Beat the stage and post your recording

[Kevin]

I'm here just to annoy some players by creating a difficult stage.
Play Stage 1 on CRAZY.
Your goal is to score as many points as possible.

Download the stage - Click Here (Mediafire)
Download, replace the stage.dat file in ***/LF2/data/ with the downloaded one (back up the original stage.dat first so you can revert back to the original stage).

Allowed Characters
You can only use the ten main characters, with the exceptions for Henry and Rudolf. Please don't complain about this stuff. I know banning characters (maybe especially Rudolf) is very controversial but I want the challenge to be specific for melee characters. I'm sorry if you don't like this idea.

Scoring

Spoiler (Click to View)

Each phase is worth 20 points, with every fourth phase scoring double points.
The last phase is worth 100 points.
No milk bonus of 30 points is given for completing a sub-stage (e.g. 1-1 or 1-2) without drinking.
No milk bonus raises by 15 points for every successive sub stages completed without drinking.
*Note that CRAZY gives you 50 bonus HP per sub-stage.
Quarter Hour bonus as big as 40 points is given for completing the whole stage with less than 15 minutes time record.
Rush-win bonus is worth another 60 points and for this challenge is given for completing the stage within 13 minutes 20 seconds.
A perfect game scores 1000 points.

If you score at least 600 points and posts your recording here, I will watch it entirely .

High Score (last updated: 21 March 2012)
1-2. Kevin - 535
1-2. Zort - 535

Spoiler (Click to View)

Beat Stage 1-1: 100 pts
No Milk Bonus: 30 pts
Beat Stage 1-2: 100 pts
No Milk Bonus: 45 pts
Beat Stage 1-3: 100 pts
No Milk Bonus: 60 pts
Beat Stage 1-4: 100 pts

I hope you play and post recording, no matter how well you score. You make me happy by posting your recording .
I also awaits constructive criticisms and such, since I don't make stages so often, this may have some weaknesses which I would like to hear from anyone.
I want to play some stage mode again but I'm quite bored with the standard stage, so I tried to make one. It's not the best one but I did make some thinking before creating each of the phases.

If 5 more players post a recording then I will make a new stage (and try to make it better than this, so please give me some feedback). May not be going quickly tho.

[drako]

@Kevin Can we post our recodings in .flr format?

[Kevin]

you mean *.lfr right? That's what I expect . It's faster to download so I would prefer lfr files.

[zort]

I don't have much to say for now (will attempt stage later), except to observe that you've designed the points system such that it is plausible to achieve all of the things that score you points. Whereas if some things were more orthogonal to each other, it would make things more interesting, because you would have to think about which route to take, and striving towards lots of poitns one way would practically exclude you from another way of getting lots of points. For instance, if you got points for losing less mana than health, but you could also get points for not getting hurt, well, it would be very difficult to both not get hurt and lose less mana than health. It's like in chess, where you know from the get-go that you're going to lose some units, you're not going to win a perfect victory; the tricky thing is choosing which units to sacrifice. I hope that gets my point (more like a feeling) across.

Also, I see you using the terminology "sub-stage". I guess that's pretty standard? I have for some time sweated over what to call those things, but one day I came up with the word "act" (as in "stage 1 act 3"), which my brother happened to quite like. I wonder if other people like it too? You must, at least, admit that it is less dull than "sub-stage".

[Kevin]

thanks for your idea. I think there should be bonuses for less MP usage, less HP loss and early victory. A small and simple scoring table will do .
It's like if you do great in one aspect (for example very low MP usage) you get much bigger bonus than if you only do pretty good. So you can choose between getting all the smaller bonuses from every aspect or focusing on one of the aspects to get the bigger bonuses. I get it quite right, don't I?

Of course I have to keep it from getting too complex so that I can still calculate the scores easily :P .

I got the word sub-stage from somewhere... since I'm used to saying sub-stage it feels better for me xP . Well.. nvm.

[zort]

Ok here's my (6th or so) attempt. I tried to beat or match your score using Dennis, Kevin, but I really couldn't. I just got to 1-5 (finally!), not drinking milk in 1-1 nor 1-2.

Since you asked for feedback on the stage itself, I'll say this: the purple guys (the guys with "Com" under them) are not as tough as you think. For me, the Justin waves were the hardest. What would really be hard, though, is a wave having at least 5 Marks; for me, Marks are the most dangerous, aside from Firzen and Julian. Anyway, you succeeded in making it harder than the stock stage, and I certainly appreciate the lack of hostages (tied-up guys that join your team).

[Kevin]

Hmm.. I have been underestimating Mark since years ago, and everytime I face them they are always stronger than I thought they would be, but still, I keep underestimating Mark xD . Well, I agree with you. Justin is also difficult because of their energy blasts :\ . Yeah, 5 Marks turns out to be much harder than 3 heroes.

Thanks for playing (and actually putting much efforts on it ) and for your feedback! I'm watching your recording :P .

You were awesome . I like it especially how you make use of defense (and even predicting that dragon punch!).
You scored 535 (plz tell if I made a mistake). Maybe I should make it more beatable so the scoring will work better .

In the next stage that I will post, I will add MP usage bonus too, and make the stage more beatable, but the bonuses are still quite hard to get.

[drako]

Is that stage difficult? I started playing Lf2 few months ago. How much will I be able to score? Time to find out. I'll be trying out this stage kevin. Then, i will post my progress. Let us hope for the best.