to desperately cling to a medkit, and some where half a mega isn't all that important -- in the same map!

 

Here's a video (bonus early face-rocket because it captures the idea that just about every time I die here it's quickly and brutally :>).

 

 

Doing this fight well requires being able to "read" infighting and cyb behavior very well. So I'm not sure how I would recommend a beginner do it cleanly. It's kinda poetic that I get the cyb firing rockets in the air that might hit a wall and splash me, which is the first time that ever happened.

[baja blast rd.]

This area of Fractured Worlds map05 is low-key brutal but I got the hang of it. 

 

 

The area has two phases, which both have subtleties that make them very difficult.

 

The first phase pits you against bleachers of revenants on one side with a big influx of HKs roaming on the ground. This phase is difficult because the HKs will just completely eat up all available space, making it very easy to get destroyed by the revenant missiles, and there's no real obvious safe spot from the HKs. The video doesn't show up but those revenants are a nightmare and will easily create nuke missiles that take you from 200h to 0 in an instant. 

 

In the second phase, four archviles and a meatshield of four barons show up next to the bleachers of revenants. This is tricky because they just completely undo all your work killing the revenants and, despite all the rockets provided, it's shockingly easy to run completely out of ammo if the archviles don't make themselves visible.

 

So let's think about some natural first forays into getting the hang of this all and making it manageable. 

 

The pit in the center seems like an obvious ideal location for the HKs because they can't path back out of it easily. But what happens is you need to maximize rocket splash damage so targeting the Hks that roam on the left and right but leaving the ones in the pit alive is not very efficient. It also difficult to specifically lure the HKs into the pit since you have to attend to rev missiles.

 

 

Since we have revenants involved, though, what we can do is use the "safe melee range" to neutralize some of their danger (green line highlighted above). I'm mostly targeting the mass of HKs but I sometimes need to take down a straggler HK too. If there's a straggler HK close to me, I assume it is a bit softened up and fire just two rockets at it. Small detail but it matters a lot for comfort.

 

The archviles rez all the revenants, so leave them alive? This fails badly too because the revenants now are healthy and work as an even bigger group of meatshields. This is why it's so important to be able to consider "intermediate states": instead of doing all of A, or doing all of B, you can mix them! Intermediate states can be very worthwhile but are sometimes counterintuitive, even among good players. For example in the SWTW BFG bullshit fight, almost no one considered killing exactly one cyberdemon out of the four, even if you can afford to use cells here if you're not going for a record time.

 

So we soften up the revenants, but try to avoid killing all of them (the ones furthest away from the left are okay because the viles won't path there). In a perfect world it would be possible to magically damage all the revenants so that they have 100HP left, which is the sort of logic that led to "soften them up but don't kill them all."

 

Another small but important detail is that we want to tank the hurtfloor damage to grab those 15 central rockets before the fight, not during it, so we pick those rockets up first. 

 

Also kudos to Nirvana for making a fight where hitting the three switches in those very awkward cubbies is part of the encounter difficulty and actually kind of fun. :P

 

 

[baja blast rd.]

WH liking a post reminded me of a 180mpv fight I didn't really understand when I played the wad. 

 

But finding a clean solution is a good example of 'working backwards'. 

 

 

So the main bit of info to realize is that the cybie and the two heresiarchs -- which are big, boss-tier enemies that projectile spam and have an enormous cyb-like health pool -- are nearly always going to survive the main battle (excepting some weird fluke). The combination of these three is also pretty tricky in this area. So what we really want to do is get one heresiarch to infight with the cyb. 

 

What it also helps to know is that fighting a single heresiarch is not overwhelmingly difficult if you have plenty of space, since you can side-step the projectile spam (they are not afrits thankfully). It's not trivial either so it's still engaging. 

 

Our plan for the whole lead-up to this phase is informed by getting to that end state in a tidy way. 

 

To many people it would feel natural to take out the pinkies first because they eat up lots of space, right? This is often what "target prioritization" would say, but one reason I feel it's a bad abstraction for difficult fights is that difficult fights are more oriented around steering fights towards specific ends. So there is no sense where any use of it, whether that is "kill pinkies because they eat up lots of space" or "kill chaingunners because they are hitscanners" or "kill revenant because they are dangerous" or "kill archviles because they are archviles," produces a helpful answer if you don't have a good sense of what you should be trying to accomplish and why. At best, you'll luck into a good approach without understanding it. At worst, you'll get sidetracked by something silly (like focusing down the pinkies or viles, which is pretty bad here, or chaingunners, which is useless). And when you have a good sense of what you're trying to accomplish, it's not an abstraction you need at all. 

 

So the rest falls into play pretty smoothly around our primary goal:

 

- Pinkies are a very handy meatshield against the heresiarchs so we leave those alone. Killing these early will lead to: the heresiarchs entering the main area faster; maybe infighting with some revs; then turning back at you in some unpredictable way. Worst-case you're pushed back into the tunnel by one who corners you in there. It's just a mess. 

 

- The revenants are dangerous but knowing we want to kill them is not enough. What we need is a loose scheme to get rid of these effectively. And that will involve concentrating rocket splash on wherever the mass is instead of getting sidetracked by stragglers.  

 

- The chaingunners just get killed, so we can ignore them.

 

- The archviles are valuable to take out but it's important to recognize that we don't need to sell out on doing that ASAP, because the heresiarchs are lumbering and slow. Having one archie alive along with them is okay. 

 

The way to reliably get the cyb to hit a heresiarch is important too. We want to hide behind one pillar in sight of the cyb and out of sight of the heresiarchs. When the cyb fires, we want to move and get the third rocket to hit one of the pair. Splash will often hit instead. 

 

A fun detail about this encounter is that you come back to this area later, so you can leave with the cyb and heresiarch still infighting. The cyb will nearly always win due to the turret it's on eating up a lot of the heresiarch's attacks. You'll hear the heresiarch get killed a couple minutes later while you're in an unrelated area, which is funny. 

[baja blast rd.]

I have beaten this encounter in Fractured Worlds m05 many times over the past few days at a reasonably high rate -- and not a single time of those have I felt in control of it. It's almost funny. Something always gets hairy. 

 

First attempt during this latest playthrough, from a few days ago.

 

 

And here's a sample run where I have more of a strat, but still, uh. 

 

 

So that means my understanding of the fight is not good enough. Don't get me wrong, mostly improvising through a fight like this is pretty fun. But I'm really curious about something that would feel much safer. So I'm going to come back and figure that out. 

 

As an aside, a lot of people ask for "beginner slaughtermaps to help improve" and more and more I feel like the answer is to just play anything, even a random slaughtermap in a community project or Speed of Doom or BTSX. But redo fights. You take 20 cracks at a hard, fun fight. Finally get through on attempt 21. Move on to the next fight. No, now figure out how to beat it >50% of the time. Or >80%. Or throw down an extra save and do that later. That will help more than simply playing through 5-6 maps. 

 

The Skill Improvement List thread seems like it's conveying a false idea that you're meant to improve by playing lots and lots of wads and sinking in lots of hours. But you can improve quite a bit from one or two wads by actually getting a lot out of them instead of just beating every fight once and moving on exclusively (I do that with most fights tbh but I always try to truly understand some of them). Also feel this explains why speedrunners and challenge maxers improve so quickly. It's not that those models of play (no-saving in particular) are required. It's that playing that way sneakily forces you to get lots of reps without it feeling like "practice." It's kinda like how if you love a sport and do it hours a week (which is a good analogy for why certain people gravitate towards Hard Wads -- not "masochism" lol), you're probably going to be in decent shape and won't ever have to push yourself to go to the gym. Playing lots of wads and moving after one victory is the equivalent of reading a math textbook front to back like a novel and not doing the exercises. It'll help, but nowhere near as much as doing even one exercise a day and reading what you need to read to understand it. 

[baja blast rd.]

Okay this didn't take too long to figure out. It still looks visually chaotic but I knew what everything was doing. I still have wayward cyber rocket potential, but the important part is I know exactly where those rockets can and will come from so I won't be surprised by them. 

 

 

One thing I tried before is doing a U-maneuver around the entire perimeter, not constant motion but going from one safe spot to another -- but this doesn't work safely because the big mass of cybs intercepts your circuit so well. But it turns out you can just use half of the arena for this. You also let the other half infight while clearing up your own half with BFG -- especially those cybers on your side, which need to go sooner than later (you can let them infight a bit). Later on, when the fight has cleared up a lot more, I switch to using the full arena. There's one sort-of-hiding-spot that is really useful on the north side (the site opposite of the one I start on). 

 

One important detail about this approach is that you have to be willing to use BFG shots inefficiently. 

 

This comes up a lot. One way to make encounters much tougher for yourself is to apply constraints that don't really exist. Like "You have to hit your shots" or "You have to avoid taking damage" or "You have to kill the archviles first" or whatever else. This is why I disagree sassily when people give "good play tips" that insist dogmatically on switching from SSG to SG to kill lone imps, or avoiding the RL on pain elementals -- that type of thing. That type of robotic "if X, do Y" thinking is the same thinking that leads to being duped by all the fake constraints that come up. Using ammo hyper-efficiently or avoiding all damage isn't even necessarily "clean" play. Sometimes it's more like Goodharted play that fixates on one metric (ammo-efficiency or damage evasion) that might be irrelevant to surviving consistently or comfortably.

 

Anyway, it might seem surprising that, in an encounter with so many 4000HP cybs tromping around, we don't need to save ammo for them, but the main idea is that they going to be very weak from infighting by the end. We also should have lots of shells and rockets to finish any off that don't die to BFG.

[baja blast rd.]

Got curious about what a consistent strategy looks like in Fractured Worlds m32's first fight. 

 

 

- You get a free pre-fired rocket against a vile. (Noticed this in a Vytaan video.)

 

- You can kill the elusive AVs reliably if you always aim along a 45-degree diagonal, which maximizes the sizes of hitboxes involved.

 

- Doing a little context switch where you run out of the room immediately while firing rockets at one vile, and get some infighting going outside, before coming back to take out the remaining vile(s), seems like a good start.

 

- The real big thing seems to be learning how to navigate getting back out of the two-vile room safely. There are different things that can happen based on how the cybs behave, and you ideally want a game plan for all of them.

 

But the mainline case appears to be a cyber not immediately wandering into the room, which lets you lure the goats over and then slip past the goats. 

 

If a cyber walks into the room immediately, maybe you just take it out right then and there. You don't need all four of the quarter-health cybs for infighting. 

 

- Bonus: you can leave the cybs alive to help with the three vulture archviles if you're fast enough. That saves a lot of ammo. :^)

 

No real reason to do this though if you're going for pure survival. (You don't have to hit the switch actually but I was winging that part.) 

 

Wrapping it up: 

 

I think I can do this 50%+ now, and maybe higher with more practice / some Git Gud. This is one of those setups that isn't hard in regular "beat the fight once and move on" casual play because you can easily luck into beating it once in low single-digit attempts, but it seems to have a lot going for it that opposes real consistency and might have a very high skill ceiling.  

[baja blast rd.]

Was thinking about the last encounter in Fractured Worlds map32, which felt very uncomfortable to play at first. 

 

This encounter poses these major issues:

 

- You get no health whatsoever apart from the megasphere you take in. 

 

Take too much damage early and you're done.
 
- There are a bunch of archviles teleporting into the middle.

 

These can add up really quickly and seem to pin you on the outer ring, where...

 

- Four cyberdemons spawn in at seemingly untelegraphed times, so you can get bonked if you happen to be standing close.

 

This is the part of the setup that made me really queasy, like you mean, I can just die if I happen to be standing in the wrong spot. And that's what it felt like. 

 

But some other ideas that aren't necessarily obvious turn out to be: 

 

- This is a BFG spam fight, so just kill everything.

 

It's not obvious at first that this is a pure BFG spam fight because a lot of the ammo is double-stacked (and in one weird case, triple-stacked) making it hard to count, but you don't have to let the cybs help with infighting. Actually you want to just kill those as soon as you reasonably can. 

 

One good side effect of killing all the enemies in the center ASAP is that it clears up lots of space for the cyberdemons to path into the center.

 

- You don't need to hide from any viles at all, really.

 

They are too busy resurrecting enemies, and as long as they don't have meatwalls in front of them you should be safe. 

 

- The four main cyberdemons only show up at two of the room's outer ring spawn points, at the northeast and southwest, so just avoid those corners. 

 

This is the big one that helped. They only spawn in here.
 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

So with beating the fight, I try to maintain a half-speed loop in the inner circle and have my tracers do useful damage. You can tank plenty of damage, as long as it's not the sort that kills you. 

 

Another meta idea I've talked about before is that "mobility as defense" is a potentially harmful idea, especially if the takeaway is that you should be sprinting/SR40ing all over the place all the time, which is one natural thing that people who aren't experienced with these wads do that can sometimes make hard encounters unwinnable (or luck-based). You'd be surprised how many encounters it's ideal to move relatively slowly in. 

[Not Jabba]

31 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

Another meta idea I've talked about before is that "mobility as defense" is a potentially harmful idea, especially if the takeaway is that you should be sprinting/SR40ing all over the place all the time, which is one natural thing that people who aren't experienced with these wads do that can sometimes make hard encounters unwinnable (or luck-based). You'd be surprised how many encounters it's ideal to move relatively slowly in. 

This makes me wonder if there's a combat/gameplay style that could be based entirely on Doomguy's walking speed, with running disabled or disallowed -- or if you were working with GZDoom and you could alter the player's running speed to like 70% or 80% or whatever specific number and design a fluid, graceful combat style around that.

Edited September 23, 2023 by Not Jabba

[Jacek Bourne]

16 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

This makes me wonder if there's a combat/gameplay style that could be based entirely on Doomguy's walking speed, with running disabled or disallowed -- or if you were working with GZDoom and you could alter the player's running speed to like 70% or 80% or whatever specific number and design a fluid, graceful combat style around that.

 

Is it possible to disable running using dehacked or mbf21?

[Lucius Wooding]

2 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

- You don't need to hide from any viles at all, really.

 

They are too busy resurrecting enemies, and as long as they don't have meatwalls in front of them you should be safe. 

 

I was watching Vytaan's run of this fight when it came out and I noticed his approach on this fight seemed pretty flawed to me at the time. (I love his content in general, clearly he was having an off day and it's generally a hard looking map) He mostly focused on killing the imps first and trying to circle strafe the outside using cover, completely ignoring the HKs. In many fights this would probably be appropriate but this setup is interesting in how it sort of punishes that strategy. Since I'm too incompetent to actually play this I'm glad your strategy somewhat validated my thoughts.

 

-Killing stuff faster is smart here; you don't draw out the fight by trying to save your health by using cover, and you clearly spam a lot more. It seemed to me you got archies a bit sooner and didn't really have to deal with both archies and cybers together. His room, especially the center, seemed a lot more full by the time archies spawned as a result. Plus as you mentioned, dead HKs littering the center are highly preferable to live ones for both meatshielding and distracting reasons. Every resurrection will buy you multiple seconds of safety and there's a major premium on avoiding zaps here. You also tended to have much easier clean shots on them without needing to press too much and risk death to get to them (because the HKs were mostly dead).

 

-If you're circlestrafing the outside, you're pretty much stuck doing that in order to keep the ball of unkilled enemies in place. They'll move faster since they don't attack when you're out of sight behind pillars. This means if you slow down or change direction (and sometimes you may have no choice, like a cyber in your way), then the ball will collapse onto you and you'll get flanked (or simply catch projectiles). This kept happening to him whenever he tried to get a juicy BFG or track down an archvile and cost him piles of health. The archviles also tend to punish circling since your cover needs to line up perfectly with them if they're centered. If you stop to avoid a zap, you'll get overwhelmed in short order, yet if you take more than 1 zap or so you probably won't live. If an archie reaches the outside, then you're even more screwed.

 

-Between needing to keep moving rapidly and the geometry eating up his tracers, it became a lot harder to employ efficient BFG usage when it's most needed. I think you have to go a lot faster from the perimeter than from the center to accomplish the same goal, while still being very careful about archvile attacks. As you can see it's quite a bit to juggle and bad RNG can hurt you in that strategy. At best it requires very good execution to pull off compared to the Baja strat.

 

-Revenants and Hell Knights actually infight a little in your example. Not much but it's very difficult for it to happen on the outside. You really don't get any monster types mixing and no long sightlines in the outer perimeter method. And if you do, there will be 2 monsters blocking your circle for some time.

 

Anyway I'm certainly impressed with the WAD and some of the fights in it so far from a design standpoint. Even if the maps weren't huge they'd still kick my ass by the looks of things though.

 

3 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

This makes me wonder if there's a combat/gameplay style that could be based entirely on Doomguy's walking speed, with running disabled or disallowed -- or if you were working with GZDoom and you could alter the player's running speed to like 70% or 80% or whatever specific number and design a fluid, graceful combat style around that.

 

Crab% runs ftw.

[Kinetic]

3 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

encounter where walking is encouraged as the intended/opitimal strat

This isn't really it, but I did a tyson run of Scythe 2 Map27 where in one section near the beginning, I need to lure a bunch of specters out of this one area while still avoiding projectiles (including a couple potential revenant missiles) before I toggle running again to rush over to this other side of the room to hit a switch. With how the timing works out and the path I take here, I never stop moving and all the specters get out of the way and I have almost 0 chance of getting hit by a projectile. I do like 5 seconds of walking along the edge of the room while I'm alerting/luring specters out, and the slower speed allows them to run out enough while I'm also fast enough to avoid getting hit by pretty much anything in my experience. The movement is also very choreographed, I make sure I run into a specific corner before I toggle walk, and then I untoggle it when I get to the soulsphere pillar.

 

You can see what I'm talking about here:

 

 

So not exactly what you're talking about, since this was a player (me) decision and not anything I was forced to do by the mapper, but I guess it's food for thought on how an encounter could be formed out of walking speed, since I kind of found this run/walk/run strat for this section optimal and easy to follow for the run.

[Ravendesk]

4 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

You'd be surprised how many encounters it's ideal to move relatively slowly in. 

 

[baja blast rd.]

On 9/23/2023 at 11:56 AM, Not Jabba said:

This makes me wonder if there's a combat/gameplay style that could be based entirely on Doomguy's walking speed, with running disabled or disallowed -- or if you were working with GZDoom and you could alter the player's running speed to like 70% or 80% or whatever specific number and design a fluid, graceful combat style around that.

 

Have thought about this and I'm not totally sure yet, because the ability to sprint at a moment's notice makes a big difference even if used very infrequently, so the answer isn't whatever is fun in normal Doom that way. One type I'd really want to try is projectile hell combat that emphasizes enemies at many different ranges, so you'd be fighting monsters up close that make moving around inevitable, and meanwhile projectiles would coming at you from 5 seconds away, and some would be lofting at you from 15+ seconds away, making you try to control which "zone" you're standing in at any time; turning fights into slow-paced Dance Dance Revolution where you can't turn on the afterburners and get to the one safe spot on a moment's notice. 

 

 

 

Here is an intense fight from Machete map28, which gives you a lot of health and armor to survive all the damage you might take, so it isn't that hard to survive. But I was wondering how to do it without taking so much damage and without lucking out against the viles, which is very tricky. The afrits (1000HP here) pretty much force you to drop down to the bottom of the spiral, where four archviles are waiting to gain ground on you. Whether you can take them all out cleanly if they're in a pack is down to luck. The same is true of trying to use the closets to hide. Works sometimes, but the viles can easily overwhelm you. The usual tactic of trying to get cyb splash to distract viles is inconsistent, since those cybs can be fighting something else. What do we do?!

 

It turns out that we can separate the viles. Stand in a spot that lets exactly two viles see us, which makes them move up the spiral. Then drop down and take out the other two. This is counterintuitive to try because for a moment you're standing in the crosshairs of cybs and afrits (while not even trying to get those to infight), but it works. The other two viles will join up with you pretty quickly, but the crucial difference is you aren't engaging with all four in your line of sight at once.

 

 

(I was hoping to reality that attempt :P)