Because there is currently the motivation to do so, I have written a bit about the plays of the last week.
Whether or not this will be a monthly, weekly, sporadic, or one-time thing, I don't know. Here goes.
60 million was achieved on Normal B2.
Overall it is among the better scores I've managed for Fairy Wars.
Now, a little bit about this run.
Stage 1: The play should be roughly the same every time along the way to Daiyousei, meaning roughly the same score, PF and motivation.
Because I accidentally damaged Daiyousei with the last freeze in the first half of the stage, I follow plan B of my suicide placements. If she had been undamaged, I would suicide on the first nonspell. Plan B is to suicide at the end of the stage portion. Plan C, which I decided against using, is to spend that life on Sunny Milk's first nonspell.
Each placement of this suicide has its own pros and cons, and I am still uncertain which placement is actually better. The reason why plan B is good, despite not blocking the damage dealt by a freeze, is that I start Sunny Milk with 100% ice power and don't bomb the first wave. Later waves have a higher potential for bombs, so freezing the first wave is ideal.
First bomb is distributed on Daiyousei's last nonspell, depending on luck this is worth mid 400k to high 500k. Since a normal freeze on the first wave rarely exceeds 100k (30% area), I think that the bomb is fairly used. It leaves time and health for a big 30% area freeze after.
However, this bomb comes at a high cost. I have to use at least 2 suicide extra, but that's the ideal. In this attempt, I've had to use 3 suicide extra. this lowers the potential on stage 3.
Moving on, I reach all four 30% area on the lone fairies and use my first suicide. After the second suicide and I start Sunny Milk, I have 203 motivation and 202 PF. I use two more suicide and have 9 motivation left, but the freezes are both 29% area. This creates a problem with the PF, but after using 2 bombs, I managed to farm up the third bomb in time. So the first hurdle has been passed. However, I know while playing, that I can most likely not avoid the extra suicide on stage 2.
Sunny Milk is sufficiently milked with little complaints. Direct Sunlight was a little stingy with the luck, though.
Stage 2: start with 7,27m, 166 motivation, 186 PF.
There is nothing in particular to mention until I reach Lily Black's second nonspell. Here, because my PF is below the quota, I use two suicide. Along with those, one ordinary big freeze and 3 bomb. because this leaves Lily with very little remaining health, the small freeze milks is delicate, and I could've handled that a bit better. The reason two suicide is necessary is to reach the 200% PF quota when I beat nonspell 3. In addition, it does let me use 3 big freeze on nonspell 2, rather than just 2.
Nonspell 3: I start this with 56% PF, which is 16 above the quota. Ideally, I would only just barely reach the quota, and skip the extra suicide on nonspell 2, but that has yet to happen in any attempts. Anyways, the goal for this nonspell is to not miss any 30% area freezes. a single miss would often mean I lose out on a bomb. In this run I would be able to afford one miss because of the excess PF, though. Thankfully the nonspell is splendid with great luck. Lily Black hung around the middle area of the screen and gave me lots of free extra points that way.
Second half of the stage was full of errors. The first bomb can't be timed too late, since then that kills fairies meant to shoot fireballs for the 2nd bomb. Instead, I use it a tad earlier than optimal. The real issue starts with the knife-ring fairies. I still feel a bit shaky with this version of those fairies. There's supposed to be two 30%+ area freezes at the end, but I completely failed the first one due to killing one of the fairies on accident. The last freeze was 29,9%. Sad. Missing some freezes like this just means I'll definitely skip out on bombing Dark Stillness, which isn't a very lucrative bomb anyway, so not a huge deal.
Next error, the last few spammy fairies on the stage all need to be defeated with ice. Because my ice didn't kill two of them, I lose around 80,000.
Luna Child is a difficult boss fight for scoring optimization, and my fight was just okay. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement.
Nonspell 1: Very delicate. You have to be spot on with your rate of damage (shoot only the very side of the hitbox, and not for longer than necessary), timing of your freeze, position of your freeze, and your ice power (since you won't get enough from shooting, grazing is important). The strategy is to do 1 freeze per wave on the first 3 waves, and then start to do bigger freezes every other wave, since her rate of spawning these waves increases at that time. I had to skip the third freeze because my ice power and position was so bad that freezing would've just backfired, but the upside to this is that a milking the timer all the way down is practically guaranteed, and I only missed a smaller freeze. The bigger freezes are more important.
Dark Stillness: Since I skip the bomb on this, it is less crucial to do a full milk. It's easy to reach 300% PF by nonspell 2. I end this spell a few waves early since that's safer since you can't control where Luna Child is moving, and lose maybe 30,000. Nothing too big.
Nonspell 2: This nonspell creates a dilemma because I sit on this with 300% PF for a while without using any bombs. There's not much choice, honestly. Bombing the first waves is just pathetic so I have to wait some cycles before I can bomb. This could've gone a lot better. One bomb was used despite poor movement RNG and I was hesitating about what to do, since there's not enough time to wait forever. The freezes weren't very good either.
Moonlight Wall: 30% area plus freezes are crucial here, and somewhat strict to pull off. In order to get the most out of this spell, I have to be aggressive about my grazing, limit my shooting, and use the freezes very properly. It's pretty easy to die while trying to optimize this spell, honestly. Most of the spell went well, it was all 30%+ area until the last three freezes which were all below 30%. That is fine, though.
Night Fairies: Nothing much to say about this. I do four freezes, no more than that really benefits me.
Stage 3: Start with 20,99m, 453 motivation, 175 PF.
First half was quite fair with only minor faults.
Star Sapphire enters: My score has gone up to 24,34m, with 563 motivation and 126 PF.
Because of the extra suicide in stage 2, I cannot permit myself to use a 4 suicide 3 bomb pattern on midboss Star Sapphire nonspell. 3 suicide would be redundant, and without 4 suicide, 3 bomb will kill her. The only reasonable conclusion is to use a 2 suicide 2 bomb pattern when you don't have enough lives for 4 suicide.
I executed the nonspell okay, but the RNG was pretty bad.
Star Storm: this spell is used for farming a little bit of extra motivation to make sure all remaining lives can be used if necessary. Milking it backfires in terms of score, since the SCB drops at a faster rate than you gain score, but the motivation is crucial, so I milk it just enough to get almost 500 motivation.
After the midboss, we have what I call the "chaos section". This had huge mistake. I died while doing the first big freeze. I still got to do the second big freeze, but the loss of a life is a problem because of how it affects the boss fight later. I also lose some items because the death kills fairies on the screen. Everything else after the midboss is fair, with the last freeze being 30%.
Three Fairies (Star leader) start: 31,92m, 493 motivation, 124 PF. The resources means that the ideal route might not actually happen, but I somehow surprised myself in this run.
Nonspell 1: Fair RNG, but I thought (and still think) Star was too damaged on one of the last few freezes. To adjust, I did a worse freeze to damage her less. 100,000~ lost.
Extensive Meteor: My strategy for this is to go up when Star is merely a few frames of shooting away from dying, to guarantee that a freeze will finish her off, since there's so few bullets to freeze. However, I stopped shooting too late, so the excess shot finished her off. The items are worth 80,000, but because finishing with a freeze also drains more of the SCB, the strategy gains less than 80,000.
Nonspell 2: The first freeze was timed too late, resulting in 50,000 loss and a time loss, resulting in less/worse freezes at the end (unknown loss).
Ice Dissolver: Something unusual happened, I felt that the RNG was constantly pushing me down. This is supposed to be an aggressive speedkill spellcard but I spent most of it near the bottom of the screen which is very dangerous. Thankfully I pulled it together and got the frozen items without wasting too much time.
Nonspell 3: This is the most complex and luck based attack in this category, rivalled only by Luna Child's first nonspell in terms of score variance through complexity and luck (as opposed to some attacks where the variance is all luck). Explaining everything I know would be too hard and take too long, so let's just say that I am very happy with how this went, because Sunny Milk was just barely left alive for me to get one final huge freeze in (308,000) this was utterly crucial for this run to finish, since I really needed that 20% addition to my PF considering a later mistake.
Great Triangle: I milked this, but not as well as it could be milked. In addition, Luna Child is taken out prematurely, resulting in slightly worse freezes towards the end duration of the milk.
Nonspell 4: I am extremely happy with how this went. I managed to squeeze in lots of big freezes without Star Sapphire dying, this is practically a miracle. I got to use the bomb without having to worry about not reaching the quota for the final spellcard. I even managed to keep her alive and reach my quota without suiciding!
Fairy Overdrive: The biggest fault of the run is here. So far, the run is pretty exceptional, but Fairy Overdrive was beyond terrible. Not only did I die and lose SCB (which is fairly low with a fully milked FO anyway) but the loss of a life ultimately led to enough loss of time to miss out on Sunny Milk's frozen items (200,000) I still managed to get her normal items, though. I am really grateful that the rest of the fight was good enough to let me skip 1 suicide, to allow me this mistake.
Final: In a split second of idiocy I made a huge mistake. Before I move down to the bottom after having milked and blocked fire walls for a while, I'm supposed to use 1 more freeze to block the pattern a bit longer. I suppose I was nervous because I went down and as I went down I immediately kicked myself over not using the next freeze (if you are even half a second too late with this freeze, it was a bad idea to use it.) As punishment, the first bomb is worth less (860,000, compared to the average good bomb at 930,000) but at least I got the frozen items from the side fairies, which is more important. And, I reach 1000% motivation merely seconds before clearing! If the number could exceed 1000, I probably would've finished with around 1006 or 1007 motivation.
Overall a satisfying run because I reached the goal and played mostly well. With the pattern I used, the reasonable limit would be around 61,5-62m. With the theoretically best patterns I can think of (which would require quite a few miracles) a reasonable limit would probably rather be around 63,5-64m.
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LNN was achieved on C1. This took around an hour of attempts, in addition to some prior run I did last year.
There is not much to say, but my mentality was mostly "safety comes first". For instance, I used a safespot to time out Yellow Deflection, and I pacified the chaos section.
Because LNN is so much less challenging and interesting than scoring, I only play LNB on rare occasions. However, doing the 4 remaining routes is still a goal to be completed some day, and playing FW for survival is still enjoyable.
The next scoring goal is to get highest B1 Normal score. At this point I don't have a higher target in mind, and I don't have my routes entirely planned out yet.
I barely played anything other than Fairy Wars lately (a few rounds of Money Puzzle Exchanger now and then) and I will most likely keep playing Fairy Wars for a good while longer.
