All right, time to get my report on the rest of the decoy rooms together.
For clarity, here is the proposed change as it relates to decoys:
If there is a brain in the room, queens will ignore decoys if they have a pathmap to the player. If there is no pathmap, they will react to decoys within range as they would if there were no brain in the room.
Now, I didn't really know how to categorize one room, so I'll just note it here. It's already been mentioned in the post on stalwarts, though, so this is just a minor follow-up.
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Moving on, here are the easiest cases to deal with. In these rooms, all the queens can't move at all, so there's no way for a change to affect demos. In a lot of these, they're stuck on force arrows so it will be hard to check from the previews alone - feel free to double-check my work in case I've overlooked something.
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Another simple category is one where there are no decoy potions - only preplaced decoys. And in particular, in these rooms there's no way for the queens to even get near them, so the change would have no impact.
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The next category is a little bit more complicated, but not that much. In these rooms, you can't break the brain pathmap to the queens, so they will always act on Beethro's position rather than the decoy's. Some of these will take a little explaining, though.
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Next we have rooms that wouldn't be impacted by the change for reasons other than the above. This either means the interaction is entirely impossible, or cannot happen on a winning run.
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Below Witherwood - Citadel of Blades - 1 North, 1 East
The decoy potion is the only way to kill the brain, so decoys, brains, and queens can't exist at the same time in a winning demo.
Darkness of the unknown - Floor 8 - Shadow's chasm - 1 South, 1 East
A tricky puzzle. The plate below the queen closes off the door just before the green door, so the queen can't move or spawn before you reach that door.
This means that if you get her to move in response to the decoy while the brain is still alive, you won't be able to exit. So the change would just creates a new way to fail, which you'd have to go out of your way to make happen.
Figure Or Ground - The Maze - 1 North
This hold is a maze where rooms have to be traversed multiple times, but luckily this one gets cleared on the first pass so we don't have to consider others.
It's pretty tightly constrained. The queen is going to spawn one roach no matter what; the only way to kill both is to limit spawns to one and have the decoy stab the single roach while standing on the fuse. Which means the queen will try to retreat to the east, but she's already as far as she can go in that direction.
Ice Cap Vision - Level 02: Survivors - 1 North
The decoy potion is surrounded by orbs, walls, and pits, and this is a JtRH hold so things that can destroy orbs don't exist yet. You can't get it, so it can't impact the room in any way.
Mysteries Of The Deep - Twelfth Level - 1 North
To get to the queens, you have to hit the orb. This requires clearing the briar off the south plate, which requires using the first decoy to either light the fuse or just blow up a bomb directly. And the second potion has to be used to kill the brain, because the south exit will be blocked off before the briar finishes growing to it so you need to kill it with a decoy to open the west door.
Mysteries Of The Deep - Twelfth Level - 1 North, 1 West
You can only get this potion after dropping the green doors, which means there won't be any brains or roach queens left.
The Wrong Way - The Architect's Folly - Entrance
You start by the brain and decoy potion, facing west.
Only the queen on the west side can move, the rest are stuck on force arrows.
If you take the decoy potion on your first move, you can place it north of that queen, but you'll kill the brain, so there's no chance for the interaction to happen.
If you turn first so you don't kill the brain, the queen moves onto the force arrow before you can place the decoy.
So, there's no situation where the rule change would be relevant.
The Wrong Way - The Architect's Intention - Entrance
Variant of the above room which is meant to be the "
right way"
. You get the decoy potion at the end of the room instead of the beginning.
However, your starting placement is such that there's no way to prevent the guard from hitting one of the two orbs in his chamber. This will lock the door at (15,9), which means you have no way to backtrack at the end due to the force arrow and bombs; and while the bombs can be blown up, that locks the door at (8,31) so you're still stuck.
What this means is that you have to exit through the yellow door near the brain, which can only be opened with the orb next to the green door in the southeast. Which means you need the decoy to hit it (as the mimic has already been used to let you get past the red door), and the green door has to go down so the brain and queens have to be gone.
Up next: rooms where this could be a factor and demos might break, but they're unlikely to because they involve complicating the rooms in ways few people would bother with. I could separate this into "
unlikely"
and "
extremely unlikely"
if I wanted to, but overall the impact is likely to be small. Even the more likely of these involve doing things you have no particular reason to do. In fact, for all of these rooms I already had a demo where the behavior would never come into play.
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adventure king mirror - the end of the chase - 3 East
We're starting with an extremely unlikely one. For the rule change to matter, a demo would have to:
-get at least one queen out of the northwest corner
-kill golems and block remaining tiles with snake bodies
-and do this while the queens are in the few tiles in decoy range
Not impossible - especially as you have a speed potion - but I would be very surprised if anyone bothered.
Cab driver's paradise - First Level - Sandgrounds - Entrance
While the changed behavior is very likely to come into play - you'd have to deliberately wait for the queen to go north before killing a seep with the decoy - given that this is a linear one-tile corridor with a single micro-puzzle, it would only break demos that played around rotating their sword a lot. And even if that happened, it's trivial to replay.
Cab driver's paradise - First Level - Sandgrounds - 1 East
The brain is right at the start of the room, so you'd have to leave it alone and then surround yourself with some combination of tar and golem piles. Pretty unlikely.
Cab driver's paradise - Second Level - Screwdriver - 4 North
This room is packed tight. While you could place a mimic at the north, and clear out enough enemies to make the queens able to move while the potions at the south are blocking the pathmap, and then place a decoy to make them move differently, I don't see why anybody would.
Do Not Disturb Compilation - Walls In Place - 1 South, 1 West
Do Not Disturb Compilation - Challenges - 1 South, 2 East
These are variants of the same room. In both, after crossing into the central structure to kill the brain, you can't go back out the way you came. The only way to open another exit is to hold down all the pressure plates, then use the decoy to light the fuse.
The intent is to use queens to hold down all the plates, as the trapdoor prevents normal roaches from following you and the central area is full of trapdoors and yellow doors, yellow doors, and force arrows. However, it is theoretically possible to spawn roaches on the brain's pressure plate, so if you really tried you might be able to get a queen to the lower right and move it with the decoy.
Drod History Month - Memories... - 1 South, 1 West
First off, you can kill the brain with the first decoy potion and then just make a run for the second to stop the briar.
But even if you don't, the queens on the southwest are all trapped on force arrows, so you could only affect the queens on the northwest side. This seems like it would only happen if somebody were showing off by putting a decoy in what they thought was a meaningless place.
Empire's power: And Beethro comes along - The Remira Tunnels - 1 East
Not a lot in this room. Anyhow, you can only break the pathmap if you don't cross the force arrow with the initial Beethro and do everything with clones, and then you have to place the decoy somewhere that it would affect the queen rather than just killing her with it.
Jmit' 2 - Second Level - 1 South, 1 West
The decoy potion is right next to the brain, so most players will probably kill the brain immediately on taking the potion. Maybe even on the same move. Plus, you need to let the tar grow a lot to break the brain pathmap, or do something fancy with snakes.
JYS - First Contact - Squenton V's Dusty Chambers - 2 North
This is probably the most likely room out of this set to break demos, but the chance is still low. There's not really anything better to do with the decoy than stab something, and the brain pathmap is cut off to begin with. But there's also an invisibility potion right next to the decoy potion, so many players will get it on the next turn, which means the brains won't have time to react.
If you do this, the only way you can be in brain range but have the pathmap closed off is if you're on (10,14) or (10,16) and haven't hit the orb yet. So this is a fairly unlikely combination of factors. Then again, you could hop into the middle to kill the tar mother before killing the queens, which would also do the trick.
That said, I happened to have a demo where I just placed the decoy to the side, because there wasn't anything important for it to do. So this room would at least be solvable with the change.
King Dugan's dugedion 2 - Level 07 - 1 West
You need to surround yourself with tar or mud to break the pathmap, and with two decoy potions available right away, and two brains... well, a lot of people are just going to render the brains irrelevant fast.
Labyrinthitis (JtrH edition) - Vertigo - 1 South, 9 East
The potion and queens are both only available after dropping all trapdoors, at which point the only way to break the pathmap is to surround yourself with golem piles and one of the force arrows up north. Not something a lot of people would bother doing.
MMGs Dungeon Reloaded - Forth Level - Reflexion 1 North
You can kill the brain right away and there's basically nothing in the room that makes it a problem to do so.
MMGs Dungeon Reloaded - Sixth Level - Memoria (Omega) - Entrance
The southeast queens can't move. The west queens can, but only if you break the nearby walls. There's no reason to do this, though, and it gets even sillier - if you break the walls enough to let a queen out, you lose one of your two accessible areas to break the pathmap. The only other spot is the tile north of the brain, which you can't get out of without clearing the room.
To make this work, you would have to get a queen out, leave her and a guard alone, break the pathmap and then have the guard kill the queen and eventually make his way to you. This is probably the most ridiculous scenario I'm going to come up with here.
MMGs Dungeon Reloaded - Eight Level - Final Level - 1 North
You can kill the brain as soon as you wake both of the north eyes and there's no reason not to do so. Plus I think the decoy has to be used for one of the snakes. Haven't analyzed the room any further in-depth than that, but it doesn't seem to particularly incentivize a situation where a behavior change would impact things.
Tiger - Level 1 - 1 North, 1 East
You can kill the brain immediately if you enter on the right, which is also the easiest way to access the potions. And you have to go out of your way a bit to break the pathmap.
Tiger2 - Chess Battles - 2 East
There's one roach queen and you can kill her fast with all the potions here. On the other hand, if you decide something else is a prime decoy target, that could easily lead to a demo that would break.
Tiger2 - Strategy - 1 East
You have to go at least a little out of your way to break the pathmap here, not to mention that there are bombs that are easy to set off that will kill the brains.
Tiger2 - Strategy - 3 East
Breaking the pathmap here requires dropping a bunch of trapdoors you have no specific reason to drop. Sure, there's a red door, but you have three mimics that can kill stuff behind it.
war14 - start the journey - 5 South
The decoy potion is behind a force arrow, and after you cross it you can't return to the north side of the room. You can, technically, chase some roach queens past that arrow, get the potion, and cut off the pathmap by being on a raft in the middle of the water. On top of that, you have to use the decoy to either blow up the bomb on the dark tile or stab the wraithwing behind the blocked door. The latter does, technically, allow you to have a queen in decoy range. But it's also pretty silly to do.
And before we get into the actual problem cases, here are rooms that are more complicated to analyze for one reason or another. Thankfully there aren't many of them.
All I feel confident in saying is that these rooms could definitely be solved under the hypothetical new rule.
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Deadly Square of Death - The Square - 1 South, 2 West
I don't have it in me to figure out this room beyond that my demo doesn't take the potion until after the queen is dead. There's also only three demos on CNet here.
Edit: Took another look. I forgot there's a second queen - she never moves in my solution, and is just out of decoy range. I checked the other two demos and they put the decoy in the same place I did.
Analyzing whether this change would open up another solution or be relevant in one that already exists is still beyond me, so I'm just going to note the demos here would be unaffected.
Do Not Disturb Compilation - A Basement (But Not Erik's) - 1 South, 1 West
The complicated thing about this one is it's a multi-pass room. Luckily, it turns out that only one entrance allows you to take the decoy potion - the one at (19,0).
And if you want to clear the room after taking that entrance, you need to use the decoy to stab the mud. You can either clear the room on that trip, or use a non-obvious exit and do another pass to gain access to an optional scroll - a challenge presented by the architect. Both options can be done without this rule change having an impact, largely because you have to cut the mud with the decoy and the only queen near the mud would just get pushed towards a wall anyways.
Putting the Pieces Together - Assembly Hall - 1 South
I'm pretty sure I built this room in a way that heavily constraints where you can put the decoy while still solving it. But if this change somehow introduces a break, I'm okay with that.
Riddle of the Bar - Trickster - 2 North
This room requires you to go in from the south and then loop around and come from the north. You can't even get any decoys from the south or southeast entrances, so they're not a factor, and you can immediately kill the brain if you come in from the entrance just north of it.
You can solve the room from the entrance north of the black door, and this will impact queen movement. However, it's easier to do this from the brain entrance.
Finally, there's a challenge (not scripted because this wasn't made in TSS) to complete the room without hitting an orb with your own sword. Zorglub's demo does this and that demo would not be impacted by this change.
Finally, there are three rooms in Beethro's Bad Dream that would have a room break introduced. They would remain solvable as intended.
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Basic summary: three rooms get unintended solutions that are easy to fix, one room breaks but can be fixed with a simple change, one room I'm not sure of the solvability on if the change is made but a simple alteration would ensure it works. Even most of the rooms where demos could break are unlikely to have it happen.
So the overall impact is mild enough that I'd say I'm in favor of changing this in all cases (timeclones, stalwarts/soldiers, and decoys), but obviously anyone else is free to weigh in. Also, I stayed up way too late writing that all up and I am well aware of this.
[Last edited by Dragon Fogel at 07-21-2021 06:33 PM]
