HM:StH Doubletalk strat ideas

Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland
Doubletalk strat ideas
[Updated 19 Apr 2020]

HM games traditionally provide the player with the chance to boost an NPC's affection in two principle ways: gifts and conversation. In general, these options are each limited to once per day. However, StH differs in that multiple conversation boosts are possible even on the same day--under certain circumstances.

These circumstances are not yet fully understood, but one instance is a "stationary" boost directly followed by a "walking" boost. In StH, conversation boost is tied to the NPCs current location (e.g., Lyla gets +4 from talking next to her garden). Furthermore, when an NPC is traveling between two locations, they almost universally receive +2AP (the only exception appears to be Ronald). So in this case, preliminary testing seems to indicate that the player can talk to an NPC for a standard +4 boost, then once that NPC is scheduled to start walking, the player can talk to them again for the additional +2.

Below are some ideas of when this could potentially be implemented in a speedrun.

AZURE SWALLOWTAIL any%
- Normal strat is intro+gift, then 7G+T (8 trips). Each trip is ~1m05s.
- Doubletalk would wait for Lyla to start heading inside after gifting, then talk again for the walking boost. Wait is ~32s.
- Doubletalk grants the following routing possibilities
	> Intro+gift, 5G+6T+6DT (7 trips). This saves one trip (-1m05s), but loses time for each doubletalk (+3m12s).
	> Alternatively, we could weed intro in order to cut our PCM count to 5, thus saving a foraging trip (-1m).

GODDESS DRESS NG+
- Doubletalk day of second Villa cutscene, as Gina starts walking inside. Saves an interaction (18 instead of 19).