SFA 101 - comprehensive basic post

RULES


*Remember to play at least 170 VS Mode matches and get all secret flags from the campaign! Youtube "starfox assault flags" if you need help.
1. Time, 5 minutes
2. Radar ON, in-game minimap DISABLED
3. reversal weapons OFF
4. special weapons ON
5. Landmaster, Arwing and Wolfen OFF
6. Wolf cannot be used
7. All players on NONE handicap


Stages:
RED = banned stage
YELLOW = legal, non-neutral
GREEN = legal, neutral

1v1 colours:
Outer Sargasso, Fichina, Space Station, Aparoid City, Titania, Great Fox, Simp3, Simp4, Simp5
Corneria, Sauria*
Katina, Inner Sargasso, Simp1**, Simp2***, Zoness****

*On Sauria, the cave beneath the smallest temple can't be entered
**On Simp1, the barrier cannot be picked up
***On Simp2, the stealth pack cannot be picked up
****On Zoness, the platform directly above the missile launcher spawn can't be jumped on top of

2v2/FFA colours:
COMING SOON!

Sets:
A set is a best of 3/5/7/9 games.
For game 1:

• Players declare their character picks simultaneously before the stage is selected
  
• Players play rock, paper, scissors to determine who strikes a stage first
  
• The player who wins RPS strikes 1 GREEN stage
  
• The player who lost RPS strikes 2 GREEN stages that have not been struck
  
• The player who won RPS selects from the 2 GREEN stages that have not been struck, and that stage is played
  

For game 2:

• The winner of the previous game strikes 2 stages, either YELLOW or GREEN
  
• The loser of the previous game selects either a YELLOW or GREEN stage from the stages that have not been struck
  
• The winner chooses their character
  
• The loser chooses their character
  

All games after game 2 proceed exactly as game 2.
Players cannot, at any point, pick a stage on which they have already won a game.
If a draw occurs, players should immediately play a 1-life SUDDEN DEATH match on the stage where the draw took place. They may change characters, but must do so simultaneously.


Tourneys:
*1v1 tourneys are usually single, double, or triple elimination
*2v2 tourneys are usually round robin but can be elimination
*FFA tourneys are usually round robin
*Febreeze is banned at all tournaments


Penalties:
You lose the game (no score is recorded) if you:
*Exit a game in progress
*Play with HIGH or LOW handicap when handicap has not been agreed upon
*Physically impede other players (includes unplugging controllers)
*Pause excessively
*Re-enter and play while other players are away on pause
*Use macros like the turbo on a turbo controller
*Exploit glitches to delay the game or obtain unfair advantage


If you violate stage restrictions (such as entering the cave on Sauria or picking up the invis on Simp2), you must forfeit a point immediately. If you violate stage restrictions a second time, you forfeit the game (no score is recorded).





KNOWLEDGE


Damage and health:

N.B. Current damage system is based on the assumption that the MGun does exactly 1 damage and that character healths are whole numbers.

Character health:

Wolf - 48 health
Slippy - 44
Fox - 40
Krystal - 32
Peppy - 32
Falco - 32 health


Weapon damage:

Weaps from 8 to 15 damage do hitstun 1 (quick freeze and 2.5 seconds of invincibility after being hit)
Weaps 16 damage and over do hitsun 2 (launches character and 2.5 seconds of invincibility after getting back up)
Predator, Homing Launcher, Sensor, Grenade, Missile and Pod do splash damage in order of increasing splash size.

Machine gun - 1
Uncharged blaster - 4
Gatling gun - 4
Green charge blaster - 8
Blue charge blaster, Homing Launcher, Predator (when shot) - 12
Red charge blaster, Missile - 16
Sensor - 20
Grenade - 26
Sniper - 44
Pod - 176
Demon Sniper - infinite
Silver health - recovers 20 health
Gold health - recovers to full health
Barriers have 210 health and deteriorate for 15 s at a rate of 14 health/s


Weapons in play:

The amount of weapons in play at any given time over the total number of weapons on the stage, and the percentage of weapons in play that it equates to (rounded to nearest percent)
Inner Sargasso. - 12/15 - 80%
Corneria - 12/17 - 71%
Titania - 12/19 - 63%
Aparoid City - 8/14 - 57%
Simple 3 - 5/9 - 55%
Simple 1 - 5/10 - 50%
Zoness - 9/19 - 47%
Katina - 8/18 - 44%
Fichina - 4/10 - 40%
Sauria - 8/20 - 40%
Simple 2 - 5/13 - 38%





WORDS

HAXage's Advanced Tactics guide on GameFAQs: see [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Power vs. Skill: power is your game directness/efficiency while skill is how good you are at engage combat. In HAXage's triangle, smashers use power and techers use skill; boxers use a balance of both.

Tanking: full unranged attack without concern for being hurt. Power strategy.

Walling/Ultra-close/engage combat: keeping very close with constant jumping, invented by HAXage using Falco. Skill strategy.

Assault/ranging: maintaining a distance from your opponent equal to the max range of your weapon to have the smallest chance of being hit back. Power strategy.

Flight: "hit and run" play. Skill strategy.


Jargon:

Boiler: the middle of Ap or similar central area with many weaps.

Cheese: using a gatling gun, machine gun or uncharged blaster on a zoomed-in sniper. Fatal, because you can't zoom out or fire while being hit.

(Splash)Crash: using missiles or homers at close range, perhaps with a barrier.

Fash: a player was "fashed" if killed with an unused barrier. "Double" or even "triple" fashed means a death holding two or three barriers. Shows a lack/lapse of judgement or skill and can decide a game.

Gimping: heavy, successful reliance on/abuse of one strategy.

Masties: the flying platforms on Zoness (small, blue) and Aparoid City (big, aparoid-coloured).

Points era: the tournaments played using 5 Points game type, now outdated, including FirstRev, Kelowna 2010, and NYNT.

Revenge: a fast kill on a player who just killed you, usually only called a revenge if you take little to no damage.


Techs:

Airdash: term for short hopping around while holding L. You can quickly change directions and it makes you hard to hit.

Attackdodge/dodgeattack: term for firing a weapon and rolling immediately afterwards. Reverse it for (less common) dodgeattack.

Barrier bomb: term for exploding a grenade in your hand while using a barrier.

Corking: emulating Dual Stick while on Single Stick, using airdashes to turn your aim while jumping.

Dodge dancing: a comedic term for holding L and walking left and right rapidly, but has a serious(ly humiliating) application if you have an MGun or find yourself in a UCB fight, increasing the chance of dodging shots.

Green spam/blue spam: term for Slippy and Peppy (mainly Peppy) firing rapid blaster shots with their fast charges.

Hit drop: term for how a grenade drops to the ground if you are attacked while cooking it.

Jump chase: a hit on a player who is just landing a jump, where they are an easy target.

Quick-draw: zooming in, sniping, and then zooming out or switching weapons immediately.

Recycling: Airdashing out from behind cover, shooting, and quickly going back behind cover. Often done many times in succession.

Short hop: the faster/lighter you tap the jump button, the shorter the jump will be. Useful for quick, light dodging or to avoid getting dodge-chased.

Uzzdrop: term for rolling while cooking a grenade to make the grenade drop to the ground at the spot where you started the roll.

I don't believe that the Char health is exactly right. I'm pretty sure that 1* health and 2* health are identical. I'm pretty sure that from my testing, they each take the same number of MG shots to kill. (32 I think) I was able to find no difference in 1*/2* health, but I may be wrong.

i can't verify this for you unfortunately but i'm almost positive they're different. can't remember the MGun bullets required, but i'm pretty sure Falco dies to a sensor + BCB whereas Pep and Krys don't...

Alright.
Actually, there's a possiblility that the MG is not the basic unit of damage, and some weapons are a little bit off. (Such as a BCB doing 13 damage as opposed to 12; something like that.) This may be the case, but I have no idea if there's any way to test it

actually, you're right, the MGun is not "1 damage" as far as "1 damage" is understood by SFA. while testing stuff with GCNrd i remember inputting damage values to see how much damage each weapon did and it transpired that a damage of 1 was actually far less than any weapon in the game could give; the health bar barely decreased at all.

unfortunately i can't remember any damage values beyond that. it's been assumed for a long time that all the values are multiplicative, and that you can reduce all the damage to a system where 1 is the base unit (given by the MGun), but i'm not so sure myself, haha.

i suppose what we have now is good enough for practical matters... all the same, it would be kind of cool to discover exactly how much damage everything does in terms of game units and not just MG bullets... i seem to vaguely have the number 60 as a value for one MG bullet worth of damage, but i can't remember if that's correct or not.

Yeah, the system is good now, and changing it would be just awkward.

"You see, the Pod does 10,560 damage, but Slippy's health is only 2640, so it'll kill 'im every time..."

It would be interesting just to know what the exact totals are though.

Hax, is that true, you can input damage with the crack? If you still have access to that system I'd be down to hash it all out together some point in the near future. I think we should find the RCB and use that as the base unit of damage.

yeah, i'll be damned if i can remember how to do any of it, but it's possible, and i found out once so i can definitely find out again, heh.

i'd be down for a RCB-based damage system although i really don't know what we'd set the values to. i'm all but positive one RCB is precisely half Pep/Krys's health, and it scales so nicely as it is...

It's nice, but unless I had an aneurism when I tested damage, * and ** health take the same number of MG bullets to kill.

okay, well that i can easily test without GCNrd xD in fact, i think i'll do that right now just to satiate my own curiosity

well, F12, i owe you a bit of an apology because you are absolutely right - Pep and Krys have 32 health as understood by our current damage system: it takes 32 MG bullets to kill them, as well as Falc. i have no idea how we could have missed this for so long, but i'm sorry i doubted you!

we also had nade damage wrong: they do 26 damage (one nade + 6 MG bullets to kill Falc/Pep/Krys (Feptal? Kralpy? Prylco? lol). unfortunately i ran out of time to test other stuff but this is an indication that we should probably go back and look over all of this...

EDIT: forgot to mention, also tested some CB damage because there was some uncertainty about that - our current understanding of BCBs as doing 12 damage seems to be right; it takes a blue+green+green+4 MG to kill the low-healthers, or 2 blues and 8 MG.

sfafreak wrote:

xD i've been wondering how long it would take for someone to notice that one. it refers to this match [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] which is basically the silliest finals ever played. essentially we had all the doors open (it being summer in Kelowna) and a pretty strong scent of weed being smoked outside somewhere was blowing in through the door; midway through the match, Leon started spraying Febreze all over the place to kill the smell and got a bunch of Febreze in STG's eyes which made him freak out and suicide. much later, STG added this rule to the LS code and i just copied it over when i was transferring it to the new forum

I think you should make another "Why it's banned" video for febreeze. I'm not sure I fully understand.

lol i'll make one, it'll just be cuts from that video: STG yelling AHHH FEBREZE and then his suicide looped over and over

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

This is kind of off topic, but who is the girl whose voice is in the background of that vid? (Username, please.) I didn't know there was a girl in the RevoLeague.(I don't mean to be sexist or anything like that. Please do not misinterpret this.)

Another funny thing is to watch the matches AFTER the febreeze incident.

there are a few girls that inexplicably tolerate our company actually although i don't know how many of 'em were in the background at the time. they're just friends of us and the Kelowna guys (they live in Kelowna too) and they hang around at gatherings and stuff

Why are vehicles banned exactly?

first of all, hey and welcome to LS!

as best as i can break it down:

vehicles remove most if not all of the competitive depth and potential in the game. primarily this is due to the health and mobility afforded to a player while they're in a vehicle; when you step in one, even if you're in the red health-wise, you're free from taking damage that would otherwise kill you for a short period of time automatically, thanks to vehicle health. add this to the fact that vehicles augment mobility a hundredfold - ever try to hit a boosting Arwing with a charge blaster? or, really, with anything other than a locking weapon? - and you have a real boon to player survival.

what this contributes to is a metagame where both players are simply fighting for control of the vehicles. while you're actually in one, your job is simply to deny the other player any chance to have one and stay alive for as long as possible. this is very easy to do if you're in control, and it is very, very difficult for an on-foot player of equal skill to get around this. vehicles also output a lot of damage compared to any weapon and have built-in locking weapons.

this stunts your character selection a good deal as well; aim in vehicles is not so important, and they move at the same speed no matter which character you pick, so a faster character is more or less always more valuable than a slower one, since getting in the vehicles is the most important thing. you could argue that Slippy's health, for example, can help him make it to vehicles without dying, but health is only worth anything when you're getting hit and most commonly the race to vehicles is just that: a footrace. there are very few arguments you could successfully make to pick any character except Falco with vehicles on, and those arguments will all be tenuous at best.

yes, you can screw this up, yes, this is not failproof, yes, it is possible for on-foot players to beat vehicles. the decision to ban vehicles simply comes from a belief that this kind of game - where both players are just fighting for vehicle control and the conflict is based on who can get in an Arwing faster - is a lot less interesting than the alternative, where your survival is not so certain, your plays are made based on long-term decisions rather than looking for the next white flashy thing on your screen, and character selection plays a huge role in shaping the unique method in which you make use of your own skills in game.

note that this is a totally subjective decision! you might find that you, personally, prefer that kind of game; this group doesn't, and so we've decided to remove what we see as the root of the problem (which, thankfully, is easy enough to do). that's about all i think is important to cover - glad to see you taking an interest in competitive SFA and hope to see you around more!

HAXage wrote:

note that this is a totally subjective decision! you might find that you, personally, prefer that kind of game; this group doesn't, and so we've decided to remove what we see as the root of the problem (which, thankfully, is easy enough to do). that's about all i think is important to cover - glad to see you taking an interest in competitive SFA and hope to see you around more!

Actually, I don't have SFA yet, I played it a few years ago at a friend's house, and loved it. When I finally got a Wii, to my dismay, it was the Black version, which cannot play GameCube games. I played a lot of games, got pretty far, my Grandparents offered to trade our Wiis since theirs is White, and they don't play Cube games on it. But I didn't want to give up my save data, so I declined. Recently, I became interested in Project M, which doesn't require you to unlock anything, and I stopped playing most other games. I then decided to switch the Wiis. I plan to purchase SFA, two controllers and a save card in a few days. Speaking of which, what size would you recommend? I don't really plan to buy many games, besides Melee, maybe a Zelda title or two, Super Mario Sunshine, and any games I find that'll be fun. (Guessing it'll be about 2-5)

oh geez, i couldn't tell you anything about memory cards... i picked up a huge one on eBay for very cheap and i've never had to worry about it. probably just something in the mid price range

anyway, hope you enjoy! get some friends into it, start a local league, play friendlies, play tourneys; it's great.

e: also, sorry if that last post was a lot more information than you wanted - i've kind of grown used to answering that question over the years so i tend to dump a lot of text whenever someone asks about vehicles, heh

It's no problem, I know basic SFA stuff and a bit of competitive stuff from playing Project M, so I understood pretty much everything. How many people are actually active on this forum?

it varies - i check it pretty much on the daily even when there's no one posting, but things are usually pretty quiet during school. Cac, STG, F12, Jay, sfafreak and TLF are the most active members i can think of when things are actually happening, Doubleshields tends to chime in when tourneys are being planned, etc, etc. just stick around, it'll warm up eventually!

How effective are snipers against vehicles? From all my time with the game I've found they are really the only reliable way to fight against them, even if it is still rather onesided.

And has anyone considered banning planes but not landmasters? I think pilots still have a good chance against them and they have their disadvantages.