Secreted to save space: (I didn't read the other replies after Watcher's yet, so I may be repeating something)
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Watcher wrote:
What irritates me most about this hold is that too many of the rooms give you very little or no margin of error. Take, for instance, First Level 1S1E. The idea isn't bad at all - you need to get enough roaches to spawn so that you can block the rightmost roach queen. Fine. In order to do this, you not only have to get each of the other queens to spawn as many roaches as possible, you also have to do so in the correct order. Make a single mistake, and the room becomes unsolvable.
I wouldn't have personally changed this particular room at all. Reduce the roach requirement, and the room becomes quickly trivial. It's part of the trick to see why you were a few roaches short (Referring to the correct order). Also, I hope
this room didn't feel tedious. After that single mistake, it shouldn't take long at all to get to the position in which you were.
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As for the timer rooms, okay, I admit it. The one on the second level is too tight (And the concept isn't really *that* interesting). But there aren't exactly that many of them in the hold... And the others have far more room for error. Actually, L1:1N2E was built so that if you used the trick, the room would become much easier, while it was still possible (but a lot harder) to be cleared otherwise for people going for best scores.
Mostly, I get the impression that someone took a hold about as difficult as late JtRH, browsed through the Challenges forum and collected the most difficult challenges for each room, and decided to enforce all of them. I can't see challenges being created for any of the rooms I've seen so far - there's no way to improve on a regular completion of the rooms.
This is intentional. I simply didn't find this a bad thing when making the hold. I've not generally built rooms, so someone would go to create challenges for them (The challenges board is very inactive anyway). There are still several intentionally built ones, though. (Not referenced in speech or anything)
On top of that, there's so far been an annoying overreliance on lots of roach queens to create difficulty. Especially First Level 3E and First Level 1N strike me as rooms that consist of a regular puzzle plus a lot of roach queens behind force arrows to make it harder.
Okay... I agree with you here. Those rooms could've been more interesting with less roach queens and more different tricks. Thanks, I'll try to keep in mind when making rooms later. But again, this isn't a major focus in most of the areas in the hold. It just happened that there were several of those near the beginning.
Then there's First Level 1N2E and Second Level 4S, both of which are pretty regular horde management rooms, except that the first is on a rather tight timer, and the second is rendered unsolvable if you make a mistake during the first 35 turns or so. Finally, there's First Level 2N1E which consists of a lot of QW-ing with an enforced efficiency of one roach every other turn, which is just plain tedious.
L1-1N2E: The timer isn't that tight if you block the queens in the beginning. One of the main problems here was making the timer long enough, but still not too long to make the "
direct approach"
too easy. It was supposed to be extremely hard, but was maybe still a little too easy in the end, as some people completed it the hard way without thinking about alternatives at all. But yes, the timer could've been better. One more spawn for the non-challenge-timer could've been a good idea, and several moves less for the challenge-timer.
L2-4S: Yes, the room becomes unsolvable. Saying 35 moves sounds worse to me than it really is, though, because it's really just about doing thing X before progressing with the room normally. And you should see exactly
where you made the mistake, so it's easy to correct it next time.
L1-2N1E: It's enforced to be 1 roach every 2 turns, because the room wouldn't work otherwise. And no, I
wouldn't have built it if there wasn't a CTRL+Q/W option in DROD.
). That being said, what I enjoy most about this game is the challenging holds - I tend to abandon easier ones fairly quickly - and this one is by far the hardest from start to (and here I'm assuming) finish that I've encountered. I hope that I am able to finish this one before I retire in 25 years. 
)
