Difference between revisions of "Mission records"

Revision as of 17:25, 16 November 2021

Thanks to the Replay feature introduced by the WA Updates, some players are recording their mission attempts to show how some missions can be completed in record times with the use of ingenius methods or mesmerising skill. Below is a table of these "world records". Click the links to download the replays.

If you have a replay in which you completed a mission in a record time or record number of turns, please send it to Deadcode (or a WKB SysOp) with your WormNET nickname so that we can upload it here.

Understanding this table

Method credit

Getting a record is not simply a case of speed and reflexes. Missions can be completed in a large variety of ways, some faster than others, and some less obvious than others. As well as those that achieve records through their skill, so should players who have developed a new method (or part of it) deserve credit for their ideas.

Medal

When a mission attempt fails, the Attempts counter is incremented. The medal awarded for a successful mission depends on the value of the Attempts counter when the mission was started: 0 = Gold; 1-3 = Silver; 4 and higher = Bronze. A successful attempt resets the Attempts counter to 0 (so after any failed attempt, two successful attempts in a row are required to get Gold).

Most missions give some bonus crates at higher Attempts counts, to make those attempts easier. In most cases, the threshold is 1 or 4 Attempts; this makes it straightforward to categorize the bonuses under those medal names. Because the nature of the mission can be altered significantly by the presence of bonus crates, the mission records listing is now categorized by medal, allowing the variants of each mission to be speedrun separately.

When the Medal column is marked "—" it means that mission doesn't have any bonuses. (And in the case of Mission 33, the "bonuses" are just Morse code messages, not crates.)

In some cases the bonus crates (or text messages) conditional on a certain minimum Attempts counter only would have appeared at a turn later that what is contained in the replay file. In these cases, the Medal column contains the effective medal at which the mission was completed, considering the run as self-contained. The actual Attempts counter that constructed the mission script stored in the replay file is not necessarily what is shown in the Medal column. For example, Mission 26: Mad Cows, the bonuses only appear on turn #5 (the player's third turn) and turn #11 (the player's sixth turn). So even though the Attempts counter for c0o1's 2-turn "with bug" replay had a value of at least 5 (Bronze), turn #5 is never reached, and the replay is considered to have been played at Gold.

The ability to adjust a mission's Attempts counter manually after achieving Gold in that mission was only added in WA v3.6.29.0, released 2008-07-28. Many of the mission records are from before that, when there was no easy way to do multiple attempts at the same medal tier level in a row for any tier other than Bronze. So in the case that a mission was played as if it were a higher-tier version, but was actually played at a lower tier, the actual medal tier is placed in parentheses next to the speedrunner's name / replay link. This is because the bonus crates (and even Morse code messages) still have an effect on the game logic, even if they're not collected or used (and in some cases they're blown up, causing even more of an effect).

Turns and Time

The time counted for these speedruns is the human team's total turn time, not including retreat time. The time taken for enemy worms to take their turn, crates to land, health to be deducted, etc, is not counted. An easy way to find this time in a replay of your own is to export a log of your replay by right-clicking it and choosing "Export Log", open the resulting log file (which will be in the same folder with the same file name as a "*.log" file) and check the time displayed after the first instance of "Turn:", which is near the end of the file.

The number of turns used is always considered first when determining the best run of a mission. This is to prevent players from using an indefinite number of 0-second turns to win missions.

Tool-assisted speedruns

These tool-assisted speedruns are similar in nature to tool-assisted speedruns for console games, such as the ones hosted at TASVideos, which archives complete speedruns of various classic console games. However, special tools were developed by Deadcode specifically for Worms Armageddon, because there is no emulation system which runs WA with tools already built in. The tools are still in development, and are not nearly as powerful as they could be yet.

These tool-assisted speedruns are played frame-by-frame, with trajectory mapping, power-angle-scanning, multiple undos (similar to the use of "savestates" in console tool-assisted speedruns) and useful indicators, allowing the player to perform actions and make shots precisely without reliance on reaction speed. These tools will not necessarily tell the player what the quickest way to complete the mission is, but they will allow the player to try out different ideas without having to rely on fast reflexes. There is often room for improvement, so no particular tool-assisted replay should be considered the fastest that is theoretically possible. Sometimes, when a new glitch is found in the game, it can be exploited to improve the time in a tool-assisted speedrun. Tool-assisted players often make use of luck manipulation, which involves a deep understanding of the game's pseudo-random number generator. This luck manipulation can affect many game elements, including the wind on subsequent turns, the trajectories of a clustered explosive, and the falling patterns of flame bits.

Tool-assisted speedruns can sometimes be regarded as goal times for unassisted players to strive for in their attempts.

Further reading about the details of the TAS build can be read on the TASVideos forum, in the Worms Armageddon discussion thread started by Lex.

Highlighted

Highlighted table elements indicate the most recent updates. For a list of pre-2009 updates, view this page's source code.

"All Missions" unassisted speedrunning

There is a page on speedrun.com dedicated to leaderboards for unassisted Worms Armageddon speedrunning categories, including the "All Missions" category. To qualify for placement in that category, players must follow the posted rules visible when clicking "View Rules" on that page.

For strategies and tricks used to improve such unassisted speedruns, see Mission speed strategies (Worms Armageddon) and/or the Missions Speed Run forum on TUS.

Credits

This page was originally maintained by Run as a page on his website (earliest known snapshot from 2006 on the Internet Archive), and was moved to the Worms Knowledge Base in May 2009.

We would like to thank:

Run for creating and maintaining this page all these years
Deadcode for introducing the replay feature
Lex and CyberShadow for helping Run with this page
M3ntal for starting the whole thing off with his Jurassic Worm replay
And everyone and anyone who's participated!