Touhou Draft - Yet Again.

[Djeets]

the draft still alive?

[Wen Yang]

we just started actually.

[Balcerzak]

That reminds me, when is deadline again?

[Wen Yang]

Deadline for EoSD is September 15th, 12:00 PM GMT+7

Edit: added deadline to OP as well.

Edited September 7, 2014 by Wen Yang

[Sifer]

progress report:

3rd stage

9.7 million

I should have chosen easy :(

-

I also have no idea how the scores work in each game...

just kill things and collect drops I guess.

Edited September 9, 2014 by Sifer

[Balcerzak]

progress report:

3rd stage

9.7 million

I should have chosen easy :(

-

I also have no idea how the scores work in each game...

just kill things and collect drops I guess.

A breakdown of the basics of scoring in Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil, since that's the week we're currently in:

Blue point itmes are a major source of score, worth Difficulty * 100000 points at the PoC (E=1,N=1,H=1.5,L=2), and roughly 60% of that slightly below PoC, all the way to a minimum of 31.5% at the very bottom of the screen.

Power items are worth 10 points at less than maximum power, after achieving maximum power, they will multiplicatively increase their value until a cap of 51200 (e.g 10, 20, 30, ..., 90 , 100, 200, 300, ..., 900, 1000, 2000, 3000, ..., 9000, 10000, 11000, 12000, 52000).

Two additional major sources of points are Star Items and Bullet Bonus, which are somewhat related. Star Items are generated when bullets are canceled, through attaining full power, defeating specific enemies (e.g. stage 4 swirling red fairies), finishing a bosses card/non-card, or bombing. Star items base value is 500, but can be greatly increased the higher your Graze value is: the wiki says this happens at a 10:3 ratio, so if you have 450 graze, then a star item would be worth 2000 points, and a screenful of them could easily be 300 bullets -> 300 icons -> 600000 points. Additionally, defeating a card/non-card of a (mid)boss awards a point bonus of 2000+x per bullet, where x increases by 10 points for each bullet beyond the first.

[spoiler=stage 1, stage 2 examples]

You can see the 3300s right on top of Reimu there coming from the star items.

Similarly in this case because my graze is much lower, this time they're only worth 1040.

You can also plainly see the 2000+ per bullet values spattered across the screen, and their total value listed as "Bonus".

Finally, there's Spell Card bonuses and Stage Clear bonuses. Capturing a spellcard is worth a base value dependent on the (mid)boss, increased by a multiple based on the amount of time remaining when you capture it. The Stage Clear is the sum of the stage number multiplied by 1000, your power multiplied by 100, and your graze multiplied by ten, all of which gets multiplied by the number of point items you collected on that stage.

The game clear bonus awards some additional points based on lives and bombs in stock at the end, and the Stage and Game Clear bonuses have some possibly mulitpliers based on difficulty selected and other options, but the basic thrust of things is Point Items > Graze (for both star icons and the graze itself) > Power Items > Bullet Bonus > Spellcard Bonus > Lives/Bombs in stock.

Well... if you're incredibly skilled, it might even be Graze > Point Items, but I'm assuming that's not the case here. At least, this is my estimation, someone more well versed (Proto, Scarlet) should jump in and correct me if I'm wrong.

Edited September 10, 2014 by Balcerzak

[Wen Yang]

5 Days and 55 minutes to the deadline for EoSD.

[Scarlet]

The game clear bonus awards some additional points based on lives and bombs in stock at the end, and the Stage and Game Clear bonuses have some possibly mulitpliers based on difficulty selected and other options, but the basic thrust of things is Point Items > Graze (for both star icons and the graze itself) > Power Items > Bullet Bonus > Spellcard Bonus > Lives/Bombs in stock.

Well... if you're incredibly skilled, it might even be Graze > Point Items, but I'm assuming that's not the case here. At least, this is my estimation, someone more well versed (Proto, Scarlet) should jump in and correct me if I'm wrong.

It's definitely Point Items > Graze. On Normal, I'd put even Power items above Graze, as it's just not reasonably possible to get enough Graze per stage to make a significant difference in the value of star items. More important than increasing the Bullet Bonus is to get it at all - that is, avoid finishing off spellcards when there are little to no bullets on-screen (whether as part of the spellcard's pattern or because you bombed).

On Normal, lives are worth 3 million points each, whereas bombs are 1 million points each; at 8/6, that's 30 million points. That's definitely a significant chunk of points on its own; actually, that's probably more than all the spellcard boni in one run of this game combined, considering most of them are well below a million points (the earlygame ones often aren't even half a million points lol).

Thus, personally, I'd put the order of importance in scoring more like this:

Easy: Point Items > Power Items > Spellcard Bonus > Bullet Bonus > Graze >>> Lives/Bombs in stock

Normal: Point Items > Power Items > Lives/Bombs in stock > Bullet Bonus > Graze > Spellcard Bonus

Hard/Lunatic: Point Items > Bullet Bonus > Graze > Power Items > Lives/Bombs in stock > Spellcard Bonus

Edited September 10, 2014 by Scarlet

[Balcerzak]

Hmm. Okay, you do raise some very good points, and also, I was reminded I wasn't 100% accurate in reporting something about the star items. It seems the star items generated by bombs are only worth 100 points each flat, save for items generated at the very end of the bomb duration. I'm not sure where the cutoff threshold is, and it's probably different for the different bomb types.

[Scarlet]

Yeah, if you're going to use bombs for scoring, use them in a way that gets you extra point items. For instance, the beginning of Stage 2 and Stage 6 both have a spot where bombing with MarisaB will get you point items worth several million points in total that wouldn't be possible to get otherwise.

[Wen Yang]

I know what you mean scarlet, I always bomb in early stage 2 myself, both to get to full power earlier and to get the several million that'd have dropped otherwise.

[Kriemhild]

To me, EoSD scoring is just point items > power items > clear bonus. Nothing else matters enough to me, though I would still graze heavily if given an opportunity that isn't too risky. Auto-collection is essential for point value and power items don't offer 51200 points until you collect enough after full power, so yeah, being at MAX Power is really important for EoSD scoring.

I consider EoSD to have the vanilla scoring system, with no special scoring mechanics like all of the other Windows Touhou games.

[Wen Yang]

3 Days, 3 Hours, and 33 Minutes till the Deadline for EoSD submissions are up.

[Wen Yang]

25 Hours until the deadline for EoSD Submissions are up. Still missing replays from Aki, Fox, and Sifer.

[Sifer]

here is my replay... I never made it to the Scarlet Mansion :/

http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=34557

[Wen Yang]

submissions will be closed and results will be announced in 90 minutes.

[Emeraldfox]

http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=34560

Eyup, let's go PCB

[Balcerzak]

here is my replay... I never made it to the Scarlet Mansion :/

http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=34557

Don't worry too much/be too hard on yourself. How many times did you attempt the game?

[Wen Yang]

Well and the first round is over!

Results:

1st Place: Balcerzak - 20 points http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=34488

2nd Place: Wen Yang - 12 points http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=34559

3rd Place: Akinaoki - 9 points http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=34550

4th Place: #Most #Qualified - 6 points http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=34560

5th Place: Kay - 8 points http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=34513

6th Place: Sifer - 0 points http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=34557

Deadline for the second round, PCB is September 22nd, 12:00 GMT+7

Edited September 15, 2014 by Wen Yang

[Autumn]

...lol third

I only submitted this as a placeholder too...

[Sifer]

Don't worry too much/be too hard on yourself. How many times did you attempt the game?

Nah, this is for fun! But it looks like Meiling did her job instead of napping like usual.

I played for several hours, so 4-7 hours I guess.

How does scoring work in the next game?

-

I also don't know how to DL replays from the Gensokyo website. I just get this mess of text when I DL any replays.

Edited September 15, 2014 by Sifer

[Balcerzak]

Okay, I watched everybody's replays twice, and wrote up some comments on each (aside from my own, I feel it would be disingenuous to comment on my own run, unless people have questions for me about specific aspects of it. That said, I certainly welcome anyone to comment if they feel they have any insights on where I could improve, or even if they just want to point out things I did that they liked seeing, etc.). Since there's a lot of text, I'm nesting them in spoilers.

Sifer Tips/Criticisms

Stage 1 is all about striking a good rhythm back and forth across the stage. You'll want to adjusting yourself vertically to collect the falling items mostly, trying not to interrupt your back and forth horizontal unless necessary to avoid some big red bullets. As I can see in your current run, you'll often not perform a whole sweep, and only make it to a little past center of the screen, also you'll hesitate for a long while beneath items waiting for them to fall to you, which is inefficient when you're not in danger of death. If you had a homing shot you could maybe get away with it, but it's still bad form. To counter any claims that since you need to be focused on survival and not on score, let me just point out. You reach midboss Rumia with 19 power and 8 point items, that's about 7 power items and 4 point items behind my run, when you reach final Rumia you have 45 power and 16 point items, which is 27 power behind and 14 point items behind. 27 power in the early game can be huge, and since you do get extends based on score, losing a lot of points isn't ideal either. A lot of this can be recovered by working on some fundamentals, and practicing stage 1 a half dozen times or so to get a feel for the waves and the rhythm. (Since you are mainly concerned with survival, I'll ignore other point optimizing tips regarding specifics for grazing and bullet bonus on Rumia).

As I said before, having 57 power at the start of stage 2 puts you at a huge deficit, you're not going to reach full power until very near the end of the stage, rather than at around the midboss, meaning a huge loss of potential points. That said, you do a pretty much optimal job of the first half of stage 2 with the hand you were dealt. The Daiyousei fight though, you really didn't need to bomb. Practice streaming her during that 3rd pattern, just inch your way slowly focused left or right and let the bullets just creep along behind you. Less sudden/jerky motions is much better, you want this to be as smooth as you can get it. No complaints to be found about your second half of stage 2 either, you are doing good work here.

The Cirno fight, however... There should be no need to bomb Cirno's opener (barring a brain-fart induced deathbomb or something). You end up bombing it twice. That's unfortunate for your resources. It makes me think you honestly were unaware of what was coming next or how to deal with it, to which the answer is stage practice it a few more times. Her 3 spreads of diamond bullets are fired at your position, and if you're far away from her you can evade them simply by moving full unfocused speed left and right in alternate. When she shoots the homing circular bullet patterns at you, like you should do for Daiyousei, you just need to stream these (while paying attention not to run into the large round bullets). Instead you move too far too fast (which ironically is what you need to do for the other half of her opener).

For Icicle Fall, there are a couple ways of handling the spell. The first relies on being up close and personal in shotgun range at the start, then inching backwards and dodgeing the yellow bullets side-to-side and hoping you can clear the card by the time the first wave is done. If you can't do that, then you need to time it right on trying to sneak through the patterns. It looks like you had the right idea, just fudged the execution a little. A very positive note about your death here is that you didn't lose any bombs, because you'd already used them all. This is a good thing! I'm serious, even though you're perhaps a little liberal with your resources, you're not letting them get wasted unused. Try to keep this mindset.

You shouldn't need to bomb Cirno's second nonspell. This is again a job for streaming. You seemed to kind of get the hang of it after you noticed this though, so I'm thinking you were just caught off guard here.

You were doing an absolute great job on Perfect Freeze, and honestly you looked to be pretty safe when you panicked bombed it at the end. That was kind of disappointing to see, but I'm certainly in no position to criticize panick bombing this particular spell. >_> You handle her final blizzard spellcard just fine, and you collect your first score extend at the stage clear bonus. Ideally, you would be collecting your second score extend around here (for frame of reference). You ended the stage with 74 point items collected, compared to my 98. That's honestly not too bad, considering you didn't have full power for a full half of the stage that I had it for. So good work, when put in perspective.

Early stage 3 it looks like it was just a panick bomb? Those can happen I guess, but try to minimize them if you can by practicing the stage a few times. While certainly bombing is better than dying, if you're more aware of your positioning and what's coming ahead you won't find yourself in risky situations as often. Like where you had to bomb there, or very shortly after when you went to autocollect and got drilled by those whirly discs coming in from the right hand side. Again though, a zero-bombs left death, though, so let's count our silver linings.

Looks like you panicked bombed right at the end of Meiling's midboss card. It looked like you were safe from my pov, but sometimes in the heat of the moment we get itchy trigger fingers. Unfortunately shortly afterward you get railed by one of the lines of blue kunai bullets during the section where you're also bombarded by large yellow circle bullets. This can be a tricky spot to get through, so try to clear a few of the kunai fairies before they can fire off and use the safe spots you create there for better wiggle room against the circle bullets. You lost two bombs here, which was unfortunate. The final wave of these guys also was a problem for you, but you learned your lesson and bombed instead of dying. A step up, but keep working so you don't have to bomb either.

You bombed while completely safe during Meiling's opener, which made me sad, but maybe you didn't know how much the pattern was going to twist. You had pretty much the right idea on Rainbow Chime, but you ran into a bullet by accident and lost another bomb, then you ended up bombing the last bit of it instead of taking any chances. You also bombed her 2nd nonspell, which is honestly speaking the nonspell of hers I die to most frequently, so I don't blame you at all for wanting to just nuke your way past it. Unfortunately you run into a bullet during the Colorful Rain, ending your run. All told, only 4 bombs wasted to deaths instead of being used, out of a total of 16 available to you (if I did my math right). 75% bomb usage is better than a lot of people can manage, so be proud.

Emerald Tips/Criticisms:

On the whole you've got a pretty great rhythm stage 1, got to midboss Rumia with 26 power, 11 points, that's just 1 point item shy of what I got so great job there. You fell off a little bit in the second half of the stage, clocking in at 63 power and 27 points compared to my 72 and 30, but still a pretty competitive performance. That could all boil down to when the RNG decide to drop or not drop the large power items instead of the small ones, which I haven't really sussed out the logic behind just yet (I've definitely had runs where I can only get 64 power, it honestly just happens sometimes). Stage 1 is going great.

Then there was that heartbreaking careless death to Rumia's opener, where you start dodging to the right to avoid her second wave of stuff before being completely cleared of the previous bullets. I hate it when that happens. I would have rage quit right there, but kudos for pressing on.

Curiously, you don't bomb the first part of stage 2 for collection purposes, but I'll chalk it up to wanting to save your resources, after the unfortunate early death. Daiyosei goes down without an issue and you reach full power in time (aka before Cirno). You take down Cirno like a champ too, so no real problems with stage 2 aside from some missed collection overall (68 point items total stage 2, as opposed to my 98).

Stage 3 you demonstrate good POC technique throughout the first half of the stage, and you're ready for what it's throwing at you, which is great. Then there's that unfortunate death to Gorgeous Sweet Flower with 4 bombs in stock. Ouch. You get the 2nd score extend shortly after the midboss fight hough, so you're back up to 3 stock 3 bombs, which isn't terrible, but you'd want to be in a better situation if you could.

I'm not sure how you died to Meiling's opener, but I'm guessing you were watching the bullets that are usually the tricky ones that she fires out last, and didn't quite clear one of the penultimate ones. That definitely happens sometimes and you'd normally not be prepared to deathbomb so I can't blame you for missing it. At this point I'm imagining your nerves were shot, which is why you flub on Rainbow Wind Chime. You did do excellently on Colorful Rain and Extreme Typhoon, though, so great work there. Your collection was actually better than mine, it looks like, with 95 point items over my 94. I'll have to review that and see what I missed out on! (You had 54 at midboss to my 51, so my early stage 3 is apparently my weak link.)

You use your first bomb of the game here at the start of stage 4, which kind of caught me by surprise, but I can see why you did it. Those spinner can be very tricky to stream, for me at least, and when you do it's almost impossible to get their drops, so sometimes you have to take risks and then you get into a pickle. It was probably for the best to play safe and not autocollect right before the books show up, though it is always a painful choice to have to make. Unfortunately they still manage to kill you there near the end.

You bomb at the start of the booklaser+fairy gauntlet, which can happen, especially with leftover spinner spam on the screen, but honestly it shouldn't. I've seen a lot of different strategies for this, from streaming your way left/right, to my preferred streaming vertically down the center. Try to find what works best for you. You deal pretty well with the 8 waves of spinners, earning your third score extend here, though they do draw out a bomb from you. I think I might have bombed in there too though, so, shit happens sometimes. Unfortunately your run is cut short by a redbullet during nondirectional lasers and then by Princess Undine.

All said, you have strong POC and streaming skills, but you bombed only 5 times out of 23 available (provided I did my math), which should make it clear where you need to focus on improving. Also try to catch the small blunders and not give in to nerves. You can do it!

Kay Tips/Criticisms:

Early Stage 1 I honestly find it better not to kill the fairies immediately at the top of the screen, becaus when they throw their items up off the edge you can't grab them. If you kill them a little lower, you can grab the items before they travel the full apex of their journey, and save time, allowing you to get to the next wave of fairies both on time, and with the items collected. Overall though, your rhythm here was pretty decent, 22 power and 9 point at midboss, being only a few items behind on each. You really hit a good groove in the second half of the stage too, and come out with 69 and 22, which is a great score for power, and while a little low on points, not too bad still.

You should work on streaming Rumia's opener better, the long string of red bullets at the very start will never change, though her positioning after does. Still, you have plenty of time to defeat the noncard, so you might as well milk what you cna when you can. The long strings of red bullets are the most profitable, and RNG can be a troll and not give you as many of those waves in favor of some of the shittier circular based patterns. That said, you do do a pretty decent job of grazing during Dermarcation, so kudos there!

You're probably at the stage where you can afford to bomb the opener of Stage 2 for collection purposes, which will help you reach full power faster, and overall improve your score. You survive all the way to the end, and 1cc easy, so it's either you work on optimizing for score on easy (probably not the best choice, given it lacks an entire stage), or you should move up to Normal(I honestly would like to see this). While I would still recommend bombing on Normal, I've seen some of the others (Raymond I think) recommend against it. That said, Raymond is better at using all of his resources before dying than I usually am, so it might just come down to that.

Anyway, you stream Daiyousei perfectly, then nearly give me a heart attack when it looked like you weren't going to get the bomb drop. :o In the end there are no problems, you reach full power later than desired (due to not bombing, mostly, your power at the end of Stage 1 was fine), but still on time. You've got an excellent handle on Cirno's patterns on easy, but do be aware when you go to Normal that Icicle Fall will actually have some degree of challenge and she'll have an additional card after Perfect Freeze. Your 55 point items is a lot less, due in part to the lack of bomb and the missing spellcard. In fact it's dangerously close to half of what a good stage 2 should give you.

Your stage 3 first half seems to be fine, decent POC work, but you could consider streaming/grazing the kunai fairies a bit more. You get 48 point items by midbos, which is about par it seems, and you've collected your first score extend (I have a hard time judging when you should get the extends on Easy, due to the scoring penalty). Things seem to be progressing on track overall though at least. Midboss Meiling doesn't pose any problem for you either.

Your first bomb of the run comes during the gauntlet of vertical kunai fairies with their random yellow circle friends, when you wisely saw that you'd run yourself into a sticky situation. I think it could have been avoided if you'd maybe been a bit more conservative about your movements, but that whole section can be tricky regardless, I know I've had to bomb there, much as I don't like it.

I was so vicariously upset for you at that death during Wind Chime. You were handling it perfectly, but then you didn't move far enough to the left, thinking you had moved to safety and could just wait in place during one of those changings of the rotations. You get the second score extend just afterward, and do a good job against Meiling's hardest nonspell (imo). Colorful Rain didn't pose you any problems either. Do be advised that Extreme Colorful Typhoon (the spellcard after this on Normal) is sort of like doing two Colorful Rains at once, kind of a clockwise one and a counterclockwise one, instead of how Colorful Rain can be mostly vertical. Unless I'm just thinking about it totally wrong and somebody should tell me to shut up. Either way, it's a step up in difficulty but similar in execution, so when you move to normal expect to have to practice it a bunch or bomb it.

Your stage 4 is pretty solid up to Koakuma, although your POC could be a little more optimized I think. You handle the booklasers and the book+redfairy pairs just fine... except for the tail end when you were homefree and racing up to presumably the POC and you collided with a stray bullet. That sucks. Dying when you're not in any real danger is always a downer. The gauntlet of spinner waves doesn't pose any threat to you, at the cost of some autocollect you didn't risk for, putting you at Patchy with 3 lives 3 bombs, which is fair. You have a real knack for nondirectional lasers, so that's awesome actually. You even handle all of her spellcards without a hitch. Fair warning though, on Normal she will sprout 2 additional spellcards for you to be concerned with. This is the real difficulty spike.

You get your 3rd score extend in early Stage 5, putting you at a pretty commanding 4 lives for the final stage. Unfortunately complacency/lack of practice sets in and you end up needing most of them. Let's address the sticky spots in particular, shall we?

Strange Art "Misdirection": You're handling this spellcard all wrong. You're moving way too much, you should only be moving minimally streaming about a position just under where Sakuya will appear on either the right side or the left side (personal preference). Trying to move to hit her in the middle and on both sides just invites disaster in the form of unnavigable waves of dense bullets (imo). This may not be as noticeable on Easy, but come Normal you will definitely see a difference. While you didn't die to this spell, your poor handling of it caused you to time it out, meaning Sakuya doesn't drop her extra life for you. At the very least you should have bombed this (net gain of 2 bombs).

Then there's the bullet currents in the second half of the stage. You shouldn't have died with full bombs during them.

Sakuya's opening nonspell was handled OK, you survived and didn't have to bomb.

Clock Corpse, is mostly symmetrical, so when Sakuya floats left, you should dodge left so you can do damage to her. You dodged right, extending the length of time this spell will take, and artificially inflating its difficulty. You still manage to capture it though, which is excellent, but it's better to develop good habits for Normal.

You die at the very tail end of her 2nd nonspell due to overconfidence I guess. This happens, just try to avoid it I guess. No real tips.

Luna Clock can be beaten with mostly the same skills as Clock Corpse, so you should only need to bomb as a last resort. Still, it got the job done I guess.

Another death to complacency in Sakuya's 3rd nonspell. Not really sure it was troublesome, so unless you ask for some I am not sure I can give you advice.

Marionette is a fucker of a spell. I've only ever captured it once. Unless you have literally zero bombs, just bomb it, imo. If you want to capture it, ask someone better than me for advice.

Honestly, you had an excellent run, but you let everything fall apart at the end and it looked much closer than it had to be. I still think you have the skills to move up to normal and at very least reach Stage 5 (after a couple of practice rounds to learn new spellcards and adjust to stage differences). I believe in you Kay.

Akinaoki Tips/Criticisms:

Pretty decent Stage 1, 20 power 12 points at midboss, 55 power 27 points at Rumia though, so you lost out on a fair bit of potential in when it all added together. I've not tried with Marisa in forever though, so I don't have good advice on finding that rhythm. Decent grazing on Rumia's opener, could be a bit improved, but since you still need to focus on survival overall I'm not gonna harp on it.

You elected not to bomb the Stage 2 opener, which as I've said to others I feel is a mistake, but it's also personal preference. It just means your stage 2 collection is going to be overal weak, which will hurt you in score extends. You do an excellent job handling Daiyosei though, and manage to hit full power just before Cirno, so the stage isn't all bad.

I question your handling of Icicle fall. Rather than doing back and forth weaving and staying in the center, I find it more effective to go out one side, over and around the top, and then return to the center and come back down. This could have saved you a bomb, in my opinion. The panick bomb in Perfect Freeze was understandable, but I think in this case you were safe. Diamond Blizzard was handled perfectly though, and you got a total of 75 point items in stage 2, again mostly suffering from that lack of early bomb and corresponding lack of full power. That said you do get your first score extend, so that's something.

You demonstrate some reasonable POC during early stage 3, though perhaps a tad conservative. Still, better safe than sorry, I suppose. Your midboss fight went just fine, no complaints there. Your handling of the blue kunai fairies with their large yellow circle bullet brethren was smooth and practiced, and you cash in on that second score extend here, putting you at 5 lives 2 bombs for the boss, a very good position to be in.

Rainbow Wind Chime went off without a hitch, which is excellent, and you bombed 2nd nonspell to avoid an embarrassing death, which puts you a leg up over some of my more embarrassing attempts. You bombed in Colorful Rain, which can certainly happen, but wih some more practice it can probably be minimized. Extreme Typhoon was handled masterfully though, managing to stay both safe and in the center the whole time. 97 point items here all told, which is better than my Stage 3, so that seems to be something I need to work on.

Stage 4 opener was handled mostly well, but that greed related death on the final wave of spinners before the 4 red fairies was unfortunate. That said, its hard to both be safe and collect their items, because streaming them makes the latter really tough, imo. You dodge the books just fine, and Koakuma doesn't give you any trouble either, 31 point items at this point, seems pretty standard stuff, I believe I had 32. You bomb the leftover bullets from the last wave of spinners before the booklasers, which isn't ideal. I think you just need a little more stage practice to figure out a good way to transition between the two. Also, you bomb during the book lasers because you got dangerously close to a laser and feared for you life. I think that was just sloppy. You should be streaming this section either horizontally or vertically, imo, with no real danger whatsoever. The red fairy +booklaser claims another bomb. This can be a judgement call, but I might consider not nuking the red fairy immediately, and only finishing her when the spinners have most of their bullets on the field, so you get the most out of that free bullet clear. It may make it harder to kill all of them and then autocollect though, but you need to focus on survival first, which means resource conservation. You get the 3rd score extend in the middle of the 8 spinner waves, which is I think the same place Emerald got his, but your resources are in a lot better shape, so great job there. The final 3 red fairies were handled fine.

You slip up near the end of Patchy's first nondirectional lasers, and I think this is where you die with your first unspent bomb, if I'm not mistaken. Making it this far without wasting any is a good acheivement, be proud. Slyphae Horn is one of those spells that I fully condone bombing for safety if you're feeling threatened. I'm not good with a screen full of tiny bullets and micrododging personally, but if I remember right that's the sort of thing Proto excels at. Maybe he has tips for you. You handle the second wave of nondirectional lasers like a pro. You do bomb the end of Agni shine, which is unfortunate. In my personal opinion I find it to be one of her easier spells, probably just behind Water Elf and Mercury Poison. You had the right idea throughout, I think you may have just panicked. You die to Forest Blaze when you honestly should have just bombed. If you have trouble with Slyphae Horn, you're going to have trouble here, pretty much guaranteed. I think this was the second wasted bomb for your run. It's been years since I faced Emerald Megalith, so I'm not sure I have good advice for you, but I think it should have been possible to manage without needing a bomb. 152 point items in total on the stage though, quite impressive, I think I managed 174 so that's pretty close in the scheme of things.

You start Stage 5 with 3 lives 2 bombs, which is promising, though not quite what you might hope for in a best case scenario. You don't have the right technique for handling the giant bullet spam fairies. The trick is to remain motionless (they only see motion, like a T-Rex) until after they've fired their spread, making their lines of bullets perfectly traight and easy to dodge, rather than a curling, overlapping mess, which led you to have to bomb. Still, reaching mid-Sakuya with only one bomb expended since stage start is very good (ideally it would have been a bomb for scoring/collection though).

You bomb Sakuya's opener here, which is unfortunate, as it's a pretty straightforward pattern. I think you have the general idea and maybe just need a little more practice. My comments to Kay about the handling of Misdirection apply wholeheartedly to you so I'm going to copypaste them down:

Strange Art "Misdirection": You're handling this spellcard all wrong. You're moving way too much, you should only be moving minimally streaming about a position just under where Sakuya will appear on either the right side or the left side (personal preference). Trying to move to hit her in the middle and on both sides just invites disaster in the form of unnavigable waves of dense bullets (imo). This may not be as noticeable on Easy, but come Normal you will definitely see a difference.

This spell caused you a death and two bombs, which is massive for something than can be trivialized with the right approach. WORK ON THIS, it will make so much difference.

You do a good job surviving the first wave of carpetbombing post-Sakuya, but then run into a stray bullet in the second wave with an unspent bomb. Sadness. You get Full Power in the middle of the 3rd/final wave, which should have meant it would be trivial, but improper positioning means when you saw the big bullet spam fairies coming you decided to safety bomb. Better than dying, but it could have been avoided by being at one of the edges of the screen and preparing to stream toward the center. Again, not knowing that refusing to move, or streaming very slowly is the key, the final wave of these spam fairies draw out another bomb from you, leaving you at two lives 1 bomb for the boss fight, which is less than ideal.

You get caught by Sakuya's opener before getting a chance to use that bomb too, which really hurts your position. I think perhaps part of why you might be having trouble during this nonspell may be staying too close to the bottom of the screen and giving the knive waves time to spread out? I can't swear to this though, but you should practice this fight a lot to get it under control. It should NOT need two bombs on top of that first death to clear out. You immediately bomb Clock Corpse, which suggests you just really want to get this fight over, because you're so close to the final score extend you can taste it, but it's a relatively easy spell and you're short on resources, so I think this what a mistake. The fact that you showcase pretty much precisely the proper method for capture post-bomb just serves to illustrate this (though you would be better served by always dodging to the side Sakuya is on, instead of always to the left as you've done here). Her second nonspell seems much like the first for you, you stay too close to the bottom, where her knives are going to be taking up too much space, instead of dodging them up higher where they're relatively tighter. Fortunately you only die once and don't use any bombs. Much like Clock Corpse, Luna Clock sees another immediate bomb, which I disagree with, but you've got 0 lives in stock, so I can understand your trepidation. Sakuya's final nonspell was handled well, getting you to Marionette with two bombs. Now, Marionette is the spell I would advocate just bombing into submission, and while you get one bomb off, that wasn't enough and you're taken down before you can get the second one off. Heartbreaking. You were so close to seeing Stage 6, I really feel for you.

Wen Tips/Criticisms:

Aside from my repeating my comment to Kay about how you shouldn't kill the first fairies when they're high enough that their drops get shot off the top of the screen, your stage 1 rhythm is good. Homing shots helped this out a lot, probably. You get to midboss with 23 power and 10 points, which is reasonably solid. You get to end of stage Rumia with 70 power and 25 points, which is high tier performance indeed. You do an excellent job milking her opener nonspell for graze as well. It looks like the only thing you need to work on in your Rumia fight is timing the finish of her final spellcard for optimum bullet bonus, which can be tricky, especially with a weak shot type like Reimu A.

Stage 2 was handled for the most part impressively, no real room for improvement that I can see, maybe a little bit of POC work, 73 point items before Cirno could maybe be a bit better, especially with the advantage your homing shot should have given you. Bombing Cirno's opener though, I disagree with, you should be able to easily dodge those waves. Not sure what happened here. The rest of the Cirno fight went without incident though, so well done there.

Stage 3 opening through midboss looked fine, 51 point items is I think exactly what I managed there as well. Final Meiling fight was staring out well, but then you had that embarrassing death to a giant blue bullet at the start of her 2nd nonspell. I maintain it is her deadliest nonspell, it can be quite deceptively difficult. Losing to unspent bombs is a damn shame, though. That said, you no what is even worse? Bombing again after respawn. There is no reason for a revenge bomb here. You can easily collect your own power drops and the field is clear, there is no danger, and no point items needing collection that you will miss out on POC from, this is a boss battle. In fact, in boss battles you only need to collect your large power drop, ignore the small powers if you have to. You lose 16 power by dying, and 13 of it comes back to you in the form of 8 (large power) and 5 small powers. When a boss spell is defeated, they will drop at least a large power, and definitely more small powers. If you only die once, this large power in combination with the large power you already collected means you only need to worry about picking up two drops to get back to full power, and don't have to fret about putting yourself in danger. It's literally that simple, there is no reason to expend a bomb to collect your power drops. NONE. It's not going to help you clear out that nonspell either, not really. Just don't do it. You fall for the trap of being too close to Meiling when you go to autocollect her point items, meaning her circular fan of kunai coming out force a bomb in response. Now, a lot of people bomb Meiling's 3rd nonspell for points, but that depends on some rather precise timing, and you have the wrong timing, and nowhere near the graze needed to try that, meaning this is just a pointless, easily avoidable bomb. You handl Colorful Rain well, and Extreme Color Typhoon more or less correctly, although you get pushed far to the edges sometimes, you are a homing shot, so you don't need to worry as much (you should still worry some, because if you don't get your forward shots in you're just prolonging the time you need to survive this card). I generally find being up a little higher helps me in this card personally, not sure if it works for you.

Overall, very sloppy handling of Meiling, work on this.

You fall to a greed death to spinners early on stage 4, and immediately do the revenge bomb thing again. DON'T DO THIS. This is your greatest obstacle to a 1cc, imo. This frivolous waste of resources. You really shouldn't need to bomb at the 4 red fairies either, though Homing Reimu has this the hardest as her homing shots are distracted by the wandering spinner meaning she often has trouble killing the fairies and getting the bullet cancels. You have a derp death in the books' bullet field as well, and stage 4 is honestly just tearing you a new one right now. Yet ANOTHER revenge bomb here and you're just refusing to stop shooting yourself in the foot. I guess it at least hits Koakuma, but she really shouldn't be an issue you need to worry about either. You wind up bombing at the booklaser start, like many of the other competitors. This isn't really necessary with a proper approach. Work on finding one that works for you. You handle the rest of the booklasers just fine, but rather than managing to use the window provided by the red fairy clear to autocollect you are forced to use a bomb here. I know this happened to me in my run too, but that doesn't make it alright, that just means I fucked up as well. The 8 spinner waves force out another bomb, which is unfortunate, but better than a death I guess. The final red fairy wave managed to work out just right for you though, so you reach Patchy at 3 lives 0 bombs, which is less than what we'd like to have at this point. 167 point items though, which is most impressive here.

You die right at the end of nondirectional laser, indicating you just overestimated your damage and didn't react under the assumption you needed to dodge. Sucks when that happens, not going to lie. Unfortunately, since you go up to collect Patchy's dropped power, that puts you in a vulnerable position at the start of Agni Shie and you have to bomb an otherwise pretty easy spellcard to stay safe. Running into a fire bullet right at the tail end as you're capturing it though is absolutely devastating. You lost a lot of bombs there, plus the bomb you lose when you revenge bomb, YET AGAIN. NO. BAD. *hits with rolled up newspaper*. Also it looks like it may not have been a case of damage overestimation, but being legitimately bad at nondirectional lasers, as you need to deathbomb the end of her second one. Hmm. Do you actually need some tips here or do you know what you're doing? You get your final score extend right at the start of Rage Trilithion, so that's good. At this point, just ignore score and try to focus on survival, seriously. I used to have some trouble with this spell I think, but you capture it just fine, and as I'm watching, I can see a resemblence in it to Mercury Poison, huh. The more you know... Lava Cromlech can be kind of bitchy if it doesn't cooperate, I suppose, and it claims your life. I think you should have maybe bombed for safety sake. Bombing before dying being infinitely preferable to revenge bombing after like you end up doing. Seriously, I know it sounds like I'm harping on this a lot, but it's a really bad practice you need to get out of the habit of doing. Unfortunately you don't seem to know how to handle Mercury Poison, as you're not doing as much weaving as you should be, rather sitting static. This costs you your life and a revenge bomb. Ugh...

You're forced to bomb almost right away at the start of Stage 5, due to improper positioning for the second set big bullet fairy spammers. You're not set up properly to handle it when they come in and do the repeated wave of blue, red, green either. I've addressed this to the others but, minimal motion and streaming is key here. You end up dying when you're all out of bombs and caught in a bad position by the curtain bombers right before mid-boss Meiling. RIP.

Also, I invite anybody who disagrees with my comments to speak up and offer a rebuttal or explanation. I'm certainly no Touhou expert, and my thoughts stem obviously from my personal experiences and biases.

Nah, this is for fun! But it looks like Meiling did her job instead of napping like usual.

I played for several hours, so 4-7 hours I guess.

How does scoring work in the next game?

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I also don't know how to DL replays from the Gensokyo website. I just get this mess of text when I DL any replays.

kk, sounds good. 4-7 hours is a pretty solid investment, but if you don't have much in the way of background experience I doubt it would get you the sort of familiarity you'd need to comfortably advance to the final stages, and I can understand some of the mistakes I'm seeing. I'm not going to discuss PCB scoring at this time, as that's an incredibly more complicated beast than EoSD scoring, and I've spent several hours watching and writing about replays already and kind of need a break. As far as downloading the replays go, your browser is not set up to recognize the file association properly, and so it attempts to open the file as a hypertext webpage instead of prompting you to download it, so you'll need to Right Click->Save As on the "Download Now" link.

I am planning on screencapturing my EoSD run and putting it on youtube though, so maybe I'll embed it next post for those who can't or don't want to bother downloading the replay and booting up EoSD can watch it if they choose.

[Autumn]

Thanks for the feedback!

[Balcerzak]

Youtube version of my run:

Thanks for the feedback!

No problem man, I like EoSD a lot, so I want to help everybody else do better so they can like it too. I was contemplating trying to do a replay of other shot types to help explain a bit better, but I honestly think I need to focus on my PCB and IN attempts at the moment. If it's something you think would help in the future for after the draft though, or you want a replay for a specific spellcard or something though, just ask. I'll try to see what I can do in that case.

[Wen Yang]

I have to confess that I was using a crappy placeholder entry for my EoSD run... in part because I got addicted to Kichikuou Rance in the last 2 days of the draft and didn't even play touhou at all.

Will probably do better in the other games.