Tips & (early) Strategies

Slam23

Active member
Jul 21, 2012
1,279
2
Hi guys,
After a lot of short games and only near 600K (up to 870K after taking my own advice :) ) to show for it as best score, I still would like to share some observations about this great game. These will be heavily influenced by the as usual excellent Bowen Kerrins PAPA video tutorial, so disclaimer there.

The basics: this table is all about the bonus after each ball and stacking it across the game
- FIRST get the bonus X and EB first by dropping those targets at the upper left alley. Love it that dropping the first one doesn't give you sh*t except some points. EB is offcourse the main thing, but even if you miss it, you'll still get some multiplied bonus out of it. The EB is repeatable every ball, but you can't get more than one per ball I believe.
- SECOND get the super bonus up to at least 20. This is worth at least an extra 20K at the end of every subsequent ball, even if you house-ball one (which will happen)
- THIRD focus on all shots that give bonus to get to the next level of superbonus and build up that score. The max held superbonus is 40K but on the current ball you can get 49K max for a 245K end of ball bonus.

Now for some tips and tricks:
- Ball control: get the ball cradled on the lower left and right flipper. Nudge like a mad man to achieve that, and then aim with precision. Playing flow style is not recommended because wild balls can drain in numerous ways.
- Safest shot to the drop targets: shoot the drop target alley with the lower right flipper. Then hold up the left upper flipper when the ball rolls back, this will often drop the ball back at the lower right flipper, even let you cradle it again. This works best when the ball rolls tightly at the left wall of the drop target alley, when it's more to the middle or right, you can also choose to let it drop to the lower left flipper and nudge to cradle.
- Use the upper left flipper in general to prevent the ball entering the beast lair area at the lower left. Shooting the ball away with this flipper is risky but if you know your angles, go for it.
- If you have the ball at the lower left flipper, alleypass it to the lower right. Just flip the left when the ball just passes the tip, and you'll shoot it up the right alley, the "inlane" for the lower right flipper so to speak. Just look up "alley-pass" on youtube to see the technique. I find it quite easy and low-risk to perform on this table
- Another pass technique from the lower left is doing a reverse alleypass by performing a post pass but too quick to actually hit the slingshot at the right point. This will shoot the ball up the left flipper alley instead and then the ball can be flipper-passed to the middle flipper. However, although you now can shoot the drop targets, the angle from this flipper is more risky for a SDTM drain. Furthermore, the reverse alleypass can have variable strength and speed, and it will be difficult to reliably reproduce safe shots to the drop targets.
- I haven't been able to backhand from the lower left flipper yet, Bowen proved that a weak reverse alleypass could be used to backhand the shot, but those weak alleypasses seem not to be possible or very hard. I'll investigate if nudging the ball up the alley will do the trick. On iOS this will probably tilt the table sooner than later though.
- Nudge every time the ball leaves the "waterfall" area at the right hand side of the table, otherwise SDTM in x% of those returns, catching or grazing it with the lower right flipper gives the most control.
- There are no real safe shots because of the unavoidable bumper area, but I found angled shots to be safer than straight up shots in general Also get to know the angle of the shot from the lower left flipper to the right target bank and up to the PARAGON hole. This seems to be a relatively safe shot to put the ball up top, next to the shot through the waterfall gate.
- Watch that left spinner, because in x% of the time, the ball will catch a bump or something when fallimg back through it and go SDTM

The bad stuff:
- The game will rollover and Farsight forgot to put in the detection for higher scores (should be possible right?) so don't score over 999.999


Let's hear some other tips & tricks!
 
Last edited:

Gorgias32

New member
Jan 14, 2016
436
0
Great tips, especially about the alley-passing!

A few other tips:

On Android, I have found that when the ball comes out of the waterfall, 95% of the time I just flip it with the right flipper and I don't need to nudge. The other 5% it drains, but it seems safer than doing a nudge, I need to work on the ideal nudge direction and timing.

Another thing I learned watching Bowen's PAPA video is to always nudge when the ball comes out of either of the upper saucers (Paragon or cliffs) - even with the brutish nudge implementation on Android, when you time a straight-up nudge right when the ball kicks out and hits the bumper directly below the saucer, it is likely to bounce back up into the saucer area on the other side, I have gotten 4 or 5 PARAGON letters in a row doing this and racking up the cliffs value is pretty lucrative after a while as well.
 

strells

New member
Oct 7, 2014
291
0
I'm not sure about your flipper naming here. You mention cradling on the "lower right flipper" to hit the drop target alley, but that's impossible! I'm sure you mean the upper right flipper.
 

Slam23

Active member
Jul 21, 2012
1,279
2
I can see the confusion here. With lower right I mean it in a more absolute vertical way, in relation to the upper left flipper at the drop target alley being "up" and the other three flippers being "lower". I would actually call the inner right flipper the middle flipper here. Maybe right-most lower flipper and (lower) right inner flipper would have been better names.
 

Michael

New member
Jan 9, 2015
75
0
Thanks, I'm sure this will be useful to me about 1 year from now when this table is made available on the PS4... :p
 

Byte

Member
Nov 11, 2012
585
1
We have it now on PS4 :)

Too bad that tap-pass doesn't work though. Would be a lot easier to get those bonus multiplier targets down.
 

switch3flip

Member
Jan 30, 2013
944
0
We have it now on PS4 :)

Too bad that tap-pass doesn't work though. Would be a lot easier to get those bonus multiplier targets down.

Trap on left flipper, flip quickly so ball rolls back up the inlane then as it returns down to left flipper again keep holding the flipper up and when ball is on tip of flipper, quickly flip. The ball will hop over to right flipper for a perfect shot at the drops.

This works pretty much like a tap pass. Not ideal but functional at least.
 

switch3flip

Member
Jan 30, 2013
944
0
We have it now on PS4 :)

Too bad that tap-pass doesn't work though. Would be a lot easier to get those bonus multiplier targets down.

Trap on left flipper, flip quickly so ball rolls back up the inlane then as it returns down to left flipper again keep holding the flipper up and when ball is on tip of flipper, quickly flip. The ball will hop over to right flipper for a perfect shot at the drops.

This works pretty much like a tap pass. Not ideal but functional at least, and you can play with the same approach as on a real pin.
 

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