Williams Defender arcade game -- baiter hunt! 69K - vid #2
Channel: modolief
Date: 22/10/2014

Baiter hunting. I go through wave one, then at the end of wave two I leave a single pod, then hunt baiters.  I have standardized on going into space so I always start my baiter hunt at 6K. These are Red ROMs at factory settings with the following change: Settings #8 & #18 are at 3 & 10 respectively. 

This is my second video of baiter hunting and it's still really hard.  Not anywhere near my goal of 350K.  I've also tried baiter hunting at 99/99 difficulty and it's not all that much harder.  It's always remarkable to me that the ship itself feels faster at 99/99 -- I wonder if the lower difficulties have some wait states or such programmed in.  Maybe I'll make a video of that; the only problem is it's extremely hard for me to get my "standard start" at 6K with four ships stacked.  Anyway, fun stuff.  I do pretty well in the early part of this game, but I think I just get tired.  I didn't have as many dozen-baiter style battles as in the first video, but I think I was more efficient about shooting the baiters right away.  I've also played a bunch of games where I mix baiter hunting with other play.  Since my whole game is in space, I can do some practice against mutants, and since I get ships every 3K I can play without using smart bombs (for the most part), which is also interesting practice.

Some more thoughts:

 * Another way to try: patrol back and forth on the planet rather than trying to stay as far as possible from the pod -- maybe motion like that will affect the baiter behavior.

* Do they have some limited AI? Do they learn what I'm doing, see if they can adapt their attack to my pattern?

* How quickly do they come in -- does the rate accelerate? Sometimes it seems like it does up to a point, then kind of resets.

* Double - materialization - how to deal with this?

* Some variations for training: usually just one pod remaining, but can do up to three enemies - maybe hardest would be 1 mutant, 1 swarmer, 1 bomber.

* Firing rapidly - many shots; pros and cons: one advantage is that the first shot or two can be used as a tracer to see how to adjust the aim. The disadvantage, of course, is that it takes more time, and you might be giving up your CPU slice; i.e., when you want to hit fire you'll get a delay. One corollary of this is that it seems often good to wait just a moment when the baiter first arrives, then fire, as you'll have the full time slice. Don't jump the gun, just give it that ever so brief pause, then vaporize.

* Most dangerous is when they materialize right on you. What to do then except try to be elsewhere. Or really close is hard sometimes just millimeters from the ship, hard to fire soon enough.

* To really be good at baiters, have to be able to enjoin them in a knife fight. It's really that up close and personal.

* As someone commented on one of Mikael Lindholm's videos, it's not just being able to fire accurately, but also bullet dodging. So many shots fired by baiters.

* The baiter kamikaze move is perhaps their biggest weapon. If they can slam down on you they will, they're just trying to get in range.

* If I am able to tag a baiter very quickly upon its appearance then the next one comes in a bit sooner than if I miss my first shot, so the pressure is always on!

* When a baiter is above and has "locked on" very tricky to avoid, but often possible. This is the key scenario to understand how to recover from because it always happens.

* Garry Wittingham has suggested that the ultimate way to baiter hunt would be to carry eight humanoids, then I could get them to warp away (by firing a lot) if the action was too hot.

Grey Wolf had a whole bunch of comments on the "Williams Defender Players Unite" facebook page:

Baiters have a NEAT AI. They tend to do one or more of the following:

* squeeze you to/at the top or the bottom
* fire directly at you
* fire to close off your escape maneuver
* angle directly for you
* angle so as to force you to fly into another fatal obstacle
* warp in on top of you
* interpose themselves between your ship and the last remaining enemy, possibly giving said enemy a chance to retaliate or giving their shot that extra split-second it needs to hit you.

-- If you're around other enemies, I have found that a baiter will hang back a little more. It's almost like it is hoping you will panic and just plow into something else.