Conway, this is a plea for you to change or remove "The Great Wall" from your LemEdit Remake set.
Of course I'm doing something wrong, but there seems to be no logical way of correcting that wrong thing (whatever it is, I can't say for certain). Blockers and bashers being off by one or two pixels will completely change the outcome of a solution. (Yes, I have tried messing with the release rate, and different trap situations, and they help to a small extent, but do not solve the problem.)
One of these must be the goal of your level, otherwise I don't see the point:
1) To see how well players deeply understand the core mechanics of the game (i.e. judging long bashing distances and determining exactly where the final bash will end up, or determining exactly how a group of 20 lemmings will walk between a blocker in a specific position and a wall that is being bashed)
2) To frustrate players to no end as they find that what they know must be the solution does not work, time after time, even though there is no logical way to modify the solution so that it does work more often than not (or even, less often than not, but more often than once in a thousand tries!)
3) To measure players' luck tolerance threshold.
If one of these is not your goal, then one or more of the following changes should be acceptable (in order of my personal preference. I am sort of joking about d, and f should actually fall after c in the list, but I wanted to put it last):
a) Lowering the number of lemmings in the level, perhaps to 10. To eliminate luck altogether, lower this to 3.
b) Widening the level. I've found that the level gets easier rather than harder as you progress (although I've still managed to lose when I thought I was finally going to obtain victory), due to the longer distances the lemmings must travel. If the level were to start out wide, there would be fewer collision conflicts.
c) Make the level much shorter, like the LemEdit version (which was, dare I say, more tolerable!). The later stages of the level are absolutely nothing new when you get there, so why bother making a big level out of this? If anything, it makes it harder to see where you go wrong, since the reason you lose when freeing the 7th blocker could have been caused by a basher at the wrong pixel when freeing the 4th blocker, or something minor like that.
d) Somehow make the places where you have to bash and block (and I'm talking pixels here) more clear. I don't know how you'd do this without making the level stupid, but right now it is really really difficult to see how and why you went wrong when you lose.
e) Changing the level to give players more control over the lemmings, while still maintaining the general concept. Of course this would require more work than the previous suggestions.
f) Remove the level and replace it with a puzzle! B)
If you oppose suggestions a,b, or c on the grounds that they make the level too easy, then you admit that the level's difficulty comes out of chance and luck alone (unless #1,2, and/or 3 are part of your motivation for this level, of course), and is therefore no better than "All or nothing"! (In fact, since "All or nothing" technically does not require luck, this is perhaps worse.)
You could argue that my "Floating to safety" level has a high luck factor, and this may or may not be true, but there is a definite pattern that will give you decent enough results to pass the level with a few tries, plus the level is short and one mistake does not necessarily cost you the whole level! (It is possible to save more than the required amount.)
Sorry, I don't mean to sound hostile, so don't take offense if I did, but this level bothers me in so many ways that I felt the need for this long post. But I'm really not mad
