ASSISTANCE REQUIRED: Stardate 20x6 | Map07: Magnus | UPDATE: Success

For the past few weeks I've been working on recording UV-Max demos of Stardate. As of right I've managed to beat all levels except the final one. I was able to figure out a reliable strategy for every single encounter in all maps. But as far as I'm concerned the finale of Map07 is complete bullshit. I've spent over 10h trying to figure out this fight, tried just about every possible tactic that came to my mind multiple times, watched a number of UV-Max demos - nothing. Today it took me 1,5h to get a single victory in that battle. Not good.

So this is the call to all the super elite players in the DOOM community. Please explain to me how to beat that nonsensical fight. You can download 20x6 here. The encounter in question begins past the yellow-switch door near the start (just idkfa, you get fully stacked there anyway). Ignore the Archvile rush, the problem is what happens afterwards. Any kind of help is appreciated though if you feel confident that your strategy works I wouldn't mind seeing a video where you beat that fight 7 out of 10 times or something. Hell, even 50% success rate would be incredible because I haven't been able to find anything that would be even remotely reliable and to me it looks like an RNG fest - feel free to prove me wrong because I'd like to wrap up this WAD.

Yeah I could never get it consistent either when I maxed it. There is a clip of my stream where I eat 3 max damage rev rockets in a row bfg’ing through revs and simply die. Just ended up face planting that fight until I won.

iirc both of the other two max demos (not rayzik’s) use a different start to win by hiding behind the cybs. I didn’t like this one for aesthetic reasons so I never tried it myself.

you can also vile jump behind the cybs before they appear to skip the fight (I think).

Hm, I wonder if I should just start demo recording the whole level and hope that RNG gods will have mercy on me... Or just give up completely because that finale is utterly stupid. No other scenario gave me this much trouble where I literally cannot find any reliable way despite having played that fight at least a couple hundred times. I was hoping to stumble upon something but it does look like it's a "try until you succeed" deal.

The first thing I do is rushing towards the Revenant warp point and blasting them with the BFG hoping to get as many Viles as possible. This is pure RNG - you might get 3, even 4 out of 5, or you might get none. The question is what to do when the ammo runs dry. Today I tried a more gentle approach to the second stage after resupplying: spamming BFG from afar while collecting cells near the columns. When all the nearby cells are gone I rush towards the warp point again. The problem is that the entire structure of this arena is stupid and you WILL get blasted by something, no way to avoid that. Go slower and Cybers will destroy you. Go faster and you'll get stuck and all the homing missiles will catch up to you.

This entire encounter is one of those moments where I'd really love for Ribbiks to give me a detailed explaination of how the hell is that supposed to be played. Is this really just an RNG middle finger to the player? Or is there some secret technique that I don't know?

Also you can totally skip this fight easily without an Archvile jump. If you press the switch and run behind it then you're briefly able to step onto the edge of the Cyberdemon box and get to the other side. Might be useful for speedrunning but I'm there to kill everything.

So after 8 days, roughly 20h of demo recording, 10+h of figuring out the finale and 86 attempts I've finally managed to get a successful UV-Max demo of this level. I've reached the finale 15 times during that time. My soul is shattered into a thousand pieces, my heart is black as coal and I'm traumatized for life... but I prevailed.

After yet another death during the 11th time of reaching the final area I realized that there's just no way I can beat that fight the regular way. So I went back to the little exploit I've found earlier, the one where you step over a lowering switch to get behind the Cybers before they appear and used it to skip doing the fight myself by letting the big guys do all the work instead. Initially I deemed this tactic too risky because it's difficult to dodge those three Cybers at such a close range but it turned out that I can actually do this fairly reliably. Unlike the regular way which was a complete dice roll. I'm really sorry for doing this but after hundreds of attempts and over 30h of playtime I do not believe this fight is reasonably possible for a human being to complete.

[As I said before, if you disagree then you're welcome to try and prove to me that you can actually do this reliably. I'd love to see someone do that.]

Overally pretty cool and atmospheric level. Really easy compared to map06 actually, all things considered. If you ignore the nonsensical finale then this level is pretty tame. Most of the deaths happened either as a result of stupid mistakes made while securing the hub area or in the wooden room with a bunch of monster teleporter lines and a horde of Revenants (interestingly enough I've found a reliable way of dealing with it literally last minute). In the majority of battles I've never even died at all. If only the final area was something else... anything else... then this would have been one of the best maps in 20x6. It still is, if you play with saves.

Here's the demo file if anyone's interested in seeing the result of this insanity. It's not a very exciting demo and it has some stupid mistakes but hey, it's a successful run and I'll take it. Next stop: Stardate 20x7.

stardate20x6_map07_uv_max_by_touchdown.zip

Kudos for your commitment to finish it no matter the odds.

On 8/27/2020 at 1:45 PM, Touchdown said:

The first thing I do is rushing towards the Revenant warp point and blasting them with the BFG hoping to get as many Viles as possible. This is pure RNG - you might get 3, even 4 out of 5, or you might get none. The question is what to do when the ammo runs dry. Today I tried a more gentle approach to the second stage after resupplying: spamming BFG from afar while collecting cells near the columns. When all the nearby cells are gone I rush towards the warp point again. The problem is that the entire structure of this arena is stupid and you WILL get blasted by something, no way to avoid that. Go slower and Cybers will destroy you. Go faster and you'll get stuck and all the homing missiles will catch up to you.

Hi @Touchdown, I really enjoy your stardate  videos (both series) and really appreciated your honesty discussing your difficulties; I was then shocked to see @Killer5's comment, i was just expecting some sort of "i beat it first try on nightmare, too much ammo", so I became intrigued and played the map many times.  It helps that I really enjoy the map and its music, and disagree with you about the vault: the way I play the vault is that if I'm feeling comfortable and want some fun, I actually join the fray, at least for some portion of time; it's easy to run away again.  There's certainly enough ammo and health for that.  (Then again, maybe I'm just much worse at doom than you, and enjoy something easier more than you.)

Now, I do not have the demo you seek.  I am not a skilled doom player and additionally I did not grind this map heavily.  But what I do have is a simple strategy with which I was able to beat the map a few times, starting from a resource-depleted save right after the arch vile rush.  Again, this is a far cry from a successful run of the last segment following all the fatigue and stress of beating the rest of the map, I definitely do not downplay that aspect; however, it seems my strategy was not listed by you and also not tried in any other demos I watched, so it might be worth considering?

The strategy has two phases.

• In phase 1, as revenants, imps, and viles spawn in, I alternate between following a complete circumnavigation of the square, and also a nearly closed C-shape, using wallrun as much as possible.  My goal is survival and resource preservation: I use BFG for a combination of getting out of sticky situations and light crowd control mainly in the area closest to the cyberdemons (a safe space of sorts), tryin to keeps tough enemies focused near the spawn point as much as possible.  It actually works, they kindof get stuck there.  Because they are crowding their and pissed off, the viles definitely get hit a lot, and between that and the columns, one can avoid the vile attacks pretty well.  In terms of when to retreat and follow the C and when to complete a ring, I use gut feel but am very conservative, again trying to convserve ammo and health and trying to never get stuck.  This overall suggestion is in big contrast to demos I've seen, where people go completely wild trying to kill things as fast as possible before the cyberdemons come in.  Honestly this just didn't seem right to me due to the major resource depletion I had when doing this; when I did manage to beat it this way myself (from that save), I had very bad resource depletion and had to kill the final cyber with the shotgun.  Anyway, this phase is actually pretty reliable.
• In phase 2, I run past the cyberdemons as soon as they appear and tuck myself into that same nook you used, which is only visible to one of them.  This procedure is of course where most of my deaths occured.  A few times I was able to get a fancy version to succeed where I accumulate a wad of revenant missiles and have it smack the only cyberdemon who can see me on my way to the nook.  Through some miracle, I managed this the first time I thought of it, but was not able to repeat it for a while, it was actually more reliable to just run up there, dodge a little, and pick a nook.  The reason this kindof works is basically it's never 3 cyberdemons targetting me: the nature of this approach always has at least one of them getting hit when I run up, it's just hard to understand quite which one it is amidst the initial chaos.  Of course, this second phase ends up being a bit of a cheese, but it doesn't rely on a vile jump or your slow switch trick, and thus makes me think it's a bit more of an "intended method.

Hey, thanks for watching these videos. It always feels strange to hear a real person saying that they enjoy something that I do. I'm not used to that. O_O

Anyway, that strategy of yours might be worth looking into, though I probably won't do that anytime soon because I'm still recovering from dealing with that map, heh. I didn't consider doing something like this simply because I wanted to avoid running past the Cybers as that seemed too risky. So I always tried to just destroy the Viles and leave Cybers for later without mixing staying in the square and running behind them.

You probably won't see many demos using that because demo-recorders go for the record time so they won't implement a safer but slower strategy. One of the reasons I made those series was to show difficult maps being played from the perspective of someone who's not an unstoppable Doomgod spending hours optimizing the fastest strategies. Things that people do in the demos are often not very useful for "regular" players so it's always good to have some extra alternative strategies.