How To Become A Wizard At Medieval Madness
Preface: I am not here to teach you how to play pinball or Medieval Madness for that matter at a basic level. There are plenty of resources out there for that from people who are better at coaching and demonstrating it than me. I am here to show you my top-level Medieval Madness strategy that helped me garner Top 5 worldwide-tier runs. That and while this may also apply to the ROM of Medieval Madness on physical machines, your results may vary in real life. As far as my experience goes, I haven’t been able to achieve this strategy in real life (yet). However, if you are looking to go from a regular knight to a wizard at Medieval Madness in PFX, read on.
Hello, I am Simon “7Layers” Leggett. I am a top-level player on Pinball FX in one of the most popular pinball machines of all time, Medieval Madness.
Medieval Madness is a wonderful machine and one that I would recommend to any starting pinhead. It is easy to learn, it is hard to master, the flow to it is very satisfying, the medieval theme and humor surrounding it is excellent (I especially like the Mortal Kombat voice clips that pop up on occasion on the Damsel ramp). It has truly earned its reputation as an all-time great.
At the very end of this game, Battle For The Kingdom awaits you and it remains as one of the most difficult wizard modes in pinball history. Regardless of your final score, beating Battle For The Kingdom will get you a spot among the leaderboard on any given machine of Medieval Madness, a ‘King(s) Of The Realm’ title. It is absolutely a badge of honor, a testament to endurance, shot accuracy, handling multiballs, understanding rhythmic flow of the shots and dealing with objectives while under the pressure of strict time limits. It is not for the faint of heart.
However, I have beaten this mode twice in the same run through the use of my strategy. How? Well, there’s a couple skills in that list of requirements to beat BFTK that I failed to mention, that being knowing how to optimize stacking modes and how to manipulate “RNG”, both of which are very important at a pinball top level.
I’d go so far as to say that how you play the first 4–5 minutes of Medieval Madness is more important than anything else you do between the end of this strategy and when you get to BFTK. You can do the objectives to the table in any order meanwhile my strategy requires precision, patience and a strong understanding of the game’s objectives and code. I’d like to call it a Rube Goldberg Machine in a way, setting up a whole ton of little things for 4–5 minutes for one big payoff. Note that it can only be done once per playthrough, you will not get a 3 Troll Bomb reward again. So, how do we pull this off?
Merlin’s “Magic”
What a lot of new-ish players don’t understand is that when you enter a part of a table that “randomly” gives you a reward based on 3/5/however many options, its never actually random. It can be manipulated to give you an optimal outcome based on what you’ve already done. A practical example would be that if a table has an option to lock a ball/light a lock for a side-mode multiball off the “random” reward and there’s already a locked ball for said mode, it will be more likely to give you something to progress that mode rather than anything else that’s available.
Medieval Madness’ version of this is Merlin Magic to the left of the Damsel ramp. There’s many different rewards you can get out of it. Madnesses, lighting Trolls, big points but truthfully, the single best reward and frankly the only longterm-wise meaningful reward you can get is 3 Troll Bombs.
What you have to understand is that the Battle For The Kingdom wizard mode comes in two phases. The first one is merely hitting every shot on the machine during multiball which by then you should be able to do with little trouble. The second phase however is much scarier. Two ‘immortal’ Trolls spring up and you have to make consistent Castle shots until you finally end the King of Payne’s reign. Given how tight of a target that is, it is incredibly hard to hit the Castle in those conditions, let alone not drain on the rebound.
However, you can dispose of these Trolls by using Troll Bombs, making the Castle shots much easier especially if you’ve managed to hang onto multiball to this point. Many BFTK guides will recommend that you get 1–2 Troll Bombs before BFTK which can be done by lighting Trolls and then hitting the center yellow targets 8 more times for each Troll Bomb. I think this old way is inefficient, grindy and unnecessarily risky given how easy it is to fumble on the yellow targets.
With that spiel out of the way, we turn back to Merlin Magic. The way we’ll get 3 Troll Bombs out of it is by eliminating all other rewards Merlin Magic could select.
You’re filling out a checklist, rooting out any possibility for Merlin Magic to pick any lesser option. To shorten this, I’m going to make a list of Do’s and Don’ts. If you do any of the don’ts, you have to restart. The Do’s eliminate all other possible Merlin’s Magic rewards and thus lock in 3 Troll Bombs.
DO:
Light every Madness (Damsel, Peasant, Joust, Catapult)
Light Trolls
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Lower the Castle drawbridge and open the Castle gate
When all of this is done, THEN collect Merlin Magic and claim your reward/massive Madness
DON’T:
Collect Merlin Magic or any of the Madnesses prior to doing the full setup. Remember, you’re playing this for a massive reward and multiball. The 3 Troll Bombs reward does not reappear on any Merlin Magic after the first.
Collect a Troll Bomb after lighting Trolls. This will take away the possible 3 Troll Bomb reward.
Start Castle Multiball.
By the end of this setup, your playfield should look like this.
And there you have it. After a few minutes of shots, you have a nearly guaranteed win at BFTK and you’ve set yourself up to progress both Castles very quickly and towards your first extra ball of the run. Much better than hitting the yellow targets 32 times for the same result minus having a multiball to show for it.
Further Optimizations
First of all, you’ll notice that I didn’t bring up anything about Castle Multiball beyond not starting it in the Don’ts yet I’ve locked two balls for it in my screenshot. That is because locking balls for it doesn’t seem to have an impact as to whether or not you get 3 Troll Bombs out of Merlin Magic. I’ve done the setup with no balls locked, 1 balls locked and 2 balls locked. It ultimately doesn’t matter until after you started Castle Multiball in which case, you blew the setup.
Thus, Castle ball locks aren’t necessary to progress the setup, they’re just nice to have for progression after the Madness. If you can get the locks without simultaneously collecting a Troll Bomb, go for it. Having Castle Multiball going helps progress the Castles easier and it makes it so you can potentially get another Extra Ball without having to mess around with the silly video mode.
Secondly and this may come across as blasphemy but I think the Castle shot is far easier on the left flipper than on the right. It can fairly easy be looped on the rebound be it from rolling into the left-side of the Castle bridge and thus spitting out from the left Joust lane, allowing you to catch it and repeat the shot. Worst case scenario, you use a nudge to bring it to the right flipper on the rebound, pass it back to the left and do it again.
All of this matters because when you use the Troll Bombs in BFTK, the lefthand Troll will always go down first leaving the left flipper shot on the Castle wide open. Theoretically, you could use one Troll Bomb per BFTK and with enough skill, loop the Castle shot on the left flipper. Thus, you stretch this reward into covering 3 BFTKs rather than 1 1/2 BFTKs. This is all without even including Troll Bombs you could potentially get via Troll Combos (Which I won’t be discussing strategy on since they seem luck-dependent rather than something that could be consistently pulled off through skill) or hitting the yellow targets.
I have beaten BFTK with one Troll Bomb and even if I’ve never beaten 3 BFTKs in one run, its definitely possible with enough skill and by spacing out the 3 Troll Bomb reward.
Summary
There you have it. I think I have made a solid case as to why a strategy like this is viable, why you should do it, how you can pull it off and how to optimize it even further. There’s not a single Merlin reward you can get that benefits you as much in the longterm as 3 Troll Bombs. I’ve even go so far as to say that Extra Balls aren’t as good seeing as how Troll Bombs open the door to massive points in BFTK/Victory Lap.
Medieval Madness is an easy to learn but hard to master game and this is about as “technical” code-wise as the strategies for this game get. You will run into setups in many other pinball machines but I have shockingly never seen a guide that lays out this setup for one of the most popular machines of all time. Everything else is up to you as a player to achieve. Have fun out there! Beat my score!
