Master of Weapon - Caravan Mode - 875,990 / マスターオブウエポン キャラバンモード
96th place this week. Lots to learn & then implement as best possible in a difficult shmup. The 'Wo' bonus is essential as it makes up half of your score. The easiest way to trigger it is to shoot at least 4 of the blue soldiers who are on the road at the start of Act 1. They're worth good score so even if you don't know the trigger, you should be aiming for them anyway. so long as you don't die, when you destroy the buildings beside where the Wo symbol spawns, you'll begin earning the 500K. If you die before the score is tallied, it stops. So don't die
The default autofire lets your special weapon charge faster than using external autofire but the default deals a little less damage, so there's quite a lot of switching between the different rates depending on what you need. The only special weapons you really want to have are Guided or Wide. They do a lot of damage & also damage aerial enemies. Laser is OK in a pinch. Piercing is barely noticeable but has a slightly wider range than the normal ground attack. You always keep your normal ground attack but by pressing both buttons together you trigger the special weapon too. You can fire the special weapon so long as you have 1 bar but it's best to let it charge to 4 bars as the max power attack is much better in general.
The Act 1 boss has no hitbox so if you sit on top of it's core, it won't shoot & you can kill it quickly. This doesn't work on the 2nd form, so you need to move back. Special weapons don't seem to deal much damage to bosses so I use the faster autofire rate & try to kill it as quickly as possible.
Within the stages there areenemies that spawn missiles & mines. The ground turrets that shoot missiles are obvious but the aerial enemies that create extra scoring opportunities are less so. Their extra scores aren't huge but it all adds up. There's also a few sets of formations that award 8000 or 4000 bonuses if you defeat them. The main extra scoring technique I worked out, whilst not hugely valuable, is that both being further towards the top of the screen & defeating enemies quickly causes more enemies to spawn in faster, so where ever it's feasible I try to work my way upwards to increase appearance rates
I definitely drop score in Act 3 as I didn't kill the midboss especially fast & a couple of the mid-sized enemies were onscreen for too long, which wasted time & lessened other enemy spawns. It's a difficult game, especially if you have to recover but if you can stay at full power with the Guided or Wide secondary weapons, and understand how their charging & usage mechanics work, then you have enough firepower to handle things. You just need to get used to the fast scrolling & faster enemy shots