Judge Dredd Tactics & Strategies

[Slam23]

Hi fellow pinheads,

I think I just played enough to discuss some strategy. Currently at 29B which is 2nd place behind Tarek, who has a great score of 99B.

Crime Scenes = Bonus and EB
I think the points on this table are in the accumulation of Crime Scenes, who add 1M to bonus, upwards to 255M, after which they -sadly- reset. You already shoot for them to get a repeatable EB, every 6 Scenes. So basically it comes down to get EB's more often than you drain. You can stack 4 EB's for a nice cushion. Once per game you can have your bonus doubled but that's it. I think the Martians will infinite this table in no time, especially if TPA takes scores beyond 100B.

Getting Crime Scenes
If you get proficient at hitting the inner loop with the upper right flipper, you are set because the rest of the Scene shots are pretty straightforward. This requires getting the ball on that right upper flipper in the first place. I prefer one of two ways: 1. Shooting the left loop will feed the ball to the kickback lane at the lefthand side. This will autofire and bring the ball across the playfield. 1 out of 2 times the ball will not hit the JUDGE standups and land on the right upper flipper instead. You can also try to one-time the inner loop when the ball comes screaming around from that orbit shot. 2. Shooting a bit early from the left upper flipper will let the ball graze the standup targets and put the ball right at the right upper flipper.
Anyway, if you hit the inner loop for a Scene, try to hit it again if you get this Scene as fifth one, they will all reset after five and you get a free shot at the new inner loop Scene. Plus you'll look like boss while doin' it This reset after five can be a bit confusing at first, especially because the insert for the inner loop Scene is not very visible.

Other scoring
A good Ultimate Challenge can also provide nice points but require 9 Chain Link modes to be played first or you'll have to win Multiball which in itself will need a lot of shots to be activated after the first instance. I haven't won MB yet. The Chain Link modes themselves will not yield more than 30-40M a piece on average, although some of them can be more lucrative if maxed. Most of them can be played without a lot of risk, and even provide some welcome change of pace during a long grind. Stay away from playing Blackout which is a 2-ball MB without a ball saver, this will often end in a double drain. Also modes like Safecracker and Bad Impersonator are risky because they need you to hit the standup targets. I tend to play the safe modes but focus on getting lit Crime Scenes when playing them, sometimes they go together nicely, sometimes they just time out.

Miscellaneous
There are some players who report a potential rewarding bug in which Ultimate Challenge continues after draining to the last ball. Apparently real machines display the same behaviour, so it's probably a ROM thing.
The table doesn't tilt easily, so nudge to save those SDTM's. I find the outlanes to be not especially hungry, but when a ball goes there, it's quite hard to nudge them away.
Live catching works but doesn't happen very frequently, nor is very important imho.
Balls returning to the left inlane can be flipper-passed almost always without risk to the right, setting up left ramp and orbit shots, the reverse is not true.

I hope there's some more strategy possible but I'm not seeing any at the moment, so let's hear it!

 

[relaxation]

Theoretically speaking

Exploit the rom bug by completing the jackpots in multiball (ultimate challenge), drop it to one ball play, get to the ultimate challenge via links and whenever you get down to one ball play just simply restart ultimate challenge multiball with one shot. Once that is setup just shoot left ramp all day&night, it's a shot that increases by .5M that doesn't reset as long as you don't drain.

Alternatively if you're really good, just start Blackout mode for the double scoring. You'll get to 10M ramp shots within 11 shots and it grows from there. (Blackout, 10 ramps) it's basically a No Limits mode with more modes betweens restarts, however it doesn't reset when the mode ends

if you're exceptional, do this also to cut down on time.

if a participant in a PAPA tournament gets 4bn by only shooting the left ramp, I'm sure it's safe enough for us

 

[Tarek Oberdieck]

The fastest way for huge points is the million plus award from the left ramp. There's no time limit for the shot and it seems also that there's no value limit. At least I've got more than 60M for one ramp shot. So here's my very boring strategy: Start all modes and play the left ramp during them. Use the Blackout 2Ball for the ramp too, all ramps counts double. Once the ramp reaches 10M it's also the first target during Ultimate Challenge. A one ramp table.

 

[Slam23]

Well, that was not what I was hoping for....
Just kidding, will try

 

[relaxation]

I swore I rolled the table twice but I ended up at 16,222,254,670 instead. Waiting for this 3hr 40m game to encode, I'll check it in the morning.

I got the UC bug once during the game and restarted it a bunch.. iirc ended up at a 1,700,000,000* UC for bonus and I only got to like 62M ramp shots before it drained.

edit, DMD readings
2:15:32 9,688,497,920; EoBB 412,251,120
2:28:15 Multiball
2:29:24 Ulitmate Challenge from multiball starts
2:33:38 2,856,823,240 UC starts, ends at 3:09:10 7,755,444,150; EoBB 2,191,246,920

both times happened to roll at or really close to the bonus screen.. does quick calculation mess TPA up?

 

[relaxation]

The 5M on the DMD is misleading on Stake Out, can be worth 183M by itself if you do it perfect. Other modes score what they say.

 

[Zaphod77]

There are three major rom bugs in the game.

1) ball saver stacking bug. If you get a second ball saver while one is already running, they stack (the ball saver active flag is incremented to 2 instead of set to 1), and then when the ball saver timer expires, the ball saver on flag is decremented instead of directly set to zero. Saving a ball only turns off the ballsaver because it zeroes the timer. Then, because the ballsaver enabled flag is still positive, the timer then wraps around to 255 seconds, which is almost 5 minutes. high speed 2 used to have this EXACT same bug.

2) mode+multiball bug. what's supposed to happen is that the mode stops, and then when multiball ends, the mode starts over but you keep your points. but if the mode has multiple stages, like sniper tower (first stage the hurryup counts down, and in the second stage the sniper is falling and the value is fixed) or safe cracker (same rule, second stage freezes the hurryup), if you start multiball during the second stage, the mode instead continues, and then you can stack other modes with that multiball, which is highly buggy.

3)double ultimate challenge bug. if you get it from mutliball, it turns on the flag telling the game to not reset the mode lights after ultimate challenge. This is of course correct. BUT... this flag is only turned off by a drain, when it should be turned off by shooting start chain link. This means that until you drain after the mutiball ultimate challenge, you can restart chain link ultimate challenge infinitely by shooting chain link start. once you drain, then the flag gets cleared and your next chain link ultimate challenge will reset the lights.

The fixes are as follows.

1) when the ballsaver timer hits zero, set the ballsaver active flag directly to zero. (uses a little more space, probably, which is probably why they used the silly increment/decrement system in the first place)

2) disable multiball start while in the second stage of a 2 stage mode. Again, requires a little bit of code space, if you want to keep the restart logic.

3) instead of turning off the "don't reset the mode lights" flag during a drain, turn it off when a lit "BUILD UP CHAIN FEATURE" shot is hit. This ensures that it will never be set if ultimate challenge is started outside of multiball, since bug 2 is also fixed.