Dune II - Harkonnen mission 2 speedrun

Building 2 refineries and capturing third with a full harvester. Didn't come up with this strategy myself, just optimized it a bit and saved further 30 seconds on the previous record. I was considering about capturing a windtrap required for building refineries, instead of building one. That would save 300 credits, but it's way too slow and postpones harvesting quite a bit. Also considered alternative maps for this mission, but this one is clearly the best for speedrunning. Could save few more seconds at least with better luck, but this run was kind of lucky already considering harvester movement and such. Building three refineries, not capturing anything and just manually optimizing harvester movements would in optimal case probably be at least 30 seconds slower.

[@Malkasphia]

All Hail Harkonnen Eino!

[@Krzysiek712]

I knew there were some seconds to optimize, but never would've thought you'll improve it by 30 seconds! I guess this is as good as it gets? Noticed you click a lot at the harvesters, does that affect their harvesting? If it does, maybe helping the Atreides harvester is a thing?

[@JonasRosenven]

Playing this game for several years in the nineties I found that the harvesters would for some reason have a truly unholy tendency to always seek out worms and all other units had a tendency to go the long way around the base instead of taking the obvious short route to a target. I loved the game but some times the units vere absolutely infuriating :)

[@timix_au]

Clicking on harvesters while they're harvesting doesn't speed anything up, just gives you more frequent % readings on them. A harvester in motion isn't actually capturing any spice despite the animation, so moving them manually isn't going to help anything, unless you're guiding it around so that it's on a spice square closer to the refinery when it hits 100% instead of somewhere out in the field.

[@einokeino303]

As Tim Hicks said, also the amount of spice in each square is a random thing and varies each play. Spice can overflow to adjacent squares while harvesting, but haven't figured out how that works exactly. At least one mistake I did here was doing too much unnecessary damage to enemy refinery. That slows down harvester unloading. Potentially the enemy harvester could gather a bit more spice on second round if it was released sooner. Could optimize harvester movements further to save few seconds at least. Also, mission complete screen was a bit slow, could appear maybe 1-4 seconds faster after reaching 2700 credits.

[@timix_au]

If you drove that quad to the square right below the left edge of the refinery, when he stopped, he'd 'discover' the top left corner of the thing and let you see its current damage. I thought that's what you were doing a few times instead of baiting enemy units out of hiding, and I have to admit I was close to yelling at the little guy to stop in the right spot for that :)

[@einokeino303]

Yeah, didn't get the damage readings in this play and had to go on with the capture by gut feeling. On previous attempts it was sufficient to go somewhere at the bottom of the refinery. When an enemy trike targets the quad to attack, it reveals the upper left corner and those refinery health details. I guess the trike got lured out from the initial position before it targeted to attack so it didn't reveal the square on upper left. Another thing would've been to just stop the quad one more square up or right at the the bottom left of the refinery, but it wasn't usually necessary so I wasn't expecting that this time.