Strike

Strike, also known as Strike%, is a miscellaneous speedrun category for Horizon Forbidden West centered around the in-game “Machine Strike” board game. Strike is notorious for being perhaps the most RNG-dependent category in all of Horizon Speedrunning. Strike runs are significantly shorter than the main categories. Even the most inexperienced of Strike players can beat the run in 45-50 minutes on a PS5 (55-60 minutes on a PS4 with HDD) by following along with huntks’ Strike Guide. Experienced Strike speedrunners can complete a run in about 35 minutes on a PS5 (45 minutes on PS4 HDD), though who knows how far that time will fall in the future with the right luck and strategies. Maybe one day a sub-30 minute Strike speedrun will be possible, but only time will tell if that will ever happen.

Resources

Here is a list of helpful resources for Strike and Strike speedrunning:

• huntks’ Strike Guide
• Update History for huntks’ Strike Guide
• Tutorial Playlist for the Strike Guide
• huntks’ Piece Information Spreadsheet
• Speedrun.com Leaderboards

TODO: add links to all of these

Rules

To complete a Strike run, players must defeat all of the challenge boards from all 16 of the Strike players in any order, as long as you start in Chainscrape and finish with Strike Master Leikttah. The Chainscrape tutorials, Erend, and Leikttah’s Random Board are not included in the run. In addition, the preorder only Apex Clawstrider piece is banned. Runs are timed using Real Time Attack (RTA). The run begins when you enter into the Chainscrape: Easy board and ends when the brown “Victory” screen appears after defeating Leikttah. Because of the variation in loading times between platforms, the leaderboards have been split between PS5, PS4 HDD, and PS4 SDD.

The History of Strike Speedrunning

Strike has been a category for Horizon Forbidden West ever since the leaderboards opened on March 5th, 2022. The first Strike run ever submitted to the leaderboards was a 1:06:07 on PS5 by TheCalmBerserker on April 2nd, 2022. DorianSnowball would submit a PS5 run of 1:23:08 4 days later. Although Dorian’s run was slower than Berserker’s, it contained a groundbreaking strategy that would massively impact the future of Strike strats. Rather than using exclusively the Fireclaw and Slaughterspine Strike pieces like TheCalmBerserker did, Dorian discovered a new set that revolutionized Strike. In his run, he introduced a strategy that used a Stormbird and a Leaplasher, which was far more powerful than the sets that preceded it. Berserker would submit the first run that was under one hour on April 14th, which as of now is his last run. Inspired by Dorian’s discoveries, huntks would submit the first PS4 run of 56:11 on April 23rd. His run featured a combination of the Stormbird-Leaplasher strategy as well as some of the Fireclaw and Slaughterspine pieces. Once hunt got a taste of Strike speedrunning, he began to work on a guide for speedrunning Machine Strike. On May 28th, the first run using the Guide was submitted to the leaderboards, a PS4 time of 53:00 by huntks. Along with his run, hunt would publish the first version of the Strike Guide that same day. The Strike Guide featured more of the Stormbird and less of the other two pieces, which was much quicker than the previous strategies. With the Guide in hand, hunt would improve his time twice in the next two days, lowering the time all the way to 47:54 on PS4. After this run, hunt would go on a month long break, during which WolfSquish would also enter the PS4 scene on June 8th with a time of 59:33. WolfSquish’s time would improve 3 more times in little over a week, ending with a 53:49 on June 17th. On July 9th, huntks would return with a 46:22, which was achieved with an updated version of the Strike Guide that would completely phase the Fireclaw and Slaughterspine out of the run. The first, and currently only, sub-45 was achieved on July 14th, with a PS4 time of 44:14. Though several updates to the Strike Guide have been released since hunt’s last run, he has yet to do another run since his 44:14. Though huntks has not yet returned to the Strike scene, several new runs have been completed on PS5. GreedyOldKa completed several runs, the most recent of which was a 45:08 on August 6th, which is the current PS5 world record. CasualRen also completed a run on October 2nd as a reward that was part of a charity event, logging a time of 51:12. On December 9th, a runner named WooDio also completed a run as a punishment for losing a bet he made with huntks.

Strike Pieces, Piece Mechanics, and Sets

Most of the mechanics are explained by the in-game glossary. To access this glossary, enter a Strike match and then push “Options” to enter the pause menu. There should be a glossary option that you can select to read about all of the Strike mechanics.

However, there are a few very powerful mechanics that are used heavily in the Strike speedrun that are worth delving into. In general, pieces with high movement and attack ranges as well as a decent damage stat are good. Health is not super important for speedruns of Strike, as most of the time games are won in only one turn. Another often overlooked piece attribute is flight. The Swoop class of pieces can ignore the usual terrain limitations imposed by Marsh and Chasm terrain tiles, allowing for more versatility and mobility with how it can move. One rarely used but occasionally useful ability is the Pull mechanic. This is only useful on a couple of boards where a piece needs to be either pulled into range of a piece with the Sweep skill or off of some high terrain.

Besides the stats of a piece, the skill of a piece is also important. Two piece skills in particular, the aforementioned Sweep skill and the Empower skill, can decimate enemy pieces. The Sweep skill allows one piece to attack up to three enemy pieces at once, which means that you can kill most or all of the opponent’s pieces in one turn depending on how they are set up. Empower allows your pieces to increase the attack power of all friendly pieces within attack range by one. This means that we can choose pieces with less damage and more mobility and add a damage buff afterwards. Because of the attack range limitation on the Empower skill, pieces with a higher attack range (like the Longleg) are usually more useful than a piece with a very short attack range (like the Leaplasher). This sounds powerful enough on its own, but there is one insanely powerful phrase nestled into the description of the Empower skill; the effects of Empower skill can be stacked. Usually, one Empower piece is enough to defeat the board in one turn. However, there are a handful of boards where two or even more of these pieces can be useful. With present strategies, the most Empower pieces used in one set is five.

Taking all of the above into considerations, a few pieces stand out. The Stormbird is an obvious choice to be a main damage dealer. It has high mobility and flight, a pretty good starting damage, and the overpowered Sweep ability. The Glinthawk is another good selection, as it is basically a Stormbird without the Sweep skill. For the Empower piece, either the Longleg or Leaplasher–and sometimes both–are used depending on the circumstances. Although a Pull piece is rarely used, the Snapmaw’s fairly low cost and decent range make it a good choice for the rare occasions that it is needed.

Strike Notation

Because Strike is a complex game that has many possible moves, a notation system is necessary in order to effectively and efficiently describe possible Strike moves. Chess notation is a good starting point for a notation system, though the greater number of pieces and the ability to rotate and overcharge requires a more sophisticated form of notation. Board tiles are labeled just like a chess board, with the letters A-H being used to represent the columns and the numbers 1-8 for the rows. Some possible squares are A1, D4, F7, and H2. Unlike in chess, the labeling centers on Aloy and not the player who starts to keep things more simple. An abbreviation for the piece to be moved is put in front of the word “to” followed by the tile that it is moved to, again similar to chess notation. A full list of piece abbreviations can be found on the Piece Information Spreadsheet. In the event that two or more of the same type of piece are present, the tile that the moved piece was on prior to its move is put before the piece abbreviation. The rotation of a piece is denoted by an “R”, “L”, “F”, or “B” (for Right, Left, Forward, and Backward) immediately following a tile name or before an “OC” (for “overcharge”). Unless otherwise stated, assume that the rotation of a piece remains the same as it was the turn prior. If a piece needs to be overcharged following a move, an “OC” is put at the end of the turn. Most of the time the overcharge is used to gain an extra attack, so an overcharge used to move will be noted with a “Move To” phrase or something similar. Overcharges are also separated from the main move with a comma. Attacks are notated with an “A” following the tile name and rotation if applicable. The notation can be somewhat clunky at times, but it gets easier to parse once you gain some familiarity with using it. Here are a couple of examples of this notation in action:

Example 1:

Text: Move the Stormbird to the space in the fourth row and the fourth column and attack and then overcharge.

Notation: SB to D4A, OC

Example 2:

Text: Move the Glinthawk on the tile on the second row and seventh column to the space on the fourth row and seventh column. Turn left and attack, and then turn so that you face forwards again and use your overcharge to gain a second attack.

Notation: G2 GH to G4LA, FOC

As you can see, the notation can significantly compress the length of directions. Although it can be hard to grasp at first, it is well worth the effort to learn as it will dramatically improve the transmission of Strike-related information.

Basic Strike Strategies

TODO: fast travel locations, minimal map icons

Speedrunning Strike

With 47 different Strike boards in the entire Strike run, it can be difficult for even top runners to remember where to put their pieces on each board. In order to help organize all of the most optimal Strike strategies, speedrunner huntks created his Strike Guide to create a coherent, organized guide detailing everything necessary to run Strike at any level. Most of the information on this page can be found in the Strike Guide, though some information is left out or added to keep it more focused on what is necessary for the Strike run itself. Because of the risk of losing a run to a misplaced piece and the difficulty of memorizing the setup for every board, even the most skilled of runners trying for a personal best or world record opt to follow along with the Strike Guide, so there is no shame in using it.

Advanced Strike Strategies

Movement Tech

Due to the limited amount of movement in a Strike speedrun, there are only a couple of movement skips in the entire run. There are three skips in total, though only two of them are used due to the difficulty of the third for minimal timesave. The first skip, Table Skip, is in Hidden Ember. The skip involves jumping onto the table, from the table onto the cloth awning, and finally up to the floor on the next level. This skip only saves 1-2 seconds, but it is fairly simple to pull off. The second skip, Campfire Skip, is far more difficult that the first, though it is manageable. To perform this skip, you must jump onto the campfire in Scalding Spear, position yourself fairly precisely on the campfire, and then jump up. If you did this correctly, Aloy should grab onto the ledge and pull herself up. Though this skip is much harder than Table Skip, the reward is far greater, saving up to 7-8 seconds if done optimally. The third and final movement skip is known as Sunwing Skip. This skip involves fast traveling to the Plainsong settlement rather than the campfire. You then must face down and summon your Sunwing as quickly as you can, and then proceed to fly above the area where the board is. You then have to dismount the Sunwing and activate your Shieldwing to glide into the area. This skip is difficult to pull off, with only about a 30% success rate. If the skip is done incorrectly, the run is practically dead. Even if you were to successfully perform the skip, the amount of time saved can vary widely. The most time that you can save is about 5 seconds if you are very luck, and it is actually possible to lose a couple of seconds depending on how well the mount behaves. For these reasons Sunwing Skip is not currently used in Strike speedruns.

Other Strategies

As previously mentioned, you must fast travel 14 times in each completed Strike run. Most of the time it is faster to travel to a campfire within a settlement, though sometimes the settlement is faster than or identical to the campfire. In the event that it is identical to the campfire, having the settlement icon active means that you don’t have to zoom in as far on the map as you would for a campfire. Although you can switch to show settlements when necessary, it is actually possible to still have certain settlement icons activated without having them turned on in the map settings. If you have ever turned them off before, you may have noticed that the settlements with melee pits stay activated. This is because the game keeps locations with quest objectives on the map, even if it should be turned off. The melee pit settlements are annoying for speedrunning Strike, but the same mechanic can be used to save some time in a few places. By completing the “A Taste of Victory” up until you need to return to Salt Bite and talk to the cook, you can keep the icon on the map at all times. The same can be done with any of the Dunehollow quests in Hidden Ember to save a couple of seconds.

TODO: Link movement video, etc