Lemmings 2 Classic Tribe - save requirement for silver?

[namida]

I'm probably going to end up remaking these levels for Lemmix (and by extension, NeoLemmix) at some point, and I feel that the best place to set the save requirement for each level would be the same as the overall requirement for Silver for the tribe as a whole. Does anyone know what number of lemmings this is? (Or is it more complicated than that? I'm not overly familiar with how L2 works.)

[Clam]

This is a good question, and one I'd be curious to know the answer to myself. AFAIK it hasn't been found yet, because everyone wants gold and no one cares for silver

The Gold requirement is defined per level, and to get Gold for the tribe overall, you have to get Gold on each individual level. Likewise, for Silver overall you have to get Silver or better per level.

The Lemmings 2 level file format has a field for the Gold requirement (in terms of lemmings lost), but not one for Silver. I'd guess it's something like (number required for Gold - x) for some constant x. [EDIT: comments from IRC suggest it might be a percentage (eg. half) rather than an absolute.] It might also depend on how many lemmings you start a level with - say you start with 2 lemmings and save 1, do you get Silver or Bronze?

It'd be straightforward to test the requirement - create a trivial level, vary the the Gold requirement (and maybe the starting lemming count), and save different numbers until you find the cutoff between Silver and Bronze.

[ccexplore]

Given that few people would even recognize a number as based off of the silver requirement (unless you explicitly told them so), maybe best to just set it based on factors such as:

- is the level meant to be easier or harder (the later levels obviously harder).  For harder levels you may even consider basing the save requirement on gold instead.
- is the level meant to be more open-ended (eg. Lemtris) or just one intended solution
- at what save requirement would the level allow for overly trivial solutions (relative to the intended ones) that aren't worthy to be kept?

etc.  Basically same as how you'd normally decide on save requirements for any other levels.  For some levels it is likely that the save requirement could actually be quite low and still requires you to solve it the intended way(s), in which case rather than trying to figure out exactly what silver is, making it simply 50% or the gold requirement (for hard levels) may well be more appropriate.

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(That being said, it is still interesting to find out how the game decides on the silver cutoff exactly, even if not for purpose of the remake.  I've read that it is percentage based but don't remember the source and definitely can't speak to the reliability of the source even if I remember.)

[Proxima]

Looking at the levels, I notice that Level 1 has 20 bombers (it has 20 of everything) while all other levels have a small number of bombers, except Level 10 which has 20. This suggests that the designers intended bombing most of the terrain on that level to be available as a solution.

One way to set a non-arbitrary save requirement would be to allow the player to lose, on every level, the same as the number of bombers. That actually seems to work pretty well in terms of ccexplore's criteria 

[Clam]

I've done the testing I mentioned above and found the cutoff between Bronze and Silver:

T = the number of lemmings you start the level with.
L = the number of lemmings you can lose and still get Gold.
G = T - L = the number of lemmings you need to save for Gold.
S = G - T/2 (round up the result) is the number of lemmings you need for Silver.


I've also found the thresholds for all the different post-level messages. There are 15 of these, many of which I'd never seen before! Here they are:

Saved (minimum)	Medal	Message
G	Gold	Excellent! A gold standard successful rescue attempt.
G-1	Silver	That was a sparkling performance.
G-2	Silver	Nice one! But can you give that extra bit of effort?
G-3	Silver	You got a grade "A" for merit.
G-4	Silver	You obviously had few problems there.
G-5	Silver	That was a reasonably good go.
G-6	Silver	Do you think those were acceptable losses?
S	Silver	That was a passable effort. Must try harder.
S-1	Bronze	A little practice might be what you need.
S-2	Bronze	Not bad, but not good either.
S-3	Bronze	That just wasn't good enough. They're relying on you.
S-4	Bronze	That wasn't very impressive was it?
S-5	Bronze	You saved so few that they are going to be very lonely.
1	Bronze	Uh oh. That was a feeble effort.
0	None	Oh Dear. You seem to have made this tribe extinct!

In ambiguous cases where more than one of the above cases applies, the order of precedence is: 0 > Bronze > Silver > 1.


I've started a new topic for this in case we ever decide to do similar investigations into other Lemmings games

[Wafflem]

Pacguy765 from YouTube has made a cut-and-copy of the Lemmings 2 Classic levels for Lemmini. He was probably the one who figured out the save requirement for the ten levels. The download link is also in the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hviZ0oX_fSU