OK, so here are my replays for the levels I've managed to solve so far. I came close to solving Strato's The Creation, but there is one key element to this level which eluded me, and it's to do with Slider behaviour:
Sliders do not simply walk off the edge of a platform, bridge or block: they always turn around and drop backwards, even if the terrain piece is only 1px thick!
This behaviour is very unique to the Slider skill, and definitely lends itself well to puzzle creation. It makes it more than just another way to get down from a height: it's also a way to turn a lemming around without needing Walkers
Therefore, the Slider is definitely top of my list from this bunch of new skills. That's not really saying much though coz they're all great! :thumbsup:
Have you seen my level "The Creation"? It wasn't in your "Strato Exp Skills levels" ZIP. And that one should definitely need the Spearer to work.
Yes, I've tried it several times and was unable to come up with a solution. After watching your replay, I'm certain that the reason for the no-solve was because it didn't occur to me that a Slider would turn and drop from the edge of a Builder bridge: this is even more key to the solution of this level than any of the other assignments!
This is a clever trick, and makes it a particularly interesting level amongst this bunch. The more of these sorts of tricks we learn, the better our ability to solve levels! :lemcat:
Just a few gently burning comments after reading the replies to namida's New Skills Potential post (https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=5236):
A quick glance at the "Favourite Tricks" comments has made me realise that these skills are even better than I thought! In particular, - Sliders landing 1px ahead of the wall they are sliding down - I thought this was a bug, but I can see how it could be extremely useful
- Laserblaster tunnels being able to cross! :lem-mindblown: :thumbsup:
- Grenadiers being able to blast through OWW
- Spearers being able to land a vertical spear which can be used as a Blocker
We'll definitely need some decent tutorial levels to demonstrate the most likely possibilities.
The Slider>Shimmier transition possibilities are particularly worthy of note: this is doable from any type of overhang, and cannot be emulated by any other skill/object combination.
The extensive range of the Laserblaster is one of the many things that makes it such a good skill, I definitely wouldn't want to see the range shortened from what it is now, at least not by any significant amount.
The fact that the Grenadier blast radius is larger than that of the Bomber is, again, a very good thing. Anything that can make such light work of OWW is OK in my book! ;P But seriously - yes, it's a powerful skill, but due to the intensity of its arc, it's one you still have to be fairly careful with.
I've said the Spearer is my least favourite, but I could definitely get used to it. I think we're all in the "All Four Skills" club, really :lemcat:
Although this isn't just a popularity contest as the general potential can be different from the popularity.
That may be technically true - theoretically, a lot of people could enjoy something that would enable e.g. bad puzzle design - but in practice, I'd say those two things go hand in hand:
1) If a skill is popular, a lot of people will use it, therefore lots of level ideas will be created. That's already loads of potential by itself, but you're pretty much also guaranteed to get quite a lot of decent puzzles out of this if so many different minds throw their hats in the ring.
2) If there were really something we would consider "bad for the game but popular"... well, wouldn't that just mean that the community consensus on what makes good level design shifts? :D
Just like we see it happening now already: Initially, this whole idea came from the shared feeling "19 is a weird number, let's wrap NeoLemmix up with one 20th skill".
The somewhat unspoken consensus also seemed to be "NeoLemmix is already complex enough, let's not overdo it with too many skills."
Now there are more voices than I would ever have expected on team "4 more skills!" (insert Trump joke here). As if this experimental version had brought out the inner Lemmings 2: The Tribes player in all of us. ;)
One more thing I realised about the Laserer:
It's not just that you can cross them - you can obviously also clone them. This is another issue with the Fencer: Clone him inside his own tunnel and the clone is cancelled immediately.
With a Laserer, obviously you would have to have him carve out a tunnel first, then once he is inside that tunnel, assign a second Laserer and clone that one.
Still a little bit of a hassle, because that second un-cloned Laserer would be pretty much useless, since it shoots along the exact same path the first one has created, so it most likely wouldn't remove any further terrain - except for its range, of course, now that the Laserer is inside his own tunnel, i.e. further away from the point where he fired the first shot.
However, cloning a Laserer inside his own tunnel is still way less complicated - just one additional skill assignment - then getting a Fencer clone to patch up the patch behind the original Fencer by using a Platformer first, and at such a position that he doesn't leave a gap between platform and tunnel ceiling, so that he can then walk up right to the wall and start fencing, which still requires a second assignment of the Fencer anyway (meaning, cloning a Fencer actually never leads him to fence directly).
1) Bashers can "widen" Laserer tunnels just like they can widen Fencer tunnels. However, in case of a Fencer tunnel, this makes it Shimmier-friendly (which the default Fencer tunnel isn't). In contrast, a Laserer tunnel is Shimmier-friendly by default, yet sending a Basher down the slope will make it Shimier-unfriendly, because the Basher will give the ceiling dents of 2 pixels in height.
This is a nice contrast, I think. While the Laserer and Fencer are similar, with these important differences in the detail, they're indeed shaping up more and more to become the Stoner/Stacker couple of destructive skills.
2) Water can EDIT: NOT stop Laserers.
3) The Spearer has a great unique application in which, because the spear is longer than its competitor that is the Stoner, it can oftentimes create the right spot from which other things need to be done - meaning without the correct Spearer placement first, the correct position to assign a given other skill does not exist yet. This is indeed huge puzzle potential that's unique to the Spearer. :lem-shocked:
Because where in levels so far, if the solution is cleverly hidden in plain sight, the correct spots to assign all the skills are there - you just need to identify them.
With the Spearer however, it might indeed be that there is no correct spot to assign a certain skill. So you look at the landscape and find nothing. Now you need to factor in where you might be able to create the correct spot by throwing a piece of terrain there.
In the older of the two newest example levels, this "skill for which you need to find the right spot" is the Jumper: The Climber wouldn't have anything to land on (and to jump off off) if he hadn't thrown the spear there first.
I've added a steel square to prevent the Slider shortcut; nothing that inteferes with the intended solution nor either of the backroutes.
- Make a thin floor with water below so that an explosion too close will lead to death.
- Make a few zombie prison cells a bit upwards over the supposed basher tunnel in the block so that the bigger explosion will dent+release them.
Those are good suggestions, IchoTolot - indeed I've seen these applied a couple of times to fix Bomber backroutes. ;) Or at least "Bomber backroutes that only continue to work if you can make the lemming a Climber before" (like the example with the thin floor and water underneath).
With the Grenader, however, because you can vary the height of the impact depending on from where you throw, it's more like the player always has the choice between "walking Bomber" (=grenade close up to the wall) and "climbing Bomber" (=grenade thrown from further away).
The Zombie approach would require the Zombies to be inside the one-way wall, at such a height that indeed the grenade would free them but the Basher wouldn't. Since that is going to look quite ugly, and the Zombies will be completely irrelevant to the intended solution, I would consider this another "last resort" on par with making the Grenader a pickup skill.
In this particular level, one could not make all Grenaders a pickup skill, because one is required right at the start. However, of course some of them could be made into pickups.
It actually doesn't work to have the Slider land on the left side first, then throw the grenade himself to break through the ground, and continue sliding - because once he reaches the bottom, he immediately turns around and faces the fire trap already on the very first frame of being a Walker. Great way to enforce throwing from afar! :thumbsup:
As I said, I'm not even that strongly opposed to the current Grenader crater size and shape (funnily enough, in this level I noticed that when you throw strictly from above and hit the ground with the grenade, the crater does actually look pretty circular already). Personally, I would still accept the Grenader as it is right now and be perfectly happy about it.
We just need to be very aware of its dangers, and that indeed, such "last resort" measures as almost making Grenaders pickup skills by default on most levels where they appear (which would at least be in-flavour, gotta pick up the grenade before you can use it :D ), or placing Zombies at awkward spots, might be required more often than not to keep those levels backroute-proof.
Nice levels, NieSch!
Don't Get Cold Feet is a really nice, neat little puzzle! It took me a while to get the Jumper to Shimmier transition
My solution to Bookends to the Rescue is possibly a backroute...
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Solved "Eternal Flame," plus scored 100% on "Morning Rescue" :)
Still can't figure out "Keep Off The Grass", though; managed to save 8 by using compression method + RR85
The slider is showing a huge amount of variety in its potential uses. Yes, it's another parkour skill, but it doesn't just add a new movement - it offers a lot of interaction with others, and decent amount of interaction with the terrain-affecting skills too. For the most part, its behavior is understandable and very predictable - the only case that really requires trial and error is "what happens if a lemming that's both a climber and a slider, jumps into a wall" (answer: it climbs), and that's a matter of "try it once, now you know".
Slider is medium in terms of maintenance / bug potential. Permanent skills are often high-risk for bugs (in particular, Glider has been by far the nastiest skill for bugs), but as far as they go, Slider is pretty average. More importantly, the bugs tend to be the kind that are very simple to investigate and fix. It's likely to be a case of that, once we've got it right, it shouldn't need any further maintaining - it should continue to work without needing to make further adjustments.
Backroute potential still needs further examination for all skills, but Slider hasn't shown too many problems so far, and I would expect most that arise are fairly manageable due to the effects of the slider being fairly limited without adding other skills into the mix (which in turn allows more opportunities to address backroutes, as those skills could become the target of a fix rather than the slider itself).
Likely outcome: I expect the slider will make the cut.
The grenader has a lot of potential in solutions, but is a tricky one to work with. A parabolic arc is always trickier to visualise than a straight line - this is why the projectiles have the skill shadow even in the exp build, at least for the arc. There is the concern of if this could lead to too much complexity. It's also very powerful, as many people have noted. The recent update has very slightly nerfed the power, but only very slightly.
Coding complexity is a big concern here. Projectiles essentially end up being a new object (albeit a bit different from traditional ones) and a new skill in one. The high complexity is somewhat negated by the "two for one" tradeoff, where the majority of effort spent on the Grenader also benefits the Spearer (and vice versa), and that the majority (though not all) of bugs that apply to one also apply to the other. However, these have had by far the most bugs so far.
Backroute-wise, while this still needs to be fully investigated, my impression is that the Grenader is giving rise to more backroute issues than all three other new skills combined. This may be reduced if the skill is weakened, although the parabolic arc (which allows quite a variety of impact locatoins in most setups) + bomber-like destruction effect still means Grenader is always likely to be up there with Walkers, Stoners and Builders for backroute potential, if not higher.
Likely outcome: I suspect the grenader will not be making the cut.
(Interestingly, when I first released the exp, my thought was that Grenader might be the only one to make the cut, so this goes to show that just because I think something at one point, doesn't by any means make it the final decision.)
The spearer has the same complexity as the grenader, perhaps a bit more due to the angle-of-impact effect. However, adding a very small piece of terrain is far, far less powerful than removing a large chunk, which in turn likely also reduces the useful ways a spearer can be used in any given situation.
Just like usage, the coding complexity is slightly higher than the grenader. All bugs so far that only applied to one or the other, as far as I recall, applied to the Spearer. It does need to be taken into account that if one projectile makes the cut but the other doesn't, that in a sense doubles the effort needed, on the grounds that "effort that would previously benefit two skills, is now only benefitting one".
The spearer is not likely to be even nearly as backroute-prone as the grenader, though, due to the much lower power. It's still a ranged skill with lots of flexibility around where it hits, but the effect of the impact is far lesser, and needs more effort to make use of.
Likely outcome: I could still see this one going either way, and don't feel I can make a prediction at this point.
I've already indicated this, but this one I think is very likely to make it. It's easy to understand, and only involves a straight line. There are some tricky cases around range, especially when turning around mid-laser (or being cloned, which is essentially the same thing), but these are under discussion for changes and at any rate it is not the only skill that can need getting used to. It's showing a lot of interesting potential as well, and doesn't tend to produce particularly finnicky results.
As far as coding goes, Laserer is showing itself to be possibly the most bug-resistant of the skills - I didn't expect it to be so solid, but here we are. I have little if any concerns about the maintainability of it.
Backroute potential still needs further examination for all skills, but I'm not seeing too much in the way of issues with the laserer, and the range reduction has likely reduced the risk of this.
Likely outcome: I am near-certain that the laserer will make the cut.
Taxing 3 Heaven Can Wait (We Hope!!!) - initially thought impossible, but can be done by using spearers and grenaders in combination to create downwards movement through the platform (credit to Pooty for discovering this particular trick)
Taxing 8 The Art Gallery - this one is one of the few levels which almost plays out like an intended solution...
Taxing 14 Hunt The Nessy - requires multiple workers, and just as much the epic adventure that the original is ;P