Hello Icho,
I have solved the new levels and also resolved all levels where my replays broke. I have my entire replay collection attached.
Regarding the new levels:
3 22 - The Graveyard Wow, this was an unusually tough one for me but it's a great one. Demonstrates the three tricks needed to avoid further zombie infection well.
I was a dummy and simply didn't think of having a lemming turn around on a blocker before assigning him a blocker and hence why I kept losing more than one lemming or needed to use two walkers, one to release the blocker and another to turn him around unnecessarily
3 23 - Laboratory of Explosions Easier than the previous level, but it definitely helps that I'm already aware of both of these tricks mentioned in the pretext. Even then, they occasionally go over my head! :laugh: Still, that's great that a level that teaches this is made for the NL Tutorial pack ;) Interestingly enough, I beat this level without the pretext ever loading, but that's because I have discovered a bug and I'm able to reproduce it.
3 24 - Containment Breach Yet another level that I was able to mostly figure out without the pretext ever loading, although what was mentioned in the pretext for this level I had figured out on my own. Once again, I was a dummy and completely missed what I mentioned in the spoiler for 3 22 above and therefore I was short a skill :forehead: It's amazing how sometimes these things get overlooked :XD:
6 8 - Saving Two Lems with One Bomb O.o, this was my favorite new level! :thumbsup: Not only is Proxima's tileset really nice, I really love the puzzle here. I remember namida suggesting on Discord this trick be taught in this pack.
6 9 - Stack and Step This was an unusually difficult level for me, and that's because I found it quite odd that the pre-text never even loaded when I first played this level. Even then, while I was trying to figure out what tricks you intended to teach in this level, I still managed to solve it on my own :P I have mentioned in various places around here that levels that provide lots of stackers tend to be hard ones for me. You can pretty much say these are "hard for kaywhyn levels." :laugh: Even then, this should be a backroute, considering I don't even use one of the tricks mentioned in the pretext when I did find out later on what it said.
6 10 - Jump the Sausage! This was also a difficult level for me, but it's a nice one. I'm glad that you put these levels teaching some stacker tricks, especially since they can be some of the most difficult ones to do. Even then, that didn't stop me from being able to complete certain United levels that required these tricks :P This might be a good time to add some tricks to Strato's topic on the stacker skill: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=3864.0 (https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=3864.0)
Levels I needed to resolve:
6 4 - Walking Over Dead Bodies
6 7 - Checkerboard's Crossing Much easier now than it was before thanks to all the pickups.
6 12 - Shimmichanga Now the walker is relevant instead of optional.
6 17 - A Different Kind of Space
Completed the first four ranks, replays attached.
The new content is very good for the most part. I have concerns with two particular levels, but the rest are going great so far. I really love the new Slider and Laserer tricks that you've shown off. Particularly liked the stuff about sliders+builders and the showcasing of how much a single laserer can do for you in a level.
Check my replay for Basic Training 1-11 The Guardian. I spent probably 45 minutes trying to get this solution to work and eventually did, but it's craaaazy fiddly. I now know from discussions in the Discord that the solution I found is not the intended solution, but so that nobody else tries what I tried, it might be best to tweak it to make sure what I did is impossible. It's not really your fault either, it was just me being a giant derp and forgetting that I could turn the climber/jumper around using the platformer. Btw, I really think one of the pre-level screens should mention that jumping is faster than running, since this level seemingly requires that fact.
The other one is Basic Training 1-27 Containment Breach. Assuming my solution is the intended one, I really don't like the precision on the right-hand side of the level. The builder bridge needs to be perfectly positioned, because if it's too far left then it won't reach high enough up the wall to allow the lemmings to step up into the 2nd miner tunnel later, but if it's too far right, it'll get chopped by the 1st miner. I might be wrong, but it feels like the margin is only a couple of pixels, and it took me 4-5 attempts to actually get it right... forcing me to redo most of the puzzle each time to adjust the builder placement, since there's no good way to check it ahead of time, seeing as the 2nd miner is the last thing you do in the puzzle. Frustrating.
And this level is quite fine imo, but I will note that Basic Training 1-14 King of the Sky took me quite a while, almost an hour off and on between the other puzzles... because I was stuck on the idea of having to assign the Floaters/Gliders either immediately or at the last second, resulting in me spending TONS of time exploring dead-end solutions, when you actually needed to assign one of the gliders mid-fall to have them land at the base of the wall and bash. I got it very quickly once I thought to try that, but thinking to try that in the first place took me quite a while. If you want to do anything to clue it more, that's up to you.
I'll do Advanced Training over the coming days, time permitting.
Advanced Rank complete and replays attached. Some of these were pretty tricky, even with the hints.
These ones:
9 Stack and Step
10 Jump the Sausage
13 Caught and Released
20 A Different Kind of Space
27 Victory Lap
...each took me at least half an hour. Not necessarily a bad thing, though it does make the beginner tag feel slightly misleading, hah.
Some specific comments:
I found the tooltip in 9 slightly cryptic. It took me a while to figure out the first trick, as we briefly discussed in the discord. But after that, it still took a while after that because there is multiple promising 'tricks' in the bottom left and I ended up picking all of the wrong ones first. You can have a walker step up onto the stacker mid-build in the bottom left, then turn them into a shimmier to have them shimmy up toward the top by themselves for example, which I thought was the intended path for a while. My fault.
For 10, the hard part was the bottom right. I spent a significant amount of time (~30 min) trying different combinations of stackers/builders/platformers, but the closest I got was one pixel short. You can see where I got here: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/249720184116477956/938209876763607090/SPOILER_unknown.png Eventually I gave up and asked for help and was given the solution to it, so... technically I never actually successfully solved this by myself.
For 13, I think the puzzle is really good but also really tough due to how much is going on at once. The whole block of 8 through 13 is, imo, harder than 14 through 16, so I think those two groups of levels should be swapped around. One thing that really caught me off guard is that in the bottom right, the timing works out perfectly (at least in my solution) if the first lemming that arrives becomes the stoner, then the second lemming becomes the builder worker. My first instinct was actually the opposite... I used a slider to make the first lemming that arrived the builder worker, then the second became the stoner... but if you do this thinking it'll buy the worker my time, it actually ends up not working out. A little bizarre, but hey.
For 20 and 27 I have no complaints, they're just tricky, but in a satisfying way. I know 20 in particular has been a real pain in the butt with regards to backroutes, so hopefully this solution is the actual one at last, because it's really cool!
For 20 the main thing which took me a long time to realize was how to get the crowd up to the exit despite not having any construction skills at that point. The fact you had to let the crowd past then trap them on top of the ramp using the blocker was the ingenious trick I was missing but did eventually realize. Very clever. For 27, the hard part was figuring out a way to release the crowd after fully preparing the path ahead. I eventually realized I could do it by assigning the lower miner ahead of time and then releasing the crowd later using a climber-bomber.
Congrats on getting through the NL Intro Pack in its current state. Looks like Icho will now need to find a nice afternoon/weekend to look over your solutions. Let's see if you managed to find any backroutes that Armani and I missed in our pre-testing! ;)
I've already stated to you that it's not quite complete since there will still be new levels to add, such as introduction levels to the new objects when they drop. Even then, any kind of feedback you can provide for Icho regarding unusual difficulty spikes, unclear pre-texts, etc, is helpful! :thumbsup:
@Icho
Swerdis has brought to my attention two builder-related tricks that weren't introduced anywhere in this pack,
- Dolly Dimple builder trick of isolating a worker lemming by building in one direction and only one lemming looks in the other direction, most notably for catching one of the last few lemmings from the entrance
- Building through a thin enough wall to leave a builder step past it to catch a lemming on the other side
I don't know whether or not these were ever discussed and a decision was made to not introduce them. Do you think they should? If yes, most definitely they're levels best suited for the Advanced Training rank :)
Also I noted down the tricks mentioned here! Those will be good additions for the next patch (although I think the first one will be Basic Training 2 rather).
That works too! :thumbsup:
I quickly looked through the pack again, and a few more tricks I thought of that I didn't see anywhere and could possibly use an introduction:
- Blockers can still turn lemmings around even if there's a tiny gap before the blocker (Pragmatism from Pimolems or War 13 from United, for examples)
- Along with this, maybe a tutorial on how blockers can still turn even if the other lemmings are a few pixels above or below the blocker (i.e, lemmings don't need to be at the same height as the blocker to still get turned by them, eg, Manic 13 from LPVI)
- There's a small enough gap before a wall so that bashers/miners can still reach and punch a hole in the wall on the other side so that you can get a climber or drop a slider into the newly made hole to start building, eg, Nightmare! 7 from Reunion)
Maybe these don't need introductions, but well, I'll just drop them off here just in case they might be worth being taught in this pack ;)