[NeoLemmix] Lemmings United [Difficulty: Hard-Extreme]

[607]

Looks very nice, and I like that it is 607 kB.

[IchoTolot]

V 2.8 is out!

The following levels have received a backroute fix:

- 4 37 (removed some steel + slight terrain changes)
- 4 39 (removed the stoner pick-up - so -1 stoner, +1 stacker, +1 platformer, +2 bashers, +1 save requirement)
- 4 40 (added a 3 minute timer, added some steel)

[namida]

On a side note - the [NeoLemmix] tag in the title isn't really needed, given that all packs on this board should be NeoLemmix.

[IchoTolot]

On a side note - the [NeoLemmix] tag in the title isn't really needed, given that all packs on this board should be NeoLemmix.

You are right there, I am still used to it though and think it looks neat.

[namida]

Finally got around to playing some of this.

I've completed the first rank, except for the final level of it. Attached are my replays (including my best attempt so far at 0141). No hints yet, please - I want to try a bit more first.

I felt that the X-of-everything levels (and a couple of other meant-to-be-simple ones) were more long and tedious than they needed to be, with many such levels taking over 10 minutes in-game time. However, once I got past those and into the puzzles, I really enjoyed this pack so far! I also find - though this isn't really your fault - that the traps in some graphic sets are almost inherently hidden traps, in particular the BeastII tileset's weasel(?) trap. The Biolab set also could perhaps use some darkening on the background; it's very easy to mistake terrain for background in some cases.

There are a couple of replays here that I think might be backroutes.

Some feedback on individual levels.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

0104 "Water Maze 2" - Why the "2" in the name?
0111 "Bright Colors And Funky Tunes" - Great to see this music make a comeback!
0119 "Silenced by Shining Lights" - This was one of my favorites so far!
0121 "Little Wilma" - Maybe I'm overlooking something, but I felt this level would've worked just fine even without the traps and the disarmer.
0126 "The Circular Lemming Reactor" - Did I backroute this one? If not, it's weird that it's impossible (as far as I can tell) to not get the walker pickup skills, yet they don't need to be used. They would be useful if a lemming is facing the wrong way upon reaching the bottom - except I had a spare platformer that would've been just as capable of solving that issue for an unlimited number of lemmings, rather than the limited number the walkers could help (though as I had no lemmings go the wrong way, I didn't need that either).
0127 "Dr Do-ping's Hideout" - Another especially great one.
0128 "Lamentations of the Lemmings" - It took me quite a while to notice the lattice structure of the wall could be used to gain height. Once I figured that out, this level was pretty straightforward.
0129 "Bring In The Siege Engineer" - I smell a backroute on this one.
0132 "McLemming's Climber Course" - I smell an even bigger backroute here.
0133 "At The Breaking Point" - A very good level, but I also felt this was a huge difficulty spike compared to the rest of the rank (aside from 0141).
0136 "Bloom and Doom" - If this is intended, it's very nicely hidden.
0138 "Sunny Side Down" - This level was extremely easy compared to the ones around it. A good level, but a very easy one.
0140 "Fall Like An Egyptian" - Another particularly great one.

[IchoTolot]

V 2.9 is out!

Based on namida's feedback the following changes for rank 1 were made:

Level swap:

- 1 33 <--> 1 38

Backroute fixes:

- 1 26 (locked the RR, - 1 platformer, 1 pick-up skill removed, some steel added)
- 1 29 (some steel added)

Comments on namida's comments:

I felt that the X-of-everything levels (and a couple of other meant-to-be-simple ones) were more long and tedious than they needed to be, with many such levels taking over 10 minutes in-game time. However, once I got past those and into the puzzles, I really enjoyed this pack so far! I also find - though this isn't really your fault - that the traps in some graphic sets are almost inherently hidden traps, in particular the BeastII tileset's weasel(?) trap. The Biolab set also could perhaps use some darkening on the background; it's very easy to mistake terrain for background in some cases.

The bunch of very long levels in the earlier stages of the pack are indeed made a bit tedious by design I must admit. They can easily be shorter no discussion and convincing needed there! They are not meant to be very great, but there is another reason why they are made this way.
I plan to teach routine and endurance here, as I think this one of the first major things a new player desperatly needs.
Just assign skills and get through these levels moderately efficient, use a lot of skills, gain more of a feeling for the abilities. This routine and the endurance to tackle long tasks I see as very critical things a player needs to increase their skill level. It's not just learning tricks!
This routine for example enables the ability to see the more hidden usages of tricks and simple assignments and is the first step of seeing solution patterns.
I also rather have a few long X-of-everything levels than a ton like the old game here. I still see them very nessesary, because of my own experiences on how I learned Lemmings. I learned so much in terms of basic skills by simply getting through larger landscapes with a bunch of skills in the beginning of playing custom levels.
Also this prepares for longer tasks in the future by developing the nessesary endurance.

I still tried to keep them to a reasonable number though and tried to find a balance between these long tasks and short puzzles in this first rank.

But I could write whole topics here and I think everyone has their own philosophy to teach things in the end.

Now to the more level related:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

0104 "Water Maze 2" - Why the "2" in the name?

Fishthekiller had Water Maze 1. I decided to create a more refined one.

0121 "Little Wilma" - Maybe I'm overlooking something, but I felt this level would've worked just fine even without the traps and the disarmer.

Totally! My goal is more to hammer into the players brains that permanent skills can be cloned. So I added another variable, even if it's otherwise redundant.

0126 "The Circular Lemming Reactor" - Did I backroute this one? If not, it's weird that it's impossible (as far as I can tell) to not get the walker pickup skills, yet they don't need to be used. They would be useful if a lemming is facing the wrong way upon reaching the bottom - except I had a spare platformer that would've been just as capable of solving that issue for an unlimited number of lemmings, rather than the limited number the walkers could help (though as I had no lemmings go the wrong way, I didn't need that either).

Backroute + the pick-ups are only there to give an option to reduce walking times.

0132 "McLemming's Climber Course" - I smell an even bigger backroute here.

This is a fine alternative. I just want to teach creating a smooth wall there. The second way is using another lem with a basher+walker while the digger starts.

0136 "Bloom and Doom" - If this is intended, it's very nicely hidden

There are variations here, so you got a few options.

And I must say this loud:
I smiled so much over your 1 41 attempt!! It's just like I walked into a time machine and watched your Reunion 1 41 attempt again for the first time! Some things never change!

[namida]

I smiled so much over your 1 41 attempt!! It's just like I walked into a time machine and watched your Reunion 1 41 attempt again for the first time! Some things never change!

I forget what exactly went on there beyond "I backrouted it with a solution much more complicated than it needed to be" (and let's wait until I've solved it to clarify that any further, or at least spoiler tag it), but one thing has definitely changed: You successfully managed to prevent what I was trying this time.

[namida]

Here's my re-solves of 0126 and 0129. (Haven't looked at 0141 again yet.)

[IchoTolot]

Here's my re-solves of 0126 and 0129. (Haven't looked at 0141 again yet.)

Exactly intended!

[namida]

Aaand, 0141 solved. Not sure if this is intended; a couple of the skills had to be very precise.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If this is intended - basically, the reason I failed before is that I spent so much time thinking about how to contain the crowd, that I didn't stop to think "do I even need to contain the crowd, or can I just delay them a bit?"

This was a very nice level!

[IchoTolot]

Exactly intended!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Basically I wanted that 3 builder block from the last Reunion 1st rank level to return + getting the trick from "Sactum of Nippius"  in and that little platformer trick to round off the core of the tricks.

[namida]

Completed the first 10 20 levels of Neutrality. Holy shit, this is a HUGE step up in difficulty from the first rank - at least at first; I felt the difficulty dropped a bit as I got further into the rank. Though I'm still only half way, so no doubt it'll pick up again.

Individual level comments (click to show/hide)

0201 "Arkon" - To be honest, I think this was the second-hardest of these levels (after 0207)! (EDIT: This was written before I solved 0211 to 0220; I'd now say 0214 is harder as well.) I'm not sure if this is intended or not - on one hand, the level layout fits just right for this solution, but on the other hand, it feels kind of brute-force-y.
0202 "Midnight Stroll" - Excellent level! It seemed impossible at first, until I realised I just had to get a non-glider to do the bottom platform (and get all the gliders past there first).
0203 "Let It Krachen" - This one wasn't particularly difficult, but it was very fun.
0204 "Move Beach! Get Out The Way!" - I wonder if the required precision on this level can be reduced a bit? It's a very clever puzzle, though.
0205 "Pandora's Cave" - I like the crowd control trick here, but everything beyond that feels very filler-y and most of the builders need to be pixel-perfect, despite that requirement not really adding anything to the level.
0206 "Cyclic Crowd Control" - Eh. It's very obvious how to do this one, it just takes a lot of fiddling to actually make it work.
0207 "Being High And Seeing Double" - This was definitely the hardest of these ones! But I'd also say it's the best level in the pack so far! Though I must say, there are a LOT of things I tried that failed by a single pixel here.
0208 "Let The Room Get Chiller" - Did you mean "Chillier" in the name? Anyway, this might be a backroute, but if not this was by far the easiest of these levels, and even easier than a lot of rank 1 levels.
0209 "Open The Port!" - Also fairly easy, although hard enough to be a 2nd rank breather level. I'm fairly sure this one was intended.
0210 "Racing Hearts" - I wasn't really the biggest fan of this one, it was more frustrating than anything else. (I do like the music, though!)

---

0211 "IchoTolot's Flying Circus" - Fun, but pretty simple.
0212 "Sever Sacrificium" - Very nice level! The general approach is obvious almost right away, but it took me a while to work out the finer details, especially the blocker trick.
0213 "Fence and Forget" - This was one of the easier ones, but still a nice level.
0214 "3791980" - Okay so first; any meaning behind the name? Anyway, this level was INCREDIBLE! It's another one that looked impossible at first, and turned out to have an amazing solution. I think this already knocked 0207 off the "best so far" spot.
0215 "Mysterious Glide" - This one was very easy.
0216 "Symmetrical Asymmetry" - So was this one.
0217 "A Little Bit Of Backlash" - Clever idea to do a cloner-based variant of that trick! I also solved this one quite quickly though.
0218 "Stress? Just Cool It!" - The general idea is obvious right away, and then it just becomes a matter of setting everything up correctly. Not a terrible level, but not one of my favorites either.
0219 "A Wizard Is Never Late" - This one was extremely easy. I figured out what to do right away; it took a few minutes to get the correct timing, but even that was fairly simple (nothing like eg. the previous level, that took quite a while to figure out the exact setup). I'd say apart from 0208 (which I suspect may have been a backroute) and 0211, this was the easiest level so far in this rank.
0220 "Snake Ways" - This one was also pretty easy, once I remembered that only falling / floating / gliding lemmings can't disarm (other skills will just be interrupted, not fall victim to the trap).

[IchoTolot]

V 3.0 is out!

Based on namida's feedback the following changes for rank 2 were made:

Fixed backroute:

- 2 08 (some terrain changes + the level name in-game was fixed; the file name still is the old one due to simplicity reasons and I don't think this matters much )

Positioning changes:

- 2 01 ---> 203 (so the old 2 02 and 2 03 are 1 place earlier)
- (The new) 2 01 <--> 2 15
- 2 05 <--> 2 19

Comments on the feedback:

A few of the "this was easy" cases I think come from the you already know the trick special case here.
Prime examples would be:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

fencer + basher in 2 13, miner interrupt + platformer in 2 16, the trick in 2 18, disarmer behavior in 2 20, I would even guess the intended route in 2 08 falls into this category.
For the ones where I had a similar feeling before I applied some changes.

What I would like to know/want you to know:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The old 2 01 "Arkon", I still think this isn't too difficult, but I moved it 2 placed further.
Yeah, I take the blame for the bloated 2nd half for 2 05   I just had too much fun creating the landscape here while experimenting with the tileset.
What was fiddly in 2 06? I never had any fiddly issues myself, or reported ones from beta testers.
I am very surprised that 2 07 was very hard.
Why was 2 10 frustraiting? So far this level was quite popular from the feedback I have gotten. But this could be a personal preference thing.
I am honored that 2 14 was a such a hit. The number is a) a reference to the L2 outdoor level which was named such a number as well and b) It's the telephone number for my local pizza delivery place as this was Simon and my theory what the original number stands for.
2 17 was the one I was considering a bit hard here so a fast solving time surprises me a bit. Josh even had some problems here, but I think this comes down to you already know the trick.
The old 2 19 is nearly timingless when using the climber.

[namida]

Respose to your comments (click to show/hide)

I didn't already know the Fencer-Basher trick, though it wasn't hard to figure out. My first attempt was that, except starting the basher at the bottom of the fencer tunnel. When this didn't quite make it in time, I figured "oh wait, a basher will probably keep going in a fencer tunnel" and tried it.

0206, I had a lot of cases where the crowd ended up in the wrong place and some died / etc.

I think 0210 probably is a preference thing, yeah. Despite having made a few levels of a somewhat similar style myself (eg. "Splittin' Like Crazy" from LPO), I'm not the biggest fan of them when it comes to playing.

[namida]

Looked at the next three levels - I say "looked at" because I only actually solved one of them.

Individual level feedback (click to show/hide)

0221 "Tonight It Is Showtime" - I honestly don't have the faintest clue what I'm meant to be doing here. There doesn't appear to be any way to get a lemming down to the bottom without first using a builder. However, there's no way to get the second builder pickup without using another builder, except by digging straight down, and I can't see any way to safely manage the crowd while doing this other than two digger tunnels, but having them offset like this means falling straight past the pickup. Unless I'm overlooking something that should be obvious, this level is far too hard for the 2nd rank.

0222 "Basher Laboratory GRO" - Yeah, I don't really think using that trick in a setup that requires 11 bashers, with other elements of the solution both before and after it, while requiring it to be done at the right timing, was a good idea. To be honest, I don't really think using that trick at all, outside of maybe a setup that just uses one or two bashers, or in a proof-of-concept level containing nothing but the trick, is a good idea. Aside from one minor element near the end, I could tell how to solve this level as soon as I saw it, but actually executing it was a nightmare. Sorry, but this is by far the worst level in the pack so far.

0223 "Go On, Make Their Day" - This one looks like it probably has a fair and reasonable-for-the-position solution, but I'm a bit burnt out after the last two to try much for now... I'll continue later.