I thought capturing spells (not sure about nonspells) made rank angrier, like being in full power mode did? iirc, timing out some patterns made the latter ones less dificult.. and I didn't pay much attention to grazing, at least no more than avoiding the point items, and power items (both the 128 power mark and the surplus power items) unless I needed the extend (at 60 million, not sure though). (
shameless plug because I'm not in the mood to try to learn/play EoSD again :p)
Looking at some revisions on the rank section on EoSD's wiki, we have..
[quote
http://en.touhouwiki.net/index.php?title=Embodiment_of_Scarlet_Devil/Gameplay&oldid=41636]18:01, 24 September 2006 J Lau (Talk | contribs) (15,344 bytes) (→Rank)
There exists a rank system in this game. As rank increases, enemy bullets will generally become faster and more plentiful. This effect that rank has in this game is most prominent with boss attacks, where the bullet difference between minimum and maximum rank can differ by a factor of 4 or more.
The longer you stay alive, the higher the rank will increase, until it reaches the maximum for that stage. Dying decreases rank by a fair amount. Bombing affects rank in a few select spell cards, e.g. Water Elf. [/quote]
[quote
http://en.touhouwiki.net/index.php?title=Embodiment_of_Scarlet_Devil/Gameplay&oldid=41638]01:01, 11 March 2007 Veracity (Talk | contribs) m (16,201 bytes) (→Rank)
There exists a rank system in this game. As rank increases, enemy bullets will generally become faster and more plentiful. This effect that rank has in this game is most prominent with boss attacks, where the bullet count difference between minimum and maximum rank can differ by a factor of 4 or more, and bullet movement speeds can double. Note that the game does not display the numerical value of rank at any point - under most circumstances, it can be estimated only by observing bullet pattern behaviour.
Rank ranges from zero to thirty-two, and is reset to sixteen at the beginning of each stage. It increases gradually with survival time, and jumps up noticeably on defeating spell cards, until it reaches the cap of thirty-two, corresponding to the highest variable difficulty. The rank value is decreased by sixteen whenever the player is hit. This means that, for the most part, the only way to reduce the variable difficulty is to die. Since the rank drop occurs on a hit, not a death, it is theoretically possible, through counter-bombing (see Lives, above), to reduce the value by sixteen without the loss of a life. Since the game's allowed counter-bomb interval is so short, though, it is not possible in practice to do so deliberately.
Bombing affects rank in a few select spell cards, e.g. Water Elf. [/quote]
and the most recent version,
[quote
http://en.touhouwiki.net/index.php?title=Embodiment_of_Scarlet_Devil/Gameplay&oldid=227646]18:40, 28 October 2011 ThibG (Talk | contribs) (17,599 bytes) (→Rank: Fixed a few misconceptions, based on observation of the memory during gameplay, as well as using a debugger)
There exists a rank system in this game. As rank increases, enemy bullets will generally become faster and more plentiful. This effect that rank has in this game is most prominent with boss attacks, where the bullet count difference between minimum and maximum rank can differ by a factor of 4 or more, and bullet movement speeds can double. Note that the game does not display the numerical value of rank at any point - under most circumstances, it can be estimated only by observing bullet pattern behaviour.
Rank ranges from ten to thirty-two (from twelve to twenty in easy), and is set to sixteen at the beginning of the game. It increases gradually with survival time (+1 every ~32 seconds), item collection (from +0 to +2 depending on the item type), grazing (+0.06) and gaining an extra life through score (+0.02), until it reaches the cap of thirty-two, corresponding to the highest variable difficulty. The rank value is decreased by sixteen whenever the player is hit, by two when the player uses a bomb, and by 0.03 when an item disappears through the bottom of the screen. [/quote]
maybe, based on this, some things need to be analyzed:
- if capturing spells/nonspells make the rank angrier
- if being in full power or collecting point items while in full power or collecting point items while they've reached their maximum value (51200 iirc) makes rank angrier
- if rank is maintained across stages
- if rank is decreased on hit, not on death (or vice-versa)
- if score or number of lives/bombs affects rank
