Centipede Strats

 So with the new Centipede strat, I have a few things to say about it. First, shoutouts to Hetfield and Ova for finding this strat, as it really helps with a lot of runners who aren't to experienced in fighting Centipede, as he is the hardest boss in the game to optimize.

Second off, the new strat makes the fight consistently quick, but ONLY if you can actually farm a tailspin off of him, which is roughly 33.3% repeating decimal. While most runners who aren't doing CF0 Chain strats this will benefit, the other ones who can do CF0 Chain strats while getting two tail spins aren't benefitting, AS MUCH.

The deal is with this strat is that the normal strat is to fire off a double neon at the start of the fight, praying that he does a tail spin. Then you can proceed to do CF0 chain if you do it to prepare for another tail spin if he does it. HOWEVER, with this strat, it's almost not optimal anymore to go for that. I feel like most people would start the fight with a full charge, and farm for a tail spin, keeping him on the ground at all times. If you do the old strat where you fire off two neons and you end up not getting a tail spin, he can teleport on the ceiling, and then do a tail spin and then the whole fight is completely fucked. That is pretty normal for someone like myself who does CF0 Chain on him.

Hetfield tested with a tail spin at the start of the fight (optimal RNG) that is saves about 1.6 seconds over a standard CF0 Chain Centipede. This is due to being able to optimize your wall neons more efficently with this strat. However, if you do the normal strat when firing off two double neons and you WAIT for him to do a tail spin to see if you can abuse the RNG with it, you are losing time over the normal God Centipede strat because you have to wait for it, just to see if he is tail spinning. If you don't wait for it and YOLO double neon at the start like normal, there is a decent chance you won't be able to save time with the new strat given that you still have to wait for him to fire off a tail spin.

In conclusion, in runs I will still go for the Double Neon at the start, and not try and wait for a tail spin because at that point you have to choose on which strat you wanna go for, because at that point, it will not be an optimal fight. IF he does end up tail spinning then boom, it is something you have to react to which isn't hard, thankfully.

In races though, this would probably be a good idea to do granted that it has a decent chance to make things consistent. But once again, this is a decision you have to make, because waiting for the tail spin can lose you a lot of time, theoretically.

All in all, this will definitely help runners who haven't optimized the game yet and take out a lot of learning/execution of the centipede fight. But for those who have put many hours into it, it won't benefit them nearly as much granted that waiting for the tail spin can lose a lot of time anyway, making the fight no longer optimal.

This is a really sick strat and hopefully we can find a way to make sponge consistent as well :)