Talk:E1M2: Nuclear Plant (Doom)

Walkthrough demosEdit

Revisions to walkthrough demos today.  The highlights:

• More conservative barrel management (all four).
• Safer routes through the first room and the maze (all four).
• More logical harvesting routes (all four).
• Remembered to pick up the blue armor before entering the maze (ITYTD, HNTR).
• Much safer strategy against the sergeants in the courtyard (UV).

Ryan W 20:59, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Alternate route to secret #2?Edit

24.143.140.98 said: Going up the left stairs, turn right & there is a window. Jump out of it & there is a supercharge.

I said: (Is the sill actually low enough to jump over in vanilla? I forget.)

The answer is no, you cannot do that (at least in the Collector's Edition version), because all of the window sills have the "impassable" flag set.    Ryan W 01:32, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Half-baked routes and tricksEdit

The general issue in the background is the reader's skill level.  In walkthrough prose, we attempt to answer newbie questions; technical articles crosswalk functions into ingame behavior; but speedrunning (hitherto) presumes the most specialized of audiences, usually not even indicating the difficulty of each trick.  Might we also address novitiate or intermediate runners wanting to reach their next tier?

What I saw in DSDA, but wasn't sure they were common/effective enough to include:

• In the first room, why do most troopers on the north side sometimes stay put (as mentioned in the article), but at other times congregate near the start point to be mowed down? [1]
• Can you manipulate RNG to make a trooper more likely to prop the first door open? [2]
• Importance of green armor in 100% categories.  All the dense crowds are at the start and end, where you would have had to go anyway.
• Importance of soul sphere in NM100S.  No optimized COMPET-N run takes it, but nearly every DSDA contributor does.
• In a max run, skirt around the sergeants until you have the chaingun, because it's faster to kill them that way. [3]  Counterargument: In a run with optimized movement, weapon changes in crowds take too long.  If you'd already decided to get the shotgun (which is indeed helpful near the end), that's one switch, so stay with it until returning to the staircase. [4]
• Open secret #4, clear the chainsaw area, then return just in time to step on the secret sector.  Proposed by an expert but perhaps no one has pulled it off yet [5].
• It's commonplace to tear your hair out over the final room, except in ZDoom where you just step on the last guy's head to exit.  (An entire tutorial subsection could be written about aiming with freelook in maps not designed for it.)

Conversely, things already in the article, but now I'm less confident:

• The clockwise maze route in UV -fast is far less common in DSDA.
• NM100S maze routes also show more variation in DSDA.
• Barrel frag in the penultimate room — most of the time, people aim but miss!
• Feinting left to clear off the exit lift.  A variety of paths seem to have succeeded over the years.

I'll leave these to the judgement of smarter players, as perhaps I should have done from day one.  Ryan W (living fossil) 17:25, 29 June 2020 (CDT)