And while most of us have done this at the end of the Last Battle,
pitchie has managed to do this almost before the battle got started.
As he explains:
After playing "The Last Battle" level over and over again, and
dying over and over again, I decided it was time to get rid of
Balor early, rather than face all the hordes throughout the level.
The strategy was simple, but effective. I noticed in other levels
of Myth that the Fallen Lords can only use their special weapons
on units that are a certain distance away from their position.
Otherwise, they are forced to fight hand to hand. Counting on
this, I surrounded Balor from 3 or 4 positions so that he could
not use his lightning sword. Realizing that the initial attack
would not completely take him out, I set an additional trap with
satchel charges.
And so he did, before Balor even had a chance to go into his song
and dance about the Myrkridian standard, pitchie had jumped him
and killed him (and in the process lost every Dwarf and Berserk
he had). And while all this was going on, did any of Balor's buddies
try to help him? No, not at all.
While this behavior may seem strange to many, the explanation
is straightforward. pitchie managed to derail Bungie's unit scripting
on this level. For the game to progress naturally, Balor and Alric
have to go through a set series of three speeches. Remove Balor
for the game early and most of the scripts which control the Dark
units will fail. In this case, all the dark units were waiting
on Balor to do his thing, after which they would get triggered
and the real battles would begin.
Bungie never added to code to check if Balor was killed early.
Why? Probably because in the original 1.0 Myth, the lower difficulty
levels were geared to be much harder. Even on Timid, Balor was
no pushover. But when Bungie created version 1.1 they made the
game much easier on the lower difficulty levels. It became possible to
kill Balor even if he is whacking away at your units.
And what did pitchie get for all his trouble? Well, that bit of
fun cost him the game:
The problem was that the level didn't end when he was killed!
After killing Balor, I continued on to kill every last enemy unit
on the map, including the group of Fetch toward the end. Even
then, the level would not end.
Well, you takes your chances and you pay the price, don't you?
Here is the film [mac] [win] of pitchie's game, which I have appropriately named "Balorus
Interruptus."
But there is more!
This level is just chock full of ways to confuse Alric and Balor
and derail the level. Check out as Jeremy Hildebrand traps Alric and waltzes around the map killing everybody. In keeping
with the theme of this page, the film [mac] [win] is entitled "Alricus Interruptus." Be sure to catch Balor's
teleportation trick when he frags two innocent Archers whose only
crime was they happened to be standing in his favorite spot!
OK, enough! We get the idea here. Alricht, let's not Balabor the
point.
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