Why The Castle is a Good Strategy for Tournament Games
by 4th Place Andy
Castle payouts are on a fixed schedule, and there’s no way to botch it (as opposed to getting stuck with a 2-ball multiball when you were trying to light up catapult+joust+peasant+damsel). They pay out regularly (gate hits award nice points, and destroying castles are huge) plus there is that extra ball at the 2nd castle. After 4 hits, you’ve already destroyed one castle for 2.4M points. That’s 600K per hit! 4 shots to the peasant ramp scores you only 250K and lights a weak multiball (100K Jackpots, 400K Super Jackpots). Why not keep shooting the castle – after another 6 shots you’ve earned another 4.6M points. You’d have to hit 11 Super Jackpots during your multiball to get that many points.
6 shots is less than 11 shots.
After your 28th castle hit, you have earned a cumulative 22.8M, which is nearly a replay, for an average of 814K per shot! You need to get 4 multiballs stacked (ie catapult+joust+peasant+damsel simultaneously) to beat that with an 850K Super Jackpot. And still you only get that scoring while multiball is active. You keep getting massive points per shot with the castle throughout the whole game. The only dry spells are when you shoot the moat. At your 54th castle hit, you defeat the King of Pain, which awards 20M on top of the 41M you’ve already received from castle hits. Assuming you have not gotten all of the blue lights, you move to a “Castle Bonus” mode where the drawbridge is always down, gate hits score 750K, and every 7th shot or so you get 7.5M for destroying the castle. Now if you put me in a situation where I could get a guaranteed 750K, or I could try to build up my multiball for a chance to collect similarly-sized Super Jackpots, I’d just shoot the castle. It’s like getting multiball scoring in single ball play. And the best reason to always shoot the castle: If/when you miss, the ball does not go near the slingshots or outlanes, not to mention that you only have to practice one shot, so your accuracy should get very high.