so i started playing 20g on tgm and i found that i have trouble with what to do with the I is a real problem. If i daon't have it set up for a tetris yet then i'm stuck either making it flat which blocks off everything or making it vertical which can hinder movement of blocks to the left or right depending on where it is. for the majority of situations it's better to go flat right? I'm also having trouble with the movement of the L and J blocks. i'm positive they can go over blocks if you rotate them right but i can't seem to pull it off right.
Vertical in the middle works pretty good sometimes, especially column 5. That's the "center" column, so you retain all mobility. Vertical against a wall is pretty good too in a lot of cases.
Gosh, sorry about this, I've been delaying starting this project for absolutely ages! I've recently learnt how to use Jago's The TOOL properly, so now it's only my own laziness holding me back. I'll try to get something started tomorrow. Or if DIGITAL or one of the other guys is keen to start without me, feel free by all means. As for the question about the I piece, personally, I stick it vertically in column 5 a lot. If you watch my M rank video [/shameless plug], I do this move at 157, 236, 270 and 418. The placement at 418 might look like it gives me trouble, but to be honest, I think the I placement here is a sound move; the S at 425 is probably the cause of my subsequent mis-drop with the J. Sticking the I vertically in column 5 is what I would call a "default move", a move that I fall back on if I can't see a better place to put it. Another one of my default moves that I really like is S IRS'ed and shifted one to the right, waiting for an L to kick under it. Similarly, Z IRS'ed and shifted one to the left, waiting for a J to kick under it, does the same.
Was this ever made? I noticed in the wiki there is a lot of stacking strategy for SRS/low gravity, but almost nothing for ARS 20G. I can't get to level 1000 in TGM1ARS even with infinite lock delay, so I know my strategy is inferior, but it's not intuitive to me how to fix it. A guide like this would be very helpful to me and I'm sure the rest of the western Tetris community as well.
For serious though DarthVivi, nothing you read will make you make the right decisions at one piece per second. You've got to play it out, trying stuff like preventing holes in the middle of the screen. If you think hard about that as your goal and also learn how the I piece rotates, you could become quite competent over a month of regular, small play sessions. Whenever you make a hole in the middle, just pause and think about what lead to that hole... Usually it's an unwise placement a few pieces earlier that reduced your stack's stability. There's a certain value to playing a large volume of pieces (by which I mean not abusing your infinite lock delay too much). On some basic level you've got to condition yourself to automatically avoid the most foolish placements, and again this requires repetition. When you're first starting out, the game is more about learning to avoid bad moves than learning to make especially good ones (like fancy recoveries).
I was going to make a separate thread but this one is perfectly suitable for this: This has happened to me: The pieces came in the obvious order (no t-spins: L,I,T,J ,S , then i stopped to play seriously ..) It seems that after the T, nothing could be really done...any idea?
You can't do anything about the T other than not have a dip in the middle of the field. However, if you'd IRS'd the L piece anti-clockwise, you'd have been able to get it down the right hand side which would have given you a lot nicer stack. Really though, you should have arranged the first few pieces better, so that columns 5 and 6 were the tallest ones. You didn't stack in a pyramid shape.
Your biggest mistake was the I placement, which cut off the right part of your screen. I would never open with the L like that either. It's already cutting off the right side, though less so. In general you want to keep columns 4 and 5 highest so that you can move pieces to both sides. This prevents holes in the middle.
help my openings suck Here's what I used to do: S/Z: vertical, with column 5 highest L/J: vertical, with column 5 highest I: vertical, with column 5 highest T: rotate 180, with column 5 highest O: one to the left I'm finding having a huge....."tower" in the middle isn't always quite so beneficial. So I've changed: L/J : flat, with column 5 highest I: flat, columns 4-7 (no movement) O: DAS to left Obviously openings aren't really THE most important thing out there, but it'd be nice to learn for example, whether people prefer to concentrate on getting column 5 highest, or whether they slide their initial piece over to the left in order to start with a "build high on left, garbage on right" strategy. The main resaon I put Z/S in the middle is because those are the overhangs I'm most comfortable with fixing.
It could happen in TAP/Ti when the field is cleared after you hit 999 and your next piece is an S, Z or O too.
Though if you can get to 999 you don't need to ask about opening moves. "The pieces are invisible, what am I supposed to do with the first Z piece??!?"