Someone Else wrote:
I know that many of you will tell me, "You're a monster!" Those people are hopefully not right.
This hold is focussed on Stalwarts. The rooms should not require much in the way of pathfinding from the Stalwarts - I hope to demonstrate that they're usable without also being painful and without being hugely constrained.
To that end, more than usual for holds in architecture, I'd like comments on which rooms are painful to play. I'm aiming for 5-7 brains (the current commentary on whether the brain system is the best for assessing difficulty notwithstanding), so I'm not asking about rooms which are merely very challenging but which are unpleasant to play.
I am precisely the wrong person to test this out, but I'm doing it anyway. There were at least two rooms here that I quite enjoyed. For a stalwart themed hold that's quite an achievement. Demos are attached. Some thoughts on individual rooms are below as well. Take them with a grain of salt given who they are coming from
1W: This was the first room I played. 4 roaches per spawn makes this not too terrible. It's at least not horribly difficult to stay alive or to keep the stalwart alive. That being said, getting him to actually cut briar was a bit of a challenge. I mostly used brute force trial and error here.
1N1W: The north entrance may need green doors. If you enter from the north you can kill the stalwart and solve the room completely without him. On second thought... The north entrance is fine as is.
1S1W: My solution to this room was to mash random keys on the keyboard until the stalwart magically made his way to the spot he needed to get to. Not sure if there is a way to do this that doesn't involve excruciating trial and error.
1S: Here we go.
Loved this one. There's basically no stalwart fiddlyness here. You can keep him imoblized as much as you want since he won't move if he can't keep the wraithwing. This frees you up to tackle the actual puzzle of the room, which is really nice. I like that you can actually logically deduce a good way to position the WW so that he'll step on the plate without killing it. This feels like the most linchpiny puzzle in the hold for sure. Zero trial and error, tons of fun.
1E: This was not too bad. Seemed like it was going to be very fiddly at first but was only a little bit fiddly. Once you figure out a couple key techniques it becomes more approachable. I felt like getting the stalwart to push the brain on the plate was maybe long enough for the room and the bit with the skipper nest was superfluous at the end, but probably it's fine as is.
1N1E: I actually like the idea for this room just fine. Unfortunately it's plagued by weird stalwart pathing stuff. My attached demo has what I think should be a solution. I step on the c-token and the stalwart starts dispatching the queens. But then he stalls out and can;t decide which one to kill next. I'd support keeping this in but making it so that stepping on the plate after the c-token uses fire traps or whatever to kill all the roaches and queens.
2E: I remember this from NaDRODArchMo. Getting to the roach is fun. Getting back felt super fiddly. At least it's not stalwart fiddlyness. But that's a lot of fluff to fuss with. I realized halfway through that the fluff won't grow over the stalwart, which makes this a lot less bad. But I wouldn't complain if you decided to shorten this one or ease up on the number of pits or vents.
1N2E: Another super cool room. I'm realizing that wraithwings are pretty much the perfect monster to pair with stalwarts because they allow you to curb some of the more annoying stalwart tendencies by simply pushing them out of reach. I'd probably be down with a whole level of just stalwart and wraithwing puzzles to be honest.
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