Map name: The Court Yard
Map authors: Dave Swift, Jimmy Sieben, Greg Lewis, Mark Gundy, and Jim Elson

I said in 2021 to come back to it next December, well it's a few Decembers later now. :^) Improving my old time was not hard, but I'm still of a similar opinion on the run; it would be way more fun if you didn't have to deal with the start every time. That and the PEs before picking up the first invul are the most RNG parts of the run where I'm most likely to die, but the latter is at least fun. Having to deal with random door opens, inconsistent monster positioning, and awful autoaim at the start isn't really fun at all. The old 5:51 was an easy target to break, but at least with this route, I didn't find any means to save a ton of time easily. I added in the change I planned back then (alerting more revs after cyb) and even brought out more revs in that area, but it really just comes down to how nice an infight you get. This one was pretty good, the rest of the map is just grinding stuff down, and it really doesn't seem like you have much option but spend the time rocketing, which mostly averages out to the same speed of progress. The other change was really being certain to kill as much as possible of the perched monsters at the start, as their wandering to the lifts is just too annoying; it feels slow, and perhaps you can luck out by just killing them later, but that's really not the kind of RNG I want to deal with in a run like this, heh.

I had this idea to open up the vile at the end and try to get him with BFG shots while I'm invulnerable, this is the first run I tried it in and it backfired pretty hard. I probably lost 5-10s from that, not sure. Oh well, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, though it would have been fine to just rocket him then BFG the baron at the end of the run. The BFG of both of them is something I got in one run, but it's not very consistent because of the vile movement, so I didn't bother with it. There's no other easy way of dealing with the baron; SSG is slow, and he hardly comes out of the exit room, so rocket is hard to make work too.

I guess now I've tried all the contest maps (and map 29, which wasn't part of the H2H competition but was a separate competition), I can say that, despite the frustration, this is the most fun of them for max. It's got the most interesting routing; it is chaotic, but in a reasonably fun way. The monster variety and fact you get some BFG shots also helps. In the end, I would probably rank them as follows for max (in order of best to worse): 12, 14, 29, 17, 15. 14 is a bit too long for just rocketing but generally fun, 29 is decent but too easy and too reliant on monster behavior with the teleporters, 17 is alright but too much hitscan and very repetitive monster usage, 15 is just all around boring. For speed, it would be something like 17 (hitscan-heavy but still decent pacifist for movement potential and you don't get blocked too excessively), 29 (short but incredibly painful tricks), 14 (long but ok), 12 (too chaotic to be fun), 15 (all around boring jsut like max). So kudos to at least being the most fun max, but despite the ugliness at the end, sub-5:30 is good enough for me.

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