Game:

Populous (1989)

Duration: 4:30

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2

00:00 Video start and setup
00:18 The actual attempt begins
03:48 "You Win" screen
(The "original" video, if I frame-counted it right, was exactly 3M30S. Re-encoding and trimming it seems to have cut a few frames, making it a high 3M29S. SRC made it an official 3M30S, which, fine.)

So I don't expect this to stand for very long, primarily because the huge improvement wasn't due to execution, but to "routing" in the absolute loosest sense.

As you're aware if you've watched Feasel's runs of SNES Populous, some of the ports have a "Game Speed" slider where you can make the game faster or slower. As it turns out, the DOS version *also* allows the speed to be adjusted in-game. The manual doesn't tell you this....but also included with Populous back in the day (But NOT included in the extras on GOG) was a reference card with a bunch of keyboard shortcuts! The full reference card is at https://archive.org/details/populousmanual/Populous-ReferenceCard-PC -- I'll go over some of the highlights here.

There is, in fact, a whole keyboard MODE for controlling the game if you happen to not use a mouse! Sadly, some of the best shortcuts (There are keys to mimic the SNES's "quickly flatten enough land to make a castle" and "quickly flatten the general mass of land under my cursor" button combinations to name two--"/" and "*" on the numpad respectively) are buried and ONLY allowed in keyboard mode. You can hit Ctrl-M to switch between keyboard, joystick, and mouse modes, so I suppose one theoretical improvement might be quickly swapping into and out of keyboard mode to quickly flatten land.

But guess what shortcuts AREN'T buried in keyboard mode? That's right--increase and decrease game speed! It's a pretty fine-grain control actually--you can slow the game down to ludicrous levels if you're patient enough, and it might be that one press speeds up or slows down the game speed by one "frame per action" if that makes sense. To increase game speed, hold Alt and hit S, and to decrease it, hold Shift and hit S. From the default game speed, it seems like about 10 Alt-S presses will get you to "max speed". Be warned, though, it's fast. Very fast. "Even on Genesis enemy will outpopulate you and begin engaging you on your land" fast, or at least they did to me.

Other keys not locked behind keyboard mode are hotkeys for your various powers. These are:
Placing your Papal Magnet - P
Earthquake- Q
Swamp- S
Knight- K
Volcano- V
Flood- F
Armageddon- W (Why W and not A? I have no idea. Maybe "World End")
In any event, as for the strategy of the run, "Start on Genesis, speed the game up 8 times, Swamp the enemy on occasion to make sure I out-populate them, rush Armageddon". That second step is responsible for most of the improvement. People who are actually good at this game can use this knowledge along with actual proper routing to push the time down further, I'm confident of it.
By the way, if you don't know where your speed is, you can hit "Move to Next Map" to reset it--in Conquest Mode, this just resets the map you're on with the default speed. There is otherwise no "in-game slider" or any way to tell how fast the game is running except watching the water animations and "eyeballing" it.Again, I don't expect this to last long, but I built my former speedrunning career on the "Free World Record", so I had to briefly grab one more for old times' sake. :)

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