Cultris II

Cultris II is the sequel to Cultris. It is a PC based online multiplayer tetromino game, similar to Tetris, available as a free download. It is known for it's Timer-based combo system, which makes it an extremly fast-paced game. You can play games over Internet as well as several singleplayer modes. Cultris II uses LWJGL, BASS, Allatori and Excelsior JET. The music and sounds in the game were composed by Tomi Korkalainen, Lukas Nystrand, Stephan Raab (1998), Mark Wallowy, Eivor Lilja, Esa Ruoho, Kai Fischer, Konsta Mikkonen, Christian Antkow and others.

= Features =

General

 * Customizable control keys
 * Customizable DAS and ARR
 * Customizable tetromino colors and spawn orientations
 * Windowed mode or fullscreen

Single-player

 * Playing against bots

Single-player challenges
Challenges are arranged in a pyramid shape. There are 32 challenges in total, 16 of them are Tier 1 (located in the bottom line). To play a Tier 2+ challenge, you first have to beat the 2 associated challenges below.

Online

 * Free for all
 * Team play
 * Cheese

Offline

 * split screen

= Mechanics =

Garbage
Be it Standard multiplayer or Swisse cheese, garbage in Cultris II has always exactly one hole per row. The position of the hole is completely random. This means there's a 10 % chance that two consecutive lines have the hole in the same column, and a 1 % chance that three consecutive lines have the hole in the same column. However, all players receive exactly the same garbage (the sequence of hole positions is fixed for a round).

There are two ways to send garbage lines to other players:


 * clearing more than one line with a single piece placement (multi-line clears):
 * Double: worth 1 garbage line
 * Triple: worth 2 garbage lines
 * Tetris: worth 3 garbage lines
 * Combos

All lines sent during a combo (multi-line clears included) are evenly distributed among all opponents. If opponent #1 receives 10 garbage lines from a combo, then opponent #2 will receive 9, 10 or 11 lines from the same combo.

Incoming (pending) lines can be blocked (countered) before they enter the playfield. There's roughly a 1.5 seconds delay before the first pending line is inserted. Afterwards, one pending line is inserted every 0.5 seconds. During this period, every line that is normally sent to an opponent will be used to delete 1 pending line.

Combos
Cultris II uses a time based combo system. A combo ends when the player runs out of combo-time - and not when failing to clear a line (with a piece placement). However, failing to clear a line is penalized with an additional 0.4 seconds time loss. Time is earned by expanding the combo-counter (clearing a line before running out of combo-time). The amount of additional time depends on the current combo-counter and on the amount of lines cleared with the last piece. More explicitely, additial time per Line clear is Base(counter) + NumberOfClearedLines * Bonus(counter) with the numbers found in the table below. The additional time per line clear gets considerably smaller the higher the combo-counter gets - it will even become negative for big combo-counters. This means a player will eventually lose combo-time - even when clearing lines incredibly fast. A 14 combo seems to be the limit for human players.

The combo-counter determines how many lines are sent to the opponents in addition to the normal amount (multi-line clears). The higher the combo-counter, the more lines are sent per line clear. In contrast to multi-line clears, combos get more powerful the longer a round goes (this ensures the end of a round - no hurry up garbage). However, this doesn't happen within the first minute of a round.

Total/counter tells the effective strength of a combo, provided no multi-line clears are used. A 9 combo is more than double as efficient as a 6 combo, in other words one 9 combo will beat three 6 combos. After roughly a minute, everything above a combo-counter of 5 will send (at least) one additional line. 70 seconds in the game, a 6 combo will send 9 lines in total (0+1+1+1+3+3), whereas a 4 combo will still send only 3 lines. In a very long round even 1 combos will send a line.

Combo-time example: If you start a combo with a Single (counter=1), then you begin with 2.4 + 1 * 1.2 = 3.6 seconds combo-time. If you start a combo with a Tetris (counter=1), then you begin with 2.4 + 4 * 1.2 = 7.2 seconds combo-time. If this is followed up by a Single (counter=2), then you gain 1.1 + 1 * 0.6 = 1.7 seconds additional combo-time. If this is followed up by a Tetris (counter=2), then you gain 1.1 + 4 * 0.6 = 3.5 seconds additional combo-time. If you start with a Single followed by a Tetris, then you are rewarded with 3.6 + 3.5 = 7.1 seconds combo-time. If you start with a Single followed by a Tetris, then you are rewarded with 7.2 + 1.7 = 8.9 seconds combo-time. In both examples 5 lines were cleared, but the rewarded time is different. Try to start a combo with a multi-line clear, but avoid them in the later course of a combo.

Rotation System
Cultris II rotation system is pretty similar to SRS. The differences are:


 * spawning orientations are customizable
 * I piece spawns one row higher
 * 180° rotation is included
 * Wall kick system is different

Wall Kicks
Cultris II's wall kick system is pretty simply, but still powerful. The kick directions (and order) neither depend on the piece kind nor on the current orientation nor on the rotation direction. Whenever a rotated piece would collide with the current stack, these fallback positions are checked (in the given order): left, right, down, left & down, right & down, 2 x left, 2 x right. Adopting the notation from SRS Wall Kicks we have the following kick table:

Note, that a piece is never kicked up, or 2 rows down. It is not possible to clear 3 lines at once with an S, Z or T piece as it is in SRS. On the other hand, Cultris II checks the 1 x down kick. This allows a bunch of kicks which can't be done in SRS.


 * L piece, left & down kick
 * J piece, down kick


 * T piece, down kick
 * S piece, down kick
 * I piece, down kick

Sometimes, 2 successive kicks are needed to get a piece in the desired location.


 * J piece, right & down kick followed by down kick

Kicks also work with 180° rotations.


 * J piece, down kick
 * T piece, down kick


 * S piece, down kick
 * I piece, down kick

Randomizer
All players receive the same piece sequence. A sequence never starts with an S or Z piece. Apart from this, everything is possible in theory. It's possible to get 5 S pieces in a row ("flood"). It's also possible that the player has to wait 100 pieces until the next I piece finally shows up ("drought"). However, these 2 scenarios are very rare, since the Cultris II Randomizer reduces the chances of getting one of the most recent piece shapes. The chance that the next piece will be of the same kind as the current one just lies at around 3 %.

Game modes
= See Also =


 * Cultris

= External links =


 * Homepage
 * Manual
 * Forum thread
 * Randomizer analysis
 * 1on1 example (ICL season 2 final)
 * Teammatch example (country tourney final)
 * Botmatch example
 * Swiss cheese example
 * Survivor example
 * Maserati WR (40 lines)
 * A 14 combo
 * Uberl33t completion
 * Twist guide