Amped_2

Score (bonuses, score decay, ...)

The score of an individual trick is determined by trick type, landing, stance (switch or normal), style, media bonus or not and finally by the score decay.

Score decay

The "spirit of the game" is to promote trick variation. As a general rule, every trick has a default value it gives you the first time. The next time you perform the same trick, the new score is divided by two (this can vary a bit though, depending on the trick) and so on. However, the game mechanic that governs this is full of exceptions and does not seem to be fully consistent. Here are some observations:

• Off-axis spins are immune to score decay.
• Double (or triple) flips are not subject to score decay and don't impact the score for single flips.
• Several kick-flips of one type impact subsequent kick-flips of the same type according to the general "50%" rule.
• There are several cases of inter-dependencies between tricks:(br />

- Spins impact each other in a fairly complicated way. For example performing a standard 720 gives 5.000 points. If you have done a 180 before, you only get 4.800 for the 720. If you have done a 360 before, it goes down to 4.000. The exact details how these inter-dependencies are likely never going to be important for a speedrun and haven't been investigated further.

- Just like the spins, the kick-flips have a complicated inter-dependency. The default value is 2.000. If you then do a different kick-flip trick, you only get 1.600 per kick-flip. The score per kick-flip occasion continues down in a non-linear fashion that will likely not of importance in a speedrun.

- Every off-axis jump impacts future spins and flips (corkscrews only impact forward flips and rodeos only impact backward flips). E.g. the default score for a flip is 2.500. If you do two off-axis jumps and then a flip, you will get 625 for the latter.

- Each grab type along with the three possible tweaked grabs of the same type (for example stalefish, tweaked stale, bs stale and stale method) impact each other (with roughly the 50% decay, even though it's difficult to measure exactly).

• Single spins impact future spins regardless of direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise).
• There is no score decay on any of the sponsor challenges.
• According to http://www.ign.com/wikis/amped-2/Guide_part_3, style is affected by score decay. It's unknown to what degree though due to the difficulties of performing the same trick with the same style twice. It doesn't appear to be a huge decay effect though.
  

Bonuses

There are a few ways to boost (or deteriorate) a trick score:

• Media coverage gives +25%. If done during a combo, it's only the part that is caught on camera that will get the media bonus.
• Doing a trick from switch stance gives +30%. This is also true for jibs and rail grinding.
• There are four types of landing and they impact the trick score (if done as a part of a combo, it's only the jump score leading up to the landing that is impacted):
  

- "Sketchy", -50%

- [Default], no bonus

- "Sick", +15%

- "Stomped", +30%

Various observations about the score system

• Melon and stalefish type of grabs (so including the three types of tweak possibilities) appear to have a non-linear score advantage over the other four types of grabs (starting at 25% and then seems to only increase). The style points from the different grabs appear however to be more or less identical.
• All jib tricks have the same score rate. However, handplant gives a x1.5 combo bonus when landing. This can be increased to a x2 combo bonus by performing a spin before jumping up to the jib.
• According to http://www.ign.com/wikis/amped-2/Guide_part_3, "Balancing on your nose and tail scores more points". This is a bit difficult to test accurately, but there seems to be some kind of bonus from grinding on the edge. The bonus should lie somewhere around 10%.
• Jib scoring is non-linear: [diagram to be added]
• Butter scoring is non-linear (?): [diagram to be added]
• Grind scoring is non-linear: [diagram to be added]
• Grind spinning has a non-linear scoring that is different from straight grinding: [diagram to be added]
• All kick-flips give the same amount of points. Same goes for spins, flips and off-axis spins (= regardless of direction of the trick).
  
  

Speed considerations

Movement speed

• The surface impacts the speed. Due to how accurate tests would be quite time-consuming, only rough estimations have been made. The deeper the snow is, the slower the movement will be. On the other end, newly prepared slopes are faster and ice is the fastest surface. There is maybe a 10-15% range within the movement speed because of the surface. This is enough to warrant going out of the way in certain spots to spend as much time as possible on the fastest surfaces.
• Buttering and grinding are done at 75% of the normal movement speed (regardless of tweaked or not).
• The stance has no impact on the speed. Switching stance has normally no impact either, but in practice often leads to a small time loss.
• Ollie jumps keep the speed intact.
• Even though the animation is different if you press the A-button or push forward on the left stick, the acceleration and max speed appear to be the same (at least within measuring error margin). Combining the two doesn't appear to speed up the character either.
  

Various speed tricks and exploits

• By pressing select, the screen goes black for ~3 seconds and the character is teleported out on the slope. This mechanic was probably put in place to avoid the character being stuck somewhere. Despite the long reset time, the game will sometimes teleport you quite far away and this can be used to get down the slopes faster, as well as combining "own the mountain" targets that would otherwise have been impossible to combine.
• If approaching a "jibable" area at too high speed, trying to jib will result in a "jib jump". You will briefly enter the jib animation, but then get bounced off at high speed. This doesn't save time over normal movement, but is useful for connecting with the end area of gaps that lead to rails (faster than starting to grind and then jump off the rail).
• You can go "out of bounds" in several places. Typically by entering seams in mountain walls or buildings. The game always reacts in a similar way to the select trick above. So the screen goes black for a few seconds and you're teleported out onto the slope again. There doesn't seem to be any documented cases of any extreme cases of this behavior, but at least once on Mt Buller, the character was teleported 10-15 seconds away after having entered a house seam (ktwo, not recorded). So there is at least potential for further findings.
• When traveling at low speeds, you can gain speed by going over small bumps or ramps. The speed increase of the downward part of the bump is generally bigger than the speed loss going up the same.
• As a rule of thumb, you'll lose 1-2 seconds going over a jump instead of around it. The details obviously depend on the dimensions of the jump, but in general it's considerably faster to go around than over.
• Many areas of the game have "imperfect" physics that can be exploited:

- Half-pipes seem to be programmed in a different way to the surrounding slopes. It's generally easy to scale half-pipes by zig-zagging.

- Stretches with a half-pipe like layout (so surrounded by elevated edges) can sometimes be climbed by using by zig-zagging and gaining speed on the edges.

- Stairs have sometimes sketchy physics and can be scalable (e.g. Mt Buller a little below the Town Square).

Various unknowns

• Is there a pattern to sitting starts? (or "fast starts"?)
• Is there a way for any given situation to predict if you'll be riding regular or switch on a rail?